Jazz Inquest

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
I used to call these type of threads 'X Autopsy', but Reynolds gave me an Oxbridge bollocking and told me to call them inquests.

You could argue a rough definition of Jazz being music that incorporates Jazz harmony, swing time and improvisation. Those individual components continue to be relevant in music, so why did Jazz die?

Elitism, too avant-garde for it’s own good (Café Oto- John Eden), dissolved by Fusion, J Dilla is Jazz, Miles Davis (the only Jazz innovator since the late-40’s) died, all genres die, no new ground to be covered, everything Kendrick Lamar touches turns to shit, improvisation in the age of sequencers, improvisation in the age of samplers, decline of African-American middle-class, commercial unviability, Chris Dave is God
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Louis Moholo-Moholo was at Cafe OTO on Monday with the lad who is on the front cover of The Wire this month and it was a pretty accessible jazz gig I'd say.

With some free-ish flourishes on the sax admittedly, but nothing that would be out of place on a Blue Note album from the late 50s.

Amazing night, in fact.

There is an argument that polarity has meant that the genre is too bifurcated to be cohesive any more. It's not healthy if you have avant garde scraping one on hand and polite lounge/lift music on the other with nothing in between.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
I think all genres or movements in music have finite resources - they use them up and have nowhere else to go by a certain point

The venerable jazz critic Gary Giddins worked out some kind of schematic to describe the evolution of the genre, in terms of different phases. It was quite persuasive and you could map it onto rock, onto techno-house-rave etc.

I'll see if I can dig it up
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
ah I blogged about the Giddins schema on my Retromania blog a while back:

Truth is, genres generally are finite, in the sense of having a range of resources that they burn through and exhaust. Then you get a heritage version of the genre: musicians and custodians who resemble conservationists husbanding a nature preserve, protecting vulnerable species that would otherwise go extinct. Underground rap is one example of this syndrome [albeit slightly different: this is a preserve for a fetishised earlier phase - boom bap, breaks, samples - of a genre that is still very much alive and going places (traplanta etc) just in forms that the undie-rapper doesn't accept or respect] So is the neo-classical school in jazz. Unlike undie rap, it has institutional support that keeps the legacy on life support, as with Lincoln Center's subsidizing of Wynton Marsalis's orchestra.

Legendary jazz critic Gary Giddins came up with a four-phase schema for the life cycles of musical genres. In his impishly titled essay "How Come Jazz Isn't Dead?" he outlined a succession of stages.

"Native" is the emergent phase, when the music is primarily tied to a community.

"Sovereign" is when the music dominates mainstream popular culture.

"Recessionary" is when it is ousted from center stage (in jazz's case, by rock'n'roll) but continues to have a strong presence in the culture. It goes through a multitude of artistic developments and mutations as it interacts with other forms of music and even achieves a prestige it never had before when it was popular dance music.

"Classical", the final and present stage of jazz, is when "even the most adventurous young musicians are weighed down by the massive accomplishments of the past." Many are "content to parrot the voices of the masters". The genre isn't dead exactly, but has become a "stately, classical art", a "Cultural Treasure".

My own Giddins-style schema would be:

-- emergent / (raw, naïve, effortlessly and unconsciously innovative) ROCK'N'ROLL

-- mature (selfconsciously innovative, with overt ideology of progression etc) ROCK

-- outer extremes (purism/intensification/back to basics reductionism) OR fusion/maximalism (looking outside itself) (this is still a modernist phase, but starting to unravel, decay, undermine itself) PROG/PUNK/POSTPUNK / POST-ROCK

-- postmodernism/retro/"museal" -- pastiche, revivalism, parody, recombinant, historicism - INDIE / ALTERNATIVE / BRITPOP / HYPNAGOGIC / FREAK FOLK / ETC
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
i don't know where non-idiomatic improv fits into the Giddins scheme

perhaps he would consider it so far from the source that it has become its own tradition

and i think that's what Derek Bailey thought - that it had nothing to do with the jazz tradition anymore

even though most of its pioneers had started out playing jazz

a conservative / conservationist like Stanley Crouch & Wynton M would say that improv doesn't have blues feeling or swing and ergo isn't jazz

plus they're not wearing nice suits and ties, but scruffy jumpers
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
1) Emerges from other traditions

A new music begins to emerge from one or more other traditions by way of fusion or outright innovation. Often, the music that comes out of this stage is hard to distinguish from the music that came before.

2) Solidifies as a genre, singularly functional

The music at this stage becomes easier to distinguish from the music that preceded it. It is intent on serving a singular social purpose and as such is at its most accessible.

3) Genre evolution and artistic exploration

The music begins to evolve, and artists start to explore musically, even at the risk of detracting from its previous social purpose.

4) Peak abrasiveness, singular musical vision

The music is at its harshest and most inaccessible. This often entails the music becoming very narrowly focused on a single characteristic or idea.

5) Self-conscious eclecticism, drawing in foreign elements

Though the music is always drawing from other music, at this stage it is doing so self-consciously and to a much larger extent. Eventually, so many elements are drawn in that it becomes hard to say if the music is still of the same tradition as stages 1-4. At this stage the music may return to stage 1, either because the macro-genre starts another cycle or because a new macro-genre has been pioneered.

,
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
senescence or at least the autumnal phase of a music seems to come when it's original / originating audience moves on to something else

first step in jazz decline - when the black popular audience moves on to R&B

terminal stage in jazz decline? when the musician class itself is no longer majority black

Stanley Crouch grapples with this in one of his books - being both conservative and optimistic he tries to see the fact that some of the best (meaning in his terms, the most faithful to original principles) players of contemporary jazz are Italian or Norwegian as a sign of the music's continued vitality

a sociologist or anthropologist, on the other hand, would probably wonder how vital a music could really be if it's drifted loose of the population that birthed it
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I think with improv there is an argument that it’s jazz + post war European avant garde and therefore a new thing. I mean something like The Necks is nothing like jazz.

We can argue whether improv is dead too but first we’d need to get into whether it’s really a genre or a technique or both. (See also: Dub).
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
i might be a bit off with the timing, but this was also probably the stage when jazz was at it's most innovative.

well that's a moot point innit - it's innovative in a certain sense where the assumption is that innovation = difficulty, harshness, emotional opacity, extremism

but you could argue that there is nothing more innovative than the initial birthing of a new form of music

is Louis Armstrong really less innovative than Charlie Parker or Ornette Coleman?


with that particular sense of innovative (challenging, confrontational etc), you are dead right - bebop / free etc = the point when jazz is peaking artistically, it's following its logic right out there, where it seems to want to go (c.f. the feeling among classical composers around end 19th / start 20th C that the music had some internal drive in it pushing towards atonality, and that they had to go along with that)

and of necessity that is the point at which jazz's functionality (as dance music) fades away, it becomes a head music - contemplative
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Genres often reach the point where the only way forward involves the music becoming increasingly difficult and unpleasant, to the point where the cutting edge is actively mutilating and wrecking whatever was appealing about the music in the first place.

That explains the neoclassical approach, whether it's Wynton Marsalis, or in rock figures like Jack White and The Black Keys. They are going back to a moment when the music grooved or swung.

Often there's an impulse to dress the part - Marsalis with his sharp suit, White et al dressing like Leon Russell or somebody of that ilk.

An earlier example of the syndrome is the trad jazz people in Fifties UK, going back to New Orleans 1920s style. They wanted a high-energy dance music and bebop wasn't that, and the swing bands were too genteel and mild.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
that's not all. please explain.

what do you want me to say? was big in the loft jazz scene of the 70s, and is still putting out great stuff, check the session he did with Kikanju Baku called conversations II. some very speech rhythm drumming from Baku on that.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
well that's a moot point innit - it's innovative in a certain sense where the assumption is that innovation = difficulty, harshness, emotional opacity, extremism

but you could argue that there is nothing more innovative than the initial birthing of a new form of music

is Louis Armstrong really less innovative than Charlie Parker or Ornette Coleman?


with that particular sense of innovative (challenging, confrontational etc), you are dead right - bebop / free etc = the point when jazz is peaking artistically, it's following its logic right out there, where it seems to want to go (c.f. the feeling among classical composers around end 19th / start 20th C that the music had some internal drive in it pushing towards atonality, and that they had to go along with that)

and of necessity that is the point at which jazz's functionality (as dance music) fades away, it becomes a head music - contemplative

you can dance to free jazz. not so much for Euro free improv.
 
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