Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore

[Face of the Bass]

I thought Noj's comments about culture being irrelevant to music were the most interesting in this entire thread. I think I disagree with the assertion but it raised many questions for me. Increasingly I have searched for music that is more stridently political in nature, but the political that I have in mind is basically inherent in any form of artistic expression.

Anyway, when Noj made the remark about culture's irrelevancy to music itself, I thought about, say, the tradition of Mbira playing among the Shona peoples of Zimbabwe, and all the spiritual significance of the Mbira in precolonial times particularly. In fact, I think that in some ways the idea of appreciating any kind of art for its own sake is a sort of Western construction, maybe a product of the Enlightenment, that has sought to create clear and distinct boundaries between the secular and the sacred, and that has tried to elevate Reason to the highest of virtues. This is one of the things about many precolonial African musical traditions that I've always found intriguing...that such neat divisions are not even possible in cosmological systems that do not make clear distinctions between church and state, or between work and entertainment.

I guess this is a way of saying that I think I am the exact opposite of Noj. When I listen to a piece of music, I want to know the soil from which it sprung. I find all the intersections between class, race, gender, generation, etc. that one finds in any form of cultural expression infinitely rewarding. But maybe that's just me.

[Leeway]

glib but untrue.

Definitely not cool.

[AllenLowe]

uncool is the new cool -

trust me.

[Leeway]

uncool is the new cool -

trust me.

Not a chance.

[thedwork]

I'm thinking this thread is evidence item #1 why jazz isn't cool anymore.

i wouldn't necessarily say that. but i would say this thread has now become officially boring and is already well into the category of jazz music forum threads that devolve into meaningless pontificating on what usually turn out to be one (or all) of the following: is marketing/money necessary to make art? is jazz black music? can white people play jazz? does wynton suck ass (and why/how)? how do you define swing (and could bill evans swing)? can/should you be able to separate an artist's personal behavior from his music/art? can pop music elements be used in jazz forms/musics? and if so, is jazz a higher artform than blah blah blah... all of these "topics of discussion" are sooooooooooooooooo played. for me personally, they're boring before they've begun. been there, done that. it's like going back to high school.

vomit.

Payton seems to be quite an adolescent asshole. maybe he'll grow up soon. he's also an excellent trumpet player. afaic, that's all there is here.

Edited December 14, 2011 by thedwork

[Noj]

I thought Noj's comments about culture being irrelevant to music were the most interesting in this entire thread. I think I disagree with the assertion but it raised many questions for me. Increasingly I have searched for music that is more stridently political in nature, but the political that I have in mind is basically inherent in any form of artistic expression.

Anyway, when Noj made the remark about culture's irrelevancy to music itself, I thought about, say, the tradition of Mbira playing among the Shona peoples of Zimbabwe, and all the spiritual significance of the Mbira in precolonial times particularly. In fact, I think that in some ways the idea of appreciating any kind of art for its own sake is a sort of Western construction, maybe a product of the Enlightenment, that has sought to create clear and distinct boundaries between the secular and the sacred, and that has tried to elevate Reason to the highest of virtues. This is one of the things about many precolonial African musical traditions that I've always found intriguing...that such neat divisions are not even possible in cosmological systems that do not make clear distinctions between church and state, or between work and entertainment.

I guess this is a way of saying that I think I am the exact opposite of Noj. When I listen to a piece of music, I want to know the soil from which it sprung. I find all the intersections between class, race, gender, generation, etc. that one finds in any form of cultural expression infinitely rewarding. But maybe that's just me.

It's not that I think culture is entirely irrelevant, but that I consider it distant secondary information to the sonic criteria I have for musical enjoyment. Culture is certainly relevant biographical information, but when do I reference that while listening?

For example, I'm listening to John Coltrane "Out Of This World" from Coltrane (Impulse) right now. I love what the percussion and piano are doing right from the jump, then I hear Coltrane come in and as usual I love his sound. Coltrane's sound takes me back to some of the first jazz I ever loved (a few of the first jazz albums I bought were Giant Steps and Africa/Brass). McCoy Tyner's solo kicks in, and I'm amazed by both his hands. I can keep alternating back and forth between each soloist and Elvin Jones' tireless drumming...

Where/when does the culture figure in? I know the cultural origins and the history (and enjoy learning about it), but ultimately when I'm listening the music stands on its own and is speaking to me in musical terms.

For another food analogy, when I eat sushi, I'm psyched on the texture and taste of the raw piece of yellowtail tuna on my tongue. It's wonderful to experience, and I take my time chewing it in order to appreciate it. During that enjoyment, it's not likely that I would be sure to filter that enjoyment through some pronounced mental appreciation of Japanese culture in my inner monologue. I might, but it isn't necessary. It's more likely that I'd just enjoying eating while watching sports on the TVs above the bar.

[Shawn]

Where/when does the culture figure in? I know the cultural origins and the history (and enjoy learning about it), but ultimately when I'm listening the music stands on its own and is speaking to me in musical terms.

If music truly is a universal language, then the culture it sprang from really shouldn't matter anyway.

I just listen.

[Big Beat Steve]

... on what usually turn out to be one (or all) of the following: is marketing/money necessary to make art? is jazz black music? can white people play jazz? does wynton suck ass (and why/how)? how do you define swing (and could bill evans swing)? can/should you be able to separate an artist's personal behavior from his music/art? can pop music elements be used in jazz forms/musics? and if so, is jazz a higher artform than blah blah blah... all of these "topics of discussion" are sooooooooooooooooo played.

You forgot one:

Can "Smooth jazz" actually be considered jazz? :lol:

(No, it can't, but let's not digress ...)

Edited December 14, 2011 by Big Beat Steve

[cih]

Forgive me if I put this clumsily - but there's a point here somewhere that I'm trying to make. There’s been a fair amount of comment - NY Times, Roots etc - on the increasing numbers of black atheists... clearly these individuals have felt outsiders within their own race. The words of Payton, and Wynton and others are HEAVILY steeped in religiosity (not that I’m against explicitly religious music - I listen regularly to black preachers with amazement and wonder) and there is an undertone there that implies that ‘spirituality’, or ‘heart’ or whatever in the music is a black thing, and intellectualism or cold ‘atheism’ is a white thing..

Jamila Bey: “Our culture dictates -- mandates, even -- that we be spiritual. Accepting that definition of who we are forces us to defend our blackness should we have doubts about spirituality. [Accepting that definition means accepting that to be] authentically black is to be religious -- wrongly -- and that to doubt God is a white thing -- wrongly.”

The line that follows from Payton etc is to stop digging - we already know what this thing is - somewhere he says something like ‘you can’t learn blues, it’s given to you’. Where is the question mark? Where's the exploration? From that perspective, the act of standing up and walking away from Wynton, both physically and intellectually, resolutely puts you outside 'his' jazz, but I don’t think it’s dependent on your race?

Edited December 14, 2011 by cih

[AllenLowe]

your last paragraph is right on the money - those guys, as I said earlier, are now too "inside" to do edgy work anymore - their blues is middle class, a bourgeouisie (spelling?) exhibition. The Dwork is, as usual, wrong. These are lifelong issues always worthy of discussion,argument, and re-argument. And Noj's point is also exactly correct; as my old friend Richard Gilman pointed out, art creates its own counter history. It has its own life and reason for being, OUTSIDE of the social.

as for Leeway desperately hoping that there's "not a chance" that uncool is the new cool, the exception proves the rule here, negative equals positive. His very act of denial proves I'm right; only if he agreed with me would I be wrong.

Edited December 14, 2011 by AllenLowe

[Tom Storer]

Warning: long post.

I persist in saying that all of our reactions to anything are conditioned by "culture", in the same way that fish are wet. Recognizing, interpreting, analyzing the cultural thing is important, as is deciding what importance we want to ascribe to it.

What Payton and many others seem to fail to recognize, however, is that:

1) Culture is learned, not genetic. It spreads from generation to generation, from group to group, from place to place. This doesn't mean that anyone can lose everything they have learned as part of one group and completely assimilate everything there is in the cultural universe of another group; to some extent we are all outsiders and insiders in that we can hardly avoid belonging to overlapping groups. We can be attracted to another culture and go very far into it without ever being a total insider.

A personal example: I've lived and worked in France for over thirty years, speak fluent French, have more French friends than non-French friends, and am more conversant now with everyday French customs and assumptions than with American ones, yet my American accent is still detectable and there is still a mass of cultural information that French people have that I lack or only know about rather than know, because I didn't spend my childhood here and my parents and grandparents weren't French. I'm Frenchified enough to be taken seriously when I argue about French politics or cooking, or correct the written French of my coworkers, but I will never be as French as the French. But that is not necessarily a problem. Insiders, if they are secure and wise, appreciate outsiders for having a fresh and different outlook, and for allowing them to learn about other ideas, attitudes and approaches.

That's two overlapping national cultures. Within a national culture, there are many other groups, of which origins are the most visible. Were your ancestors from America, from Africa, from Europe, from Asia, from South America? In all those groups there are those who have inherited ancestral cultural traditions more strongly or more weakly. Modernization weakens ancestral traditions: more and more, in a given country, we all share a consumer culture, the same kinds of media, the same governmental institutions, we play the same sports, we eat the same food (because we all eat everyone else's food as well as "our" food). But many of us hold on to the things we inherit from our families and neighborhoods as uniquely "ours" and resent it when we feel that special bond is ignored or denied by others who want it to be theirs too. Not because they're dirty thieves, but because they have fallen in love with those traditions, internalized them, and have let themselves be defined by them. These "outsiders" don't feel like outsiders, they feel natural and fulfilled when they participate in these traditions. So naturally they resent it when they're snubbed and made to feel like outsiders. Culture is not a thing to be owned by any one group, it is a web of learning, action, response and transmission. A Frenchman could say to me, when I miss a cultural reference or misinterpret a gesture, that I'm too American to ever really get the French thang; he would be right, on one level. On another level, I have chosen France and made my life here. My son is French. I'll never be as French as the French, but it's my culture too. It's one of my cultures. Belonging does not have to be total or unadulterated to be real. Same thing with jazz and all the non-African-Americans who join it. Purity is a chimera.

2) Culture evolves constantly. The African-American culture that was behind the first jazz is emphatically not the same culture it is today, despite many continuities. Nor is the music or any other cultural output the same. How could it be? The very success of jazz, the brilliance of its founding innovations and the irresistible appeal of its greatest practitioners, has caused it to be swamped by "outsiders" who adopt its characteristics and whose own stuff is also taken into the mix. Each generation creates new things, looking all over for inspiration, as original practices get further away in time. Even swinging, mainstream jazz players don't swing the way their grandparents' generation did. They swing differently. It's inevitable. Everything at the origin eventually disappears, replaced by other things, even if the origins leave their imprint. Each generation does it their way, and by now the current generation is worldwide. It's worth mentioning that it's been said in this thread that jazz is not black or white, it's American. But it's not even that anymore. Some American black musicians from New Orleans seem almost to feel that New Orleans jazz is the core, and everybody outside New Orleans is an outsider. Others say the core is black, non-blacks are outsiders; some American whites say the core is American, implying that others, non-American, are outsiders; but jazz musicians making their own mix in Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, would say that they are not outsiders, either. The important thing is that if you love it as a listener, it's yours to listen to. If you love it as a musician, it's yours to make.

Edited December 14, 2011 by Tom Storer

[Big Beat Steve]

IMO you nailed it pretty well, Tom.

In every respect.

Had to laugh, though, when I read this as an example of your interactions with a culture that not "inherently" yours:

I'm Frenchified enough to be taken seriously when I argue about French politics or cooking, or correct the written French of my coworkers ...

No doubt you've got an awful lot of work on your hands there, right?

(Details like thsi sound familiar as I'am in a somewhat comparable situation as - though I do not live in France - I've had lots of constant personal contacts with France for 25 years now and in some areas of my private interests my contacts and friendships are much more numerous with the French than with Germans or persons from other nations so I can sympathize with a lot of what you state in your example)

[Face of the Bass]

I'm thinking this thread is evidence item #1 why jazz isn't cool anymore.

i wouldn't necessarily say that. but i would say this thread has now become officially boring and is already well into the category of jazz music forum threads that devolve into meaningless pontificating on what usually turn out to be one (or all) of the following: is marketing/money necessary to make art? is jazz black music? can white people play jazz? does wynton suck ass (and why/how)? how do you define swing (and could bill evans swing)? can/should you be able to separate an artist's personal behavior from his music/art? can pop music elements be used in jazz forms/musics? and if so, is jazz a higher artform than blah blah blah... all of these "topics of discussion" are sooooooooooooooooo played. for me personally, they're boring before they've begun. been there, done that. it's like going back to high school.

vomit.

Payton seems to be quite an adolescent asshole. maybe he'll grow up soon. he's also an excellent trumpet player. afaic, that's all there is here.

Yes, it's much better to restrict discussion topics to the numbering system deployed by Mosaic for their limited edition box sets. That's always more enlightening and entertaining. Seriously, instead of divebombing into a thread and crapping all over the discussion, why don't people who are not interested in what is being discussed simply stop reading it?

[AllenLowe]

thank you for saying that.

[Face of the Bass]

I thought Noj's comments about culture being irrelevant to music were the most interesting in this entire thread. I think I disagree with the assertion but it raised many questions for me. Increasingly I have searched for music that is more stridently political in nature, but the political that I have in mind is basically inherent in any form of artistic expression.

Anyway, when Noj made the remark about culture's irrelevancy to music itself, I thought about, say, the tradition of Mbira playing among the Shona peoples of Zimbabwe, and all the spiritual significance of the Mbira in precolonial times particularly. In fact, I think that in some ways the idea of appreciating any kind of art for its own sake is a sort of Western construction, maybe a product of the Enlightenment, that has sought to create clear and distinct boundaries between the secular and the sacred, and that has tried to elevate Reason to the highest of virtues. This is one of the things about many precolonial African musical traditions that I've always found intriguing...that such neat divisions are not even possible in cosmological systems that do not make clear distinctions between church and state, or between work and entertainment.

I guess this is a way of saying that I think I am the exact opposite of Noj. When I listen to a piece of music, I want to know the soil from which it sprung. I find all the intersections between class, race, gender, generation, etc. that one finds in any form of cultural expression infinitely rewarding. But maybe that's just me.

It's not that I think culture is entirely irrelevant, but that I consider it distant secondary information to the sonic criteria I have for musical enjoyment. Culture is certainly relevant biographical information, but when do I reference that while listening?

For example, I'm listening to John Coltrane "Out Of This World" from Coltrane (Impulse) right now. I love what the percussion and piano are doing right from the jump, then I hear Coltrane come in and as usual I love his sound. Coltrane's sound takes me back to some of the first jazz I ever loved (a few of the first jazz albums I bought were Giant Steps and Africa/Brass). McCoy Tyner's solo kicks in, and I'm amazed by both his hands. I can keep alternating back and forth between each soloist and Elvin Jones' tireless drumming...

Where/when does the culture figure in? I know the cultural origins and the history (and enjoy learning about it), but ultimately when I'm listening the music stands on its own and is speaking to me in musical terms.

For another food analogy, when I eat sushi, I'm psyched on the texture and taste of the raw piece of yellowtail tuna on my tongue. It's wonderful to experience, and I take my time chewing it in order to appreciate it. During that enjoyment, it's not likely that I would be sure to filter that enjoyment through some pronounced mental appreciation of Japanese culture in my inner monologue. I might, but it isn't necessary. It's more likely that I'd just enjoying eating while watching sports on the TVs above the bar.

That's fine if that works for you. My point was simply that when I listen to music, I always want to know the background, the history, and to think about the "broader" implications of the music. Maybe it's because I'm a historian and I've just been trained over the years to deconstruct everything. I don't know what else to say other than that for me I tend to appreciate music more when I can grasp the cultural, social, economic, or political perspective from which it is coming. For this reason I suspect that I would really, really suck at blindfold tests, and that's why in fact I have no interest in them as such.

Warning: long post.

I persist in saying that all of our reactions to anything are conditioned by "culture", in the same way that fish are wet. Recognizing, interpreting, analyzing the cultural thing is important, as is deciding what importance we want to ascribe to it.

What Payton and many others seem to fail to recognize, however, is that:

1) Culture is learned, not genetic. It spreads from generation to generation, from group to group, from place to place. This doesn't mean that anyone can lose everything they have learned as part of one group and completely assimilate everything there is in the cultural universe of another group; to some extent we are all outsiders and insiders in that we can hardly avoid belonging to overlapping groups. We can be attracted to another culture and go very far into it without ever being a total insider.

A personal example: I've lived and worked in France for over thirty years, speak fluent French, have more French friends than non-French friends, and am more conversant now with everyday French customs and assumptions than with American ones, yet my American accent is still detectable and there is still a mass of cultural information that French people have that I lack or only know about rather than know, because I didn't spend my childhood here and my parents and grandparents weren't French. I'm Frenchified enough to be taken seriously when I argue about French politics or cooking, or correct the written French of my coworkers, but I will never be as French as the French. But that is not necessarily a problem. Insiders, if they are secure and wise, appreciate outsiders for having a fresh and different outlook, and for allowing them to learn about other ideas, attitudes and approaches.

That's two overlapping national cultures. Within a national culture, there are many other groups, of which origins are the most visible. Were your ancestors from America, from Africa, from Europe, from Asia, from South America? In all those groups there are those who have inherited ancestral cultural traditions more strongly or more weakly. Modernization weakens ancestral traditions: more and more, in a given country, we all share a consumer culture, the same kinds of media, the same governmental institutions, we play the same sports, we eat the same food (because we all eat everyone else's food as well as "our" food). But many of us hold on to the things we inherit from our families and neighborhoods as uniquely "ours" and resent it when we feel that special bond is ignored or denied by others who want it to be theirs too. Not because they're dirty thieves, but because they have fallen in love with those traditions, internalized them, and have let themselves be defined by them. These "outsiders" don't feel like outsiders, they feel natural and fulfilled when they participate in these traditions. So naturally they resent it when they're snubbed and made to feel like outsiders. Culture is not a thing to be owned by any one group, it is a web of learning, action, response and transmission. A Frenchman could say to me, when I miss a cultural reference or misinterpret a gesture, that I'm too American to ever really get the French thang; he would be right, on one level. On another level, I have chosen France and made my life here. My son is French. I'll never be as French as the French, but it's my culture too. It's one of my cultures. Belonging does not have to be total or unadulterated to be real. Same thing with jazz and all the non-African-Americans who join it. Purity is a chimera.

2) Culture evolves constantly. The African-American culture that was behind the first jazz is emphatically not the same culture it is today, despite many continuities. Nor is the music or any other cultural output the same. How could it be? The very success of jazz, the brilliance of its founding innovations and the irresistible appeal of its greatest practitioners, has caused it to be swamped by "outsiders" who adopt its characteristics and whose own stuff is also taken into the mix. Each generation creates new things, looking all over for inspiration, as original practices get further away in time. Even swinging, mainstream jazz players don't swing the way their grandparents' generation did. They swing differently. It's inevitable. Everything at the origin eventually disappears, replaced by other things, even if the origins leave their imprint. Each generation does it their way, and by now the current generation is worldwide. It's worth mentioning that it's been said in this thread that jazz is not black or white, it's American. But it's not even that anymore. Some American black musicians from New Orleans seem almost to feel that New Orleans jazz is the core, and everybody outside New Orleans is an outsider. Others say the core is black, non-blacks are outsiders; some American whites say the core is American, implying that others, non-American, are outsiders; but jazz musicians making their own mix in Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, would say that they are not outsiders, either. The important thing is that if you love it as a listener, it's yours to listen to. If you love it as a musician, it's yours to make.

Great post. Well said, Tom.

[cih]

Cultural influence - often a person steps outside the culture and changes the course, away from self-reflexive expressions when the pathway has become monotonous. Or it is somehow ready for change. For example, the revolution in art that came out of Paris a century ago was not really due to Parisian culture - the ‘primitive’ objects that provided Picasso, Matisse, Vlaminck with an inspiration were not in the cultural galleries but in ethnographic museums and flea markets - mere curiosities. They were later elevated, in Europe, into ‘art’ only after their influence had already revolutionized the culture. Then, fifteen, twenty years later in America, Alain Locke suggested that African American painters adopt African art as their inspiration, thereby connecting themselves with a cultural history in Africa, via a revolution in Europe.

[JSngry]

I'm just trying to visualize if I'll ever be able to experience Coltrane as sushi in a sports bar.

Probably not, but you never know.

[Noj]

I'm just trying to visualize if I'll ever be able to experience Coltrane as sushi in a sports bar.

Probably not, but you never know.

Thanks Tom Storer and Face Of The Bass (that's crawjo, right?) for your insightful posts.

Perhaps it is because I am so immersed in a variety of cultures in Los Angeles that I don't feel as though I belong to any one of them. Or that I don't want to be of any one culture because I enjoy the variety. But ultimately I am white, and of the white American culture, so I'll have to accept its role in my own listening. It's a bit like not realizing you have an accent, because everyone around you has that accent. Or something.

[Face of the Bass]

I'm just trying to visualize if I'll ever be able to experience Coltrane as sushi in a sports bar.

Probably not, but you never know.

Thanks Tom Storer and Face Of The Bass (that's crawjo, right?) for your insightful posts.

Perhaps it is because I am so immersed in a variety of cultures in Los Angeles that I don't feel as though I belong to any one of them. Or that I don't want to be of any one culture because I enjoy the variety. But ultimately I am white, and of the white American culture, so I'll have to accept its role in my own listening. It's a bit like not realizing you have an accent, because everyone around you has that accent. Or something.

Yeah, crawjo. And actually I think I mostly prefer to explore the cultural depths of music because they are not identical to my own. I think I am constantly trying to escape or evade my past upbringing as a white, upper-middle class Catholic of the suburbs, since with experience I have come to realize that it is the white middle class that is consistently reactionary in its politics and values.

[AllenLowe]

I, too, often want to know the socio-cultural context - but, my reasons may be different than, say, an academic's reason - to me this is part of an aesthetic inquiry, because there HAVE been many times that I did not "get" a musician in an aesthetic sense until I knew more about why they did what they did - Bobby Short and Mabel Mercer are two examples.

as for the rest, part of my annoyance has to do with this big blues project I just finished, and which I believe clearly out-distances anything Payton or his gang have done in this realm. And maybe (no, definitely) it helped that I came at it from a distance, as a white suburban Jewish intellectual (former) kid. Because it made me really look at everything, really try to understand things from a technical standpoint, from a musical standpoint, from every standpoint. Freshened things up, perhaps.

my next project, Visions of Uncle Tom, is going to have everything from Jumping Jim Crow to the Old regular Baptists to the screaming of Yoko Ono. Maybe I can get Payton to guest on it. Worth a try.

Edited December 14, 2011 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

You know who was cool? Cleveland Eaton & Morris Jennings. And MF-in Leo Fender-Rhodes.

[Noj]

Yep, that Ramsey Lewis album is cool afaic, bwtfdik?

[thedwork]

I'm thinking this thread is evidence item #1 why jazz isn't cool anymore.

i wouldn't necessarily say that. but i would say this thread has now become officially boring and is already well into the category of jazz music forum threads that devolve into meaningless pontificating on what usually turn out to be one (or all) of the following: is marketing/money necessary to make art? is jazz black music? can white people play jazz? does wynton suck ass (and why/how)? how do you define swing (and could bill evans swing)? can/should you be able to separate an artist's personal behavior from his music/art? can pop music elements be used in jazz forms/musics? and if so, is jazz a higher artform than blah blah blah... all of these "topics of discussion" are sooooooooooooooooo played. for me personally, they're boring before they've begun. been there, done that. it's like going back to high school.

vomit.

Payton seems to be quite an adolescent asshole. maybe he'll grow up soon. he's also an excellent trumpet player. afaic, that's all there is here.

Yes, it's much better to restrict discussion topics to the numbering system deployed by Mosaic for their limited edition box sets. That's always more enlightening and entertaining. Seriously, instead of divebombing into a thread and crapping all over the discussion, why don't people who are not interested in what is being discussed simply stop reading it?

thank you, face of the bass, for pointing out an essential element i had inadvertently left out of my salient analysis of current internet forum trends in post-cold war U.S.A.: in threads like these (see my post above which facebass was kind enough to repost), you can almost always count on folks to chime in and say they think the thread has become a useless repetition of jive 'debates' that have come and gone endlessly in the past which never cast any real illumination on the 'subjects' being pontificated on. and then, like clockwork, you can count on someone to counter by asking said person to leave the thread if they don't like it. this request is as meaningless and unconstructive as the thread itself.

look for my full report in an upcoming issue of Scientific American. big beat steve will be referenced for his 'smooth jazz' contribution...

Edited December 14, 2011 by thedwork

[Face of the Bass]

I'm thinking this thread is evidence item #1 why jazz isn't cool anymore.

i wouldn't necessarily say that. but i would say this thread has now become officially boring and is already well into the category of jazz music forum threads that devolve into meaningless pontificating on what usually turn out to be one (or all) of the following: is marketing/money necessary to make art? is jazz black music? can white people play jazz? does wynton suck ass (and why/how)? how do you define swing (and could bill evans swing)? can/should you be able to separate an artist's personal behavior from his music/art? can pop music elements be used in jazz forms/musics? and if so, is jazz a higher artform than blah blah blah... all of these "topics of discussion" are sooooooooooooooooo played. for me personally, they're boring before they've begun. been there, done that. it's like going back to high school.

vomit.

Payton seems to be quite an adolescent asshole. maybe he'll grow up soon. he's also an excellent trumpet player. afaic, that's all there is here.

Yes, it's much better to restrict discussion topics to the numbering system deployed by Mosaic for their limited edition box sets. That's always more enlightening and entertaining. Seriously, instead of divebombing into a thread and crapping all over the discussion, why don't people who are not interested in what is being discussed simply stop reading it?

thank you, face of the bass, for pointing out an essential element i had inadvertently left out of my salient analysis of current internet forum trends in post-cold war U.S.A.: in threads like these (see my post above which facebass was kind enough to repost), you can almost always count on folks to chime in and say they think the thread has become a useless repetition of jive 'debates' that have come and gone endlessly in the past which never cast any real illumination on the 'subjects' being pontificated on. and then, like clockwork, you can count on someone to counter by asking said person to leave the thread if they don't like it. this request is as meaningless and unconstructive as the thread itself.

look for my full report in an upcoming issue of Scientific American. big beat steve will be referenced for his 'smooth jazz' contribution...

Well, what I found most interesting about your laundry list of boring topics inevitably beaten to death in jazz forums is that none of them described what we have been talking about in this thread. Which makes me wonder what kind of special asshole it takes to come into a thread and complain about how stupid such threads are without having made any actual contribution to the topic at hand, knowing that this will annoy people who are actually getting something out of the thread.

If you come into a thread and loudly tell everyone how dumb and pointless the discussion is, expect to be challenged.

[thedwork]

I'm thinking this thread is evidence item #1 why jazz isn't cool anymore.

i wouldn't necessarily say that. but i would say this thread has now become officially boring and is already well into the category of jazz music forum threads that devolve into meaningless pontificating on what usually turn out to be one (or all) of the following: is marketing/money necessary to make art? is jazz black music? can white people play jazz? does wynton suck ass (and why/how)? how do you define swing (and could bill evans swing)? can/should you be able to separate an artist's personal behavior from his music/art? can pop music elements be used in jazz forms/musics? and if so, is jazz a higher artform than blah blah blah... all of these "topics of discussion" are sooooooooooooooooo played. for me personally, they're boring before they've begun. been there, done that. it's like going back to high school.

vomit.

Payton seems to be quite an adolescent asshole. maybe he'll grow up soon. he's also an excellent trumpet player. afaic, that's all there is here.

Yes, it's much better to restrict discussion topics to the numbering system deployed by Mosaic for their limited edition box sets. That's always more enlightening and entertaining. Seriously, instead of divebombing into a thread and crapping all over the discussion, why don't people who are not interested in what is being discussed simply stop reading it?

thank you, face of the bass, for pointing out an essential element i had inadvertently left out of my salient analysis of current internet forum trends in post-cold war U.S.A.: in threads like these (see my post above which facebass was kind enough to repost), you can almost always count on folks to chime in and say they think the thread has become a useless repetition of jive 'debates' that have come and gone endlessly in the past which never cast any real illumination on the 'subjects' being pontificated on. and then, like clockwork, you can count on someone to counter by asking said person to leave the thread if they don't like it. this request is as meaningless and unconstructive as the thread itself.

look for my full report in an upcoming issue of Scientific American. big beat steve will be referenced for his 'smooth jazz' contribution...

Well, what I found most interesting about your laundry list of boring topics inevitably beaten to death in jazz forums is that none of them described what we have been talking about in this thread. Which makes me wonder what kind of special asshole it takes to come into a thread and complain about how stupid such threads are without having made any actual contribution to the topic at hand, knowing that this will annoy people who are actually getting something out of the thread.

If you come into a thread and loudly tell everyone how dumb and pointless the discussion is, expect to be challenged.

you're funny. i was the first person to comment/post in this thread. way to go man. and look who's the one who feels it necessary to resort to personal attacks/name-calling when he feels "challenged." again - you're funny.

Edited December 14, 2011 by thedwork