Aging Avant-Garde

[clifford_thornton]

Yeah, FR is just Bagatellen without the vitriol. Good times, though!

[Tom Storer]

Chuck expresses fear that "pockets" of new styles means there is "no direction ahead." Implied here is that there is no common direction. Jim S says "all great music comes out of a heritage of ritual, including dance." Clementine replies that "art cannot abide the tyranny of group ritual."

It seems to me that one big question is that of knowing what group we're talking about--is there even a group? At one time, it could be argued, there was a group you could call "jazz musicians," who were a group because of a solid core of common concerns: the professional practices and the musical techniques, preoccupations and explorations of all were observed, commented on, argued about, shared, changed and developed by all the others, or close enough. In parallel was the group of "jazz fans." At some point, the centrifugal force of movements toward jazz "avant-gardisme", toward opportunistic commercialism, toward electronic experimentation, toward large-scale injections of other world music traditions, and toward a shift away from a strictly American heritage and context, seems to have led jazz to escape the gravity of history that kept it bound up as one thing, however disparate and restless. Now (to stick with this cosmic metaphor) it's as if the first fifty years of jazz history are the sun around which revolve, at distances ranging from very close to very distant, several different planets. Some planets are always in danger of being declared not really planets at all (by astronomers on the other planets, naturally). And when you read some of the debates between Wynton fans and Vision Festival regulars, truly "dialogues of the deaf," you can't help but conclude that yes, these people are from different planets.

But anyway... Is Chuck's yearning for a "direction ahead" not the flip side of the Wyntonian desire to circle the wagons? Don't both assume that it's desirable for "jazz" to be unified enough that we can talk about a direction ahead as opposed to many paths, none of which can claim to be the direction for jazz? Jim points to the importance of ritual, by definition a group activity, but I think his social thinking is probably too developed for me to schematize. Clementine calls ritual a "tyranny" that Art cannot abide. And yet ritual abounds in the arts, even art that loudly proclaims that it is unfettered, because human beings are social animals. How could we do without it?

Personally, I think it's too late to pine for a single direction for jazz, even a principal direction. There are too many of us human beings out here, too much freedom, too much visibility, for alternative directions not to swell. That means that for musicians and listeners alike, the days when one could be a "jazz musician" or "jazz fan" without having to add many qualifications to explain what you meant have ended. Having ambitions, expectations or yearnings on behalf of "jazz" as a whole no longer means anything; "jazz" has become a useless generality. Nowadays we have to be specific.

[Larry Kart]

Clem -- I've been a Skalkottas fan since 1965, when the LP of his Octet, Third String Quartet, and Eight Variations on a Greek Folk Tune came out on EMI (reissued a decade later on Argo). It was the Octet especially that blew me away -- talk about a language sense! I've got most of the BIS discs but for some reason haven't been listening to them the way I should; they're like accumulating Mosaic boxes. There is or was a 1953 Eduard Steuermann concert recording of Skalkottas's Piano Concerto No. 2 on Arkadia that should be compared to whatever hash Geoffrey Madge makes of the piece when he gets around to it on BIS, if he hasn't already.

Allen -- Lots to think about there. Thanks.

[JSngry]

If we want to look backwards to look forwards in a non-necrophilliac kind of way, it seems to me that all great music comes out of a heritage of ritual, including dance. To that end, I'd suggest that the big disconnect of our times is between the "musically intellegent" community & the dance music world. The former is (mostly) too intellectually self-congratulatory to lower itself to the realm of something as common as dance, and the latter has (mostly) been barracaded from musical depth/breadth by a combination of their own myopic/claustrophobic life vision & the self-interests of an industry that needs to discourage true escape in order to keep selling the illusion of it.

This needs to change if humanity is going to remain human. People who hate dancing, especially "creative musicians" are dangerous. And so are people who would rather dance than think. You gotta, absolutely must gotta, do both. In some way.

Jim,

Isn't this the schism that Ellison et al identify as emerging in the mid-1940s with bop? (Pace Mr. Jones/Baraka's assertion--not without validity--that bop could be danced to--but I'm interested to see you putting forth a modern variant of this line of thought.)

Questions of intent & proportion. It's the music that needs to dance, no matter what the intent is. If the music dances, as it most definitely did with bop (& w/the early free players), then all is well. Bodies (and heads - not for nothing is Cecil heavily into dance) will move. Free your mind and your ass will follow, as the man said. It's a good thing indeed - if followed to completion, and in equal parts.

But people whose minds aren't free ain't gonna get the ass (or head) moving. They're going to be stuck playing for an audience of their peers (or more specifically, the limited portion of their peers who are perversely proud of their condition). And here we are.

Now, if you free your ass, will your mind follow? It should, in a righteous world. But this is not a righteous world, is it?

That, however, is no excuse.

[king ubu]

Seems the future of avantgarde lies in americana...

sorry to interrupt for a second: Gallio is not what you'd consider young, but is that a decisive factor? I don't think so, if someone still does his thing and does it with conviction and not apeing anything etc., it's still good, and can be just as "avant" as what younger musicians do.

I know that if the future of the music is in question, age is in the end a factor, but that does not lead me to believe that anyone older than, say 40, is not avantgarde any longer, regardless of what s/he does.

I mean, Jack Wright is pretty old, no? Still a good case in point that the music is not dead at all. Also I assume Daunik Lazro ain't no youngster any longer, but hey...

[JSngry]

re: Dance = no!! art cannot abide the tyranny of group ritual...which is NOT to say i don't diggeth that end of it sometimes but there are other ways, ** ALL ** of which should be encouraged.

Art should not abide tyranny, period. When it does, it becomes mere propaganda, even if it might well have been something else entirely when it was created.

But show me a music (or a culture, or an individual) w/o ritual of some sort, and I'll show you something that ain't hitting on all cylinders. Ritual is the gravity which holds us together (as groups and as individuals). And, yes, sometimes down. But as nice as flying is, at some point you need to land.

Which is not to say that all rituals are healthy, only to say that the fear/disdain of them is irrational, and is little more than the delusional hoping against hope that we can be fully human w/o being fully human.

Sometimes you gotta tear down. But after that gets done, you damn well better be ready to build something back up. Find a way to do that w/o involving ritual (and dance - HOE DOWN!) & you'll have found a world that has yet to exist, except to collapse before it began.

The problem is not ritual in and of itself. And the problem is definitely not dance in and of itself. No no no no NO!!!!

The problem is that the war to inseminate The Wonderful World Tommorow is being fought between Rape & Incest. And there's plenty of ignunt ho's giving it up to both of 'em.

[JSngry]

MUSC 107 - History of African American Music

Crosslistings: AFAM 341 ...

Instructor(s): Braxton,Anthony

D: Times: .M.W... 01:10PM-02:30PM;

Well there you go - you sound like a g*ddam college catalog.

Yours in Regency,

Dean Chancellor of Hyatt

[Tom Storer]

Jim, I hate to be a pill, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "dance" when you say "the music needs to dance"? I know, I know, "if you don't know by now, don't mess with it," but humor me.

[JSngry]

Motion that just can't help itself, and which would be perverse to attempt to make do so.

Best I can do.

[AllenLowe]

Paul Bley has a line, to the effect that jazz critics always think the music has ended, but that there's always a next thing - a big problem is age and obligation, the inability to keep up with new music due to day gigs, kids, mortgage debts, time, etc. A bigger problem is personal frustration, whether on the part of a musician who has never really achieved recognition, a business person who feels that he can no longer keep up with trends, or a writer/critic who feels irrelevant to current audiences - with the added risk, to quote Sartre, of "confusing disillusionment with truth." The reason that, in my piece above, I compared my own dissatisfaction with older critical reponse (1960s and 1970s) is that I find this reassuring - that I'm not just getting old, but that I'm dealing with a condition - bad art - which is timeless. On the other hand, Clem cites fascinating music with which I'm only peripherally familiar, and this is a good reason to be cautious about making blanket statements. I have listened to a lot of new music, some of it purported to be on the cutting edge, even though it ain't (thinking about current folkies, which correspond, stylistically, closer to my current musical inclination than jazzers; also groups like Comets on Fire, which I found to be quite disappointing). Some of this, for me, is listening fatigue - 40 years of constant music, which has distorted my own sense of perspective. I suspect that this is true for a lot of others who post here -

Edited October 24, 2006 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

on the riddim front-- what about highly rhtymic musics such as Indian? we can dance to it, sure, but can George Clinton?

I'm sure he could if he needed to.

But he probably doesn't need to.

Edited October 24, 2006 by JSngry

[RDK]

"Jazz: music to get your ass moving"

As good a definition as I've seen in a while.

And before I forget, Clem - haven't read any of Wurlitzer's novels, but i am of course familiar with some of his film work. Read an unproduced SP of his from a few years back that my notes refer to as "misguided action-adventure." An attempt t go mainstream, it appears, that didn't work.

[Larry Kart]

Motion that just can't help itself, and which would be perverse to attempt to make do so.

Best I can do.

By this standard -- and I'm being serious here, though the words no doubt will fail us -- does dancing in your head count? I do a lot of that I believe, to almost any music that makes sense to me, and do it well (if there's any way or reason to judge something like that). But dancing outside my head has never worked for me very well, both in terms of how I feel when I do it and how other people tell me I look (and they're right).

[Hot Ptah]

There is much food for thought in this thread, and it will take a while to digest all of it.

I see a shift in thinking about the avant garde over the years. I believe that at least up through the mid-1960s, if not later, much jazz writing was in the style of the Great Man Theory of History, popularized by Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century, in which historians focus on a few key individuals in writing the entire history of an era. Thus the entire history of World War II would be reduced to a retelling of the thoughts and actions of Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and a very few other individuals. This approach to writing history has come under fire and is not generally used much today, from what I have read and heard from my professors in college. It has been criticized for overemphasizing the importance of a few people and minimizing the larger societal trends and contributions of large numbers of people.

In jazz it seems to me that the avant garde was often written about in that way--there was a consistent focus on the towering figures like Ornette, Cecil and late Coltrane--hence the many laments about no new giant after Coltrane.

Many of the posters on this thread have gone beyond this way of thinking, and are genuinely interested in where is the avant garde today, wherever it may be, and whether or not it is tied to a few "Great Men".

It strikes me that if we do not focus on the Great Men, there is a certain lack of ability to report on, and find out about, all of the important avant garde musicians of today---or else there is less consensus about who are the musicians making significant contributions. In some sense the internet has created a mind numbing surplus of information--there are so many CDs written about, so much music to hear and catch up on.

Is it that the many avant garde jazz musicians who come at us in waves today are less compelling than the Ornettes on Atlantic and Blue Note, or Roscoe Mitchell's "Sound"--or are there just so many of them that no one has time to take one album and listen, relisten, let the work sink in, discuss and talk about it at length? If there were just a few avant garde works released each year and that process took place with them, would they be considered as "great" as Coltrane's "Meditations"? Or is music just not as good these days?

[Lazaro Vega]

Hot Path,

Those figures, especially Ornette, are cited and discussed because they developed a compelling method of organizing a jazz performance that furthered the sort of instrumental role liberation that began with Jelly Roll improvising his way out of ragtime. They were door openers. Roscoe was one of the first responders, and his method was to broaden the breakthrough. Because they were some of the first ones, and the change was sort great or so different from what went before, and compelling enough to attract other musicians to the open door, they are discussed. Subsequent developments were made possible by them. Gotta go.

[Hot Ptah]

Hot Path,

Those figures, especially Ornette, are cited and discussed because they developed a compelling method of organizing a jazz performance that furthered the sort of instrumental role liberation that began with Jelly Roll improvising his way out of ragtime. They were door openers. Roscoe was one of the first responders, and his method was to broaden the breakthrough. Because they were some of the first ones, and the change was sort great or so different from what went before, and compelling enough to attract other musicians to the open door, they are discussed. Subsequent developments were made possible by them. Gotta go.

Are you saying that they are not discussed as "Great Men" because the "Great Man Theory of History" was being used, but because they were in fact "great" musicians and would have been stressed even if a very egalitarian system of reporting was being used?

[Larry Kart]

Hot Ptah -- I took a good crack at some of these questions in the chapter I wrote for "The Oxford Companion To Jazz" on the avant-garde up to 1967 or so. At 5,000 words, it's too long to post here, and I don't think Oxford would like it if I did that anyhow. Also, that chapter was written six or seven years ago, and I don't think I still believe everything that I thought back then -- not that I've gone back on any of the points I made there, as far as I can tell; I've just had further thoughts based in part on further experiences. One thing I tried hard to do there was stay focused on what I thought the musical issues were in the jazz A-G -- why they arose in the ways that they did and how they worked themselves out -- and leave it to others to plug in the social/political stuff that's often talked about as though it determined everything else. Alluding perhaps to some of the things that are in Chuck's mind, it might well be the case (I now sometimes think) that jazz is a kind of perhapscontradictory (eventually, over the course of time) "language game." That is, its initial habits (I don't want to say "rules," but go that way if you want to) have given rise over time to all sorts of fruitful new habits (and some that some mightr feel aren't so fruitful) -- with all this taking place in the context of jazz's awareness of/reaction to/use of a good many other musics, all this in the name of simple, or not so simple, musical freedom and curiosity, if nothing else, which makes this process difficult if not impossible to control or restrict, should anyone want to do that. But jazz's habits, while fluid and subject to great variation, are also fairly "thingy" in that language game sense I mentioned before (no, don't ask me to define what a language game is -- as Fats Waller said to me at the Onyx Club one night, "If you have to ask...") and while one can quite fruitfully continue to live at or just beyond one or more of the very edges of that game, and get IMO a quite genuine and long-lastingly meaningful A-G rush going from being at or near that edge of the game and its habits, it is from such vantage points that one can sense that jazz's language game may not be "progressively" limitless, either in time or in terms of materials (as, by comparison, the language games of the visual arts or literature certainly seem to be). For instance, there is IMO jazz, great jazz, that doesn't swing by some reasonable definitions of what swing is. But jazz that doesn't allude to, isn't aware of (at least historically) the existence of swing, with all that that phenomenon brings in its wake? I may be wrong, but I don't think so. (For instance -- if one "for instance" is enough -- I would say that Cecil Taylor's music certainly alludes and is aware of what swing is.) Likewise, though this may be a trickier matter because less openly thought about/pored over, jazz's to my mind multiple crucial discoveries about timbre, in particular about how timbre can become rhythm and vice versa. A jazz in which such details of timbre (personality of, personal nature of, stimulating mutability of, etc.) is of little or no matter? Again, I don't think so. There's obviously much more here; and better minds than mine, not to mention minds of actual musicians who can do something about this, will be chewing it over in our lifetimes. But to me all this is at once anxiety provoking and exciting, though I know it's also not impossible that I'll finally be looking at a mess of broken eggs without an omelette or a souffle to be seen, expect those plastic ones they keep in the jazz museum.

[Hot Ptah]

That is very interesting, and thought provoking.

Is the current situation different in a significant sense from 1930s Kansas City, which brought forth Charlie Parker? Is there any reason why one or many original geniuses of the avant garde could not burst forth today? (A different question is, have they done so and we don't agree on who they are, or don't know of them). Is it a lack of "something" in all of those playing avant garde jazz right now, or would a budding Charlie Parker be unable to emerge today because of something in today's world, in the external environment, or in the jazz community, or lack of it.

Does it really just get down to the scarcity of individual genius in any art form, over any period of time, and did jazz have a "lucky streak" where several individual geniuses emerged in a 50 year time span? Could another cluster of them emerge in a few years, or in 25 years, or in 150 years? (Or will it be like certain organized religion, where the wait is over 2000 years and counting?)

Edited October 24, 2006 by Hot Ptah

[Jazz Kat]

I wish people would stop putting a lable on music. It's bad enough we have to deal with what is "Jazz" and what's not and all that. Avant garde, hardbop, free, straight. Who cares. Everyone should just get out there and play what they feel. I know I do.

[Tom Storer]

Yeah, but you're asking us to just listen and then not talk about it ad infinitum. Impossible!

[(BB)]

Is the current situation different in a significant sense from 1930s Kansas City, which brought forth Charlie Parker? Is there any reason why one or many original geniuses of the avant garde could not burst forth today?

"Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening but surely tomorrow"

[(BB)]

That sounds a little more negative than I ment it to.

I do agree with what you are saying, in the sense that I do not believe the creative proces, either individual or collective, moves in a linear fashion.

Bill

[Larry Kart]

That is very interesting, and thought provoking.

Is the current situation different in a significant sense from 1930s Kansas City, which brought forth Charlie Parker? Is there any reason why one or many original geniuses of the avant garde could not burst forth today? (A different question is, have they done so and we don't agree on who they are, or don't know of them). Is it a lack of "something" in all of those playing avant garde jazz right now, or would a budding Charlie Parker be unable to emerge today because of something in today's world, in the external environment, or in the jazz community, or lack of it.

Does it really just get down to the scarcity of individual genius in any art form, over any period of time, and did jazz have a "lucky streak" where several individual geniuses emerged in a 50 year time span? Could another cluster of them emerge in a few years, or in 25 years, or in 150 years? (Or will it be like certain organized religion, where the wait is over 2000 years and counting?)

I think (or at least hope) that it's still possible for original geniuses to burst forth, but if there's anything to the jazz as language game stuff I talked about above, where and when and how one enters that game (i.e. accident of date and place of birth and subsequent social/economic surroundings, etc.), may well have something to do with the extent to which person X's genius will burst forth and how it will be or will not be nurtured, furthered, squelched, etc.

You might want to check out art historian's George Kubler's brief, shrewd book "The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things." Here is a passage from the book's final chapter: "Radical artistic innovations may perhaps not continue to appear with the frequency we have come to expect in the past century. It is possibly true that the potentialities of form and meaning in human society have all been sketched out at one time and place or another, in more or less complete projections..... Some portions of the diagram are more completely known than others, and some places in it are sketchy, or they are known only by deduction.... Were this hypothesis to be verified. it would radically affect our conception of the history of art. Instead of our occupying an expanding universe of forms, which is the contemprary artist's happy but premature assumption, we would be seen to inhabit a finite world of limited possibilities [yet one] still largely unexplored, still open to adventure and discovery.... Should the ratio between discovered postions and undiscovered ones in human affairs greatly favor the former, then the relation of the future to the past would alter radically. Instead of regarding the past as a microscopic annex to a future of astronomical magnitudes, we would have to envisage a future with limited room for changes, and these of types to which the past already yields the key."

Also worth a look in this vein is Borges's great story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," which kind of takes what Kubler is saying (though Borges was writing almost 20 years earlier) and turns it upside-down and inside-out. It's a very funny story, too.

Finally, looking at jazz from a Kubler-ish point of view, I've wondered at times whether the accident (if you want to think of it that way) of jazz's emergence on the stage of human affairs as a belated but arguably full-blown and more or less self-determined, integral art might be thought of as kind of relatively observable gift/example to humanity of what it is that arts are, do, and can be. After all, though my mind starts to melt down when I think about it, can there be any doubt that however you wish to define jazz and however far back and to wherever you want to trace its origins and contributory streams, it wasn't that long ago that there was no such thing, no such art, nor any guarantee that it would ever take shape? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the only other major arts of which that could be said are photography and motion pictures, and both of those had a novel technological basis, while jazz took shape out of nothing but human soul stuff being applied to already existing musical instruments. In that, I like to think, jazz had a more than whiff of the primary to it -- akin to the way and the why of people beginning to draw, paint, and form three-dimensional images for reasons that extended beyond what was practical or basically ritualistic.

[Larry Kart]

Here's that Borges story:

http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Borges...is_Tertius.html

[Larry Kart]

If that Borges story seems like it's not your cup, don't miss the part about the "hronir."