the pre-mature autopsies on mermaid avenue

This seems like a really interesting opinion piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/31/arts/music-what-jazz-is-and-isn-t.html

Which forms a sort of prequel to this:

http://www.mdcbowen.org/p1/cobb/premature_autopsies.htm

And all of this forms a setting into which we could transpose other
sorts of controversy taking place outside of the Jazz world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Wright_controversy

Further, as a contrasting case, it is interesting to examine the
intellectual property transfer and/or "collaboration" style employed
by these singer-songwriters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaid_Avenue

They say there is no accounting for taste, and maybe even for opinion
(Is "free jazz... JAZZ"? -- Gosh, who knows!). Still, I think these
discussions about Jazz are an interesting nexus of the aesthetic, the
political, and even the technological -- e.g. how do we think about
musical art in world in which recorded music is so easily shared by
file transfer? Presumably not the same way we thought about it when
it was shared on LPs or radio broadcast, etc.

To compare:

* this rather horrible recording by Billy Bragg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Ib0-yKmoA

* a *potentially* slightly less awkward one by Woodie Guthrie and pals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcKwGS7OSQ

Of course, we can't think about the technologies of war the same way
we once did, either -- e.g. consider this statement by Jeremiah
Wright, made in his capacity as 'controversial figure': "The
ambassador said the people that we have wounded don't have the
military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are
willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to
grips with that."

I don't think this statement implicates only "terrorists"; e.g. some
variant would apply to "internet pirates", another to
"third-worlders", another to "drug overlords", etc. At question is
the relationship between individual and society.

To bring in another familiar angle:

"[Reading 'And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks', w]e have, in
essence, finally come full circle after almost six decades, turning a
corner into a blind alley and walking smack-dab into a mirror image of
ourselves, credit-crazed zombies with the dropping eyelids of a
Burroughs morphine addict, hungover from the post-war boom, slogging
through a nightmarish netherworld [...] In a bleaker assessment than
those of most private forecasters, the World Bank predicted a
shrinking of the global economy for the first time since World War II
[...] We are not exactly sailing into uncharted waters here, but until
our new artists arrive to help us understand what we have done to
ourselves, it would probably be best to heed the words of Henry
Miller, a writer who wielded great influence on the Beats: 'I am
against revolutions because they always involve a return to the status
quo.'" -- http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/71573-little-murders-and-the-hippos-were-boiled-in-their-tanks/

To wind this up: it seems Miller would agree with Marsalis and Crouch
in this matter?