Not that he's behind bars, but I can normally listen to Frank Rosolino without flinching.

Bukka's "Parchman Farms" is nice. (I confess I haven't thought about any of the many moral considerations that may be connected with asserting this.)

I say celebrate these musicians BECAUSE of their transgressions. Perhaps this is what Sun Ra meant when he claimed he was the warden of the BEST prison on this planet… I distinctly remember arguing with a close friend on one occasion about whether or not Lucky Thompson’s situation was indeed tragic. Not only has the saxophonist left “the business”, seemingly for good, in the mid-1970’s, but, if rumors are to be believed, he has also been unable to overcome some psychological difficulties and, although he is no longer homeless, is now in a place about as demeaning to human dignity as your average over-crowded American prison: a home for the old, infirm, and emotionally disturbed. I keep trying to express to my friend how I felt that Thompson’s silence over the past 30 years was a great loss, but my friend argued – convincingly so – that to want a change in Thompson’s situation, and certainly to propose for some alteration of his “character”, some remedy, was to disrespect the music the man did manage to create. My friend’s point was that, although we do not have to know a musician’s biography to be affected by their work, by the same token, we cannot separate a musician’s music from his or her life and from his or her Self. Thompson’s improvisations, intricate but brawny and almost precarious in their lyrical poise, would not exist without the mental anguish which plagues the mind capable of such inventions. Be happy with the Lucky Thompson we do have, my friend was telling me. If you want something different, turn to another musician. Perhaps we can wish, in the most empathetic sense of the word, that Thompson would have made better use of his experiences, but do not annul those experiences with good intentions. This seems to me a rather Kantian notion, but I am OK with that.

I would never deny another person their rights, but I do understand how certain crimes warrant the abridgement of rights. However, I think there is something cruel and unusual and essentially injurious to human dignity to take their craft away. Think of what happened to Monk and Jackie McLean (he considered his hard time with Prestige precisely that) when they lost their cabaret cards, and recall further that Gene Ammons was occasionally let out of the pen to record sessions (the Prestige 2fer GET HAPPY documents at least one such session, and it is one of Jug’s best from the period). There may be no way back to “civilization”, if you will, for people such as this accept for their music. Monk’s musical activity helped ensure his personal and familial stability, while Ammons was THE Saturday night hero for thousands of African-Americans of his generation. Even in prison, with Bob Porter and others issuing and re-issuing Ammons recordings, Jug remained an important “contributor” to society. Which is more than you can say for Bill O’Reilly, who seems not to understand that artistic expression of a certain lifestyle cannot be equated with an endorsement of the same. An artist is someone who goes somewhere the rest of us necessarily cannot / will not go, and returns to tell their tale. Orphic, huh? Silence these musicians and you may as well sentence them to death. There is a big difference between a Red Rodney, who did his time and returned to the scene playing better then ever, and Bird, his mentor, who never lived to serve the time he probably should have for his many wrongdoings. Bird paid his debts, cashed in the consequences of his conduct, by hocking his life in piecemeal fashion – you might say. Anyway, the glamour pundits complain about, like a regional speech accent, is as much something the audience (listener) is willing to perceive as it is something the performer (speaker) possesses.

Finally, I think it’s important to remember how the criminalization of certain activities, as well as systems of incarceration can become forms of institutional discrimination. Musicians, on the average, are marginalized economically and politically. Factor in certain racial and educational variables, and you may have some extremely marginal figures. It was illegal for slaves to own drums in the pre-Civil War South, not because plantation owners were concerned with noise pollution, but because they understood that drumming for African-American peoples was a medium for communication, and that, as in Haiti, drums could be used to foment rebellion. Better in my mind not to start down a slippery slope by thinking about the music made by those whose records aren’t entirely clean as a form of “hate speech”. One always, always has to mind the jailers as much as their charges.

Joe, thanks for ringing in here. Deriving pleasure from another person’s suffering, anguish, malaise seems sick in one sense. But what about when this suffering is translated into art? Does an observer’s pleasure from the art carry the same pall? My answer would be ‘no,’ but it’s not as black & white as it might seem. Being thankful for the Lucky Thompson we do have seems supremely selfish to me, yet I am thankful (selfish) just the same. I’m not an altruistic enough soul to wish that the man had avoided his many tribulations, if it means the emotional weight of his music would’ve been watered down or pacified. Then again, who’s to say that given a different less tragic lot in life he wouldn’t have come up with even greater artistic achievements? Here is where I think you’re friend’s argument falters. He seems to be contending that the weight & resonance of Lucky’s music came from crosses he bore (the mental anguish, etc.). But to me that’s highly subjective conjecture.

Maybe the scale that makes the most sense in judging the ‘criminal’ musician is a gradation of his or her offense. Monk, Jug, McLean and others were convicted of drug related crimes (trumped up or otherwise). These sorts of transgressions to me are minor & the punishments received major by comparison. There was even the illusion created (unintentionally) by Bird that heroin was a means by which artistic genius could be accessed. The aura of ‘cool’ that sucked in its fair share of fledgling would-be ornithologists. Frank Lowe even described the tonic of drugs as an essential means of casting off the shackles of dominant (white) society and achieving some semblance of free thinking from which to create.

The situation is different in the case of a murder or a rapist. These kinds of crimes warrant a removal of rights to a far greater degree IMO. It’s where part of me can see O’Reilly’s point (though the hypocrisy inherent in the mouthpiece through which it’s communicated still makes me scoff). The idea that such individuals are celebrated for their achievements (ie. through a national television series) does seem problematic. Then again, the making of music seems a fundamental human right, particularly when it’s a central part of who an individual sees him or herself being. Robert Pete Williams killed a man- he claimed in self defense. If this standard had been applied to his situation and his guitar removed from his custody we wouldn’t have his Oster recordings, a body of music that is unique in the history of the blues.

all you have to do is listen to the words...If he done got that good, its either gonna be God or the devil comeing out of his soul...thats when you decide!