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Nicholas Payton - On Why Jazz Isn't Cool

Cosmic said:
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"..

.
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Completely disagree, you must brush up on your Ellington.
 
Art K. said:
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..
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Your story about the half empty hall of intellectuals makes me sad.

Frankly Art, this is the problem with this music, many people just miss the whole point. They think its all about analysis, crtitique and celebral intake. Actually, its about ants in your pants, booty shakin and stank face funkin.

I am a "musician" and have played electric bass for years. This brings me to analyze music as a whole. I think jazz deserves analysis. We are talkin about the finest players, masters of their instruments, involved in one of the highest musical forms. I can't help but disect a players style, or how a pianist comps for a player like Coltrane or Miles. Yes, that is one side of my listening, but...

For the most part, I just let the music take me where it must. Toe tappin? How bout motion in tha ocean?!? This is what too many miss out on with jazz. The vibe, the swing, the funk, the soul. I think this is where alot of Payton's frustration comes from. There's not enough fans who want to just soak it all in and have some fun.

I think there's room for both, but pure enjoyment is more essential. If you can't just sit back and take in something sublime, or get up and move when the swingin gets heavy...well, you would be missing the whole dang point.

As for the caretakers? Thank God for them. Without them much of the music may have been swept under a rug. Guys like Cuscuna are a blessing. They are there to document and share. It's the fans who must set the tone for this music. It's the fans who must dictate its future. Yes the artists "lay the egg" so to speak, but as fans we can influence even that level of the art.

I think this is alot of what Payton's "call to arms" was all about.
 
To me, Jazz died with Louis Armstrong. Most of what I have heard over most of my life self described as "jazz" has been nothing more than a slightly arrogant musical masturbation, by 3 or 4 guys each playing a different song at the same time.
 
Bigerik said:
To me, Jazz died with Louis Armstrong. Most of what I have heard over most of my life self described as "jazz" has been nothing more than a slightly arrogant musical masturbation, by 3 or 4 guys each playing a different song at the same time.
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Then you need to stop listening to "freestyle" jazz…


Vacuum tubes are where it's at!
 
That post was a great read. I am not missing the point (I hope), but rather trying to make a point by saying that I think the summation and the real core of the issue is this:

A true, concrete, defined, discrete genre of music does not really ever exist. When reality does come close to such a thing, it really only lasts for a few years, maybe a decade at best. Sometimes that leaves a genre name, and a vague tradition, that lasts indefinitely, slowly shifting and diffusing into irrelevance. People notice this, and proclaim the genre dead, or the tradition spoiled, or the context lost, or the name misapplied, and we can all discuss, and argue about it.

The truth is, it's always just music, and the genre labels aren't actually necessary for describing it outside of marketing. Music already has a language. When a new artistic idea is really something, when it is really alive, when it really has its own context that contemporaries will obsess over losing, it doesn't have a name. Or, if it does, it's just a nickname between friends, a shorthand for the kind of party you're going to. By the time that name has been stretched into marketing category, of course its meaning has already died. Of course some people are just dragging a dead horse around, embarrassing the origins of the label they carry. Of course there could be better labels for all the artists who are not, but what can we do with 100,000 genre names? Ignore them, let the artists tell us what they are trying to do? Well, that would be nice.
 
Jazz, I like Steely Dan, my "Jazz" friends say it isn't Jazz, I play Rock and Roll Covers, Jazz players wonder how I can enjoy that. I go see them play and it seems like 4 people playing 4 solos of 4 different songs at the same time. I took some Theory Classes last winter and at least now I know why they play that way but still ain't no groove.
So I tend to ignore Jazz for the same reason I ignore Hip Hop and Country Music.
Its just noise to me ;)
 
Swing is the ultimate groove, jazz informed everything you find groovy today. Better give a shout out to the blues too.
 
Wigwam Jones said:
"America is a lie."

Yeah, OK. Bye, bye.
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I'm with you. What a bunch of pseudo-intellectual self-serving--"Hey everybody, look how cool I am"--crap.

Jazz was never about making lots of money. Even in its heyday, most musicians were on the edge.

Look at the Big Band era . . . a few big name band leaders made money, all the musicians struggled to make ends meet . . . endless road tours in buses, running from one town to the next, playing sets till late then back in the bus to the next town.

Nobody but a very few ever got wealthy playing jazz/big band/swing.

I think Nicholas is just full of himself and his vapid, nihilistic, angry at everyone schtick.

I made it a little further than you, but you're right, when you get to that line, it's pretty clear what sort of jerk he is.:thumbsdn:


:music:Will
 
Obviously this thread is too hot a topic to be discussed without toeing the line between acceptable comments and unacceptable comments. After cleaning up a few that were unacceptable, this thread has precisely one more shot. The next post that crosses the line, it's gone.
 
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I didn't read the linked articles but I did read this thread and all I can say is if Jazz died in '59 then thank you Mr. Coltrane for killin' it! (and I mean by playin' it and "killin' it")

When Coltrane took the emphasis off the "head" and put it on the solo everything in the world of music changed, for the better! imo!

As far as Jazz not being taught in public schools, many of the high schools I remember had Jazz Bands and the reason Jazz has been moved to the "intellectual" level is because when one goes to college for musical performance you have two choices, Classical and Jazz and it's been this way for years. Now you know few kids care about classical or getting beat over the head with it for yet another four years and not many are into Jazz but when there are no "rock" guitar courses or "blues" saxophone courses or degrees what's the closet thing that's not Classical.......Jazz! So it becomes the music of "intellectuals" for "intellectuals"
 
poppachubby said:
Your story about the half empty hall of intellectuals makes me sad.

Frankly Art, this is the problem with this music, many people just miss the whole point. They think its all about analysis, crtitique and celebral intake. Actually, its about ants in your pants, booty shakin and stank face funkin.

I am a "musician" and have played electric bass for years. This brings me to analyze music as a whole. I think jazz deserves analysis. We are talkin about the finest players, masters of their instruments, involved in one of the highest musical forms. I can't help but disect a players style, or how a pianist comps for a player like Coltrane or Miles. Yes, that is one side of my listening, but...

For the most part, I just let the music take me where it must. Toe tappin? How bout motion in tha ocean?!? This is what too many miss out on with jazz. The vibe, the swing, the funk, the soul. I think this is where alot of Payton's frustration comes from. There's not enough fans who want to just soak it all in and have some fun.

I think there's room for both, but pure enjoyment is more essential. If you can't just sit back and take in something sublime, or get up and move when the swingin gets heavy...well, you would be missing the whole dang point.

As for the caretakers? Thank God for them. Without them much of the music may have been swept under a rug. Guys like Cuscuna are a blessing. They are there to document and share. It's the fans who must set the tone for this music. It's the fans who must dictate its future. Yes the artists "lay the egg" so to speak, but as fans we can influence even that level of the art.

I think this is alot of what Payton's "call to arms" was all about.
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I agree totally with your thoughts on missing the forest (the joy of good music) for the trees (what to call it :scratch2:). I was reading this thread while listening to an album of Count Basie's orchestra interpreting old big band tunes. The liner notes are very appropriate to this discussion, so I am going to summarize and quote when appropriate:

Talking about the Swing Era, when you had the big voices with the bands (Holliday with Basie, Fitzgerald with Webb, Sinatra with Dorsey): "Of course, this was a long time ago, before jazz became obsessed with cultural aspirations and its status as an art form. But now (this album was recorded in 1963, after Payton's "death of jazz"), when the music is seldom aimed at the feet, it frequently passes so high overhead that the audience is left with nothing whatsoever to whistle or hum. Of all these facts, Count Basie is perfectly well aware..."

The writer notes that the songs in the album that Basie rearranged "seldom stray far from the melody,... but are equally good for romance and the dance". He closes his comments quoting the Latin ars est celare artem, or true art is to conceal art.

In short, is it Swing? Blues? Jazz? If it's got a good beat and you can dance to it, don't worry about it - just enjoy!

(BTW, the album is Count Basie - More Hits of the 50's and 60's - Verve, 1963)
 
jsixis said:
Jazz, I like Steely Dan, my "Jazz" friends say it isn't Jazz, I play Rock and Roll Covers, Jazz players wonder how I can enjoy that.
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Woody Herman would disagree with that.If you have a copy of this record,pull it out,and read Woody's liner notes.

I don't get Payton's point.Is he saying that free jazz killed jazz in the early 60s? If so,I call bulls**t on him,and say he's an old fossil.I am reminded of what Louis Armstrong said about bop in the late 40s.

The trouble with jazz,is,that on a large scale,it ran out of steam,and new innovations.The early 70s fusion boom,that came along in the wake of Bitches Brew,was the last of it.Starting around the time punk and hip hop broke,jazz pretty much ran out of steam,and has been running on fumes,and "tradition" ever since,much as rock has been since the late 90s.

I say both have had their day.We need something as revolutionary as rock was in the 50s,or bop was in the 40s,to completely clear the musical landscape,and redraw the map.
 
I believe the writer of the article should spend less time putting words to intellectualizing about an artform that Jazz artists struggled to create sublime musical communication that left words/subject matter unnecessary......and trying to emulate:)
 
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