Jazz and Progress

[montg]

I'm reading 'The Imperfect Art' by Ted Gioia'. I found this point (below), from the chapter Neoclassicism in Jazz, to be interesting because it questions my implicit assumption of progress in jazz:

The idea that art should progress like science is a rather extraordinary one, no matter how much artists and critics alike may have come to take it for granted. By an odd set of circumstances, this belief in progress has gained force in the world of art while, at the same time, being discreditied in the world of science under the attacks of influential thinkers such as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. In the world of modern jazz, the deisre to be "progressive" continues to motivate an enourmous number of musicians and non-musicians.... It is hard to conceive of a pre World War II jazz artist displaying the same obsessive interest in being "progressive"; previous musicians such as Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington certainly experimented and evolved during their early years, but when they achieved techniques that worked for them, they were not hesitant to use them year after year, decade after decade. The beboppers...(discredited) their implicit notion that art should be an expression and not necessarily a progression.

[BillF]

I take it that "progressive" as used in this quotation means using new, previously unheard forms and means of expression. If so, this would be generally true of modern jazz up to and including the avant-gardists of the 60s (Coleman, Shepp, Ayler), although all these built on tradition to make their new sounds. But with the emergence of the generation of Scott Hamilton and Warren Vache in the 70s, we had musicians once again happy to work entirely within a long-established tradition. Critic Alyn Shipton calls this post-modernism and sees it as the dominant characteristic of today's jazz. I suppose the most obvious example is in the activities of Wynton Marsalis (whatever you think of them!) The term "neoclassicism" would also apply to his stuff.

Edited January 12, 2008 by BillF

[papsrus]

First of all, this sounds like a wonderful book. I will find it.

When I think of the word 'jazz,' I think of a process of creativity. And creativity, by definition, means expressing something new.

While Ellington and other jazz musicians of the past may have been formulaic to an extent (I'm not sure this is so, but it's what the quoted passage states), I think of Ellington as a highly creative, therefore progressive, musician.

The word 'creative' itself suggested not just change for the sake of change, but a 'new' way of presenting things. Is this progress?

I'm not familiar with these notions in some quarters of the science community that there is no progress in science. I assume that it means science is merely the art of uncovering what is already there? Of giving us the tools to understand and utilize what is already in existence?

This book sounds very good.

Edited January 24, 2008 by papsrus

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Change and progress are different things.

Change is with us all the time; the world changes; each society changes; each person's life changes. Music relates to this, and artistic innovators are those who, in their chosen media, can capture the essence of the new needs of their society and of individuals within it, because they're part of that society and subject to the same changes.

The idea of progress is that all these changes make things better. If you look at the history of the entire human race over the past ten thousand years, that's undoubtedly true in the macro sense. But to believe that everything is getting better all the time everywhere is nonsense. Sometimes, in some places (and sometimes everywhere) things get worse. And artistic innovators have to follow and capture even those changes, because they can't be real any other way.

Scientific progress is an abstraction related to the volume of knowledge. We know more about how things work and can use that knowledge to do things that couldn't be done before. Artistic efforts aren't about knowing how to do things but about knowing WHAT to do (in the changing circumstances).

So this seems to me a silly comparison.

MG