Jazz for aficionados

Thanks for your response(s), @audio-b-dog.

re Rattle:

Q: How can one tell that the floor of the stage is level?

A: The viola players are drooling out of both sides of their mouths.

😊

frogman, so funny that you're hip to the violist jokes. At the L.A. Phil we had a lead violist named Carrie Dennis. She must have been one of the best violists in the world. In her twenties she was chosen as the L.A. Phil's lead violist but she went to Berlin instead. Then she came back to the L.A.a Phil. She used to sway her body like crazy to pretty much any composer. I used to like to watch her. She brought the concerts to life. She performed Bartok's Viola Concerto in bare feet. Then one day she did not come to work. She disappeared, and as far as I know, nobody knows where she is.

acman3, it has taken me years of working on a book to try to get across my ideas on the Feminine Creative Spirit. I don't know how much you know about physics, but there is a concept called entropy. Basically, it says that forms will eventually dissolve and become white noise. The universe will become white noise (particles scattered without form). Yet the universe has been around 14 billion years and it just keeps getting more complicated and more orderly. Something is missing in our male view of the universe. And it is male, just think of all the famous physicists you can think of. Physics' concepts have been designed by males. There is something we're not seeing. Richard Parnass writes about this in his book "The Passion of the Western Mind." He says our science is based on left-brain, logical thinking and we need to engage our right brains more. Einstein might be an exception because when he was a child he dreamed about traveling on a light beam.

But let me give you a quick perception about jazz that is indisputable. Female vocalists are not different than male vocalists simply because their voices are higher. Women convey a song differently than men because feminine expression is different than masculine expression. I don't know why this shouldn't prove true across the board. I don't think there have been enough female musicians (other than singers) for us to see that difference. Any females on this thread? That's another issue. 

I'm in with your brother and I think females will stand on their own excellence but it will take males some time to understand it. Actually, I think it will take the Feminine Creative Spirit to save our asses, because male-think is about to descend us into social entropy. 

Richard Tarnas wrote the best book about astrology  and history after his wonderful book on history of ideas in the West...

But he pointed to a polarity not to a sexual difference but to a symbolic one, an archetype...

I think it push us in the wrong direction if we associate music with sex differences... We are all male and female on the psychical level with a determined sexuality biologically but we are all male and female and we must balance the two aspects.

 Iain McGilchrist analysed this polarity well in two books...

By the way i like Chet Baker a lot because he express the more feminine aspect , his anima, in his playing...

Roland Kirk is at the opposite...

I think Miles Davis represent a good balance...

mahgister, first of all I think it is so cool you've read Richard Tarnas. And you are right, he did not talk about things in terms of masculine and feminine. That is why what I'm doing is so difficult. Nobody has really broken down our history by gender. But in my reading I have found a history of the suppression of women. It is clear to me when and where it happened and the consequences. Now that I've been studying it, I see the results all around me. And I have the difficult job of making others see what I see.

I agree with you that we all have a degree of both sexes, and I like your examples of Chet Baker and the amazing Roland Kirk of the many horns in his mouth at once. Male artists, as opposed to men in general, are most likely to embrace their feminine. I have recognized the feminine in myself, although my masculine side is pretty strong. Probably one of the reasons I'm trying to see the feminine. 

Yet we must admit and see that we live in a patriarchy. This is not just feminist BS. Look at the countries around the world that suppress their women to various degrees. Or in order to succeed their women learn to adapt to the patriarchy. It's a fact that men have developed thought all around the world. We mostly have read male writers in school, although that is changing, partly because women read more than men, especially fiction. Sociologically, psychologically, and politically, patriarchy has reigned. Western music is a product of male minds, with very few exceptions mostly occurring from the latter half of the 1800s onward. 

Yet, to your point, men who suppress the feminine in themselves long for it. Look at all the poets who have called upon the female muse. In jazz, we have loved our female singers and still do. Religions that have suppressed women still have a female aspect. Mary in Christianity, the Shekinah in Judaism, and I have read that there are feminine aspects to Islam. 

I am convinced that women were the strongest force in spirituality and the arts, but I can't go on too long here talking about history. I will look at Iain McGilchrist, though. Thanks for mentioning him.