I have a friend at the open stage who complained about a Warren Zevon song called Keep Me In Your Heart. She said it sounded so sappy. I told her he was dying when he wrote and recorded it. Later she changed her mind, now likes it. Is it that the song grew on her or that she likes knowing about his struggle? I bought the Keith Jarrett record “Sacred Hymns” around 1980. The premise was that this music transcribed by Thomas de Hartmann based on music supplied by Gurdjieff was connected to altered states of consciousness. It was too slow for me. Not as irritating as the ambient Eno records but close, played it just twice. Teen Town by Jaco Pastorius was more my speed for altered state of consciousness. The slippery unending Taekwondo bass playing took me somewhere special. Then in 2014 I read a book about Pastorius and when I got to the part about him making buttons that said “I Like Kike”, for attending a record industry party, it got in the way of my previous admiration, I was less interested in Teen Town.
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I didn’t know anything about the music Gurdjieff made with de Hartmann, no back story about those ancient communities he lived with or studied with, which are perhaps gone now. But I bet if I was told the right story in the right way all my bias would percolate and I might hear it differently. That’s how it goes with back stories and bias. There was a moment in a live Duke Ellington video in Europe where Freddie Stone takes a wild solo, very angular and high velocity. After it concludes people applaud and Duke leans into the microphone “Freddie Stone. Freddie Stone. We don’t know what he’s doing but we don’t want him to stop.” That’s about the most unbiased compliment I ever heard.
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Q, Soul -Pepper, Jazz 91.1, etc….people’s bias are helping destroy the arts at a much faster rate than anything Doug Ford can do. Funny, when a corporate CEO is found out to be behaving inappropriately, they simply replace it with another clone and the machine goes on. When it happens in the arts…