[Revolting cat!]

What a brilliant analysis! (Is it over the head of some?) Maybe I don't read the right newspapers/magazines, but this is the kind of analysis you'll see often in European press, rarely here. Compare, please: same day, same topic, typical American journalism's laundry list of clichés.

After reading Early's piece in its hardcopy version this morning, I googled on "Gerald Early" to find he's a quite an interesting writer. See this first Google hit, for example.

[Finny]

Brilliant analysis? ... maybe. This guy lost me when he started talking about Miles Davis. While Miles' contemporaries, like Dizzy Gillespie, played the same style and stuff, year after year, decade after decade, Miles was pushing the envelope of electric jazz fusion with some of the gnarliest jazz musicians around.

Miles was not only a continual innovator, he was a mentor and an inspiration to MANY young jazz musicians, white and black -- I SAW this, on stage, at the several Miles' performances I was lucky enough to see live. Meanwhile, Diz and others who managed to survive the heroin and hard drugs that led so many hard-core bebop and straight-ahead players to early deaths, were still playing hard bop, Night in Tunisia, Green Dolphin Street, year after year after year, and writing new tunes that sounded a lot like the old ones, doing the same ol' same ol'.

Not that Diz wasn't GREAT, he was. But for all his jazziness, Diz played it safe. Miles never did. Miles innovated with new styles, new musicians who employed new technologies, etc. I didn't like all of Miles' music, but Miles was a real adventurer. That this author chalks if off to some cynical move on Miles' part to stay popular with the mainstream, shows a certain shallowness on his part. Which sort of ruins his credibility in my eyes when he talks about the tragic figure of Michael Jackson.

--Jazz Rant off!