@Chris Fitzgerald did I miss your post?
Hi Sam, I had not yet posted but have been watching the subject.
My thoughts on this are very complicated, and also very simple. In no particular order:
- This subject is very tired, one of the closest things something as esoteric as jazz gets to "ragebait". There's this topic, then there's "Younger players don't respect the tradition/the music/their elders", followed by a lot of outraged old jazz man in bathrobe shaking fist at the universe. Both of them cause me to roll my eyes and generally avoid them.
- "Academia" is not a single entity, any more than any country or ethnicity or religious denomination or political affiliation is a single entity. Within all of these things, there is an entire spectrum of belief and experience, so to lump them all together to try to make some broad brush generalization like this always strikes me as disingenuous and attention seeking.
- "Jazz" means different things to different people. Like "swing", it can't really be nailed down in words. But if I had to say in the most general way what it means to me, it could stand for a history of stuff that has been nominally called "jazz", which I would describe something along the lines of
the practice of improvising, usually but not always collectively, over and around a shared musical vehicle or intentional lack of same. In English, to me that means people get together to have (hopefully) spontaneous improvised musical conversations about a shared musical topic. Beyond that, see my objections to generalizations related to the word "academia" above.
- As a "musical academic", or in English, "music teacher at the collegiate level", I view my job as some combination of informing students about the tradition, imparting basic theoretical and technical strategies to help them further their music making, and providing a small but tight knit community of like minded enthusiasts of the art where they can explore the possibilities of implementing these things together. At my school, the faculty consist of a broad range of perspectives, from very conservative to very exploratory. I am on the latter side of that equation in our program, which no doubt would make some people laugh, but it's a good system and I think it works well. We all play well together, I think (but feel free to visit the share your recordings thread and make up your own mind about that), better than we likely would if we all came from exactly the same perspective. Because we as faculty are all so different, the students get a wide range of perspectives and challenges.
- Is jazz dead? No. There are still gigs going every night in my town in multiple venues -
Live Jazz in Louisville - and we are something like only the 28th largest city in the states. The players here are strong, and many are graduates of our program.
- Is jazz dead because it's damn near impossible to make a living doing it? No. The correlation of any art form's viability with its popularity and/or earning power is a particularly pernicious western perspective which is quite frankly antithetical to art. The greatest authors do not always sell the most books, the greatest craftsmen usually don't have their wares on the shelves at Walmart, etc. In my view, real art should exist first and foremost for its own sake, because it satisfies a need for expression on the part of an artist.
- When I play gigs, I am most often playing standards at bars or clubs as a part of some social fabric of the place. After that, sometimes I get to play listening concerts. In both situations, if I'm playing standards, it's not about the money; it's about mining the material for something new that I haven't already said 1000 times, trying to deconstruct it so that it bears new fruit. With the right people on the bandstand, this can be a revelation. With the wrong ones, it's damn near impossible.
I wonder how many people come through Classical institutions and then become classical COMPOSERS, versus just performers? I think it's helpful to think of (and possibly reframe) Jazz Academia in relation to that. Certainly plenty of people go through Jazz college programs and never really aspire to become composers.
This is a valid point. My degrees in college were all in theory and composition, which at the time were all centered on the classical side of the aisle, although I was playing jazz on the side. I view improvisation as simply spontaneous composition, plain and simple. The difference is that there is no option to go back and edit and polish once you've played something. For me, largely eschewing formal composition was a healthy choice, because I'm too much of a perfectionist to really let anything go, and also because it's a very lonely way to live IME. I still write the occasional formal composition:
(is this jazz? Don't know, don't care... it's just something that got stuck i my head and I had to work it out to stay relatively sane)
...but what I really love about jazz is that there's nowhere to hide. You play how you play, as well as you play, in that specific moment and everyone can hear it immediately. Want to sound better for whatever reason? Practice more and listen more. That, for me, is the simple part, and the part that keeps me going after all these years.
