Marc Myers on jazz geniuses

[Dub Modal]

Just now, JSngry said:

But, you know, Louis got a Narrative Industry working for him now (and has had one for a good long while, to be honest), those other two, hardly an at all. And this is what happens with that.

Indeed. That's what having a museum and strong advocates gets you. They should all have that, as you say. 

[JSngry]

 Lester "Prez" Young, whose relaxed and fluid tenor saxophone played high on the register gave birth to several dozen imitators...

But why does that make him a "genius"?

Too many (damn near all?) of these people who make lists of "genius" don't seem to have too much of an idea of what genius in music actually, maybe because they don't really understand how music works. You want to talk about Monk & Prez  and their geniuses, you need to get into their architectures and physics, how they created real/provable new concepts of space and shape and time itself...and color, which is another physics, sound paintings...not just a turn of phrase, it's a real physical thing. You use sound, time, space, shape, you paint a picture and tell a story. Elements of aural language actively engaged, very real things. It's an Oral/Aural Culture.

These type guys don't go there, but it's there for them if they wanted it. But I guess, you know, music is ultimately a hobby for them. Their gig is writing about their hobby. Nothing wrong with that, it's useful enough and is sometimes actually entertaining. But writing about "genius"...no, just stop doing that. Write some more about whatever happened to Jacy Parker, do that work.

Also spotted this absurdity:

Coleman Hawkins, whose earthy tenor saxophone and eely improvisational style...

No goddamit - Bud Freeman was The Eel.

Shouldn't have to tell this to people.

[kh1958]

18 minutes ago, JSngry said:

I prefer to think of it as the undervaluation of Jellly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet relative to Louis Armstrong.

But, you know, Louis got a Narrative Industry working for him now (and has had one for a good long while, to be honest), those other two, hardly an at all. And this is what happens with that.

Louis should never be undervalued, but if the plate needs to be bigger to hold all that belongs, then make a bigger plate dammit.

Louis is of course great.

[Milestones]

I don't know who Marc Myers is.  I'd just soon as get lists of geniuses from members of this forum. 

 

 

[Rabshakeh]

50 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Well, at least on his TV show, he sought out a copy of Syd Barrett's masterpiece The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Yes, but what did it mean to him?

[mjzee]

It's intriguing that the article apparently was originally titled Fifteen Geniuses of Jazz, per the article's URL: https://www.jazzwax.com/2021/08/fifteen-geniuses-of-jazz.html

I wonder who got added at the last minute?

I thought it was a good list.  I would have left off Dizzy.

[Rabshakeh]

4 hours ago, Dub Modal said:

Indeed. That's what having a museum and strong advocates gets you. They should all have that, as you say. 

4 hours ago, JSngry said:

But, you know, Louis got a Narrative Industry working for him now (and has had one for a good long while, to be honest)

The Narrative Industry (good phrase) is a weird one.

I don't get the sense that other genres of music have anything like as much of a dominant shaping narrative as jazz has. Genres like rock or rap have a pretty multifaceted audience who are generally aware (if they're paying attention) of developments since the 50s or 80s (respectively). 

I don't think it is anything sinister. I think it is a combination of various factors:

a small base of listeners; few dedicated, the rest drawn by a wider culture industry representation of jazz as 'sophisticated adult music'; mostly people who are coming to the genre fresh and often as a second favourite genre or out.of a sense of obligation to self educate;

no critical base of older listeners to pass on knowledge (compare again to e.g. hip hop or rock);

a small group of record labels with marketing clout and money dedicated to their legacy catalogue, with the rest of the market basically left fallow; 

an institutional bias in some specific academic and non-academic institutions that leads them to favour specific styles over others; and

a presently dominant strain of not very well informed journalism that essentially exists to summarise the views of the above two groups (true everywhere, but noticeably dominant in jazz).

The result is a situation where a few pockets of history are privileged and marketed whereas nothing else gets time. We all know the pockets: Blue Note and Columbia (plus a tiny bit of Riverside); pre-1970; white middle class customer as target consumer; New York; hard bop or the Minton's moment of bebop. Then there are some scattered names from the Before - Armstrong primarily - and the After - Ornette, the Spiritual Jazz set that is now retrospectively popular, Zorn & Co; and then whatever contemporary act is trendy NOW (to be instantly forgotten in three years). 

But everything else, from 1970 to immediately before whatever time is NOW; anything not on a label that is promoted (witness Clifford Brown's utter lack of name recognition!); anything not from New York. 

All in all, you end up with lists like this. 

If you were to Google "greatest reggae geniuses ever" you would not just get a list of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Desmond Dekker and Prince Buster. Likewise, a rock fan would know acts like My Bloody Valentine, Prince, REM or the Replacements - these being regarded as a key part of a long and rich history, despite not being part of a key "moment" in rock's history.

I do think that is really just a jazz story. 

Edited August 6, 2021 by Rabshakeh

[JSngry]

5 minutes ago, Rabshakeh said:

no critical base of older listeners to pass on knowledge (compare again to e.g. hip hop or rock);

It exists. It's just not got Professional Gigs doing such. But you hang out here, you pay attention, you can learn stuff that The Narrative Industry won't be bothered with.

Whatever I knew coming into this place, it's like...exponentially more now thanks to the lifers who live/have lived here.

 

[Bluesnik]

6 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Syd Barrett's masterpiece The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Isn't that a Pink Floyd album? Yes, it's from the time with Syd Barrett, but it's a Pink Floyd.

[Teasing the Korean]

3 minutes ago, Bluesnik said:

Isn't that a Pink Floyd album? Yes, it's from the time with Syd Barrett, but it's a Pink Floyd.

It is Syd Barrett with a competent backing band.  

[Bluesnik]

And I like it very much. Like all the 3 first albums. Up to More, a soundtrack they made in 1969 for a movie shot mainly in Ibiza. And I think with Dave Gilmour already on board.

[Rabshakeh]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

Whatever I knew coming into this place, it's like...exponentially more now thanks to the lifers who live/have lived here.

Certainly. This place is great. 

What I meant is that there's no critical mass of older listeners. No older siblings or uncles who were there at the time who are there to guide people taking first steps, or at least only if you're lucky.

[JSngry]

Don't look for the media to be your uncle, they got zero interest in that gig. Ain't no paycheck in that gig! 

[jlhoots]

Don't look at lists.

[JSngry]

Resit metered parking!

[Larry Kart]

3 hours ago, Rabshakeh said:

Certainly. This place is great. 

What I meant is that there's no critical mass of older listeners. No older siblings or uncles who were there at the time who are there to guide people taking first steps, or at least only if you're lucky.

I'm 79 and I think Chuck is 78 and we've both been listening for about the same length of time -- myself sInce 1954. If we're not part of some sort of critical mass who is? Also, grumpy though we may be, neither of us has the musical tastes of a grumpy old man.

[Chuck Nessa]

Old Farts

https://youtu.be/pHjOuS-rABU

Edited August 7, 2021 by Chuck Nessa

[JSngry]

...maybe it's time for some electric prunes, to bring it to pass, this critical mass, held by Pope Bitchemoaner

[Rabshakeh]

7 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

I'm 79 and I think Chuck is 78 and we've both been listening for about the same length of time -- myself sInce 1954. If we're not part of some sort of critical mass who is? Also, grumpy though we may be, neither of us has the musical tastes of a grumpy old man.

The problem is that there aren't enough of you to go around.

Your average 15 year old or 21 year old who thinks jazz might be interesting doesn't have you or Chuck as his or her uncle to recommend the good stuff (at least I don't think so). So he or she is pushed back on corporate and institutionally created groupthink in the form of articles like the one in this thread. The consequence is everyone for the last 30 years has started with the same 5-6 records from 80-60 years ago (Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew, some Blue Note hard bops starting with Moanin', a Charlie Parker, Monk or Gillespie Verve comp, a singed fingers experiment with Atlantic era Ornette, and a yearning attempt to move beyond the narrative by buying the "recent" Black Codes) and then either gives up, under the impression he or she has exhausted the best the genre has to offer, or rarely ever moves past the above referenced material. We all know music fans (including extremely engaged music fans, and people who consider themselves to love jazz) to whom this has happened.

Contrast to the situation with rock, where "I inherited my older brother's / sister's records when he / she went to university" has been a time honoured method of musical education.

I don't think the situation is irredeemable. Particularly in the age of the internet, the dominance of narratives and marketing campaigns in music should be quite weak (witness e.g. Led Zeppelin's precipitous crash out of the rock canon and the elevation of acts like Funkadelic into its place). But the fact is that for jazz these sorts of impoverished lists with the same old recommendations keep getting produced and keep getting read (for lack of anything else), and there remains limited access to other lines of thought. This is not the case with other genres, where the larger number of irl peers and the rise of the internet has vastly increased access. 

If there were two or three reasonably high profile lists of recommendations by people of taste and knowledge, with a proper sweep across time and geography, and with short descriptions, and those lists were available on the internet, I think it would really change matters. 

The fact is that, ridiculous as the recent JazzTimes by Decade lists were, I did not know half of the albums that were listed - I had missed them at the time and had never heard them mentioned since. Nate Chinen's recent book has a list of his recommendations from the last 20 years - I don't share his taste at all, but again, this list has been invaluable and has introduced players and material of which I had never heard because, in jazz education terms, 2000 - 2015 might as well not exist.

Less ridiculous, @HutchFan's blog on the 70s has been an incredible resource. That's an era that is covered a little bit in the core "non-mainstream" jazz narratives (i.e., (I) NY style free jazz on Impulse!, and (ii) "spiritual jazz", also, magically, on Impulse!), and there is a canon of sorts for the biggest fusion acts, but the 70s is otherwise hardly explored.

This place is a paradise of recommendations and knowledge. Whilst I only started posting fairly recently, I have been lurking for a long time and picking up what was said. I think I'm probably a bit guilty of excessive demands for recommendations. I've learned a huge amount here.

But the fact is that this sort of knowledge is not available elsewhere. 

Edited August 7, 2021 by Rabshakeh

[Teasing the Korean]

16 hours ago, Rabshakeh said:

Certainly. This place is great. 

What I meant is that there's no critical mass of older listeners. No older siblings or uncles who were there at the time who are there to guide people taking first steps, or at least only if you're lucky.

But the other side of that coin is that culture is continually re-evaluated and re-contextualized, yet each generation has its own biases.  I certainly see this in film conversations with people who came of age in the 1970s.  

 

[Rabshakeh]

2 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

But the other side of that coin is that culture is continually re-evaluated and re-contextualized, yet each generation has its own biases.  I certainly see this in film conversations with people who came of age in the 1970s.  

Film is a closer example. But still: most people are film fans, or at least film watchers. You can't say that for jazz.

[Teasing the Korean]

2 minutes ago, Rabshakeh said:

Film is a closer example. But still: most people are film fans, or at least film watchers. You can't say that for jazz.

To clarify, I was using film as an example of a form in which there are major generational biases, not as an example of a form with a tiny audience (such as jazz's audience).

[Rabshakeh]

20 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

To clarify, I was using film as an example of a form in which there are major generational biases, not as an example of a form with a tiny audience (such as jazz's audience).

I got that. My concern is that there aren't generational biases in jazz. It is the same thing repeating on loop.

Edited August 7, 2021 by Rabshakeh

[Teasing the Korean]

4 minutes ago, Rabshakeh said:

I got that. My concern is that there aren't generational biases in jazz. It is the same thing repeating on loop.

Well, that is certainly true about the big names, such as those referenced in the article.  But look at the other subgenres that have gone in and out of vogue - organ groove, West Coast, "rare groove," etc. 

And I am not knocking the generational biases - I think they provide a worthwhile snapshot of a time.  

[Rabshakeh]

2 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Well, that is certainly true about the big names, such as those referenced in the article.  But look at the other subgenres that have gone in and out of vogue - organ groove, West Coast, "rare groove," etc. 

And I am not knocking the generational biases - I think they provide a worthwhile snapshot of a time.  

I dunno. "Rare groove" always seemed to me to be a DJs category. Unless I have misunderstood you, the others are trends that are over 50 years old, and that notably don't form part of most incoming listener's diets unless they have really made the plunge.