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Some Necessary Thoughts


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I've always had a different take on post modernism than the commonly held definitions, which seems to put it in the space of cultural neo-conservatism, a huddling with the old ways of doing things, representing a particular manifestation of a fear of modernity, of being lost in an artistic world in which standards appear to be lost. This is kind of the Terry Teachout position, a desperation to rescue the old values from the barbarians at the cultural gate. It applies to Marsalis and Crouch, of course, as well.

My own belief is that post-modernism is simply the condition of the contemporary artist who has lived either physically or imaginatively through the progressions of representational and non-representational expression; and who finds him or her self in a place populated (well, really crowded) with so much choice, so many potential directions, that reality often becomes a matter of synthesis - sometimes conscious and sometimes not.

But then I worried whether my own proclivities - decidedly tonal, somewhat conservative in a radically excepting way - were too conservative, or even reactionary.

This all came to me as I answered some questions recently put to me by someone writing a paper, who asked me if I believed in the concept of authenticity. I replied: "There is such a thing as authenticity; which really, in my own tastes and preferences, relates to things that reflect a real and un-mediated response to life (as opposed to art that seems to first take a market survey before deciding what to do or sell). It is authentic if it is a product of need and if it is as first-hand a form of expression as possible – it needs to lead from some immediate condition of the artist’s consciousness, it must avoid the use of pre-digested expression, gestures which do not come from the artist’s personal consciousness but which rather derive from some second-hand absorption of a third-party’s work or opinions or image. Robbe Grillet spoke about the need to avoid metaphor because he saw the use of metaphor as a means of putting an object between the mind and the action, and in doing so filtering out the deeper realities of experience. I agree completely, which is why I hate clichés of language and music, because they tend to be used as points of shallow identification, in ways which allow the artist (and also the audience, but the artist has to come first here) to avoid looking at things with a fresh eye and ear. Now, even within this somewhat radical idea of creation I still love the older musical arts and am not opposed to harmony and tonality and other kinds of post-representational reality. I see the beauty in preservation through a new lens, because revolutions themselves usually end up as means of enforcing newer kinds of conformity; but that’s another subject."

and so it occurred to me that, though our ears tell us, repeatedly, otherwise, it is possible, in jazz and improvised music, to produce fresh work which is tonal, representational, and harmonically based. Not long ago I discussed with a member of this group (to beat a dead horse, at least on this forum) how offensively bad some of W. Marsalis' composing is. Because listening to music as lifeless as I heard one night on a net broadcast of JALC paralyzes me. It's like seeing a bad movie or a bad play, or reading a bad novel - it seems (at least to my frozen mind) to induce hopelessness that anything, in the wake of this bad, bad work, can succeed as music or writing or acting.

But then, of course, there are the common jazz rescue points - Mingus, Bud Powell, Bird, Monk. Followed by the usual discouragement at how even these beacons of light have been misused, as artistic ends rather than means. Which just leads me, immediately, right back to the piano to see if the first thought, as Kerouac and Ginsberg said, really is the best. Which it often is not. Though more often than not it is the necessary first step, the shortest line between those two points which both begin and conclude the inevitable, and next, sounds.

Edited by AllenLowe
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At the moment, I can only think first of specific examples, positive and negative, and then try to draw some conclusions. I agree about the peculiar, alternate-world deadness of W. Marsalis' composing and, after a certain early point, his playing as well, but OTOH I don't think his music represents much of anything in terms of whatever post-mdernism in jazz or in general is or might be. Rather, I think of the whole neo-con Marsalis-linked JALC phenomenon as more or less an act of social engineering, aided and abetted by many people who should have (and in some cases do) know better. I'll bet that when the last literal vestiges of the Marsalis Era/Style/What Have You are gone, in terms of actual human beings playing such music, (and sadly I won't be around to see this), there won't be any other vestiges of it around -- no music of any interest or value that could be said to stem from it. The only real effect of the WM Era is and will be one that's almost impossible to calculate -- the blotting out the sun aspect of it, the way it occupied so much of the public space and soaked up so much of the money that otherwise might have gone to other jazz artists of all sorts of styles who were already making, or would have gone to make, worthwhile genuine music that did not fit into the WM-JALC tent or just wasn't connected to that empire.

Otherwise, restricting myself to direct experience, several very positive examples:

1) Roscoe Mitchell and the rest of the first and second wave of the AACM. There were some strains there that might look seem Post-Modern like at times -- the level of irony, playing with fragmented older styles of jazz, in some of Mitchell's early music and in the Art Ensemble of Chicago in general (in particular the sheer amount of trumpet history that Lester Bowie incorporated and played with); the Joplin versions that Air came up with early on, etc. By and large, though, Mitchell and most of the major AACM-associated artists seem to me to be Modernists in the classic sense -- i.e. language re-shapers like Joyce and Picasso who refer to the past (as the former did with so many writers, as the later did with Degas and others) not on an attempt to comment on the past or to draw on its energies but as a natural aspect of their drive to make it new.

2) The no-longer so new Chicago New Wave that began to emerge in the late 1990s and continues to flourish. Lots of variety here, and some Post-Modern touches -- e.g. the way cornetist Josh Berman springs more or less from both Ruby Braff and Don Cherry and has built some of his most effective pieces on Austin High Gang material. But in the event I would say that in Berman's case, and in most others from this group of musicians, such aspects of the past as may be there are not essentially referential but a part who those musicians are. I know for a fact that Josh never thought of Braff as some old guy but rather as a player whose whose musical-emotional solutions (so to speak) spoke directly to him. That he was open to hear that -- and that he, like many others in this group, probaby listened to a lot of recordings from all eras -- is another thing, but not a hard core Post-Modern trait, I think.

3) The Dutch, the ICP Orchestra crowd in particular. Post Modern for sure, on the face of it -- as many recordings and much that figures like Misha Mengelberg have said over the years will attest -- but the difference here, I think, is that Post Modernism in the arts, at least in my experience, has a smell of solemnity and political aggrandizement to it; it's typically a power operation, a way of edging other ways of making and experiencing art off to one side, if not trying to mock or even obliterate them. None of this feeling do I get from the ICP people and their music; rather (and I just heard them in concert a few nights ago) there's a consistent sense of wit, play (sometimes impish), and joy, and when actual pieces from the jazz past are present, they're typically inhabitee with great zest and insight.

4) The "Kind of Blue" reproduction by Other People Do the Killing. Now that's might be my idea of a deliberately Post Modernist gesture in jazz, except that it was at once so self-conscious, and also so musically inept by any standard that I could bring to bear, that I think it was in effect a Post-Post Modernist act, a la the references to the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of 'Don Quixote'" with which they sought to bolster what they had done. But that great Borges story, like its companion piece "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was not only immensely clever as a piece of storytelling in its own right but also very funny. In effect, Borges created something; these guys hung up a broken shaving mirror.

My guess then -- though it's just a guess -- is that Post Modern strategies and gestures don't and perhaps never will have much of a place in jazz, if only because both the notion and fact of personal instrumental expression is so tightly woven into the fabric of the music. Yes, there have been brilliant multi-voiced ironists in the music -- e.g. Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter in certain phases of their careers -- but sustaining such an approach was something that neither man chose to do, for whatever reasons. Otherwise?

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I agree; I think the main thing I was grappling with was whether one could use classic musical strategies while still maintaining an edge, or whether such use simply consigns one to the toilet bowl of history. Which for me is really a matter of self justification. But you are right in that typical post-modernism is overly self-conscious, whereas more interesting work - like Berman's - just gets to where it gets because it has to.

though maybe I am creating a new category of post-modernist, as one who simply lives as much of it as he can - instead of selecting certain aspects of 'tradition' - and then lets it come out as whatever it comes out as. But whose condition is unique in terms of aesthetic range of choices.

Edited by AllenLowe
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My own belief is that post-modernism is simply the condition of the contemporary artist who has lived either physically or imaginatively through the progressions of representational and non-representational expression; and who finds him or her self in a place populated (well, really crowded) with so much choice, so many potential directions, that reality often becomes a matter of synthesis - sometimes conscious and sometimes not.

I agree with this definition, and find it quite more generous than many another definition of the post-modern condition I have encountered (n.b., I am coming to this topic largely from a literary studies perspective).

One difficulty we face now is that post-modernity itself is now a historical condition, and not meta-historical, as so many post-modernists seemed to hope. So, what comes after post-modernism(ity)? Post-post-modernity? And what what "post-modernism": really, post-modernism in scare quotes, post-modernism as a set of stylistic conventions. (Thanks a lot, Paul Thomas Anderson.)

The music of The Microscopic Septet I find interesting in this context. There's a certain self-conscious po-mo pastiche-ing / "posturing" (no, I don't mean this as a dis) to even the most swinging of their arrangements. To take but one example, how they push the riffing in their take on "Johnny Come Lately" into Glass / Reich / Adams territory.

This stance is very much the one I find in MOPDTK's Miles-by-way-of-Duchamp BLUE. But that project is also about constraint, isn't it? Anyway, whatever its merits, BLUE reads to me as another expression working out an article of faith that is streaked through a good deal of today's aesthetics: that conventional notions of creativity are themselves passe, that action is nothing but rhetoric, and concept trumps execution, and that artistry is awareness. You better know what you are doing, and you better be able to make an account of it. What the implications are here for improvisation is a topic worthy of further discussion, IMO. Maybe, in this millennium, we arrived at a period in which improvisation itself has become a style, with all that entails, rather than a practice / method.

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the problem, however, with the Kind of Blue project is that they have not found a way to occupy that piece with a style that makes all their efforts worthwhile. Instead of Duchamp-ian commentary it comes off as Fraternity Prank. At least to me.

Edited by AllenLowe
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IIRC Alyn Shipton's A New History of Jazz has a chapter or at least a section on postmodernism in jazz.

The term postmodern often comes to mind when I listen to the British reedman Alan Barnes. Alan, now in his 50s, is the product of a jazz studies course and continues to be active in jazz education. He is something of a walking encyclopedia of jazz history - though he tries his best to conceal this beneath a semi-comic exterior - and his solos are littered with quotes from a wide variety of jazz sources. Stylistically he's something of a chameleon - you hear Hodges, Benny Carter, Bird, Art Pepper, Paul Desmond. On clarinet he sometimes plays in a Goodman-style trio with vibes and drums.

All this, of course, is totally different from the position and characteristics of jazz musicians when I was listening to the music around 1960. Modernist would be the term to describe those players: part of the avant-garde, each moved on from the past and forged a new style. Their approach was serious, and there was no ironic dipping into past styles, which before the advent of jazz studies courses were less well known to them.

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the problem, however, with the Kind of Blue project is that they have not found a way to occupy that piece with a style that makes all their efforts worthwhile. Instead of Duchamp-ian commentary it comes off as Fraternity Prank. At least to me.

I may be projecting too much here, but it would not surprise me if the MOPDTK wouldn't agree with this judgment and say "Well, ain't that the point!" IIRC, the liner notes for BLUE propose the project to have been conceived as a necessary failure. It's not so much music, which explains its failings -- failings I hear as well -- as it is an argument. And that argument is, in part, an argument against certain aesthetic "master narratives" (a po-mo chestnut): against universal / absolute humanistic values, and against objective standards of beauty / truth. The positions the members of the band are working so hard to occupy in recreating BLUE are inaccessible, even or especially in "art". BLUE scans to me as very much a political document, and in any number of ways. But certainly in what it proposes vis-a-vis subjectivity and the authenticity of selves as a product of artistic expression.

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it's the use of irony, I think, that sticks in the craw. It's not just in jazz; I think through the last 30 years or so of certain modern singers who have adapted to country music, but in a way that is just too much of a parody and too contemptuous for my tastes.

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First time I heard ICP play live, I knew very little about them. It must have been around 1999 or 2000.

When they played an obscure (well for me, it was) Ellington piece (may have been Village of the Virgins) towards the end of the set, the place was abuzz with energy and true excitement like we were hearing something new for the first time, like they were playing something new for the first time.

When I heard them play Jackie-Ing, I was as excited as when I *heard* Monk for the first time.

Why?

Maybe humour. Maybe Misha.

Methinks a lack of taking themselves way too seriously. Seems to me since they are simply playing music and simply improvising that the music breaths. Breaths deeply and therefore is fresh and new like it was the first time.

Thanks for the post, Larry

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Regarding the now-infamoulegendary MOPDTK Blue thing, I'm reminded of back in the days of the space race, and you'd find some really old African-American folks who would just ponder and say something like "white man done lost his mind goin to the moon, can't live on the moon, ain't nothin there, why they spending all that to go where there ain't nothin to get to" and then I'd be well, yeah, but, you know, curiosity, technology, human spirit and I felt, and still feel that that was the ultimately correct answer, as much I as I loved the oldsters who just could not get it.

But with that MOPDTK thing, it's my turn to say like the really old African-American folks, only ain't nobody yet convinced be of the gains of any of it.

Unintended sideffect of spiritual authenticity in terms of really old African-American folks who could not get the space program, but with everybody taking pictures of everybody today like they do, that ain't gonna buy me no roses.

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Has anyone here actually purchased and listened to MOPDTK's Kind Of Blue? Is it really a note-for-note reproduction of the real thing?

Heard the ICP Orchestra in concert last Saturday. Stiff-sounding bass and drums, though possibly unintended - the band hadn't slept in 24 hours - are their unswinging occasions and Han's antics post-modern? Some grand improvising by most of the others. The material was marches and ditties by Misha and others and concluded with their best performances: 2 Monk and 1 Herbie Nichols songs, very straightforward even as the improvising went outside the changes. Those marches and ditties seem like a contemporary Gilbert & Sullivan view of jazz, as opposed to the Weill-Brechtish approach to jazz of the Wm Breuker Collective. Both these and in fact the European orientation of free jazz from Europe over the past 50 years seem like a natural evolution rather than the ironic or otherwise self-conscious attitudes that I associate with the idea of post-modernism. Similarly, Air playing Joplin and Roscoe and the Art Ensemble playing pre-free jazz pieces may have a playful surface, but the musicians' playing sounds downright earnest. Again, not post-modern in inception.

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Some interesting thoughts here. I personally put a huge premium on sincerity - I really like it when an artist puts all of his or her cards on the table in a sincere manner. What bothers me a lot about some art, including music, that loosely falls under the category of post-modernism is its seeming lack of sincerity, a parody of a parody so to speak, a mask hidden behind a mask hidden behind another mask. That may be good for a temporary laugh or two, but not usually for the ages.

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Another artist whose work, IMO, partakes of (the best of what) post-modernism (has to offer): Ran Blake. Or: he extends certain artistic traditions associated with jazz (e.g., not drawing fine distinctions between "high" and "low" culture) in new and startling ways without sacrificing emotional content on the altar of cleverness.

Also, a link to the Microscopic Septet performance referenced above: https://myspace.com/themicroscopicseptet/music/song/johnny-come-lately-13607106-13408290

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I'm very glad I'm seeing the band on their second night in NY:)

I liked your descriptions Mr. Litweiler. I do find Misha's pieces a bit more than ditties but it's not a bad descriptor. I do find great joy in their carnival nature.

Having not been that familiar with Breuker or his band save for one live concert, and my memory of the show was substandard drumming and rhythm. It left me with little interest to follow through to hear more. I found that their "humour" was not backed up by anywhere near the improvisors that you saw the other night.

As compared to the driving force of Bennink, Glerum and Honsinger which is a great strength of the ICP band.

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personally I am likely not a post-modernist by the ICP definition; my interest in these forms is not for distancing or irony; I guess I would just suggest people listen to Mulatto Radio, as I think our take on this sort of practice is unique.

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I like what my old friend John L said above. Sincerity.

I'll add honesty without pretension and arrogance.

Remember when Wynton started giving his guys nicknames? Stultifying arrogance. Warmdaddy?!?!? Spare us

People in the 80's and 90's acting like they were the ones making shit happen.

Latching on the legends while missing the dudes who made it happen in the 60's, 70's & 80's.

Honest sincere music always rings true.

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it's not laying on labels, Paul, it is trying to come to grips with questions that are really essential; and I'm not a critic, after about 12 cds of my own work (not that there's anything wrong with it....)

I actually think that one of the reasons jazz fails so regularly is because of this kind of anti-intellectualism; it has stripped a lot of the music of a deeper intellectual rationale.

Edited by AllenLowe
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it's not laying on labels, Paul, it is trying to come to grips with questions that are really essential; and I'm not a critic, after about 12 cds of my own work (not that there's anything wrong with it....)

I actually think that one of the reasons jazz fails so regularly is because of this kind of anti-intellectualism; it has stripped a lot of the music of a deeper intellectual rationale.

I don't think that most musicians put labels on their music. There may be a few who do that, and if it works for them, that's fine. I find that I listen for similarities in music, rather than differences, and labels work against that for me.

If listeners or critics want to label music, that's up to them.

I'm not anti-intellectual. Just anti-labeling.

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Chuck - I just tend to think that jazz, unlike, say, theater and literature, has a weak and inconsistent intellectual tradition that has fogged a deeper understanding of not only what happens in the music but also why it happens. Sometimes this is for the better, and it has helped the music move on without so much of the academic b.s. and false intellectuality that academia tends to lay on the arts.

on the other hand....as a musician I have learned as much from certain critics as I have from other musicians, and it has helped my own music in infinite ways. For example - not only hearing and absorbing Sonny Rollins but the illumination of, for example, some of the things that Larry Kart has written about Sonny. Also, Max Harrison's strange but brilliant writing on Ornette Coleman which is both clarifying and just plain wrong, I think, but in ways which clarify even further. John Szwed's writing about Sun Ra and Ellington has explained the whole line of Diasporic cultural influence; and this not only gave me a lot of new ideas but helped me absorb older but important aspects of the music.

Larry Gushee's work on not only JR Morton but on various origin theories of jazz were equally inspiring; and Mulatto Radio is filled with songs that were built on associations between my own musical proclivities and intellectual ideas absorbed from Gushee, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

And I can't even begin to grasp Dave Schildkraut's somewhat bizarre ideas of Jewish Mysticism. But somehow it was connected with the rides he took in alien spaceships. But Sun Ra would have understood.

and that is just for a start.

Edited by AllenLowe
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Yes, come to me for deep intellectual understanding, only 5 cents per insight. :)

OTOH, I think I know what Allen means, up to a point. There exists among and around jazz musicians by and large (but not always), and for perfectly understandable reasons, a sort of locker room culture that says, among other things, "Only we (and not all of us, for that matter) can understand, comment on, and judge the human and social circumstances and the artistic results of what we do.” And a lot of non-players, again for understandable reasons, buy into this jazz version of locker room culture, in part because the circumstances of their own lives make such attitudes and behavior seem necessary and attractive.

A perhaps relevant passage from my book:

‘The men and women who make jazz are just like everyone else in any number of ways--they have to put food on the table and roofs over their heads; function as children, parents, and spouses; orient themselves toward the world as best they can along political, social, and spiritual lines, etc. But they also, however varied their individual humanity, form a group apart.

'What kind of group, and “apart” in what ways and for what reasons, are questions that were brilliantly explored by sociologist-jazz pianist Howard Becker in his 1951 paper “The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience” (by “dance musician” Becker meant jazz musician), which later became the basis of two chapters in his 1963 book “Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.” Becker’s basic insight, which stemmed from his own experience as a participant/observer in the field, is that while jazz musicians by and large, and with good reason, tend to think of themselves as artists, they belong functionally to a “service occupation”--that is, one in which “the worker comes into more or less direct contact with...the client for whom he performs the service…[and one in which the client] is able to direct or attempt to direct the worker at his task and to apply sanctions of various kinds, ranging from informal pressure to the withdrawal of his patronage …. It seems characteristic of such occupations,” he continues, “that their members consider the client unable to judge the proper worth of the service and resent…any attempt on his part to exercise control over the work.” And Becker drily adds, “a good deal of conflict and hostility arises as a result ….”

'Perhaps the situation that Becker describes didn’t--or doesn’t, or needn’t--always prevail, and certainly the nature of the lives that jazz musicians lead depends on a good many other things as well. But the social side of the music is directly shaped by the artist-for-hire and at the mercy of those who hire syndrome--and all the defenses, evasions, stresses, and accommodations that arise as a result.'

Me again, in the present: Becker’s original paper “The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience,” if you can get access to it, is just mind-blowing. Failing that, check out the more compact version in his “Outsiders.”

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