Nicholas Payton - On Why Jazz Isn't Cool

[satkinsn]

A provocative note from the trumpeter:

http://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore/

And a decent, low key response:

http://iancareyjazz.com/blog/2011/12/how-not-to-become-a-bitter-white-jazz-musician.html

And the npr article where I caught both references:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupre...ive-about-jazz-as-a-whole-again?sc=tw&cc=twmp

s.

 

[Redtide]

Thanks for the thread. I never would have read this stuff if not for AK.

I didn't read any race arguments into Payton's blog. It's weird that that the second link seems to think it's a race thing. I didn't interpret a race angle at all.

 

[keithpgdrb]

Interesting post from Nicholas. I've met him a few times, and he was always a a nice guy. quiet, but clearly into his art. seems he has become so full of his art, that he feels he knows something, and can wax poetic on it. Jazz is a spirit to me. a love and appreciation of it is born in some of us. when we hear it, we connect. Nicholas needs to remember that his musicianship is a gift as well. one that he apparently is so proud of, that he wants to label it as something other than "jazz". apparently "jazz" isnt good enough for him.

I'll be the first one to say that his first couple albums are fantastic. I'll have to give a listen to his latest offerings. I'd like to hear what his "not jazz" sounds like.

I am a musician myself. I dont take kindly to pompous know it all meanderings. the first thing you see in a truly gifted musician, is humility and respect for the art. To belittle that art by arguing about what its called is a futile attempt to sound "deep". I still respect nicholas as a musician, but he has fallen a few notches with that blog. again, I'll have to hear his latest offering. see what he's up to.

 

[Mystic]

Similar debates have (hell-)hounded the Blues genre for decades.

 

[chicks]

Thanks for the thread. I never would have read this stuff if not for AK.

I didn't read any race arguments into Payton's blog. It's weird that that the second link seems to think it's a race thing. I didn't interpret a race angle at all.

You might want to read up on Paul Whiteman...

 

[poppachubby]

Wow......wooooooow.

I am speechless, what a great blog. So incredibly provoking. He is of course correct on so many fronts. One only has to look at the 70's to see the issues that "jazz" eventually ran into headlong.

I fully believe that today's landscape is full of great technicians, capable of playing just about anything. But where are the stylists? Where are the artists who can shape the music into something...anything?? I am not being fecitious, if you can answer me then do so.

Nicholas needs to remember that his musicianship is a gift as well. one that he apparently is so proud of, that he wants to label it as something other than "jazz". apparently "jazz" isnt good enough for him.

Keith I don't think he was being high and mighty. His overall point is that since jazz met it's death in '59, and since has been marketing hype, the music is infact rooted elsewhere. Frankly I think his coining of "New Orleans" music is right on the money since these are the true roots.

He's correct that many artists hated the term jazz and some were quite vocal about it. Lester Bowie already stirred this pot years ago suggesting the name be changed to "great black music".

Anyhow, I am writing this rushed. I am all over the place but thanks alot for the post Scott.

 

[Delawheredad]

There is an argument that no modern art form whether it be music, or art movements lasts longer than 50 years. That certainly seems to be the case with art which latched onto a new movement ever fifty years or so. It is not the case with film but music certainly seems to be affected.

Look at how different music is today from when the Beatles were in their prime 50 years ago. Yes there is still stuff that calls itself rock and roll but it bears almost no relationship to its forebears. Once there was Jazz and Country then there was Rockabilly and Rock and Roll which became Psychedelia, Progressive, and Heavy Metal. Now we have Rap and Hip Hop
You can argue that they are all different genres with as much in common with each other as Paul Whiteman's music has with today's pop tunes..

 

[Art K.]

This is a subject that I feel very strongly about and have definite opinions on.

This is not the place to share those. A small circle of friends where there is trust and respect is needed to be frank without causing problems. There are many levels at which Jazz and the Blues are broken and so many reasons.

Race, ethnicity, sex, politics, money...it's a sordid tale.

I'll leave it at that.

 

[Wigwam Jones]

"America is a lie."

Yeah, OK. Bye, bye.

 

[satkinsn]

At the risk of, well, making an ass of myself, let me try out a couple of ideas.

I tend to agree with Payton on his largest point, that jazz is less and less useful as a descriptive word.

What I'm interested in mostly is how it happened.

Here's what I think is the biggest, and least obvious, player. By the late 1950s, jazz was not only a music made (mostly) by black Americans, it was an aspirational music for a growing black middle class. That black middle class had stable neighborhoods and social relations, and with those things came a stable environment in which jazz could prosper.

Black neighborhoods were gutted starting in the mid-60s, and the long prosperity, which had lifted black Americans along with everyone else post World War II, effectively ended by 1973. Of course, black people suffered first and worse.

The last 40 years have constituted, mostly, a hollowing out of the black middle class.

What that did, over time, was destroy the social basis for jazz, a music which is probably the ultimate expression of the idea 'head in the sky, feet on the ground.'

The caretakers of jazz have tried to replace what isn't there with university appointments, concert series, research and preservation. Some of the efforts have been heroic, and they should be lauded, but...

There isn't much for a 'jazz' musician to stand on, any more. My impression is that scene is small, propped up by public funding, and very white.

The reason for that strikes me as economic: the children of middle class and upper middle class folks are where the next generations of jazz musicians come from, and those middle class people are largely white.

In order to accommodate what it has lost, its rootedness, jazz has turned into a bit of a scavenger hunt over the last few decades, looking to drag in other musics for an injection of vitality. True, jazz has always looked to other musics, but some fundamental shift in balance has happened - now we have a branch of jazz you can accurately describe as ECM. Whether the music on that label is really jazz I'll leave others to sort out.

The other thing that has happened in the absence of rootedness is the thing Pops talks about, empty virtuosity. (Yeah, I know I'm using the word a lot at the moment.) It's not that jazz has lost its 'soul,' or that being brilliant on an instrument is an impediment to great music making, it's that without a vital social context, it's a lot harder for the notes to mean anything.

Finally, a note about missed opportunities: there was a time, in the mid 60s, when jazz seemed to flow naturally into other musics. Listening to The Doors meander through "Summertime" from a show in 67' got me to thinking about all the places where, without anyone trying to fuse anything, you could hear jazz in other contexts. Somehow, that deeper fusion, which was going on up until about 1969, got lost.

I think I know now why Miles went out looking to shake things up with his recordings, why he wanted first takes and mistakes: because he could see what was changing, and was making a valiant effort to keep the music connected.

If I offend anyone with these notes, please set me straight. Also, if you just think I'm wrong or have missed the point, let me know.

s.

 

[poppachubby]

Great post Scott!

I think you are on the money. As blunt as Payton was, he still managed to creep around a few specifics. The fact that the black community, for the most part, long abandoned jazz is something I felt he was trying to imply as large cause for issue. But regardless fan base still exists. I'm sure he's not the only frustrated artist, annoyed with expectations and paradigms.

Anyhow he has blogged a rebuttal which was interesting enough. He explained a few things which I felt like i had understood from his orginal post.

His biggest point of truth has to be ...

Jazz worries way too much about itself for it to be cool.

I think I will take a page from his book on that one. All the divisive dogma and arguing...it's pretty lame.

Anyhow I sent my wife to the music store to pick up Bitches today. So ironically he has made at least one sale from his rousing.

 

[finnbow]

Excellent links, satkinsn. I have mixed feelings about his Payton's blog. First, it has a certain deliberately-provocative, intellectual tone that leaves me wondering if he really means what he says or just got stoned and decided to ramble (been there, done that).

In one sense, jazz is just a label like rock, country, blues, ska, bluegrass or classical that music fans use to roughly describe a genre. What else to you do? Do you describe each artist and piece with the string of evocative adjectives used by wine geeks to describe that perfect Bordeaux? While he describes himself as New Orleans Postmodernist, what does that make Esperanza Spalding?

OTOH, I appreciate his point (I think).:scratch2:

 

[stereofanboy]

There are some interesting comments here. The empty virtuosity bothers me. No new art style or form can come into being without originators to give birth to it. Good for them! Those originators may draw upon many experiences and aspects of their life to give shape to their efforts. The "empty virtuoso" may not an original bone in his body and may not have any experiences in common with the originator.

When I listen to a recording, I don't usually have any knowledge of the performers' backgrounds and life experiences. Similarly I am not aware of his current (at the moment of recording) mood or situation. Unless you are God or Lamont Cranston you don't know either. Placing a larger emphasis on your perception of a musicians background than upon his output strikes me as silly. All I know is if it sounds good coming out of my speakers, and how listening to it makes me feel. Listening to a virtuoso can help me to feel pretty good!

 

[Art K.]

There are some good points made here but something is always forgotten and that is that someone is paying for this "empty virtuosity". Someone has a vested interest in Jazz becoming cerebral and a sort of chamber art.

I attend concerts often and most of them have less than 10% of the auditorium capacity filled. The audiences are primarily middle aged and older intellectuals scowling at the stage as if to dissect every note. Most of the time I have to initiate the applause because everyone else is too busy either sleeping or playing critic. I feel alien at these events because my toe is tapping in time...

Something of greater interest to me is how few concert attendees are black. If 80 folks show up to a show there are usually 3 or 4 blacks including me. I'm less convinced that the music doesn't speak to us than I am that music education in our schools doesn't include us.

Now I'm rambling because my beliefs on this subject are far too divisive to state publicly so I have to kind of go around it. Put it this way...

"The caretakers of jazz have tried to replace what isn't there with university appointments, concert series, research and preservation. Some of the efforts have been heroic, and they should be lauded, but..."

Be careful the caretakers of Jazz. Those seemingly heroic efforts have the less careful of us convinced that it's for our own good while many of the rest of us know that it is to keep us in our place, good, subservient and grateful..

 

[Cosmic]

satkinsn,

Very well put.

Blues has pretty much gone the same way: white appreciators of pre-war country blues, et. cetera.
For how many years after the Robert Johnson box set came out could you find it in people's homes, but had they listened to it??

Who does BB King play for? Just look at the concert videos...

Someone once said something to the effect that when Black people were done with a certain genre, Whites would then pick it up.

While I disagree with that notion back in the day, with the amount of mixing going on among players and communities, today, with all the nichefying (new word?) Jazz does seem to have become predominantly Academic, in the worst sense.

Ellington was pushing hard in a classical/church direction with increasingly ambitious pieces that, while embracing the formal complexity of Western classical writing, also were taking away any vestige of what someone like Miles was doing, which was: more fire, more "new", more "free"..when Miles got out there, he lost me, but it is interesting to look at it historically.

And then, overlaying all of this: race.
As in: how ok is it among Blacks to become a success as a Black jazz player today, playing Black-originated music with the implied notion that you are, in fact, predominantly playing it to White audiences?

Oreos, anyone...

C.

 

[satkinsn]

There are some good points made here but something is always forgotten and that is that someone is paying for this "empty virtuosity". Someone has a vested interest in Jazz becoming cerebral and a sort of chamber art.

My own take is that you get rarified chamber art when your music is cut off from the larger culture. It's much less dramatic, but the same thing happened with rock in the 70s, when arenas became the venue of choice. An awful lot of music that was just beside the point got made.

I attend concerts often and most of them have less than 10% of the auditorium capacity filled. The audiences are primarily middle aged and older intellectuals scowling at the stage as if to dissect every note. Most of the time I have to initiate the applause because everyone else is too busy either sleeping or playing critic. I feel alien at these events because my toe is tapping in time...

I get depressed by the jazz crowd, which tends to be old white hipsters, even though I are one. I have the same, weird skin crawling feeling I get when I talk (as opposed to write) about music.

Something of greater interest to me is how few concert attendees are black. If 80 folks show up to a show there are usually 3 or 4 blacks including me. I'm less convinced that the music doesn't speak to us than I am that music education in our schools doesn't include us.

Don't follow you here. Are you saying schools don't teach jazz and blues?

Be careful the caretakers of Jazz. Those seemingly heroic efforts have the less careful of us convinced that it's for our own good while many of the rest of us know that it is to keep us in our place, good, subservient and grateful..

If I follow you correctly, I'm not sure I agree, at least at the individual level. It seems to me that the caretakers - and I'm referring to people like Dan Morgenstern, Michael Coscuna - start by loving the music themselves and wanting to do something to help.

s.

 

[grillebilly]

from my chair jazz is an influence that permeates other genres. Like when big band, swing and blues kinda blew apart and some of the parts formed a planet called jazz. In it's infancy it was exciting, like most new things. Some of our greatest musicians are drawn to it, I believe, because it's boundaries are so wide. Nowadays, some of our best music from all genres is influenced by jazz, and that's a good thing. I'm far from an expert on what's out there, but the piece by Mr Payton makes sense. Quit defining yourself on what history has given us and make some of your own.
maybe

 

[Art K.]

Don't follow you here. Are you saying schools don't teach jazz and blues?

If I follow you correctly, I'm not sure I agree, at least at the individual level. It seems to me that the caretakers - and I'm referring to people like Dan Morgenstern, Michael Coscuna - start by loving the music themselves and wanting to do something to help.

s.

Public schools don't teach the history and significance of the music. Certainly very few do.

I'm not sure that many of the caretakers are aware of what they are doing, but yes I am saying that these well meaning intellectuals and music lovers (academically speaking) are the folks who I am referring to.

Look, there really is no point in my continuing the conversation as I have to be too circumspect to make any sense. Perhaps we will talk one day and I can make clear what I'm saying.

 

[satkinsn]

Fair enough.

best,

s.

 

[Redtide]

Well color me embarrassed. After reading Payton's more recent blogs I guess it was about race all along.