Twenty First Century Jazz

[marcello]

Ghost,

Thanks for the article on Dianne Reeves. She's the real thing and manages to walk that line between popularity and individual artistry very well.

One of the problems for today's singers is the lack of good, new material and I hope she can explore what is out there for her to discover and make it her own.

Her band, with my buddy Reuben Rogers on bass, is very fine indeed. Reuben, who is always very busy with not only Reeves, but also with Aaron Goldberg, Charles Lloyd, Joshua Redman, Taylor Eigsti, Joe Locke and others.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I've got the odd guest appearance Dianne has made but that post, Ghost, makes me want to get more into her. Thanks.

MG

[montg]

what Gilman is arguing is not that art doesn't apply to life or relate to life or come from life - he's just talking about it coming from a much deeper part of the artist's consciousness, I think - a place that doesn't tell you what you already know or answer the same old questions, but asks new questions, and puts you in a space you never before inhabited - that ain't fiction either, but a deeper kind of reality -

it's like the difference between a crappy popular novelist and Proust - or between Neil Simon and Samuel Beckett. The pop novelist and Simon both think they are portraying life as it is; in actuality they are giving us life through a fog of cliches and received ideas, all of which touch on little that makes us as we are; whereas Proust and Beckett tap into parts of our consciousness that we may not, until we read them, even really know exist.

Think of Bird - he produces this music which is so new and so shocking at first - and yet so real and logical; it is as though it was there all along, but we did not know or see it until he showed it to us -

same thing with Ornette and Albert Ayler - and Eisenstein - and Beethoven - we could keep going here -

Man, that is so well-said

IMO, contemporary jazz is not about electronics or hip-hop or whatever, it's about communication.

[JSngry]

IMO, contemporary jazz is not about electronics or hip-hop or whatever, it's about communication.

Communicating what? To whom? How? For what reason? To what expected/desired end?

On the one hand, that's one of those statements that is so obvious as to not question, but otoh, it's also somewhat of a copout, akin to saying that cooking isn't about blending/contrasting ingredients, flavors, textures, etc., it's about getting food on the plate.

[montg]

IMO, contemporary jazz is not about electronics or hip-hop or whatever, it's about communication.

Communicating what? To whom? How? For what reason? To what expected/desired end?

On the one hand, that's one of those statements that is so obvious as to not question, but otoh, it's also somewhat of a copout, akin to saying that cooking isn't about blending/contrasting ingredients, flavors, textures, etc., it's about getting food on the plate.

I meant 'communicating' a much deeper part of the artist's consciousness, I think - a place that doesn't tell you what you already know or answer the same old questions, but asks new questions, and puts you in a space you never before inhabited - that ain't fiction either, but a deeper kind of reality -

My feeling is that the grammar of jazz has the depth and elasticity to sustain creativity for the next 100 years and beyond. The problem with a lot of 21st centruy jazz, as I see it, is that it is being played by musicologists rather than poets.

[JSngry]

The problem with a lot of 21st centruy jazz, as I see it, is that it is being played by musicologists rather than poets.

No disagreement there. None at all.

[Nate Dorward]

Hey, room for all types--some folks are great musicologists but lousy poets. Just as long as there's some passion in the musicology.....

[Hot Ptah]

All I mean is that I'm not interested in 21st Century Jazz nearly as much as I am about 21st Century Music. There will definitely be music called "jazz" in the 21st century. Whether or not it it continues to represent the creative, insistent-on-freedom spirit of the jazz I've come to know and love or something else (like I've been sensing it doing in alarmingly increasing measure for a few decades now) entirly is out of my control. If the "bad guys" win, then "jazz" will have become something in which I really don't have an interest. I'd hate for that to happen, which is kinda why I've been here howling at the moon and the washing machine.

But if that spirit gets ran out of "jazz", my concern is that it continues to live somewhere, and of that there is no guarantee. "Dark Ages" can and do happen. If ideologies and perspectives get so hardened acros the board that music becomes a group of different and rigidly defined "styles" from which one dare not deviate for fear of being banished from the landscape by the forces of fear and/or ignorance and/or meglomania, then it will happen in music. Personally, I think it already is beginng to happen.

I know (or think I know) what you're saying here, but let's not forget (per FWIW the argument/account I strung together in the introductory chapter of my book) that fairly early on jazz did develop a collective sense of "self" -- that is, "an identity of which it was conscious and that shaped its sense of what it could and should do next" -- and that this sense of identity, while neither unthreatened nor perhap an unmixed blessing, did for the most part have a very stimulating effect on the music. Lord knows I don't have anything Marsalis-ian mind here -- some status-mongering, "Jazz is America's classical music, so where's my damn subsidy/concert hall" kind of thing -- but that sense of jazz's identity, however loose-woven it might have been at times, was not just some cockamamie "construct," let alone an ideology, but the recognition of a spontaneously arising social-aesthetic fact that was quite evident to a whole lot of people. That identity may or may not have crumbled or be crumbling, but while there's certainly nothing wrong in liking any music that pleases you, I wouldn't be so quick to sing the praises of sheer porousness -- as though the presence of stupid, or self-serving, or self-righteousness stylistic rule-makers meant in turn that in no music of definite strength and integrity could that strength and integrity be to some significant degree the result of a semi-familial, self-reflective recognition of the kind of thing it is. There's both life and logic in that, I think.

While jazz's collective sense of self was at its strongest (probably 1920s to 1959, as I view it-others may differ) the "mainstream" jazz artists incorporated music from Broadway shows and other pop culture compositions, the Afro-Cuban sounds, and other experiments, without losing the identity of the music.

Why couldn't that happen now? I think that in the future, jazz can retain its "identity of which it is conscious and which shapes its sense of what it could and should do next" while being open to other music--but without abandoning the "semi-familial, self-reflective recognition of the kind of thing it is." I just don't see the situation as being as apocalyptic as others on this thread. I don't see the jazz scene of today as being quite as tired and dull as others apparently do.

I do think that there are many jazz artists performing and recording who set the bar too low for themselves. Perhaps because of the influence of academic training, they seem to think that rote renditions of standards, played with a lilting bounce, is good enough. There is not enough emphasis on laying one's heart and soul and guts out on the table, of going deep for personal expression. To me, that will improve jazz more than any openness to other musical styles.

[JSngry]

I do think that there are many jazz artists performing and recording who set the bar too low for themselves...There is not enough emphasis on laying one's heart and soul and guts out on the table, of going deep for personal expression.

In an uncomfortably high number of cases, the assumption that there is a "deep" to go to is one that I'm having a harder and harder time making. The bar may be set as high as it can stand being set.

Of course, that's the beautiful thing about living in a cave - known quantities set the standard, become the standard, and life's a breeze.

[JSngry]

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...st&p=596305

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...st&p=596305

Indeed!

MG

[Simon Weil]

I do think that there are many jazz artists performing and recording who set the bar too low for themselves...There is not enough emphasis on laying one's heart and soul and guts out on the table, of going deep for personal expression.

In an uncomfortably high number of cases, the assumption that there is a "deep" to go to is one that I'm having a harder and harder time making. The bar may be set as high as it can stand being set.

Of course, that's the beautiful thing about living in a cave - known quantities set the standard, become the standard, and life's a breeze.

I think everyone has a "deep" - in the sense of all sorts of repressed emotions and drives and God knows what. The thing that really bugs me about the "aesthetic" view of jazz is it seems to be a way of sidelining these emotions and drives in the quest for a beauty of the form. I think that's part of the Western ideal, to distrust emotions. But it leads to an awfully selfless - in the sense of you can't see any self in there, because the guy's not emoting - form of Jazz. This is the Marsalis form, which conceives of jazz as something in which emotion is induced in the audience rather than anything you articulate in and from your self.

And, and, AND...? I do my standard thing which is compare Marsalis to Ayler, who is all about emotionality. See, these are two poles of the human spectrum...and they're the two poles of Jazz. We have swung much too much towards the Marsalis pole, now we need to go back the other way.

That is we need to relegitimize going "deep".

Simon Weil