Jazz and the Black Audience

[Noj]

Interest in jazz is either instrinsic or it just ain't there.

[Hot Ptah]

... Just try to get one child of yours to listen to ANY album you wish they would like, and the impossibility of shaping the musical taste of youth will become apparent.

Apparent to a parent?

Go to a predominantly black high school in any American city with a stack of mainstream jazz CDs by major artists and play them for a class. Let's make them major black jazz artists. Then tell the students, "you should really like this, you know". See what happens.

Well, make them MINOR black jazz artists - Lonnie Smith, Boogaloo Joe Jones

MG

It would not matter.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

... Just try to get one child of yours to listen to ANY album you wish they would like, and the impossibility of shaping the musical taste of youth will become apparent.

Apparent to a parent?

Go to a predominantly black high school in any American city with a stack of mainstream jazz CDs by major artists and play them for a class. Let's make them major black jazz artists. Then tell the students, "you should really like this, you know". See what happens.

Well, make them MINOR black jazz artists - Lonnie Smith, Boogaloo Joe Jones

MG

It would not matter.

You're probably right - the key thing is telling people they should like something.

MG

[Simon Weil]

I also read many years ago someone say that you could listen to John Scofield and enjoy all the things you like about Grant Green without having to think about the politics of Grant's experience.

Ya' know...there's just so many levels and layers of wrong in that....

Yeh your right. Big silly generalisation. I remember reading it in Wire years ago. Can't even remember the source article or the context actually. Thanks for pulling me up on that.

Well, it's a glib Wire-ism. I always kind of felt such generalisations did a disservice to the idea that cultural or social issues can play out through the music. Yet Jazz itself is a subculture which fuses and merges into the cultures around it, so it's quite logical that such play should exist.

This subculture has changed in quite significant ways over the years. From a relatively small number of musicians, largely black, playing a popular form at the start, there's now a pretty large number of musicans, world-wide of numerous ethnic backgrounds playing something widely conceived of as an art - with a large-ish scale educational/institutional spread as well.

Anyway...

For a start, you wouldn't get that degree of institutionalisation if Jazz was "just" a popular form - so plainly the music and the surrounding culture do/have interacted. And you could go on like this. But I'd also like to throw in this quote, which I first heard in the Kenneth Clark series "Civilisation" nearly 40 years ago:

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.

Ruskin

I still think this has validity.

Simon Weil

[robertoart]

I don't have numbers, but I would be interested to see what the comparative bookings/earnings are for contemporary white and black jazz musicians; I would be more than surprised if whites were earning more and working more. And a few more observations:

1) the most powerful individual in the history of jazz is Wynton Marsalis, who is African American;

2) dopey white liberals are the source of many problems; when I lived in New Haven there was a young black jazz musician who was completely incompetent as a player; yet he frequently got the arts-community jazz gigs because he was young and black and fit their idea of what a jazz-cat looked like. I used to tell them ALL the time about the older black players who lived in town who could really play (like Bobby Buster who worked with Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons or Dickey Meyers who worked with Jimmy McGriff, or Sonny Williams, who plays on an old John Hammond Smith LP - ) but they were clueless and never hired guys like that. This carries over in many ways to the critical community, which is largely composed of dopey white liberals.

3) Ultimately, as Ralph Ellison says, the music is spread socially and culturally, not genetically (which would be a Nazi-like theory) - and I've always felt that as the music has moved so far from it's community roots we can no longer consider it to be racially specific -

4) Of course, I always remember an interview I did with Dizzy Gillespie many years ago; he had just performed at the White House with Stan Getz. I had seen it, as it was televised. Itzhak Perlman was the host; after they played, Perlman went over to Getz to ask him about the origins of bebop. Dizzy, when I talked to him, was still seething about this unintended insult: "They never let you forget you're black." This from a guy who had just told me that a white man - Dave Schildkraut - was the only alto player to "capture the rhythmic essence of Bird." So he was no racist -

5) At the end of the day I can play the blues better than any of these guys - Malone, Braden, Broom - probably because I know the music better than they do, understand where it's been better, and have listened to it more - so much for racial determinism -

F&*K those White Liberals.

Have they still got control of all the cheque books?