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I'm sorry. This wasn't it. If you want to educate me, I am open to it. But we are not even speaking about the same thing at this point.
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04-05-2024 05:22 PM
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All lies, blues == John Mayer
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Well …. This is what people are talking about when they talk about “blues” being an important part of jazz.
Originally Posted by emanresu
Do you not understand what I mean, or do you understand and disagree that those things are in jazz?
In the event that you’re just talking about something totally different, maybe you should explain what you’re talking about, because you’re talking about something different than others in the conversation.
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I take my leave. Carry on.
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Jazz is when upper extensions and metronome
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I mean ………….. okay? Originally Posted by emanresu
I didn’t mean that in a condescending way. You’re just working off a different definition, it sounds like.
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"Jazz" isn't a single entity with sharply defined edges, and probably the least troublesome starting point would be to establish the set of entities (performances, compostitions, musical practices, etc.) that the users of the term point to when asked to identify it. And since the term is old and some of the items and elements identified with it are even older, any attempt to define is necessarily tied to the longitudinal/historical senses. This is a version of lexicography 101, though the result of the process would not fit into a dictionary entry very comfortably. Maybe a fat scholarly book or a multipart TV documentary. . . .
Meanwhile, this keeps floating up into the Magic 8-Ball window of my mind:
Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.
--W. H. Auden, "Law, Like Love"
(I commend the entire poem to everyone, even though it's not about jazz, or even music.)
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So this is part of the problem. I guess you’d start with those things which are indisputably jazz … which are surprisingly few. King Oliver up to maybe Kind of Blue. Beyond that, you start running into people who we call jazz but who often rejected (or were at least ambivalent toward) the label on their own terms. Originally Posted by RLetson
And frankly … swing, blues, and improvisation is a pretty darned good summary of what those musics have in common.
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As an aside, I was never much for Auden’s poetry but the Shakespeare lectures are a favorite.
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Have you reread “Fleet Visit” lately, or “Fall of Rome?” I think his best poems are the tops. On the other hand, the cheesy ones are better known. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Bluegrass may swing, but does it groove?
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Every day we stray further from god. Originally Posted by emanresu
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Ah, lately, no. Nothing against them, anyway. Just didn’t really hit me when I read him. Then again poetry needs a few reads and I probably haven’t given him that, for the most part. Originally Posted by Kirk Garrett
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Yeah, I'm in! Originally Posted by Litterick
Oh... Originally Posted by Litterick
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So, looking at my calendar with the "2024" date I realise that I have been doing this stuff for over sixty years.
In that time I have played traditional "British Folk Music", blues, bluegrass, rock, "jazz [in its many incarnations]", classical, neo-classical, experimental, free-form, atonal, "anything but pop" music.
In that time I have had many complaints: but never heard "that is not jazz" - more often it would be "I came to hear xyzz=style, why are you playing jazz?"
This leads me to conclude that "JAZZ" is an all encompassing form of music that can shelter anyone under its broad tent.
In other words it is a state of mind rather than a defined structure.
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There’s lots of things in the world will a well defined core and no real edge.
There’s also a human need to draw a line somewhere for various reasons. The fact that people will argue can engage in endless debates about where this line should be drawn should not be mistaken for telling us anything to do with the thing itself. Instead, it’s a good way to learn about the people drawing the lines.
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Thinking more deeply about what I wrote above I would have to say that many of the musicians I have played with over the the years, while being close to masters in their commercial genres, would have times where they played not by ear or written score but from the senses. They would play what was in their mind/body/emotion at the given time. If they happened to be in a situation where there were other people to accompany them and it worked then they would have called that "Jazz".
So maybe "jazz" is the inherent ability to empathise with and follow another musician's intent and mental suggestion - I know that the last is incomplete; but how many times while free soloing with another have you "known" where they would move next.? Even if you work on formulas of melodic and harmonic development just how many times have you and a musical partner arrived at the same, slightly unexpected, destination? That is JAZZ!
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Hmmm. If Manouche swing is jazz, why not bluegrass? It’s not far away. String bands were common in jazz in the prewar era.
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Thats a nice turn of phrase Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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I’ve come to thinking of jazz as a particular social way of making music (“social music” being Miles’s coinage) - I actually think many of things we think of as being stylistically characteristic of jazz - extended harmony, poly meter and blue notes - emerge naturally from the way in which the music is made. (Interestingly theory doesn’t often seem to acknowledge the reality of the bandstand.)
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If jazz had a well-defined core, we would not argue about Marsalis. We would agree that his three conditions are right, or wrong. We would know whether or not they describe the core. Alternative explanations, such as the conditions being historically important for Jazz but no longer necessary, would not arise.
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Old lady: "Oh, please Mr. Waller, you must be able to tell me what jazz is?"
Fats Waller: "Mam, if you haven't found out by now, you never will."
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In some ways it seems like we have two opposites to a spectrum …
… some people who use a restrictive definition of jazz.
… some people who insist on calling any non-classical music produced by people with music degrees jazz.
But while those seem like opposing perspectives it occurs to me that both come from maybe an excessive attachment to “jazz” as a label.
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This is the root of it all imo. Jazz is sophisticated music, so everyone wants to be jazz. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Yeah and worth mentioning that almost from the outset the musicians themselves resisted being classified alongside the thing that came before (the bebop “NO DANCING” signs for example). Originally Posted by BreckerFan
And starting in the 60s a pretty broad movement to explicitly ditch the word jazz in favor of a more representative tradition (straight line from “The New Thing” to “Black American Music.”)
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