'IN THE PAST few years, with the lack of any dramatic 'new thing' innovations, the most extolled players have been the surviving veterans of the hard bop wars ... and the 'young turks' adopting modern musical language to play 'in the tradition.' " So wrote the fledgling music critic, assessing the jazz scene in his first piece for Bay Guardian, in the May 5, 1982, issue. I was riffing off three new vinyl LPs: the self-titled Columbia Records debut by a 20-year-old trumpeter named Wynton Marsalis; Destiny's Dance, by saxophonist-flutist Chico Freeman, a decade Wynton's senior; and Fathers and Sons, which featured the New Orleans-born Marsalis and the Chicago-bred Freeman in collaboration with their respective dads, Ellis and Von.

In 1982 Wynton's "vibrant staccato runs, lyrical tone and humorous smears" sounded fresh to many ears. Indeed, it was easy to get excited about mainstream jazz, because so little of it had appeared on major labels for the better part of a decade. A display ad in that issue of the Bay Guardian heralded the 16th Annual Berkeley Jazz Festival, and I can remember getting pretty worked up about the prospect of seeing Elvin Jones, Benny Carter, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, and the Max Roach Quartet all on the same weekend.

A closer look at that 36-page issue proves instructive. The front of "the book" features solid Bay Guardian fare: Bruce Dancis reporting on an Abbie Hoffman speech at S.F. State and reminiscing about their joint venture in 1967, when they rained dollar bills down on the New York Stock Exchange floor, and John Ross investigating California's resumption of helicopter pesticide spraying to combat the medfly. More striking is the provincial charm of the Eight Days a Week and Camel Soundboard entertainment calendars. Perusing listings dominated by pop (Paul Collins's Beat, Van Morrison, the Human League, Translator, the Flamin' Groovies), blues (Paul Butterfield, Roy Buchanan, Sonny Rhodes, Mark Hummel, Mitch Woods), jazz (Tito Puente, John Abercrombie, Larry Schneider, Benny Green), and even women's music (Gwen Avery, June Millington, Linda Tillery, Vicki Randle, Nancy Vogl), one notices not only that world beat and electronica hadn't been invented yet but also that the Bay Area's awareness of world/ethnic music and experimental/avant-garde sounds was dim at best.

There was new wave in rock and new traditionalism in jazz, but what we've come to call new music was so deeply ensconced in the ivory tower that even a hip, alternative-weekly-reading public didn't know it existed (unless it knew what a "Lou Harrison Birthday Concert" at Mills College might entail). Today, the critic who put relatively straight-ahead jazz at the center of his musical universe in 1982 is likely to spend more of his day listening to a Bob Ostertag CD-R of electronic sampling or the Congolese guitar duets of Papa Noel and Papi Oviedo than digesting a new Sonny Rollins disc or an Art Pepper reissue.

This week I devoted three days in a row to the new Richard Teitelbaum CD, Blends (New Albion), a brilliant marriage of academic electronic music (played on Moog synthesizers, sampler keyboards, and Macintosh Powerbook) and shakuhachi (traditional Japanese end-blown flute). Comprising two pieces – the 20-minute title track, featuring Trilok Gurtu on tabla, and the nearly half-hour "Kyotaku/Denshi," with Mark Dresser on bass and Gerry Hemmingway on drums – Blends is one of the most musically absorbing, emotionally subtle, and evocative recordings I've heard since whatever it was that captivated me last week (oh, yeah, Fred Frith and Maybe Monday's Digital Wildlife).

On "Kyotaku/Denshi," Teitelbaum, cofounder of the mid-'60s group Musica Elettronica Viva (with Frederic Rzewski and Alvin Curran), explores the real and mythic history of shakuhachi, from ancient China to modern karaoke-obsessed Japan. By contrast, "Blends" offers a "global circumnavigation," placing musician Katsuya Yokoyama's virtuoso traditional and contemporary playing in electronically generated soundscapes based on 20th-century American experimental and European classical music, Central Asian vocals, and Indian drones.