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Re: definitions, that's how dictionaries roll, get used to it.
Originally Posted by fumblefingers
As far as I can tell, most of your post has nothing to do with the music industry or with the state of Jazz today. The last sentences are vague. Yes, the U.S. has some sociological problems, always has. I'm only interested in the ones that disable the Arts.
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08-06-2014 08:55 AM
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That's why I brought up education.
I'm telling you all--you wanna know why "music sucks and nobody can play an instrument anymore" your answer is right in public education. Its also the clearest place to see the "minority majority" getting the shaft.
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It's actually more like 14.4% but a minority non the less. Also, you'de be more accurate in comparing that 14.4% against the other ethnic demo percentages, not the whole of the populous. While it's certainly true that black Americans are among the minority, the following chart shows that they are not THE minority. This chart (census) show that black Americans are the third largest demographic out of all . . (over 9) . . counted in 2010. So, one can interpret that as black Americans being more a part of the majority than they are of the minority. Originally Posted by SuperFour00
mi·nor·i·ty (m
-nôr
-t
, -n
r-, m
-)n. pl. mi·nor·i·ties 1. a. The smaller in number of two groups forming a whole.
b. A group or party having fewer than a controlling number of votes.
2. a. A racial, religious, political, national, or other group thought to be different from the larger group of which it is part.
b. A group having little power or representation relative to other groups within a society.
c. A member of one of these groups.
There are 316 million people in the U.S.
12.6% of them are Black.
That is a Minority.
You're welcome.
You too sir, are wlecome!
Population of the United States by Race and Hispanic/Latino Origin, Census 2000 and July 1, 2005 | Infoplease.com
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Poetry is an art form too, far older than jazz, and if anything, there's less money in it. Originally Posted by SuperFour00
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"Wut chu talkin bout Willis??" Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
Jeff . . . you'll need to amplify . . at least for my dumb ass anyway.?.?.?
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08-06-2014, 09:21 AM #156destinytot GuestThank you! Originally Posted by Jazzism
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I think millions of people can play instruments, a remarkable number of them at a very high level. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
There's so much educational material available to musicians either free (-through libraries or via the Internet) or for little money (-the yellow Mickey Baker book is still only around 8 bucks a copy; a Jamey Aebersold play-along with good charts and a CD is around 15) that no one can hope to work through more than a fraction of The Good Stuff. No one is suffering from a lack of musical educational material.
There's enough stuff available for free on this site alone---which is free to join and open to everyone---to keep a musician busy all his life.
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You're wrong, here's why. All the other ethnic minorities, Hispanic being the largest, have a specific set of homelands, have current immigrants, have native languages, they have legitimate cultures. Black Americans who are descended of slaves (not counting recent immigrants from Nigeria or Jamaica), have no definite homeland of origin except "Africa". They have no native language. Their cultures, languages and heritage were ripped away from them ... I should say from us, in respect of half of my family. You can't juggle groups of people and move them around on a chess board to try to win a simplistic argument from a self-serving perspective. Well, I guess you can , but it's not right. Black people in America are a racial minority, and laws that apply to established minorities apply to them. It's just a reality. Word games simply demean the people you're trying to use as game-pieces in your juvenile and twisted example. Originally Posted by Patrick2
When it comes to racial issues, you don't understand much of what you're trying to talk about, and none of what you're presenting has anything to do with the music business or Jazz.
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eggs-ackly right!!! Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
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It's not the material, it's the exposure.
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As I remember it . . you were the one who sighted race initially in this thread. As I also remember it, you were the one who sighted black Americans as being a minority based upon incorrect demo's of 12% of a population of 316 million. Those are numbers you used to define the term miniority. So, now they no longer work for you? As I also remember it, you are the one who posted exerpts from a dictionary defining ther term minotity. Which included a joke if you consider definition 2b to be relavent to black Americans. Originally Posted by SuperFour00
So, your opinion is that the only people qualified to comment at all on race related matters needs to be black?? If there's someone here is playing word games and twisting examples . . then you need to be "talking to the man in the mirror". (Damn man, that was a GREAT hook!! Thanks for that one Michael)
Feel free to challenge and debate my posts and the info within them. But, DO NOT feel free to classify my posts as juvenile. Also, there's nothing self serving about my contribution to this whole discussion, started by your own self centered and self serving comment that white society is responsible for the demise of jazz because they hated black society . . Unless prehaps you believe it's self serving to be because you think I'm a racist? If so, then don't play "word games", if I may borrow a term you trew at me. Just come out and state as much.
Your opinion was challenged by more people than just me alone. It was challenged because it's wrong and the commentary within it was rife with anamosity, as is the entire first paragraph of your post above.
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Pick any census you like, the figures work for me ... Black Americans are a minority. For you to state otherwise is inaccurate. There's no word game there. It's a simple fact. Whether Jazz is a national treasure that should be funded at at least the same level as Classical music, Opera or Ballet is debatable. The reasons it hasn't been supported to that degree are also debatable. Originally Posted by Patrick2
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Why threads about JM has that tendency to often raise a race debate (the thread on his method comes to mind), it is not like the guy has anything to do with it...
He is embracing cultural richness, collaboration and openmindness!
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I think more kids than ever are exposed to music in K thru 12. Certainly not as much of the type of music you and I would like to see them exposed to. But, it too is there, albeit in lesser amounts. Too many of the kids just aren't interested in jazz . . and even if it's exposed to them, it can't be forced upon them. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
My 14 year old grand son is subjected to the torture of having to hear jazz music and hear me lecture on it every time he's in my car. I do so because he plays violin in a school band and he's studying guitar with me. But, every time he walks into my business office here in my home . . which doubles as my man cave and has over 2 dozen guitars sitting in guitar stands . . . with the very vast majority of them being jazz arch tops . . he grabs a Les Paul and start doodling, or noodling or what ever the hell it's called. But, I do have hope! He has started to identify different tonal responses in some of my arch tops when he hears me playing them, which is almost always unplugged. He also pointed out a flat B string when I was playing a chord melody . . . which I could only confirm by usage of a Snark tuner. Hmmmmm . . . .Last edited by Patrick2; 08-06-2014 at 12:52 PM.
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Jeff, I believe there's a mind-set in this country, and lamentably, it even exists among at least quite a few musicians, that Music is a business, a trade, and that's all. Oh, it can be a hobby, too. Like carpentry is a trade. There are hobbyists who like to dabble in building a deck behind the house or making furniture. But, how invested are amateur carpenters in the state of the trade and do they really care what happens to the professionals, and to the folks at the cutting edge of the craft? Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
I don't like to see musicians minimizing the importance and value of formal public music education. And I hate to see musicians take a sink or swim attitude toward Art, as though Jazz is somehow equivalent to Disco, and if it were more popular it would be doing better, but, it isn't all that popular, so it can just dwindle, I've got mine. I think that's a terrible attitude. At one time, Monarchies and Empires funded the Arts. The Church funded the Arts. True, that led to lots of art aimed at pleasing royalty and lots of church music in the Classical community, but it was beautiful Art and beautiful music.
Sad that some of the very people that would appear to love Jazz have such a cavalier attitude regarding it's present state and it's future. If that's how the members of a Jazz forum think, what of the mind-set of the population at large, the voters who will influence things like grants and government spending?
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No arguments with any of that. But, further qualifications seem necessary to me. Originally Posted by SuperFour00
"Black Americans are a minority" . . . yes, in some cases they are. But only when compared with those ethnicities whose demo's are greater in number. When compared with those ethnicities whose demo's are lesser . . than black Americans are among the majority. "There's no word game there. It's a simple fact".
I also agree that any matters pertaining to the funding of jazz, or of jazz as an art form are and should be debatable. But as we debate let us remember that when opinions are challenged or disagreed with . . that's part of the process of debating the matter.
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I don't think that the attitude of this forum is as cavalier as sink or swim . . or that we see jazz as an equivalent of disco (hey man, I made a pretty good buck back in the day playing Tramps, EWF, Kool & The Gang, Tavares, Bee Gees, etc.). I think what your hearing here is a reflection of a comparison of the business side of marketing and selling jazz. Originally Posted by SuperFour00
So then, let's say it was funded with tax payer dollars to far better extent than it currently is. Where would you propose those dollars be invested? Should they go towards a venue such a The Lincoln Center, where Wynton calls his second home? Even if so . . if the kids aren't interested in jazz . . they'll not attend even if it is for free. Free? HA! Maybe admission to such a venue might be subsidized with tax dollars. But, I need not tell you haw expensive it would be getting to and fron and as a result prohibitive for inner city kids coming from low income or no income families.
If it's invested at the school levels, that might increase availability. But, would the availability lead to increased interest? I'm not so sure it would in enough cases to justify the expenditure/investment.
Do we force a mandatory jazz and jazz history curriculum on grade school level kids? The quickest way for parents to get out of paying for their kids' music lessons is to force them to practice or quit to lessons.
I know what we're doing isn't working . . as it relates to taking jazz interest forward. But, it's a pretty hard one to figure out. Ya can't just throw money at it.
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Exposure to music is non-stop, Jeff! It is easier for a kid today to hear Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives than it was for me when I was a kid! Same goes for Charlie Parker. You can hear pretty much every great jazz musician (who recorded) without getting out of bed! Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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Sure, but is a kid going to stumble upon Louis Armstrong while streaming some Iggy Azalea?
Re: exposure. No, you don't mandate anything...you give access. Lots of kids don't even have access.
When I started teaching 12 years ago a kid who was as poor as you can get, a kid who's parents could never swing an instrument or lessons, could take band as a class, learn to read music, play an instrument, and take that instrument home every night to practice.
Now with funding cuts they don't have that access.
So how many of those kids would actually get interested in jazz? Maybe a few. But now we can guarantee there won't be any.
And that's not just MY school. That's a lot of schools around Chicago. I'll give you one guess what the demographic makeup of the neighborhoods is where music programs are being scrapped.
This is happening in other big school districts too.
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It's sad that some people think an art form's health is to be judged by how many grants it generates... Originally Posted by SuperFour00
Your argument would be much more compelling if you could show that the best jazz musicians were coming from countries that lavished government funding on jazz education, while no one from 'backward' America could hold down a gig with good band because they were too uneducated.
But that's not happening. Americans still dominate the jazz scene worldwide. Maybe the rest of the jazz world should stop and think, "You know, maybe they're doing more right than we thought. Maybe we're putting all our eggs in the wrong basket."
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Unfortunately, the kids in the schools in areas with the demo's you refer to have much more to worry about dodging bullets and learning to keep from impregnating and becomning impregnated than they do worrying about where to find a horn or a jazz record. If additional funding is going to be provided to these schools to help these kids .. a jazz program is very low on the list of priorities of how it should be spent. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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Schools can control what we can control. There's not a damn thing we can do about crime or pregnancy, really. But we can offer programs that keep kids in school, where they're generally safe.
Our band had nearly 75 members when it was in full swing. Kids want this stuff.
I'm not even talking about a "jazz program." Just a regular old marching band. Then I'd get reccomendations from the director for kids and I'd run the pit band/jazz band, maybe a group of 8-12. Last time I had that was '08, we played all over the place, most of those kids played in college too.
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We invented it, so I'm hardly surprised that, along with Rock n Roll, we produce many of the best exponents of native music. Are you the one to judge the relative talents of foreign vs domestic Jazz musicians? How will we quantify that? Popularity, record sales, or who gets on the cover of American Jazz magazines? The powerful folks who mete out the funding to publicly funded Arts, and the wealthy people who sustain certain Arts through philanthropic donations and trusts are supporting European originated Art forms like Classical music and Ballet, but largely ignoring home-grown Art like Jazz. If you think Jazz music and Jazz education is in a healthy and progressive state today in America, and that the status quo is acceptable, then I'll leave you to your curious opinion. Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
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Well, Jeff, I was a kid once. I liked music. I read interviews with musicians I liked and sought out the records that influenced them. (I first heard about Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker from rock musicians who mentioned them, so I went haunting used record shops for their records.) Most kids I knew did not do that. So what? Certainly the school had nothing to do with it. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
Funding for school bands is always cut by administrators who want to put more money somewhere else. They are the ones who have made school bands a low priority.
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When I want a political discussion, I never listen to guitar players - I much prefer horn players.
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