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Jazz is a dirty word


BillF

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For jazz to survive—both the word and the music—someone had better teach young people how to listen to it, and fast. We also need to do more to educate people on why jazz history is American history, and why it's an enormously exciting story.

That's not how I came to any of the musics that I subsequently became besotted by. Part of the appeal was finding your own path away from what those who knew better told you was good for you.

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The small number of people who still quite like old jazz records seem (like Marc Myers) to be in constant moral panic about the fact that most people aren't into jazz. The idea of 'teaching our young people to listen to jazz' is honestly bizarre, a model of enforced 'appreciation' which you already would find almost nowhere (teach people to make music, not consume it, I'd say). I know I am repeating myself, but I think that there's a small group of folks who overvalue something they think of as a bounded entity called 'jazz', based on a dated paradigm that reads off 'jazz' retrospectively through a canon of 'great soloists' abstracted from shifting social and commercial contexts, and above all socio-musical practices, then is baffled that nobody else seems to go along with their model. Not quite no-one though - for whatever reason, jazz has been institutionalized. So we have institution (which includes practioners) on the one hand and fans-of-old-records on the other, but a gap where the desired audience of people supposed to lap it all up, guided by administrators and (musical) technocrats (uh, musicians, I mean) on the one hand and super-expert record collectors, discographies in hand, is supposed to be. Enter Marc Myers and his theory of music education to save the day!

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This bit is funny too:

We also need to do more to educate people on why jazz history is American history, and why it's an enormously exciting story.

I wonder how many other Brits recall the teacher tuning into 'Singing Together'* in primary school where we would learn to sing rather prim versions of English folk songs - 'Oh, No John' can still make me shudder. I suspect that was also to engender a sense of national pride. Could have put me off folk songs for life. The Beatles with their 'yeah, yeah, yeahs' were much more appealing.

Though given my taste for both English folk music and English cowpat classical, maybe the programmes were more successful subliminally.

[*Not on a tape or replayer - the school day had to be built round the timings of these programmes.]

Edited by A Lark Ascending
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English cowpat classical

What does "cowpat Classical" mean? I've never heard that phrase before....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/arts/music/13smit.html?pagewanted=all

A derogatory term used by composer Elizabeth Lutyens with regard to the romantic, folk-song influenced English classical music of the early 20thC - Vaughan Williams, Holst, Howells etc (i.e. the stuff you can whistle [well, maybe not the Tallis Fantasia]).

Edited by A Lark Ascending
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