the end of jazz

[JSngry]

All of which is just to say that I'm not nearly as ....distressed at the "demise" of the "Great" "American" "Songbook" as some. There just might be Pathways To Unknown Worlds available, and I'm, shall we say, not automatically opposed to that.

[JSngry]

Or to put it one more another way - I don't/can't completely hate on all those Cornball White People who imposed their will, because, hey, that's a part of who we all are, like it or not, drinks for the scars that will never heal for the house not withstanding. A lot of it worked in the end, although perhaps or perhaps not as "fairly" as would have been nice. Life is not fair.

But I don't really feel a need to hang on to any of it too tightly. It's where we've been, not necessarily where we want to go or where we would go if we could just find a way (and jeez, don't blame people for trying. If anything, encourage them). It for damn sure isn't where we would choose to go if we had it to do over again. But again, life is not fair.

I mean, I know people who dig the Confederate flag because they swear it's a symbol of "Southern Pride". Well, ok, yeah, if you say so, but...of all thing things to hold on to, that's probably not the one that'll move you past where you already are, if in fact you want to. Whether or not you'll need to, is another question not to be asked by me, but to those who would resit, yo, guess what? Life is not fair.

So it is with the Great American Songbook. George Gershwin does not equate to Robert E. Lee, nor Jerome Kern to Stonewall Jackson, but - when the point is reached where "appreciation" of the past becomes Oh Well, Everything's Fucked Now Because It's Not Like It Used To Be, We Had It Right Then & Everything & Everybody Was Better Off Because We Did, then we DO have a problem, and exiting as gracefully and/or quickly (whichever comes first) out of that crap is definitely the preferred option in my book, which will be called Life Is NOT Fair.

[David Ayers]

What Lewis is pointing out is that jazz could have a popular success based on the fact that its material (the song book) was itself popular, so it was founded on existing musical literacy. That doesn't seem like a bad point.

[Chuck Nessa]

So musicians should aim for "existing musical literacy"?

[David Ayers]

He's pointing to a confluence that created opportunities for something called jazz and saying it can't work in that way and on that scale again. The whole point about that music was that it built on already fine songs that people knew and loved. That doesn't prevent anyone from working without that context and audience, indeed we know they do that, but without the same conduit to and from an audience and popular material. Lewis's working assumption seems to be that subsequent forms of fusion didn't bridge the gap in ways that were both artistically - and I'd guess especially *expressively* - meaningful and of sufficient popular reach. Otherwise, why did jazz disappear as a popular music?

[phunkey]

The Songbook, a product of a fleeting set of cultural circumstances when popular, sophisticated music was aimed at musically knowledgeable adults, was the crucial wellspring of jazz...there is no reason to believe that jazz can be a living, evolving art form decades after its major source—and the source that linked it to the main currents of popular culture and sentiment—has dried up. Jazz, like the Songbook, is a relic—and as such, in 2012 it cannot have an “expansive and adaptive repertoire.

The wellspring of 'jazz writing' is its reductionist fetish for biblical/canonical essentialism. Utter tosh, and boring too...

[Dave James]

If new source material as verdant as the Great American Songbook were a tree and it fell in the forest and no one was there, would it make a sound? Point being, I buy into what Mr. Schwartz is saying in terms of the audience for the music...that in another 20 years, who will be knowledgeable enough to appreciate it or take the time to learn how to do so. What will kick jazz to the curb is more the lack of an informed audience than it is the lack of useable material or musicians who play it. Everything today is designed for the short haul. What used to be the flavor of the month is now the flavor or the week and I have little doubt that the flavor of the day is just around the corner. Music requiring actual thought, understanding and consideration is on life support because it requires actual thought, understanding and consideration.

[Chuck Nessa]

Well I guess that all depends on what you know.

Really sad there seemed to be no recognition of this. It was 44 years ago.

[phunkey]

Jazz is dying -- to me at any rate. The scene is at a creative dead end (to me). It mostly feels like picking over old bones when obscure releases from the 1950s or 60s are far more satisfying to me than 95% of the new releases. There are some new directions, but they just don't speak to me...

This sentiment is probably shared by 95% of the members here, as 95% of threads discuss obscure releases from the 1950s or 60s rather than new releases and young artists. Still I think there is a difference between a personal feeling that jazz is at a creative dead end and simply declaring jazz dead because today's artists have allegedly jettisoned the Songbook (read 'holy source').

Edited October 26, 2012 by phunkey

[phunkey]

If new source material as verdant as the Great American Songbook were a tree and it fell in the forest and no one was there, would it make a sound? Point being, I buy into what Mr. Schwartz is saying in terms of the audience for the music...that in another 20 years, who will be knowledgeable enough to appreciate it or take the time to learn how to do so. What will kick jazz to the curb is more the lack of an informed audience than it is the lack of useable material or musicians who play it. Everything today is designed for the short haul. What used to be the flavor of the month is now the flavor or the week and I have little doubt that the flavor of the day is just around the corner. Music requiring actual thought, understanding and consideration is on life support because it requires actual thought, understanding and consideration.

I would say that Nat King Cole heavily drew from the Great American Songbook. I wouldn't say that this was music requiring actual thought, understanding and consideration. Legend has it that the 'informed audience' in Germany threw assorted vegetables at Miles' quintet in 1967 - though I don't know whether this was during "I Fall In Love Too Easily" or during "Riot". Point being, these sound like sweeping generalisations and melancholic utterances to me. I have yet to find any evidence that today's audience is any less informed than in the supposed heyday of jazz, or that there is less 'useable' material.

Edited October 26, 2012 by phunkey

[paul secor]

Well I guess that all depends on what you know.

Really sad there seemed to be no recognition of this. It was 44 years ago.

I picked up on it when you posted it. Just didn't comment on it because this thread bores me. I imagine that others recognized it too.

[Stefan Wood]

Jazz dies because it is not referencing a base that could be accessible and receptive to a large population?

Does the American Songbook provide the foundation which made jazz popular (i think not).

[Dave James]

Does the American Songbook provide the foundation which made jazz popular (i think not).

I disagree. For those who wished to cross it, the Songbook provided a bridge of familiarity that allowed people for whom music was already a primary source of entertainment to make an informed transition to newer and more challenging interpretations of that same music

[JSngry]

Maybe it was jazz that helped those songs to get popular for so long, rather than the other way around.

Nah, couldn't be.

[A Lark Ascending]

The GAS wasn't my entry point to jazz in the mid-70s. But it was my entry point to older jazz - I'm talking pre-70s - because I was familiar with the songs from my dad's records and the sort of thing that was staple on middle-of-the-road radio then. It's one of the things that made 50s Miles, Sonny Rollins, early/mid-period Coltrane accessible when the language on those records initially sounded old hat to a teenager who'd become excited by music through 70's rock.

I don't think younger people today are exposed to the GAS in the way that I unwittingly was in the 60s/70s.

And yet there's a never ending stream of successful singers who continue to build entire careers around it. But I don't see that often translating into an interest in jazz today.

Another change is that back in the 70s jazz along with classical was regarded as what you grew up to after you'd got over the 'inanities' of pop/rock. That expectation seems to have largely vanished. Look at the way even the more up-market newspapers and magazines are dominated by keeping their readers hip to the latest rock sounds.

Not a complaint - I've attended three tremendous jazz concerts in the last month and see an endless stream of UK jazz musicians appearing, some 'in the tradition', others breaking all sorts of taboos (many in ways that don't appeal to me). Newly minted jazz continues to entertain me, regardless of where its 'artistic' status is considered to lie.

Edited October 26, 2012 by A Lark Ascending

[Big Beat Steve]

He's pointing to a confluence that created opportunities for something called jazz and saying it can't work in that way and on that scale again. The whole point about that music was that it built on already fine songs that people knew and loved. That doesn't prevent anyone from working without that context and audience, indeed we know they do that, but without the same conduit to and from an audience and popular material. Lewis's working assumption seems to be that subsequent forms of fusion didn't bridge the gap in ways that were both artistically - and I'd guess especially *expressively* - meaningful and of sufficient popular reach. Otherwise, why did jazz disappear as a popular music?

If this really is so, Lewis' assumption seems to be grossly skewed to me. Because if he were to argue that way, it is not only jazz that has come to an end but most other styles of popular music too. How long has it been since any pop/rock artist has had a hit with "I Got Rhythm", "Dinah", "Don't Blame Me" or whatever? (I am not talking about MOR artists who appeal to the remains of an older audience but about the core of the pop/rock music field) If any form of that "Songbook" had been recorded in recent decades by major pop/rock artists it was more for novelty's sake than for anything else, I guess. Or it was by artists who used these songs for a "jazz" image.

In short, the "American songbook" is not the beginning and end of popular music per se, and honestly, the audiences of "already fine songs that people knew and loved", i.e. the audience of crooners, operatic tenors and big-bosomed contraltos who performed those songs in a fashion that was as un-jazzy as possible (as was customary before jazz made those songs its own) and still had huge HITS with those performances must for the most part be dead by several decades now. It is not only jazz that has moved on with the source material that is "jazzed up", pop music has moved on too. For better or worse, but it's a fact. But as pointed out before, there is other source material too.

And any jazz (or even semi-jazz) artist who uses those Songbook songs (i.e. just plain "standards") today no doubt is inspired not by those stilted antiquated operatic or Broadway show-style singers' renditions but by preceding jazz versions of any particular Songbook song. So whatever remains of that songbook in the mind of the artists and the public TODAY is primarily based on JAZZ performances (jazz vocalists's renditions of those standards included), not on what was done with those songs in popular music many, many decades ago. Not a mean feat ... And maybe something to build on anyway, regardless of whether performing these standards will ever become a mass phenomenon in jazz again or not.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Big Beat Steve

[A Lark Ascending]

One thing that will never end is old folks worrying about what young folks listen to (with some young folks joining in to achieve accelerated wisdom!).

[AllenLowe]

1) the American songbook is not the problem - the problem is our outmoded definition of that songbook, which is far more than show songs of the 20s and 30s and Tin Pan alley - it is also folk ragtime, blues in all its myriad formats, early hillbilly and mountain music and EARLY gospel of the storefront kind - you cannot keep the tradition alive in any way if you do not know what the tradition is. And if you define tradition in narrow ways. This is why I think Nicholas Payton is so f.o.s; he wants to talk about Black music, but he excludes about 80 percent of it.

2) jazz has become problematic because there is too much bad recorded music by good musicians.

3) I don't really care whether jazz is a mass music; I care about whether or not we can hold onto our essential audience, which is becoming jaded and lazy like a lot of musicians.

4) see numbers 1 - 3

Edited October 26, 2012 by AllenLowe

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Cooooooo; good thing I'm not a jazz fan

By the way, what happened in 1968? 'House of David'?

MG

[JSngry]

By the way, what happened in 1968? 'House of David'?

[Larry Kart]

Well I guess that all depends on what you know.

Really sad there seemed to be no recognition of this. It was 44 years ago.

I recognized its source and pertinence, just didn't feel I needed to acknowledge this -- Dave Flexingbergstein (of Jism magazine)

[Stefan Wood]

1) the American songbook is not the problem - the problem is our outmoded definition of that songbook, which is far more than show songs of the 20s and 30s and Tin Pan alley - it is also folk ragtime, blues in all its myriad formats, early hillbilly and mountain music and EARLY gospel of the storefront kind - you cannot keep the tradition alive in any way if you do not know what the tradition is. And if you define tradition in narrow ways. This is why I think Nicholas Payton is so f.o.s; he wants to talk about Black music, but he excludes about 80 percent of it.

2) jazz has become problematic because there is too much bad recorded music by good musicians.

3) I don't really care whether jazz is a mass music; I care about whether or not we can hold onto our essential audience, which is becoming jaded and lazy like a lot of musicians.

4) see numbers 1 - 3

[JSngry]

A tradition that gets defined backwards is not going to be the same tradition as one that defines itself forward.

[AllenLowe]

well, sometimes it can go backwards AND forwards - I think.......

[JSngry]

Just seems that when it gets defined, it's usually backwards, and that when it defines itself, it's usually forwards. Usually.

But then again, that's all dependent on linear time in which I am not exactly a fervent believer.