Wynton vs Herbie 1985

[princeplanet]

While I can understand that meaning (to be dismissive or even disrespectful), that POV when it relates to one's own legacy is misguided (at best), if not downright ridicules.

But thanks for the explanation.

Hmm, I should be careful not to put words in the mouths of these guys! Herbie was and is obviously proud of his amazing early years, and Wynton knows this as you'd suspect. Let's say it another way - that Wynton seemed disappointed that young audiences exposed to "Rockit" in 1985 weren't aware that this was from the same man that created veritable monuments in the Jazz firmament in the decades prior. The fact that this concerned Wynton more than it did Herbie speaks to a greater concern that Jazz was losing its audience, in no small part due to the artists themselves abandoning their earlier, more sophisticated Jazz directions. It's a fair enough complaint, I reckon, and no different to the way people complained when Theatre was dumbed down to Movies, which got dumbed down to TV, which has been further dumbed down to TikTok etc etc..

Maybe Wynton was disappointed that there was no Federation of Traditionalists (hehe) or something offering any resistance, like there may have been over the centuries in other arts (painters, poets, writers etc). They just kinda meekly rolled over... or so it seemed. I've been saying for years that the exciting areas in Jazz set up by the mid 60's were pregnant with incredibly enormous possibilities, probably worthy of another 50 years of exploration. But that scene fizzled out way too soon for my liking, and within a few short years we had On the Corner and Headhunters, much loved by a lot of folks here, but way different planet!

Anyway, looks like I'm pushing an unpopular POV, ah well...

[jameslovestal]

Let's say it another way - that Wynton seemed disappointed that young audiences exposed to "Rockit" in 1985 weren't aware that this was from the same man that created veritable monuments in the Jazz firmament in the decades prior. The fact that this concerned Wynton more than it did Herbie speaks to a greater concern that Jazz was losing its audience, in no small part due to the artists themselves abandoning their earlier, more sophisticated Jazz directions :

Now the fact that jazz lost its audience (and became the least listened to music in America) and that younger audiences exposed to "fusion" by solid jazz musicians, often wouldn't go back and check out the more straight ahead works of said musicians, is a very interesting topic to me.
(Another example would be Deadheads and Phish fans I knew that got into the jam-band music of John Scofield and Medeski Martin & Wood but had little interest in Scofield's straight-ahead recordings).

But can one say that a primary reason was because jazz musicians like Herbie, John, etc... decided to go in a non-straight-ahead jazz musical direction? I don't think so. Anything that gets people (of any age), to listen to instrumental music is a plus, as far as I'm concerned.

[princeplanet]

Let's not forget that he 1960's was History's most astonishing decade. Period. Everything that went in at one end of the 60's came out different at the other end. Everything. Jazz had no more chance of surviving that decade than, say, the Merseybeat sound did, or surf rock...

[ccroft]

What you say about the 60's is true Prince. I was 15 in '69. I had been listening to Birth of Cool, Giant Steps, Blue Train, some Django, some Wes and so on. Then I heard Nefertitti and it really touched me and opened my mind. Then Silent Way, and I was hooked. It's where I wanted to go. It fit the times and it felt like me. I tracked Martino, McLaughlin, Coryell and so on. Saw Miles around B.Brew time and that was life-changing for me.

I don't feel you're pushing an unpopular POV. You have a clear idea of your 'Golden Age'. Others maybe don't agree. Some BeBoppers might put it a bit earlier. Big band lovers earlier still. Mine might be the last half of the sixties into mid 70's. Actually, I like hearing everything that Wayne went through with his music from Messengers through Weather Report right through to the end.

You seem to be making the assumption that everything that happened in jazz in the 70's was about $$$. Some of it may have been, but a lot of it was about being relevant to the times and and not going around the same old race-track. Jazz guys are always looking to evolve in one way or another. Miles did it to bebop in '59.

When I was about 18 I sat in with Dave Friesen, who was running a jazz coffee house at the time. We played a Silent Way type jam with that wide open feeling I loved. I was very stoked afterwards. He said "All you guitarists seem to love that modal stuff. If you really want to be a jazz musician you need to learn a standard a day for a year." I thanked him for everything, but said to my sax buddy afterwards "why would I want to play anything standard?"

[princeplanet]

standard[/I]?"

Haha, if only I'd realised in my younger playing years that noodling to one chord vamps is actually as "standard" as it gets for guitar players!

[Average Joe]

It's not a matter of right or wrong imho, and maybe a correction was needed. But I do think the the concervatism that marsalis became a spokesperson for eventually made jazz less attractive to audiences. Not that it's marsalis' "fault", the man is a good deal more nuanced than he's often given credit for. But it's representative of a movement back to the Old Virtues, and Old Virtues may be interesting and worthwhile for an incrowd, but to the public it can look suspiciosly like regression or a lack of growth. I love standards or bop, post-bop etc as much as the next guy, but playing 70 year old show tunes is not how you grow new audiences. Jazz-derived or adjacent can fill concert halls (Wulfpeck, Snarky Puppy, Norah Jones, etc), for straight ahead, the True Art, the audience is a handful of men as old as me.

Maybe jazz had to move into the museum and the conservatory, maybe it was good for the art and maybe it was necessary as a means of production when it was no longer popular music and therefore couldn't compete in the popular sphere. But it was also a willful move into a niche in terms of audience.

[Litterick]

Let's not forget that he 1960's was History's most astonishing decade. Period. Everything that went in at one end of the 60's came out different at the other end. Everything. Jazz had no more chance of surviving that decade than, say, the Merseybeat sound did, or surf rock...

The 1960s is history's most astonishing decade only because we are writing the history. None of us were around in the 1780s. As Wordsworth wrote in The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

You had to be there to appreciate it. The 1960s was important for those were young at the time and, to some extent, for those who grew up in the remainder of the twentieth century. Younger generations will know nothing of that decade, although they may still feel its effects.

Of course the times affected jazz, but they did not destroy it. From a distance, it is possible to see the sixties as a time when jazz was saved from fossilisation. Larry Coryell once recalled how his generation was tired of playing standards in common time, when so much more was being done by rock musicians. It is also possible to see the eighties as a time of reaction against the changes of the sixties, and Wynton Marsalis as part of that reaction. Straight-ahead jazz was risen from the grave, with the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Fusion was defused. When history was rewritten by Marsalis and Ken Burns at the end of the century, the shock of the new was replaced by the dull thud of the old. All that was new melted into air. Jazz became chamber music, preformed at the Lincoln Center.

[princeplanet]

The 1960s is history's most astonishing decade only because we are writing the history. None of us were around in the 1780s. As Wordsworth wrote in The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement:
...

Fair point, of course there are other decades that were world changing, 1890's, 1920's, the war decades etc. You might as well throw in the 2010's if you agree that the smart phone era has made it's mark on us all. But the 60's turbo charged change in every sing facet of life world wide, and the fact it was so well recorded will leave Historians with enough to get their head around for centuries, you'd think.

Interesting you feel that Wynton and the Young Lions had a regressive effect on Jazz. I don't see why turning on a new generation to classic old forms is a death knell. If you listen to new music being made inspired by the old greats, it's far from "chamber music" that belongs in a museum:

(Link works for me)

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

There's plenty of life left in those classic styles - plenty of fresh takes. It's not like classical music at all in that regard, a hundred years after Schoenberg (I'm a big fan BTW), people are still seeking out Bach and Mozart performances far more than serial composers, people seem to like museums! But try telling David Binney his latest album is regressive! Styles or forms need not limit creativity, I have a 24 hr playlist of blueses from 1955 to 1967, no tracks are in any way similar to any other. And everyone knows that pop songs still use intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle8-chrous-outro... never gets old, apparently.

So give me a classic Jazz quartet or quintet, even one that plays predominately 32 bar standards. There are endless challenges in those classic changes, and if the players are good enough (and yeah, it's a big IF), you should be entertained for several lifetimes. And if the players are getting bored, they're probably not trying hard enough to find a fresh angle... or they should write some new 32 bar tunes!

Bop. Lives. Matter.

[2bornot2bop]

I don’t care for either because they’re with Columbia Records. Don’t you know it was Columbia that killed STAX records? True story.

In 1970 the head of Columbia was the great Clive Davis. Clive cut a deal with Stax in 1973, giving Columbia 15% and Stax 85% of the take of future earnings, and for that Columbia agreed to distribute Stax recordings.

Less than a year later Clive was brought up on bogus charges, fired, replaced by another exec.

Then what does Columbia do? They decide that Stax was given too sweetheart of a deal by Clive, and they want to renegotiate the Stax contract. Stax refuses to renegotiate.

What was Columbia’s next move? They froze all of Stax’s inventory in the warehouse! Their desire was to either force a new contract or kill Stax permanently. Stax attempted to land another deal with a local bank in Memphis but no deal was to be had. The result was by 1974 Stax was dead, and also the first bank that Stax had an agreement with came in and took all of the Stax master’s.

The big fish always eats the smaller fish.

But in one respect black music was not allowed to flourish from Stax. How long could Stax have survived after 1973 if the original deal remained in place? We’ll never know. But at the time Stax had Grammy and Oscar winners on its payroll, and they were still putting out hits. Unfortunately, both Stax and Motown would be gone by the mid 70’s, and only Philadelphia International Records remained as the last bastion of black music in America. The record business always was dirty, and everyone knows that. But what happened almost echoed Wynton’s thoughts about how race impacts everything in America. And if your eyes are truly open you don’t have to be black to understand that.

[Marc Grossman]

I don’t care for either because they’re with Columbia Records. Don’t you know it was Columbia that killed STAX records? True story.

In 1970 the head of Columbia was the great Clive Davis. Clive cut a deal with Stax in 1973, giving Columbia 15% and Stax 85% of the take of future earnings, and for that Columbia agreed to distribute Stax recordings.

Less than a year later Clive was brought up on bogus charges, fired, replaced by another exec.

Then what does Columbia do? They decide that Stax was given too sweetheart of a deal by Clive, and they want to renegotiate the Stax contract. Stax refuses to renegotiate.

What was Columbia’s next move? They froze all of Stax’s inventory in the warehouse! Their desire was to either force a new contract or kill Stax permanently. Stax attempted to land another deal with a local bank in Memphis but no deal was to be had. The result was by 1974 Stax was dead, and also the first bank that Stax had an agreement with came in and took all of the Stax master’s.

The big fish always eats the smaller fish.

But in one respect black music was not allowed to flourish from Stax. How long could Stax have survived after 1973 if the original deal remained in place? We’ll never know. But at the time Stax had Grammy and Oscar winners on its payroll, and they were still putting out hits. Unfortunately, both Stax and Motown would be gone by the mid 70’s, and only Philadelphia International Records remained as the last bastion of black music in America. The record business always was dirty, and everyone knows that. But what happened almost echoed Wynton’s thoughts about how race impacts everything in America. And if your eyes are truly open you don’t have to be black to understand that.

Black popular music in the 60s and 70s was incredible. Not that it wasn't prior to that.
But they made so many great records within the pop, soul, funk, and rock genres.
Motown and Philadelphia were incredible. Holland/Dozier/Holland and Huff/Gamble and Bell just made so much high quality, original, accessible, and beautiful music.
And then there were excellent artists like Stevie Wonder, Barry White, Issac Hayes, Jackson 5, Sly Stone, Otis Redding who were in their prime.
And of course, the phenomenal Hendrix who could write, produce and play in any style.
Obviously, the Black contributions to jazz during this time were off the charts.
I still rate Huff and Gambles songs and productions during this period as the pinnacle in American popular music in the last 75 years. Too bad they didn't continue.

[ccroft]

Just to say a little more about the late sixties: when I was there, standards with walking base, ride cymbal and 2-5's sounded way too much like my parents music for my liking.

At age 70 I listen to it a lot. I have a feeling both Wynton and Herbie may have softened up a bit over 40(!) years too.

[princeplanet]

I don’t care for either because they’re with Columbia Records. Don’t you know it was Columbia that killed STAX records? True story.

....The big fish always eats the smaller fish.

.....

Ah, so that's how it went down, interesting. Thanks for sharing. Still, you can't blame Herbie or Wynton for Columbia's actions...?

[princeplanet]

Just to say a little more about the late sixties: when I was there, standards with walking base, ride cymbal and 2-5's sounded way too much like my parents music for my liking.

At age 70 I listen to it a lot. I have a feeling both Wynton and Herbie may have softened up a bit over 40(!) years too.

But you still listen to stuff from the 70's and beyond too, right? Here's a question that's probably impossible to answer, are you listening for nostalgic reasons when listening to say, mid 70's jazz? And if you were born 30 years later, and your parents had a stack of Jazz records from the 60's and 70's, which decade do you think you'd be more drawn to? This is not to suggest that I think younger people would prefer the 60's to the 70's, in my experience they don't. But I wish some of them would...

[ccroft]

At this point I'm far beyond any influence my parent's music might've had on me. Actually, they weren't all that musical beyond dancing. Swing, square, or ballroom. Nobody knows how I got the bug.

Nostalgia? No. I'm into now. Good music from the 70's is good music now. Good music from 1720 is good music now. Maybe I'm a Buddhist. I know I was for at least 4 or 5 years anyway.

I'm all over the place. Music I like does something to me that I don't even try to understand. Sometimes it's not even jazz.

[2bornot2bop]

But you still listen to stuff from the 70's and beyond too, right? Here's a question that's probably impossible to answer, are you listening for nostalgic reasons when listening to say, mid 70's jazz? And if you were born 30 years later, and your parents had a stack of Jazz records from the 60's and 70's, which decade do you think you'd be more drawn to? This is not to suggest that I think younger people would prefer the 60's to the 70's, in my experience they don't. But I wish some of them would...

Personally, the biggest jazz recording I recall was from 1971. It was Freddie Hubbard’s, First Light, which featured great Benson and Hubert Laws, some of CTI’s finest. I was 16, having played trumpet in jr high. So that album stuck with me the remainder of my life. I still listen to it. Stylistically, Freddie’s playing was everything that I wanted in my own. And interesting that it was even occasionally on the radio. I didn’t hear any other recordings on the radio until another 5 years after I got to Philly, compliments of Uncle Sam.

And, personally Hubbard runs circles around Wynton Marsalis. I get that Wynton was young and from a jazz family but as a trumpet and flugelhorn player I never cared for Wynton’s style nor material. I thought Wynton was, meh. I get he’s won awards for Classical recordings, but he’s no Miles or Freddie Hubbard.

[Sam Sherry]

And, personally Hubbard runs circles around Wynton Marsalis. I get that Wynton was young and from a jazz family but as a trumpet and flugelhorn player I never cared for Wynton’s style nor material.

I think they're both jaw-dropping.
(Personally, between Wynton and Branford I would rather listen to Branford most of the time.)

Nobody can argue about young Freddie Hubbard's ability to turn peoples' hair curly:

But young Wynton Marsalis was pretty paint-peelin':

[2bornot2bop]

I think they're both jaw-dropping.
(Personally, between Wynton and Branford I would rather listen to Branford most of the time.)

Nobody can argue about young Freddie Hubbard's ability to turn peoples' hair curly:

But young Wynton Marsalis was pretty paint-peelin':

One from Indy, one from New Orleans. And yet, I had a talk for about 5 minutes one night at Seattle’s Jazz Alley with Freddie Hubbard. As he pointed to the black and white photo hanging on the wall, he spoke glowingly about Pops saying he was the one who deserved more recognition than anyone for starting it all. And personally I didn’t own one Louis Armstrong recording, but then again like most I was stuck in my own generation, until many years later.

[ccroft]

...I didn’t own one Louis Armstrong recording, but then again like most I was stuck in my own generation, until many years later.

You nailed with one sentence what I couldn't make clear with several paragraphs!

[Doctor Jeff]

I think they're both jaw-dropping.
(Personally, between Wynton and Branford I would rather listen to Branford most of the time.)

I’m going to see Branford Marsalis on Saturday—playing Dead music with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead.

Branford’s embrace of different musics is quite interesting given his brother’s very vocal conservatism, at least in the 80’s/90’s. But then Wynton went on to play with Willie Nelson and Eric Clapton. (To be fair those were Live at Lincoln Center concerts, and featured mainly country or traditional blues.)

[princeplanet]

.... And personally I didn’t own one Louis Armstrong recording, but then again like most I was stuck in my own generation, until many years later.

Yeah, says it all. And some of us, if we're lucky, will make it all the way back to Satch. And hopefully it will all make sense!

[Stevebol]

Wynton vs Herbie. The Purist and Crossbreader Duke It Out – Wynton Marsalis Official Website

I love this - it's a heavy discussion that no-one likes to have any more. At it's core, it's Art vs Pop, but it's also so much more!

And it's as relevant today as it was 1985, or 1945, or 1845... I know most of you know what to expect, but I urge you to take a few minutes to read it, and then give us your take. Is your view any different to what it would have been in 1985? I know mine is!

Prince was kicking record execs out of the recording studio when he was 19 years old.

[henryrobinett]

It was precisely THIS interview that pissed me off about Wynton forever. I read it when it came out and formed my opinion. Then. I just read the first few questions and answers and I feel exactly the same. Wynton was new on the scene. He had been playing with Blakey. He blew up because of his blistering technique. His first album was out and did well. This interview was supporting his second album, kind of a Miles 2nd Quintet thing. And he’s ARROGANT AF. The question is asked and HE IS the first one to open his mouth, full of opinions and disrespect for Herbie. I hate him all over again. What a complete AH. If he could play like Freddie or Brownie, ok. But he can’t. Because he got that ridiculous Columbia contract for both jazz and classical his head got too big to fit in any room. Don’t like his arrogance.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[Stevebol]

Wynton vs Herbie. The Purist and Crossbreader Duke It Out – Wynton Marsalis Official Website

I love this - it's a heavy discussion that no-one likes to have any more. At it's core, it's Art vs Pop, but it's also so much more!

And it's as relevant today as it was 1985, or 1945, or 1845... I know most of you know what to expect, but I urge you to take a few minutes to read it, and then give us your take. Is your view any different to what it would have been in 1985? I know mine is!

I just listened to Wynton sing blues at Lincoln Center. I'm so traumatized I'm ready to start a new career as a gangster rapper.

[princeplanet]

Yeah, not much love for poor old Wynton out there... and although I haven't really followed his career, I still say that in 1985, I believe his intentions were good in reminding people how special and important, like really important, the classic jazz eras were. Seemed like no-one wanted to hear it back then, but by golly, he was right! He was right to say it then, and he's still right. Someone's gotta stand up and declare it (yeah, I know, I wish it was someone cool, too).

But I mean c'mon, most of you guys prefer those classic older styles (the polls said so), you don't have to agree with everything he said (says) - just the important stuff...?

FWIW, I prefer vintage architecture, cars and movies. Does that make me a mouldy old fig, or irrelevant? I would rather hang out with Miles, Dexter or Dolphy than anyone that's alive today.
If someone can find something wrong with that, I'm not sure I could care less...