Here is something annoying: famous pianist, Bad Plus member, and blogger Ethan Iverson recently wrote a post entitled 11 Canonical AACM Performances (curiously titled given his relative unfamiliarity with the AACM, which he acknowledges right there in the post itself). You can't read the post he wrote, though, or over three-quarters of the comments that, in the few days comments were open, were appended to it, because it's been revised and they've been deleted. He even said he'd edit the post and delete the comments the day before he did it, and I read that comment, and had I been thinking would have saved the post, in order to—well, to be snide, I guess.
The inadequate occasion for the revisions was this: in the original post Iverson had included some digs at Anthony Braxton's standards albums, which were both inflammatory and pretty poorly presented (part of one of the negative paragraphs consisted of quoting and then mocking some dude's review on itunes—burn!). It was clear that Iverson found the recordings pretty shabby, and that he thought that most people who knew from standards would agree, but he refrained from saying much of anything about why, so the overall impression was that no one likes them because they're self-evidently amateurish crap and nothing more needs to be said. (Contrariwise, he's generally pretty specific about what he praises). Unsurprisingly, this inflamed some people, and there was some discussion in the comments about Braxton. One guy came in and said something about Braxton's role as a leader on one of the albums, or something like that (I can't remember and obviously can't check), nothing really that contentious, just making a correction. Smartypants pianist Vijay Iyer contested the characterization of Braxton's standards-playing and suggested that Iverson was listening to the AACM's output with too jazz-specific of an ear. In responding to Iyer Iverson gave more specific reasons for his dislike of the performances in question, and also said that the next day, today, he'd edit things as described above—he should learn (he said) what being negative on the internet gets you.
This struck and obviously continues to strike me as incredibly petulant behavior. The conversation was, with one exception, civil, if forceful. Disagreement is not in itself bad. The post was more interesting for the back-and-forth in the comments. Multiple people—Iyer, some guy called Dan, and me—pointed this out, to, obviously, no avail. If these comments, along with the comment in which Iverson made plain his plans, were still available to be read, I would be able to support my contention that Iverson's reaction was, furthermore, incredibly discourteous to his commenters, suggesting that the reasonable disagreement which is what they were actually offering was what he deserved for offering negative opinions on his blog. That is, one gets the impression that for him the only salient feature of the comments was that they disagreed with him; their further content was irrelevant. Pretty disappointing (and it makes you wonder how he deals with bad notices).
Here you go - the post w/comments pre-purge:
http://www.restructures.net/Iverson-AACM.htm
Posted by: Jason Guthartz | December 18, 2009 at 09:17 PM