Science can now explain why a Hendrix solo tastes like oranges, and Axl Rose’s voice tastes like awful.

Varese stares into the camera with Gallic intensity, daring you to listen to sound recordings of his jazzplorations.

Click on his ample hair.

 Amirtha of SWEAT Lodge spins her wheels:

OK, let me  just say: I dig Varese, who doesn’t?  I spent the majority of my time in college obsessing over Ionisation, Hyperprism and Ameriques.  I have always been equally magnetically drawn to Charles Mingus, a monster of a composer and improviser.  I had always been told (or at least it had always been implied) that never the twain shall meet.  That the universes in which each of these composers exist are parallel lines, with no correlation and no evidence of a relationship.  I remember later hearing the anecdote about Charlie “Bird” Parker knocking on Varese’s door asking for composition lessons.  Varese describes these fateful encounters: “He stopped by my place a number of times. He was like a child, with the shrewdness of a child. He possessed a tremendous enthusiasm. He’d come in and exclaim, ‘take me in as you would a baby and teach me music. I only write one voice. I want to have structure. I want to write orchestral scores.’ I promised myself I would try to find some time to show him some of the things he wanted to know.”  While many of us may have heard these stories, the depth of the relationship between bebop and the classical avant-garde is sort of a murky musicological black hole.  It always seemed like a lot of hogwash or hearsay (like the one about Sun Ra playing with John Cage on Coney Island???).

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