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What do you expect when you post definitive myopic opinions in a dick-ish manner?
Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
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04-04-2024 12:35 PM
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Ah. Well, in that case I think Neely is also incorrect in paraphrasing (this) Marsalis. He's describing improvisation, swing, and blues, in a much more symbolic sense, and Neely is treating his words too literally. Neely's a pretty smart guy, so I doubt he actually missed Wynton's drift, and was more likely just trying to stir the pot a little for its own sake. Now I wonder how Delfayo, Jason, and Ellis define it ... Originally Posted by enalnitram
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Well okay. Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
… on the “golden age.” We frequently hear bebop referred to as “the common practice” jazz. Prewar musicians thought it was terrible music, let alone jazz. Any definition of a style period that encompasses Interstellar Space and the Hot Five is also practically useless.
As for there being no other styles to obscure that … Cool, bebop, free, swing, and prewar music are themselves very very different styles, so I’m not sure that’s particularly useful in the first place. But also blues, gospel, soul, Western swing country, Tin Pan Alley Broadway, ummmm Bossa and Brazilian music, other Central American and Latin musics, salsa … should I continue, or is that sufficient?
It’s possible you have actually figured out the singular clear definition of jazz and solved a problem that people have been arguing about for almost a century. It’s also possible that all those people aren’t “irrational” and “neurotic, and you actually haven’t solved it so thoroughly as you think.
NB … I for one am both irrational and neurotic, just not so much about this.
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Oh, yes, it is 'jazzy' because by that time players like Rice had introduced extended harmonies into his rhythm playing - 9ths, 13ths, and so on. But always within the spirit of the genre; he never went over the top. Western Swing already had those sounds but Rice put them into bluegrass. Originally Posted by RLetson
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Quite. And especially if he thinks Earl Scruggs defines bluegrass for the last few years! Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Doesn't take long to start a bar fight, does it?
But I salute this logical gem:
Outstanding :-) Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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I assume most people would label this as bluegrass\jazz fusion?
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Nah, that's Dawg Music! Originally Posted by jameslovestal
(which is yes, definitely bluegrass/jazz fusion)
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What’s often missing when speaking of jazz-but hinting at the above “it’s jazz when it sounds like jazz” is the the specific idiomatic phrasing of the music: slides, growls, gliss, the legato nature of a good bebop line in which staccato functions as a kind of accent, the use of accents across bar lines to create a polyrhythm, the unstoppable forward momentum, freight train like feel roaring down the track, (as opposed to jumping up and down in a static way, i.e, rock and roll). and the fact that the drums and bass comp in an improvised way. Someone’s downbeat becomes another’s accent, as the entire band is playing different rhythms in a 12/8 basis that works beautifully.
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Taxonomy is great fun, especially when it attempts to draw sharp lines across/around complex, constantly-changing sets of items. And humans making and experiencing "art" is about as complex and constantly-changing as it gets.
A big part of my professional life (English teacher, literary critic, book reviewer) has involved talking about literary art, and one thing I learned in the course of writing my dissertation--and teaching undergrad lit courses--was how hard it is to devise categories (genres) that don't leak at the edges or fail to account for some items. Why is this text "poetry" and that one "prose"? What the hell is a "prose poem"? A "nonfiction novel"? "Creative nonfiction"? Why is this story "literature" and that one "pop entertainment"?
As a reviewer specializing in science fiction and fantasy, questions of definition and pigeonholing are perennial and frustrating. How much and what kind of "science" makes a story science fiction? What exactly is a "space opera"? A tour through Wikipedia articles on SF terms will get you more amateur literary taxonomy than anyone should have to endure. (FWIW, my dissertation, a half-century ago, dealt extensively with some taxonomic issues in supernatural fantasy. Don't get me started.)
To finally come around to jazz: any even halfway-useful attempt to "define" the term or the items it gets attached to is not going to look like a genus-and-species or college-dictionary definition. Instead, it's going to be a long, historically-rooted description of various speech communities that have used the term, what exactly they were pointing to when they said it, what the characteristics of those musics were and where they came from.
There is not one, logically-describable "jazz." There is, however, a family of musics, and musical practices and products--and those practices (improvisation, harmonic and rhythmic agility) are not unique to "jazz."
(Long appendices on lexicography, linguistics, and semantics omitted as a service to the audience.)
Yrs in pedantry,
Etc.
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I've got that album, but by accident. Someone lent it to me and I forgot about it. I think he probably did too :-) Originally Posted by jameslovestal
I'm not fond of it. Call it Dawg if we must but to me it's neither bluegrass nor jazz. They're not playing jazz and most of it is just pentatonic chord outlining which isn't really bluegrass either. It sounds vaguely like it because it's played with bluegrass instruments but that's not enough. Not for me, anyway.
Incidentally, Swing 51 is very last track on the album and that one does sound jazzy. It's the rest that don't. If my memory serves me right.
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I think Adam is generally trying to oppose gatekeeping with the word jazz, whereas Wynton wants to preserve the jazz tradition. I can see where both are coming from, although I think I side with Wynton. Patrick Bartley has pointed out how gratuitously the word jazz is used to describe all kinds of things that aren't really jazz. Calling something jazz lends it an air of musical seriousness and sophistication, which is why everyone wants to use it.
But I also think Adam is right that Wyntons definition is not complete. Swing, blues, and improvisation or not precisely defined terms, and it's not precisely clear how they're being applied. Do you need all three in one song, or one album, or one body of work? I think instrumentation should be part of the definition too; I doubt Wynton would want to include keytar solos in jazz. Trying to abstract some generalizations that do justice to all the particulars is an impossible task.
Musical genres are not discrete entities that can be clearly distinguished. Music exists in a historical continuum, with genres constantly overlapping and feeding into each other. I think a good analogy would be a color spectrum; at the center of blue, you have something that is incontrovertibly blue, but the precise boundary between blue and green is not clear.
I think it would clear things up to call what Wynton is talking about straight ahead jazz (hard bop, bebop, post bop, swing). You can pretty clearly tell that that is all jazz. I think jazz fusion is another valid genre that falls under the broader umbrella of jazz. What else is under that umbrella is unclear. It's probably the case that the word jazz on it's own doesn't really mean much at this point.
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Marsalis is right if you want jazz to be a musical form that stopped changing in the early 1950s. He keeps Miles out. His definition excludes almost everybody who does not wear a suit on stage, and many who do.
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Blues is so far from jazz. Why even include it?
edit: the thought is, jazz doesn't own blues at all. it just took it and toyed with it.
this is not jazz:
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Marsalis is saying that blues is an essential element of jazz. Hard to disagree with that notion. I’m not sure what it would mean if “jazz owned the blues,” but I’m not sure anyone is saying it does. Originally Posted by emanresu
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Blues itself is very far from jazz. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Most jazz pieces have no blues in them.
When taking a blues piece, when jazzified enough, it will not sound like blues at all. It'll sound like jazz.
Why even mention the blues when it comes to jazz? The source? Yes, but completely turned into something else.
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This is super not correct. Originally Posted by emanresu
I think the first thing is that guitarists often think of “blues” as being “BB King licks” but we should definitely be thinking of vocal blues when someone like Wynton is talking about blues. He’s a smart cat and he’s referring to it the way a musicologist would. When hes talking about blues he’s referring to it stylistically—use of blue notes, bends and other microtonal techniques, timbres from the music, the way the melody relates to the accompaniment, etc etc.
This stuff is ALL over jazz. And honestly I’d probably agree with wynton that it’s an important part of what makes jazz sound like jazz. A lot of modern music is wonderful and I love it, but it feels distinct from jazz to me, and I think this is actually a really insightful summary of why.
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Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Originally Posted by pamosmusic
All of it?
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Yeah. Originally Posted by emanresu
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Yeah. Whenever they decide to define jazz is to try to contain it. And give it rules. This just doesn't work at all.
Most of jazz has nothing to do with blues except the feel for the rhythm.
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Again, this is just objectively incorrect Originally Posted by emanresu
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I'm literally writing some worksheets at the moment about the roots of bop, and of course I'm talking about Prez, which means I'm talking about the blues.
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Without an explanation, I fold. You win. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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I did explain, didn’t I? Originally Posted by emanresu
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This was the explanation. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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