http://plone.org/events/regional/nola05/

'Le bon temps' is starting to 'rollez'!

See some Photos from the French Quarter...

The band in the Dragon Den at the Siam Cafe is "Improvisational Arts Council"

This note about IAC from "resodance.com"

The Improvisational Arts Council, led by festival organizer Janna Saslaw on flute, played an amazingly tight set of improvisation, some sections even having a composed feel. Over a plate of food at Ashe, someone asked incredulously if the group had ever played together before, feeling that the music was sheer chaos, but I disagreed. A piece might evolve out of a three way set of conversations between pairs of instruments, but will snap suddenly into a groove. Sometimes it just takes a little listening to discern the coherences of even the strangest combinations of sounds.

It's easy to forget that Coltrane's mid-Sixties music, for instance, the monumental "Ascension," or Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz" could once, and still do, drive some listeners out of the room. Poet Diane di Prima recalls in her memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman that, during a brief period of retreat to her family's house in the early Sixties, she often cleared the living room in order to write by putting on Ornette's music and waiting a few minutes.

New movements in art-and here we're talking about a "new" music that's already 40 years old-needs a curious audience, one that is willing to listen and think, and not simply receive the familiar song structures of popular music or conventional jazz. People who berated Eric Dolphy, Coleman, and Coltrane for their departures might still feel this music doesn't swing or lacks a grounding in the blues and therefore isn't jazz.

There are those who believed (and maybe still do) that Sun Ra was a charlatan. But to put a cap on the imagination is to close off invention and squash change in art. And without change there just isn't any art, only reproduction of expected standards of behavior, musical conformism, and commodity exchange.

After the first set, I walked a couple of blocks back toward the hotel to "Molly's on the Market" on Decatur St. and some great wide-ranging discussions with Rob and Joel...

Everything from the Phase of the Moon to fractal dimensions and David Hilbert's infinite-dimensional space, Terence McKenna and Rudy Rucker

I'm trying to pace myself.

One gorgeous black-haired tattooed bartender enough material for six volumes on the virtual history of the US if only the French had arrived at Provincetown instead of the Puritans...