aberkok

Hey there peoples. One think I often think about (well probably the thing I spend the most time thinking about since it's what I hope to do full time one day) is the direction that jazz is going in nowadays. There's a lot of change towards new things happening, since many of the bebop era guys are dying, but at the same time there's a repertory/backward looking thing happening too, led by folks like Diana Krall and Wynton Marsalis. Now I don't feel too strongly against the retro stuff per se, but somehow I feel like it's holding back some more original and exciting music which I think the public is ready for, but turned off of because their perception of what jazz is "supposed" to be.

Since this is a discussion board and not an essay posting forum, I'd love to hear what others have to say about this before throwing in. I will therefore kick off this can of worms with a pointed question:

What effect do you think the retro movement in jazz has on original creative artists in the same field?

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Paradise Lost

If the Jazz artists of today are looking back and seeing how wonderful the old stuff really
was, and doing their own compositions in that style, where's the harm? While these
people may have their own style, they also see what's great about how the old greats
used to do it and feel a certain sense of honor making music in that older style.
Songwriters, artists, and whatnot do it all the time. They may put out many albums
featuring their own stuff, but you can usually see an album or two done totally in the
style of the people they were influenced by. ie, Ten Years After does a Pure Blues
album which, using their own music, follow very closely in the style of the Chicago
bluesmen of the 50s and 60s.

And besides, it's all original music, just in the style of the more retro music. If people
put out truely unique stuff, there will be people who buy it, but there are people
(like me) who love the older stuff, so those who continue on making fresh recordings
of retro jazz will have a buyer too. Besides, if you lose the old heritage, newer
generations will not have a sturdy foundation on which to build their jazz knowledge.
Sorta like the blues, which is why I'm glad for people like Martin Scorsese for
Presenting us the Blues, so we don't lose touch in the roots and the true meaning of
the genre.

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alansmithee

It seems that from what I have observed, it's not really "retro" jazz. Much of the music by the artists you named seems more timeless. I think jazz in that vein has taken on more of a classical air, in that it's something that has it's own framework somewhat separate from time. If someone has something original, I think it would still be welcomed.

Personally, I would like to find out what is "new" in jazz. What new directions are there being put out? It seems hard for instrumentation to get more experimental than much of the free jazz that was produced in the 60's-70's. I asked what was new in jazz on another message board, and alot of the responses led me toward artists such as DJ Shadow or RJD2. I greatly enjoy bebob, hard bop, avant garde, free jazz and the like, but it seems that I haven't seen many artists in that mold, or artists who push boundaries in the same way as earlier. I listen to some of the jazz pieces from that era and still don't think that the music has been fully absorbed-much still sounds as new and cutting edge today as when it was first produced. If you know of any artists you feel are cutting edge today, I'd greatly like to hear about them.

jakewesier

a jazz musician chiming in on this one.

The trouble with Jazz is that it's to big for itself. One of the fundamental things about this music is that it's ever changing. It refuses to settle down in one place for to long and therefore people are often confused as to what's new in Jazz or what the state of it is right now.

The whole retro thing as discribed is understated. Straightahead Jazz playing is just a style. It's how everyone learns the music properly (by learning standards, transcribing Parker, Miles, Trane). When I play my own music it's not that style of playing. However when I sit down in the morning to practice I start with standards to get my head in the right mind set. Those styles and those tunes are home base for Jazz Musicians.

And Jazz players are traditionalists. YOu need to be, it's all about the tunes that you can play with other people the second you meet them. Therefore when your career is off and running, established sometimes you get inspired for a Standards album and when you record it people will want to hear it because Musicians who buy the records will be interested in seeing the bare bones of your playing, your influences and your understanding of the music.

You might say there's a retro thing happening. But that's allways been going on and since the emergence of Krall it had become mainstreamish for a little while. At least if you were in a resturant you would hear her over the speakers while you enjoyed your soup. She's popular and a star and she's done standards albums. her new stuff has nothing standard in it. Norah Jones is popular and while she's not pure Jazz there are super strong elements of it in her playing and she's not singing standards.

For every album released with a 10 minute treatment of a 12 bar Blues there is an album released with a 10 minute free improvisation by a quartet of musicians. Everywhere artists are pushing the envelop in Jazz it's just that it's hard to find them, and the Music buying public will not support it.

In the end the "Public" isn't ready for much in terms of Jazz. It's %2 of the Record Selling market and therefore if you want to do a jazz album you have 2 options.... be one of the elitist musicians in the world (Pat Metheny) or be naturally Marketable (Diana Krall) and get a record lable contract that will market and distribute your album. Or 2 do it yourself and release it independently, distrubute it independantly and market it yourself. Jazz musicians generally do not record albums to make money off of them unless they are super established and know that they can sell 100k units and there are very few of them out there that can do that.

Spektr

I stick to the avant garde, free jazz. To me, it's where the most incredible, off-kilter music comes out of. Apart from the classics such as Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, John Coltrane's Interstellar Space and Derek Bailey, newer artists such as the John Hollenbeck Trio maintain this ever progressing, incredible genre.

warrrreagl

I think what is being referred to as "retro" is more properly designated as "neo-classical," which is (by definition in any form of art) a "new" way of expressing "classical" jazz. Also, remember that jazz is almost uniquely pluralistic; it was created as music for the dance hall, but now finds itself on the concert stage and in historical accounts. For this reason, jazz will never be a museum piece; it must remain vibrant and expressive. Although many, many different threads of exploration have been uncovered in jazz since WWII, they were not remotely exhausted, and contemporary performers have the courage to push older forms to limits they never previously saw. Just because a new shaft has opened up, there's nothing wrong with going back for the diamonds still sitting there in the old one.

For example, the natural extension of be-bop was toward the jazz canon, and performers like Wynton Marsalis are savvy enough to explore new directions in be-bop canons while still paying proper homage to the old guard.

I would add to the neo-classical list Terence Blanchard (Clifford Brown), Nicholas Payton (Louis Armstrong), Jon Faddis (Dizzy Gillespie), Wallace Roney (Miles Davis), Joe Lovano (Ornette Coleman), Jane Ira Bloom (Sidney Bechet), Joshua Redman (John Coltrane), James Carter (Sonny Rollins), and Ahmad Jamal (Bill Evans).

And most importantly, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

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tspikes51

One thing that I think is pretty unique to jazz is that it seems to always look back to its roots. I guess thats because of its improvisational nature. I need to listen to more of it though before I talk too much about it.

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roachboy

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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warrrreagl

I agree with a great amount you've said, and it will certainly produce a lot more thinking on my part. However, I take a different approach to jams. To me, they are the last remaining breath of the once-powerful cutting contests. Cutting contests had the unique duplicity of producing a winner without producing a loser. You may have gotten your ass kicked, but it simply pushed you into more practice time rather than damaging your career. The jam sessions I used to play in were very similar; brutal, merciless, cut-throat, and absolutely marvelous. To be in the middle of one of those monsters felt like being in by-God combat. There is no question that I no longer have the ganas to play that way anymore, although that is clearly where I learned the bulk of my craft.

Modern jam sessions seem to have lost their brutality, and jazz desperately needs that bloodthirstyness in its young players.

My gut tells me that younger players are learning the technique of jazz without the fire, and they either A) drop back because other cats have way more technique than they'll ever have, or B) learn technical brilliance without soul. I am currently teaching a bass player who worships Jaco and can play almost every damn thing he ever recorded. However, I would NEVER hire this kid for a gig because he has no heart whatsoever in his playing and he honestly can't hear the heart in Jaco's playing; it's all simply technique to him.

Jazz needs a new generation of blues-infused gut-busters to knock the shit out of the Wynton Marsalis crowd, and the only way you grow such a crop is back in those old brutal jam sessions.

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roachboy

cutting sessions...i understand the idea of them, have been in or found myself in some (at times unwittingly)--i never really enjoyed them because--basically--the harmonic structures were always rigid and the rhythm sections usually not able to take things out.
so you were locked in place running scales or whatever one does.
in my experience, these would turn into displays of speed and precision as if both were ends and not means.

so i guess what i would say is that cutting sessions--which can be fun sometimes as ways to get your ears pinned back (i find the same thing when i listen, say, to monk or cecil closely)---are not to only way to develop some fire in your playing. i have found it more useful to put myself in spaces where nothing at all is given in advance with a group of players who are interested in heading out as far as they can go. whatever that means.

these sessions too can be extremely demanding technically--for example you might well find yourself having to fix, divide, subdivide and then reverse a particular motif in real time that you might have had difficulty playing to begin with---if the situation seems to require it. but what i have found most interesting in these kind of sessions is that speed and precision remain means not ends--for myself (more generally)---if folk listening to what i am doing focus on the speed that is required to do it, then the performance fails in a basic way--speed for me is about reaching a place beyond it, where the sound and its ordering slow down. i dont know how to explain this better.

related to this: music is, for me, a kind of highly focussed trance medium--it is not particularly an athletic undertaking---though again it requires a whole arsenal of technical possibilities to be able to work in this kind of space--and the ability to switch in and out of them--and the ability to visualize what you are doing so as to give space for development--and a really good understanding of what development is--all of these things worked to a level that enables you not to think about them but to assume them, to focus on the sound rather than on the means to get to the sound.

i dont know if this is coherent or not, but there we are.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

aberkok

This was the finest piece of writing I read all day.

Me and my buddy, who is a trombone player, listen a lot to J.J. Johnson and Coltrane and one of the things that we notice is missing from most players today is a sense of rhythmic development and fire. So many of our colleagues come out of school knowing how to play changes, but with flaccid time. For heaven's sake! Jazz is about rhythm! Harmonically, there's NOTHING new that came out of Jazz that didn't already come out of Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, Stockhausen or even Bach for that matter. Rhythm and the blues is where it's at!

But I digress.

I do have a feeling that the "cutting" sessions produced something that we don't have nowadays. Kenny Werner once said that Jazz musicians are like coat-hangers. You never actually buy any, but there they are, more than you need, filling up your closet. Maybe cutting sessions would weed out those who weren't dedicated enough to work to be the best. Me, I'm up for an ass-kicking (not that I'll get it living in Toronto - we Canadians go pretty easy on each other).

I digress from the thread again.

One problem I see which is related to the whole "neo-classical" thing is the glut of re-issues. I know that the existing models of record distribution are crashing down around us, but while they're still around, we have the problem of major labels spending very little money promoting new jazz artists. In the meantime, it costs them next to nothing to put out another re-issue of "Kind of Blue," make a mint off of it (mostly through guys like us), and Joe Schmoe continues to think that the cutting edge of jazz ends with Miles Davis and Bill Evans.

This is not to say that I'm not into the old stuff. I agree it's necessary to my development as a player and will always be in my heart. I'll be damned if Art Tatum playing Danny Boy isn't the most beautiful thing I can think of.

For the poster who wanted to check out some modern day jazz artists who break the mould, here's a few ideas:

Anthony Braxton - saxophone (hard to find his stuff)
Dave Douglas - trumpet
Django Bates - piano/E flat Peckhorn
Kenny Wheeler - trumpet
Dave Holland - bass/composer
Branford Marsalis - do I need to tell anyone him really?

and...last but certainly most, and still in their respective primes...

Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter

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OFKU0

Your right. Funny how a jazz player would say to me, " Oh,..(long sigh) your a blues guitar player." drollfully I might add but the blues players would be like, " Wow you can play jazz. That's great."

I think I learned more about playing jazz (fusion) with blues players than with the jazz guys. Attitude had alot to do with it. Plus the blues guys weren't so wrapped up in the thing, they just had fun and played their asses off.

As for the retro stuff? I dunno. Everything that is old is new again. I just like hearing good players doing their thing and sounding great regardless of any analysis.

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