Double Bass Did Academia Kill Jazz?

[Steven Ayres]

So within "academia" we have to include secondary education. A surprising number of great pro jazz players got their start from the high-school program here in tinytown Prescott, where marching band is required.

Nicki and Patrick Adams Offer an Engaging Classical/Jazz Hybrid on 'Lynx' » PopMatters

The restless musical spirits of siblings Nicki and Patrick Adams have found a pared-down yet bracing place to land on their latest musical collaboration. With

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[Lee Moses]

This may be a tired subject . . . but man, there is some gold in this thread.

@Chris Fitzgerald did I miss your post?

He's been too busy murdering Jazz to post...

- 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.

 

[bassmanbrent]

So within "academia" we have to include secondary education. A surprising number of great pro jazz players got their start from the high-school program here in tinytown Prescott.

Nicki and Patrick Adams Offer an Engaging Classical/Jazz Hybrid on 'Lynx' » PopMatters

The restless musical spirits of siblings Nicki and Patrick Adams have found a pared-down yet bracing place to land on their latest musical collaboration. With

www.popmatters.com

Yes, absolutely. Although, I didn’t type it, I was definitely thinking just that.

 

[savid]

Anecdotally, I’ve seen more interest in jazz from younger people on social media. There are also pretty vibrant scenes with young players in LA and NYC, as well as the Richmond scene that was mentioned earlier in the thread. And they’re not insulated (at least LA and NYC), this is a broadly distributed multi-generational/multi disciplinary community of musicians I see interacting.

I think this trend is largely a backlash to the algorithm-ification of music, more live performance and improvisation.

Not claiming jazz is taking the world by storm but it looks very healthy from where I’m from, I haven’t even touched on global regional scenes.

 

[bass player 53]

I had never heard of this group before, and I don’t know if they play out, but
they seem to want to keep Jazz alive.
The bass player seems to be replaced
with plastic and electrons.

 

[Thunderthumbs73]

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.


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:

I agree with basically all of this. If I had more time and energy (this makes day 4 of 4 hours of snow shovelling every day, with another forseeable 3-4 days left IF the next storm doesn't hit) I would have jumped in on a more thorough response. So in lieu of that, I'm agreeing with you.

I my lifetime, I have received the music degree, and spent time at that time doing popular, classical and Jazz music of a number of varieties, and I remain musically invested in these genres and experiences in some way or another so I have plenty to say... and yet very little time relatively-speaking to say it.

Ok, I need this precious intersection of daylight, temps, energy to deal with more snow AGAIN for as much time as I can muster, before dropping temps, freezing, energy and lack of daylight forces me to quit for the day.

 

[longfinger]

I agree that questions like "did Academia kill Jazz" are totally pointless, and a time-suck, but are fun and good as enjoyable time-wasting friendly debate.

One thing that underlies this question is what Isaac Asimov wrote of in his "Cult of Ignorance" essay which gave the memorable quote :

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

So here we have this position that Academia is somehow false and "popular music", which is mostly what Tweens, Teens and early Twenty-somethings buy, consume is the real deal. What kids like, and what they spend money on is the ultimate goal. Now, for the $$$ market, that can be true, but it is for sure false when it comes to art, history, knowledge and more.


Music Academia (those who partook in past, present, future, as student, staff, teacher) are the professionals who care about the music, its language, history, impact, performance and more. They do it, even if the money is less. They are the intellectuals of the genre who keep it alive and investigate its meanings deeply, once the superficial money-market has moved on to the latest cash-earning style.

These articles insist "popular" is the ultimate goal. "youthful rebellion" being a code for making money off of kids while they are impressionable, by selling them stuff that feeds their fantasies, and the sellers bank accounts.

That's just about the money. It isn't the ultimate goal for many.

Now we can say, popular is also about something resonating with the people in a large-scale way, but that's usually not what these articles write about. There are Teenagers who still love playing and listening to the music of J.S. Bach, just not that many compared to those who love K-Pop. However, teens like that have been around for centuries, and will continue for centuries more.

Another point, all these anti-elites of music are not anti-elite when it comes to sports. Yes, participating is better than spectating, but imagine if the pro sports fields had "regular folks" competing alongside the pros? The quality of the game would drop so far so fast, people wouldn't watch it.

They understand elitism in the physical realm, that elite players offer elite performances. Well, that good elitism also functions in the intellectual and artistic realms too. Those who study the craft get better than those who don't study the craft. And studying the craft often changes how one perceives and appreciates the whole art.

 

[Steven Ayres]

... "popular music", which is mostly what Tweens, Teens and early Twenty-somethings buy ...

Maybe it's a niggle, but that nuance didn't come along till the media started dissecting youth culture in the '70s. The more salient use of "popular" distinguishes music for and by the majority from that of the elite, imho. This applies to the country, folk and blues traditions as well as jazz from its beginnings. Yes, young people were involved — Jazz Age imagery frequently includes flappers and college boys — but the audiences were much more diverse than that. That jazz was disruptive only shows how much more popular it was than other genres.

 

[longfinger]

Maybe it's a niggle, but that nuance didn't come along till the media started dissecting youth culture in the '70s. The more salient use of "popular" distinguishes music for and by the majority from that of the elite, imho. This applies to the country, folk and blues traditions as well as jazz from its beginnings. Yes, young people were involved — Jazz Age imagery frequently includes flappers and college boys — but the audiences were much more diverse than that. That jazz was disruptive only shows how much more popular it was than other genres.

Interesting.

Keep in mind, the largest disruption in music during the 20th century, by far, was audio recording technology. It allowed "popular"
music to be recorded and remembered long after the initial performance. That shift was tectonic.

Before, the specific music that was remembered as generations passed was only music that was written down in music notation. Likely "Art music"... kept by trained people who could read and perform music.

Recording technology allowed performers, singers, non-composers, to be heard and become famous well after their live performances were silent. To experience the recordings, listeners did not have to be musicians, nor did they have to perform the music themselves. The technology played the music for them. Jazz, and other styles like various-folk, blues, country, etc., rose up in that transition time.

One could propose that "popular music" that we can still remember culturally, was music composed directly to recordings for machine playback, as opposed to musical notation scores for human performer playback.

In that sense, "Popular music" wasn't written down. If it was written down, it wasn't popular music anymore. We don't know what popular music really sounded like 300 years ago in the various places around Earth.

 

[Steven Ayres]

the largest disruption in music during the 20th century, by far, was audio recording technology. It allowed "popular"
music to be recorded and remembered long after the initial performance.

And jazz developed alongside recording technology (which began to circulate in the late 19th century). Less obvious is that much of the popular music that became the early jazz canon was from long before recordings, going back into the 1870s ...

Before, the specific music that was remembered as generations passed was only music that was written down in music notation. Likely "Art music"... kept by trained people who could read and perform music.

... and all that was sold as popular sheet music that anyone could buy to learn and play at home or onstage. The ability to read music was not anything like as rare then as it is today.

... Jazz, and other styles like various-folk, blues, country, etc., rose up in that transition time.

As mass media developed from sheet music to recordings to radio, the popular traditions and genres that had been in place for generations became more widely known. More so than the older traditions, jazz is a child of mass media, I agree.

One could propose that "popular music" that we can still remember culturally, was music composed directly to recordings for machine playback, as opposed to musical notation scores for human performer playback. In that sense, "Popular music" wasn't written down. If it was written down, it wasn't popular music anymore. We don't know what popular music really sounded like 300 years ago in the various places around Earth.

I'm sorry, this to me is nonsense. Writing music down is recording it too, but even that wasn't the first form of recording: that would be memory and oral tradition.

But none of this really addresses my point that in any era, popular music is the music of the people rather than the rich, it didn't just appear in the middle of the last century. Jazz arose from the people, and it was popular music till it lost touch with its roots and became elite and rarefied. The question at the center of this thread, as I understand it, is how that happened.

 

[DJ Bebop]

“Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny"

 

[james condino]

Can the mods merge this thread with the Pat Metheny vs Kenny G. ?

 

[fdeck]

I think jazz may have been "elite" in some respects, for a very long time. The recording industry may have been a factor. Unlike locally performed music, the studios could demand musicians of the highest caliber. And it made sense. A few clams might fly past you at a live performance, but they become painful if you listen to a recording more than a few times. And being able to record in fewer takes probably made up for the cost of hiring better players.

With recorded music as a standard, live music audiences could acquire more demanding expectations too.

My main band plays charts from the 1920s onward. I'd say that by the early 1930s, that music is not playable unless you at least have some lessons behind you, or a level of devotion to reach that level on your own. The musicians were unabashed about this. I think they wanted to play sophisticated, challenging music. Stories about the history of jazz mention the musicians studying classical music in search of ideas. Miles Davis was happy to attend Julliard -- until he wasn't. Thelonious Monk was consulted by other musicians as a theory expert.

What I'm thinking is that some level of elitism in jazz predates the development of academic jazz programs.

I think jazz can be whatever you want it to be. I play plenty of gigs in bars where the audience is having fun, and I don't think we're lowering our standards in any way. And we can throw in a Polka or two. It's Wisconsin after all.

 

[tinyd]

- 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.

I don't really have opinons on whether education has adversely affected jazz, but I think the tradition part (that @Chris Fitzgerald puts first above) is important, not in the narrow sense of "it's not jazz if it doesn't sound like it did in <insert year before 1960>", but in the sense of being aware of playing improvised music that draws on a long African American lineage. You can hear this in the playing of great musicians - they reference this shared language even if the overall band is a long way from straightahead jazz.

 

[Roger Davis]

What did they say? Writing about jazz is like ice skating about architecture. Or something very similar.

 

[Lee Moses]

What I'm thinking is that some level of elitism in jazz predates the development of academic jazz programs.

I think you're using the term "elitism" in a somewhat unusual manner. I don't equate the pursuit of excellence, or even the demand for excellence, with elitism.

 

[KenSmithFan]

I think you're using the term "elitism" in a somewhat unusual manner. I don't equate the pursuit of excellence, or even the demand for excellence, with elitism.

I was accused of elitism for suggesting that people tune their instruments, learn the songs and adhere to some minimal standards of professionalism.

 

[bassmanbrent]

I think you're using the term "elitism" in a somewhat unusual manner. I don't equate the pursuit of excellence, or even the demand for excellence, with elitism.

Okay, I'm getting way too deep in the weeds, but here goes. I think historically jazz has been less welcoming to newcomers than bluegrass or other styles. I've definitely seen it, although I also think it's way less prevalent than it used to be. To be really excellent at playing this music takes many years of hard work and dedication, which I think can lead to elitism when a high level player encounters a musician that hasn't yet done the work. Maybe it's not about the pursuit of excellence as much as how you treat people that haven't reached your level yet.

 

[Lee Moses]

Okay, I'm getting way too deep in the weeds, but here goes. I think historically jazz has been less welcoming to newcomers than bluegrass or other styles. I've definitely seen it, although I also think it's way less prevalent than it used to be. To be really excellent at playing this music takes many years of hard work and dedication, which I think can lead to elitism when a high level player encounters a musician that hasn't yet done the work. Maybe it's not about the pursuit of excellence as much as how you treat people that haven't reached your level yet.

I would definitely agree with that. Although you will find examples of similar elitism (or snobbery, or exclusion, or derision...or maybe just a high bar) in other forms of music demanding a higher level of ability. Or even not. It might just be about having the "bona fides" to play a particular form of music; e.g., you have to be from the country to play country music; you have to be from the 'hood to be involved in rap, etc.

 

[bass player 53]

I would definitely agree with that. Although you will find examples of similar elitism (or snobbery, or exclusion, or derision...or maybe just a high bar) in other forms of music demanding a higher level of ability. Or even not. It might just be about having the "bona fides" to play a particular form of music; e.g., you have to be from the country to play country music; you have to be from the 'hood to be involved in rap, etc.

There are so many counter examples
of elitism or snobbery, or whatever you
want to call it. Since this started as a jazz thread, telling people who are not black or African-American that they can’t authentically perform jazz is like telling the world’s greatest cellist,
Yo-Yo Ma that he can’t authentically play Bach. Or Eminem regarding rap.
Or Dylan, from Minnesota.
Jazz music is essentially Western harmony, using typically conventional
instrumentation, deeply rooted and
reflective of the Black and African-
American experience, with a large
Caribbean rhythmic influence. The
major contributors, innovators,
composers, and musical artists are
Black and African-Americans,
reflecting their collective experiences.
However, once the music is out there,
it’s anyone’s fair game to participate,
innovate, and contribute.
I believe anything else is basically
racism.