Thirsty Ear

There's a nice interview with Peter Gordon of Thirsty Ear Recordings up on AAJ, talking about the industry, the music, and the birth of the Blue Series that Matthew Shipp and Mr. Gordon have cultivated.

I'm always appreciative of people who are documenters of the music and who release recordings whose artistic potential is inherently greater than its commercial potential. I guess potential isn't the right word there - I'd like to believe that the commercial potential is huge, but the commercial reality isn't remarkable.
A few quotes I like from the interview:

"If there’s a problem with music and jazz in particular today, it’s that [jazz] is caught up in form and structure. And that should come later, after you’ve done the innovation. If we start with form and structure then you can’t ever get beyond that—it becomes your prison. What we encourage at Thirsty Ear is to just let it go."

"We have our great masters and no one can escape our big masters—it’s like a quicksand we fall into. You have to force innovation because it’s not promoted as greatness. If you look at the essence of jazz—that’s the original punk rock back in the day. These guys are the bad boys, these are the guys that were saying “screw you” to music, doing their late night sessions and cutting the cloth in a different way. [Jazz] has become so institutionalized it’s become antithetical to its original roots."

"Jazz doesn’t succeed because it’s not in the common culture. The common culture is about today not about yesterday—yesterday is history. And if jazz wants to be alive and it needs to be alive, it needs to relevant and it can’t be relevant if you’re always tipping the masters of fifty years ago. It can only be in historical society then. The masters are great and the masters will never be topped and that’s precisely the problem—they never will be topped. So let’s try something new! Let’s try something fresh."

Emphases mine.

More later....