GENERAL SEMANTICS AND ALL THAT JAZZ: A REVIEW OF GENERAL SEMANTICS

ABSTRACT

On December 2, 2020, Lance Strate, who was at the time President of the New York Society for General Semantics (NYSGS), convened a virtual session in place of the monthly sessions he had coordinated, until the time of COVID-19, at The Players Club in New York City. One of the unforeseen benefits of holding virtual sessions during COVID times was that local organizations like the NYSGS were able to spread their net much wider in terms of both presenter-participants and audience. For this particular occasion, Lance invited a group ofjazz composer-musicians from Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area who he discovered while surveilling the Internet for mentions of general semantics. The group, the Geof Bradfield/Ben Goldberg/Dana Hall Trio, had just released, in September 2020, an album entitled General Semantics (Delmark DE5035 ©2020 Delmark Records LLC). The driving question of the session was of course "Why General Semantics as a title for your album?" The following is an edited transcript of the conversation that took place on that evening.