Do you wish jazz sold more?

[wolff]

I blame the narrow mindeness and jealousy of EU countries/people for this.  They can't create a viable/original product on their own.

But otherwise you're ok, right?

I felt like posting such a reaction, too, at first, but then I thought maybe it was worth trying to make a few points...

Seems we poor EU people (oh, wait, I'm not even a EU person!) are greedy pigs that don't do anything but press worthless reissues of public domain discs. You know, CD pressing is the main occupation of 7/8 of the EU's population...

(I know you didn't mean it this way, Wolff, but still you could have chosen your words a bit more carefully.)

ubu

Yes, I flew off the handle a bit. Sorry. Maybe, the PD issue will work out ok, but when I see them taking up shelf space(even in the USA) it bugs me.

[JSngry]

Actually, I'm less in favor of jazz becoming more popular in today's world than I am of today's world figuring out just what the hell jazz is all about.

Get that much done, and then we can talk.

[king ubu]

I blame the narrow mindeness and jealousy of EU countries/people for this.  They can't create a viable/original product on their own.

But otherwise you're ok, right?

I felt like posting such a reaction, too, at first, but then I thought maybe it was worth trying to make a few points...

Seems we poor EU people (oh, wait, I'm not even a EU person!) are greedy pigs that don't do anything but press worthless reissues of public domain discs. You know, CD pressing is the main occupation of 7/8 of the EU's population...

(I know you didn't mean it this way, Wolff, but still you could have chosen your words a bit more carefully.)

ubu

Yes, I flew off the handle a bit. Sorry. Maybe, the PD issue will work out ok, but when I see them taking up shelf space(even in the USA) it bugs me.

No problem, wolff! I can't tell you how much it bothers me... go figure a store with the autumn 2004 RVGs in the "just in"-section, not a single OJC (except maybe a couple of Miles, Trane, Monk and Rollins, NOTHING besides that), but tons of Freshsounds (full prize of 36 CHF, currently around 30 US$, go figure!!!), and Lonehilljazz discs (still impressively prized at 22 to 24 CHF - the prize of a Blue Note disc, here, btw). THAT sucks!

But that has nothing to do with either us Europeans and our greed(s), nor with the actual European jazz scene!

[A Lark Ascending]

BTW, Bev - big article on Soweto Kinch in yesterday's New York Times.

Mike

Good to hear that, Mike.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

FWIW, here it is:

NYT April 10, 2005

To Be Young, Gifted & British - How a London-based group of mostly black musicians is redefining what European jazz can be.

By Ben Ratliff

The United States used to be the big leagues for the mainstream of jazz: it was the land of paradigms. But not so much anymore. In the past decade, information from the entire history of jazz's development has been swirled around the Earth by the Internet and the rise of academic jazz education. A result has been an aesthetic widening of the genre that has penetrated not just the music's fringes but its core language.

One of the new paradigms comes from a circle of mostly black London-based musicians, cohering around the bass player Gary Crosby and the record label Dune. Since the late 1990's, a lot of good music has come from this group, through a smart jazz-reggae band called Jazz Jamaica; the young saxophonist and part-time rapper Soweto Kinch; the tenor saxophonist Denys Baptiste; the New Orleans-born trumpeter and singer Abram Wilson; and Mr. Crosby himself, a bandleader well known as an incubator of talent.

So what do these new players have? The first answer is a British Afro-Caribbean identity. The second is a movement. They have come together around several guiding ideas: swing, blues feeling, the historical relationship of reggae and jazz, and a commitment to improving stereotypes of Afro-Caribbeans and black Britain in general.

The third answer is summed up in a term that's become fairly widespread among these musicians, as well as the English press: black British jazz.

The phrase is jazz-criticism shorthand meaning that this is music derived from an

African-American jazz tradition, with an emphasis on swing. But Mr. Crosby and his

colleagues really do talk in terms of race and class; it's their key to understanding what British jazz has been and can become.

In January, I visited a London studio where the new Jazz Jamaica album, "Motown

Reloaded," was being mixed. (The album features rearrangements of Motown songs for jazz improvisers over reggae rhythms.) Gary Crosby, Soweto Kinch and Abram Wilson were three of the musicians there, and we broke off from the control room to talk.

Mr. Crosby, 50, is the affable spokesman for the group. English-born of Jamaican parents, he is the nephew of the ska guitarist Ernest Ranglin.

About 15 years ago, he sensed that a black jazz scene in Britain wasn't just going to

explode on its own. In the 1980's, he had been a founding member of the saxophonist

Courtney Pine's collective organization and big band, Jazz Warriors, which, he said, "used to provide an outlet for a lot of young black musicians wanting to play the music."

"There wasn't any other environment or framework to develop from just being a musician to playing jazz," Mr. Crosby said. "Practically every black player - or I suppose you could use the term 'urban' player, because there were a lot of working-class white kids who got involved - didn't feel that the academies would suit them."

Jazz Warriors splintered, and from it, in 1991, Mr. Crosby formed Tomorrow's Warriors, another collective that held organized jam sessions. Mr. Crosby used it as a farm team, feeding various members into his own working band, Nu Group, as well as the Jazz Jamaica band. In working with younger, less schooled players, he found himself forcing an emphasis toward swing.

"In the Jazz Warriors, we'd be playing world music," Mr. Crosby said, "and there were all kinds of battles to make the band more commercial. But when I started this session at the Jazz Cafe, every Saturday afternoon, we just created a nice buzz there, know what I mean? It just caught people's imagination: an all-black, British-born group playing bebop."

Granted, this was 1991. But from an American perspective, it sounds upside down. Of

course all-black groups would play bebop - or all-white groups, or mixed. Talent in the United States is abundant, and the shared musical language well mapped out.

But Mr. Crosby's young charges faced greater obstacles. In his story of the emergence of black British jazz, various "politically minded" people stretched the system open so black players could have their chance: an educator who started a jazz course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, an early owner of London's Jazz Cafe who "used to create situations where you'd get young black and white musicians working together," and so forth. Mr. Crosby kept up his weekly sessions, at the Jazz Cafe and then at a new club called the Spice of Life.

Mr. Kinch is 27. The son of Don Kinch, a Barbadian playwright, he graduated from Oxford with a degree in modern history, and practices an alto saxophone style that links bebop with modern players like Greg Osby. And true to the community-building ethos of his colleagues, he has started his own arts organization, Nu Century Arts, based in Birmingham, where he grew up and still lives.

"The vision is very much for the African-Caribbean community in Birmingham, where it's not encouraged amongst our people, really, to go to the theater," Mr. Kinch said.

"Some of the best hip-hop I've listened to, certain forms of community theater in the West Indies - these are part of an African-Caribbean tradition." he said. "At the moment, this urban tag of what people perceive as black is about being garish and loud and instant-gratification. But my parents' generation, my father and myself and some other people, see our people differently."

Back to black British jazz. Most of us don't talk about black American jazz. If we're talking about black-identified jazz, we mean jazz based in blues and swing, which is its mainstream. But now, in the United States, the rise of jazz education argues that jazz is for anyone. Anyway, so many important Latin players have come along in the last decade that talking about the music in black and white terms is dated.

But the fact is that British jazz has mainly been thought of as white jazz. Among the

important exceptions are the saxophonist Joe Harriott, who died in 1973, and Mr. Pine. Mr. Kinch, trained in history, goes a little deeper. One of his recent songs, "Snakehips," is about Ken (Snakehips) Johnson, the Guyanese-British bandleader, who ran the West Indian Orchestra, London's most popular swing band in the 1930's.

"Deep down we're all into swing," Mr. Crosby said. "We're black Europeans, and we're not really part of the Eurocentric jazz music."

Mr. Kinch added: "There's this phrase that's bandied around in the States: European jazz. Everyone talks about it like it's a unified idiom. I don't know if we want to be included in that."

"Forget the word," snapped Mr. Crosby. "The meaning of European jazz, it can only come from us. We're the only community in Europe that, racially, has no restrictions. It can only be us."

===========

Mike

[MartyJazz]

Actually, I'm less in favor of jazz becoming more popular in today's world than I am of today's world figuring out just what the hell jazz is all about.

Get that much done, and then we can talk.

Precisely what I was thinking as I was going through this thread. I'm so tired after 40+ years of listening and collecting of having to be SO mindful of the listening sensibilities of guests in my house whenever I put on music. I feel like screaming sometimes, "Wake up already, get educated, these sounds are so swinging and vibrant and they're 35, 40, 50, 60 (whatever the case may be) years old! How could you be so goddamn ignorant musically and so negatively responsive?"

Excuse the rant. I'll be all right.

[JSngry]

Glad to see this music getting some attention, so I'll not point out the several crania en rectca statements the Ratliff makes, none of which have anything to do with the specific music being highlighted.

[ghost of miles]

Actually, I'm less in favor of jazz becoming more popular in today's world than I am of today's world figuring out just what the hell jazz is all about.

Get that much done, and then we can talk.

I wish there were more people like the people who post on this board... Not only would jazz sell more--the world would be a better place as well!

[ghost of miles]

Did the West Indian Orchestra (mentioned in the Ratliff piece) ever record? Lately I've been getting interested in British big-band history.

[AmirBagachelles]

No question - the music industry, and popular taste's indifference to jazz is a reflection of many forms of depravity. It is a bummer.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Plenty of info on Snakehips Johnson:

http://www.swingtime.co.uk/Reviews/kenjohns/kenhome.html

Maybe this belongs in a separate thread.

Mike

[RDK]

No question - the music industry, and popular taste's indifference to jazz is a reflection of many forms of depravity. It is a bummer.

No disrespect, but this is the sort of elitism that I feel hurts our cause. Rather than think that the vast majority of people out there are "depraved" idiots who don't understand the superiority of jazz music, I prefer to think of jazz as a specialized - even special - niche that only a few seem to really "get" and appreciate. "Popular taste" is exactly what it is - a common ground enjoyed by the masses - not something to be disparaged. And certainly not something to be bummed about.

[David Ayers]

No question - the music industry, and popular taste's indifference to jazz is a reflection of many forms of  depravity.  It is a bummer.

No disrespect, but this is the sort of elitism that I feel hurts our cause. Rather than think that the vast majority of people out there are "depraved" idiots who don't understand the superiority of jazz music, I prefer to think of jazz as a specialized - even special - niche that only a few seem to really "get" and appreciate. "Popular taste" is exactly what it is - a common ground enjoyed by the masses - not something to be disparaged. And certainly not something to be bummed about.

I tend to agree. In fact I'd go further. Does nobody wonder why jazz 'collectors' are seen as social misfits in cardigans, not some kind of intellectual elite? When I played in a band my interest in jazz got me branded a 'muso' and my solos were called 'laddle-daddle' - no-one thought of me as a hero.

I understand why people resist jazz - it IS possible to have other priorities!

[king ubu]

muso!

stop that laddle-daddle NOW, man!

now what you mean!

[chris olivarez]

Actually, I'm less in favor of jazz becoming more popular in today's world than I am of today's world figuring out just what the hell jazz is all about.

Get that much done, and then we can talk.

That works.