Wednesday, May 07, 2008


“We’re not playing to musicians alone,” Donavon said, “We are playing to the public, you dig, and it’s time for some new music. You say that the Japanese know more about our music than we do? That’s cool–but we made it.”

That was my result, from George Lewis' "A Power Stronger than Itself", when Robert Kirkpatrick, from A Spiral Cage tagged me in this round of the net version of a chain letter, wherein one must:

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Find the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences.
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Thus, I'll annoy several blogging friends, forcing them to play along. Hereby tagged guten well are: Richard Harland Smith (contributor to Movie Morlocks), Pete Cherches (Word of Mouth) and Caleb Deupree (Classical Drone).

Have at it gentlemen...don't blame me!

[edit: I'm only into the second chapter of Lewis' tome, but so far it's very engaging. He's balancing academic and street reasonably well, thus far, maybe a bit overboard on the biographical details, but conjuring up a good picture of the Chicago bop and proto-free scene in the 50s and (halfway through Chapter Two) the racial divisions in NYC in the early 60s. Fun factoid: Joseph Jarman, Fred Anderson and John Cage apparently performed in concert around '68.]

8 comments:

  1. Thought I'd play along even though I don't have a blog:

    "I mean C.S. Peirce and Gottlob Frege, as opposed to J.S. Mill (an inveterate private linguist). In an essay published in 1868, Peirce astoundingly found it hard to answer the question, "What distinguishes a man from a word?" He held that "the word or sign which man uses is the man itself."

    From Ian Hacking, "Historical Ontology"

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  2. Might have been more appropriate if your author had been, "Anon." but thanks all the same!

    How's that book?

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  3. I’ll play too, but with the lingering sadness that I was not among your anointed ;-(

    Closet book at hand was “Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930 & 40s”, ed. Robert Polito, but page 123 only has one sentence: …THAT FOR THE CRIME OF MURDER IN THE FIRST DEGREE…

    So, second closest:

    From Larry Kart’s “Jazz In Search of Itself”:

    He makes sense only when one is prepared to move with him, when one learns to share his restlessness and feel its necessity. Or, as composer Stefan Wolpe once said, “Don’t get backed too much into a reality that has fashioned your senses with too many realistic claims. When art promises you this sort of reliability, drop it.

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  4. But...but...but...You don't have a "blog" (not counting Bags, where it might not be appropriate), do you? Abject apologies and happy to have your contribution here.

    Caleb and Richard have posted their responses at Classical Drone and Movie Morlocks, respectively (links on front page). Now if that recalcitrant Cherches would just get his but in gear....

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  5. The rules are that you have to tag 5 people and you've tagged 3... innumeracy rears its ugly head yet again!

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  6. Rules, schmules! This is an improv-based blog. Besides, coming up with more than three previously un-memed friends bearing blogs who wouldn't cut off all ties with me at the suggestion was iffy enough.

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  7. re: Cage with Jarman in Chicago -- see pp. 239-40 in Conversing with Cage.

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  8. Thanks Jason. I'd read that (just last year, actually) but hadn't put the two together. The Lewis book is proceeding apace, just into the AACM formation now, about 90 pages in.

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