You know those people that don’t get it, and they say things like “That’s not music--that’s just noise.”? I’m not one of them, of course. I always play it safe by saying “I’m reserving judgment for now.”

I’m not talking about “wrong" notes, which go way back to the '40s or earlier; I’m hep to wrong notes.

But there was something that started in the 60s--the earliest example I can point to is Jimmy Giuffre’s “Free Fall”--a kind of screaming, squealing sound. Giuffre was banished from recording for a long time after “Free Fall.”

John Coltrane, on the other hand, went even farther than Giuffre and was able to keep on recording. He had more players in his group than Giuffre, so there were multiple instruments screaming all together, as if they were trying to out-squeal each other.

John Coltrane outgrew chord changes and steady rhythm; he said that such things constrained him. There’s no question the new sound was unconstrained.

In HiFi/Stereo Review, Joe Goldberg wrote: “After the Ascension disc, and now this [Meditations] I cannot be scoured or scraped any more ... I feel only that I am being wildly assaulted, and must defend myself by not listening.”

Needless to say, I’m still reserving judgment, but when I read opinions like Goldberg’s I can sure enough relate.

I have a very low tolerence for screaching "noise" music. But, that said, the difference between the good the bad and the just plain ugly is definitely there.

I think an analogy to modern art works. There are amateurs (like, oh... um... me) who have no training and only the most marginal understanding of what's really going on in the best paintings by artiats like Pollack (for one example) or Kandinsky (for another).

Or maybe poetry. The difference between e.e. cummings and some guy who abandons spelling and punctuationa and arranges lines in a random manner.

Or, I don't like hard rock music much at all; the same guitar solos over the same simutaneously hyper macho yet testicularly challenged vocals, BUT I regularly listen to Led Zeppelin who i enjoy enormously. It you think "Led Zep" you usually thing "guitar solo over screaching vocals" and yet if you listen there's SO much more going on.

Anyway... I think the same is true for avant garde noise music. The best is made by a sax player who could, if he chose to, pull up a chair and sit in with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, no problem.

Perhaps then, it is a matter of ALL musical styles having 1% to 3% really good stuff and the rest dreck of one order or another. But in some styles the lesser stuff is still listenable where in others it's not.

I love Ascension, but not all the time.