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Soul jazz and jazz historiography


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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

fuck jazz.

let my children hear music. more importantly, let my children MAKE music, and let them make music that is straight from who they are, what they know, what they are leaning to know, who they are, who they are becoming, and who they will refuse to become. Let them make the music that is how they, all of them, know to be life.

long live soul.

I'm on board with that. :tup 

But I'm not quite ready to give up on the word and idea of Jazz yet.  I like the word. It has all sorts of positive associations for me.  With jazz there are so many places to go:  Ultra-refined.  Gutbucket.  Or both. Or neither.  In. out.  Euphonious. Dissonant. Party time. Meditation. Anywhere really.  Freedom. 

Like you said, life.

Edited by HutchFan
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Coda: The writer who has written most acutely about the music in this context is Gerald Early, who is not a jazz critic per se but a cultural critic and African American with a deep feeling and knowledge of the music, particularly its social function. There are a few trenchant jazz-related essays in "Tuxedo Junction" (1989), a book I HIGHLY recommend, and he travels into the territory in a more recent interview with Ethan Iverson. Here are some relevant passages:

----

GE: ,,,  As a professional musician, you’re looking at how this person performed on record and in concert – this person’s abilities as an expressive artist in making this particular type of music – how this person deals with the particular theories and principles of making this music and the like.  But a black musician within African-American culture occupies something that’s quite distinct from that.

EI:  Absolutely.

GE:  Very distinct from that.

You know, when I was growing up, somebody like Jimmy Smith was like God.  To black people he was God! It was like a Hammond B-3 was the thing! If Jimmy Smith was God, then he had some acolytes under him, like Richard “Groove” Holmes, and Brother Jack McDuff, and these people.  And I didn’t know any white people who really liked this music very much.  I’m sure there were some because Jimmy Smith was pretty popular, but by and large this was black music.

At any rate, while they certainly had their detractors and there were some who didn’t like that sound, their importance culturally in the African-American community was quite apart from whatever their worth was as musicians.  Those that had this groove style of playing (especially with a Hammond organ) occupied a kind of position that I think was quite apart from how any professional musicians might evaluate them based purely on their abilities as musicians.  What they were expressing as musicians was deeply connected to the culture.

And I think that it’s important for any musician that is interested in jazz – or anyone who really wants to understand this music – to understand that aspect of the musicians as well.  How the first-generation fans decide how they’re going to translate the music into their cultural lives may have nothing to do with how later listeners see it or what they think it’s about. ...

EI:  I’d like to talk about a couple of essays in Tuxedo Junction which are smart without being the least bit academic, “The Gathering of Stones” and the obit for Sonny Stitt that closes the book.

The Stitt piece goes back to the organ business we were talking about with Jimmy Smith.

Actually, the first time I read Tuxedo Junction many years ago, I felt you missed something on Sonny Stitt because I regarded him as the quintessential professional bebopper…

GE:  Sure.

EI:  …and your piece was about him playing in organ joints with Gene Ammons.  And I sort of thought, “Well, Gerald Early doesn’t know the real Stitt.” That was before.  Now I’ve been around the block a few more times, and when I came back to your essay I realized that this might be one of the few places where Stitt is placed in the context of an African-American saxophone player making a living for years playing the real blues in all-black places.  This is important to remember when considering his bebop music.

GE:  Well, that’s interesting.  My piece was an elegy, and the only way I could remember him was how I was introduced to Stitt in Philadelphia where I grew up.  My uncles would go out to see jazz performances, and that bluesy style was the kind of jazz they went out to see.  They didn’t consider Sonny Stitt as this kind of bopper or something like that, they saw him in tenor sax battles with Gene Ammons with the screaming organ in the background.

I was aware of Stitt as the bopper and everything, but in that essay I wanted to present his loss in the context of participating in an important part of the cultural memory.  He had this African-American audience based in part around the honking tenor tradition like Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Johnny Griffin and Illinois Jacquet and so forth.

There was a whole culture about saxophone battles and honkers, you know.  When I first heard Junior Walker, I said “That’s another honker, man!” I remember when I first heard Gato Barbieri, I said “He’s another honker! He’s got these little avant-garde bleeps in it, but basically he’s another one of these honkers!”

That’s how I saw it, and I thought that was an important thing to remember about Sonny Stitt when he died.  But I can understand you saying “Boy, that really missed the mark.”

EI:  I now realize you didn’t miss the mark.  Stitt’s an artist whose star seems to be receding because the understood trope is that he is a very proficient musician who lacks individuality.  But your piece illuminates the cultural aspect.  Even on Stitt’s boppiest records, there’s an element in his music which is as deeply mysterious as any other type of feeling, emotion, or technique: It’s the blues, and to really play the blues well is just as hard or harder than bebop.

GE:  Of the saxophonists I heard when I was a little kid my favorite was Gene Ammons.  That way he had of playing, his bluesy style, the big sound and everything – that was what the adult people I was around liked.  They liked that, they liked Ben Webster, they liked Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis.  (I didn’t hear Charlie Parker or Ornette Coleman until I got to college.)

That bluesy kind of jazz was really a popular music.  My uncles, aunts and everything, they danced to that stuff.  They said “Aw, yeah, man, hit it, hit it!” That was what I thought jazz was, because that’s how I saw people respond to it.  I didn’t know until college that jazz was supposed to be an intellectual music!

The people I grew up with, they weren’t intellectual people, these were working-class black people listening to this music.  Their response to it was very basic.  Their response to it was that it had a groove…  and the bigger and bluesier the sound, the better!

The first time I was introduced to jazz as an intellectual music was when my sister got Sketches of Spain. I had heard big band music before, a lot of Count Basie and some Quincy Jones.  But Gil Evans or George Russell I hadn’t heard.  So Sketches of Spain was the first time I was told that you’re supposed to come to this music with a kind of intellectual attitude.  (Although the quality of Miles Davis’s trumpet solos did strike me emotionally.)

But my introduction to jazz was as a kind of popular music that didn’t have any particular intellectual significance…and nobody told me that it was supposed to have some kind of intellectual significance.

EI:  Well, that sort of leads into the essay framed by your experiences listening to Lester Young in an all-black youth environment in the 1970’s.  I think “The Gathering of Stones” is one of the best things ever written about jazz.

Let me quote:

“So you really like jazz, huh?” asked Mike Carpenter, a member of the West Philadelphia team, in an extremely sinister way.

“Yes, I do,” I rather hesitantly replied.  “It is a music of great dignity and rich in black cultural heritage.”

I thought this to be a truly innocuous statement, but it must have offended Mike.  He looked at me with the sort of disdain any lower-class black ought rightfully to feel when his middle-class brother pontificates like a condescending ass.

GE:  That’s pretty funny! I haven’t seen that essay in years.  That’s an absolutely true account of that conversation.

EI:  I wouldn’t mind hearing more about jazz leaving the working-class African-American experience.  Arguably jazz has been more awkward since that transformation.

GE:  There’s smooth jazz.

EI:  That’s true, there’s a very big African-American following for smooth jazz.  There’s a black bar in Brooklyn I go into sometimes and there’s a picture of Kenny G on the wall, which is sort of like life’s greatest irony or something.

GE:  My older relatives, when I go back to Philly, they love smooth jazz.  They love George Benson, Earl Klugh, they love that kind of music, because for them it still has a certain kind of groove to it that they like, and so it’s cool.  Some of them like Kenny G now, I guess.

I would say that a divide came up for me when I was in college, when jazz became much more of an intellectual exercise and I was deeply into classic recordings of jazz from Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton up to Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman.  At that point a break came, because Grover Washington Jr.  became really, really popular.  And that was the first time that I really rejected an artist that was popular with African-Americans.  A lot of the black kids I hung out with at college loved Grover Washington Jr.  They thought it was funky, but I thought it was this kind of sellout music and I didn’t really care for it that much.

By the time I’m describing the events in “The Gathering of Stones” I had really become quite a snob about jazz.  In recent years, I’ve wanted to understand two things.  One is how jazz’s appeal has become almost exclusively elite.  (There’s some people I think who even take a certain kind of pride in how they like jazz because of its snob appeal.) After that, I’d like to get an understanding if it’s possible for jazz (other than smooth jazz) to have a broader appeal ever again.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve became concerned with how I felt I was losing my connection with what jazz was really about – and really concerned about losing connection with my African-American cultural roots in jazz.  The more I began to see jazz as this kind of elite art music, the more I lost a fundamental understanding of how the music worked.  Because I wasn’t introduced to this music in this way! The people who played jazz for me as a kid didn’t tell me anything intellectual about this music, nor did they think it made them snobs to like it.  They thought it was part of what everybody liked.

In some of those essays I’d been kind of thinking about those issues and the divide within myself about jazz.  Autobiographically, my own snob turn with jazz represented a disconnect with African-American cultural roots.

It’s not unique, it happens to a lot of second-generation immigrants.  You kind of get educated out of your background, and then you’re embarrassed by how Grandma has these habits from the old country.  Probably in some way I became embarrassed by how the jazz fans around me when I was growing up didn’t have much of an intellectual appreciation for it.

I’ve spent the last few years running summer workshops teaching schoolteachers about jazz so that they could put it in their curriculum.  I’ve wondered: Is it possible that this music can still speak to young people in the way that it spoke to me when I was young? I suggested we just strip it of this intellectual veneer when teaching it to the kids.  Too often the teacher treats it like classical music, with long speeches about “Bach this,” and “Mozart this,” and now a whole long speech about “Coltrane this.” Naturally, any kid being true to himself is definitely not going to be interested in what you’re trying to give this whole long speech about.  You’re making the music like medicine! “Oh, this is gonna be good for you! Take your vitamins.”

Instead of that approach, which we know doesn’t work, why don’t we pick out some pieces of music that we think the kids might like and not give them any explanation? Let’s just play a selection of enjoyable jazz and tell them, “Pick one of these pieces and write about it.”

We had great success.  We had Mose Allison’s “Your Mind Is On Vacation,” and Nina Simone.  We did a Benny Goodman piece which was very popular with the kids, not “Sing, Sing, Sing,” but “King Porter Stomp.” The kids loved that one! We didn’t tell them anything about it: “Here.  Just listen to this piece.” And Louis Armstrong’s “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” went over big with the kids.

We never gave them any explanations about these pieces of music, but that didn’t stop the kids from really getting into it or writing about it.  This success convinced me that jazz still could speak to people emotionally.  That was an important discovery to make, and important for me getting back to my roots.

The greatest power in music is its ability to reach people emotionally.  I’m not belittling the intellectual side of jazz or saying that that’s not important.  I think it is important.  Jazz is a virtuoso music that presents interesting constraints the artists have to transcend.  All sorts of intellectual things are very interesting and exciting with jazz.  But the emotional impact of the music is the key.

The reason why this whole question came up was not whether could jazz ever speak to young people again, but whether it could ever speak to African-Americans again as it used to in the past.  Because African-Americans don’t go out to hear much jazz anymore.

EI:  No, they don’t.  That’s true.

GE:  Based on my experience with these kids, the answer was yes, I think it can.  But for that to happen, it would have to be a persistent and careful re-cultivation of that audience, and it will take some time.

EI:  Well, it’s interesting and honestly a bit revelatory about how the Jimmy Smith audience evolved into the smooth jazz audience, because I forget about smooth jazz, it’s not even on my radar.

GE:  It’s on my radar only because I have so many older black adults around who listen to it.

 

 

 

Edited by Mark Stryker
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18 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Good luck on getting 21st Century realities to get back to your 20th Century notions. :g

I don't know whether my notions were ever practical, then or now, in the way that they need to be to practitioners of the art.

As someone who is strictly a listener -- unconnected to the "business" in any way -- I'm free of the constraints of making it real in the world. 

I'm just articulating a way of thinking about things that makes sense to me.  A model.  That's it.

 

 

16 minutes ago, Mark Stryker said:

Coda: The writer who has written most acutely about the music in this context is Gerald Early, who is not a jazz critic per se but a cultural critic and African American with a deep feeling and knowledge of the music, particularly its social function. There are a few trenchant jazz-related essays in "Tuxedo Junction" (1989), a book I HIGHLY recommend, and he travels into the territory in a more recent interview with Ethan Iverson. Here are some relevant passages:

----

Thanks for sharing this, Mark.  That GE book is going on the reading list! 

BTW, Early's comments remind me of things that MG often said here on the board when he was talking about Soul Jazz.  Different function, different purpose -- different sound.

 

Edited by HutchFan
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14 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

I don't know whether my notions were ever practical, then or now, in the way that they need to be to practitioners of the art.

As someone who is strictly a listener -- unconnected to the "business" in any way -- I'm free of the constraints of making it real in the world. 

I'm just articulating a way of thinking about things that makes sense to me.  A model.  That's it.

 

 

Thanks for sharing this, Mark.  That GE book is going on the reading list! 

BTW, Early's comments remind me of things that MG often said here on the board when he was talking about Soul Jazz.  Different function, different purpose -- different sound.

 

Slightly off topic, but a few months ago a local bookstore in metro Detroit asked me to provide a list of 10 books that had a big influence on me. Early's "Tuxedo Junction" was on the list. https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/2020/04/22/jazz-is-and-other-notes-by-mark-stryker/

 

 

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47 minutes ago, JSngry said:

I'd like to know what Albert Murray thought about James Brown.

There are two brief references to James Brown in "Stomping the Blues," including a tremendous photo whose caption that I read as an endorsement  -- "James Brown, longtime kind of soul musicians. He performs almost as if he were a spellbinding evangelist preacher delivering a shout-getting sermon; and the atmosphere he generates is that of a downhome sanctified church during a revival time."

Edited by Mark Stryker
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2 hours ago, Mark Stryker said:

I think that might be a bit of misread. Murray was less concerned with the primacy of sophistication per se  than with the idea that the blues encompassed a far wider range of expression and cultural meaning than commonly understood, including including elegance, joy, sophistication, as well as the gutbucket -- as opposed to the music only expressing emotions of sadness and degradation.

I can't find any mention of, say, Gene Ammons or JImmy Smith, in the Murray books I have close at hand -- he didn't write ear-on-the-ground criticism when it came to modern players. But given his insistence of viewing the music through an African American cultural lens and his admiration he expressed through blues-oriented social music by folks like Basie and Illinois Jacquet, who were precursors in a way to soul-jazz, I'm confident that he "got" this music way more than white critics. 

My reading of Stomping the Blues was two major theses.  The first one I agree with - that there is a broad blues aesthetic that is present not only in jazz but in other African American music, and that much in the development of the music can be understood as a development of that broad aesthetic.  The second thesis is that jazz, as the most advanced and sophisticated realization of this aesthetic, is superior to other forms of blues music.   For some reason, I can't find the book right now, but I even recall a specific quote on Duke Ellington being superior to Muddy Waters and other greats of non-jazz blues.   I would assume, but am not sure, that he had the same view of superiority to "less sophisticated" soul jazz.      

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Really glad that Mark posted that conversation between Early and Iverson, because the smooth jazz analogy had been on my mind since I first started following this thread. There’s another conundrum for modern-day white critics, whether they’ve come around on soul jazz or not...  make room for another elephant! 

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26 minutes ago, Mark Stryker said:

There are two brief references to James Brown in "Stomping the Blues," including a tremendous photo whose caption that I read as an endorsement  -- "James Brown, longtime kind of soul musicians. He performs almost as if he were a spellbinding evangelist preacher delivering a shout-getting sermon; and the atmosphere he generates is that of a downhome sanctified church during a revival time."

Well, that's respectable...nice way to marginalize the power.

People of that mind still haven't really adjusted to the realities (not "political", but physical and metaphysical shifts of being) of a post-Malcolm mind and a post Cold Sweat space of movement.

I have come to totally distrust Albert Murray. Where he was right about Basie/Jo Jones liberating the bodies and spirits of African-American societies, hey, the same thing happened with James Brown and the best he can do is put the man in the church instead of everywhere. Never mind what has happened post-hip-hop. You want "call and response", hell listen to this shit, live/samples/scratching, shit bounces like BOUNCES, it's just "black folk" doing that. If you miss that as the starting point, you lost from jump.

Just go to a club (are there still clubs?), sit in the corner for a few hours, watch and learn how these lives work when "we're" not holding the camera.

That is, if you can find anywhere where there's not a camera, and good luck on that.Where IS that place anymore?

 

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LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka seems to have taken a fairly anti-Soul Jazz stance too, at least at times. Cannonball Adderley comes in for a lot of criticism in some of the articles gathered in Black Music

That Ethan Iverson / Gerald Early interview is really good, by the way. Many thanks for posting it.

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Cannonball got all kinds of shit from all kinds of people. Some of it was legit, some of it was bullshit.

Bottom line - anybody who made this record was right enough for me:

do keep in mind, though, that those essays are 50+ years old (or older)..."soul jazz meant something a bit different then, maybe, depends on who's doing the talking.

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43 minutes ago, ghost of miles said:

Really glad that Mark posted that conversation between Early and Iverson, because the smooth jazz analogy had been on my mind since I first started following this thread. 

There's a Vinyl Me Please primer on Smooth Jazz that I came across once about a year ago. I started listening to the records that it recommended ironically, but they are almost all pretty damn great. Possibly better than a lot of widely accepted CTI classics. The primer sensibly kept to funkier stuff and avoided Messrs. Tesh and G etc. Bit of a life lesson. 

I think what was said above about Soul Jazz certainly holds true for Smooth Jazz too: Smooth Jazz is a big and vital genre, and any general history of jazz that fails to at least cover Smooth Jazz is missing something that is important to an understanding of what jazz is, where it went and where it is going.

9 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Cannonball got all kinds of shit from all kinds of people. Some of it was legit, some of it was bullshit.

Bottom line - anybody who made this record was right enough for me:

do keep in mind, though, that those essays are 50+ years old (or older)..."soul jazz meant something a bit different then, maybe, depends on who's doing the talking.

I only half recall it, but I don't think Jones / Baraka uses the term. He just obviously regards Cannonball as some sort of regressive force. The essay in question was from the same period when he was putting forward Wayne Shorter and Sonny Rollins as key Avant Garde players, so I agree, the terminology and the viewpoint was different from what we use and where listeners stand today. 

That video is incredible by the way. 

Edited by Rabshakeh
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2 hours ago, Mark Stryker said:

Coda: The writer who has written most acutely about the music in this context is Gerald Early, who is not a jazz critic per se but a cultural critic and African American with a deep feeling and knowledge of the music, particularly its social function. There are a few trenchant jazz-related essays in "Tuxedo Junction" (1989), a book I HIGHLY recommend, and he travels into the territory in a more recent interview with Ethan Iverson. Here are some relevant passages:

----

 

GE:  There’s smooth jazz.

EI:  That’s true, there’s a very big African-American following for smooth jazz.  There’s a black bar in Brooklyn I go into sometimes and there’s a picture of Kenny G on the wall, which is sort of like life’s greatest irony or something.

 

I remember reading an op-ed piece somewhere by a Black woman attacking Miles for his  habit of  beating women.  I was floored when she said Kenny G. was very popular with Black audiences but what if was revealed that he was a racist. (She wasn't suggesting he was.)   

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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Well, that's respectable...nice way to marginalize the power.

.Where IS that place anymore?

 

Short answer: Detroit on many nights.

1 hour ago, Rabshakeh said:

LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka seems to have taken a fairly anti-Soul Jazz stance too, at least at times. Cannonball Adderley comes in for a lot of criticism in some of the articles gathered in Black Music

That Ethan Iverson / Gerald Early interview is really good, by the way. Many thanks for posting it.

Baraka is complicated (what else is new?). What you say is absolutely correct, but I recently came across a set of liner notes he wrote in the early '60s where he expresses more sensitivit/admiration to the grits 'n gravy organ sound. Of course, he was being paid to dig it ... Hey, it's a living.

I'll see if I can dig it up.  

Edited by Mark Stryker
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I am not sure how we are defining "soul jazz," but of course just about all definitions are slippery.  I am currently delving into a book titled Cookin': Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, 1954-54 by Kenny Mathieson.  He does not dwell too much on definitions, but certainly he sees strong links between the two styles.  He starts with chapters on Blakey and Silver, then moves on to Jimmy Smith, who seems to embody the idea of soul jazz.  I guess I look at soul jazz as mostly organ combos of various sorts and usually a stomping r&b approach on the sax .  Of over 30 artists covered  in the book, I'd say only about 4-5 worked in this vein to a considerable degree--for instance, Kenny Burrelll and Grant Green (but I would say their most admired records were not deeply in the soul jazz vein).  Gene Ammons does not receive a chapter, though he gets quite a few mentions.  

In whatever way we define both terms (hard bop and soul jazz), Mathieson exclusively covers African-Americans musicians.  

 

    

Edited by Milestones
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Yep. Sonny Philips too. But Leon Spencer, definitely.

I don't know of too many "jazz historians" who were really into R&B that much, especially once the Big Bangs of JB/Sly/Meters started to normalize, and turn into mainstream R&B/Pop..

Not saying that they should have, but you can't really speak knowingly about "soul jazz" without also having an appreciation and awareness of that music as well.

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I strongly agree w/JSngry's thesis that race in America and our attitude toward it has a lot to do with soul jazz getting overlooked in most jazz discourse.  It was music closely connected to 1940s-1970s African American popular music that was either ignored, or looked-down-upon, by the people writing about and talking about jazz (now and then).  Some artists like Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, Herbie Hancock, Cannonball Adderley achieved crossover success within "straight ahead" jazz and have been treated more kindly, but these are relatively rare.  (For that matter, think of the "white" artists drawing upon this style since 1990 - John Scofield, MMW, Soulive, etc... interesting story in itself.)

I really liked the Gerald Early interview.

19 hours ago, Rabshakeh said:

LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka seems to have taken a fairly anti-Soul Jazz stance too, at least at times. Cannonball Adderley comes in for a lot of criticism in some of the articles gathered in Black Music

I wonder how much of Baraka's reaction reflects Cannonball's genesis.  He was from a relatively middle-class, Episcopalian background, right?

15 hours ago, Milestones said:

I am not sure how we are defining "soul jazz," but of course just about all definitions are slippery.  I am currently delving into a book titled Cookin': Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, 1954-54 by Kenny Mathieson.  He does not dwell too much on definitions, but certainly he sees strong links between the two styles.  He starts with chapters on Blakey and Silver, then moves on to Jimmy Smith, who seems to embody the idea of soul jazz.  I guess I look at soul jazz as mostly organ combos of various sorts and usually a stomping r&b approach on the sax .  Of over 30 artists covered  in the book, I'd say only about 4-5 worked in this vein to a considerable degree--for instance, Kenny Burrelll and Grant Green (but I would say their most admired records were not deeply in the soul jazz vein).  Gene Ammons does not receive a chapter, though he gets quite a few mentions.  

Haven't read this book but seems indicative of how "mainstream" jazz historiography approaches the style - "soul jazz was something straight-ahead jazz musicians dabbled in"

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Here's something that's related to our discussion that I've been thinking about, and I'd like to hear what everyone thinks about it. 

For a long time, if a jazz critic said that something is "commercial," it was an implicit -- if not explicit -- criticism of the music as "less than."  Less real.  Less legit

On the other hand, no one would think to criticize a Soul or R&B album for being commercial.  In fact, the opposite is probably true.  I remember reading an interview with James Brown.  When the interviewer asked him what he was looking for when he recorded music, he said, "I'm looking for a hit!"  No bones about it! 

So why is it that this implicit criticism of "commercial" only seems to be applied to jazz? ... But not to these very closely related genres?

One thought: Does it have something to do with the early stages of jazz's development when jazz and pop were basically inseparable, one and the same thing.  But there were musicians (and aficionados) who were looking for music that gave instrumentalists an opportunity to "stretch out."  Think about the timing limitations of a 78.  If someone described that music as "commercial," it might mean that there's negligible soloing -- or even none. 

But that sort of thinking got carried forward, even up to the present day, when those technological limitations are long gone and jazz has evolved into something separate unto itself.  It's a sort of "vestigial" criticism, no?  

Thoughts?

 

 

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