"His blackness had been equivocated by powder..."
Posted by Mark Laurence on Saturday, July 14, 2012
A typical contemporary jazz composition: a four bar motif, followed by eight or ten wildly displaced accents, followed by another snatch of melody in a barely related key. Repeat, if you will, to make sure the audience has 'got it'. Now launch into the improv.
In 1999, Richard M. Sudhalter wrote a book called Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, in which he contends that a number of white players had a substantial input into the music and did not just emulate black innovators. This undoubtedly justified corrective was at the time widely disparaged by black musicians and others, who vehemently opposed his message.
However, it seems to me now that the whitening of jazz has risen to unhealthy levels, by which I mean that musical standards are more aligned with those of European or classical music: academic, intellectual. Part of this is due to the way jazz is learned, nowadays through academies, music schools, formal teaching, and less through the traditional means of collaboration and association. This point is borne out by Kenny Barron: "Current jazz - a lot of the young players: their music is very intellectual. You know, it appeals to the brain... I think it has to appeal to [the heart]."
I have written before about staying true to the idiom, and my argument here is that the jazz ethos of playing predominantly for feeling has been displaced by something quite alien: an emphasis on knowledge, theory and technique which has its roots in the European approach to everything - although how true this is to the European tradition itself is debatable. I get more of a kick out of Brahms than I do out of some jazz. And since I perceive that this influence within jazz is driven by a desire to legitimise it alongside 'serious music', it is hard to see how to combat it without musicians losing hard-won credibility as artists-to-be-taken-seriously.
Jazz cannot be conformist and survive. Why? Because it is hip music, and hip, as Norman Mailer showed us, means outside, judged by its own standards. Judging an idiom by the standards of another idiom inevitably imposes a Procrustean Bed: you chop off the bits that don't fit. This is what we see with today's squeaky-clean jazz: the heart has been excised. Kitty Grime famously described John Dankworth's music as couth, kempt and shevelled. That observation could now be applied much more widely. No wonder the spirit of jazz migrated into other genres: hip hop for example, out of the reach of academic standardisation.
(Title from Native Son, by James Baldwin).
In 1999, Richard M. Sudhalter wrote a book called Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, in which he contends that a number of white players had a substantial input into the music and did not just emulate black innovators. This undoubtedly justified corrective was at the time widely disparaged by black musicians and others, who vehemently opposed his message.
However, it seems to me now that the whitening of jazz has risen to unhealthy levels, by which I mean that musical standards are more aligned with those of European or classical music: academic, intellectual. Part of this is due to the way jazz is learned, nowadays through academies, music schools, formal teaching, and less through the traditional means of collaboration and association. This point is borne out by Kenny Barron: "Current jazz - a lot of the young players: their music is very intellectual. You know, it appeals to the brain... I think it has to appeal to [the heart]."
I have written before about staying true to the idiom, and my argument here is that the jazz ethos of playing predominantly for feeling has been displaced by something quite alien: an emphasis on knowledge, theory and technique which has its roots in the European approach to everything - although how true this is to the European tradition itself is debatable. I get more of a kick out of Brahms than I do out of some jazz. And since I perceive that this influence within jazz is driven by a desire to legitimise it alongside 'serious music', it is hard to see how to combat it without musicians losing hard-won credibility as artists-to-be-taken-seriously.
Jazz cannot be conformist and survive. Why? Because it is hip music, and hip, as Norman Mailer showed us, means outside, judged by its own standards. Judging an idiom by the standards of another idiom inevitably imposes a Procrustean Bed: you chop off the bits that don't fit. This is what we see with today's squeaky-clean jazz: the heart has been excised. Kitty Grime famously described John Dankworth's music as couth, kempt and shevelled. That observation could now be applied much more widely. No wonder the spirit of jazz migrated into other genres: hip hop for example, out of the reach of academic standardisation.
(Title from Native Son, by James Baldwin).