The Urban Sound
Posted by Mark Laurence on Monday, April 25, 2011
Music changes, but critics are largely conservative. Every artist that contributes to music brings some innovation, but critics often want to pin music down within some definitive framework. For Stanley Crouch, jazz has to have 4/4 swing, blues, afro-hispanic rhythms and ballads - these four things. Against this, you could argue that a measure of the strength of a culture is its ability to absorb aspects of other cultures, and yet remain itself. These are if you like the two poles of the argument, and raise the question, how far can jazz go and still be jazz?
Last Saturday night, I was listening Geo Rose by the late Tony Williams Quintet. I turned to my wife and commented that to me it had such an urban sound, a sound that captured the spirit of jazz. Without wanting to fall into the conservative trap, it does seem to me that jazz is urban music, that it comes from and reflects an urban environment. Think of Monk's uneven tread along sidewalks with the roar of traffic in the background and car horns incorporated into the melody. I question how far jazz can accomodate country and still be jazz. Steve Swallow and Gary Burton's attempts to infuse jazz with a country influence seemed to me to lose the jazz feel, just as Brubeck's incorporation of other influences produced something somewhat other than jazz. Perhaps these experiments were too much like adding too large quantities of a new ingredient to a classic dish - the thing needs to be done judiciously.
I'm not going to say jazz has to have this or that, but I am going to say it has to be true to its native environment to sound convincing. It is the sound of the city.
Last Saturday night, I was listening Geo Rose by the late Tony Williams Quintet. I turned to my wife and commented that to me it had such an urban sound, a sound that captured the spirit of jazz. Without wanting to fall into the conservative trap, it does seem to me that jazz is urban music, that it comes from and reflects an urban environment. Think of Monk's uneven tread along sidewalks with the roar of traffic in the background and car horns incorporated into the melody. I question how far jazz can accomodate country and still be jazz. Steve Swallow and Gary Burton's attempts to infuse jazz with a country influence seemed to me to lose the jazz feel, just as Brubeck's incorporation of other influences produced something somewhat other than jazz. Perhaps these experiments were too much like adding too large quantities of a new ingredient to a classic dish - the thing needs to be done judiciously.
I'm not going to say jazz has to have this or that, but I am going to say it has to be true to its native environment to sound convincing. It is the sound of the city.