I’m coming a bit late to this expansive
post on Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, sacred cows and polemical
critics at the Bad Plus blog, Do the Math. (Did I leave anything out? You bet I
did. Read the damn thing for yourself.) I feel as though I’ve done this a lot
already, but congratulations to Ethan Iverson for a piece that feels both
passionate (in its feeling) and dispassionate (in its fairness). It’s good criticism, made all the better by the open-forum
commentariat.
One undercurrent in the post -- about the deference shown to
Hancock and Shorter by critics, perhaps partly for fear of mass indignation -- rang
familiar, amusingly and scarily so. There isn’t a jazz critic working who hasn’t marveled
at the vitriol generated by Peter Watrous’s notorious
takedown of Shorter’s High Life. To adapt a
phrase from Iverson’s assessment, it was a drowning-kittens moment. (I agree,
by the way, that we need this kind of criticism even, or especially, when it
runs contrary to our own baseline judgments.)
Continue reading "Herbie Fully Loaded" »