Aging Avant-Garde

[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."

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

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.

Art has ALWAYS abided (abode? aboded?) tyranny. Art is expensive. For thousands of years, the only people who could afford it were the ruling classes. And most of them were tyrants. But art served their interests. He who pays the piper.

Great man theory of history (Hot Ptah referred to later on) was the same. Who was the target market for history? Same bunch of people. Not unreasonable, therefore, to write great man histories - only readers were the great men (or their relatives). Most people couldn't read anyway.

Criticism was the same. Who was the target market for criticism? Same bunch of people. What were their views on culture? Easy - "we are cultured" (and the masses/peasants aren't).

Not a lot different now. Ruling classes much bigger. More can afford art. But they still want what they want. And artists and critics still provide it. Same cultural rule pervades criticism. Art of "the underclass" not so regarded; "commercial/showbiz".

JAZZ IS SHOWBIZ. (And if so, why not?)

MG

[JSngry]

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?

ABSOFREAKINLUTELY!!!!!!

but there's nothing wrong with the other kind either. It should be done no matter how funny you or anybody else thinks it looks if you feel the urge

[Jazz Kat]

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

I don't call the music I listen to jazz, I call the scene I'm a part of, jazz. I like to think of jazz as a group of people who are associated with one another who play music. If Chick Corea wasn't a part of the "jazz scene" would they be calling his Return to Forever stuff jazz? No, they'd call it rock. But it's catogorized as jazz, because people associate him as being a jazz musician.

[jon abbey]

wow, nine pages here, and no mention of EAI? impressively blinkered, people. the concept of "avant-garde" jazz in the semantic sense pretty much ended after Miles left the first time, post Agharta/Pangaea. Euro free improv carried the day for a while, but that also ended up in its own set of cul-de-sacs a while back. I suppose it's theoretically possible that something "new" could emerge from the jazz tradition, but we're going on three decades now and I'm not holding my breath.

if there is an "avant-garde" in the jazz lineage in 2006 (and it's a pretty anachronistic phrase in and of itself), it's in the EAI world, which is two generations removed from sixties free jazz, and stems from the collision of the Japanese "onkyo" (another lame word) crew with the existing Euro free improv world around 1998-1999. the ideas of exploration and risk-taking, which were so crucial for so long in the jazz tradition and which have largely been ignored in the last 30 years, still exist here, in a tradition which has jazz as one of its primary roots.

[ep1str0phy]

-and no real discussion of the Euro free improv cats, either. If the purpose of this thread is to trace the narrative of American free jazz (Black American in origin) into the modern day, then there are a number of tangents we could probably move into (EAI being one, perhaps the most creatively viable of several... regardless, I'm wary of any linear narrative conception that positions free jazz on the furthest, earliest end and progresses into Euro free improv, then EAI--the gradients are a little more complex, although I don't suspect that anyone here thinks otherwise).

-J Abbey introduces a legitimate issue, however-- just how narrative is our conception of this music? We may be running in circles about the free jazz mill where the spirit of the music has passed elsewhere (creatively, if not socially... there's a stark imbalance in the ethnic demographics of Af-Am on the one hand and EAI on the other, but that's another story). I, for one, am more than enthused about the potentials of EAI, although I'm not sure that it's our sole, saving grace; there are some starving, dying traditions out there.

Edited October 26, 2006 by ep1str0phy

[jon abbey]

Mr. Strauss,

nothing to be ashamed of, you haven't kept up with current music much the last decade or so. Congotronics might pass for cutting edge on ILX or Pitchfork, but not in the real world.

luv,

Jon

P.S. Kan Mikami/Kazuki Tomakawa=totally different tradition. all Japanese people aren't the same, sorry.

[Chuck Nessa]

Like EAI is new.

[jon abbey]

I'm wary of any linear narrative conception that positions free jazz on the furthest, earliest end and progresses into Euro free improv, then EAI--the gradients are a little more complex, although I don't suspect that anyone here thinks otherwise).

yeah, that's obviously a very simplistic version of it, and each artist has their own specific lineage. EAI has become an increasingly worldwide music in recent years, with tiny knots of artists in many different countries, and obviously the Argentinians and the Austrians and the Australians are all going to be approaching things from different perspectives. but I do think there's a lot of truth to the basic lineage as I wrote above.

[jon abbey]

Like EAI is new.

come on, Chuck, you can do better than that. sure, a handful of artists improvised in real time using electronics in the seventies (and even in the sixties) and there's a classical electroacoustic history, but it doesn't take too much listening to figure out the differences. there are forerunners, certainly, AMM first and foremost. but Sachiko M isn't Alvin Lucier, for better or for worse (I'd say for better, but that's just me).

anyway, I'm not really here to argue, just surprised that no one brought it up previously in nine pages, so I did. ep1str0phy's post was a good one.

[jon abbey]

we really do know wuzzup

I'm not talking to "we" here, I'm talking to you, and I highly doubt many other posters here would care to be lumped in with you as part of "we". you've heard a lot of music in your life, you've got the sub-Byron Coley writing style down pat, and you've got enough pent-up anger from never getting a primo gig in the world of music criticism to rival LaMonte Young. but you've shown very few signs you know what's going on now, sorry, and I've read plenty of your posts.

as for a discount, I sent you promos that you requested when I first started, which you turned around and dumped at Kim's pretty damn quickly. there's your discount, all-knowing one. that was seven years ago, though, the music's moved a lot since then. you might consider opening your ears at some point and checking it out, but probably not. it's all on SLSK if you're interested (although 192 MP3s are far from ideal), you know how that works.

Edited October 26, 2006 by jon abbey

[Chuck Nessa]

Say nice things, get more Clem.

[jon abbey]

no real dialogue here, Chuck? it's a shame, Nessa was a pretty great label back in the day and George Lewis was front and center at the festival I put on at Tonic a few weeks back, even dropping some serious cash at the merch table. maybe it's not for you, but do you really not recognize the same spirit you had long ago? I hope you do, we wouldn't be working in the same way if it wasn't for you and others like you.

[jon abbey]

I think you're David Strauss. I'm actually pretty sure about it, from the last time we went through this. at least this time you remember who I am.

Edited October 26, 2006 by jon abbey

[jon abbey]

hahahaha, bingo! this wasn't what I found last time, but this'll do just fine given the current discussion...

ballot for Strauss, D.

Albums

1 Konono No. 1 Congotronics

Crammed Discs

http://www.villagevoice.com/pazzandjop05/ballots.php?cid=739

[Chuck Nessa]

I'm really bummed by your edits.

[Chuck Nessa]

Now you are deleting posts. Grow up.

[jon abbey]

Now you are deleting posts. Grow up.

come on, man, just trying not to clog up the thread any more than necessary. any chance you're going to respond to my post above?

[jon abbey]

many of us have heard plenty of EAI over the years

"us", again with the "us"? what group of people is it that you think you speak for?

[clifford_thornton]

This better fucking not turn into a Bagatellen thread...

[Lazaro Vega]

What's EAI?

At first it sounded like you're talking about Asian improv, then it's electronics -- please clarify for those of not in the know.

[Guy Berger]

This better fucking not turn into a Bagatellen thread...

If this thread was a baguette, I would eat it.

Guy

[Chuck Nessa]

This better fucking not turn into a Bagatellen thread...

If this thread was a baguette, I would eat it.

Guy

You would have digestive problems.