Aging Avant-Garde

[Lazaro Vega]

Er, the West Michigan lure tossed in the cement waters has bounced into my boat, I suppose, and reflecting off the surface of the polished mahogany we see that Patrick Brennan's "Sonic Openings Under Pressure" played Mexicans San Frontieres on South Division Avenue in Grand Rapids this Saturday. Thriving? Well, for the people who were there...Grand Rapids has developed a row of new studio apartments on South Division designed for artists -- I'm sorry I can't recall the corporate group that put this together right now...

West Michigan can be a tour stop. It isn't a place where creative music is growing, but a place where it may, if the stars line up, find some nourishment. Just a week or so ago the 10th Annual Edge Fest was held at Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor. Various folks in Grand Rapids try to get bands that are up for Edge Fest to do a run out. It's just that the money sucks right now. I tried to get The Claudia Quintet on the radio here at the beginning of the month but the economics didn't work out for it. Here's hoping Henry Grimes returns at the beginning of December. Would LOVE to have him with Fred Anderson. That would be only on the radio, live from our studios. Don't have time to raise a house or deal with concert economics anymore.

Somethings have happened here, though. I mean Fred Anderson played Detroit in 1966 with Jarman and after than his only returns to Michigan have been to Grand Rapids (1995 with Vandermark and 2001 with Roscoe Mitchell's Quintet featuring Craig Taborn). Living here I take Michigan as a region as opposed to one single community who's going to carry all the water. The majority of activity is around Ann Arbor. There's a guy down in Kalamazoo who regularly puts on Chicagoans and their European allies at The Kraftbrau Brewery. And Mount Pleasent has had it's moments, too, with Mike Johnston, a musician, making a go.

Since the birth of my children it's all about radio concerts for me. For a good 15 years before their arrival the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids allowed me to produce some adventuresome music on nearly a monthly basis during the season. Whether the musicians were old or young didn't matter as much as what they had to say. Roscoe, Fred, Lacy, Bowie, Vinny Golia, Rova, Lisle Ellis, Adam Rudolph, Billy Bang, Pharoah, even Lee Konitz. Thing is if you want to do something in places like this you don't have to stand in line behind anyone -- just go out and make it happen. The trouble now, though, after 9-11, the audience went back down to early 1980's levels. Where once you could work and pull in 150 to even 300 people it went back down to 50 and breaking 100 unless it was just the right venue on just the right weekend and your press was all perfect from 3 months out it just wasn't going to happen anymore. Not in a concert situation. So the fall back position is the 100,000 watt radio station and the 4,000 or so listeners in their vitual concert hall (and the handful of people who listen on the web).

Maybe Mexicans San Frontieres and other artist driven venues will have more success now in these here parts, VanderGrandRapidsMa-ly yours, O'vega.

[AllenLowe]

I'm a little late to this party, and out of my depth in terms of some of the music Larry and Clem are talking about - I have, however, been suffering from listener fatigue for some time; the trick for me is to differentiate between what is my problem and what is the problem for contemporary musicians - but I have been thinking about this a lot and want to be so bold as to post a section of what used to be the liner notes to a CD I have coming out, hopefeully in January - a lot of this did not make the cut for space reasons, but it does reflect my current thoughts, for better or for worse:

"As I listen these days to a lot of contemporary music (thinking, among other things, of Public Radio’s World Café) I am struck by how bad so much of the writing is – lyrically we seem, on the neo-folk-rock/indy rock side, to be stuck (in the way of old 1930s and 1940s social-realist novelists), with a kind of outdated, dusty, realism. I hear in this music a surplus of badly written, false-sounding Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylanisms and other tired folkie phrases, likely artifacts of the rise of a post-literate generation. When musicians who write (and who live, from a literary standpoint, in an a-historic vacuum) only listen to other musicians who write, it tends to make the product sound in-grown and narrow. It reminds me of my theater/drama school days: than (and now) a lot of talented writers had primarily television and melodramatic films as their frame of reference, and their writing – intelligent, fluent, sharp, but shallow – showed this (I see the same general problem in much of today’s independent film). Maybe I am a dinosaur here, but I wish new writers had more of a sense of language and spoken rhythm, and it wouldn’t hurt them to read Ezra Pound and George Buchner. Just as it wouldn’t hurt latter day cineastes to include Bresson and Antonioni in their Tarantino-saturated play lists or as supplements to the graphic novels that line their shelves.

From an instrumental standpoint, a lot of the alt/music players that I hear have neglected to really learn much in the way of new music/creative improvised musical techniques, of extemporaneous playing and the creative use of noise. It’s too easy these days to send massively sustained notes laden with fake digital feedback lapping against the studio walls, to wail in a synthesized electronic way, to mistake modernist or post-modernist gesture, gimmick and mannerism for true style (as in a lot Sonic Youth or all of Beck). Too much of what I hear is really the same old/same old, dressed up with contemporary references. The resulting creative dilemma is not, of course, confined to the pop and rock field, as jazz musicians and other improviser/composers also struggle, with very mixed results, to stay creative. For this side of the music, process has come to dominate in a way that merely reinforces the received clichés of free improvisation, much like 1960s hippies and hipsters, in seeking new ways of being and behaving, ended up by defining the parameters of a new kind of conformism. The result, in the sphere of sonic experimentation, is a generation of great musical theorists (see the magazine The Wire, in particular, and many of the groups featured in the jazz magazine Signal to Noise) who can talk the talk but who are MUCH stronger on sonic theory than practice. They do come up with great titles and philosophical parallels, but the music invariably disappoints. Formalism has indeed run amuck.

It is as though some performers have decided that the idea is sufficient, that execution and artistic rigor are secondary considerations (when considered at all). The result is the persistent failure of performers/creators to differentiate mannerism from style, gimmick from idea. Eric Bentley pointed out long ago, in the realm of theater, that the author of a play was not just a flailing typist seeking pure emotional expression but a thinker, too, an intervening intellectual force. Most significantly, Bentley never tried, in theatrical terms, to isolate intellectual content from the emotional deliverance of the work. So should it be with music: intellect and emotion, like form and content, are aspects of the same consciousness, and any attempt to separate or divide them either degrades the work or leads to artistic and intellectual hollowness (anticipating, as I am, a counter-argument that I am missing the emotional or emotive aspect of some contemporary work). This does not have to be a fundamentally conservative concept, as it applies, in one way or another, to virtually every successful modernist or avant garde movement of the last 100 years.

...I was recently reading Kyle Gann’s very smart collection of critical pieces on contemporary/classical/new music. Though I’m not well versed in most of the music he was covering, I was struck by a fairly regular reiteration, by musicians of that other school (other, that is, than American pop/vernacular/blues/jazz etc), of the idea of the necessity of finding, in musical terms, a truly American voice. I have heard and read this before, as it was debated by the American “classical” avant garde even before World War II. And though I admire a great deal of the music produced by such musicians, I am always somewhat bewildered by the mystification of the concept of an American “sound.” This is, after all, something that “unsophisticated,” semi and illiterate, uneducated, enslaved and indentured Black and White rural Americans began to devise and develop some 300 years ago. Which is not to say that people like Conlon Nancarrow do not have something important to tell us musically, only that, when it comes to Americanism in sound, they live in a musically gated community.

Within that community certain kinds of minimalist, neo-vernacular gestures seem to have arisen as a response to America-in-song, and I appreciate some of them but also find a lot of them to be mired in by-now clichéd, glib concepts of rhythmic repetition. Apparently some composers view such repetition as representing an accurate musical analog to “modern” concepts like the “factory/machine age” (sic), or as replicating vernacular ideas of musical rhythm, sonority, and space. To me, however, this represents not “real” life but a somewhat delusional and out-of-date liberal presumption about working-class music, working-class life and the banality of working-class and plain old American day-to-day work. And it tends, also, to come from people who have not really had to do much of that work (eg, from composer Annie Gosfield’s web site, describing a recording she’s made: “a journey through shifting industrial environments… uses junk percussion, lush sonorities, odd drones, twangy guitars, and driving rhythms to suggest a cacophonous industrial din accompanied by the crashes and bangs of heavy machinery.” Seems she had a residency somewhere in Germany, though I am presuming she meant to connect with working people throughout the world, particular those in Amerika, who, after all, when it comes to matters of taste, have nothing to lose but their chain-link fences. And let’s not forget Laurie Anderson, who tells us that, to get back in touch with America, she went to work for a while at a McDonald’s. Maybe Lou needs to work more).

But than again, there’s also the composer Harry Partch, who, bemoaning the classically layered harmonies and academic-complexities which have descended in Western music from Bach, wrote: “The ancient Greek and Chinese conception – as old as history - that music is poetry, has deteriorated…even when words are used they are merely a vehicle for tones. The voice is just another violin or another cello… with this metamorphosis…the ancient conception…was obscured, left to folk peoples – sailors, soldiers, gypsies…troubadours, Meistersingers, the Japanese Noh and kabuki, the folk music of England and our own southern mountains, the pure Negro spiritual (not ‘symphonized’) - hearers are transported not by mass but subtlety…the true music of the individual.”

Which is a nice, and decidedly non-anti-intellectual, antidote to not only certain kinds of musical elitism but also to their equally false, social-realist, popular front opposites. Partch is thinking of a real and actual people’s music, of the kind that reflects a life lived, not along the jaded lines of “been there, done that,” but rather in the realm of thought, experience, ideas, and imagination. And, as Partch points out, the aesthetic ideal he is proposing has already been realized by hillbillies and bluesmen and others in touch with American thought and speech. In his prophetic, brilliantly prescient view (he wrote the above in 1941) anything and everything are ripe for musical picking (though I will say that even Partch seems to have that peculiar blind spot for the vernacular which seems to be most characteristic of academics; his anti-dance-band pronouncements – he found such things to be commercial corruptions of African and other exotic sources – reflect not only the excessive zeal of the newly converted but also, ironically, an academic-like misunderstanding of the complicated communal and socio-commercial functions of jazz and other forms of vernacular-sourced performance. Likely as a result, his own works, fascinating twists on conventional tonality played on self-made and eccentrically tuned instruments, show an odd lack of awareness that he was, in actuality, trying to reinvent the wheel: the sound of his own tunings are less interesting than the off-kilter tonality of the down home country players from whom he might have more efficiently and directly learned to apply the essence of African and Southern tonalities. If he had spent some real time listening to that rural and local music he might have saved himself a good deal of trouble, as the theoretical basis for a non-tonal – or pre-tonal as Larry Kart calls it - approach to American music had already been well established).

Partch, for all that, was in no way guilty of stylistic dilettantism, an unfortunate contemporary outgrowth of some current musical schools, like new psychedilia/drone/world music/sonics. Though I tend to disagree with Wynton Marsalis on nearly everything, I understand his skepticism about World music and it’s glib absorption by contemporary musicians; such gestures are, in my experience, rarely earned by the quality or depth of music produced. So it is, as well, with much of the new freak-folk-psychedelic movement (which, despite this, has real possibilities, I think) and with some other contemporary musically avant and roots niches. One gets the feeling that few who produce such things have really listened to and absorbed the music of the “old weird America” for which they advocate, to either the black and white hillbillies who recorded so prolifically in the 1920 or to the free jazzers who sprouted so quickly in the 1960s. They seem instead to have picked up the music at second and third hand. In musical terms this does not necessarily matter or even have to matter, though there are often definite and significant musical side-effects. And what is most irritating is the way archaic styles and stylists are cited, in publications like Signal to Noise and The Wire, with so little real understanding, like names dropped in a post-modernist gossip column.

...Reading back through these notes, it occurs to me that my complaints about the contemporary music world differ little from criticism made by past generations of critics about contemporary arts, and sound suspiciously like many of the things that the theater and literary critic Richard Gilman was writing about in the 1960s and 1970s (no coincidence, that). As they say, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, the last time as repeater pencil."

Edited October 24, 2006 by AllenLowe

[paul secor]

Have only had time to skim this thread - hope to do a more thorough reading in time.

Just a couple of quick thoughts:

Reading Cadence over the course of a year, I find recordings that might be considered to fall into the category of "avant garde" by artists who range from young to middle aged to old, so it would seem that the musicians are there.

Whether the audience is there is another story. Many of these artists have several CDs out, but I wonder who's listened to them, outside of family, friends, Cadence reviewers, and perhaps a handful of others.

This thread has made me think about my own listening habits. I find myself unwilling to take a chance on unknown artists these days. My listening to and purchasing of new recordings by "avant garde" artists seems to be restricted to artists who are older and who probably can't be considered "avant garde". (Hate that term - which is why I put it in quotes.)

Perhaps what is needed is a new thread recommending younger artists to lead people like myself to them. I find the Funny Rat thread fairly useless for this purpose.

[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