YouSaid · the spoken record

Coleman Hughes

lines on the record: 68
first: 2024-05-01
most recent: 2024-05-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Interesting. So, my counter argument to that would be, insofar as I understand the early history of jazz, it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time in the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in say New Orleans and New York City was many, many decades ahead of the curb in terms of its attitudes towards how people should live racially, interracial friendship, interracial relationship, et cetera. So, yeah, I'd argue the ethos of jazz was more colorblind in my sense than the American average at the time.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would basically explain it by saying the idea of colorblindness, by which I mean trying to treat people without regard to race and having colorblind race-neutral public policy, that's become a dirty word and a dirty concept, in particular on the left in the past couple decades and really in the past decade. So this book is an attempt to rescue colorblindness from the jaws of disdain and argue that it is the best overall philosophy by which to view the idea of race that we want to raise our children, even if it's a watered down version of MLK, we ought to raise our children on that message and we ought to get race out of public policy and wherever possible, wherever plausible, use socioeconomics where we want to deal with issues of disadvantage.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I mean, so there is research suggesting that longer school days are a good thing. I mean, Roland Fryer's experiments in Texas where he randomly selects schools and extends the school day, among other things, gets good results. On the other hand, there just are a lot of kids that don't resonate with the structure and skill set of high school or public schooling in general. And their talents lie elsewhere. I mean, I know countless musicians that may have even been diagnosed as quote unquote ADHD in school, but the reality is they had no trouble focusing in general and certainly had no trouble focusing on practicing their instrument for five hours at a time, but had no interest in school as it was structured. I'd be curious what can be done to make school. More tolerable for those kinds of kids.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The truth is, I didn't resonate with much of any continental philosophy. It struck me as not respecting what I value in writing, which is brevity and clarity. And so I might like to read someone who really gets Nietzsche explain what Nietzsche was trying to say, but reading Nietzsche itself was not a very funny experience for me. And so I gravitated strongly towards analytic philosophy”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep. I don't think there's much correlation between being able to explain it well and being able to do it well is one thing I've noticed of musicians.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, interesting Yeah, so I mean, I was wondering if it's just that it was so influential it influenced everything else, and now sounds banal in retrospect, but it sounded banal at the time.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. You know, I love piano, man. I think it's an incredible song. I can't really speak to that much. Billy Joel being great outside of the few hits. But piano man, I think, is a correctly rated song.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trombones can be used because most of that music was performed with Willie Colon, who's arguably the greatest Latin trombone player. And they would essentially, they could sustain the whole harmony of the band if they wanted to without a piano or guitar simply by having two trombones playing triple forte. And that's another thing I really love about that music.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you should definitely start with Hector Laveau. I would say Hector Laveau's music, it's incredible. It's incredible to dance to. It stands the test of time. A lot of it is thematically dark, actually. Many of his most famous songs, I mean, so for instance, El Dia de misuerte is an extremely sad song about how his mother died and then his father died. And he had a tragic life. But you would never know that because it sounds so happy and it makes you want to dance. And it's also probably the best example of how”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contrafactor of the song, All the Things You Are, and Contrafact meaning same chords, different melody, and he called it all the things you could be if Sigmund Freud's wife was your mother. So he had these very funny titles. I'm a lifelong Mingus fan and blessed to play in the band.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think she should start with Mingus Aum because it's the album that would most broadly appeal to someone who didn't know any Mingus. I would also very much recommend watching his interviews as his personality as part of the experience of listening to him. And then my favorite Mingus is probably Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is, I think, a masterpiece. And the lesser known Mingus piece that is a beauty and was part of his multi his several hour-long composition called epitaph, which I think he never finished. But it's a song called Pinky Don't Come Back from the Moon looking for love, man. And it's a beautiful 10-minute or so just gorgeous piece. And he had a penchant for giving really long names and funny names. So he has another one, for instance, called, it's a...”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would wholeheartedly agree that it's special even within jazz. The way I would describe it is there are certain jazz musicians that seem to have created their own autonomous island within the landscape of jazz, whereas most of the great jazz musicians sort of resided in the same country. Certain people were like off in Taiwan on their own island. I would put Mingus in that category. I would put someone like Monk in that category, Ornette Coleman, people like that. Mingus' music is my favorite of all of those because it sounds like Duke Ellington. If Duke Ellington had had an acid trip and composed things that were broadly in his idiom, but just everything was changed a bit. That's how I would describe Mingus.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I participated in the Charles Mingus High School Jazz Festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite bands from all around to audition, and they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band. And I sat in with the band and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights. And I was probably 16 or 17 at this point. So I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night, play two sets with the Mingus band sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now kind of my mentors, people like Kumba, Frank Lacey, who was a fantastic trombone player, played with Art Blakey and D'Angelo and so forth. And then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, not the slide. The slide, in my view, that's what attracted me to the trombone, the fact that you push and pull rather than pressing buttons or valves. And that's what makes it distinct. But the slide motion is not actually the trickiest thing about it. The trickiest thing about it is the same thing that's tricky about every other brass instrument, which is the ambushure. That's what separates great trumpet players from poor trumpet players. In my view, the finger technique is not nearly the hardest part. It's always the small muscles of the mouth and coordinating those to play the instrument effectively.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but in a way, I benefit. This is why you can't compare modern players to players of the past. I benefit enormously from having studied and learned all of many of JJ Johnson's solos. So there were things he had to invent that are now second nature to most trombonists, which make it easier to improvise in that style than it would have been for him.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bebop trombone player would also preclude you from being a truly improvisatory musician, which is generally characteristic of jazz musicians.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was most interesting about JJ Johnson is that he was an extreme perfectionist. What people don't realize about JJ, at least people that aren't deep kind of connoisseurs is that most of his solos on his records were prepared. To an extent that is not true of his other contemporaries like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, et cetera, most of their solos were truly improvised. Like if you go to the alternate takes on those records, it's a different solo. If you go to JJ's alternate takes, it's almost the same solo. And I think that rather than be a bug that was a feature of his success, because if you consider the challenges required to make the trombone into a bebop instrument, which nobody thought was possible before JJ Johnson did it, it's kind of a catch-22 because the level of perfectionism you would have had to have in order to be the first successful”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you so much, and I have to apologize for stealing the name of your podcast for mine. I figured I have alliteration, so I have extra reason to do it.”
2024-05-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source