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Here's another question: I was thinking about including some electric Miles, something from, say, Bitches Brew or one of the 1970 live/studio recordings. But what was critical reaction to Miles' electric records when they came out? I mean, when I first became a jazz fiend the accepted CW seemed to be that critics had trashed these records when they were released. But I've always been suspicious of that theory. I suppose perusing some dusty old Downbeats at the library would provide a clue, but I wanted to pose the question to some of the folks here who were actually around when those records came out.

I don't know about America, but in Britain, The Magnificent Goldberg was the only one who was slagging off "In a silent way" - mainly because everyone else was fawning over it.

MG

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Posted (edited)

I agree with Jim about "Black Byrd". Real controversy there, because the critics in magazines like Blues & Soul thought it was great. It was only "jazz" people who thought it was shit. There's actually an awful lot of Soul Jazz for which that's true. Perhaps "Green is beautiful" was the first Soul Jazz album for which there was a sole good review (by Derek Stewart-Baxter), among a lot of pannings.

One I've heard was controversial, though I've never seen any contemporary writing on it, was Sydney Bechet's "Summertime" on Blue Note. Leonard Feather's notes on "Jazz classics" says that lots of people apparently thought it was radical for a New Orleans jazzman to play a pop song.

MG

Edited by The Magnificent Goldberg
Posted (edited)

So what Wynton recording(s?) would best represent the schism that he has generated?? (And yes, I would count him as the primary architect of that schism -- or at least certainly its most influential proponent.) Perhaps the award winning "Blood on the Fields"?? (Or if not, what else then??)

Have critics been particularly divided (or, rather, bitterly divided much?) about Wynton?? I mean, he's a Flashpoint in our world (meaning the various on-line circles we travel in) - for sure. But has that translated into much published critical writing on what I would term "our behalf"?? (if ya know what I mean ;) ).

I remember a piece on Slate, or maybe Salon, a few years ago -- that really tried to put Wynton's musical output in some sort of perspective -- and one that many of us here would agree with. OK, found it...

Trumpeting Mediocrity - Was Wynton Marsalis ever that good? (Fred Kaplan. April 2004)

Has there been much else??

Edited by Rooster_Ties
Posted

So what Wynton recording(s?) would best represent the schism that he has generated?? (And yes, I would count him as the primary architect of that schism -- or at least certainly its most influential proponent.) Perhaps the award winning "Blood on the Fields"?? (Or if not, what else then??)

Have critics been particularly divided (or, rather, bitterly divided much?) about Wynton?? I mean, he's a Flashpoint in our world (meaning the various on-line circles we travel in) - for sure. But has that translated into much published critical writing on what I would term "our behalf"?? (if ya know what I mean ;) ).

I remember a piece on Slate, or maybe Salon, a few years ago -- that really tried to put Wynton's musical output in some sort of perspective -- and one that many of us here would agree with. OK, found it...

Trumpeting Mediocrity - Was Wynton Marsalis ever that good? (Fred Kaplan. April 2004)

Has there been much else??

Jazz Times March 2000.

Mar2000.jpg

Posted

Re Marsalis, here stitched together is the intro and epilogue to the section "("The Neo-Con Game") of my book that deals with him and related phenomena:

"Most of these pieces [written between 1968 and 1986] revolve around the advent in 1980 of trumpeter/composer Wynton Marsalis and the several sorts of jazz neo-conservatism or revivalism that he and his associates began to propose--first a return to a kind of classicized version of the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1960s, then a series of visits to chosen styles of the jazz past (New Orleans polyphony, thirties and forties Ellington, etc.). Such impulses have surfaced in jazz before, at least as far back as the late-1930s (the so-called New Orleans Revival that centered around Lu Watters and his Yerba Buena Jazz Band), and it should not be forgotten that three years prior to Marsalis’s arrival on the scene, the similarly young and similarly revivalistic tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton made his first recording. What was different about what might be called the Wyntonian Era, though, is that never before had a return to selected aspects of the jazz past been presented--and, to a remarkable degree, accepted--as an event of central aesthetic importance. That it was not such an event is the conclusion these pieces eventually reach, but that it could be regarded as one at all is significant--not quite a sign that jazz was dead or dying (although that was one thought that came to mind at the time) but evidence that the weight of the music’s past, relative to its present and to its possible futures, was something that jazz was grappling with as never before….

"Almost twenty years have passed [since Marsalis' emergence], and it now seems clear that despite the prominence that the engines of cultural politics and publicity have given to Wynton Marsalis, his music (especially his latter-day orchestral work) is a non-issue aesthetically and has been for some time. Such Marsalis pastiches as the oratorio Blood on the Fields (1997), the suite In This House, On This Morning (1993) and the ballets Citi Movement (1991), Jazz (1993) and Jump Start (1995) seem to come from a strange alternate universe --one in which some of the surface gestures of Duke Ellington (Marsalis’s chief model) have been filtered through the toylike sensibility of Raymond Scott.

"Marsalis remains a skilled instrumentalist, but he has never been a strikingly individual soloist. As for his orchestral works, their relative poverty of invention becomes clear when they are placed alongside the likes of George Russell’s Chromatic Universe and Living Time, Oliver Nelson’s Afro-American Sketches, Bill Holman’s Further Adventures, Muhal Richard Abrams’s The Hearinga Suite, Bob Brookmeyer’s Celebration, John Carter’s Roots and Folklore, and, of course, the more successful orchestral works of Ellington himself. A brief comparison between one of the major vocal episodes in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” (sung by Cassandra Wilson), and the opening vocal movement of Ellington’s otherwise instrumental Liberian Suite (1947), “I Like the Sunrise” (sung by Al Hibbler), might be revealing. The works are comparable in theme--the subject of Blood on the Fields is slavery in America, while Liberian Suite was commissioned by the West African republic of Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in 1847--and both “Will the Sun Come Out?” (which lasts nine minutes) and “I Like the Sunrise” (half as long) are meditative semi-laments in which hope, pain, frustration, and doubt are meant to joust with each other. The melody of “I Like the Sunrise” has an equivocal, sinuous grace (climbing in pitch toward a point of harmonic release it cannot reach, it expressively stalls out on the words “raised up high, far out of sight”), while the key turn in the lyric--“I like the sunrise…it brings new hope, they say” is commented upon and deepened by a tapestry of orchestral and solo voices (particularly those of baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton). By contrast, the three verses of “Will the Sun Come Out?” go almost nowhere in twice the span of time. The melody itself, despite Wilson’s attempts to shape it, is hardly a melody at all but a lumpy recitative that sounds as though it had been assembled bar by bar, while the ensemble’s instrumental interventions and the solos of pianist Eric Reed merely distend things further. It could be argued that within the overall dramatic scheme of Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” is meant to be an episode of near-paralysis, and that the music ought to mirror this. But listen to “Will the Sun Come Out?” and ask yourself how often you have heard nine minutes of music pass this uneventfully.

"Why, then, the Marsalis phenomenon, such as it has been and perhaps still is? One struggles to think of another figure in the history of jazz who was a significant cultural presence but not a significant musical one. Dave Brubeck? Perhaps, but there is no counterpart in Marsalis’s music to the lyrical grace of Paul Desmond or to those moments when Brubeck himself was genuinely inspired. Paul Whiteman? Yes, in terms of the ability to marshal media attention, but if we credit Whiteman with all the music that was produced under his aegis, the comparison probably would be in his favor. Think again of Whiteman and Marsalis, though, not in terms of the kinds of music they made but of the cultural roles they filled. In both the 1920s and the 1980s (when Marsalis arose) the popularity and respectability of jazz were felt to be key issues--the difference being that in the twenties some part of the culture found it necessary and/or titillating to link a popular but not yet “respectable” music to the conventions of the concert hall, while in the eighties jazz had come to be regarded as a music of fading popular appeal that needed the imprimatur of respectability in order to survive--and to be subsidized, like the opera, the symphony orchestra, and the ballet. Thus the tuxedoed Whiteman, wielding his baton like Toscanini; thus Marsalis the articulate whiz kid, equally at home with Miles Davis and Haydn and foe of rap and hip-hop. But while the byplay between notions of what is lively and what is respectable may be an unavoidable part of the cultural landscape, a music that springs from such premises, as Marsalis’s so often seems to do, eventually stands revealed as a form of packaged status whose relationship to the actual making of music always was incidental."

Posted

How about Wynton?? :ph34r:

Wynton is definitely in the running.

I remember Wynton as being pretty universally praised when he first appeared. It's actually the defection of Branford to Sting's band in the mid-80s that seemed to have been the critical flashpoint (his response to that). I think that was important as a public statement of where Wynton stood. With everything with Wynton it's as much his mouth as his playing that gets people riled up. So, it's not really his recordings that are the flashpoint...

Which probably says something.....

Simon Weil

Posted

How about Wynton?? :ph34r:

Wynton is definitely in the running.

I remember Wynton as being pretty universally praised when he first appeared. It's actually the defection of Branford to Sting's band in the mid-80s that seemed to have been the critical flashpoint (his response to that). I think that was important as a public statement of where Wynton stood. With everything with Wynton it's as much his mouth as his playing that gets people riled up. So, it's not really his recordings that are the flashpoint...

Which probably says something.....

Simon Weil

I agree, um..., retroactively.

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