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In the May/June issue of Departures Magazine, there's a short article on Wayne Shorter. He's now 81 years old.
The interviewer asked him, "Where do you think jazz is going?"
Laughingly, he replied, "Where is jazz going? It's gone. Jazz is just another word for creativity, to dare one's self."
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05-15-2015 07:18 AM
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It'll take most people more than 81 years to figure out what he really means. Step one: You might turn off the computer and dare to listen and see. He makes doing look so natural and easy.
Shorter's the cat.
David
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Gotta watch out for that Wayne dude!
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I read a story about a Weather Report roadie asking Wayne Shorter for the time. Wayne started spouting off about what time really meant to all of us and whether it was relative to this or that and it's relationship to space and dimensions and astro whatever ... until Joe Zawinul cut him off and said "It's 4:29. Come on man, you oughta know better than to ask Wayne that shit"
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Also it was a book (I'm blanking on the name) that was a series of interviews with jazz heavies where the guy sat in a room with the musicians' and listened to the musicians' favorite recordings (almost always not their own). Then he'd talk to them about them. The idea was that musicians are always either too proud or too embarrassed or feel awkward or obligated to self promote etc when they are forced to talk about their own music but were much less guarded when talking about other music they admired. The author thought he'd get a much deeper understanding of their creative impetus by talking to them about any music they were into as opposed to trying to ask them directly about their own. It was fascinating.
Wayne Shorter was into classical music and Lethal Weapon. No shit.
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Pretty much all you can say about it. I loathe the conversations that happen pretty much on schedule monthly "how can we make jazz more popular?" or "is jazz dead?".
We can't make it more popular. The reason it was so popular 60 years ago is because it was all there was. 50 years ago you had the rock thing gain popularity, that's when jazz fell behind. There are too many styles of music, and you can't force anyone to like something they just don't like. As a jazz musician, you just need to be open enough to accept this fact and to embrace other music styles that you probably will have to play if you want to make a living.
Anyways, most people study jazz not to swing anymore, but just to explore improvisation inside of a built concept.
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Originally Posted by jtizzle
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People who think jazz is frozen in time need to put away their Verve albums and go see some jazz.
I could name 100 players right now who aren't stuck in 1950-something.
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Originally Posted by jtizzle
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Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
My own situation and those of the people I hang out with and play with (I'm talking, again, of guys in my generation, under 30, and in the circle of music that I work in), we all went or go to school, we study the music of our predecessors, and some of us get pretty deep into it, but the things we are trying to do are so far from that. Personally, along with my jazz studies, I also study classical music, reading and analyzing scores and composition techniques. When not studying music, I listen to a lot of different styles of things. I love metal, progressive stuff, and I enjoy jamming hip-hop and even the most lame pop music you can imagine, for fun. All of that exists, and it's options that you have of what you can listen to, but as soon as you listen to it, it informs your ear, and will affect your writing, improvising, or even your reaction to simply listening to other music.
I like to make these analogies with food. Imagine that ever since you were born, you've been eating something like tofu puree. Something with no flavor to it. Then you turn 17, 18, or 19, and someone gives you a slice of pizza, a bacon cheese burger, and a bowl of ice cream with coke. That stuff is delicious! Then you wonder how you could have been eating something with no flavor while such thing like what you just had in existence. All of a sudden, that food informs how you taste the puree afterwards, and it gives you something to compare to. Now you want to try all sorts of foods too. So the way you prepare your food, taste it, and even compare it to things change. Change the food to music and there you go (except, music doesn't make you fat, haha).
I'm taking my music studies as a way to learn a certain concept of improvisation in order to apply that to my own music, which I would not call jazz. I mean, we call guys like Kurt Rosenwinkel jazz. And yeah, half his stuff is swinging. I've spoken to Colin Stranahan, who plays with him occasionally, and he's told me the way they treat the band is almost like a rock thing. Especially with the newer music that Kurt is writing. He's always sending "riffs" and ideas over so they'll learn it. And that other half that I spoke about does not swing. Sure, they improvise. But blues musicians, African musicians also improvise, and we don't call that jazz. There's a European style of improvised music, but we still label that as Classical music.
Jazz, and more specifically, bebop, has a greatly developed concept of improvising inside of tonalities. which makes it great as a style to study. Steve has many deep and detailed analyses of these concepts, of their advantages and flaws. He is also clear that it's something already done, which we can't do again. Even if we tried.
I was reading an interview today with Spike Wilner (owner of Smalls) conducted by a great Polish guitarist, Rafal Sarnecki, where Spike is talking about how a lot of the music is not jazz (he's pretty conservative in those terms). I totally agree with him in all those points, the difference being that I (and a lot of my peers) embrace the other styles of improvised music, while he probably does not. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, there's probably an age difference issue, but the reason doesn't matter.
My point is that which I made in my first post. Jazz won't ever be the great important thing that it was over half a century ago. Things change, and new things come about. Pamos made a great point that with all these styles that are around, putting them together is the most logical thing. For those that know Miles Okazaki, he's studied a lot of Indian music, and has applied that to his own. He's also heavily studied a lot of pretty traditional jazz, mostly a lot of Charlie Christian. His music sounds absolutely nothing like either of these things.
I also don't consider myself an authority on any point that I've made here, so take anything I say lightly.
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Originally Posted by jtizzle
Look, you hear a lot of "Jazz is dead, like Latin, get over it" , "or mid century Jazz now belongs in a museum" etc etc
This may make the objector seem (or perhaps even feel) hip, modern, more important or relevant. After all, who wants to be seen as the fuddy duddy, stuck-in-the-mud old square complaining how things used to be "better when I was alive - woops, I mean young!" ...
But wait a sec, why is it then considered ok to institutionalise and regurgitate other kinds of "classic" music? Let's look at classical or "fine art" music from Bach through to Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and beyond, there's at least a dozen classic "periods" in fine art music that have been "frozen", and reheated and served to an adoring public that frankly find more nourishment there than in any modern music whatsoever. Is there something wrong with them?
What if I prefer mid century cars, architecture, movies? Am I some weird fetishist?
Classic periods in art should be deeply respected, methinks. Something that captured and reflected the zeitgeist of the times, like the swing to hard bop era obviously did, can't be shrugged off. If I feel more nourished by 60's McCoy Tyner than by current Brad Mehldau, maybe it's because I feel it on a deeper level. "It goes into my body" as Miles would say, in a way that much post 70's stuff does not. Because it's closer to the "tradition"? Well, yes, the same tradition that put Jazz on the map in the first place. You think that what you hear in Jazz clubs today could ever have captured the world's ear/heart/soul like classic era Jazz did?
It's not just old people that think modern art/music/fashion etc is vacuous and pretentious, there's plenty of young people who feel the same way. You'll say it's dependant on perspective, one man's floor is another man's ceiling yadayada, you may even say that the purpose of art is to reflect the present, not to repeat the past. Brilliant, I agree.
But Jazz was never just art, first and foremost it was entertainment. Teenage girls would check out Don Byas in the early 40's and declare he was the end - not because of his suave looks, but because of his playing. Teenage girls! That's broad appeal, and when you add high artistic merit you have something that will be remembered far longer than almost all of Jazz made after the classic golden era. If you believe that, as I do, then that's pretty sobering...
So obviously I agree with Spike's article, it ain't Jazz if it's not tied somehow to the tradition and not swinging. Music that calls itself Jazz- that really isn't - is probably harming Jazz's reputation, and spoiling it for any would-be convert that has no patience for modern improvised art music using a fusion of influences. And hey, that doesn't mean I have anything against such music, I like some of it, and much weirder stuff than any of it too, but classic era Jazz is now treated like the embarrassing grandfather you don't want your friends to see, and I think that's the problem. If you look at Post Bop mid 60's Jazz, it was just getting warmed up before the plug got pulled. There were things starting up that needed another 50 years to finish, instead, the 50 years we got was insecure and misguided BS for the most part, that moved Jazz away from the "tradition" into the marginalised halls of white-geek bespectacled academia.
They took the sex out of Jazz, dammit, now ya gonna have to steal it back from those pesky Hiphoppers!Last edited by princeplanet; 05-18-2015 at 12:10 PM.
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Surely one of the great things about jazz (or whatever you wish to call it) is that it's a fairly broad church, and someone somewhere is bound to be playing just about every style there is or ever was.
If I want to see classic mainstream/swing I can see Scott Hamilton. If I want to see straight-ahead jazz guitar there's Jim Mullen. A while ago I saw Polar Bear, who were quite way out, combining Ornette Coleman-type tunes with electronica from a guy with a laptop. Recently I saw Peter Bernstein and Larry Goldings. A few years ago I saw Hiromi doing amazing fusion with Dave Fiuczynski on guitar. Not long ago I saw Ken Peplowski playing lovely swing clarinet. Soon I might be seeing Amina Figarova who is a pianist/composer with her own sextet, I'm not sure yet what she sounds like! I have also seen recently an amazing UK trumpeter called Laura Jurd, who plays superbly lyrical, swinging trumpet like a bop master, yet she also has her own projects composing quite unusual and experimental music.
So all the old styles are still going plus all the new ones, at least that's my experience here in the UK.
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Originally Posted by jtizzle
Also on the other note, I'm not as young, but of course, being a musician I hang out and play with younger folks... Living in NYC, I don't have to tell you how big is the trad jazz/hot swing scene here is. lol. And most of the gigging musicians I met in their 20's or 30's. Kids playing music their grandparents were enjoying, how cool is that? I think it's a very healthy thing for jazz, the really old jazz is hip again, and it's the kind everyone can enjoy, and dance to if you want!
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Originally Posted by princeplanet
As far as the institutionalization of classical music. If there's a music scene even worst than jazz about this, it's classical music, and a lot of the so called fans of this music are what is killing this music. I found an article a month ago or so, where they were taking reader Q&A's, and I saw what's probably the most disgusting comment I've ever seen in relationship to this topic: "Once again, Mr. Tommasini makes his pick based on the new music director’s ability-sympathy with modern music. This is the same critic who picked Debussy, Bartok and Stravinsky on his list of 10 greatest composers of all time and left off Haydn, Mahler and Tchaikovsky (not to mention Dvorak). You can’t force audiences to like something they don’t, and they-we don’t like modern music. Give me someone who excels at Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Sibelius, Schubert and so on. The garbage Mr. Tommasini is talking about will be forgotten in 10 years. Why should we have to put up with it in the meantime?".
I don't feel I even have to comment on this. This is a person who considers himself part of the audience of this music, and this is his opinion.
There needs to be room for new music, or else we won't have, in this context, a new Beethoven, Mozart, etc or whatever (not in the sense that the new composers are trying to be these people, but in the sense that there will be no great composers of their magnitude in the future).
Originally Posted by princeplanet
Originally Posted by princeplanet
With time I got into other things and more modern stuff. Today, John is probably one of my favorite guitarists and I'm ashamed to say I ever thought that way of him. But I came around because I studied more modern music and now have come to understand what he's doing. Now, I don't expect everyone in the world to study modern music. Non-musicians especially. But if you're a musician, I do expect you to try your hardest to understand everything that's going on around you and influencing your ideas. I think other instrumentalists do this more than guitarists. I hear piano players who talk about how they need to learn to play in McCoy style, Red Garland style, Chick Corea style, Art Tatum style, Wynton Kelly style, Bill Evans style, etc... Guitarists don't do this too much, there's basically the Freddie Green comping, play like an older guitarist, because people seem to jumble up all the guitarists pre-70s in one category, and then sounding modern. I rarely hear people separate guitar by musicians styles, because there's a huge difference between Wes Montgomery and Charlie Christian and Joe Pass, you know? If you're a guitarist, I expect you to study modern guitar like Pat Metheny, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and whatnot, as much as you study the tradition with guys like Charlie Christian and Wes.
Originally Posted by princeplanet
Originally Posted by princeplanet
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Nice response JT, and yeah, although I studied atonal composition at uni for 5 years, it certainly doesn't mean I can immediately understand everything the modern cats are doing, but that's not the reason why I can or can't connect with it. Heck, I don't understand what McCoy is doing half the time either, his Quartal trip is kinda heavy!
Was just making the point that old art (or entertainment for that matter) isn't less useful or relevant than "new" art. If Chaucer speaks to you more than Martin Amis, it might be because good art transcends time and place. It speaks of the human condition that, at root, hasn't changed much in centuries. There are golden periods in all the arts, even pop music had it's heyday. You could start a new band and pick up one of the many strands that Joe Henderson left dangling in 1964, and make plenty of fresh, compelling and approachable music. Would it be new? Maybe, sometimes a new twist to an old bag can be enough to bring something right into 2015 and beyond.
At any rate, I disagree that we "need" to support new art. I'd never respect any artist that expected support from anyone. Art can either make the choice to come to us, or to to hide in a dark corner where it can either feel sorry for itself, or feel validated somehow by the world's indifference. There's a lot of romance to being misunderstood....
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It's less about supporting new art and more about acknowledging that it exists, and the world might have turned and left you someplace else.
Like the swing cats felt about bebop.
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Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
Surely we can all agree that there is a lot of pretension in almost all of the modern "arts" these days. The true test, as always, will be if anyone is moved by any of it in decades to come. If anyone is listening to Mary Holvorson in 30 years time then it will rightly be regarded as important, just as hindsight helps us to evaluate the past.
If you were to believe Downbeat in 1963, you'd have thought Gunther Schuller was gonna be way more important to future generations than John Coltrane!
(BTW, I in no way wish to infer that Mary herself is pretentious, just that many of her admirers seem to be ) ....
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I get what you're saying...but the thing I always find funny is that so many of the folks I meet who don't like it seem to have a tough time believing the folks who DO like it actually, uh, like it. Or that you can like both.
I also don't find that the really good modern players are "embarrassed" of the past sounds at all.
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Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
You can only hope that at some point these kids grow a spine and stand up for what really moves them. Otherwise what's the point? The schools are churning out players with alarming "cookie cutter" chops, with attitudes to match. Jazz to me was "street" music, and you could feel the attitude coming through. Not saying all young players are too sheltered these days, I like guys like Stacy Dillard for example, but even he'll tell you he's an exception...
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Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
Who's missing out in this equation? Not me.
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Originally Posted by princeplanet
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We're all influenced by lots of different music, personally, I don't feel any need to resist, just let it be.
Last edited by GuyBoden; 05-19-2015 at 01:25 PM.
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