Milo Fine

“Get Down! Shove It! It’s Tango Time!”

The Milo Fine Free Jazz Ensemble

(available)

Sides 1 and 2

Milo Fine: clarinet, m-drums, clavinet, prepared tape, voice
Steve Gnitka: guitar

Recorded by Milo Fine in concert at the 7th Street Entry, Minneapolis, MN; January 20, 1981

1986 – Shih Shih Wu Ai SSWA 5 (LP)

Sides 1 and 2
“‘Live’ non-stop set recorded January 20, 1981 at the 7th Street Entry (Minneapolis, Minnesota) by Milo Fine” [quoted from the LP]

Milo Fine: clarinet, m-drums, clavinet, prepared tape, voice
Steve Gnitka: guitar

1986 – Shih Shih Wu Ai SSWA 5 (LP)

Purchase Recordings
Articles/Interviews
Aesthetics Addenda
- Introduction to OOGLEPLEX ⁽²⁾
- Maintaining Essence (in memoriam Bill Dixon)
Aesthetics
Today Fine remains an aesthetic absolutist who, upon seeing unfamiliar faces in the audience, will indulge fears of being reduced to a novelty act for avant-garde tourists. As a result, he seems to have deliberately estranged himself from the mainstream. “Pop music, by its very nature, feeds on the deeper streams of creativity,” he explains, “and by its very nature, which is parasitical, it doesn’t do those streams justice.” But, as Fine suggests, the avant-garde is equally suspect. Having knitted the high-brow in its own image, institutional art is subject to the same pitfalls as any commerce. For Fine, postmodernism is pop writ large, favoring pastiche over depth. And so he instead occupies a prematurely discarded modernist space that he seeks to insulate from both commercial and political influences… So is it possible to evolve from angry young man to mature iconoclast without taking a detour to embittered irrelevance? Fine strikes a characteristic pose of unrelenting ambivalence. “I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to earn my merit badge for artistic integrity. That would be just another image-mongering ploy. I’m just trying to keep a few steps away from becoming a typically mendacious hypocrite.”
- Keith Harris City Pages (9/29/99)