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i am not sure what jazz is at this point.
i teach jazz history courses, i am involved with the music, but i do not know what it means really.
i think the wynton marsalis tendency is stultifying--if it operated on a more level playing field with other, more forward-looking types of music, it might be fine--but it doesnt--having control over the lincoln center programming is a powerful position to occupy within a fragmented field. that and most of his recorded output simply sucks.and the idea that such a player is in a position to functionally exclude from the category jazz those who work in more "experimental" areas seems to run directly counter to everything interesting and vibrant about jazz as a music. he wants to turn it into a museum piece. he wants to gut the music in the name of preserving it.
when i think of jazz these days, i think mostly about a previous generation that includes musicians who have never stopped pushing, never stopped moving--ornette coleman, cecil taylor, anthony braxton, leo smith-- among those who have died more or less recently--steve lacy, john carter, the art ensemble of chicago, sun ra--the list could go on and on.
each outlined and worked through a range of possibile relations to tradition by bringing these relations to bear on improvisation. the key is the priority acccorded these elements--tradition/improvisation. if the former has absolute priority, i think the music suffocating and suffocated. but that is my own, particular view of the matter.
i do not understand the utlity of standards.
i really do not enjoy "jam sessions" in whcih what happens is the repetition of older tunes.
it's not that i am hostile to the tunes---i like listening to them, sometimes actually enjoy when others cover them--but for the most part, i find it tedious--for example there is nothing more boring than listening to some berklee-type player strip all the rhythmic and motivic complexity out of a monk tune--why would you bother?--monk is better at being monk than you are, so what is the point of providing an audience with a demonstration of how not monk you are?.
but i have no interest in playing them as such--if i can find something i might like to do using an older piece as a jump-off point, then that is different. i do not see why anyone needs to treat tradition as something to be venerated--why it is not simply a vast pool of resources that one can pick up, visit or revisit or discard as one chooses.
there is alot more that could be said about this.
but i gotta go.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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