Jeff Goldblum IS interested in 'saving jazz'

[Simon Weil]

10 hours ago, JSngry said:

Just saying - it was a window of opportunity for "normal" people to be challenged and not automatically feel threatened.

People's self-confidence is so low nowadays...Yet, under the surface...It's mostly a self-confidence issue (IMHO).

[Steve Reynolds]

I’ve had 3 or 4 younger friends get into jazz via the stuff I listen to live. 

My friend that I’m going to shows with these days (he’s almost 23) went to the Mars Williams show last night along with the 2 sets at Cornelia Street

He told me some of the Ayler Christmas music set was tear inducingly great - that 12 days of Christmas as played by these masters was stunning. I mean we were in the front row 3-4 feet away we had Steve Swell & Williams - you know what’s it’s like to be that close to Steve Swell when plays trombone??? - with Nels Cline 8 feet away behind Swell with Tomeka Reid stage left 10 feet away and the wonderous Hilliard Greene straight back 8 feet away with Corsano maybe 12 feet away in the back left corner. Two 30 minute suites of unrelenting energy and moments of pure beauty.

I think that concert would be a fine introduction to many newer listeners who are unfamiliar with jazz and maybe grew up on rock, hip-hop or whatever else. They don’t know that this stuff is “out” or “avant-garde” or “difficult” - they don’t know that jazz is supposed to sound like the jazz they might have heard from their fathers or grandfathers - they may not know the great classic jazz or the 50’s & 60’s and therefore not know that most or some of current jazz doesn’t sound anything like that any longer as it is now 50 to 60 years since that music was played!!!

In fact our first show early this year was Mary Halvorson with Randy Peterson.

favorite two shows were Tony Malaby with Tim Dahl, Ben Monder & Gerald Cleaver & Ben Monder with Malaby & Nasheet Waits - These nights were each 2 set monsters of far reaching abstract long form improvised music on the order of Can, 70’s Miles with a modern improvised edge that was way beyond either of the above. Both nights to my 2018 ears were among the best shows I’ve seen in 4-5 years.

for all tastes - of course not - but let’s not misunderstand what open young listeners are going to get excited about. Some like drones, overtones, huge energy, off the hook virtuosity played with passion and fierce energy.

He had been to Smalls a couple of years back and “liked” it but this stuff has him into it. His current dream is to see Peter Brotzmann 

one other guy a few years back when he was 23 or so went to a bunch of shows with me (he’s a rock bassist who also plays upright jazz bass) and his absolute favorite show was a duo of Peter Brotzmann & Hamid Drake.

so sure in 1990 or so I heard KOB, Monk’s Music & Mingus Alice at Antibes but who’s to say if I didn’t SEE Thomas Chapin live with Mario Pavone & Michael Sarin or maybe even Anthony Braxton with Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser & Gerry Hemingway that I wouldn’t have come back for more? At that point I was listening to Beefheart, Crimson, Gong and many more - why wouldn’t I have been open to more out leaning jazz? In the end I wasn’t closed off but I might have been if I didn’t pick up the Penguin Guide where they gave Ellington or Dexter Gordon or John Coltrane great respect as well as being excited about Evan Parker or Misha Mengelberg or Peter Brotzmann 

Edited November 28, 2018 by Steve Reynolds

[JSngry]

Yeah, in the early 70s, Beefheart & Zappa had records in the stores and were getting press, somevariant of "wonderfully weird" or something like that, little actual musical understanding, just the vibe that it was "different".So if you gravitated towards "that kind of thing", it wasn't hard. I had the first 3 Mothers albums virtually memorized by the time I even thought about jazz. And a buddy of mine had gotten Trout Mask and Decals shortly thereafter. Between Zappa & Beefheart, it all fit together with the New Jazz Sounds Of Today that were also being discovered.

Really, when you're young, it's a lot easier to embrace the overlaps than it is to discern the differences.

[clifford_thornton]

I still feel those overlaps. Fun stuff.

[Rooster_Ties]

I had two gateways really.  The first 4 jazz albums I had and heard with any degree of repetition, were two C90 cassette dubs a friend of mine made for me the summer before my Junior year of college -- and I must have played those tapes to death on auto-repeat for about 2 months straight, until I had to get more.

Tape #1: Kind of Blue / Nefertiti + "Prince of Darkness" (from Sorcerer)

Tape #2: Power To The People / Mode For Joe + "Gary's Notebook" (from Sidewinder)

But I did have some key earlier exposure...

1) I took an Intro to Jazz 101 class at the end of my Sophomore year in college (actually it was a 200-level class).  I was intrigued by it all, but I wasn't yet a 'convert'.  My final project was on Sun Ra, but honestly, that was as much because my uncle had told me a number of great stories about Sun Ra off and on over the years, and both of Ra's A&M dates had just come out on CD (and were conveniently borrowable from the college radio station I were I was a DJ), that I thought that would be fun and different.  Don't know how much I really "got" the music, but both those A&M CD's (Blue Delight and Purple Night) did make some sort of impression.  Plus my uncle loaned me about 12 other Sun Ra LP's, which I listened to (though really didn't connect with as much).  But Ra's story was out of this world, and made for an easy final project.

2) I mentioned my uncle (who was head of the art department at the college I went to, Knox College in Galesburg, IL - pop 30,000).  For YEARS I'd heard him talking about jazz, and he played lots of stuff for me every year at Christmas or Thanksgiving.  Don't know how much I really picked up, but I certainly got the impression that jazz was something really cool and special, and I got a sense of the whole scene and lineage of the music (or that there was one, even if I didn't "know" it yet).  My uncle was a huge influence on a lot of my interests, even though I only saw him a couple times a year.  He sadly passed about 5 years ago, after 6-8 years of ever worsening dementia.  But even in his last several years, he like to talk about jazz a lot (if not often very coherently).  He also played trumpet all through his adult life -- not especially well, but he worked a lot at it, and wasn't half-bad sometimes.  I have a nice handful of his LP's and some 78's -- and also his entire Downbeat collection (complete), from 1965-1990 -- which I'll always treasure.

I should also mention that I listened to a *LOT* of Frank Zappa my Freshman year -- and that HAD to have had a big influence too, in opening my ears to jazz (even if it smelled funny).  Before that, I only knew 4-5 tracks from the radio ("Watch out where the huskies go..." - and god only knows what else), but I had a suitemate my Freshman year who was somewhat into Zappa when he got there, and then he started borrowing every Zappa album he could find (from the college radio station), and bringing them home and playing them a lot -- and I dubbed a few of them.

Edited November 28, 2018 by Rooster_Ties

[JSngry]

Can't stress enough how much the whole "psychedelic" thing was still in the air in the early 70s, not as a pop culture fad, but just the concept of "trippy" and "mind bending" and "expanded consciousness", etcetcetc being something to engage in in all aspects of life, especially music. Especially music. Even as the popular culture started trending softer, the psychedelic ethos did do leave all at once. There were still plenty of people tripping all through the 70s and exploring accordingly.

And to that end, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Hendrix as yet another "gateway" music into then-newer form of jazz. Younger people who start off in a post-Hendrix world might not be able to grasp how truly new the Experience albums were in terms of sound and texture. Again, although personal growth yields to a greater discernment of the differences, the first hearing of Ayler, in my case, was very much a EUREKA! moment - here was a tenor playing making the same sounds and textures as Jimi Hendrix! The boundaries had been destroyed! ONWARD!

Of course, no, it's not that simple, then or now. But I didn't know that at the beginning, and the still-important thing is that the path was made open. Never mind if it split at some point, it was too late by then, the road had been taken, the realities embraced.

[Scott Dolan]

Perhaps it really is an age related thing, as you suggest. Because I didn’t get into Jazz until my mid 20’s. By that time I’d left behind my Heavy Metal and Hard Rock days, and was listening to far more mellow artists. 

So maybe if I’d been exposed to Ayler/Dolphy/Sheppard, etc. 

[Rooster_Ties]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

And to that end, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Hendrix as yet another "gateway" music into then-newer form of jazz. Younger people who start off in a post-Hendrix world might not be able to grasp how truly new the Experience albums were in terms of sound and texture. Again, although personal growth yields to a greater discernment of the differences, the first hearing of Ayler, in my case, was very much a EUREKA! moment - here was a tenor playing making the same sounds and textures as Jimi Hendrix! The boundaries had been destroyed! ONWARD!

Well, as long as you asked...  Jim Hendrix was my first really BIG musical obsession in High School, starting around my Sophomore year.  I went through a minor Beatles phase late in Junior High (barely 18 months), and then about a year of random exploring, mostly just listening to classic-rock radio (back when the playlists were 10x as deep/long/wide).

By my senior year of High School, including bootlegs, I had over 50(!) Jimi Hendrix albums -- so in a great many respects, THAT was my gateway.  Or it certainly prepped me for Electric Miles Davis, that's for damn sure.

So there was that too.

[JSngry]

Oh yeah, electric Miles was very much in the mix. But it didn't start getting really "noisy" from my pov) until On The Corner. By then, I was fully committed!

I do have a funny memory of the radio...was listening to the underground FM station once and they did this weird seamless segueing back and forth between side one of Jack Johnson and "Open Up Wide", the opening track from the debut Chase album. I mean, seamless. So, the back announce Miles, but not Chase. So, you know to the record store, buy JJ, come home and wait, where's all the trumpet lava? Then a buddy grabs the Chase album for totally different reasons, and oh, THERE it is.

What was cool about that was hearing two totally different records by two totally different bands and having no real reason yet to think that it couldn't all be the same music by the same people. You'd not want to stay that stupid, of course, but as far as stooped, yeah, it was kinda cool.

[Steve Reynolds]

3 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

Perhaps it really is an age related thing, as you suggest. Because I didn’t get into Jazz until my mid 20’s. By that time I’d left behind my Heavy Metal and Hard Rock days, and was listening to far more mellow artists. 

So maybe if I’d been exposed to Ayler/Dolphy/Sheppard, etc. 

The demographic at the shows this Summer/Fall with Malaby et al was on the young side. Lots of young people there to see Nasheet Waits & Ben Monder. I’m sure Tim Dahl is exciting to people interested in alternate hard core, rock, progressive, etc. None looking for old school easy listening jazz.

Last night for Mars et all had the old free jazz regulars and then lots of people younger than I am. I don’t think anyone left dissapointed.

[sgcim]

The title of this thread was, of course, facetious. I saw the " Makaya McCraven Isn’t Interested in Saving Jazz " thread somewhere below, and tried to do a paraphrase of it, but I posted a thread on JG on another (rock-oriented) forum under a more generic title, and was surprised that the rockers showed a lot of interest in what JG was doing, and some had even caught him live at the steady jazz gig he's been doing in LA since the early 90s, and concerts he's done all over the US.

My gateway drug to jazz was the UK jazz-rock band IF. My sister worked at the concession stand at the Fillmore East, and she was able to get me free tickets to any show I wanted to see. I was entranced by this new, underground band, Black Sabbath's, first LP, and had to see them on their first US tour. in 1970. They and another UK band called IF, were opening up for Rod Stewart.

I was astonished to hear how bad Sabbath sounded live, and that their satanic sounding lead singer was just a little punk, who sounded like crap live. 

The other band, IF, featuring Dick Morrissey on tenor and Terry Smith on guitar, blew me away. They could actually play their instruments, and I felt like I was at some wild jazz jam session that I'd read about in books. And they were probably screwing the same groupies that the rock bands were.

I walked out on Rod Stewart while he was singing some stupid song about Southern Comfort, and decided jazz was where it was at.

[JSngry]

IF, yeah! Like Coliseum, that was a UK band whose records I couldn't really find in my part of the world. But I did find one called Waterfall(?) in a cutout bin and really enjoyed it. It was on Capital.

Your comment about groupies...somewhere I read some big name rock guy saying that the idea of some trombone player with Blood Sweat & Tears leaving a gig in a fur coat and groupies made him throw up. Ordinarily, I'd say get over it, but if it was Dick Halligan, I kinda get it on a visceral level.

 

[DMP]

The first record I ever bought was “Steamin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet,” which had just got a rave review in “Hi Fi/Stereo Review.”  But thanks to the Columbia Record Club, we had lots of jazz - Jazz Lab Quintet, Miles “Porgy and Bess,” several of those Columbia anthologies (“Jazz Omnibus,” “I Like Jazz,” those kind of things) and from the Capitol Record Club (among other titles) Dakota Staton’s “Time to Swing.”  Hip neighbors lent us the big Jazz LP’s of the day, stuff like Shelly Maine’s “My Fair Lady” and “Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing.”
As for Jeff Goldblum... He does have maybe an unexpected repertoire - “The Kicker” and “Nostalgia in Times Square” show up in his albums.  But, then, the Tijuana Brass did “Work Song”... Goldblum’s piano playing is in the style of Steve Allen.