When Jazz Stopped Being Cool (CNN)

[JSngry]

To be clear, when I make my music, or when I find something I really feel good about, I do want it to be heard, I do want it to get a fair (enough) shot at being heard. I just don't want to go begging to people who would no more like it than I would like a ukulele band playing Wings songs. Nor do I want to give them the "oh, just try it, you'll LIKE it!" bullshit. No, they most likely won't. Just let me know where the people who probably will like it are, let me deal with them, that's hard enough. And if it's an unavoidably mixed audience, here it is, you'll like it if you will, and you'll not if you won't, simple as that. We're not talking about a monorail here.

[JSngry]

[clifford_thornton]

12 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

History tends to favor the originators, doesn't it?

The only poets we read are Homeric?

[Steve Reynolds]

I saw a great band play two incredibly unique sets of music and probably only 2 people other than me who posted on this thread would have liked it. I almost danced. I was yelling a bit. I was moving in my chair. I was excited. It was the best music night of the year for me. People left after the first set - some of them since they were plugging into electrics for the second set. Second set was insane. 50 continuous minutes including some of the best drumming I've ever heard plus the simply the most exciting improvising I've heard on a single instrument in a few years. You all know who it was. 

one of the guys prompted my wife to tell Mat he reminded her of Hendrix. He was honored by the comparison. I think he's better:)

like Clifford, I like new music

[jlhoots]

2 hours ago, Steve Reynolds said:

I saw a great band play two incredibly unique sets of music and probably only 2 people other than me who posted on this thread would have liked it. I almost danced. I was yelling a bit. I was moving in my chair. I was excited. It was the best music night of the year for me. People left after the first set - some of them since they were plugging into electrics for the second set. Second set was insane. 50 continuous minutes including some of the best drumming I've ever heard plus the simply the most exciting improvising I've heard on a single instrument in a few years. You all know who it was. 

one of the guys prompted my wife to tell Mat he reminded her of Hendrix. He was honored by the comparison. I think he's better:)

like Clifford, I like new music

Snobs keep the standards up - & I mean that in a good way. 

[Big Beat Steve]

13 hours ago, Steve Reynolds said:

I saw a great band play two incredibly unique sets of music and probably only 2 people other than me who posted on this thread would have liked it. I almost danced. I was yelling a bit. I was moving in my chair. I was excited.

Dancing in a PARTNER dance way? That's the point as far as the "dancing" statements in the initial story are concerned. Because this is ONE (not the only one but an important one IMHO) make-or-break point about jazz being perceived as being "cool" (again).

Each one of us enjoys specific styles of jazz all for ourselves in a way that probably satisfies only us and handful of others and we find all this cool on a personal level - and it IS - but is this a way jazz AT LARGE might be perceived as being "cool" (again) ever? So let's not mix these two different ways of being exposed to jazz and enjoying it (or not).

The bottom line to me is - when we are talking about "jazz", are we always talking about the same thing or do we always know what everyone else who is using the term "jazz" is referring to? The spectrum of what is being called "jazz" today IS very, very wide and I still feel there is a lot of music out there that is being labeled under "jazz" mainly because it fits any other category even less (particularly if people openly advocate throwing any remaining common denominators overboard - such as "no, jazz doesn't have to swing anymore, swing is not that important to jazz today"). And maybe this is the only sign that there still is some "coolness" to the term "jazz" because apparently to some it is a sign of distinction to be sailing under the "jazz" flag (niche existence or not ...).

But STILL it is a dead end if you go about lamenting the fact that people don't "get" those strains of jazz that you happen to enjoy and want to see getting wider exposure but that are even a minority's taste within the minority world of jazz. And it doesn't help one bit either if you put down others who might enjoy other forms of jazz that you might find too "lowly" because they are "too accessible" (meaning "too watered down" or "too dumbed down" in the lingo of quite a few out there, it seems) and therefore not "new-music-ish" enough.

 

Edited September 29, 2016 by Big Beat Steve

[David Ayers]

Improv has an audience, I see them often, but I don't think of jazz as having one. Record collectors sure, and lots of folks who learned to play it, but otherwise if there was no dinner I suspect there would be no audience. An impression, I suppose, but I've long felt it. 

[BFrank]

On 9/26/2016 at 7:05 AM, BeBop said:

I'm so old, I remember when CNN was a respectable source for news. 

(Really?  A "Celebrity Watch" channel?)

Which is why I'm not even going to read this piece.

[AllenLowe]

I don't think it even matters any more and I am really tired of even having to listen to the question. Do they ask the Southern Poverty Law Center if there is still an audience for truth and justice? Is there an audience for Proust? Is there an audience for healthcare? Is there an audience to help abused women and children? It doesn't matter. I find the whole thing a little insulting, like second class citizenship. 

Edited October 5, 2016 by AllenLowe

[Larry Kart]

2 hours ago, AllenLowe said:

I don't think it even matters any more and I am really tired of even having to listen to the question. Do they ask the Southern Poverty Law Center if there is still an audience for truth and justice? Is there an audience for Proust? Is there an audience for healthcare? Is there an audience to help abused women and children? It doesn't matter. I find the whole thing a little insulting, like second class citizenship. 

If I understand what Allen is saying, I think I agree with it. As long as I am who I am and as long as I find jazz interesting and important and I can find other people who want to listen to/talk about the music, and as long as the people who make and record the music can make enough of a living to keep doing what they're doing, any and all talk about jazz being cool or no longer being cool and/or how to make it cool again, etc. is nonsensical and pointless. Also, in the event that it should somehow become "cool" again, for better or for worse, I don't think that anything we say or do will be the cause of it.

[Steve Reynolds]

1 hour ago, Larry Kart said:

If I understand what Allen is saying, I think I agree with it. As long as I am who I am and as long as I find jazz interesting and important and I can find other people who want to listen to/talk about the music, and as long as the people who make and record the music can make enough of a living to keep doing what they're doing, any and all talk about jazz being cool or no longer being cool and/or how to make it cool again, etc. is nonsensical and pointless. Also, in the event that it should somehow become "cool" again, for better or for worse, I don't think that anything we say or do will be the cause of it.

I agree with all of this. It might be elitist or something but I think people don't know what their missing. Two more great nights of live music last week within 10 feet of two great bands led by the *great* Ches Smith. It was very cool with cool people to the left and right of me and in front of and behind me. Plus very cool to say hi to a few of the musicians before and after a he sets. Plus everyone is cool with my wonderful wife, Barbara

 

 

 

[JSngry]

Is it still cool to be cool? Does that con never get old?

[A Lark Ascending]

'Cool' is best left to teenagers and lifestyle colour supplements (or whatever the cyber equivalent is). 

What I do find interesting is how jazz, despite ceasing to be a 'popular' music in the late 50s/early 60s, still enjoys occasional periods of wider notice. Like mini-skirts and the Rubik's Cube every now and then it is declared to be 'back'. 

Even more interesting is the growing difference between performer(s) and audience. Most of the concerts I go to are performed by people in their 20s/30s/40s. Most of the audience are 50s and beyond. Equally true of folk and classical music. So there's a steady stream of young people interested in jazz wanting to play it professionally; but that doesn't seem reflected in the audience. Maybe it's just down to the fact that only the baby boomers, who lived through times when we could afford to save up and have benefited from fair pensions, can afford the tickets (or the time to attend).   

[BillF]

3 hours ago, A Lark Ascending said:

'Cool' is best left to teenagers and lifestyle colour supplements (or whatever the cyber equivalent is). 

What I do find interesting is how jazz, despite ceasing to be a 'popular' music in the late 50s/early 60s, still enjoys occasional periods of wider notice. Like mini-skirts and the Rubik's Cube every now and then it is declared to be 'back'. 

Even more interesting is the growing difference between performer(s) and audience. Most of the concerts I go to are performed by people in their 20s/30s/40s. Most of the audience are 50s and beyond. Equally true of folk and classical music. So there's a steady stream of young people interested in jazz wanting to play it professionally; but that doesn't seem reflected in the audience. Maybe it's just down to the fact that only the baby boomers, who lived through times when we could afford to save up and have benefited from fair pensions, can afford the tickets (or the time to attend).   

No, they know the vocabulary of jazz from their younger days. Almost all youngsters are bewildered by music without backbeat, amplification, vocals, etc., the rare exceptions being youngsters studying music who are exposed to jazz as part of their curriculum and learn to read its complex grammar. However, youngsters don't walk out of places like Starbucks where I sit listening to the musak and thinking That's Cannonball or That's Timmons. Perhaps because it's at low volume it's not recognized as music and is subliminally accepted.

[A Lark Ascending]

On today's Guardian Website:

The new cool: how Kamasi, Kendrick and co gave jazz a new groove

I like this bit from Shabaka Hutchings:

“What I always find frustrating is that so many jazz musicians have forgotten how to write decent melodies. They are often so keen to show off their chops and their harmonic knowledge that they forget how to connect to an audience. That’s something that pisses me off. In fact, it was working with the Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke that really gave me the confidence to play simple, strong melodies – drawing from folkloric music. That’s something that all jazz musicians can benefit from.”

I saw Astatke earlier in the year. Nothing remotely 'trendy' about the music but it did have those folkish, melodic hooks Hutchings alludes to (as well as being highly rhythmic) - played to a packed house (much more mixed age-wise than I usually see...lots of those mythical 'young people') going bonkers with excitement. In the band were hardcore improvisors like Alex Hawkins and John Edwards clearly having a ball. 

Fear of melody* seems to a general issue with musical modernism. Even though much classical music moved back from the frontiers of atonality a long while back there still seems to be a reluctance to employ a good tune.  

(* Using the word as the general public understand it - something singable that sticks in your head [as opposed to 'a note row with the potential for variation and development']). 

Edited October 7, 2016 by A Lark Ascending

[HutchFan]

On 10/5/2016 at 4:51 PM, Larry Kart said:

If I understand what Allen is saying, I think I agree with it. As long as I am who I am and as long as I find jazz interesting and important and I can find other people who want to listen to/talk about the music, and as long as the people who make and record the music can make enough of a living to keep doing what they're doing, any and all talk about jazz being cool or no longer being cool and/or how to make it cool again, etc. is nonsensical and pointless. Also, in the event that it should somehow become "cool" again, for better or for worse, I don't think that anything we say or do will be the cause of it.

Right on.