To the editors:
Moldy figgery forever!, it seems. Michael Solot is entitled to his opinions about free jazz, but he shouldn’t let them let him indulge in falsehoods and misrepresentation [“Reading: It’s Really Gone, Man,” May 7]. The political consciousness that Solot says made free jazz a vehicle for hating the white man was–according to David Rosenthal in the very book, Hard Bop, Solot was supposed to be reviewing–already at work in hard bop. Indeed, the most talented musician ever (although not solely) associated with hard bop, Charles Mingus, made some of the most in-your-face black-power music of all–and because it was him writing it, most of it’s still powerful and vital, which–to my tastes, at least–is more than can be said of the stultifying funkiness of far too much hard bop.
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Ray Olson W. Elmdale
