• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join free Log in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

Double Bass Did Academia Kill Jazz?

#121
s van order said:
Does this seem to be happening to guitar-based rock and roll too? Not there yet. We can always point to examples of young people today keeping the trad alive, but the heyday seems passed.
Click to expand...
Not to the same degree, but yes.

Rock is no longer youth rebelling against adults. When I do rock gigs, there is a lot of grey hair and facial creases.

There still is guitar based rock played by and younger people, but a lot has moved to keyboard and computer (not to mention, with digital recording technology, almost nothing isn't recorded without being digitally altered, pitch, rhythm and actual tone).
 
  • Like
Reactions: scrubhelmet and s van order
#122
matthewbrown said:
The last line reminds me of a Pat Metheny remark that the styles of music aren't so clearly marked off, it's the dress codes that matter. Or something along those lines. I think the language you use matters, too. If you're at a jazz jam session, it helps to drop a few terms that show you know the lingo. The jazz scene where I live, such as it is, remains stuck with Great American standards and singers. The jazz material I love to play is not represented at all, and if a tune is not sung, it had better be some old warhorse that everyone knows. That's pretty widespread, I expect, unless you're in a large city (or a university with a large music school and a jazz program).
Click to expand...

Great insights. Great post.
 
#123
bass player 53 said:
To quote the OP:

“A little bit off-tangent, but do you think the United States is the best place to study jazz?
The genre is certainly alive in countries outside of USA, but jazz is certainly root in American culture and history.”

I think it depends on what you hope
to accomplish by “studying jazz.”
Certainly, jazz music is an aural
phenomenon, and nearly the entire
history of it is available on recordings.

If you consider performing jazz music
as a craft, the tradition way to learn a
craft is with an accomplished teacher.
There are many outstanding collegiate
jazz programs in the US, and /or
a person can study privately.
If your goal is to eventually teach at
the college level, then you need advanced degrees.

Opportunities to perform what you
are learning are probably still found
in the US, predominantly in the larger
cities, ie, NYC (Brooklyn), LA, Nashville,
New Orleans, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, etc.,
with smaller pockets throughout the
country.
The ability to earn a living as a musician
involves performing, in as many genres
as possible, teaching, perhaps composing, recording, travel, and participating in as many associated
activities as possible.
For many, now as in the past, it is a ‘lifestyle’ and/ or an ‘identity’.
Hopefully, you have a choice in the
whole matter.
Click to expand...

Not to nitpick . . . well, actually, this is specifically to nitpick . . . but is there any way you can fix the formatting on your posts? All the line breaks mid-sentence makes this very undesirable to read.
 
#124
Yes because when you formalize and classicize the music, you kill creativity, instinct and spontaneity, the fundamental things that what we call “jazz” thrives and continues to evolve on.

(For reference - I’m 70 years young.)
 
#125
Maybe we should talk about what the present-day use of the word “means”?

I know what it means to me from what I heard in the house from birth, maybe we should just stop calling music this or that name and just call it music?

(Like Duke said, there’s only two kinds of music…)
 
#127
Lee Moses said:
Not to nitpick . . . well, actually, this is specifically to nitpick . . . but is there any way you can fix the formatting on your posts? All the line breaks mid-sentence makes this very undesirable to read.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I was unaware of this. I only read and write on my iPhone, and after editing, or not, this is how it appears.
Lee Moses said:
Not to nitpick . . . well, actually, this is specifically to nitpick . . . but is there any way you can fix the formatting on your posts? All the line breaks mid-sentence makes this very undesirable to read.
Click to expand...
Your message also appears this way to me, and I have no problem with this.
 

Attachments

  • IMG_4857.png
    IMG_4857.png
    897.9 KB · Views: 18
  • Like
Reactions: scrubhelmet
#129
Selim said:
Maybe we should talk about what the present-day use of the word “means”?

I know what it means to me from what I heard in the house from birth, maybe we should just stop calling music this or that name and just call it music?

(Like Duke said, there’s only two kinds of music…)
Click to expand...
I've always wondered if Ellington ever elaborated on or even actually said that oft quoted statement. Did he ever say what he meant by bad music? I would love to know if anyone has any info.
 
#131

Attachments

  • IMG_4859.png
    IMG_4859.png
    341.5 KB · Views: 18
  • IMG_4858.png
    IMG_4858.png
    294.2 KB · Views: 20
  • Like
Reactions: Lee Moses
#132
By the way, I've been watching this anime recently (Spy x Family) which your children and younger relatives might have been watching too. If so, they have the chance to passively listen to some jazz-leaning themes such as this:



And this:

 
#133
Academia did not kill Jazz but drove it into a certain direction. Luckily there are always those who do not follow the academia roadmaps (too deep). Jazz today has a marvellous bouquet of all kinds of sounds.

The only thing that is really academic (and killing) is the debate about whether something is jazz or not…
 
#136
What starts out as sign painting evolves to Van Gogh (who most people like some) and even Pollock (who is often used as a false example of "my kid could do that" (he can't even get close). It's a normal evolution as an art form grows and evolves. I'm getting tired of internet opinions, and the same muscles that reject dumb opinions are now on the look out for ever encroaching slop.
 
#137
Jazz IMHO is mostly 8th note swing-based improvisational music. The price of R+B becoming popular with white people was dropping the swing beat. Chuck Berry's early hits were swung, but you can hear beats getting more and more straight. The beatles killed jazz in the sense that they shifted popular music away from the swing feel and towards the rock feel. Same happens with country in the same era--it shifts away from swing and towards straight. And then African American music, under the influence of Afro Cuban styles, shifted toward 16th note funk grooves rather than swing patterns. The 60s: the straight beat decade.

But swing based grooves are all over hip hop and its variants, and every modern drummer has a repertoire of Dilla beats. Jazz was academicized--just like rock is now academicized--and it got to the point where the weight of the past starts to crush creativity. If you want to know jazz, you're starting with recordings made 100 years ago. If you want to play rock styles, you have to have 80 year old amps and expensive boutique vintage crap or digital gear designed to imitate it very rock guitar sound ever recorded. As Karl Marx wrote, "the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

It's not academia per se--I'm a history prof for a living. It's academia as orthodoxy, which is hard to avoid.
 
  • Like
Reactions: AndyMopley and bass player 53
#138
PB+J said:
Jazz IMHO is mostly 8th note swing-based improvisational music. The price of R+B becoming popular with white people was dropping the swing beat. Chuck Berry's early hits were swung, but you can hear beats getting more and more straight. The beatles killed jazz in the sense that they shifted popular music away from the swing feel and towards the rock feel. Same happens with country in the same era--it shifts away from swing and towards straight. And then African American music, under the influence of Afro Cuban styles, shifted toward 16th note funk grooves rather than swing patterns. The 60s: the straight beat decade.

But swing based grooves are all over hip hop and its variants, and every modern drummer has a repertoire of Dilla beats. Jazz was academicized--just like rock is now academicized--and it got to the point where the weight of the past starts to crush creativity. If you want to know jazz, you're starting with recordings made 100 years ago. If you want to play rock styles, you have to have 80 year old amps and expensive boutique vintage crap or digital gear designed to imitate it very rock guitar sound ever recorded. As Karl Marx wrote, "the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

It's not academia per se--I'm a history prof for a living. It's academia as orthodoxy, which is hard to avoid.
Click to expand...
I’d argue the increasing tendency of younger musicians and listeners to gravitate towards microgenres and regional sounds is in some ways a response to the phenomenon you’re describing. “popular” music in the sense of a mainstream is completely without identity, and it’s killed the aspirational aspect, which is really all it had going for it.

so combined, we get: the vast wealth of music tradition around the world means most people can frankly only focus on engaging with slices of what’s out there or pushing in a new direction from some starting point, *and* people are rewarded in the industry as it stands for staking a very specific flag that says “this is my artistic identity”

to me, this is not a recipe for creative death. it is ripe with opportunity, particularly when taking into account and standing in opposition to the aspects of society which have devalued artistry. and I see this when I dig into what’s being put out, wherever I look. of course, there’s always slop, but the creative spark is there to be found. even amateur work can be (and often is, to me) inspiring.

all that to say, I don’t see this current atmosphere as stifling or killing of any tradition, much less something with as much influence as jazz.
 
  • Like
Reactions: PB+J
#140
JazznFunk said:
<snip>

One of my former teachers said once that the canon of songs which built the vocabulary of Jazz (the 'standards') are the stories of the people and the time in which they were written. If all people ever play are THOSE songs, they're telling THOSE stories over and over again. It's up to people today to write jazz that tells OUR stories. Stories of the current times... becaue Jazz is at its core the music of NOW.

So if you want to experience jazz, whether it's made by people who came out of school and have kept going, or people who have been doing it for decades and are still finding new things to say, it's out there.
Click to expand...

". . . the music of NOW. . . . " Dead on.

Jazz lives, though it might be hard to recognize in the music of now. But there's a through line from Dixieland to big bands to the birth of the cool and on to rap and hip hop and deejay culture.

Example: just came across this Ty Alexander video and I love what she'd doing. Live improvisation, very much in the spirit of jazz, by means of live remixing, using techniques invented by Kraftwerk.

Wild, the cultural appropriation going the other way for a change: Black music incorporating the DNA of music created by a bunch of white Germans.

(Warning: NSFW lyrics are sometimes heard in the video.)

(Favorite comment under the video---' Damn apartment neighbors just knocked on my wall talking bout, " turn that shiiii uuup!!" '


 

Latest posts

Top Bottom
Back