Ax, and reax …

How’s the book going? Well … it’s not, at the moment. No fear, no rush, the only goal is an intro­duc­tion, and hope­fully this cold will be head­ing off soon, until I catch the next thing our fifteen-month-old catches … this obit­u­ary for Pete Rugolo has been stew­ing in my mind for a while. I don’t think his story can be repeated, not just the clas­sic Ital­ian immi­gra­tion and migra­tion to Cal­i­for­nia, with the son becom­ing the first to attend col­lege. It’s Rugolo’s oppor­tu­nity to study with Dar­ius Mil­haud at Mills (while Nadia Boulanger is thought of as the most impor­tant com­po­si­tion teacher of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, Milhaud’s stature is as great, more so for the avant-garde). More unusual, it’s Rugolo’s career work­ing the hippest edges of both exper­i­men­tal­ism with Stan Ken­ton, artistry with Nat King Cole, June Christy and Mel Tormé, and pop-culture with his scores for “The Fugi­tive,” “M*A*S*H” and other shows. Mil­lions of peo­ple have heard his work, few know­ing who he was … what weird edi­to­r­ial deci­sion went into giv­ing so much real estate to a reis­sued col­lec­tion of music by Alan Hov­an­hess? He was a first-rate second-level com­poser, he wrote plenty of enjoy­able, lovely music — which is why peo­ple like it and play it — but in terms of cre­at­ing world music (in the arti­cle there’s no dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between the idea of incor­po­rat­ing non-Western music into clas­si­cal sys­tems and the term as a com­mod­i­fied cat­e­gory), he pales in impor­tance before the likes of Henry Cow­ell and even Alan Gins­burg. His sup­posed mys­ti­cism is national and sen­ti­men­tal, not mys­te­ri­ous. Stuff like this makes me miss Lou Har­ri­son more and more … who reads Grant­land, why does any­one think it’s good, and why would any­one pay money for the priv­i­lege? I’m a long time sports fan and wit­lessly clever, flavor-of-the-moment think­ing and writ­ing like that at the site dead­ens my enthu­si­asm. Rev­er­ent and self-reverent, it com­bines the worst of jock-sniffing of Dick Young with the naive, mis­an­thropic snark­i­ness of Gawker Media and now, sadly, The Awl … jazz jour­nal­ist Bill Kirch­ner is also a musi­cian, and he has two new releases out, dig­i­tal only, check them here (Sheila Jor­dan fea­tured on one!) … Blue Note has announced a new Robert Glasper release, sched­ule for Feb­ru­ary, fea­tur­ing Erykah Badu, Mos Def, Meshell N’Degeocello and more. Save your pennies …