"Lady if you have to ask you'll never know!!"

(Haha Lester Young called everyone "lady", male or female, and I approve...)

I have myself used this line, in a drama competition.

if basie had said "swing lady, why it's THIS!! *pinkyplinkplonk* Did you hear that? Not this *plonkaplonkaplonka* but THIS!! *pinkyplinkplonk" You have to listen carefully and it's harder to do than to hear," then I wouldn't have any problem at all. She wasn't asking to join the Count B Orc, she was just asking "what's swing then"?

How are you supposed to find stuff out if you don't ask?

Anyway, Basie (or whoever, it doesn't really matter) WAS showing her what swing is, the whole damn time with every note he played, and the response wasn't so much "swing is not for the likes of you" as it was "MU! Don't ask! I won't tell you! You can learn it, but your intellectual/academic approach won't get you anywhere with it!"

This is, I suppose, tied into my punk rock snob idea that if you've never played in a band, you'll never REALLY get punk rock -- which isn't a secret way of saying that that only those annointed few who were good enough to be in bands will ever understand, but that playing in a band is really the only good way to get the essence of punk, it even worked for a clod like me, and I'd be wasting your time if I tried to tell you otherwise. So if you HAVE to ask, if you have no other way to engage with the problem of swing than using abstract words, then you probably will never know.

I have never interpreted it as a technique/perception dismissal though, always as the other example you've said, about eg 'soul' - the argument that there are some things you just have to 'feel'.
As someone who just doesn't get it w.r.t classic 'soul' music (cf the thread covering WH-Diva & 'soul/gospel' background refs) I end up trying to make equivalent mappings: eg trying to find qualities in singers/music I do like that might be 'soul' by another name, and figuring THAT's what they might mean...

ie he was saying "lady use yr fkn ears", ok sure, but the non fuck-off way of replying is in that case "it's really hard to explain to someone who isn't a musician", which i think is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and i accept that that may be all basie/whoever was saying: what i dislike is the moral dimension that re-telling the story — making these words iconic of some silly people's cultural shortfall — seems to introduce

basically with yr being-in-a-band analogy you ARE saying it's abt technique anyway (as far as i meant and used the word): i don't have a problem with THAT, it's the subsequent zen-zinger-turns-back-into-antizen-pumpkin aspect of it i actually dislike (where musical understanding/hearing/capability/being is converted — not by basie-whoever but the endless hordes recounting this tale — into moral grandstanding, if you like)

which "technique!= higher state of being, technique = being" could do too, if you see what i mean: reduction of enlightenment to checklist, levels of enlightenment converted into league tables etc etc

"what is soul?"
"you only ask becz you obviously have none"
vs
"master what is buddha nature?"
"grasshopper if you have to ask you'll never know" *whack of stick on head*

I don't think that paraphrase is really accurate -- I'd call it "It's really hard to explain to someone who doesn't have a decent ear". And the problem is, of course, that that's very true. Swing isn't really an easily paraphrasable thing; the usual explanation of tripletification is inaccurate in a whole bunch of ways. At slow tempos, it can be very close to 3:1, which Tony Williams was known to do; at fast tempos, it can approach 1:1. (They did a whole study on this, but if you have a decent ear and/or a playback device with pitch control, you can pretty easily hear it for yourself.)

I understand your objection to the hostility/exclusiveness of whoever-it-was's rejoinder, but the brickwall is real: that brickwall being that even the most lavish paraphrasing and description can't substitute for a good ear, they can only point a developing one in the right direction. As I've said before, and as is one of my mantras, there are things about music that are totally unparaphrasable into text, and even the ones that lend themselves to description can be a pain in the ass to quantify, and are too easily mistaken for (say) sociological or mystical issues when they're really an extremely complex calculus, apprehended and articulated in real time through intuition, skill, and a good ear.

So in a way, you're apt to get an equally gnomic answer from any high-level practitioner of a discipline whose processes can't be paraphrased, because any answer would in a way comprehend the thing itself. That's not really true, of course, and I actually think it's possible to give a remarkably enlightening answer to the swing question -- but such an answer would of course require that the listener can hear, and Basie/whoever was, perhaps, sick of giving thoughtful answers to questions posed by people who couldn't hear their way out of a paper bag.

it's the way the story gets told and referenced and retold that bugs me: cz the retellers are always implying that of course THEY'RE in on the knowledge the lady didn't have

(i mean for all any of us know she achieved enlightenment at that moment and went and paid for lessons and ended up a great jazz drummer!!)

(the other aspect that bugs me a bit is i suppose the semi-implication that jazz chops are somehow in-born rather than learnt: that anyone who ever swung, swung from the moment they picked up an instrument... which i'm afraid i don't believe for a second) (the "natural rhythm" implication, i guess)

I'm currently playing in a project with a guy who's a very talented keyboard player and a jazz fan. He has aspirations to play jazz. But he doesn't/can't swing. For the music we're playing it doesn't matter, but I'd be pretty reluctant to play in a jazz band with this guy (or even some kinds of rock bands where certain types of feel are important, though that's probably not music I'd be interested in playing nowadays anyway).

Now this guy KNOWS he doesn't swing (mainly because he used to play with an excellent drummer who tried to teach him and when he failed was pretty blunt about it). But he can't really "hear" this inability which is pretty obvious to most of the guys who've played with him.

Nevertheless, he is optimistic he can "learn" to swing. If he does it might disprove the quotation at the top of this thread, but it won't alter the fact that he's had to work hard at learning to do something that many of us just DO.

And here is me thinking through my original feeling:
What I dislike is the assumed moral attitude: that because someone had to learn something, or because someone asks a fkn question, they are somehow second-class citizens, artistically speaking. I'm not saying this is how Basie meant it, or that this is even slightly how you guys think or feel, I'm saying that the popularity of this anecdote is symptomatic of a why-bother contempt at large in the Swing Community towards the rest of the (music-loving) world, which doesn't do it any favours: "Outsiders don't understand what we do: that's how mahvellous we are." I don't even much mind musicians thinking like this: most of them CAN do loads of stuff non-musicians can't (which makes up for that fact that some musicians CAN'T do what lots of non-musicians can, eg communicate competently with spoken or written language) (OK that's putting it a bit a grumpily: there's a non-grumpy truth somewhere in there which I think is interesting: the pursuit of non-verbal expressive skills as flight from or resistance to the hegemony of the verbal blah blah)

What I dislike about this anecdote is it heightens the grumpiness and isolation at the expense of what's actually interesting/useful/valuable abt these apparently incommensurate ways of relating to one another.

I'm sure it's a v. unegalitarian impulse, but isn't being a 'music fan' always partly abt distinguishing yrself from the uncool ppl who HAVE TO ASK?

Not aware of anything to defend. Your glib dismissal of the "natural rhythm" theory seemed not to chime with my own experience so I pointed that out. People can have different levels of innate ability to hear rhythmic subtlety.

I can't say I know the quotation. No doubt some people (including folks with no sense of swing) have repeated it for one-upmanship reasons. I can't understand why you think this is so very remarkable though.

There is plenty of research demonstrating a positive correlation between musical and verbal skills, so I'm a bit mystified by your implication that there is some trade-off between the two.

i don't believe this theory

"There is plenty of research demonstrating a positive correlation between musical and verbal skills, so I'm a bit mystified by your implication that there is some trade-off between the two."

the verbal skills comment started off as a grumpy joke about the fact that none of the musicians seemed to be understanding what i was saying => ie there is a writer's and reader's version of swing and people have different levels of innate ability blah blah. My evidence wd include the fact that you Arf Arf have a total tin ear for my jokes.

but the trade-off question is much more interesting, so i'm gunna start a thread about it when i get a moment to state it more clearly

"I can't understand why you think this is so very remarkable though."

ArfArf this is ilXoR: who the hell posts stuff here bcz they think it's "remarkable"? I posted something about a vague feeling of animus towards an anecdote, an animus I didn't entirely understand and wanted to think through w.the help of the Massive-at-Large. Is this trivial and just me, or is it something significant. The difficulty of getting the point across suggests to me that something significantjust emerged here. I don't know what it is yet.

er, yes, I know: but I don't think taking issue with the argument obliges me to take on the carefully implanted non-sequitur, even at the second time of asking.

"Remarkable" in the sense worthy of remark. Poorly defined group of people allegedly use recondite quotation in entirely predictable way shockah.

But I'm forced to agree, my not getting your jokes can only be understood in terms of your, in-no-way-corroded-by-musicianship verbal communication skills.

==================

A wanna be gangster
Thinkin' he's a wise guy
Rob another bank
He's a sock 'em in the eye guy
Tank head
Mr Bonnie and Clyde guy
Lock him in the eye
He's not my kinda guy
Never wanna be
Confusion proof
Pudding's sweet
But too aloof
Orange eye girl
With blackslide Dew said
Yo homie
Who you talkin' to
A backed up paddywagon
Mackin' on a cat's ass
One upper cut
To the cold upper middle class
Born to storm
On boredom's face
And a little lust
To the funky ass Flea bass
Most in the race
Just loose their grace
The blackest hole
In all of space
Crooked as a hooker
Now suck my thumb
Anybody wanna come get some

If you have to ask
You'll never know
Funky motherfuckers
Will not be told to go
If you have to ask
You'll never know
Funky motherfuckers
Will not be told to go (oh woh woh)

Don't ask me why
I'm flying so high
Mr Bubble meets superfly
In my third eye
Searching for a soul bride
She's my freakette
Soak it up inside
Deeper than a secret
Much more
Than meets the eye
To the funk
I fall into my new ride
My hand my hand
My hand my hand
Magic on the one
Is a medicine man
Thinkin' of a few
Taboos that I ought to kill
Dancin' on their face
Like a stage on Vaudeville
I feel so good
Can't be understood
Booty of a hoodlum
Rockin' my red hood

If you have to ask
You'll never know
Funky motherfuckers
Will not be told to go
If you have to ask
You'll never know
Funky motherfuckers
Will not be told to go (oh woh woh)

==================

The first song on this LP is called "The Power of Equality".

The many many casual refs to the story on the net tend to prefer Armstrong as the speaker and jazz as the thing defined, though I often found swing included, and Basie, Ellington and Lester Young all credited.

A rival version: "If you gotta ask, don't mess with it"

Well in my definition it would include disagreeing with people and explaining why. I don't have this sense of being at loggerheads that you have and I'm always taken a bit by surprise on the couple of occasions you've mentioned it.

"Some (white) people just will never never get it" is a real attitude that exists in the world, and is probably the attitude present in most of the people who tell this story, and is there in ArfArf's and (to a lesser extent)Phil's posts, but that's not how I understand the quote and isn't what I think Basie (or whoever) was saying.

In the form of a question: Mark, are either of these two statements less of a problem for you than the other:

1. Use your ears (what am I saying -- you have white person's/non-musician's ears, forget it!

2. Use your ears or your feet, but don't try to think your way into this, for Pete's sake!

The second version, the one I like, isn't about what clubs you can or can't join, and is really about helping someone clue in rather than telling them to forget it. I think that anybody (regardless of skill level, intelligence, or "talent" (a word I despise as meaningless))can get any rhythm if they know the right approach. Sometimes you have to count it out, sometimes you have to dance it out, sometimes you have imitate another person who's already playing it. Swing is available to everybody if you're around it enough and move your body with it.

Not everybody has an innate knack to pick up on particular rhythms, and some of these folks still become good players. But I have never ever played with anybody with serious rhythm problems where a lack of concentration, of simple attention to the task at hand, of USING YER GOD-GIVEN EARS wasn't the real problem.

Your calling it a genre proves my point.

Punk snob hat off.

part of the frustration must be the perceived (by us) willingness of certain artists to subscribe to an image of their craft not very far removed from J Morrison's shaman schtick - "i am engaged in an important mystic experience which you the square earthbound layman cannot possibly understand or really fully participate in". this goes a bit further than simply cool vs. uncool (or does it?).

it also ties in somehow to your earlier comment re: musicians being reluctant to admit technique - the anti-muso reflex which SEEMS modest ("i have no proper training") but actually isn't since it removes the skill in question from the realm of graspability. (haha i ought to know: i AM an unskilled musician and i just realized I SAY THIS TOO!! but my lack of skill isn't enviable - i'm not in an "innate chops" type position and nobody ever asks me awestruck "how do you do it")

(bah sorry i guess i'm just repeating points you've already made)

sidetracking but Sterling - aren't artists listeners as well? nabisco's recent moribund rock thread suggests that a lot of groups are actually TOO aware of genre

As for the racial component to its use, I think what you're seeing is (a) black people deliberately using that screen to shield their culture from curious white onlookers -- i.e. "look you've had no interest in and nothing good to say about our culture for ages, so butt out of this one" -- and (b) black people conveniently appropriating the old trope that their music is primal or soulful or innate to explain why it seems alien or ungraspable to some white audiences. (This is also a way of avoiding discussion of the fact that black and white people and cultures as a whole have been segregated for so long in the U.S.)

The point of discussing things?

i still keep meaning to respond to colin's question but not doing so

It seems that two gentlemen, Riley and Farley by name, had a band playing at the Onyx Club in New York; and one fine day they upped and composed that daffy hit tune, "The Music Goes Round and Round." Everyone remembers how the music was going round and round that year.

Jack Egan, the puckish manager and publicist for the band, added his fuel to the fire:

"You can blame me for all the confusion on the definition of Swing," says Egan. "When we pushed the tune up to where it was a sensation and the whole country was singing it New Year's Eve, December 31st, 1935, the papers began yelling for stories. In one day, I gave out big feature stories over the phone to every New York daily and a few syndicates and news services. Each one would ask who Riley and Farley were. I'd answer they had a small Swing band at the Onyx Club. Then they'd want to know what a Swing band was. I'd say it was band that played Swing. Then they'd ask me, 'What's Swing?' and I'd try to answer. I had no prepared material, so each time I'd give as a definition the first thing that popped into my head, make it very involved, and lo and behold, every paper had a different explanation of what Swing was. That started a big controversy, a controversy that did more to publicize Swing music than the guys who played it."

i am engaged in an important mystic experience which you the square earthbound layman cannot possibly understand or really fully participate in

and the real reason this is so infuriating is surely because he follows with the sentence

but I am also selling a lot of records and so will remain in your face for some time, butt-boy

In a Greenwich Village nightclub, Fats Waller had just finished playing and singing his way through a stunning twenty-minute set which included Honeysuckle Rose, Sweet Georgia Brown, I'm Just Wild About Harry, Basin Street Blues, Body and Soul, Somebody Love Me and Blue Turning Grey Over You. Perspiring, laughing, loving the applause, Fats left his piano and walked over to the bar where he encountered a fashionably dressed woman. "Oh", she said, "Just the man I want to see. I'm sure you can answer my question. Tell me Mr Waller, what is swing?" Fats reached for his drink with one hand, mopped his face with the other, looked the woman squarely and replied "Lady, if you gotta ask, you ain't got it!" - Art Tatum

But the whole attitude comes out of jam sessions, doesn't it? If you've got two bass players there and one of them can swing and one can't, are you going to bother trying to teach the first one? It's the old 'come back when you've done the work' thing, which exists in everything, even here on ILX. It's just trash talk between competitors, and while I have problems with trash talk, it's part of life.

I found it after typing 'Duke Ellington Cunt' into the ILM search engine. I wanted to find a quote from a 1970ish Rolling Stone int. w/ the Duke where he said something like "I don't know why musicians get into drugs. I like cunt." I think M. Matos posted it originally.

While we're here, I read an online int. w/ Cecil Taylor recently, where he closed the int. with this gem - " Well, Ellington said to Mr. Gillespie, "Why do you let them call your music bebop? I call my music 'Ellingtonia'!" Made me laugh, anyway.

what?

1) Yeah it's a cocky attitude. That's the fucking point of the quote. I'm sure some woman or man somewhere asked some jazz musician a similar question and got a detailed answer with demonstrations and a lot of patience and understanding. That anecdote wasn't funny, so it didn't wind up in a book.

2) re: Dylan. Dylan's standoffishness toward the press and fans wasn't due to naive questions. I wonder how he'd respond to something as simply curious as the "what is swing." He had to deal with assholes who wanted him to be something particular, who thought they knew what he was and what he meant before he even walked in the door. It's more like Waller dealing with some lady who tries to tell HIM what swing is. There was a great cartoon in a 40s record collector magazine where a scrawny little nerd is talking to some old jazz musician about his "brief stacatto period" or something like that, and the old guy is just sitting there like "what the hell is this loser talking about?"

3) There's only one way to accurately discuss music, and that's playing music. You can listen all you want, but that's a one-way conversation. I say this as a total non-musician.

4) If you just listened to a whole Fats Waller set, and you've previously read 10 words about jazz in your entire life, and you still have to ask what "swing" is. Then, honestly, lady, you ain't never going to know.