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i want my mummy: fighting nostalgia on the new york jazz scene


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His take on things isn't anything new. It's the same old complaint that nothing 'new' is happening, that jazz today is just a regurgitation of yesterday. It never crosses their mind that 'the new thing' from the sixties is still the same 'the new thing' today. As old and retreaded as hard bop, bebop, ect.

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His take on things isn't anything new. It's the same old complaint that nothing 'new' is happening, that jazz today is just a regurgitation of yesterday. It never crosses their mind that 'the new thing' from the sixties is still the same 'the new thing' today. As old and retreaded as hard bop, bebop, ect.

the way i read the article was that more concerts should be like those mentioned,including some rock stuff.

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And whether the avenues opened up by Ornette, Taylor, Trane and the AACM are as fully as exhausted as those of Bird and Diz, for instance, is debatable.

Jackie McLean said bebop was sort of left for other things and going back to it to was artistically possible.

Roscoe Mitchell said there are no "cracks" left in playing on changes type jazz to truely investigate, meaning that methodology has been sufficiently covered.

(Both said in interviews for attribution in The Grand Rapids Press and Blue Lake Public Radio).

One big difference is that Ornette, Taylor, Roscoe, Braxton, Muhal -- major figures in the development of freer forms of improvisation are still alive. Don't know how much of a retread the living music of Roscoe Mitchell is, for instance.

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And whether the avenues opened up by Ornette, Taylor, Trane and the AACM are as fully as exhausted as those of Bird and Diz, for instance, is debatable.

I can't get the article to load on my computer (which wouldn't be the first time. But it still works well enough, mostly). But I think there's too much made of the supposed lack of development in the avant-garde since the 60s. There's very clear antagonism to this music in sectors of Jazz, and has been since its inception. People don't want it to develop and never did - and the more they can say it hasn't and won't, the more they can declare (and believe) it to be an irrelevance. Which is where they want to be. If they can get others to be believe it, then nobody will play this form - and they'll be dead happy.

Jackie McLean said bebop was sort of left for other things and going back to it to was artistically possible.

That's a comparable idea to post-Schoenberg, you can't go back

Roscoe Mitchell said there are no "cracks" left in playing on changes type jazz to truely investigate, meaning that methodology has been sufficiently covered.

(Both said in interviews for attribution in The Grand Rapids Press and Blue Lake Public Radio).

Who knows, if you went further out there in the avant-garde, you might find new potential for "cracks".

One big difference is that Ornette, Taylor, Roscoe, Braxton, Muhal -- major figures in the development of freer forms of improvisation are still alive. Don't know how much of a retread the living music of Roscoe Mitchell is, for instance.

I think that is very important - that there's a link between the great generations of the past - and any potential generations of the future. And that these people continue to grow and have life is vital. Judging by my sight of Roscoe, five or so years ago, his music is well and truly alive and vital. There's something massive in his soloing which I don't think you get from retreads.

The whole idea of the "avant-garde train wreck" (I believe this was "Clifford Thornton's" phrase) - which exists in different forms - is wish-fulfillment on the part of the conservatives. Either the music was dead at the source, because chaos (train-wreck there). Or some of it was good, but it went too far into vapourings (train-wreck there). Or it was good, but intrinsically negative in conception - just throwing out form, rather than remaking it - so ran out of steam (train-wreck there).

Or just it ran out steam (train-wreck there. Who cares why. Just so long as we can declare that it happened). All of this, IMO, reveals a deep insecurity about the music - as though there's something in it that people are absolutely determined to keep in its box. Or maybe get back in its box.

But Jackie Mc is right. You can't do it. Not without destroying Jazz.

Simon Weil

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Bassist Barre Phillips: "If you look at jazz as a tree, the trunk has stopped growing. There's no direct line now, as there was between Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie that was the jazz tradition.

Now, it's just the branches of the tree that are growing and going off in all different directions."

Does he have a point?

Edited by pepe
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Simon,

"Jackie McLean said bebop was sort of left for other things and going back to it to was artistically possible."

What he meant was that there was potential for Wynton Marsalis, for instance, to go back to the pre-1959 era and pick up where the story left off before modal jazz and free jazz came in to change the form and re-direct the improvisor's base.

"Roscoe Mitchell said there are no "cracks" left in playing on changes type jazz to truely investigate, meaning that methodology has been sufficiently covered. "

He meant by that if you're going to piano, for instance, on popular songs of the great American Song Book in a jazz style you have to contend with everyone from Billy Kyle and Clarence Profitt to the greats of jazz piano, and that there is little space to develop your own voice because every time you try you run up against a "sound" or approach that someone else has already discovered and developed before you even get the table.

Geri Allen was able to find a way yet she included Cecil Taylor and M-Base in her over all vision of what she could do -- a long view.

Otherwise you make some good points in that post.

LV

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Pepe,

I think he does. The scene is diffuse. The trunk of the tree was the African American community, too, as much as it was an aesthetic evolution. Randy Weston pointed that out to me -- when the music moved out of the black community it lost its core. He'd like to see it get back to the community as a central part of life. Keep hope alive!

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Simon,

"Jackie McLean said bebop was sort of left for other things and going back to it to was artistically possible."

What he meant was that there was potential for Wynton Marsalis, for instance, to go back to the pre-1959 era and pick up where the story left off before modal jazz and free jazz came in to change the form and re-direct the improvisor's base.

OK, Lazaro. What I remember of the McLean interview in the Burns series said that (kind of) 60s Jazz was about rage. So you can see him thinking that pre-59 Jazz would be worth going back to, in that a Jazz based on rage would be kind of monochromatic and tedious and really a deflection from the main trunk (To use the metaphor we seem to be playing with now). Because, clearly, any art is about much more than mere rage.

"Roscoe Mitchell said there are no "cracks" left in playing on changes type jazz to truely investigate, meaning that methodology has been sufficiently covered. "

He meant by that if you're going to piano, for instance, on popular songs of the great American Song Book in a jazz style you have to contend with everyone from Billy Kyle and Clarence Profitt to the greats of jazz piano, and that there is little space to develop your own voice because every time you try you run up against a "sound" or approach that someone else has already discovered and developed before you even get the table.

Geri Allen was able to find a way yet she included Cecil Taylor and M-Base in her over all vision of what she could do -- a long view.

It is sort of the Geri Allen-like approach I was getting at. But, then I do think RM is the greater musician. It was just a line from Jeff Beer that was in my head, where he basically said that hearing avant-garde (e.g. Ornette) stuff made you go back and listen to Parker in a new way. And I was thinking maybe you could bulk that up into a way of making a new style.

Otherwise you make some good points in that post.

LV

Thanks, Lazaro.

Simon Weil

Edited by Simon Weil
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