“Best of…” “The Essential…” “The Only [X] CD You’ll Ever Need.”  Seasoned listeners might turn their noses up at compilations, but for new listeners they can be a great place to start exploring artists or styles.

With a career spanning over fifty years, a compilation is a logical place to begin with the music of drummer Cozy Cole.  Cole’s boom and glide enlivened the bands of Jelly Roll Morton, Benny Carter, Cab Calloway and Benny Goodman, as well as dozens of small groups of the Swing and bop eras.  He continued his education at Julliard in the forties and shared his knowledge at a drum school he cofounded with Gene Krupa in 1954.  Cole was a powerful but tasteful drummer who continued to develop over a lifetime.  So there’s no shame in starting off with a $3.99 “The Very Best of Cozy Cole” CD from J&R’s aisles.

Except scanning the track listings for this disc, we find just eight tunes, all of which reference Bizet’s opera Carmen for some reason.  There are no jazz standards or blues (even Cole’s 1958 chart-topper “Topsy” is nowhere to be found).  Personnel are listed on the back, but there are no dates or indication if this is collective personnel or players appearing on different tracks.

A quick search for “Cozy Cole” on Amazon returns this disc as the second of just a few options to hear Cole’s music, and it’s also the cheapest (even if Amazon jacks up the price to just under nine bucks).  Yet Amazon doesn’t say much more, even omitting the information on the back cover.

If you do take the plunge and purchase the disc, the liner notes consist of an informative but brief biography of Cole without any personnel listings or explanation for the Carmen connection. If you’re new to this artist or to jazz, you’re not sure what you’re getting, other than something with Cozy Cole for a low price.  For some reason, this is the drummer’s “very best.”

In fact “The Very Best of Cozy Cole” is a budget reissue of Cole’s 1961 album “A Cozy Cole Conception of Carmen.”  Cole was in the original pit band for the 1943 Broadway adaptation of Bizet’s opera, Carmen Jones, where his thunderous drums earned him top billing in the program.  The score must have made quite an impression on Cole, because close to twenty years later he revisited it on his own terms.  Cole is an exciting, creative presence on this album (my review/PSA talks more about the music), but it’s a very specific session devoted to a very unique project.

The disc manages to stay under the radar of seasoned jazz listeners who see just another introduction to Cole’s work, yet new listeners seeking a survey will be disappointed.  If this sounds like splitting hairs, keep in mind that Cozy Cole doesn’t have a marketing firm, PR agent or Twitter feed (he tweeted once in July 2009 but I don’t think it made much headway in the music industry).  It’s up to passionate fans and word-of-mouth to attract new listeners to Cole and other lesser known musicians.  With releases like these getting buried in cyberspace, those fans have their work cut out for them.

One of These Things Is Exactly Like the Other

BUT there are a couple I do like, and there are reasons why.

The first one I’m going to mention is one I have the vinyl of, Pavement – Quarantine The Past: The Best of Pavement. This is because a LOT of the 23 songs are songs you might not have heard before. Most of them are from random, VERY hard to find EPs from the early 90s. A couple of them are even rehashes of their bestt songs. In my opinion it’s the greatest Best of album of all time. It looks so fucking cool in my record collection too…

One that I also absolutely adore is FatBoy Slim – The Greatest Hits: Why Try Harder. This because every single song on this album is amazing and mind blowing and songs that everyone knows and loves. There are also a few songs on it that were never heard before. But the reason I love it the most is for the DVD of TWENTY music videos!!! These are some of the greatest music videos of all-time too! I remember buying this as soon as it came out. I’ve lost it now though. It had a great sleeve too that said all the things he had done since his career began. One that’s always stuck with me was how he was on stage with THE FLAMING LIPS dancing in a tiger costume…

So what your favourite best of or greatest hit album? And why? And do you think I’m wrong about the concept of best of comps? I’m interested.

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soundtrack

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Michel Foucat

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What others are saying about
Feline Cuteness Hegemony

The intentional spelling mistakes.

And then we are all its slavez.

- Walt Whitman, I Download the Kitty Electric

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Beware the lulz of Caturday.

- Anonymous_27

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L’arnaque (The Swindle)

“I not cheezburger!” cries the Caturday star, as he is projected into the limelight, a feline endtime sacrifice with added anaesthesia/cuteness.

He is not cheezburger, nor does he really want a cheezburger. It is viewers who long for the cheezburger, the cuteness, and the lulz. It is viewers who are being swindled (arnaqué(e)s) by hegemony-encoded cat macros that hijack natural altruistic instincts. The swirl of multiple meanings and vulnerability of the featured cat enslave the viewer through a juxtaposed power-seeking guilt discourse.

- Jean Baudrillard, The Impossible Furball

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What Qatzel Ok is saying about
Feline Cuteness Hegemony

The Caturday Dialectic

The Caturday Dialectic has us “frozen in the headlights.”

The Post Caturday Condition (Qatzel Ok, March 2009) explained – in gay postmodern layman’s terms – how this process works. It is totalitarian and irresistible. You don’t need to own a cat to understand Caturday, after all!

Most of my ancestors were holocausted by superpowers. I am the progeny of many survivors. Under every leaf of my family tree, there is a gas chamber and a smiling Nazi patriot. And yet, where are the Caturdays that empower me? Where is my propaganda industry?

Feline Cuteness Hegemony freezes you in its headlights. The audience waits to be hit by the genocidal eighteen-wheeler of hegemony. Relax, and take it easy, for there is nothing that we can’t do (Caturday thinks itself invincible).

Where is that magical entitlement that can put me behind the wheel of that large vehicle?

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Blinded by Feline Cuteness Hegemony

We are unable to react rationally or to respond naturally to FCH. We have been enslaved by a hegemonic Caturday industry that offers us memes that short-circuit our (normally) altruistic instincts. These instincts are triggered by symbols that have been whored by commerce for many years to help them concentrate their kitty power. Just look at these cute and helpless abominations in your mediascape – the ones that you build your “reality” around. Aren’t they adorable? Aren’t you adoring them?

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Cuteness and “the Beast”

The Caturday aesthetic is a situated product of a hegemonic Western Elite culture and upper middle-class commercial values.

“Zaniness,” “fluffy,” “cute,” and “frivolous” are the operative topoi that create the consumer narrative structure. These situated coping strategies (in a boring, commerce-run society) give Feline Cuteness the legs it needs to kick the common good with.

It is in addressing these images of feline cuteness that the Western consumer beholds the “beauty” to which he must then play “the beast.” Western aggression is a necessary condition for maintaining both cultural and military supremacy over other cultures that do not maintain the same manufactured social prompts. Likewise, the Western Elite depends on these hijacked instinctive responses to build an army to protect their privilege with.

In conclusion, the “beast” that the consumer evolves into while witnessing the pussycat narrative is essential for maintaining Western Elite hegemony all over the world. So, post more cute little kitties!

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From the Feline Cuteness Hegemony Mail Room

Here’s an email I received from a recent inductee into the FCH Resistance Movement:

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I am momentarily returning to the Internet to thank Qatz for making postmodern thought accessible to “the little guy” like myself.

Prior to his paradigm-shattering essay “The Post-Caturday Condition,” I was far too close to the Caturday text. But now, thanks to the vocabulary tools that the Qatz text has given me, I am able to deconstruct this product of Western Hegemony.

I no longer respond to this kitty’s semiotic blackmail. I am finally free.

- Big Evil

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Why thank you, Big Evil. It’s always nice to hear that these difficult-to-pigeonhole Caturday essays are making a difference in somebody else’s life.

Meow.

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http://www.resistfch.org