Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Wine Talk Colonizing Jazz Crit

In the November 07 Downbeat, p. 57, John McDonough makes this mention of Luciana Souza's newest CD (one of my own top ten of the year, by the way) "The New Bossa Nova":

"Souza's sound is careful, calm and cool, with a petite, pitch-perfect vibrato and a slim dynamic range with a tactile, furry feel."

I'm all for synaesthesia, really I am, and I can handle dense description of just about anything.

I love, par example, the way Paul Austerlitz analyzes African Kente Cloth as checkered sound (in his book Jazz Consciousness, chapter 2), but the furry feel here is a bit distracting, because, well, it's kinda yucky. Sound--->singing--->mouth--->furry....

It's also pretentious, but then I'm into beer more than wine, so what do I know? The late, great Beer Hunter Michael Jackson was able to work up a fine, fulsome mess of adjectives to describe the taste of ale in the mouth.

Mouth. In the end I guess I'm some kind of old school prude. It's about taste? How pre-postmodern! I like my impressions of sound you-can-see or -feel to stay close to the sense organs they're involved with....

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