Jazz at Lincoln Center generates new works all the time, sort of, in the form of rearranged repertory from jazz's past.
Yet Western subject matter was so popular at the time — sort of like the New World version of Orientalism — that others used it, too.
One is everywhere all the time, sorting out the world, talking, arguing, writing, debating, smiling, snarling, playing the piano and, mostly, conducting, usually from memory.
The strong rhythm section erased its tracks all the time, sorting among shifts in tempo and feel, routing through grooves and far less comfortable patterns; it used strong consonant riffs and bizarrely raw (though never haphazard) atonal harmonies.
It did not resonate at the time, sort of like Rodriguez's checking his swing Tuesday night on a 2-and-1 pitch, falling into a more favorable 3-and-1 count before hitting a grand slam.
Calling it weight training gave it a stigma in those days because of the name, but there was a certain advantage to being where we were at the time, sort of isolated in some respects.
I was in my headspace at the time sort of contemplating negative mysticism, like being terrorized.
Four for the Washington Post, three for the Times, sort of.
All of which leaves the old kind of anticorporate populism — "the people versus the powerful," as Al Gore put it — a beat behind the times, sort of like "flower power" or the Laffer Curve.
And I read the Times sort of interchangeably.
