Jazz and Boxing
I decided to save my job search retrospect until I get to Florida and have that moment where it hits me and I really reflect. So no short novel on my last five years yet...but it's coming.
Meanwhile, some quick thoughts on a couple things.
-- Boxing may soon overtake football as my second favorite sport. As a houseguest of two boxing fanatics, their zeal for the sport has finally rubbed off on me. I realized how invested I had become when I had watched the Corrales/Castillo and Mayweather/Gatti fights for at least the 5th time each when we played them for my man Tony after Saturday's Hopkins/Taylor tragedy...well, maybe not tragedy, but at least surprise.
I don't think I'll ever be as rabid as Chuck, who was yelling at the top of his lungs, barking out instructions for Taylor, like he wasn't in DC and Taylor wasn't in Vegas...or better yet, like Taylor wasn't an image on the screen. There was one moment when Chuck started jumping up-n-down like an angry Rumplestilskin. This is all, of course, why I love him. But even if my fandom never reaches that level, I'm doing my knowledge on the weight class rankings.
It's kind of exhilirating, too. I haven't formed a new attachment to a sport since I started getting into baseball when I was a pre-teen...basketball, football, tennis -- I was up on those since I can remember. Matter fact, Tony even expressed some surprise that I wasn't up on boxing, since I'm the Sports Dude and all. The thing is, we never had the premium channels when I was young. I mean, we didn't cable until I was maybe 10 or 11. But we never had Showtime and HBO. My parents didn't want us having access to some of the adult-themed entertainment, like Real Sex...and I don't blame them. Anyways, without Showtime and HBO, I was never able to see these fights...so I grew up missing out on the Holyfields, Bowes, Sweet Pees. I didn't even see Hagler-Hearns until I was in the 8th grade. I missed out. Now though, there a re a slew of great young kats out there gettin down, Floyd especially, and I'm totally crushing on the sport right now.
-- I went to go see my man Nic Payton at the Blues Alley yesterday. My man Vino is probably the only that reads this blogs who knows about Nic Payton or cares that I went to see him, but leaving the show I thought of two things. For those that don't know, Nic is the dopest jazz trumpeter on the scene right now. He's from New Orleans so he has a strong base in jazz tradition, but he's a hip nigga, so he's trying as hard as he can to take the music forward.
But that's it...one of the things that had me bugging is the fact that he has no recording home right now. We kicked it after the show because I wanna write a piece on him for DownBeat or JazzTimes and in the midst of our conversation he dropped the "you know Warners dropped me right?" bomb on me. You? Nic Payton? Grammy winner? Leader of the new school? A cat so gangsta and so creative that when recording Sonic Trance you had the balls and wherewithall to say, "everytime I heard the bass start walking, we would stop and do another take. I was trying NOT to swing"? For this kat not to have a recording contract is sick. Nic tells me that there are only two labels left that still produce jazz artists. All other artists are coming out on indie labels. But jazz indie labels are MUCH different than, say, a hiphop indie label. There is no built in fanbase that checks for jazz, you can't sell a jazz CD out of your trunk...and u don't have crew members with fat, drug-money pockets. So driving home last night, I actually got a little teary eyed. I was playing Trance and had a particularly mesmorizing track, Seance (Romantic Reprise) on repeat...and there's a moment in the song where they keep repeating the head and with the repitition, the intensity builds until its just bubbling over the lip of the pot. Well I'm at a redlight, with the music blaring and I kept on recalling Nic's facial expression and tone of voice during our conversation...it wasn't quite despair, but it was dissapointment...and I felt so sorry for my brother. In addition to the sympathetic feelings, I was overcome with despair myself. I think we're at a point where jazz will revert back to the early 20th century, where you never get recorded (so no one will get to hear Marcus Gilmore, Nic's new 18-year-old drum phenom, in his formative years like we got to hear young, frisky Tony Williams when Miles snatched him out of the high school graduation ceremony), you just travel from club to club doing shows.
That made me even more anxious, because I'm leaving the Strict, where we have five jazz clubs that attract everyone I wanna see; and I'm headed back to hillbilly Florida, which is a jazz wasteland. This means that everytime I wanna see Nic or Kenny Garrett, I'm gonna have to hop on a plane. This has really got me depressed.
I really wanna get into the state of the jazz recording industry when I hook up with Nic for the story.
Meanwhile, some quick thoughts on a couple things.
-- Boxing may soon overtake football as my second favorite sport. As a houseguest of two boxing fanatics, their zeal for the sport has finally rubbed off on me. I realized how invested I had become when I had watched the Corrales/Castillo and Mayweather/Gatti fights for at least the 5th time each when we played them for my man Tony after Saturday's Hopkins/Taylor tragedy...well, maybe not tragedy, but at least surprise.
I don't think I'll ever be as rabid as Chuck, who was yelling at the top of his lungs, barking out instructions for Taylor, like he wasn't in DC and Taylor wasn't in Vegas...or better yet, like Taylor wasn't an image on the screen. There was one moment when Chuck started jumping up-n-down like an angry Rumplestilskin. This is all, of course, why I love him. But even if my fandom never reaches that level, I'm doing my knowledge on the weight class rankings.
It's kind of exhilirating, too. I haven't formed a new attachment to a sport since I started getting into baseball when I was a pre-teen...basketball, football, tennis -- I was up on those since I can remember. Matter fact, Tony even expressed some surprise that I wasn't up on boxing, since I'm the Sports Dude and all. The thing is, we never had the premium channels when I was young. I mean, we didn't cable until I was maybe 10 or 11. But we never had Showtime and HBO. My parents didn't want us having access to some of the adult-themed entertainment, like Real Sex...and I don't blame them. Anyways, without Showtime and HBO, I was never able to see these fights...so I grew up missing out on the Holyfields, Bowes, Sweet Pees. I didn't even see Hagler-Hearns until I was in the 8th grade. I missed out. Now though, there a re a slew of great young kats out there gettin down, Floyd especially, and I'm totally crushing on the sport right now.
-- I went to go see my man Nic Payton at the Blues Alley yesterday. My man Vino is probably the only that reads this blogs who knows about Nic Payton or cares that I went to see him, but leaving the show I thought of two things. For those that don't know, Nic is the dopest jazz trumpeter on the scene right now. He's from New Orleans so he has a strong base in jazz tradition, but he's a hip nigga, so he's trying as hard as he can to take the music forward.
But that's it...one of the things that had me bugging is the fact that he has no recording home right now. We kicked it after the show because I wanna write a piece on him for DownBeat or JazzTimes and in the midst of our conversation he dropped the "you know Warners dropped me right?" bomb on me. You? Nic Payton? Grammy winner? Leader of the new school? A cat so gangsta and so creative that when recording Sonic Trance you had the balls and wherewithall to say, "everytime I heard the bass start walking, we would stop and do another take. I was trying NOT to swing"? For this kat not to have a recording contract is sick. Nic tells me that there are only two labels left that still produce jazz artists. All other artists are coming out on indie labels. But jazz indie labels are MUCH different than, say, a hiphop indie label. There is no built in fanbase that checks for jazz, you can't sell a jazz CD out of your trunk...and u don't have crew members with fat, drug-money pockets. So driving home last night, I actually got a little teary eyed. I was playing Trance and had a particularly mesmorizing track, Seance (Romantic Reprise) on repeat...and there's a moment in the song where they keep repeating the head and with the repitition, the intensity builds until its just bubbling over the lip of the pot. Well I'm at a redlight, with the music blaring and I kept on recalling Nic's facial expression and tone of voice during our conversation...it wasn't quite despair, but it was dissapointment...and I felt so sorry for my brother. In addition to the sympathetic feelings, I was overcome with despair myself. I think we're at a point where jazz will revert back to the early 20th century, where you never get recorded (so no one will get to hear Marcus Gilmore, Nic's new 18-year-old drum phenom, in his formative years like we got to hear young, frisky Tony Williams when Miles snatched him out of the high school graduation ceremony), you just travel from club to club doing shows.
That made me even more anxious, because I'm leaving the Strict, where we have five jazz clubs that attract everyone I wanna see; and I'm headed back to hillbilly Florida, which is a jazz wasteland. This means that everytime I wanna see Nic or Kenny Garrett, I'm gonna have to hop on a plane. This has really got me depressed.
I really wanna get into the state of the jazz recording industry when I hook up with Nic for the story.
posted by Twistinado @ 12:36 PM
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