Not that anyone has to like Halvorson's music .... any more than one has to like or dislike Kenny G.
I don't like it. I do like it. That's enough for me. Music either speaks to you or it doesn't. That's enough.
But yes... people said the same things, well some of the same things, not the she's hot parts, about Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman etc. And similar things in the art world about Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Salvador Dali, etc., etc. People still say the same thing about Jazz in general, even mainstream MOR Jazz.
And if we go way back, people actually trashed harmony as the work of the devil at one time. Music was modal - that is the way it is and should be. Harmony was limited to the accidental intersection of modal voices.
We mustn't ever colour outside the lines, even if the lines are arbitrary.
So we won't look at Derek Baily, Robert Fripp (at his most experimental), Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Sonny Sharrock, or Terrie Ex - etc., etc.
If one is interested in exploring the the cognitive psychological, psycho-linguistic aspects of the issue here, I offer the consideration of the concepts of Speech Community and Schemata/Genre Structures/Macrostructures/Mental Models:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_community
http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Schemata
http://www.google.ca/url?url=http:/...wQFjAH&usg=AFQjCNF--cSXJSXbbuyS8p3qn-gycHaoGg
:wink: And just to put things in perspective, let's do look at the
seriously whacked Terrie Ex with Han Bennink and Brodie West, not that I am entirely sure what to make of this myself:
I saw this group at IronWorks in Vancouver. Cindy Santana-Blackman was standing next to me in the SRO crowd. I didn't notice her at first. She seemed to be enjoying her anonymity, so I let her keep it. She was obviously digging Bennink.
My son, when he was five years old, was a huge Bennink fan. When he heard that I was going to see Bennink with Evan Parker at a free Vancouver Jazz Festival concert, there was absolutely no way he was not going with me, so I had to take him. After the show, he wanted to go talk to Bennink who was on the stage taking down his kit. I lifted my son up onto the stage, and he started to walk over towards Bennink. Bennink looked confused, so I told him my son was a huge fan, and he laughed and said, "Yes. Our music needs younger fans." He and my son talked for about 15 minutes. I have no clue about what. I couldn't hear. My son wandered back to me, and I lifted him down. I asked him what they had talked about. He just said, "Music." My son in his listening would go from Abba to Raffi to Stockhausen without any concern - it was music, just music. Children do not have preconceptions and prejudices unless we feed them to them. In a shopping mall later that year, my son asked Santa for a Jamaldeen Tacuma CD. Santa had no clue what he was talking about.