Culture War, Young Lions & Trend Manufacturing

[HutchFan]

I think Branford understands that controversial statements are the only ones that get noticed.  It's the path to "publicity." 

He probably learned it from his brother.

 

Edited February 25, 2021 by HutchFan

[Larry Kart]

And/or Branford probably learned it from the late Mr. Crouch -- as did Wynton as well for that matter.

[Dub Modal]

And didn't they all kind of get it from Murray? 

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, HutchFan said:

I think Branford understands that controversial statements are the only ones that get noticed.  It's the path to "publicity." 

He probably learned it from his brother.

 

I think he's gotten older, fatter, and is probably in the habit of having one glass of wine too many before pronouncing.

In other words, just another old fart.

[HutchFan]

Sounds about right.

"Hey, you kids get off my lawn!"

 

 

[JSngry]

Get off my Astroturf, you mean...

[Quasimado]

Just when you thought it's gone ... IT'S BACK!

[Dub Modal]

FWIW, my original intent was more about the machinations behind the movement that created the aforementioned astroturfing/scapegoating etc. and how hopefully it's in the past (at least at its most aggressive) rather than the individual provocateurs themselves, but I guess that's really inevitable. They're still alive and pretty vocal and it's also inevitable that jazz forums address the Burns Jazz doc since, despite its faults, did and does seem to have caught attention. 

[Guy Berger]

On 2/24/2021 at 8:17 AM, Dan Gould said:

Were there really marketing efforts that said "saving jazz" or anything like that?

I think the 'saving jazz' story came from Marsalis and Crouch and that there was amplification from people like Feather and a few other critics. But other than the turn to album covers with men in suits, where was the hardcore "saving jazz" marketing?

I'm probably responsible for the use of the term "marketing", for better or for worse.

IMHO maybe that's not the perfect term.  But it does feel like there was an institutional effort to push this narrative.

On a much smaller scale this happens all the time in jazz.  Think of young musicians who (often totally legitimately) get a brief period of hype, then either develop a less flashy career or just fade away.

On 2/24/2021 at 9:01 AM, Dub Modal said:

As I read that NYT link I sense a "passing of the torch" trope, with a hint of "can they do it? YES! they can" type of victory lap.

Some gems from that link...like how the guys from Miles' SGQ sold out first before coming back to the real stuff - and guess who was there: 

" So one by one, Mr. Shorter, Mr. Hancock, Mr. Williams, and many of their associates abandoned the poised, exceptionally creative smallgroup improvising that had occupied them for the better part of a decade...and the music being made by most of Mr. Davis's ex-sidemen was becoming increasingly formulaic and predictable..."

But then:

" Whenever they temporarily abandoned their presumably more lucrative commercial careers to play the sort of jazz that had originally made them famous, it was an event. .. Mr. Shorter, Mr. Williams and Mr. Hancock, along with their contemporaries Charlie Haden and Bobby Hutcherson, play in varying combinations on three of the album's four sides, along with the much younger trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, and they play brilliantly. The music is freer and more adventurous than much of what they played on the Blue Note albums of the mid-1960's.."

" In a sense, the Young Lions of the 1980's are finishing the work the Lions of the 1960's began, mediating between the jazz tradition and the latest innovations... Their task is to make room in the jazz mainstream for all this input, and they seem determined to do so without sacrificing the swing or the blues-derived expressive devices of the older jazz forms."

So it's not overt, but the saving jazz does seem to be there. 

Yikes!  And wasn't Robert Palmer "one of the good guys"?

[Dan Gould]

without sacrificing the swing or the blues-derived expressive devices of the older jazz forms."

There it is, and in the Paper of Record.

 

Edited February 26, 2021 by Dan Gould

[JSngry]

blues-derived expressive devices

"devices"...at both reductionist stupid and macro-inadequate.

It's language, dammit. If it's your native tongue, it's not a "device", it's just the way you speak. "Devices" are what other people try to figure out. If you strive to become multi-lingual, you try like hell to lose the "devices", that means you're really "speaking from the heart".

and don't get me started on "swing"....musics all over the worlds have their own swing. I keep looking trying to find one that doesn't and the best I can say (so far) is that some worlds ration it more tightly than others, but that's about it.

I mean, I get what people like that think they're trying to say, and in 19XX it was probably a lot more obvious, especially to/for those who were saying it, but now? In 2021?

The world keeps getting smaller, the neighborhoods keep changing, and the new neighbors play their radios too damn loud, just like the old ones did. so, you know, it's there.

[Guy Berger]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

blues-derived expressive devices

"devices"...at both reductionist stupid and macro-inadequate.

It's language, dammit. If it's your native tongue, it's not a "device", it's just the way you speak. "Devices" are what other people try to figure out. If you strive to become multi-lingual, you try like hell to lose the "devices", that means you're really "speaking from the heart".

and don't get me started on "swing"....musics all over the worlds have their own swing. I keep looking trying to find one that doesn't and the best I can say (so far) is that some worlds ration it more tightly than others, but that's about it.

I mean, I get what people like that think they're trying to say, and in 19XX it was probably a lot more obvious, especially to/for those who were saying it, but now? In 2021?

The world keeps getting smaller, the neighborhoods keep changing, and the new neighbors play their radios too damn loud, just like the old ones did. so, you know, it's there.

One thing that is ironic about your "device"/"language" distinction (on target), btw, is I read an interview where Branford Marsalis made the thoughtful comment that Led Zeppelin sounded the way they did because they listened so closely to Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, and that someone who listened to Led Zeppelin would end up sounding like Whitesnake.  What does Branford Marsalis's comment imply about... Branford Marsalis?

[AllenLowe]

as a would-be gigging musician, I think jazz is just lost these days - and I get this from much more successful musicians (who were working before the pandemic). Gigs didn't lead anywhere any more; this was a change from the old days when one good gig could put you on a trajectory.

And the music is age-ist with a vengeance. I played Dizzy's in 2018 and sold the house out on a Wednesday night in February. People went nuts. Will they book me back? No, and they turned me down in a very insulting, yes, age-ist, way as well. To get into Dizzy's you now have to be young OR famous, and I am neither.

The small venues are run by young kids who will only book other people their age. They treat musicians like shit, are non-responsive (and to much more famous people than myself).

The music has little future for most of us without subsidy. And yet there are zillions of musicians and plenty of venues. But it's all like an escalator that's going sideways.

As for the Young Lions and that era; look where we are now with this new, niche-jazz. Jazz has its lowest market share ever. I guess Wynton's attempts at resuscitation were unsuccessful.

As for other considerations, it's a good thing I had a day job all those years. I still believe jazz is an art form, and that's what I try to do.

 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by AllenLowe

[danasgoodstuff]

On 2/24/2021 at 9:01 AM, Dub Modal said:

As I read that NYT link I sense a "passing of the torch" trope, with a hint of "can they do it? YES! they can" type of victory lap.

Some gems from that link...like how the guys from Miles' SGQ sold out first before coming back to the real stuff - and guess who was there: 

" So one by one, Mr. Shorter, Mr. Hancock, Mr. Williams, and many of their associates abandoned the poised, exceptionally creative smallgroup improvising that had occupied them for the better part of a decade...and the music being made by most of Mr. Davis's ex-sidemen was becoming increasingly formulaic and predictable..."

But then:

" Whenever they temporarily abandoned their presumably more lucrative commercial careers to play the sort of jazz that had originally made them famous, it was an event. .. Mr. Shorter, Mr. Williams and Mr. Hancock, along with their contemporaries Charlie Haden and Bobby Hutcherson, play in varying combinations on three of the album's four sides, along with the much younger trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, and they play brilliantly. The music is freer and more adventurous than much of what they played on the Blue Note albums of the mid-1960's.."

" In a sense, the Young Lions of the 1980's are finishing the work the Lions of the 1960's began, mediating between the jazz tradition and the latest innovations... Their task is to make room in the jazz mainstream for all this input, and they seem determined to do so without sacrificing the swing or the blues-derived expressive devices of the older jazz forms."

So it's not overt, but the saving jazz does seem to be there. 

Thank you. Will check out the Chinen book...and I agree with you that sometimes these promoted artists are worthy, and maybe more often not. 

One thing about that indie label stuff though, always look to see who the parent company is. I had no idea that Ninja Tune Inc. was doing billions in business. Of course, jazz and other niche markets are only pieces of that music catalog, but the fact they put this stuff out means it makes them money. Which means there's some commercial viability, especially if these albums become modern classics and can eventually be shifted to legacy products and mined for reissues etc. 

I can remember reading this, or something very like it (there was a lot) back in the day and thinking 'really, you think VSOP or whatever is playing more/better than the SGQ or what its members did for BN back in the day, have you lost your freaking mind?'  It was wishful thinking/non-thinking at best, and mostly just hype.

Edited February 28, 2021 by danasgoodstuff

[Teasing the Korean]

You really have to look beyond jazz and even beyond music to understand this trend.  

Is it any coincidence that, after some 30 years' worth of innovation and progress that marked the postwar period in the US, jazz got conservative and nostalgic at the same time that everything else did?

I listen to lots of film music.  The period from roughly the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s produced some of the most amazing film scores ever.  And then, just a couple of years before the young Alfred lions, John Williams scored Star Wars with a neo-Korngold swashbuckler score.  It changed the face of film music.

And look at how conservative and throwback everything became in the 1980s - pleated pants, padded shoulders, short hair, pink-and-turquoise neo-deco architecture, Neo-conservative politics, The Good Feeling Music of the Big Chill Generation, Volumes 1-47, Spielbergian feel-good kitsch cinema.  It was as if the US collectively engaged in a mass delusion that it was the prosperous 1950s again, except without the sociological, cultural, technological, or economic forces that produced the original 1950s. In the US, we went so far as to elect a mummified 1950s TV Dad for president not once but twice.  

So everything that happened in jazz at that time with the young lions was in lock-step with everything else that was going on culturally. It was a dreadful decade.

And as much as I personally avoid the young lions, they were actually right in a perverse way.  Jazz has become a legacy genre, like it or not, and the only broad cultural impact that jazz has had over the past 40 years or so has occurred via sampling in hip hop and electronica.  

Artists have life spans, and so do art forms.  C'est la vie.

[Rabshakeh]

I don’t know - Is that right? I’ve always thought that mainstream jazz’s right turn into acoustic academic fustiness was a bit of an outlier, in the age of new wave, hip hop, dance hall, etc.