Twenty First Century Jazz

[JSngry]

If push is going to come to shove, I consider the topic irrelevant.

[Chuck Nessa]

If push is going to come to shove, I consider the topic irrelevant.

You might have said that 400 paragraphs earlier.

[JSngry]

But then I'd have to do laundry.

[Chuck Nessa]

But then I'd have to do laundry.

Go do laundry.

[ghost of miles]

Miles: Why did you play so long, man?

Trane: It took that long to get it all in.

[paul secor]

All of us can talk (or write), but the musicians are going to play what they play regardless of what's written (here or anywhere else).

I just hope that I'll keep hearing music that makes me feel new things.

[Simon Weil]

what Gilman is arguing is not that art doesn't apply to life or relate to life or come from life - he's just talking about it coming from a much deeper part of the artist's consciousness, I think - a place that doesn't tell you what you already know or answer the same old questions, but asks new questions, and puts you in a space you never before inhabited - that ain't fiction either, but a deeper kind of reality -

it's like the difference between a crappy popular novelist and Proust - or between Neil Simon and Samuel Beckett. The pop novelist and Simon both think they are portraying life as it is; in actuality they are giving us life through a fog of cliches and received ideas, all of which touch on little that makes us as we are; whereas Proust and Beckett tap into parts of our consciousness that we may not, until we read them, even really know exist.

Think of Bird - he produces this music which is so new and so shocking at first - and yet so real and logical; it is as though it was there all along, but we did not know or see it until he showed it to us -

same thing with Ornette and Albert Ayler - and Eisenstein - and Beethoven - we could keep going here -

I think the (? standard) answer is that the great artist is both of his time and transcends it.

The rest of us might do great things if we get really lucky.

Simon Weil

Edited December 23, 2006 by Simon Weil

[clifford_thornton]

Refine!

That's what I think is, in a nutshell, the point of where improvised music can forseeably go - that is, until we're hit on top of our collective heads. So far, for me, that has not happened.

[.:.impossible]

If push is going to come to shove, I consider the topic irrelevant.

That's a shame.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

But then I'd have to do laundry.

Go do laundry.

Go directly to laundry. Do not pass GO. DO not collect £200.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

If push is going to come to shove, I consider the topic irrelevant.

That's a shame.

Well, I can listen to Big Band Jazz by Cab Calloway, then Big Band Djeliya by Bembeya Jazz National and it's like eating a curry followed by chocolate pudding. It all gets mixed up inside me and feeds me. I don't truly make a distinction between the two - or anything else - inside ME. Of course, if I'm trying to convey something to someone else, I have to recognise that some words have particular meanings. Of course, the meaning of the word jazz is something that people have fist fights about. And that should tell us that there's not much more to the meaning NOW than a method of marketing music. It wasn't always this way. But what people understood by the word jazz in the 1920s is yet another excuse for fisticuffs.

MG

[JSngry]

All I mean is that I'm not interested in 21st Century Jazz nearly as much as I am about 21st Century Music. There will definitely be music called "jazz" in the 21st century. Whether or not it it continues to represent the creative, insistent-on-freedom spirit of the jazz I've come to know and love or something else (like I've been sensing it doing in alarmingly increasing measure for a few decades now) entirly is out of my control. If the "bad guys" win, then "jazz" will have become something in which I really don't have an interest. I'd hate for that to happen, which is kinda why I've been here howling at the moon and the washing machine.

But if that spirit gets ran out of "jazz", my concern is that it continues to live somewhere, and of that there is no guarantee. "Dark Ages" can and do happen. If ideologies and perspectives get so hardened acros the board that music becomes a group of different and rigidly defined "styles" from which one dare not deviate for fear of being banished from the landscape by the forces of fear and/or ignorance and/or meglomania, then it will happen in music. Personally, I think it already is beginng to happen.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

But if that spirit gets ran out of "jazz", my concern is that it continues to live somewhere, and of that there is no guarantee. "Dark Ages" can and do happen. If ideologies and perspectives get so hardened acros the board that music becomes a group of different and rigidly defined "styles" from which one dare not deviate for fear of being banished from the landscape by the forces of fear and/or ignorance and/or meglomania, then it will happen in music. Personally, I think it already is beginng to happen.

I think it's been happening for a long time; since the war, I reckon. The marketing men have been getting better and better at chopping music up into little chunks that they can flog to a public that has been similarly chopped up.

But all hope is not lost. As society changes boundaries may (and, I hope, will) become permeable once more. The technology will change things as well, which may (and, I hope, will) have an eventually disastrous impact on the multinationals. One of the big issues in the culture clash I referred to earlier is the rejection of the Western way of doing business. I think the internet is going to be instrumental in changing the way business is done over the next century or so.

MG

Edited December 23, 2006 by The Magnificent Goldberg

[marcello]

There is a lot of spirit left on the scene. Because of the ease of self produced recorded music, there is a huge number of players writing their own compositions and finding like artists to perform them.

Is there a huge audience? No, but there is much innovation out there with multiple influences and inspirations.

[rostasi]

This damn modern music!

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

This damn modern music!

Sounds like Lord Tanamo, but if this was recorded in the late '40s - by the sound of it - he would only hae been about 15 years old, and whoever it is was older than that!

So who was it?

MG

[rostasi]

That was Young Tiger (or George Browne if you prefer).

You were close on the date - 1953. Sam Walker was the tenor player.

You may notice the irony of his presence on that tune - considering he became well-known

in the modern jazz scene in your country.

Of course, there were other calypso kings who thought bebop was great:

Lord Kitchener with Freddy Grant's Caribbean Rhythm

Rod

---

Now playing: Gwigwi Mrwebi - Nyusamkhaya

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Thanks Rod. I'll look into Young Tiger. He sounds very good.

MG

[Larry Kart]

All I mean is that I'm not interested in 21st Century Jazz nearly as much as I am about 21st Century Music. There will definitely be music called "jazz" in the 21st century. Whether or not it it continues to represent the creative, insistent-on-freedom spirit of the jazz I've come to know and love or something else (like I've been sensing it doing in alarmingly increasing measure for a few decades now) entirly is out of my control. If the "bad guys" win, then "jazz" will have become something in which I really don't have an interest. I'd hate for that to happen, which is kinda why I've been here howling at the moon and the washing machine.

But if that spirit gets ran out of "jazz", my concern is that it continues to live somewhere, and of that there is no guarantee. "Dark Ages" can and do happen. If ideologies and perspectives get so hardened acros the board that music becomes a group of different and rigidly defined "styles" from which one dare not deviate for fear of being banished from the landscape by the forces of fear and/or ignorance and/or meglomania, then it will happen in music. Personally, I think it already is beginng to happen.

I know (or think I know) what you're saying here, but let's not forget (per FWIW the argument/account I strung together in the introductory chapter of my book) that fairly early on jazz did develop a collective sense of "self" -- that is, "an identity of which it was conscious and that shaped its sense of what it could and should do next" -- and that this sense of identity, while neither unthreatened nor perhap an unmixed blessing, did for the most part have a very stimulating effect on the music. Lord knows I don't have anything Marsalis-ian mind here -- some status-mongering, "Jazz is America's classical music, so where's my damn subsidy/concert hall" kind of thing -- but that sense of jazz's identity, however loose-woven it might have been at times, was not just some cockamamie "construct," let alone an ideology, but the recognition of a spontaneously arising social-aesthetic fact that was quite evident to a whole lot of people. That identity may or may not have crumbled or be crumbling, but while there's certainly nothing wrong in liking any music that pleases you, I wouldn't be so quick to sing the praises of sheer porousness -- as though the presence of stupid, or self-serving, or self-righteousness stylistic rule-makers meant in turn that in no music of definite strength and integrity could that strength and integrity be to some significant degree the result of a semi-familial, self-reflective recognition of the kind of thing it is. There's both life and logic in that, I think.

[JSngry]

...but that sense of jazz's identity, however loose-woven it might have been at times, was not just some cockamamie "construct," let alone an ideology, but the recognition of a spontaneously arising social-aesthetic fact that was quite evident to a whole lot of people. That identity may or may not have crumbled or be crumbling, but while there's certainly nothing wrong in liking any music that pleases you, I wouldn't be so quick to sing the praises of sheer porousness -- as though the presence of stupid, or self-serving, or self-righteousness stylistic rule-makers meant in turn that in no music of definite strength and integrity could that strength and integrity be to some significant degree the result of a semi-familial, self-reflective recognition of the kind of thing it is. There's both life and logic in that, I think.

Indeed. And I'm in no way making that corellation.

But too much, way too much, of the family's been getting more than a little incestuous & necrophilliac, especially inter-generational, and that has but one inevitable outcome in results mental, spiritual, and musical. And strength and integrity it ain't.

[Larry Kart]

But too much, way too much, of the family's been getting more than a little incestuous & necrophilliac, especially inter-generational, and that has but one inevitable outcome in results mental, spiritual, and musical. And strength and integrity it ain't.

OK, but why should I let the bad behavior of the (too) many make me not look for or feel strains of genuine familial life? If I can tell the difference between the real thing and the fake, isn't shunning all familial coherence because some of what's on the market under that name is fake, even nasty fake, like letting the bastards win far more comprehensively than they ever dreamed of?

[JSngry]

But too much, way too much, of the family's been getting more than a little incestuous & necrophilliac, especially inter-generational, and that has but one inevitable outcome in results mental, spiritual, and musical. And strength and integrity it ain't.

OK, but why should I let the bad behavior of the (too) many make me not look for or feel strains of genuine familial life? If I can tell the difference between the real thing and the fake, isn't shunning all familial coherence because some of what's on the market under that name is fake, even nasty fake, like letting the bastards win far more comprehensively than they ever dreamed of?

Fair enough, but I guess it all depends on if you want to let a once proud & vital family evolve into a tiny little sect in the dark or if you want to keep that pride & vitality and bring it into the light as an ongoing & growing entity of relevance to more than it's ever-dwindling own. "Shunning" anything real and good and alive with the spirit of life is not something I'd ever advocate. Neither, however, is keeping it so close to the vest as to render it invisible to all but our own. If that means circulating in circles outside the immediate family, hey, send me. If that means closing the doors from the inside, count me out. That gig's more than covered as it is.

Light under a bushel, and all that.

Edited December 24, 2006 by JSngry

[ghost of miles]

Weirdly enough, immediately after reading the exchanges between Larry & Jim, I went over to the Yahoo Songbirds list and came upon this posted review:

Dianne Reeves reviewed

Reeves Shines in Carnival Center

by Evelyn McDonnell

Miami Herald, December 23, 2006

There was a moment in Dianne Reeves' superb concert Friday night at the Carnival

Center for the Performing Arts that would have made Ebenezer Scrooge smile. It

came at the end of the first set of the two-hour concert. The singer was singing

"A Child Is Born," one of several Christmas carols that shaped the set of jazz

standards and Reeves' signature tunes. Suddenly her band stopped playing and

Reeves began chanting in a low voice.

"No limits, no borders," she sang, while the band and the audience clapped in

flamenco triplets. Asking the crowd to hold one note, Reeves scatted over,

around and through it, her voice stepping briskly from octave to octave --

getting a tad out there. "One tone, one heart, one love," the 50-year-old Grammy

winner sang: Sure, they were new age sentiments, but they came surprisingly and

winningly wrapped in a tribal, harmolodic, free-form package.

With her strong tones, impressive range, warm style, and crackerjack band,

Reeves can suck the sap out of sentiment and render old tunes reborn. There are

singers whose octave acrobatics make you feel unworthy as a human being, and

then there are those who share the pleasure of gift and craft with you: Reeves

is a genius of the latter. She's the heir apparent to Sarah Vaughan and Ella

Fitzgerald, a belter with clear tones and improvisational twists.

Reeves' creative phrasing heated "One for My Baby," finding delicious new juices

in the old chestnut. She prefaced the tune with the story of how she sang it for

the movie "Good Night, and Good Luck." The girlish wink and nod with which she

described working on the set with George Clooney made the John S. and James L.

Knight Concert Hall seem intimate, almost like a family gathering.

Reeves talked about the importance of family, of how the stories we learn at the

kitchen table can be the fabric of our society. The Colorado native dedicated

two songs to her blizzard-socked home: "Let It Snow" and "I'll Be Home for

Christmas."

Reeves surrounds herself with musicians who can play bop, bossa nova, soul,

African and pop music. The quartet sounded great in the hall, which was

half-filled at 1,100 people but felt somehow full. The crowd gave Reeves

standing ovations at the end of both sets and brought her back for one genuine

encore, before letting her go fly home.

Now Dianne Reeves is somebody who's grown on me greatly as a singer in the past several years. Her Blue Note Christmas CD is the best new jazz holiday album I've heard in a long time. And yet I think she's somebody--in spite of her Grammys, or because of them--who gets knocked by both those who argue for a narrow interpretation of jazz, as well as more outside-minded folk who see her as dully picking at bones in the graveyard. I do think that a too-ideological embrace of inclusivity can lead to a none-too-open rejection of things with musical merit... in other words, that a rejection of prejudice can become a kind of prejudice in and of itself. Not that that's what you're really saying, Jim, but some of the rhetoric does seem to potentially wink in that direction. I don't want rigid boundaries, but nor do I want a "Waterloo-Records-of-the-mind" either, I guess.

I've thought for a long time, and continue to think, that the configuration of jazz groups will change & evolve, even though certain formats--the piano trio, etc.--will endure just as string quartets endure in classical music. I think a lot of what Jim's saying is very accurate. But I don't think that a continuing appreciation for jazz presented in its more historical forms of delivery is necessarily a sign of impending death. And anyway, jazz has been a "sect" music for a long time now. I want to see it grow aesthetically, I want to see it reach more & younger listeners, and I think--or like to think--that I'm fairly open-minded about how it does that. And yeah, Ellington has the famous quote about there being only two kinds of music... but I also have no problem comprehending what he did as "jazz" and appreciating it as "jazz." Whatever his feelings about that word and its implications, he, to me, is a great example of an artist continuing to grow, staying true to himself, not (for the most part, anyway) bowing awkwardly or desperately to modern trends as he got older, but still managing to infuse his projects with a fresh vitality. Somehow keeping his guard up and his guard down at the same time.

[ghost of miles]

Another thought, apropos of nothing immediately at hand, I suppose, but haven't we had genre-busters in jazz before? Nina Simone... Nat King Cole... Sister Rosetta Tharpe... without having invested nearly as much listening time in Monday Michiru as you have, Jim, I hear her being somewhat in that tradition... granted, without the popularity (yet, anyway) that any of those performers managed to achieve.

[JSngry]

Not that that's what you're really saying, Jim, but some of the rhetoric does seem to potentially wink in that direction.

Wow, we got rhetoric and a potential wink?

She didn't look away when I called her by her name. Call the preacher, we're getting married!