Martin Williams

[Simon Weil]

....this smog over jazz that has too many players and fans alike worried about what it is and isn't and who MATTERS more than who, not on a personal level but on a "historical" level, which is all well and good, but geez, don't you miss the days when jazz was just what it was where it was when it was just because that's just what it WAS?

....truthfully, if I had to choose, I'd personally prefer playing for a crowd who digs the music at a gut level but who doesn't know Jelly Roll from Little Debbie than one who's first line of response is weighing everything they hear in terms of what came before it and then deciding if there's enough commonality for it to be worthy of the past masters.

It's impossible to avoid the anti-intellectual trend in this. So OK...Once upon a time Jazz as a whole was not burdened by all these damn fool intellectualizations. That was before Ellington got take seriously as art by those European critics. But they began in 1919 with Bechet being reviewed by Ansermet, and being set in a historical context (as the beginning of an art).

Basically you can't separate the idea of Jazz as an art from the desire to think about it - which Jim so laments. Because, to think about it as an art is to say it is on more or less the same level as the highest human pursuits - as making a difference in the world as a statesman, or as a heart-surgeon or whatever. This is why Jazz is "As serious as your life".

It is natural that one wants to think about these pursuits, set them in context, learn from them what one can. Because, in them, one finds what it is to be truly human. So it's natural that one should want to think about jazz. But, historically, this has a particular resonance.

It's a racial resonance. Blacks were regularly denied the right to be fully human (Still are in many parts). They might thus NOT contribute on the highest human level. To discuss Jazz as an art is to articulate, implicitly, a belief in blacks as fully human.

Historically, that is part of the reason it matters to think about Jazz in this way - and have this sort of discourse.

Martin Williams does a riff on Bechet which kind of leads to this stuff.

Simon Weil

P.S. I also don't think we need any arguments for dumbing down debate in this day and age.

[John L]

I just found the statement

It's a simple principle, but for me if you don't get, say, Jelly Roll Morton, then I have big doubts about your ability to really get Monk, or Bird, or Ornette or whomever.

to be one that can be, and is, being used in more malevolent minds than yours, mine , and ours (saw it on cable a few nights ago!) to create this smog over jazz that has too many players and fans alike worried about what it is and isn't and who MATTERS more than who, not on a personal level but on a "historical" level, which is all well and good, but geez, don't you miss the days when jazz was just what it was where it was when it was just because that's just what it WAS?

Could this be a sign of the times?

Going back to the question of Sonny Rollins and 1949, might it be that the state of jazz was such in 1949 that all young artists really needed to do was tune into the here and now. After all, Bird had most of the (relevant) past, present and future summed up in one.

Since the 1970s and (especially) the 1980s, the outlook has been increasingly backward looking, toward finding something somehwere in the past that can bring back the magic of the golden age. The extreme realization of this is the artist who makes a conscious effort to embody the entire history of jazz from Jelly Roll Morton on up.

[JSngry]

It's impossible to avoid the anti-intellectual trend in this.

No, it's not impossible. It's very easy, in fact, to avoid something that is not there.

I'm not in the least bit "anti-intellectual". I am, however, too much anti-"overly-intellectulal", and I am VERY anti-making the intellectual one's first level of response to this music (or any art). Although, if you just can't help yourself, I guess it's ok...

Look at it this way - if my first response to Monk is what a wonderful recontextualization of traditional elements into a new way of looking at spatial relationships and shifting proportional density, that has immense implications for the way we live life on Earth, am I really getting Monk?

I say, no, not fully. I might be getting what Monk and his music represent, but not the music itself. But if my first response to Monk is a visceral one, one that says "WHOA, YEAH!" (or something like that) and then gets into that other stuff, I'm really getting it. Or even if I do have that first reaction and later but eventually have that second one, then I'm getting it. But not before, and not until. Even if it only lasts a second, you gotta have that, I say.

This is not anti-intellectual, it's a realization that the music has many components to it, and that the very first, the most primary one, is communication of non-verbalisable information through non-verbalisable means. Everything follows from that. (and there is a lot that follows from that).

It's easy for those who function in the arts from a primarily intellectual perspective to forget (or sometimes, never even realize) that the first level of intent of any art (especially, perhaps, jazz) is communication, first, foremost, and simply. When you have that layer of seperation/misunterstanding at work in all strata of the "jazz community", you quite often end up with a culture that is more concerned with preservation of the esthetic's past means of communication than the creation/support of whatever it is of today that is actually communicating in terms of now.

To put a simple face on it, you get a culture who'd rather read the sports page than go to the game. I say you go to the game and then read about it later, to see waht you might have missed, or to get some ideas about somethings that might have happened that you didn't understand. But you ALWAYS go to the game first. What we have now is a lot of people (especially people who do bookings and such) who read about the game in the sports page, watched a video tape of it over and over, and then think they really saw it. And that today's game is going to be more or less just like the one from 50 years ago.

THAT is so much nonsense.

Edited December 26, 2004 by JSngry

[JSngry]

I just found the statement

It's a simple principle, but for me if you don't get, say, Jelly Roll Morton, then I have big doubts about your ability to really get Monk, or Bird, or Ornette or whomever.

to be one that can be, and is, being used in more malevolent minds than yours, mine , and ours (saw it on cable a few nights ago!) to create this smog over jazz that has too many players and fans alike worried about what it is and isn't and who MATTERS more than who, not on a personal level but on a "historical" level, which is all well and good, but geez, don't you miss the days when jazz was just what it was where it was when it was just because that's just what it WAS?

Could this be a sign of the times?

Going back to the question of Sonny Rollins and 1949, might it be that the state of jazz was such in 1949 that all young artists really needed to do was tune into the here and now. After all, Bird had most of the (relevant) past, present and future summed up in one.

Since the 1970s and (especially) the 1980s, the outlook has been increasingly backward looking, toward finding something somehwere in the past that can bring back the magic of the golden age. The extreme realization of this is the artist who makes a conscious effort to embody the entire history of jazz from Jelly Roll Morton on up.

Personally, I think that the difference between Sonny's 1949 and our now is that Sonny came up in a time and a place where the music existed, literally, as a part of the fiber of everyday life. On the radio, in the clubs, in people's houses for recreations, so on and so on. The art sprung out of the realities of everyday lives of the people making it.

Now it seems that too often, the art is attempting to spring out of the realities of the glories of the past, which is a whole 'nother proposition, one that I feel is doomed to get you only halfway, at best, to where you want to go.

Could it be that the reality of the everyday life of today is just too damn ugly for many to even attempt to find the glory in it? Perhaps, but that's conceding the battle before it's even fought, which is what I think is happening far too often these days.

And really, that's a piss-poor excuse. Because it allows for the ugliness to spread unchecked, which really DOES lead to the destruction of the beauty that struggles to coexist alongside the ugly. I mean, there's really no good reason for a young jazz musician of today to not be looking at elements of hip-hop as an ingredient of their music. No good reason whatsoever. It's an unavoidable ingredient of today, period.

But when you got folks all up in arms about "preserving the tradition" and all that stuff, the emphasis shifts to building museums for the past rather than creating something for the musems of the future to have something to put on display. And when the people building the museums seem to be more than willing to accomodate this impulse... Yuck.

The problem is not that Martin Williams played a big part in creating a codification of the jazz tradition. Not at all, it needed to be done, and he did the best he could, which was pretty damn good. The problem is that people who should have had their priorities elsewhere decided that perpetuating that tradition was simply a matter of codifying it and replicating it in myriad forms. NOT the same thing....

Because the tradition was doing just fine perpetrating itself, as evidenced by the abundance of various and varied riches that Williams had to write about. The good news is that his writing helped many to better realize some of what it was that they had seen. The bad news, which is not really his fault, is that it sent many off looking for the same thing all over again, and they set out to find it where they thought it should be in the form they thought it should be. Which is, I'm afraid, a path to finding more of what you already know instead of more of what you don't.

It would be the cruellest of ironies if Martin Williams was the unintentional "father" of Wynton Marsalis. But this is a possibility that I think has to be considered to at least some degree, and at no expense to Williams' very real positive contributions. I know that Albert Murray gets the "credit" for the ideologies of Marsalis and Crouch both, but maybe, just maybe, Williams helped till the soil that they have so "effectively" sown. That certainly wasn't his intent, I'm certain, but the road to hell...

[Larry Kart]

Please, though I guess it's hopeless -- don't forget THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE. It's simply (though what's simple these days?) so much more fun when you run into, say, Monk's "Little Rootie Tootie," to then make the acquaintance of Ellington's "Daybreak Express" and "Happy Go-Lucky Local," Luckey Roberts' "Railroad Blues," and so forth. (And it can go vice versa or sideways.) We should deny ourselves such natural horizon-expanding pleasures because Marsalis, Crouch et. al are using The Past as a club to beat their idea of the culture over its head? To let malevolent minds edge you off the ground you've been standing on since before they were born?

Also and again, it can be really PLEASUREABLE to think about jazz as hard as it's in you to do so. It's never felt to me, and to most everyone else I know, like anyone was MAKING us do that. Geez, isn't it all one big steaming pot? Some of us, to use Jim's ball game analogy, are made to be more like Johnny Damon and some of us to be more like Bill James, but our paths and thoughts do cross, and we probably care about many of the same things.

[Larry Kart]

Also, to quote the best sentence/thought I think I ever came up with -- History is always happening, and it's happening to US. It was the experience of listening to/running alongside jazz, more than anything else, that taught me that, and they can't take that away from me.

[JSngry]

Please, though I guess it's hopeless -- don't forget THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE. It's simply (though what's simple these days?) so much more fun when you run into, say, Monk's "Little Rootie Tootie," to then make the acquaintance of Ellington's "Daybreak Express" and "Happy Go-Lucky Local," Luckey Roberts' "Railroad Blues," and so forth. (And it can go vice versa or sideways.) We should deny ourselves such natural horizon-expanding pleasures because Marsalis, Crouch et. al are using The Past as a club to beat their idea of the culture over its head? To let malevolent minds edge you off the ground you've been standing on since before they were born?

Also and again, it can be really PLEASUREABLE to think about jazz as hard as it's in you to do so. It's never felt to me, and to most everyone else I know, like anyone was MAKING us do that. Geez, isn't it all one big steaming pot? Some of us, to use Jim's ball game analogy, are made to be more like Johnny Damon and some of us to be more like Bill James, but our paths and thoughts do cross, and we probably care about many of the same things.

Larry, I couldn't agree more, in spite of the turn my writings in this thread have taken.

I wish I could have known Martin Williams personally, at least in passing. The "stick up the butt" aspect of his writing that I noted earlier is what sets me off, and from what you and others have said, this was not really the dominant aspect of his love of the music. If it's the part that I react most excitably to, it's probably because the writings are all I have, and the writings do inspire admiration and suspicion in (roughly) equal portions. I've always operated on The Pleasure Principal first and foremost (sorry , simon, if that translates to "anti-intellectual" to you), and Williams' various writings seem to, at times, run counter to that, at least in underlying tone.

From what you've written about your experiences with him, it seems that sometimes he did run counter to it, but sometimes isn't always, or even usually, and that's where I think the advantage of having known him personally would have positively affected my mixed perceptions of his writings.

[JSngry]

Also, to quote the best sentence/thought I think I ever came up with -- History is always happening, and it's happening to US. It was the experience of listening to/running alongside jazz, more than anything else, that taught me that, and they can't take that away from me.

Yeah, but they're going to try thier damnsdest, aren't they...

[Leeway]

I'm all for primary experience of the art, whatever art it is: it's better to go see the painting , than a picture of the painting. It's better to read the book than a review of the book. And so on.

But to take the baseball analogy a bit further. Yes, it' still better to go to the game than to merely read about it in the paper (actually, it's more likely that young people know about the game through video and DVD games than through actually playing it). But has anyone gone to a game recently? I have. The game as I knew it has changed on the field. It has changed in the stadium. Hell, the stadiums have all changed. Many new stadiums offer a "retro" experience of the game, realizing that the original experience of the game is long gone,, and offering some kind of recreation of a former era (ersatz or authentic?). The ballpark organ is gone, replaced by very loud rock and roll. In between innings, one is likely to find an overstuffed mascot shooting wadded-up t-shirts into the crowd. There will likely be a disco dance contest at some point. Maybe even some of the players will climb into the stands and try to beat your brains out (those steroids can make you crazy and violent). And so on. A far cry from the baseball of the 50s and 60s that I grew up with. My point is that direct experience of any thing is much more problematic and undefinable than we might like to think.

So what is direct experience of jazz? For virtually all of us, we know about jazz through recordings. Certainly, that's the only way for us to know the musical past. And what has changed in jazz is what has changed in all the arts: the multiplicity of media, the availability of media, the commodification of all art forms into consumer "product," the rise of critical commentary of all sorts, including this board. As has often been said, this is a post-modern era, in which all forms of art, past and present, are mingled, sampled, recycled. (It's a byproduct of capitalism; but that's another thread I suppose). Some celebrate this complexity and diversity, some don't. To paraphrase our Secretary of Defense, one goes with the age one is born into; it may not be the age one would like, or the age one would want to have, but it's the age we have been dealt.

Now I too feel increasingly uncomfortable with the zeitgeist, and perhaps when enough people do, then a substantial change will occur. I believe one should always advocate authenticity, naturalness, directness, in life and in art. What form that ultimately takes will be determined by the artists amongst us or to come. THEY shift the forms of art, the experience of art, and have been doing so since they drew on the walls of the caves.

[Larry Kart]

Ah, but does a baseball really curve? There were scientists who said for years that it didn't/couldn't and that anyone who thought it did was the victim of an optical illusion.

About Martin and the jazz avant-garde, somewhere I have a late-ish (mid-'80s?) three-part piece he wrote that expressed what turned out to be (I think) his final printed thoughts on the subject. He made some shrewd, some disgruntled points and held up as his main sign of hope the World Saxophone Quartet, which seemed to me to not be a good sign. That is, I thought that the WSQ was kind of beside the point --especially in light of Roscoe Mitchell's incredible sax quartet version of "Nonaah," which came first by several years and was miles ahead of anything the WSQ ever did IMO -- and that Martin's singling out of the WSQ was a sign that he hadn't been paying enough attention lately, but then I think he was in declining health.

I'll look for that piece later on and try to report in more detail on what it says.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Get your primary experience in the world of baseball by PLAYING the game. Where I live little kids still do this (although they do love video games). Yes, I have problems with the parental micromanagement of things and the competitive aspects, but kids still play baseball. And I think the reason professional baseball has an audience is because kids who played baseball have grown up. They know the rules because they were in the game - not as pros, but as amateurs.

Same deal with music. Get your primary experience by PLAYING. Yes, even jazz. There's no age limit and no one is expecting you to be a pro. The reason I think music (especially classical music) is losing its audience is because of the education cuts that eliminated a lot of school music programs.

And of course, no one is saying you can't learn by listening to records, hearing and watching pros, reading, talking or writing. At least I'm not saying that. But the perspective you get from DOING it - that's worth at least half your record collection.

Mike

Edited December 26, 2004 by Michael Fitzgerald

[Leeway]

Get your primary experience in the world of baseball by PLAYING the game. Where I live little kids still do this (although they do love video games). Yes, I have problems with the parental micromanagement of things and the competitive aspects, but kids still play baseball. And I think the reason professional baseball has an audience is because kids who played baseball have grown up. They know the rules because they were in the game - not as pros, but as amateurs.

As a kid growing up in NYC, and playing baseball, stickball, stoopball, touch football, soccer, etc, in the public parks or streets, I agree that playing the game is an invaluable way to really understand it - I just don't think that's the only way. I do much prefer that kids play basketball than watch "NBA 2004" on DVD. Unfortunately, a lot of kids don't seem to share that preference, or stop playing as soon as they can get Mom or Dad off their backs. THEIR experience of sports is different than mine, certainly. Anyway, I was trying to work with the example that Jim gave about experiencing jazz in an immediate way.

I can't play a musical instrument. I'm sure that hurts my appreciation somewhat, but I don't think it is a disqualifying factor. OTOH, there are many musicians who, despite their technical ability, don't seem able to appreciate their art, or the art of others, in an immediate way (fill in blanks here). Some musicians are perceptive; some critics are perceptive, and it is hard to generalize about these things.

[Simon Weil]

It's impossible to avoid the anti-intellectual trend in this.

No, it's not impossible. It's very easy, in fact, to avoid something that is not there.

I'm not in the least bit "anti-intellectual". I am, however, too much anti-"overly-intellectulal", and I am VERY anti-making the intellectual one's first level of response to this music (or any art). Although, if you just can't help yourself, I guess it's ok...

Any time you profess a preference for a gut level response over an intellectual one at the same time as a desire to return to a time "when jazz was just what it was...because that's just what it WAS" you're going to make me worry.

And for the record, I don't think Jazz suffers from over-intellectualization, I think it suffers from people who are no bloody good at intellectualization. Marsalis isn't an intellectual, he just spouts stuff he's got from Crouch and Murray (and he says he gets all his stuff from them).

Crouch ain't an intellectual, he's a thug dressed up as an intellectual. And how do you know that? Because, when he's under intellectual pressure, he thumps people (the real man comes out under pressure).

Murray is the closest thing that lot's got to an intellectual. But, actually, he's a filing clerk dressed up as an intellectual. All these nice little ideas he's got from other people, lined up in his nice neat little system in which he thinks he's "solved" the world. And what a lifeless little system it is. If he was any damn good as an intellectual, throwing all those ideas together would produce sparks, would produce life, new ideas that live. But it doesn't. It's like Marsalis' music.

Murray drops names. That's a part of what he does that brings him in line with the non-Lincoln Center no-damn-good-at intellectualization guys in Jazz. They kind of flatter you with the names they drop. But do they really understand the intellectual atmospheres they're getting into? Nope. This, I think, is what Clem was getting at when he talked about Giddins et al.

You need people who are sound intellectually (e.g Larry, Martin W).

Simon Weil

[ghost of miles]

My two cents: can't pleasure be intellectual as well?

[Simon Weil]

My two cents: can't pleasure be intellectual as well?

Yeah sure. It's what Larry said. It's just fun to think - about Jazz, about life, about everything.

But you want other people to enjoy your fun. Oftentimes they don't.

Simon Weil

[couw]

My two cents: can't pleasure be intellectual as well?

dunno, but being "anti-intellectual" or anti-"overly-intellectulal," and making that distinction is.

I think.

[ghost of miles]

I think.

...therefore you listen?

Or you listen, therefore you think?

As Ornette says, "dancing in your head." I'm not much for ass/brain dichotomies anyway.

[JSngry]

My two cents: can't pleasure be intellectual as well?

Of course it can. You think I'd post this much about stuff like this if it wasnn't?

Although, it was the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge that caused The Fall...

[couw]

I'm not much for ass/brain dichotomies anyway.

dichotomies suck, it's dialectics that swing!

[ghost of miles]

My two cents:  can't pleasure be intellectual as well?

Of course it can. You think I'd post this much about stuff like this if it wasnn't?

But... but... I thought we were paying you!

We should be, anyway.

[JSngry]

a preference for a gut level response over an intellectual one at the same time as a desire to return to a time "when jazz was just what it was...because that's just what it WAS" you're going to make me worry.

Actually, the full quote was

I just found the statement

QUOTE 

It's a simple principle, but for me if you don't get, say, Jelly Roll Morton, then I have big doubts about your ability to really get Monk, or Bird, or Ornette or whomever. 

to be one that can be, and is, being used in more malevolent minds than yours, mine , and ours (saw it on cable a few nights ago!) to create this smog over jazz that has too many players and fans alike worried about what it is and isn't and who MATTERS more than who, not on a personal level but on a "historical" level, which is all well and good, but geez, don't you miss the days when jazz was just what it was where it was when it was just because that's just what it WAS?

I know I do. And although we know that we both like thinking about this other stuff, I think we'd both agree that it's something best undertaken after one has a bit of mileage under one's belt (is that a mixed metaphor?) and in terms of what the music means to US rather than what it MEANS, if you know what I mean. Of course, one leads to the other, usually, but hey, that's better than having it go the other way around, which I see happening too much these days for me to feel comfortable with/about.

Maybe the other pasts don't mean anything to you, but they do to me, becuase they are the gist of my point - namely that jazz was once music that existed as part of everyday life first and then fodder for intellectual speculation (in both creation and appreciation), instead of what it has now quite often become - intellectual fodder first and foremost. I don't like the shift. And if that's "anti-intellectual", so be it. I don't think it is, simply because I have no problem with the intellectual component of the music and the culture.

None whatsoever.

[JSngry]

My two cents:  can't pleasure be intellectual as well?

Of course it can. You think I'd post this much about stuff like this if it wasnn't?

But... but... I thought we were paying you!

We should be, anyway.

Cash?

[ghost of miles]

Cash?

Louvin Brothers?

[ghost of miles]

Maybe the other pasts don't mean anything to you, but they do to me, becuase they are the gist of my point - namely that jazz was once music that existed as part of everyday life first and then fodder for intellectual speculation (in both creation and appreciation), instead of what it has now quite often become - intellectual fodder first and foremost. I don't like the shift.

To what do you attribute the shift, Jim? The party line that's developed among the Murray/Crouch/Marsalis crowd is that jazz turned its back on the public (although I think they revise Ellison's dictum from bop to free as the point at which it did so). Yet same said crowd's efforts, to my way of thinking, will do anything but restore a certain degree of popularity to jazz--not in any way that's living & viable, at least.

[couw]

I blame disco