20 ene 2003

I prefer irregular past tenses in English whenever possible. For me, the past tense of dream is "dreamt," not "dreamed." snuck, not sneaked, etc...

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Ornette is the founder of a style, his own. An extremely logical, "horizontal" improviser and composer of haunting and jaunty melodies. The intellectual dimension of his playing means that I hardly ever tire of him. At one point I had a tape of "Change of the Century" that I simply played over and over in my car on long trips. In five hours, you can listen to a 40 minute tape... more than a few times. I think the mistake was thinking others would follow this lead. To dispense with harmonic changes requires an extremely strong, melodically inventive player. Don Cherry, playing with Ornette, plays ideas very similar to those of Ornette. This is not an approach that can be duplicated easily. Dewey Redmond could do it. Can I justify putting Ornette ahead of Lester and Coleman Hawkins? My list is showing its avant-garde bias. On the other hand I put these players ahead of Eric Dolphy.

I'm taking nominations for the two missing players on my top 10 list: make a strong case for Art Pepper, Anthony Braxton, Johnny Hodges, etc... and I will listen.

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