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...out of their time...


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I was listening to a discussion on the radio this morning about the songs of John Ireland and Ivor Gurney and the comment was made that the music of such composers is greatly undervalued because they were out of synch with their time (in the case of those two, an era of increasing abstraction and moving away from standard tonality).

So...

Any genre, music that was cold shouldered in its own time but who you get great enjoyment from?

[i'm not thinking of music that was neglected because it was ahead of its time; more music that was out of tune with its own time, perhaps working in an unfashionable style or idiom).

Edited by A Lark Ascending
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That's really difficult for me. I could say soul jazz. But it was only not of its time among the white jazz community, who didn't catch on until the '80s, when the Acid Jazz thing started. Until then, it was dismissed by most jazz critics (and their readers) as commercial trash. In the black community, it was the normal kind of music you listened to when you went out drinking/eating/partying and that was what it was mainly intended for. So, in that sense, it wasn't undervalued.

Nor, for that matter, was early Mbalax, though hardly any white people (or anyone outside Senegambia) heard it until the early nineties. And that applies to most modern music from Africa.

I could say the same about large gospel choirs; most white fans of gospel music don't think much of them but, in their time ('70s to early '00s) they were the dominant form of gospel expression in the black community; the Mississippi Mass Choir had two albums which each stayed at #1 on the Billboard gospel chart for over a year.

Music is intended for a specific audience and seeks to do things for the particular community that audience is part of and bollocks to the rest of the world. So it looks as if you ought to be asking what music DIDN'T meet the needs of its natural/normal/expected audience but which is now regarded by THAT audience as being good. Could anyone from outside one of those communities give an answer? I dunno, Guv...

MG

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I suppose I'm thinking of music intended for a particular audience but rejected or ignored by that audience at the time.

Classical composers like William Alwyn and Malcolm Arnold produced much music in the mid-20thC that failed to meet its market much of the time because the arbiters of what was worth promoting had decided it was conservative, unchallenging, derivative or whatever.

With the passage of time that sort of judgement has diminished (apart from a few hardy souls who feel it is their duty to uphold the standards of 'art') and the music gets more of a hearing based on whether it interests or moves or not. It's certainly much easier to hear this sort of music now, often in several versions, than it was when I first started listening and the critical response to the music is far less disdainful.

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That's really difficult for me. I could say soul jazz. But it was only not of its time among the white jazz community, who didn't catch on until the '80s, when the Acid Jazz thing started. Until then, it was dismissed by most jazz critics (and their readers) as commercial trash.

When I first started listening to jazz in the late 90s, I read this kind of commentary on a regular basis. And I still think it's out there, unfortunately.

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That's really difficult for me. I could say soul jazz. But it was only not of its time among the white jazz community, who didn't catch on until the '80s, when the Acid Jazz thing started. Until then, it was dismissed by most jazz critics (and their readers) as commercial trash.

When I first started listening to jazz in the late 90s, I read this kind of commentary on a regular basis. And I still think it's out there, unfortunately.

I certainly don't disagree with you on critics. However, at least in the UK (but I'm sure in the US, too), the people who have to buy their own LPs didn't dismiss the music beginning in the early eighties. Pathe Marconi, no doubt noting before I did the price rises for Blue Notes, began reissuing them in 1983 and included in the first batch Don Wilkerson's 'Preach brother', which had been played a lot by the deejays at soul/dance 'weekenders'. I recall a review in Blues & Soul of the Easter weekender at Caister holiday camp in which the phrase 'Don Wilkerson is God' was fair currency. Despite reissue programmes by Pathe Marconi and Ace, the prices of original 'Acid jazz' LPs rose into the multi hundreds of pounds - an incredible price for that time. A year or two earlier I'd been able to buy these LPs for peanuts - well less, actually, as peanuts aren't all that cheap - so I was a bit pissed off at the sudden popularity of the music I'd been collecting for over 20 years. Some records I hadn't got around to buying (or had never seen, these things never having been around much in the UK) suddenly became uncollectable for me, because I wasn't going to pay those prices. Then CDs came out and lots of that stuff did come out on CD, thank goodness.

I think that has pretty well died down now, but for about 20 years or so, this music was well appreciated by the dance crowd. Soul Jazz musicians came over here, not to play at Ronnie's or other 'jazz clubs' but to play one nighters in some of the largest and hippest dance halls in Britain and would attract audiences numbered in the thousands. You've seen films of the big bands of the thirties and early forties playing to packed dance halls - that is what it looked like in front of people like John Patton, Jimmy McGriff, Hank Crawford, Charles Earland, Jimmy Smith, Mel Sparks, Lonnie Smith, Reuben Wilson and others. The parallel with the short excerpt I quoted in the Eric Hobsbawm thread a few days ago is very precise.

MG

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