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I almost feel kind of silly doing this, since I last posted here right before July started, but I just wanted to reiterate that I don't think Jazz can be any less good today than it was back in the day, but I feel that most artists who started their work before 1975 start to become stagnant after 1975. And no, I don't think rock died with the Beatles, I think it died with Disco. It's not that there still aren't great acts around anymore (I made the point to say that there are plenty of great recordings still coming out by ECM artists - which would include the Kenny Wheeler/Dave Holland statements put forward by another poster) it's just that I find that a lot of artists start to become boring, or move into directions totally lacking in substance (ie, Herbie Hancock after a while). There's a general sense of creativity/imagination/spirit/excitement that starts to become lost, and why move on to re-hashings of their old work when you can look back into their glory days and pick out oodles of great records? And I'd like to know how I was generalizing anyway? I went so far as to pick out individual artists and show that within a short period tended to go from one type of jazz to another type of jazz within the blink of an eye, lending support to the idea that you can't really generalize that time period at all. It kept moving, kept staying interesting, kept staying exciting. That's not to say it couldn't get boring... even Miles got boring after a while.
And it's not that I don't feel like I'm stuck in a certain time period because it's all I've ever listened too, far from it. Just like rock, I've delved into plenty of artists from plenty of time periods before and after, playing lord knows how many different styles. My dislike stems from the fact of how the music is created, not from the time period (and I certainly hope no one's dislike of music comes from the time period.) I find a lot of today's rock boring because it's just plain bad, boring, and shitty. The music doesn't have any of the qualities that once made it great except for a few rare exceptions. I find early 50s and 60s rock to be, with a few great exceptions, to be too watered down, filtered through to the general public without any regard to the masters who formed it. I find the same holds true for a lot of jazz, and not I didn't say all of jazz. That would be a broad generalization. Early period jazz tends to sound too much the same, with the lovely exception of most female jazz/blues singers, later jazz tends to sound too boring. I do concede that I'm not quite as knowledgeable on newer artists as I am on older artists, I make the recommendations I do because I feel that that time period made so many advancements and was so thoroughly creative that they stand head and shoulders above the rest. And this usually has nothing to do with technical achievements by players.
While I'm not sure if this helped my case at all, all I was originally trying to do was point out to the original poster my favorite recommendations, and trying to explain myself a bit without publishing a book. Which I could probably do at this point.
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"Marino could do it."
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