Customer Reviews

Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein

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Like Greil Marcus and Robert Palmer, Corbett looks at (popular?) culture as both a product of and a determinant of culture at large. As a postmodernist, he delves into genres that are largely devoid of quality criticism as few are up to the task. Actually he's probably more of a Nat Hantoff or Frank Kofsky of our time in that he's quick to support what may commonly be refered to as music that tries its listeners patience and willingness to explore. I used this book as a reference for my thesis and have recommended it to several people.

"The sententious critic puts me to sleep. I would prefer a critic of imaginative scintillations. He would not be sovereign, nor dressed in red. He would bear the lightning flashes of possible storms." --Michel Foucault

Corbett seems to operate according to Foucault's injunction, and bears quite a few lightning flashes, due to his playful imagination and the imagination of the cutting edge artists he covers. "Extended Play" puts Cage and Clinton in the title, but actually focuses on free jazz/improvisation, not composition or funk. Corbett presents marvelous interviews with European free improvisers, including saxophonists Evan Parker and Peter Brotzmann, guitarist Derek Bailey, and drummer Han Bennink, as well as Americans Sun Ra (composer and bandleader),and Anthony Braxton (composer and reed player). He profiles fellow Chicagoans Hal Russell, Fred Anderson, Von Freeman, and Edward Wilkerson Jr. (the latter three all tenor players), English bassist and bandleader Barry Guy, and Sainkho Namtchylak, the only female Siberian Tuva singer in the ranks of European free improv. He does interview John Cage, which I found uninteresting, and George Clinton, which is tremendous.

Whether despite or because of his poststructuralist leanings (I'm with Evan Parker, who, according to Corbett, "...knows I'm a Continental-philosophy kinda guy, which is something he's certain that he isn't."), Corbett takes a stance clearly on the side of "optimism concerning the possibility of resistance," resistance in the realm of popular music against the capitalist status quo.

Presently overseeing the Unheard Music series for Atavistic Records in Chicago -- free jazz/improv tapes buried in the vaults until now -- John Corbett is doing his part to keep ALL the signifiers free!