Bird on Savoy, Dial

[Big Beat Steve]

1 hour ago, Brad said:

Listening to free or avant garde has never provided me with any pleasure. The ones I love are the ones you mentioned plus soul jazz. 

+1   

Broadly speaking ...

But of course tastes do differ, and I realize there are those who feel they have exhausted the kicks they got out of the styles of jazz Peter Friedman named. But from a certain point beyond that (beyond the "canon" of Free Jazz of the 60s, that is) you are bound to get into the realm of "if they don't know how to call that music they'll call it jazz. But is it still jazz and why call it jazz in the first place if those who insist on calling it jazz despise so vehemently what came before it in jazz, stylistically speaking? A case of usurpation, maybe?" 

But this is getting us far away from the music of Charlie Parker, isn't it?

Yet isn'it it amazing that while Bebop definitely upset the world of jazz (making it seem like jazz had burst apart and never was going to be put together again) some 80 years ago, Bebop has become part of the evolutionary continuum of jazz many, many decades ago, whereas what happened and continued with Free Jazz and the avantgarde AFTER, say, the 60s, is still a subject of never-ending controversy even today, some 50 years later? Could it be that there IS a limit to what you can squeeze into even a BROAD stylistic category? 

(Sorry for this O.T. remark ... )

Edited Monday at 03:49 PM by Big Beat Steve

[JSngry]

Distinct personality and musical clarity defines itself.

[Gheorghe]

23 hours ago, Peter Friedman said:

Georghe,

Glad to see that you have not completely turned away from bebop.

Just read on another thread that you said  your interest now is in music by Alice Coltrane and others. And no longer play or listen to Bebop, or Hard Bop.

Some years ago I focused my attention on "Free or Avante-Garde" jazz. But after a while, I left that music behind  me.

It was not providing me with listening pleasure.  I realized that the music I truly love has to (usually) swing and that Traditional Jazz, Swing, Mainstream, Bebop, West Coast Jazz and Hard Bop are the styles of jazz that bring a smile to my face and makes me feel good. 

well, I am a musician. And you can listen to bop to learn the basics about the music. But as a contemporary musician I have the urge to create, and bop is more the music you play just for fun, we have 2 times the week opener band (sometimes led by my group) and than jam with young music students who study jazz in Viena. That´s when I play some of those old tunes, and have fun. But it is just this....FUN. 

For inspiration, and above all for praying and meditating about that beautiful life I have, I love the music of those you mentioned. It gives me another feeling, it lifts me up.....

And it spurs my own creativity. What I write is not written as a line for jam vehicle like would have been my earlier efforts "Bebop Airlines" based on "Poor Butterfly", stuff like that, but it ain´t it. You play it for a jam, but to play it as my music....bores me ! 

On 3/25/2026 at 11:36 PM, mikeweil said:

Bird was a player who really improvised, conceived very different solos in each take. In that respect he was largely superior to his sidemen who often had to learn the tunes during the session. So all alternates merit listening, although he sometimes lost interest while the other were still finding their way through the tunes. I for one like both approaches to listening, just for Bird's incredible creativity, but listening to the music as the jazz world first got to hear it is hard to beat.

yeah superior to sideman, sometimes.

But when he had Fats, or Diz, or Miles after his first learning period....when he had learned to fly himself....they are as much worth listening to like Bird. Bud, Monk, Mingus, Pettiford,  Roach, Klook, Roy Haynes, Art Blakey, Howard McGhee inferior ? Never. 

8 hours ago, Brad said:

Listening to free or avant garde has never provided me with any pleasure. The ones I love are the ones you mentioned plus soul jazz. 

Well clear, if you seek pleasure, that kind of music ain´t for you and be glad that there is enough music for you to have the pleaser you seek. Maybe Hardbop, Horace, Blakey Jazz Messengers, maybe the Blue Note and Prestige recordings, there is tons of it that you will like. 

In my case, I am not sure if I can definite that in musical terms. Music has to move to to feelings I never had before, make me happy in another dimension than pleasure, makes me burst into tears......I am a very very emotional person....

[Dub Modal]

I'm not sure where I heard or read this story but it stuck with me and seems apropos to the discussion above: 

A man attending a concert (classical music) noticed that the guy next to him was sobbing uncontrollably during the performance. During one of the intermissions, he leaned over politely suggested that the crying man excuse himself if the music was bothering him. The guy's reply: "Do you think I'm here to be entertained?"

Brings home the point that motivations for music listening differ from one person to the next. 

 

[Gheorghe]

18 hours ago, Dub Modal said:

I'm not sure where I heard or read this story but it stuck with me and seems apropos to the discussion above: 

A man attending a concert (classical music) noticed that the guy next to him was sobbing uncontrollably during the performance. During one of the intermissions, he leaned over politely suggested that the crying man excuse himself if the music was bothering him. The guy's reply: "Do you think I'm here to be entertained?"

Brings home the point that motivations for music listening differ from one person to the next. 

 

That´s what I mean.

And as much as I loved to play bebop and still do it sometimes just for fun with those fantastic musicians I got, you can´t survive nowadays playing be bop all the time. Or standards. Clubs and Venues with more demanding expections wouldn´t book you, and records would not sell. How would by : "Ioan-Petru A." (that´s my real name!) plays Bird, Bud, Diz".....🤣

I gotcha let my own creative forces flow.

But: You learn to master your instrument. So BEBOP IS VERY IMPORTANT: Can´t play Dizzy Atmoshpere at the tempo on those old records? Go back and master ya instrument. Get chops, and that´s what bebop means nowadays, in that sense: Long live Bebop ! 

[Brad]

23 hours ago, Dub Modal said:

I'm not sure where I heard or read this story but it stuck with me and seems apropos to the discussion above: 

A man attending a concert (classical music) noticed that the guy next to him was sobbing uncontrollably during the performance. During one of the intermissions, he leaned over politely suggested that the crying man excuse himself if the music was bothering him. The guy's reply: "Do you think I'm here to be entertained?"

Brings home the point that motivations for music listening differ from one person to the next. 

 

The music was moving him, eliciting an emotional reaction.  I find that with bop, hard bop, soul jazz and blues. Avant garde does not elicit any reaction in me other than to change the music but what appeals to one person doesn’t to the other and vice versa. 

[Chuck Nessa]

51 minutes ago, Brad said:

The music was moving him, eliciting an emotional reaction.  I find that with bop, hard bop, soul jazz and blues. Avant garde does not elicit any reaction in me other than to change the music but what appeals to one person doesn’t to the other and vice versa. 

Sorry.

[JSngry]

Sounds free to me.

The people do.

[Brad]

58 minutes ago, Chuck Nessa said:

Sorry.

Lol. Be pretty boring if we all liked the same things. 

34 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Sounds free to me.

The people do.

Cool stuff. Thanks. 

[Big Beat Steve]

4 hours ago, Brad said:

The music was moving him, eliciting an emotional reaction.  I find that with bop, hard bop, soul jazz and blues. Avant garde does not elicit any reaction in me other than to change the music but what appeals to one person doesn’t to the other and vice versa. 

I do understand you, and no need to being made to feel sorry.  There are so many (still-fresh) approaches and perspectives even to styles of music that some may consider old hat. 
One man's meat ...  

And yes, that 1957 Newport track is nice (and indeed "free", in a way, within the mainstream swing idiom). Don't know how often and why I've passed up that record in the shops. Time to remedy this, I guess. 

 

Edited 3 hours ago by Big Beat Steve

[Gheorghe]

well, a lot of what people call ”avantgarde” is pretty 50 years old, or more ? 

I can´t say that any of that music of geniuses they rote books about, is older or newer for me. Bird maybe was 70years ago, Ornette Coleman 60 years his classic recordings, Alice Coltrane 50 years or so...electric Miles, Aghartha or so, 50 years. Old old stuff really, so I can´t feel a difference of time. 

 

[Big Beat Steve]

That's right - from the point of "age". But stylistically speaking, it seems to be a different matter.
Like I said in a previous post, it is amazing that bebop of the 40s (i.e. some 80 years ago by now) has been considered part of the natural continuum of jazz for a long, long time. Whereas the "avantgarde" of the 70s and afterwards (i.e. after the first Free Jazz generation of the 60s - Coltrane, Coleman, Cherry etc.) that is now some 50+ years old too is still causing controversy (and some of the music of the first generation too, possibly). So maybe I am not the only one who feels that at some point a limit of what can immediately or instinctively be grasped as "jazz" has been exceeded somewhere.

What I also find surprising, seen from today, is that most discussions of avantgarde keep focusing on the period from the 60s ONWARDS.
So what about 50s "avantgarde" musicians in jazz, like Jimmy Giuffre or George Russell (and others)? I can see and hear where they came from in jazz, but - to me anyway - there is a lot in what I've heard of their music (not nearly all, of course) that still is challenging to listen to. Because it IS "far out". But how come Jimmy Giuffre et al. seem to have fallen by the wayside within the avantgarde narrative? Taken for granted? Artists that are not "Black" enough? I'd be surprised if the general consensus were that their avantgarde work is far too accessible to today's avantgarde listeners' ears to warrant the "avantgarde" tag anymore. (But who knows ... )