[jojocomok]

Lovano was probably a bad example to use. And the cream at the top is always going to be pretty sweet, regardless of era. I'm just suggesting that there isn't the same motivation to be different now. If you were trying to get a job in the mach one Basie Band by sounding like Lester Young that wasn't gonna cut it. They already had one of him.

Surely you'll agree that players today develop in a totally different way than 50 years ago. I'm not saying it's better or worse, just different. We're never going to hear a band like say, the 1956 Miles Davis Quintet, because there isn't anyplace like the Cafe Bohemia that will pay a quintet to work there 6 nights a week for 18 months. Nobody in jazz performs that consistantly anymore, and if they do it's concert one nighters with travel everyday, which as I believe Joe Henderson once said, really interferes with your practising.


And jeez, where in that post did I accuse anybody of practising TOO MUCH.

"Who practised and had more technique than Trane?" I dunno. Sidney Bechet? My point there was it's always tempting to write off players who are not part of our own personal aesthetic. I don't play traditional New Orleans jazz, but studying these cats up close has led me to a huge appreciation of the things they did. And when you get in there with the headphones on in the Tulane Jazz Archives and listen to those oral histories, Monk Hazel or Abbey "Chinee" Foster speaking to you across time, you realize they are just like you. Being a jazz musician hasn't changed much, on a process level anyway, since the very beginning.

I'm doing a Ben Webster transcription right now and for a guy my age (I'm 50) who is basically a product of a post 'Trane world, his stuff is more out in some ways than Albert Ayler. Rhythmically it's hard to get off the CD and onto the page, and his harmony is strange to my modern ears. What's with all the sixth chords, Ben? But I'm having a ball with him, and it's very...nourishing, know what I mean?;-)