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This was posted on a flamenco forum where a thread is discussing a definition of sorts (of flamenco) being attempted by govt. bodies in Andalucía in order to recognise flamenco as a cultural treasure and to find ways of seeding general education with awareness of the culture. Needless to say there is quite some debate.
But, one guy posted this comment. "Here is an argument about why jazz musicians now all sound the same. Never mind whether he’s exactly right about jazz, just notice that the forces he points at (collapse of record sales, their replacement by social media clips) are all firmly in the private sector." In my opinion, modern flamenco falls right into the same trap - and it's not just art either.
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04-18-2023 06:54 AM
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A very interesting statement.
A sentence immediately comes to my mind: it's easy to say, harder to do.
Young people learn from the achievements of older musicians.
This is a very good phenomenon, but it does not mean that all of them will be jazz musicians in the future.
Only those stubborn musicians who really have something to say remain.
It has always been the case that brilliant jazz personalities appear on the jazz market.
These personalities have an impact on learners, because young people are looking for role models.
But it doesn't mean that the young 16-year-old who learns from good examples will not grow into another brilliant musician in the future.
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Do they?
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Tbh I daresay if you go back to 1956 you are going to hear a lot of players who sound like cheap imitation Bird at jam sessions. In fact Bird once commented to Lee Konitz ‘you aren’t trying to sound like me, and I dig that.’
To me the difference sight unseen between say, Kurt, Julian Lage, Ben Monder, Pasquale Grasso and Reiner Baas say, I’d be reasonably confident. otoh ask me to tell the difference between this or that 50s bop guitarist sight unseen and I’d probably muck it up because they do sound sort of similar - there are differences but they are less obvious unless you listen to LOT of that stuff (I’d be on safer ground with horns and piano I suspect).
great musicians are distinctive and the brutal reality is everyone else is forgotten.
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Where are the new 'Coltrane", "Miles", "Jaco"...and others.?
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Didn't all go to Berklee, did they?
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Yes.... Originally Posted by ragman1
Didn't all go to Berklee, did they?
Profesor Coltrane,Profesor Miles, Profesor Jaco...:-)
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thats a different question Originally Posted by kris
but no contemporary players do not all sound alike to me. I know distinctive players in my own community and I would say all the leading international players have to find their own thing. I couldn’t mistake Ben Van Gelder for another sax player for example. And there are heavily imitated modern players; you can tell the influence of Pasquale Grasso on most young straight ahead guitar players for instance. It’s really striking. Just like all the electric bass players copied Jaco, and all the horns copied Trane back in the day. As I say, we tend to forget the imitators whcih gives us the probably false impression people were more original in the Halcyon age.
bollocks. I’m old enough to remember when absolutely all the guitar players sounded like either Scofield or Benson.
Tbh the guy in the vid just comes across as someone who hasn’t listen to much recent jazz. Lazy cliche.
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Where at any time, in any genre, has there ever been a new anybody? Who was the new 'Josquin' or the new 'Bach' or the new 'Mozart'? Originally Posted by kris
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Where’s the new Anonymous 4, that’s what I want to know
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who is "this or that bop guitarist"? the top players at that time were people like johnny smith, chuck wayne, wes, joe pass, burell, jim hall, tal farlow, etc. all very recognizable individualists. me i could not identifiy a moreno or rosenwinkel if my life depended on it. i remember the monk competition a few years back and everyone except c alexander and that super nervous canadian dude all basically sounding the same. has anyone ever heard from the winner again? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
if anything, we had a lot more individual stylists in the 50s. none of these musicians could ever be mixed up with s/o else:
monk, h nichols, elmo hope, sonny clark, ahmad jamal, j byard, just to name pianists. or ben webster, rollins, mclean, desmond, i could go on for hours. and that all within the limited frame of straight ahead jazz.
"great musicians are distinctive and the brutal reality is everyone else is forgotten."
i agree. 70 years from now very few people will remember rosenwinkel, lage, monder, grasso et al.
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I meant people who have done so much for the development of jazz music. Originally Posted by BWV
Brilliant jazz musicians-composers.
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Maybe you need to search better. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Lately I only listen to music from the 50s and 60s....70s... Originally Posted by djg
Jazz groups play at the highest level.
The musicians had a place to play and this translated into the performance level...
I still have a lot of backlog, even though I've already listened to several hundred albums.
I like it very much.
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They're probably making videos on Tic Tok, just because you don't watch them doesn't mean they don't exist. Originally Posted by kris
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Like Pat Metheny or John Scofield? Originally Posted by kris
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Still waiting for the next Charlie Christian...
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I really want to know is which musician Charlie Christian was the 'next ____ ' Originally Posted by SandChannel
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I sadly know for a fact that I couldnt tell the difference between a lot of the older players because I didn’t do well on the blindfold test someone (i want to say Richie Zellon) posted a while back. Ok on Wes, green, hall, Jimmy Raney, Tal maybe. The ones I’ve listened to a lot. Originally Posted by djg
I think I’d do better with horn or piano….
moreno from Rosenwinkel? Absolutely. They sound completely different to me. Kurt in particular like truffle oil. I’d recognise him anywhere and have. Same with Adam Rogers. I’d be willing to test myself.
What does this demonstrate? I’m not actually huge listener of mid 50s jazz guitar. Probably. You know best the musicians you listen to. Not everyone can tell Haydn from Mozart but it’s clear as day when you’ve listened a lot.
So if you prefer players of that era you can say ‘all the modern players sound the same’ and from your sensibility that would be absolutely the case and probably wonder wtf the other guy is smoking.
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Djg are you seriously saying you wouldn’t be able to tell, say, Pasquale, Ilya Lushtak and Peter Bernstein apart, for instance? Just in the world of active straightahead players who like to play standards on an archtop plugged into a clean amp?
I don’t know what people will remember in 70 years… but that’s not really the issue… it’s actually much simpler. I think players are as distinctive as they have ever been. Maybe more so than the 50s because today there’s a massive diversity in approaches, whereas in the 50s most musicians were still dealing with Parker’s revolution (which according to cootie Williams made ‘everyone sound the same’)
You might not like them but to take a quite obvious contrast, it seems risible to suggest Lage Lund, Mary Halvorsson and Pasquale sound the same for instance. Really? Pull the other one. Ergo - there’s a lot of diversity and no all the younger cats do not in fact sound the same. For all I know they might all be terrible imitator/dreadful modernist hacks who will all be forgotten or whatever (I have no taste in music to speak of so can’t comment); but more relevantly I can at least easily tell them apart.Last edited by Christian Miller; 04-18-2023 at 06:18 PM.
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His name was Wes Montgomery Originally Posted by SandChannel
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Problem is anonymous was quite prolific… I’m wondering if it may have been more than one person. Originally Posted by kris
Maybe you need to search better.
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The video guy's initial question strikes me as question-begging, since it assumes that "all modern jazz musicians" do actually "sound the same"--a proposition that is pretty much impossible to verify. (Actually, I think it's bunk.)
The question of influence is interesting, though--where it comes from, how it propagates, what its half-life might be. It's a version of various reception-studies questions, applied to audiences that are also artists. Then there's the matter of what happens when a body of technique becomes widely accessible--the video guy mentions drumming, but any striking, innovative technique is likely to get the attention of players. I recall watching how tapping tore through the acoustic-fingerstyle world after Michael Hedges showed what could be done with it. Some of this was ordinary musical hero-worship, and some was a kind of technical competitiveness (I can play X!), not unlike the personal-best ambitions of some amateur athletes.
The notion that the "job of jazz" is to break out of ruts strikes me as one of those Romantic readings of how art operates--it has just enough truth in it to sound good, but it is a kind of flattening of the complexities of making, performing, sharing, and transmitting art. Some of us devise swathes of new ways of doing things. Some of us notice that and imitiate--and maybe do a bit of second-tier innovating along with our imitating. Some of us just bolt stuff together and hope it sounds good. And some of us only feel comfortable within the confines of a tradition or convention-set or style. That's the way it is in any primate troupe.Last edited by RLetson; 04-18-2023 at 08:12 PM.
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Whatever style of music you don't like tends to all sound the same. Seems to me that whatever defines the style makes songs sound similar and the differences will be glossed over by the uninterested parties.
The pro players I listen to on recordings do not all sound the same to me.
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It's not about recognizing guitarists of the young generation, it's about the fact that they already have their imitators. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
It makes everyone sound the same.Also, when it comes to the guitar.
Guitarists play guitars - jazz musicians mainly on arch-tops, semi-hollow and flamenco musicians on classical guitars - flamenco.
I don't know if the average listener can even tell the difference...
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