Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore

[.:.impossible]

Just to emphasize that Torkanowsky was easily the most dynamic pianist that I can remember hearing in person. He left a significant impression. I have no idea what his reputation is, or what his day to day music sounds like, but that afternoon he was doing anything he wanted and Porter/Modeliste were right there with him.

[Larry Kart]

I must say that Payton's versions of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" are adept (especially the former). Certainly nothing "white" there, unless you count the snow. Uhuru mistletoe!

[clifford_thornton]

I take it all back - Nicholas Payton is right! only someone whose mind has been colonized and held hostage by white men - no, occupied by Aliens - could have made a CD this bad -

http://www.amazon.co...23642248&sr=8-1

I didn't expect it to be that bad!

No wonder the majors dropped him. This shit is stupid.

Post-modern my arse.

[.:.impossible]

I'm actually with Jim. I finally gave in and clicked the samples. No, I wouldn't buy this album for $0.99, but it definitely didn't sound as bad as y'all are making out to. I think it has more in common with an Amp Fiddler record than anything. You know what? In the end, we've got a little shit talking going on between musicians that barely anyone knows anything about. Attitudes, egos, etc. The only place that I have seen this topic come up is here and on Facebook by people that post here. None of the musicians that I am "friends" with or that I am friends* with have given it any attention.*actual friends

[Tom Storer]

Payton's rhetoric is clever. He just released a record that is certainly not "jazz" but that could fit under the label "Black American Music" or even the rather meaningless "post-modern New Orleans music" label. He doesn't want the reaction to be "Nicholas Payton has stopped playing jazz, now he sings R&B." Instead, he is pitching it as "Nicholas Payton courageously speaks the truth about the racist label 'jazz' and goes beyond the boundaries that colonialists try to impose on him. Truly, he embodies 'Black American Music'." This guy is playing the media, especially the social media, expertly. Controversy sells and setting the agenda about yourself helps you control your public image.

The samples don't sound bad to me, but it's not a style of music that particularly interests me. It's not surprising that it doesn't grab too many of us middle-aged colonialists, pardon me, "jazz" fans. I mean, he calls it "post-Dilla" and I've never even heard of Dilla, that's how far I am from his expected audience. Any opinion I had of the album would be clueless anyway.

But this thing about referring to women generically as "bitches"... I don't know, maybe in some circles it's so common that it's no longer insulting, but the women I know would be offended, there is no doubt whatsoever. In real life, they wouldn't stand for it. If a woman made a record about "a love story, that musically chronicles the joys and heartbreak of relationship," as Payton describes his, and she titled it "Pricks" or "Bastards," I think there would be a fair amount of commentary about man-hating feminists, ball-breakers, etc.

[JSngry]

I think it has more in common with an Amp Fiddler record than anything.

Who?

:ph34r:

[Tom Storer]

In the end, we've got a little shit talking going on between musicians that barely anyone knows anything about. Attitudes, egos, etc. The only place that I have seen this topic come up is here and on Facebook by people that post here.

I have to disagree. The controversy has involved Payton, Marcus Strickland, Jeremy Pelt, and George Colligan (as an observer). These are not "musicians that barely anyone knows anything about," but accomplished professionals. Payton has won a Grammy for his album with Doc Cheatham, and has performed with lots of big names as well as releasing well-received albums of his own. Strickland's new album got some buzz and he was in Roy Haynes's band for years. Jeremy Pelt also gets rave reviews. All of them play with top contemporary straight-ahead jazz players. Colligan does all kinds of work, including a recent tour with Jack DeJohnette. These are musicians well within the mainstream and hardly obscure (at least not in jazz terms). And the whole tempest in a teapot is being discussed all over the jazz Internet. Some mention of it, and often discussion, has shown up in most of the jazz blogs I hit.

But I have to agree, it's mostly "attitudes and egos."

[.:.impossible]

When I said "barely anybody knows anything about", I meant the general public. This is a very niche audience we are talking about here. Here we are on a jazz board and it seems that most of us don't even have a Nicholas Payton record on the shelf. Just being objective.

Most other musicians seem to be going on about their business because this has absolutely ZERO effect on their lives.

Haha. Post Dilla. Sure. I'm confused because I thought it was Post New Orleans Modern.

Lots of jazz musicians playing Dilla these days and it don't sound like this!

[Lazaro Vega]

[JSngry]

The samples don't sound bad to me, but it's not a style of music that particularly interests me. It's not surprising that it doesn't grab too many of us middle-aged colonialists, pardon me, "jazz" fans. I mean, he calls it "post-Dilla" and I've never even heard of Dilla, that's how far I am from his expected audience. Any opinion I had of the album would be clueless anyway.

Finally, somebody who says "I don't have a real frame of reference to seriously judge this thing by, so I won't". Thank you, sir!

Portions of the samples (and I can still be persuaded to buy this thing...) remind me of among other things, early acid-jazz era Monday Michiru and/or, believe it or not, 80s Wayne Shorter (melodic/harmonic bits here and there). But we're still talking 20-25 year old reference points, so the only thing "radical" about this album is that a "jazz musician" did it. The drums and/or drum programming sounds pretty basic, really, in terms of timbre. And I wish that Saunders Sermons sang more than just the one(?) song. I'd like to hear more Saunders Sermons, please..

One thing's for sure though - In principle, I'm much more interested in hearing somebody explore these rhythms, these textures, these notions of what makes up a "song" than I am in hearing yet another trotting out of ching-chinga-ching or any of its mutations played by the same-old same-old "instrumentation" (which inevitably produces the same-old-same old textures), playing (or even worse, "re-imagining") the same old vocabularies.

Of course, the final say is how well do you do what it is you're doing. Something tells me that Payton's album in toto is going to be frustratingly stunted, half-frormed good ideas not executed to the fullest extent possible given the available technologies, the work of somebody who's admired this type of music more than actually been involved in it enough to fully grasp the subtlties of both the music and the technology (not for nothing did Miles work with Marcus Miller...) But that's not something about which I can be sure until I hear the whole album, and I don't yet know if I want to hear the whole album. But dammit, I do give the guy credit for trying, and I even give him credit for his confrontational defiance in doing so. No matter how many or how much stupid he's been spewing (and it'a a lot, a massive lot), the basic point that "jazz" has become a pigeonhole that limits the marketplace (creatively and otherwise) for those who call themselves that is a very, very true notion.

I might yet just go ahead and put some money in the dude's pocket, just as a market-based flip of the bird the people who can't tell a well-programmed drum machine from a badly programmed one and who reflexively sputter and spit DRUM MACHINE....AAAAARGH....SPITTT....SUCKS....STUPID....SUCKS....

[Dan Gould]

I'm afraid that last bit describes me. I can't begin to imagine what a 'well-programmed drum machine' sounds like; it all sounds like shit to me and that will never change.

[Face of the Bass]

The samples sound like something I'm definitely not interested in, and I'm very sympathetic to many of Payton's initial comments. I won't judge further without hearing the whole album (which I don't plan on getting). I would say however that I am now very nervous about the fact that my (colonialist) father is going to be getting tickets to a Payton concert for Christmas. Not from me, but from my mother, who came to me with a list of shows in their area, asking for advice. Payton was the biggest "name" on the list so I suggested she go that route, but I highly doubt my father or my mother will appreciate music along the lines of "Bitches," if that's what he's playing in concert these days. Oh well. Hopefully he will accept the humbling role of Uncle Tom, jazz musician, for at least a couple more months before courageously venturing into the post-colonial, post-modern world he has constructed for himself.

[.:.impossible]

Post-Dilla

[Free For All]

I guess I must be post-Diller.

[thedwork]

Payton's rhetoric is clever. He just released a record that is certainly not "jazz" but that could fit under the label "Black American Music" or even the rather meaningless "post-modern New Orleans music" label. He doesn't want the reaction to be "Nicholas Payton has stopped playing jazz, now he sings R&B." Instead, he is pitching it as "Nicholas Payton courageously speaks the truth about the racist label 'jazz' and goes beyond the boundaries that colonialists try to impose on him. Truly, he embodies 'Black American Music'." This guy is playing the media, especially the social media, expertly. Controversy sells and setting the agenda about yourself helps you control your public image.

BINGO!!! we have a winner...

[Big Beat Steve]

What is "Dilla", please?

Which (pigeon)hole of all (contemporary?) forms of jazz must one have been exploring in order to be familiar with THAT?

[JSngry]

What is "Dilla", please?

If you have to ask...

...use the internet.

It's one sign sign of an actively curious mind.

[David Ayers]

We must be bored if we are talking about clashes of opinion in the smooth jazz world. What does Kenny G think about all this?

[JSngry]

Payton's rhetoric is clever. He just released a record that is certainly not "jazz" but that could fit under the label "Black American Music" or even the rather meaningless "post-modern New Orleans music" label. He doesn't want the reaction to be "Nicholas Payton has stopped playing jazz, now he sings R&B." Instead, he is pitching it as "Nicholas Payton courageously speaks the truth about the racist label 'jazz' and goes beyond the boundaries that colonialists try to impose on him. Truly, he embodies 'Black American Music'." This guy is playing the media, especially the social media, expertly. Controversy sells and setting the agenda about yourself helps you control your public image.

BINGO!!! we have a winner...

Setting the agenda about yourself is (potentially) about far more than just "marketing", though.

[Big Beat Steve]

...use the internet.

It's one sign sign of an actively curious mind.

Ugh ... hip hop.

Sorry, but not much lost in not having actively ventured there before.

Any "post-50cent" fads coming up next?

[JSngry]

Dilla & 50 Cent are as different as Kenny Dorham & 50 Cent.

Edited December 12, 2011 by JSngry

[Lazaro Vega]

Nas.

http://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/brent-black-can-go-smoke-a-carton-of-cocks/

[Noj]

Although I recognize the cultural origins of different genres, the aural experience of listening to music is an instantaneous, felt reaction to arranged sounds which makes cultural references entirely secondary. The art is in the noises, and the culture is only as important to me as the labels in the "get info" panel. Although culture is relevant biographical information, it simply isn't as important (to me) as the music. Culture is an unnecessary frame of reference, because my frame of reference is constructed of noises, not cultures.

Is that insensitive? Or am I supposed to have the culture in mind while I'm listening to the sounds some of its members created?

Art operates on an intellectual level. Music is something our brains just feel and naturally "get." That's why I can enjoy the beautiful compositions of music in which the lyrics aren't in my native tongue. I don't have to know what the words mean to know I find the arrangement of noises beautiful. It's why I love jazz even though I don't play an instrument. When I listen to music from Brazil, I'm wrapping my auditory palate around the tasty noises and letting them spread across my ear drum's taste buds. I'm not thinking of the people of a foreign land.

Musicians communicate with sounds, and are mostly concerned with sounds. Isn't the actual culture of a music those who listen and care for its sounds? I think placing a cultural "claim" on a music serves only to highlight the physical differences between like-minded listeners. It's backward thinking, and exclusive.

Edited December 12, 2011 by Noj

[JSngry]

I think placing a cultural "claim" on a music serves only to highlight the physical differences between like-minded listeners. It's backward thinking, and exclusive.

In a perfect world, where the struggle with ownership of knowledge of self is impeded only by self-contained, internal obstacles (or even more to the point - where the struggle with ownership of knowledge of self is realized to be impeded only by self-contained, internal obstacles) , yes.

Until then, these issues will continue to arise, as they have before, and as they no doubt will again.

Hopefully, each time around, more people learn, so that each successive time they come around, more and more people will be able to say that they've been there, done that, and have moved on to the next phase.

Until then...

Edited December 12, 2011 by JSngry

[Larry Kart]

Was talking to a very talented cornetist last night, who knew nothing of the Payton controversy and is a great admirer of Payton's abilities as a trumpet player per se, even granting Payton's claim that nobody today plays the instrument any better -- again in the per se sense of "any better," not the creative sense. He then added, "But he's an idiot."