Re: Is it "Live" or "Memorex"

[Doug Lawrence <dlawren@pacbell.net>]

>> may i offer an analogy: john coltrane vs. dj spooky
>> i'd be pretty angry if i wrote a song and a dj cut it up
>> and remixed it just to have them say "look at this new song that i 
>wrote"

hmmm ... that's exactly what coltrane did for many of his songs when he was
getting established. many of *his* songs were patterned after the jazz
standards of the day

bassist steve swallow takes changes from jazz standards and makes them into
his own songs ... he turned "softly as in a morning sunrise" into "let's
eat" on the real book cd ... it certainley doesn't take away from his
sonwriting or bass playing credentials ...

i once read a joe zawinul quote that he stopped listening to all other 
music
except his own playing for quite some time ... his premise was that you are
always basically copping other people's ideas anyway and he didn't want to
be influenced by that ...

how much of what you play on your instrument is really ~yours~ and not some
rehash of something else you heard?