Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore

[Teasing the Korean]

He had me right up until the "Postmodern New Orleans Music" part and then I lost interest.

[David Ayers]

Well, so many musicians have said this in some form and reflected it in their practice. I think that the model of jazz as a genre is extremely flawed. I'll write this all up in due time. I guess if you don't like it from Payton you don't like it from Miles or Braxton, and I guess you are resistant to Paul Whiteman (um, like swing if you have to ask...), Benny Goodman and Duke, in terms of massive generic migration according to one model or another. Let alone Delius and Debussy. But oddly, I actually think jazz does surprisingly well. Not all the record collecting which is less than nothing and barely a blip in terms of any history of music, but in terms of continued opportunities to play and even record (though I think we know recording is much less important than it was in the 30s). As with classical music, every time I go to something it is more-or-less sold out. For a minority sport it doesn't do too badly.

[Face of the Bass]

I love how whenever a writer tries to use words and concepts that are beyond a high schooler's level of comprehension, he immediately gets attacked for being a poseur, or pretentious, or arrogant. And I also love how any "jazz" musician who refuses to genuflect before the jazz canon gets labeled as unappreciative and ignorant. All these attacks serve to do is to confirm the message of Payton's poem.

Miles was the opposite of Payton--always respectful towards Armstrong and Ellington, and dismissive of everyone other than himself who was trying to push the music in a new direction--Dolphy, Taylor, late Coltrane, etc. Jazz artists, writers, and collectors have spent far too much of their time celebrating the dead and ignoring the present. It's the reason why even a quality jazz board like this one spends most of its time talking about whatever coffin that mausoleum of a record company, Mosaic, decides to release next. Do we have every single alternate take that some master who has been dead for half a century ever made? People talk more about this than they do about anything new, and I imagine most people on this board would have a very difficult time naming very many musicians younger than 40. But suggest that a genre that most often makes news when yet another one of its acclaimed masters dies might be a dead end, and you get tarred and feathered. In my opinion, any original musician who wants to break through this suffocating discourse and actually have her work celebrated as art should run away from the "jazz" label like it is the plague. For all but a select few who get rewarded with grants and teaching gigs, it is a sure route to poverty and obscurity. And most musicians who do decide to stay within the "jazz tradition" today end up turning their work into the musical equivalent of a Civil War battle reenactment, i.e., a shadow of the real article. The difference between jazz musicians of half a century ago and jazz musicians today is that the former were the ideal models of Gramsci's "organic intellectuals," the latter more often than not academically trained professionals who are trying to recapture days of glory that never existed in the first place.

[seeline]

His new album came out at the beginning of November. I have to wonder if this is carefully-timed PR on his part...

[Lazaro Vega]

[David Ayers]

You're going to get the neighbors knocking on the door for that...

[thedwork]

His new album came out at the beginning of November. I have to wonder if this is carefully-timed PR on his part...

i don't wonder about it much. i assume it is, and that was the first thing i wrote in my post above

[Chuck Nessa]

You're going to get the neighbors knocking on the door for that...

He knows where they can purchase a copy - all is good.

[Christiern]

That's a lot of verbiage just to demonstrate why Nicholas Payton isn't cool.

[david weiss]

I don't want to get into this too much because Nicholas is a friend and associate.......

I do want to say this though......

If you want to go there, I don't think 1959 is a good date. At least pick a date after Coltrane dies and Miles goes electric then maybe you could at least make an argument though I would still disagree.

If you don't want your music called jazz then hey, more power to you but this all seems like a version of Miles not wanting his music called jazz in '60s. So not exactly a new thought.

He is from New Orleans and I believe he has lived there his whole life (I don't think he ever lived in New York) so if he wants to call his music "post modern New Orleans music" more power to him. He might even be right though I probably don't know what "post modern New Orleans music" is so I couldn't rightly say if he is achieving his goal or not. Maybe it's that stuff the young trumpet player in Treme was trying to get to...... I don't know.....Maybe he thinks he can start a new genre and call it "post modern New Orleans music". I don't know.......

I do know that he is an excellent musician and trumpet player.

Maybe this is akin to hearing about some of our favorite athletes tweets. You really wish you didn't have hear that from them and hope they would stop tweeting before your impression of them is really ruined.

Maybe the jazz mystique died in 1959 (though I will go to the late '60s for this too). I prefer the shades and the smoke and the suits and the hats (and the music) to the blogs and the tweets. I know we live in a different age but to me nothing undoes the mystique of the jazz musician more than blogging and tweeting.

And yes I know I'm a little guilty myself by posting here.......

Edited December 3, 2011 by david weiss

[A Lark Ascending]

I'm still bemused as to why anyone over 17 worries about 'cool'.

Anyway, didn't we come 'out of the cool' 50 years ago?

[david weiss]

I love how whenever a writer tries to use words and concepts that are beyond a high schooler's level of comprehension, he immediately gets attacked for being a poseur, or pretentious, or arrogant. And I also love how any "jazz" musician who refuses to genuflect before the jazz canon gets labeled as unappreciative and ignorant. All these attacks serve to do is to confirm the message of Payton's poem.

Miles was the opposite of Payton--always respectful towards Armstrong and Ellington, and dismissive of everyone other than himself who was trying to push the music in a new direction--Dolphy, Taylor, late Coltrane, etc. Jazz artists, writers, and collectors have spent far too much of their time celebrating the dead and ignoring the present. It's the reason why even a quality jazz board like this one spends most of its time talking about whatever coffin that mausoleum of a record company, Mosaic, decides to release next. Do we have every single alternate take that some master who has been dead for half a century ever made? People talk more about this than they do about anything new, and I imagine most people on this board would have a very difficult time naming very many musicians younger than 40. But suggest that a genre that most often makes news when yet another one of its acclaimed masters dies might be a dead end, and you get tarred and feathered. In my opinion, any original musician who wants to break through this suffocating discourse and actually have her work celebrated as art should run away from the "jazz" label like it is the plague. For all but a select few who get rewarded with grants and teaching gigs, it is a sure route to poverty and obscurity. And most musicians who do decide to stay within the "jazz tradition" today end up turning their work into the musical equivalent of a Civil War battle reenactment, i.e., a shadow of the real article. The difference between jazz musicians of half a century ago and jazz musicians today is that the former were the ideal models of Gramsci's "organic intellectuals," the latter more often than not academically trained professionals who are trying to recapture days of glory that never existed in the first place.

Miles had some not so nice things to say about Armstrong....... and he was not dismissive of everyone other than himself who was trying to push the music in a new direction (though I did read a blindfold test where he tore Dolphy up).

I also think it is possible to do the two things simultaneously, drool over every historic release that has new alternate takes and drool over a new release by a great up and coming artist. It is possible to be interested in both.

I can name every Miles Davis record and also name almost every jazz musician of note under 40.

The term jazz works well for some people. There are some people coming up today that really don't play a note of jazz in any possible connotation of the term and yet have fame and glory from being on a jazz label and being touted by the jazz industry. So...it works for some.....though most of them are not jazz musicians.....

[Denis]

I don't want to be disrespectful here but this sounds like the ramblings of a searching adolescent mind.

One thing is sure I won't be buying any of his music. Yeah, one liners right until the end.

[Quasimado]

Confirmation.

Q

[Face of the Bass]

Miles had some not so nice things to say about Armstrong....... and he was not dismissive of everyone other than himself who was trying to push the music in a new direction (though I did read a blindfold test where he tore Dolphy up).

I also think it is possible to do the two things simultaneously, drool over every historic release that has new alternate takes and drool over a new release by a great up and coming artist. It is possible to be interested in both.

I can name every Miles Davis record and also name almost every jazz musician of note under 40.

The term jazz works well for some people. There are some people coming up today that really don't play a note of jazz in any possible connotation of the term and yet have fame and glory from being on a jazz label and being touted by the jazz industry. So...it works for some.....though most of them are not jazz musicians.....

The Miles quote that everyone always likes to parrot is where he talks about how Armstrong played everything on his trumpet, that nobody has played anything that Louis didn't play first. I think that's probably bullshit. Did Louis Armstrong ever play trumpet the way Bill Dixon did? Not to my knowledge.

Again, I think the reaction to this poem is way over the top. People are responding to what Payton wrote way, way, way too literally...the statement should be read as one of artistic freedom, a kind of manifesto. There is a long tradition of writers, painters and musicians making statements like these. Didactic quibbling over dates and terminology is not, in my opinion, a meaningful response to the essence of what Payton is saying.

But it seems that I'm the only one on this board who enjoyed this piece and who now thinks more of Payton having read it.

[Face of the Bass]

I prefer the shades and the smoke and the suits and the hats (and the music) to the blogs and the tweets. I know we live in a different age but to me nothing undoes the mystique of the jazz musician more than blogging and tweeting.

And yes I know I'm a little guilty myself by posting here.......

But isn't this playing precisely into the most reductionist parody of what jazz is supposed to be? Wearing shades and suits and hats is the jazz uniform of a vanished age, when many jazz players were romantics who were trying to recapture the aesthetic of Charlie Parker and company, right down to the debilitating heroin addictions. If you think about what the craze for heroin did to the music in the 1950s and 1960s, you could make a reasonable argument that this ideal of what jazz should be is precisely what killed (in the most literal sense possible) the music. I've often thought that the reason jazz "died" in the 1960s or whenever you want to put it is because THE MUSICIANS died. Think of all the groundbreaking, incredible musicians who came of age in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, who never lived to see their fiftieth birthday. Though not all of these early deaths can be attributed to heroin(Clifford Brown being one obvious example of a tragic death that had nothing to do with drug use) the dependency on a dangerous drug decimated the jazz ranks during these critical years. I don't think the music has ever fully recovered from that, simply because the ranks of its finest musicians were so heavily depopulated during those years.

Also, Miles not only blasted Dolphy, he blasted Cecil Taylor as well, and in his autobiography he makes clear (in more polite terms) that the music Coltrane made prior to his death could not match what he had done earlier (with Miles). Is there any major figure from the avant garde besides Coltrane that Miles ever had any kind words for? Maybe he thought highly of Ornette, not sure.

[Brad]

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=lX24Ry3HxhM

You're going to get the neighbors knocking on the door for that...

After listening to that, however you may describe it, they might ask you to move out.

[JSngry]

Silence is what makes music sexy.

No, the anticipation of breaking the silence is what makes music sexy. Breaking it is sex, breaking it really meaningfully is orgasm, and waiting for it to return so it can be broken again is post-orgasmic afterglow and beyond.

Silence only has meaning relative to what breaks it. It's not an either/or thing, it's a yin/yang thing, complementary opposites compromising a single entity.

Not knowing this, that's why jazz isn't cool any more.

Stop fucking the dead and embrace the living

OTOH, if you don't want to make a baby and just want to get your nut, fucking the dead is pretty much a sure thing.

[Chuck Nessa]

[Neal Pomea]

Interesting study of changes in the language. What terms mean and meant.

IMO, it's a good idea to come up with new names for new kinds of music. Could have even started that in the 1930s and 1940s instead of depending on the cachet of the term jazz to apply to music that never had much to do with jazz in the first place. 1959 as cut off date? Oh really? Payton's probably 20-25 years late.

Outdated/ironic use, too, of the term necrophilia, given the fascination that young people today -- but not older people -- have with zombies in the popular culture.

Edited December 4, 2011 by Neal Pomea

[Noj]

"Cool" isn't defined by what sells best, and it never has been.

Jazz is immortal, like all good music.

[AllenLowe]

there's tons of good music - problem today is that there is so much BAD JAZZ (and I am not just talking about the trads but also the number of really mediocre free player/composers and new-music types who are great at talk but cannot do anything else - see Signal to Noise) that it drowns out the worthwhile stuff. I really feel that way, and it's one of the reasons I stopped recording for so many years. We gotta let the smoke clear (which won't happen).

[JSngry]

Edited December 4, 2011 by JSngry

[Noj]

[JSngry]

America's got talent!