Prometheus 6

“The Fastest Gun in the West”

I think Mr. Griffin was actually referred to as the "Fastest Horn in the West." In any case, he was a great tenor player and a consummate musician. There ain't but a few of the old heads left.

Rock n roll will follow right behind. Bo Diddley is gone and Mick Jagger just turned 65.

it'll still be here.

but fossilized. thanks not only to people passing...but also to the efforts of stanley crouch and wynton marsalis (who to be fair want the exact opposite of this).

but fossilized.

But is that still jazz?

"but fossilized. thanks not only to people passing...but also to the efforts of stanley crouch and wynton marsalis (who to be fair want the exact opposite of this)."

Spence,

In all respect, my brother, I don't think jazz music is fossilized and nothing that Crouch and Wynton Marsalis says or does can make the music fossilized. Nothing. The great thing about this music is that if there is a musician or a group of musicians who want to take jazz in another direction all they have to do is get up on a stage or plant themselves on a bandstand in a club and blow. If these cats are really saying something different and new, then the musicians will follow them. It is a very democratic form of music at least among the musicians. The younger musicians in the 1940s, for example, could hear that Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk were playing something different and they followed them. No complaints or criticisms from the great Louis Armstrong who called bebop "Chinese music" or, in particular white music critics who thought that swing was the apogee of jazz, stopped them from following Bird, Diz and Monk to Minton's.

i didn't say it IS fossilized, i said it WILL be fossilized.

i was given a ticket to a classical performance in baltimore. my wife and i stood out not because we were black, although there weren't that many blacks in the audience, but because we were two of the youngest people there by far...this was a few years ago and I was about 37 at the time. there's some new stuff going on in classical music, but it's falling largely on deaf ears. the only radio stations that play it are on the left side of the dial. the concerts are only attended by octogenarians, and high schools don't teach kids how to play it.

they still play real jazz on morgan state's npr station...and probably some channels in d.c. but that's about it. and it's appropriate that you point to the forties and the bebop era. there have been a number of significant innovations since then. but jazz has become less and less a progressive music, building upon the past and blazing forward, and much more of an introspective music turning backwards.

i listen to run dmc, and most of the AVERAGE mc's today have much more developed rhyme schemes and better flows than either Run OR DMC. I listen to Miles Davis and can't think of a single trumpeter today who sounds better.

"I listen to Miles Davis and can't think of a single trumpeter today who sounds better."

Miles was an innovator in terms of the sound that he produced on his horn and the bands he put together. Innovators, believe it or not, are relatively rare in a musical genre that stresses improvisation. What forced Miles to forge his own sound was that he could not match the intricate and complex rhythms and harmonies and play at the speed of someone like Dizzy Gillespie. Consequently, he had to find his own sound and in the process he managed to create a sound that is instantly recognizable and timeless. The fact that Wynton Marsalis, despite his enormous talent and extremely high level of proficiency as a musician, is not an innovator does not mean that he should be dismissed as an artist or that his music should be ignored. Miles himself once said that you couldn't play anything on your horn that Louis (Armstrong) hadn't already played.

Jazz is not becoming less and less progressive. The music is still modern. Bach's music is still modern. No classical composer in the 20th Century has written solos more modern than what Bach wrote in the 1700s. Jazz styles have undergone significant changes since the 1940s but changes in style sometimes has more to do with commercial possibilities than innovation. Miles Davis, for example, didn't particularly like John Coltrane's recording of "My Favorite Things" because he thought he and 'Trane had already explored the limits of the modal form when they recorded the album "Kind of Blue." Trane, however, loved playing in the modal form and recorded several more albums for Atlantic and Impulse that used this form. They are among the most accessible and popular albums he recorded.

Jazz is not dying. Never will.

as long as people have emotion, jazz will exist. What is your real comment?

"as long as people have emotion, jazz will exist. What is your real comment?"

Which one of us is your question directed to?

That's this guy. He thinks I'm saying jazz is dying because white people are playing it nowadays.

Thanks, P6, I can save my time. His reference to black pride blogs is a dead giveaway. He is clueless.

i think i might need to back up a bit and provide definitions, because i think we're speaking past one another.

a form of cultural production is "fossilized" to me or is in danger of becoming fossilized when people are less and less interested in producing, consuming, or circulating that form. and when the people who DO produce the form generate fewer and fewer innovations in producing it. a given form may be modern in that it addresses issues related to modernity, but it can be modern and STILL be fossilized.

the example you gave of bach works well here. you can listen to bach and hear a range of "modern" ideas expressed. but the fact remains that the high point of the form that bach produced is not in front of us...but very very far behind us. and the number of people routinely exposed to his ideas are diminishing as we speak.

"the example you gave of bach works well here. you can listen to bach and hear a range of "modern" ideas expressed. but the fact remains that the high point of the form that bach produced is not in front of us...but very very far behind us. and the number of people routinely exposed to his ideas are diminishing as we speak."

If folks are still listening to Bach, (and neither one of us has any idea of whether that number is diminishing or growing because in China, for example, the number of people listening, studying and playing European classical music is rapidly growing) then the high point of his music is not behind or in front of us because it is with us here and now. Louis Armstrong's opening solo cadenza to "West End Blues", for example, is with us every single time somebody somewhere on this dirt ball cues up a music reproduction device or machine and plays it.

The historical events that inspired and informed Aeschylus' tragedies lie very far behind us but the emotions and passions that fed his characters' behavior and moved them to action are still with us today. Contemporary playwrights are still addressing the range of issues and human emotions that captured Aeschylus's attention nearly 2500 years ago.

Contemporary jazz musicians are still confronting the same musical, aesthetic and human problems that Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Max Roach and Clifford Brown grappled with 60 years ago. Duke Ellington, who was born in 1899 was still trying to make something that was startling, new and beautiful as he lay dying in 1974, well into the 20th Century.

I don't quite understand the stress that you are placing on the term "innovation" as it applies to jazz musicians and jazz music because only the very greatest of them have ever been considered innovators. Many, many more of them are still, nonetheless, considered enormously influential in terms of their instruments and the music.

the reason why people are still dealing with the early greek tragedies is institutional. the greek tragedies are still standard fair in thousands of high schools and colleges.

jazz? not so much. contemporary jazz musicians are going to be dealing with their predecessors, now, and in the future. but this doesn't mean that the music isn't undergoing fossilization. because the question isn't "what are contemporary jazz musicians doing?" rather it's "what are contemporary MUSICIANS doing?" and whatever it is they're doing, only a few of them are wrestling with the challenges posed by jazz musicians.

again, this process is institutional.

you ask what innovation has to do with it?

i place the stress on innovation because I relate it to the arc of a given form of cultural production. miles davis, dizzy gillespie, thelonious monk. eric dolphy, john coltrane, charlie mingus, max roach, bud powell, duke ellington, charlie parker...all lived and played at around the exact same time. we aren't talking one innovator or two during this period. we're talking about well over a dozen. this too is institutional--they had the institutional space to learn their craft, the economic space to practice it enough to eke out a living, and the space to dialogue with each other.

this is what wynton is seeking to do with the lincoln center.

the problem--and this again leads right back to the central issue of decay and fossilization--is that these institutions have pretty much died out. the number of spaces where a kid with the potential to be an excellent jazz trumpeter has dwindled precipitously...just as the spaces where a kid with the potential to be an excellent boxer has dwindled. similarly the number of jazz labels who have the resources to develop and market new talent to listeners has fallen.

what i gather from you is that none of this matters. because potentially there are six billion pianists in china?

If you gathered from what I wrote that none of this matters because there are potentially six billion pianists in China then I did a poor job of explaining my views or you have a difficulty reading and understanding what other people write particularly if they do not agree with you. Let me know where the difficulty lies.

P.S. When you start treating me with the same seriousness and respect that I give to you then we can continue. This is a pattern on your part, bro.

it isn't the latter.

you've constructed an argument (jazz is not only NOT undergoing fossilization but will in effect live forever) based on an unworkable dichotomy. if "folks" are around to listen to, or consume, or produce jazz...then jazz is alive. doesn't matter how many folks there are. doesn't matter where they play. two people in a duet in the middle of nowhere? then jazz is alive. if "folks" aren't around to listen to or consume or produce jazz, then it is dead.

You asserted that the high point of Bach's music was behind us. I argued that it was not because people are still playing and listening to his music either in live or recorded formats. The same is true for jazz. The musical accomplishments of Lester Young, Oscar Pettiford, Paul Chambers, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan and Count Basie are also never behind us because of mechanical, now digital, reproduction of their recordings.

The relationship between jazz musicians who can execute variations on musical compositions night after night and contemporary musicians and composers who work in the so-called new music form has always been slight. John Cage and his colleagues, for example, were being lauded by music critics for creating so-called improvisational music while jazz musicians, who were doing the same thing under tremendous and relentless pressure, were largely ignored by these same critics. It was not in the interest of these critics nor of John Cage et al. to ever admit that jazz musicians were pushing the musical envelope much further than those who saw themselves as the inheritors of Western culture had ever done.

I agree that the critical mass of jazz musicians that existed in the 1940s and 1950s and the venues and institutions that gave them a place to perfect their art no longer exists. Nonetheless, I disagree about the music's imminent death or fossilization. Last week, for example, I listened to an interesting interview conducted by Tony Cox of NPR's News and Notes show with jazz saxophonists David Murray, Bennie Maupin and flautist James Newton. None of these musicians were of the opinion that their music was dying or becoming fossilized. Murray, who lives full-time in France now, thought that the audience for the music was increasing all over the world.

we either disagree in scale, or we disagree in definitions. without knowing how you understand the concept of fossilization i cannot say which for sure.

"a form of cultural production is "fossilized" to me or is in danger of becoming fossilized when people are less and less interested in producing, consuming, or circulating that form. and when the people who DO produce the form generate fewer and fewer innovations in producing it."

This was the definition that you used. I have at least two disagreements or, better yet, concerns about your assertion. The emergence of bebop, for example, and the adoption and absorption of its vocabulary by younger jazz musicians beginning in the mid to late 1940s signaled the end of jazz music as a form of popular entertainment that was heavily tied to dancing. So we have this interesting paradox in that the music's further development as an art form was accompanied by its decline in popularity. Given your definition, the process of jazz becoming fossilized began to occur when musicians such as Miles Davis began appearing as sidemen with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I do not, to be fair, believe this is what you meant but it is difficult to infer anything else from what you wrote.

I am having a hard time grasping what you mean about a lack or shortage of innovation in terms of a musical format that is largely built around individual and collective improvisation. Jelly Roll Morton's music may sound old to our ears and indeed did sound old to jazz fans beginning in the early 1930s, but the level of collective improvisation exhibited in the recordings he and his bands made were as complex and layered as anything we could hear being played by today's jazz bands.

Jazz musicians themselves have debated and argued about this issue for decades. Charles Mingus' efforts to recapture this sense of collective improvisation in a series of recordings he made for Atlantic Records in the mid to late 1950s were alternately reviled and ridiculed by jazz musicians and critics alike. Miles Davis said that they "sounded like tired modern paintings." Nonetheless, today, Mingus' compositions and recordings are considered classic examples of modern jazz and his music is studied and played all over the world.

Speaking of Mingus: (…Which, in following this thread, I had a feeling the conversation might end up veering towards!) Did anybody catch the Mingus' Magnum Opus: 'Epitaph' In Concert on NPR the other day?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92884124&sc=nl&cc=mn-07272008

Not yet...

Re: Aeschylus

My point about Aeschylus was not why his plays are part of the academy but, rather, that human beings have not changed so much in 2500 years that we no longer understand what he was writing about.

Thanks for this link. I am going to have to buy the cd. I noticed that John Handy's son, Craig, was one of the tenor sax players on the date. His father played on a few of the Atlantic recordings I mentioned above.