Jazz Is Alive...

[brownie]

From The New York Times today.

JAZZ IS ALIVE AND WELL. IN THE CLASSROOM, ANYWAY.

By NATE CHINEN

Published: January 7, 2007

IF you happen to stop by the Hilton New York or Sheraton New York during the latter half of this week, you’ll be about as close as possible to the global epicenter of jazz. That’s because both hotels are playing host to the 34th annual conference of the International Association for Jazz Education, which is expected to attract more than 8,000 registered attendees from 45 countries: students and teachers, promoters and producers, and musicians of every tier of accomplishment.

Wandering the overcrowded ballroom levels of either hotel, or through a 75,000-square-foot expo hall, you might draw a simple conclusion: Jazz is booming. And you would be right, in one sense. “I don’t have empirical data,” said Bill McFarlin, the executive director of the association, “but I would have to guess that the jazz education industry has quadrupled in the last 20 years.”

Yet the conference also offers workshops like “Jazz Radio in Crisis: Why That’s a Good Thing.” The panic in that title, and the strained attempt at reassurance, are emblematic: while jazz education is thriving, the business of jazz itself, as measured by things like market share and album sales, has been in a tailspin.

Fifty years ago those fortunes were reversed. Jazz, like any folk music, was imparted from mentor to pupil, or forged through trial and error. For many of those making it, the most valuable lessons came not in the classroom but on the bandstand. That was true even of artists who received some higher education, like Miles Davis, who matriculated (but did not linger) at Juilliard. The music’s instructional methods were rigorous but not yet codified.

Today’s aspiring player has a choice of school programs, method and theory books, videos and transcriptions. “I can recall back in the early ’60s, when it was sort of taboo for jazz to be presented in the classroom,” said Greg Carroll, the jazz education association’s director of education. “Now it’s unusual if a music program does not have a jazz program embedded within it.” This profusion of information may be a mixed blessing. “You can learn every Coltrane solo there is without ever listening to a record,” the saxophonist Bill Pierce said recently in his office at the Berklee College of Music, where he is the chairman of the woodwind department. “I’m not saying that’s a good thing. But it’s there. The musicianship, on a purely technical level, is accessible to anyone who wants to pursue it.”

With its clinics, performances, ceremonies and panels, the conference is where the disconnect between jazz education and the performance and business of jazz comes into starkest relief. Still, the event illuminates how profoundly jazz education has come to influence the aesthetics and mechanics of the music. Though separate, the two worlds are symbiotic, and the big question is this: How can one be so anemic when the other is so robust?

If the mass commercialization of jazz instruction has a decisive moment, it would probably be the arrival in 1967 of a play-along album and guidebook called “How to Play Jazz and Improvise.” The recording featured a rhythm section only, leaving room for anyone to fill in the blanks. Though not the first effort of its kind — a company called Music Minus One was already in business — it was quickly the most successful, and influential.

Jamey Aebersold, the man behind “How to Play Jazz,” was no stranger to formal study, having received a master’s degree in saxophone from Indiana University, one of the few colleges in the country with a jazz department at the time. He originally conceived of his target audience as hobbyists playing at home.

“Until I got up to about Volume 25 or so, I wasn’t thinking this was going to be a foundation for jazz education,” Mr. Aebersold said recently from his home in Indiana. But he acknowledged that the Aebersolds, as his play-along kits are now widely known, have become a regular part of jazz’s training arc. “If they haven’t heard of me, they’re probably not doing jazz,” he said, sounding not boastful but matter-of-fact. The series is now up to Volume 118.

High school students especially take advantage of play-along materials; for most young players it’s the best option they have. That’s partly because improvisation is not the focus of their training, even among the increasing number of secondary schools with serious jazz programs. For hands-on solo training, many students turn instead to extracurricular experiences like the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop or the Stanford Jazz Workshop, which have both been around for more than 30 years.

Big bands, relatively rare on the performance circuit, are still the focus of high school jazz education. This explains the continuing success of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition. And it explains the unusual prominence of Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, whose leader makes his original charts available to band directors.

“We’re like rock stars to these kids,” said Mr. Goodwin, who in the grown-up jazz world is known mainly as an accomplished studio professional. “It’s kind of a crackup.” At the jazz education conference, he will be promoting the first Big Phat Summer Camp, which won’t have enough openings to meet the demand.

So far the legions of high school band students haven’t produced armies of jazz consumers. That’s partly a standard retention problem; consider how many drama club members actually go on to become avid theatergoers. And not every member of a high school jazz ensemble is a true jazz fan to begin with. “When you look at the choices high school students have in general music education today,” Mr. Carroll said, “the menu doesn’t read, ‘Classical, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Rock.’ You mainly see classical music and jazz. I think one reason jazz is so popular in schools today is that it’s the closest style of music to what they listen to outside the school arena.”

On the other hand record sales may be a flawed measure of jazz’s popularity. More and more jazz albums these days are self-produced or released on independent or European labels. Those albums — many sold in person, at concerts and clinics — can slip under the radar of Nielsen SoundScan or the Recording Industry Association of America, which have reported a downward turn in jazz sales even worse than the general decline. There are almost certainly more jazz consumers than the data indicate.

Stroll through the closed environment of the conference, and the statistics come to seem irrelevant. The students in attendance make it almost impossible to get inside the door of some major ballroom performances. They pack many instrumental clinics as well, hanging on to every word. One gets a strong sense that jazz is something they’ll find a way to support, if not pursue.

At the higher levels the infrastructure for training professional jazz musicians is clearly working. Every year there are more supremely skilled players with university degrees and strong, sophisticated ideas. For almost every prominent under-40 artist, you could name an affiliated program, from the pianist Brad Mehldau (the New School) to the saxophonist Miguel Zenón (Berklee). For musicians now in their 20s the ratio is even more extreme. By most measures the age of the autodidact is over.

When that trend started in the 1970s and ’80s, a common complaint arose: too many musicians sounded as if they were hatched in a practice room. The problem with institutionalized jazz education, the argument went, was that it fostered bland homogenization and oblivious self-absorption. And the idea held at least a kernel of truth.

“It was the Me Generation,” said the trombonist and Berklee educator Hal Crook, characterizing a succession of students obsessed with running harmonic gantlets and indulging in empty feats of technique. “Now it’s more of an Us thing, where the focus is on more interaction, communication on the bandstand, continuity in the solos. Audiences have fallen away from jazz in the past because it’s gotten away from that.”

At Berklee, in Boston, one recent Friday Mr. Crook led a student ensemble in a classroom session that felt a lot like a rehearsal. The students got a piece of music and a conceptual objective, and Mr. Crook guided them through it, stopping now and then to issue a pithy critique. For the most part his comments had more to do with the collective concentration of the ensemble than the particulars of any single player.

Mr. Crook was basically behaving more like a mentor than a professor, filling a niche of jazz instruction once upheld by bandleaders like Art Blakey and Betty Carter. And in that regard, he is not alone. “The apprenticeship model doesn’t exist in the way that it once did,” said Mr. Pierce of Berklee, a Blakey alumnus. “So it’s being incubated in institutions.”

The august New England Conservatory is part of that movement, and so is the five-year-old Juilliard Institute for Jazz Studies, which benefits from a partnership with Jazz at Lincoln Center. At the University of Southern California, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance admits only enough students to populate a small combo, which is advised by that program’s artistic director, the trumpeter Terence Blanchard. And the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, which has a network of hundreds of private lesson instructors, consciously upholds what its executive director, Martin Mueller, recently described as a “tradition of the practitioner as educator.”

It’s no wonder that the most serious high school musicians pay close attention to the faculty at college music programs. “That’s my highest priority, who’s the faculty there,” the pianist Zachary Clarke, a senior at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, said in the school library on a recent afternoon.

Because of their talent and their training, students at that school rank among the nation’s elite young players. “I’d like to be signed to Blue Note,” said the guitarist William Donovan, another senior, when prompted for a blue-sky aspiration. “I know I have more of a chance of getting electrocuted by lightning,” he quickly added. One week earlier Mr. Donovan had seen a clinic by the pianist Robert Glasper, a graduate of the school and a recent addition to the Blue Note roster. Another alumnus, the pianist Jason Moran, has recorded seven albums for the label.

Mr. Donovan was not far off the mark, but an increasing number of bright young musicians are preparing to defy the odds.

“There’s an interesting phenomenon happening,” said Roger H. Brown, the president of Berklee, “which is that some of our hottest players are majoring in music business, or production and engineering. They believe they are going to have good careers, though they’re entering a world where there’s no superstructure to take care of your needs.”

The place where musicians find increasing opportunities, not surprisingly, is within educational institutions, which often means a better quality of instruction. Accomplished musicians like the pianist Kenny Barron and the saxophonist David Liebman (both faculty members at the Manhattan School of Music) have gracefully balanced education and performance. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis is a teacher as well as a player, sometimes even in the context of his own band.

And the instructional efforts of working jazz musicians, through the model established by Mr. Aebersold, can have a positive impact well beyond the academy. “I’ve got about eight books out on jazz education, and they’re all doing great,” Mr. Crook said. “They’re doing better than I’m doing,” he added, laughing.

What remains to be seen is whether the rise of jazz education can cultivate new audiences for the music. Some institutions, notably Jazz at Lincoln Center, are not taking any chances; the organization’s education department encompasses an ambitious array of jazz-appreciation initiatives, starting at the preschool level.

N.E.A. Jazz in the Schools, an outreach administered by the National Endowment for the Arts and produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center, reached an estimated four million students last year. “This could be an enormously powerful force in terms of audience development,” the endowment’s chairman, Dana Gioia, said of the program, a Web-based high school curriculum designed to run as a weeklong lesson during Black History Month. “The training of musicians is only one half of the necessary support for a thriving jazz culture.”

Of course, exposure to jazz doesn’t ensure an embrace of it; the biggest onus is on the artists who maintain the state of the art. “We have incredibly talented young folks out here now, but they have to create a market for themselves,” said the saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who retired from full-time teaching at Queens College not quite a decade ago and was named an N.E.A. Jazz Master in 2003.

However counterintuitive it sounds, local action may be the best hope for the revitalization of the music’s audience. Thanks to these educational programs, jazz now exists in college towns and isolated high schools where no club scene has ever thrived. The implosion of the monolithic music industry has little effect on that network. In that sense, jazz has a shot at becoming a folk music again.

“What I’m hoping for the future of the music,” Mr. Pierce said, “is that the students who come to these schools go back to their communities, create their own scenes and develop their own audiences so the music can come back to some level, as it maybe once was. When you multiply all these individuals and all these institutions, maybe that can happen.”

It may already have started. “These kids coming out of high school are more advanced than they ever were before,” said Mr. Crook, “and it’s because of the people teaching them, graduates of programs like this one. They’re bringing it back to the culture.”

In that sense, the International Association for Jazz Education conference might be understood not as a collision of worlds but as a gathering of the tribes. And the most important thing that happens there isn’t a clinic or show or ceremony, or a negotiation on the expo floor. It’s what happens after, when the various jazz constituencies pack up their stuff and head home.

[Simon Weil]

From The New York Times today.

JAZZ IS ALIVE AND WELL. IN THE CLASSROOM, ANYWAY.

By NATE CHINEN

Published: January 7, 2007

....So far the legions of high school band students haven’t produced armies of jazz consumers. That’s partly a standard retention problem; consider how many drama club members actually go on to become avid theatergoers. And not every member of a high school jazz ensemble is a true jazz fan to begin with. “When you look at the choices high school students have in general music education today,” Mr. Carroll said, “the menu doesn’t read, ‘Classical, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Rock.’ You mainly see classical music and jazz. I think one reason jazz is so popular in schools today is that it’s the closest style of music to what they listen to outside the school arena.”

Not really the point of the article. But I remember a post on the Jazzgrrls discussion group, from (I think) a woman in the school system (certainly a teacher) on one aspect of this. She said that more than 50% of high school band members were female and wondered where that 50% went.

I don't know that one can "go back" to a day when people are less schooled (? the good old days), but I would be a good thing if we could retain some of these women.

Not to state the bleedin' obvious...

Simon Weil

[AllenLowe]

it's an interesting article, but I would pose the question: is the rise of jazz education equivalent to the rise of creative writing programs in academia? And if so, have those programs led to any substantial literary progress or to the opposite, the institutionalizing of an art form?

Edited January 7, 2007 by AllenLowe

[brownie]

I don't know that one can "go back" to a day when people are less schooled (? the good old days), but I would be a good thing if we could retain some of these women.

Another good reason to have young people like Danielle around here!

[mjzee]

it's an interesting article, but I would pose the question: is the rise of jazz education equivalent to the rise of creative writing programs in academia? And if so, have those programs led to any substantial literary progress or to the opposite, the institutionalizing of an art form?

Good point, Allen.

[jlhoots]

it's an interesting article, but I would pose the question: is the rise of jazz education equivalent to the rise of creative writing programs in academia? And if so, have those programs led to any substantial literary progress or to the opposite, the institutionalizing of an art form?

Good point, Allen.

I also agree with this.

I spoke to a published, successful novelist recently. She said that all her MFA program did was give her time to read & write. What she "learned" from the program itself was negligible.

[ghost of miles]

I spoke to a published, successful novelist recently. She said that all her MFA program did was give her time to read & write. What she "learned" from the program itself was negligible.

Having time to read & write is not exactly negligible though, in and of itself. I know a lot of writers/aspiring writers who'd all but kill for the simple quantity of relatively unfettered time.

Whatever flaws may reside in mass creative education programs, we're talking about two art forms--jazz and literary fiction--that have been declining in mass-market popularity for decades. There's a fairly good jazz scene where I live, but take away IU, and nada... plenty of nothin'. Where are these kids going to learn their "trade" (however we may now define that) if not in jazz-education programs, either at the high-school or college level? The academy of the streets is long gone. Academia is a big, fat easy target to shoot at, and I'm not saying there aren't certain real/potentially stultifying aspects inherent in the system, etc. But jazz education, like it or not, has become, over the past two decades, the main lifeline for the music. Not to mention that many of the pros who've "made it" are doing so partly by leading workshops, clinics, playing university-subsidized gigs, and the like.

The alternative is embracing a newer kind of "jazz" that won't fit many people's definitions of the word. That kind of jazz can & is being made outside of the classroom, though a fair # of the folks doing it have had some contact with the jazz education system.

Edited January 7, 2007 by ghost of miles

[JSngry]

The academy of the streets is long gone.

Oh, the academy is still there, but the curriculum has changed, and the faculty have (mostly) all ran away rather than deal with it on thier own, supposedly "higher" terms.

Hip-hop is not the enemy of jazz. People who refuse to confront it on its own terms and steer it constructively, and who in the process leave it to its own worst impulses, are.

Think about it - "back in the day", waaaaay back in the day, "jazz" was not a "respectable" music. But that didn't keep intelligent people, "street" and otherwise, from jumping in headfirst, and the music reaped immeasurable benefits from that combination of raw street vitality and a more "considered" intellectual input.

But as the streets changed, got rougher and meaner, the balance of power shifted towards the thugs (and if anybody thinks that there haven't been street thugs, true street thugs, in jazz over the years, grow/wake the hell up, ok?), in part because the weaponry got nastier, but also in part because the counter-balance had developed a sense of "artistic entitlement" that led them to believe that they didn't have to take this shit any more, and that college kids were a more worthy recipient of their "smarts" than were street kids.

Of course, this sense of "artistic entitlement" also led to the presumption that what they already knew was "better" than anything they could learn, so why bother? I dunno, but the best teachers I've had, in any field, were the ones who were still open to learning something from their students as well as steering them. It's kinda like riding a horse - the best riders get to know their horse and work with it in a symbiotic relationship so that they both know each other, they don't just jump on and beat the poor thing into submission.

Add to this whole sorry state of affairs that, with but a few exceptions, the world of "academia" that even the best jazz musicians enter into is a world not of their own making, and all that follows from that, and you end up with a state where "the streets" have literally become the enemy of jazz rather than its lifeblood.

Sense of entitlement, abdication of responsibility/opportunity, inflexibile hostility towards/in the face of changing times/technologies, hey, if that's not a recipe for suicide, I don't know what is.

Generally/braodly speaking, it was all a grand, glorious cycle, perhaps the singlemost meaningful collective artistic expression of the 20th century, and it came from an ongoing interaction between street smarts and "brain" smarts. But that was then, and this is now. One part of the equation has deliberately removed itself. For it to blame the portion that didn't is a copout.

Game Over, and we need more people like Mike Ladd.

[jlhoots]

I spoke to a published, successful novelist recently. She said that all her MFA program did was give her time to read & write. What she "learned" from the program itself was negligible.

Having time to read & write is not exactly negligible though, in and of itself. I know a lot of writers/aspiring writers who'd all but kill for the simple quantity of relatively unfettered time.

She didn't deny the value of the time to read and write. That was the whole point.

She said that what she learned / was taught from the "curriculum" of the program was relatively useless to advancing her skills as a writer.

[ghost of miles]

The academy of the streets is long gone.

Oh, the academy is still there, but the curriculum has changed, and the faculty have (mostly) all ran away rather than deal with it on thier own, supposedly "higher" terms.

Hip-hop is not the enemy of jazz. People who refuse to confront it on its own terms and steer it constructively, and who in the process leave it to its own worst impulses, are.

Think about it - "back in the day", waaaaay back in the day, "jazz" was not a "respectable" music. But that didn't keep intelligent people, "street" and otherwise, from jumping in headfirst, and the music reaped immeasurable benefits from that combination of raw street vitality and a more "considered" intellectual input.

Well, exactly--I think our thinking on this is pretty much alike, though your train of thought has traveled a longer track. I simply meant that the jazz academy of the streets is long gone. That's why I said

>>The alternative is embracing a newer kind of "jazz" that won't fit many people's definitions of the word. That kind of jazz can & is being made outside of the classroom, though a fair # of the folks doing it have had some contact with the jazz education system.<<

But IMO the streets were in the process of abandoning "jazz" before "jazz" abandoned them--or maybe it happened more simultaneously. The streets, based on my relatively limited experience of them (esp. compared to some other folk here), move without regard for the "sanctity" of art forms, though they will give past masters some respect... but primarily, they move to where the most rawly alive, vibrant & happening thing is going on. And it seems to me it's been several decades at least since they've found that in any element of jazz. Is that the fault of the jazz education system? I just don't think so, though the jazz education system, burgeoning as it is, may indeed be getting in the way of jazz's return to the streets... but I'm just about as inclined to think that the big bands will come back, too. Again, I think it comes down to what we define as "jazz." I've heard folks argue that hiphop, turntablism, rap, etc. is the new jazz (even though said forms are rather hoary themselves at this late point in the game). But it's all turning on definitions. I like to hear musicians who sound as if they've organically transcended the boundaries (rather than making self-consciously willed, contrived efforts to do so), who are speaking to a jazz heritage without being imprisoned by it. Thing is, I also enjoy a certain degree of jazz repertory too, whether it be hardbop, bebop, or son-of-Sixties improv. I guess my question is this--remove the jazz education efforts of the past 25 years, and what sort of role would jazz--as is generally defined on this board--be playing in our culture? It would still be there, to some extent, but I think it would be even less visible, prominent, influential, or whatever, then it is now.

[Chuck Nessa]

crap

[JSngry]

I guess my question is this--remove the jazz education efforts of the past 25 years, and what sort of role would jazz--as is generally defined on this board--be playing in our culture?

And what role is it playing now?

[ghost of miles]

Something more than what it would have otherwise. I don't know what that "otherwise" would be, though. All kinds of interesting things were happening under the commercial surface in the 1970s and into the 1980s, but the music was already moving--or was being moved by forces bigger than itself--to the margins. Lots of complext things going on, no easy answers (that I see, anyway), and to implicate jazz education as the culprit seems like a bit of a copout in and of itself. As for guys like Jackie & others abandoning said streets, were the streets still offering them the opportunity to make a living? How long does one have to keep running the streets, anyway? The streets are going to run away from them regardless. Why the need to play a blame game? I don't buy an archvillain in this narrative... I just don't. Institutions or personalities. To a large extent I think what's happened has been inevitable. And if kids are so enthusiastically drawn to jazz ed programs, what's so wrong with that? They're going to bring their own experiences, their own take on the world to their music. Believe me, there are kids out there doing interesting things... but they're doing them in basements or in record-stores or in whatever their town's equivalent of a loft-scene is. I talk to the kids playing in this town, and they have total love & respect for the older guys who've taught them. They're also far hipper to the "codification" and all that than perhaps we give them credit for.

I completely agree that the best teachers have to stay open and be willing & able to learn back from their students. I wish the jazz audience were more open & willing... again there's this strong desire to hold onto a certain kind of "our jazz," coupled with a bemoaning of the artform's lack of growth & vitality, coupled once more with an outright rejection of anything that challenges our most cherished definitions of that artform. Blind alley blues. If there's a way out of the alley, it'll come from a bunch of artists and a much looser "movement" than what's come before... I'm not waiting for Bird Reincarnate to swoop down with the next Jazz Advance.

[JSngry]

I've heard folks argue that hiphop, turntablism, rap, etc. is the new jazz (even though said forms are rather hoary themselves at this late point in the game).

I would make that argument too, except that there's been a noticable lack of the "intellectual" counter-balance in far too much of that music, which is, to me, a huge part of what made jazz the special thing it was back when it was what it was.

Now, I don't meant to sound like I'm entirely blaming jazz for leaving the streets. The street over the last 25 years or so have gotten significantly nastier than they used to be, When I was out and about on them, a guy like me could get by by just following some simple, common-sense, rules. You could definitely get vibed stronger than was comfortable, and ther were even then certain pockets into which you did not tread w/o "proper accompaniment" (and one or two that you didn't, even with), but if you could handle walking among pimps, hookers, pushers, junkies, cons, and hoods w/o acting like a punk and/or a fool, you could get where you needed to go, and once there, get down to whatever business was at hand. Automatic weapons, drive-bys, crazed crackheads, and children playing Capone weren't a part of the equation then (give me 100 junkies - and 500 winos - over one crackhead any day. Seriously.) So I can understand.

Earlier, I used the phrase "abdication of responsivility", and that might have been too much, given the realities. But I do question, not that people moved, but what they did once they moved. We rightly criticize government and "the majority" for abandoning the streets, writing them off and leaving them for dead. But what about the musicians? Couldn't they feel the raw enegry and the (often blunted) real intelligence coming out of all that "noise" that was coming from what they left behind? Didn't they feel at least some affinity/empathy for what was making it all go down like that? I mean, shit, I did, I heard Public Enemy back in the day when I was pretty much a "jazz purist", and said, "Yeah, I can understand this".

But like too many others, I had lost my direct sense of connection (which was admittedly nowhere near as direct/constant/organic as many), and therefore any real sense of responsibility to in some kind of way find a way to look for a conduit, to let some of that into my world as something other than what "other people" were doing. I can chalk some of that up to my age, my maturation in marriage/family/etc., but some of it I have to admit was due to simply not "being there" any more and just not feeling the need. Hey, things were going well, i was making music, a lot of it the kind I wanted to make, so what if there was all this other shit going on? It could get along just fine without me, right?

Well, yeah, it could get along fine w/o me, but I look at how many other "me"s there were, and how many of them had a lot more immediate conection to all this than me, and I'm thinking now that to not actively engage all this energy and raw intelligence in at least some form or fashion was a mistake. A lot of us were (and still are) hung up on the technology, and the ease with which "non-musicians" were making "music". Well, ok, we all have our vanities, egos, and conceits, but it soon became apparent that this was the way things were going to go, nothing we could do about it, so we pretty much said, "fuck it", and quit even pretending to be connected, instead looking backwards to the good ol' days when the wino on the corner had a heart of gold and some convoluted yet cosmically profound wisdom to drop on you if only you'd listen to him in the right way.

That was a mistake, I think, and now where are we? Street music has continued to grow and evolve, and I hear so much of (but not on the radio or tv) it trying to grow, expand, to stretch out musically. But they just don't have the tools to get to where they sound like they're trying to get to, and whose fault is that? When are "jazz musicians" going to reach out and say, "hey bro, that's a nice loop you got going there, but why don't you try variatin' it a little, maybe like this..." or "that's a bad rap you got going there, but why don't you put this underneath it to give it a little more meat, give it a little more dimensionality"? Contrary to what "we" like to think, the possibilities are damn near endless, not claustrophobically limited.

More to the point - how many "jazz musicians" of today would have the cred to make suggestions like that that would actually work? And how many of them would deem the effort "worthy" of their "talents" in the first place? "We" like to bitch about shallowness and superficiality, but at what point does that cross the line into simple curmodgeonry, of not being able to enjoy a simple pleasure on its own terms w/o feeling "contaminated" by it or some wack shit like that? We whine about the Barbarians taking over, but how much resistance are the getting these days, how many alternatives are being proposed out there where the ideas are formed long before the records get made? Have the connections been so strongly broken that there's no re-connecting, ever?

Probably so, and we're all fucked long-term (other than those whose connection to music doesn't extend beyond enjoying 30+ year old reissues in the comfort of their living rooms) if they have been, but I'm not making a definitive answer just yet. In the meantime, like I said above, we need more people like Mike Ladd (in no ways "jazz", but a seriously intelligent mofo w/a serious sense of musicality). And we need to stop "training" people to play like Bird & Trane. Instead, we need to be encouraging players to pay attention to what's going on and to actively engage it on equal terms. The two things that "jazz" is largely lacking right now is a sense of immediacy, and a sense of relevancy to anything other than itself. And the two things that street music is largely lacking right now is musical depth and a perspective of life beyond itself. You'd think that there'd be some sort of hookup, nature abhoring a vacuum and all, but there are not necesarily natural times in which we live...

[JSngry]

to implicate jazz education as the culprit seems like a bit of a copout in and of itself.

Oh, I agree, even if it might not seem like it. That whole thing is just a symptom, not the disease.

Thre's been a "jazz diaspora" of sorts ever since the eraly 80s, and it came from forces both in and out of "the business". And those amnogst the refugees who were closer to the "new country" in the first place have naturally "assimilated" into far more effectively than those who come into it from a distance.

Thing is, those who had that "distance" were the heart and soul of the "old world", and there's no getting around that, much less trying to create a substitute for it. It is what it is, and it was what it was.

It truly is a "new world" now, and I for one am not particularly interested in trying to re-create the old one in an environment that has little use, and even less understanding, of what that old world really was. It's a waste of time, and an exercise in vanity and/or delusion.

Time to move on, remembering at some level that "once an enemy, always an enemy". I say that with full love, really I do, not looking to kill anybody or anything, but that's the way it is. Core values have not changed, anywhere. They've gotten distorted as hell, but that's not the same thing as having changed. If the old ways of being true to one's self have been co-opted, then it's time to examine new ways and see what fits, even if significant alterations are needed to make'em fit.

Is there any other palatable option?

[Larry Kart]

I've heard folks argue that hiphop, turntablism, rap, etc. is the new jazz (even though said forms are rather hoary themselves at this late point in the game).

I would make that argument too, except that there's been a noticable lack of the "intellectual" counter-balance in far too much of that music, which is, to me, a huge part of what made jazz the special thing it was back when it was what it was.

Now, I don't meant to sound like I'm entirely blaming jazz for leaving the streets. The street over the last 25 years or so have gotten significantly nastier than they used to be, When I was out and about on them, a guy like me could get by by just following some simple, common-sense, rules. You could definitely get vibed stronger than was comfortable, and ther were even then certain pockets into which you did not tread w/o "proper accompaniment" (and one or two that you didn't, even with), but if you could handle walking among pimps, hookers, pushers, junkies, cons, and hoods w/o acting like a punk and/or a fool, you could get where you needed to go, and once there, get down to whatever business was at hand. Automatic weapons, drive-bys, crazed crackheads, and children playing Capone weren't a part of the equation then (give me 100 junkies - and 500 winos - over one crackhead any day. Seriously.) So I can understand.

Earlier, I used the phrase "abdication of responsivility", and that might have been too much, given the realities. But I do question, not that people moved, but what they did once they moved. We rightly criticize government and "the majority" for abandoning the streets, writing them off and leaving them for dead. But what about the musicians? Couldn't they feel the raw enegry and the (often blunted) real intelligence coming out of all that "noise" that was coming from what they left behind? Didn't they feel at least some affinity/empathy for what was making it all go down like that? I mean, shit, I did, I heard Public Enemy back in the day when I was pretty much a "jazz purist", and said, "Yeah, I can understand this".

But like too many others, I had lost my direct sense of connection (which was admittedly nowhere near as direct/constant/organic as many), and therefore any real sense of responsibility to in some kind of way find a way to look for a conduit, to let some of that into my world as something other than what "other people" were doing. I can chalk some of that up to my age, my maturation in marriage/family/etc., but some of it I have to admit was due to simply not "being there" any more and just not feeling the need. Hey, things were going well, i was making music, a lot of it the kind I wanted to make, so what if there was all this other shit going on? It could get along just fine without me, right?

Well, yeah, it could get along fine w/o me, but I look at how many other "me"s there were, and how many of them had a lot more immediate conection to all this than me, and I'm thinking now that to not actively engage all this energy and raw intelligence in at least some form or fashion was a mistake. A lot of us were (and still are) hung up on the technology, and the ease with which "non-musicians" were making "music". Well, ok, we all have our vanities, egos, and conceits, but it soon became apparent that this was the way things were going to go, nothing we could do about it, so we pretty much said, "fuck it", and quit even pretending to be connected, instead looking backwards to the good ol' days when the wino on the corner had a heart of gold and some convoluted yet cosmically profound wisdom to drop on you if only you'd listen to him in the right way.

That was a mistake, I think, and now where are we? Street music has continued to grow and evolve, and I hear so much of (but not on the radio or tv) it trying to grow, expand, to stretch out musically. But they just don't have the tools to get to where they sound like they're trying to get to, and whose fault is that? When are "jazz musicians" going to reach out and say, "hey bro, that's a nice loop you got going there, but why don't you try variatin' it a little, maybe like this..." or "that's a bad rap you got going there, but why don't you put this underneath it to give it a little more meat, give it a little more dimensionality"? Contrary to what "we" like to think, the possibilities are damn near endless, not claustrophobically limited.

More to the point - how many "jazz musicians" of today would have the cred to make suggestions like that that would actually work? And how many of them would deem the effort "worthy" of their "talents" in the first place? "We" like to bitch about shallowness and superficiality, but at what point does that cross the line into simple curmodgeonry, of not being able to enjoy a simple pleasure on its own terms w/o feeling "contaminated" by it or some wack shit like that? We whine about the Barbarians taking over, but how much resistance are the getting these days, how many alternatives are being proposed out there where the ideas are formed long before the records get made? Have the connections been so strongly broken that there's no re-connecting, ever?

Probably so, and we're all fucked long-term (other than those whose connection to music doesn't extend beyond enjoying 30+ year old reissues in the comfort of their living rooms) if they have been, but I'm not making a definitive answer just yet. In the meantime, like I said above, we need more people like Mike Ladd (in no ways "jazz", but a seriously intelligent mofo w/a serious sense of musicality). And we need to stop "training" people to play like Bird & Trane. Instead, we need to be encouraging players to pay attention to what's going on and to actively engage it on equal terms. The two things that "jazz" is largely lacking right now is a sense of immediacy, and a sense of relevancy to anything other than itself. And the two things that street music is largely lacking right now is musical depth and a perspective of life beyond itself. You'd think that there'd be some sort of hookup, nature abhoring a vacuum and all, but there are not necesarily natural times in which we live...

Admittedly my knowledge of the street music of today and recent times is limited and fragmentary, but much of what little I've heard leaves me with the impression (early Geto Boys would be one exception) that in terms of musical tools/habits (rhythmic tools/habits especially) and also, though perhaps not to the same degree or in the same way, sensibility, the divergence between jazz (no matter how broad we stretch that net) and the street music of today and recent times could hardly be more fundamental. However aesthetically valid "what's going on" might be, I get the impression that in terms of musical tools/habits and sensibility, a newly arrived Martian might think that the street music of today and recent times arose as in specific opposition to anything we might want to think of as jazz -- again in terms of musical tools/habits and sensibility. Of course, that's not (or hardly at all) literally the case; and though the incorporation/use of jazz "beats" does speak of a certain curiosity, it could just as well have to do with a vagrant impulse to alter/expunge via appropriation.

Again, I'm not saying the street music of today and recent times isn't or doesn't deserve to be "what going on" aesthetically; but based on what I've heard, I see room for little or any musical congress beyond the level of decoration or mere literal (let's lay thing one on top of the other and see what we get) co-existence. Is the belief that it is or ought to be otherwise in part based on the racial makeup of today's street and the racial makeup of the streets that gave rise to jazz and furthered its development? One would think or hope that there would have to be/should be some overlap along those lines, but in terms of musical tools/habits and sensibility, I just don't hear it (which may be my problem/my ignorance). But if it doesn't have to do with the belief/hope that today's street links up with the streets of the past, and it is instead primarily a musical tools/habits and sensibility thing, then to me it's as though the polka were somehow in our world as sophisticated and edgy/street as can be. Would that then mean that jazz and the polka (arguably having so little in common in musical terms) still needed to work something out?

[Guest youmustbe]

Jazz has become a "classical' music. Just as in western European 'classical' music, the practioners teach...many like for one instance, Bartok, earn(ed) their living thru teaching in a classroom.

The only 'problem' with Jazz has always been that, whereas, European classical music has centuries of culture, politics, art, religion(s), ethinc groups, civilizations, not to mention food and alcohol, war, social transformations, etc., Jazz is a 20th century phenomenon, and 'limited' in all those areas.

I believe that Jazz is the 'natural' musical' and 'social' continium in the 20th Century in the 'New World', the 'American Century' ...but it will take probably a century for Jazz to sort it's self out and find out whether it really is that important, or if it was a way station to something else.

Jazz was created by an ethnic group which today shows absolutely no interest in it's creation, is even embarresed by it. Jazz, certainly the touring biz, exists because of white Europeans. And the recording end, thanks to Japanese. No Japanese, no Blue Note, or Sony to sign Wynton!. Just like if you want reissues you got to go to Hiroshi Tanno or Jordi Pujol.

But then again, that is no different than, you name them, Dvorak, Tchaikowsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and on and on coming to America to tour, many of them settling here for a myriad of reasons. And becoming world famous as Americans.

Very complicated, like life.

[JSngry]

(Early hip-hop, btw, does NOT correlate to King Oliver; [

Indeed not, although I tink it does correlate somewhat w/L.A. jump blues .

[Guest youmustbe]

In Arthur Rubenstein's autobiography, he states that the reason he was first invited to tour the US, why most of the pianists toured America from the late 19th to early 20th, was that the various piano manufacturers could only promote their pianos by subsidizing these tours. pianos being the home instrument of choice before radio, phonograph et al.

So, in a way, it's always about technology, just like in some ways we owe all those Blue Note albums to the introduction of the 12 inch 33 1/3 rpm and the need for 'product' to be played on them.

No different than today with cell phones etc, and downloading versus going to a store and buying a compact disc. or even ordering a cd online.

[JSngry]

Very few of y'all know who Charles Scott was. Charles Scott was a Fort Worth bassist/"inner city" band director who for years played locally w/the Red Garland Marchel Ivery crew, a fine player with a quiet yet warm personality.

I played a Juneteenth jazz/blues festival back in the 90s, and Scottie's band was the opening act. In it, he had Thomas Reese, another FW resident, and a pianist who was a better fit for Marchel the was Red, imho, Rachella Parks (then in her earliest teens), and... a bunch of rappers and kids beating on buckets (with a pretty solid groove, I might add).

Well, "the public" dug it, but the musicians were livid. What the fuck was Scottie doing letting these no talent kids make all this noise? Scottie put it simply and truthfully for somebody who asked him exactly that backstage - "Look man, I got a school full of kids like this. They gonna do what they gonna do and this is what they gonna do. I just try to get them into doing it well. And they do know about Bird & Trane. I make sure of that."

Defeatist, perhaps even irresponsible, some said. But not me.

[ghost of miles]

Jim, you might want to check out the latter parts of Steve Isoardi's new book on Horace Tapscott and the community-arts scene in L.A. There were some gestures & outreach made to hiphop performers and rappers there as well... I don't know how that scene is doing in the wake of Tapscott's departure (going on what, seven years now?). While Tapscott was alive it seemed to be staying pretty close to the street (bad as it got in L.A., which was bad indeed).

[Guest youmustbe]

The attempt to connect the Hip Hop 'community' and the Jazz 'community' is over. Ships passing in the night.

Hard for them to connect, since Jazz musicians are just that, musicians, while most, if not almost all of Hip Hop performers can't play an instrument.

[Guest youmustbe]

And that's what was always interesting about Hip Hop....'Music' made by people who are not 'Musicians'.

[Chuck Nessa]

crap.

[JSngry]

Jim, you might want to check out the latter parts of Steve Isoardi's new book on Horace Tapscott and the community-arts scene in L.A. There were some gestures & outreach made to hiphop performers and rappers there as well... I don't know how that scene is doing in the wake of Tapscott's departure (going on what, seven years now?). While Tapscott was alive it seemed to be staying pretty close to the street (bad as it got in L.A., which was bad indeed).

This is a new book you say? I've read the older one. What's the deal w/this one?

Well yeah, I mean, when things go "off track" and it's because nobody tried to keep a hand in to steer, what right do "we" have to complain about the results? If "we" tried and lost, that's one thing. But - did we?

And I'll say this as well - the best American "popular music" has always benefitted from jazz' presence, and jazz has always been happy for the gigs. Is it a coincidence that the percieved decline of pop music has paralled the willful withdrawal of jazz musicians from participation therein? I mean, what would Pet Sounds have been w/o The Wrecking Crew, and what were they if not a bunch of jazz players turned studio rats? That's a "apex" of sorts, but geez, if pop music used to swing (even if it wasn't "swing" music", it's usually because there were jazz/jazz-informed players involved in the playing, arranging, production, all of the above, etc.

But when shit started getting digital and computerized, jazz people had mostly reached the point where A) they didn't want to learn the new instruments (and yes, a computer and programs are instruments, or can/should be) & B) they felt above the need to be connected with popular "entertainment" culture at almost any level. We're Artists, dammit! So who was left to make the pop music? Mechanics, pimps, hos, accountants, and idiots. Of course, there remain exceptions, but I hope/think you know what I mean.

Now I can hear somebody saying, "Who cares? It's just pop music." Well ask yourself this - if it's dangerous to lose the existence of a viable middle economic class, is it not just as dangerous to lose the existence of a viable middle "cultural" class, and for precisely the same reasons?