Double Bass Did Academia Kill Jazz?

[turf3]

Is it helpful in understanding "jazz history", (and jazz wellness), to consider that Swing was music that was Dance-oriented and BeBop was meant for Listening/Digging? I've always felt that this was an important factor in the shifting "popularity" (among the mass audience) of jazz.
Once it became music for Listening, it became ripe for entry into Academia (for better or worse, or both.)
IMFO, of course.

Like I said, teenagers turned away from jazz as pop music before bebop became well known across the country. So it wasn't "oh, we can't dance to that, let's go find something else to dance to", it was "now we're all dancing to this new stuff that's not our old aunts' and uncles' music, or our parents' music", now what's this weird stuff coming out of New York City?"

The conventional wisdom, which seems to have been written by about five to ten jazz writers living in New York City and spending all their time immersed in jazz, in my opinion has the whole thing backwards.

As I wrote above, I'd bet that even as late as 1950, there might have been as many as 500 professional musicians playing bebop; there were probably two to three "listening clubs" in each of eight or ten major cities where the music might have been heard (Leaving NYC out of the mix, of course); compared to the tens of thousands of dance halls, National Guard armories, high school gyms, restaurants "with dancing and cocktails", etc., in every town big enough to have a gas station, all over the country, and being served by tens of thousands of musicians in local and territory bands who were still cranking it out in Goodman Lombardo Kaye Miller style. While bebop was coming to fruition, there was NO SHORTAGE of danceable jazzish music in the country. This idea that suddenly you couldn't find a way to hear (or dance to) Harry James, or the Dorseys separately or together, or Miller ghost bands, or the Elgarts, or Durwood Cline, or Jack Melick, or Mal Fitch, or Les Brown - heck - Duke Ellington, Roy Eldridge, Henry Red Allen, Coleman Hawkins, Cab Calloway - or or or, and so all there was, was "undanceable" bebop, and so young people sought out something different, just is not borne out by any kind of social history or music history.

Unless, that is, your focus is purely New York City and the cutting-edge musicians working there and you're completely unaware of the entire rest of the country.

 

[Bruce Calin]

I played in a territory band in the 60s while in school. The leader had been lead trumpet in Lawrence Welk's band and his wife and our keyboardist had been Welk's original Champagne Lady, so they knew the routine from that 30s-40s era. This was no jazz band but played the swing era hits along with "sweet band" (Lombardo) type stuff. I would occasionally be told "don't jazz it up" if I got a little too enthusiastic and a young tenor player would get the fish eye if he played too boppish a solo on a swing tune. We knew about bop and tried to pick our spots. I assume there were players in similar bands at that time doing the same thing. We played some "rock'n'roll" to try to keep current and the band was quite successful commercially even after all those years but it definitely wasn't jazz. This was a dance band that tried to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. It was still a great learning experience and taught me things about all sorts of music and performance that I don't know I would have gotten in school.

 

[Don Kasper]

As I wrote above, I'd bet that even as late as 1950, there might have been as many as 500 professional musicians playing bebop; there were probably two to three "listening clubs" in each of eight or ten major cities where the music might have been heard (Leaving NYC out of the mix, of course); compared to the tens of thousands of dance halls, National Guard armories, high school gyms, restaurants "with dancing and cocktails", etc., in every town big enough to have a gas station, all over the country, and being served by tens of thousands of musicians in local and territory bands who were still cranking it out in Goodman Lombardo Kaye Miller style. While bebop was coming to fruition, there was NO SHORTAGE of danceable jazzish music in the country. This idea that suddenly you couldn't find a way to hear (or dance to) Harry James, or the Dorseys separately or together, or Miller ghost bands, or the Elgarts, or Durwood Cline, or Jack Melick, or Mal Fitch, or Les Brown - heck - Duke Ellington, Roy Eldridge, Henry Red Allen, Coleman Hawkins, Cab Calloway - or or or, and so all there was, was "undanceable" bebop, and so young people sought out something different, just is not borne out by any kind of social history or music history.

Yeah. One of the problems of attempting to analyze ANY Historical path is that there were/are large amounts of simultaneous change(s) happening all at once. It's not always as clear and clean of a break that we'd like to see from our view 75 yrs into the future.
I'm not arguing with you, just trying to add my perspective to the overall conversation.
I just checked Wiki and the first JATP (Jazz At The Phil....) concert was in 1946, in LA (I thought is was much later!), and this is just a small example of the music slowly exiting the "Dance..." lane, and entering the "Listening..." lane, which then slowly crept towards Academia.
And we haven't even mentioned the Third Stream movement.
Thanks for your perspective and civility - I appreciate both.

 

[JazznFunk]

3) finally, the musicians who turned leading-edge jazz in the directions of bop, cool, hardbop, avant garde (which means so many different things!), and fusion, were by and large NOT part of academia, by and large had learned their craft on the bandstand as professional dance band musicians.

The fact that today's academically-oriented jazz players aren't filling stadiums like Taylor Swift has very little to do with their educational process. There's plenty wrong, in my opinion, with the academic approach to learning how to play jazz; but it is a result, not a cause, of the reduction in market and cultural prominence of jazz since 1940ish.

I don't think anyone has ever claimed that the progenitors of Jazz in the moment were ever part of 'academia'. However, it IS well documented that plenty of touring musicians would welcome local players (and young people) to jam with them and learn the music... so they WERE teachers on some level, to some degree. They may not have gone to school or had degrees, but they DID teach, as was the tradition of Jazz to pass down the tradition. Whether you consider that to be 'academia' is up to the interpreter. However, the next generations (again, Wynton Marsalis being one of the main ones), DID start to categorize, distill, and place barriers around who/what did what/where so they could start to say 'this is valid jazz/this is not'. Later generations of Jazz musicians certainly were more involved in the 'academic' restructuring and revising of the history of Jazz for further dissemination among new students.

Today's academically-oriented Jazz players aren't filling stadiums because there is no widespread market for the music on that level. It's also largely because they haven't been encouraged to take an original path by those academic institutions. It's incumbent upon the newly-minted Doctor Of Jazz to find their own path and voice.

 

[JazznFunk]

Like I said, teenagers turned away from jazz as pop music before bebop became well known across the country. So it wasn't "oh, we can't dance to that, let's go find something else to dance to", it was "now we're all dancing to this new stuff that's not our old aunts' and uncles' music, or our parents' music", now what's this weird stuff coming out of New York City?"

The conventional wisdom, which seems to have been written by about five to ten jazz writers living in New York City and spending all their time immersed in jazz, in my opinion has the whole thing backwards.

Unless, that is, your focus is purely New York City and the cutting-edge musicians working there and you're completely unaware of the entire rest of the country.

Like it or not, New York was the mecca for what was considered 'current' in Jazz at every major landmark along the way. And as you alluded to already, some people didn't even consider the swing/Jazz of the 1920s and 30s to be 'Jazz' anymore either... just moldy old 'swing.' So what I think we have here is a bit of personal revisionist history (your opinion, as you stated) about whether it was New York which was the center and vanguard of Jazz (it was, for the most part.... which is why every serious musician who wanted to be on point went there eventually), or if we should regard what the rest of the country was doing at the time as it relates to jazz (excluding the other major metro areas with healthy Jazz scenes) as the benchmark for its 'popularity'. The 'Jazz Writers' in NYC were far more plugged in and aware of both the current happenings there, and to the musicians who would have also been touring and out of town on the road.

Due to the limited reach of recorded music at that time, it makes sense that a lot of the country would be unable to keep up with the rapid stylistic and cultural developments in Jazz, as they emanated from a concentrated hot bed in New York, with other concurrent movements in other major areas like Chicago, Kansas City, St Louis, New Orleans, and even LA and San Francisco. The 'youth' may have turned to other things without ever knowing as much about Bebop etc simply because those small groups didn't tour widely, if they existed in X form beyond a club date and a recording session, and the distribution for their records was limited, often to just major metropolitan areas. Lots of interesting discussion in this thread, but also a little bit of selective repositioning about where the true benchmarks of jazz were fixed in history.

By the metrics you've proposed, I think it's most accurate to say that the youth of the time 'killed the most widespread and culturally popular subset of Jazz', which was only considered 'popular' because it was the most accessibly presented package because of the touring groups - i.e. the dying big bands and swing/dance bands. So did the youth turn away from them because they tired of them, or did the youth turn away because they were simply fading away? Perhaps it was more passive than active in that respect. Also of note is that the musicians in those bands were often spreading the 'gospel' of the 'real thing' happening in New York, etc while they were on the road. But 'Jazz' in the purest sense of the tradition was thriving in NYC and other major metro areas.

 

[PB+J]

Into the 50s there was swing based pop music that was jazz adjacent--Louis Prima comes to mind. Louis Jordan as well. Also Bill Haley's "rock around the clock" was just a fast swing tune that featured some guitar breaks: it wasn't that far from jazz when jazz was jukebox pop.

There's the larger problem of the "attention economy." Most people really can't muster the attention jazz requires. I teach a class on the origins of digital audio, and the question I start out with is "why do people prefer music with little or no dynamic range?" I play examples of pop hits from the past with some degree of dynamic range, and then a modern pop tune with zero dynamic ranger, and ask them why the preference. I use Katy Perry;s "firework" a lot for this. Eventually they always get around to if it's highly compressed/limited, "I don't have to pay attention to it." Music with dynamic range variation competes for you attention as it goes loud and quiet

 

[Sean Riddle]

I think another we need to reckon with in the history of jazz is thinking of NYC as being the place for creative arts and jazz. It certainly is, but the reasons are more economical than creative IMHO. At the time jazz was growing in popularity, NYC was the place that had the most performance and recording opportunities, so naturally a musician looking to make a living would go where the work is.
The musicians who helped foster the be-bop movement all moved from either the South, Midwest, Texas, or LA to NYC to take part in the scene there. And they were already cooking up their concepts in their hometowns before hand. Charlie Parker is just the next step in the Kansas City sax virtuosi. He wouldn’t be able to do what he did without Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins breaking grounds on phrasing and harmonic improvisation.
Meanwhile, Sun Ra was already like 50 years ahead of everyone in Alabama in the 1930s!
And bebop was known throughout the country. I vividly remember Bobby Bradford talking about learning Dizzy Gillespie solos as a kid in Texas and seeing Charlie Parker and Dizzy at clubs in Texas.
Meanwhile, a lot of great and unique music was happening in South LA in the 1940s and Charlie Parker was a part of it! He spent an extended stint in LA trying to get sober, but his influence was felt deeply in LA.
We need to get beyond the great man myth in understanding jazz history. Bebop did not magically come from nowhere. It was the result of countless developments in music that were already happening in the generation beforehand. And there are countless musicians we don’t talk about who helped make this happen. Bebop was just the natural step forward.
Was bebop the mainstream music of the time? No. But it was a huge counterculture movement with inspirations and scenes everywhere.

 

[turf3]

OK, well, what I've been addressing here is the idea that the reason jazz and jazzy music which was to a large extent the popular music of the 1930s, failed to remain so.

Everything everyone's said about New York City being the center of innovation and development for jazz from the 1930s at least through the 1950s, is 100% true. The point I keep trying to make is that there's a HUGE distance between "the popular music of the nation's youth" and "the new red hot trend amongst jazz cognoscenti most of whom live in New York City or look there for what's going on the jazz world".

Obviously, whatever moved jazz and jazzy music from being "the popular music of the nation's youth" to "a niche art form with many committed performers and consumers" was not related to "academia", since that move occurred a couple decades before the teaching of jazz music became a common thing in high schools, colleges, and universities.

The open question is whether teens moved away from "jazz" because of the new, more challenging stuff coming out of NYC (and, yes, there were nuclei of jazz innovation in California and a few other places, but mostly it was NYC) which did not support the preferred teenage activity of going out on dates, dancing, and trying to couple up with other teens; or did those teens move away from "jazz" because they perceived it as "Aunt Ethel's music" and "that old corny swing stuff from 1938"?

I suggest that if we look at "the popular music of the nation's youth", the actual exposure of "the nation's youth" to bebop in the period 1945-1950 would have been minimal to none. There were a few magazine articles about "this weird new stuff in NYC with the berets and glasses", but I really doubt that teh teenagers of 1945-1950 were seeking it out in large numbers, listening to it, and rejecting it.

I have suggested another cause and effect relationship: it seems to me that as "the popular music of the nation's youth" moved away from jazz and jazzy, it became possible for a small number of musicians to decide they weren't going to aim at pleasing dancers but rather at pleasing themselves. In a couple places (NYC, LA) there was a sufficient number of aficionados to make it commercially viable to have clubs dedicated to "the new thing", and the musicians were able to work in those places and study together to develop this, without constantly worrying about whether they would clear the dance floor - there was no dance floor, the whole scene basically ran on a shoestring budget and the clubs didn't have room for dance floors.

So I personally believe that the turn of "the popular music of the nation's youth" away from jazz and jazzy after WW2 did NOT have much if anything to do with this new bebop style of music from NYC, that maybe 500 musicians were performing by 1950; but rather that it was an inevitable turning away from the music of one's elders in popular music. As happened when N.O. jazz was replaced by swing, as happened when "singer-with-anonymous-band" was replaced by early rock and roll; as happened when Elvis and his ilk were replaced by writing-performing bands like the Beatles, Stones, etc.; as happened when the "ooh ooh ooh she loves you yeah" teenybopper style of 1964 was replaced by what we called "hard rock" around 1970; as happened when the punks said they were going back to basics.... At each of these changes the "old stuff" was characterized as "stuffy" or "corny".

So, that's the main "killing of jazz" that we've been discussing - why it was "the popular music of the nation's youth" in 1938 and it wasn't in 1948.

But that's 80 years ago.

There's also the question of the effect of academic study of jazz since - say - around 1955 or so. I think that's roughly when it started being treated as a subject suitable for an academic approach, in the first few institutions. By that time, jazz and jazzy were no longer "the popular music of the nation's youth", and barring some really drastic counterfactual events, they weren't ever going to be, again. But the subject of how has academic work has affected jazz AS A NICHE BUT STILL IMPORTANT music, is something else, and worth additional discussion.

 

[bassmanbrent]

So I personally believe that the turn of "the popular music of the nation's youth" away from jazz and jazzy after WW2 did NOT have much if anything to do with this new bebop style of music from NYC, that maybe 500 musicians were performing by 1950; but rather that it was an inevitable turning away from the music of one's elders in popular music. As happened when N.O. jazz was replaced by swing, as happened when "singer-with-anonymous-band" was replaced by early rock and roll; as happened when Elvis and his ilk were replaced by writing-performing bands like the Beatles, Stones, etc.; as happened when the "ooh ooh ooh she loves you yeah" teenybopper style of 1964 was replaced by what we called "hard rock" around 1970; as happened when the punks said they were going back to basics.... At each of these changes the "old stuff" was characterized as "stuffy" or "corny".

This, right here.

 

[Clyde Stats]

Wow; a lot of words to answer a seemingly simple question! Did academia kill jazz? No; it probably saved it by providing a steady stream of talented and committed young players to keep the music going and replace the elders as they retired and passed on. It’s possible that it may have promoted a more theoretical and technique-based approach to the music at the cost of emotional expressivity, but this is really a personal choice on the part of the players and not the fault of academia, as you can’t really teach someone how to be emotionally expressive. I know in my area (Burlington,VT), local high school and university jazz programs turn out talented young players who bring their friends to local gigs to support them. Other young players hear about it and move to the area and a nice local scene, which has been there for many years, is re-populated and enriched.

 

[Bruce Calin]

My background is as a professional player with no academic training to speak of. One of my enjoyable pursuits these days is to play with and mentor students who've come from an academic training experience. We have very different perspectives but still very much enjoy and learn from each other. I've learned a lot(for example, I had never heard the word "contrafact", even though I have played many of them). They also get info from my perspective they haven't gotten in school. What it comes down to IMO is it's all jazz and it's all music. Play on!

 

[bass player 53]

Agree with this--it's crazy to blame Bird and Ornette. In the 60s lots of people were chasing the jukebox success Lee Morgan had with "the Sidewinder." I mean listen to Shorter's "Adams Apple," or Herbie's "Watermelon Man" or any number of greasy Jimmy Smith grooves.

A friend insists that the real change comes from Afro-Cuban music, which introduced a lot of rhythmically complex two chord vamps and abandoned the swing feel. You can see this in James Brown, going from R+B triplets in the 50s to 16th note funk vamps. Static harmony, complex drumming and horns. He argues the Latin piece has always been present, but it boomed with the "mambo craze" in the 50s and then boogaloo in the 60s and then the generic Santana style latin beat, which you get in jazz early on with Jamal's "poinciana," which was a big hit, and Dizzy's "manteca." It comes with large scale immigration of Cubans and Puerto Ricans to US cities

I don’t want to get into too much
detail here, but anything that came out of New Orleans was heavily influenced
by ‘Afro-Cuban’ rhythms very early on, including the ‘second line drum beat.’
It is not possible to overstate the importance of Caribbean rhythms in the development of early jazz music.

 

[Lee Moses]

My background is as a professional player with no academic training to speak of. One of my enjoyable pursuits these days is to play with and mentor students who've come from an academic training experience. We have very different perspectives but still very much enjoy and learn from each other. I've learned a lot(for example, I had never heard the word "contrafact", even though I have played many of them). They also get info from my perspective they haven't gotten in school. What it comes down to IMO is it's all jazz and it's all music. Play on!

I think a lot of that interaction between the two camps was going on in the early days of jazz, although those who had received the "academic training" received a classically-based training.

 

[PB+J]

I don’t want to get into too much
detail here, but anything that came out of New Orleans was heavily influenced
by ‘Afro-Cuban’ rhythms very early on, including the ‘second line drum beat.’
It is not possible to overstate the importance of Caribbean rhythms in the development of early jazz music.

Agree

 

[Lionel Albert]

Yes and No !
It depends of how you exploite what you have learnt.
Academic learning doesn't really insist on basics but on isolated exercises.
It doesn't give you a repertoire, if it does it teaches you how to play it on a lonely way.
There is a difference between being a good student and a musician you can trust.
Sometimes there is no relationship between the two cases, I admit it's very rare except if you don't go forward from what you learnt.

 

[Keith Rawlings]

I'll agree with you that I don't care much for the type of jazz where everybody takes a turn soloing, while some other players sit it out, but there is a whole lot of modern jazz that doesn't go that route. Just great grooves and playing.

So, I don't know if it's 'truly new or out of the box', but it's not the tag team approach to my ears. Both these acts have killer bassists too.

Thanks for sharing these artists—I’m really digging Lydian Collective. Excellent music!

 

[Paul New]

They DO walk a thin rope, and they need to keep doing that.

I see no reason to "suspect" or be hostile" to the people who are trying to preserve a genre or group of genres so that it doesn't become indistinguishable from some other genre that's directed at gaining popularity. I don't "suspect" them of it- I expect it and I'm happy to see it. There is no "gate" to its enjoyment other than the limits of one's own study. That's about as democratic as it gets, and on some, level, the work done to appreciate that art is a journey in and of itself. Formal study for something other than primary employment isn't the waste of time it's been made out to be.

There is already a ton of art as entertainment out there for anyone who wants it.

EDIT: And we are entertained by different things. I am entertained by the art that is jazz.

Man, I LOVE that solo with the eBow!

Where can I hear more of that, and who did you study with or listen to in becoming so fluent in that eastern feel?

 

[ctrlzjones]

So, that's the main "killing of jazz" that we've been discussing - why it was "the popular music of the nation's youth" in 1938 and it wasn't in 1948.

What you are missing is that there was no “youth culture” that could have been popular in ‘38 and ‘48.

Youth culture wasn’t a thing until Rock’n’Roll happened with Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. Also the invention of youth culture was intented for growing a market share that has not been there before, turning music into a commodiy as part of a supposed “new” & divergent lifestyle opposed to what the fathers prefered.

 

[ctrlzjones]

So, that's the main "killing of jazz" that we've been discussing - why it was "the popular music of the nation's youth" in 1938 and it wasn't in 1948.

There was no “youth culture” in those times.

It was the musicians turning their back the the popular form of “watered down” sounds of jazz that went Bebop and that controversy between the real and the comercial thing has been there since popular mass culture. A lot of musicians were blamed for selling out the soul of the real original culture (what was mostly a debate about afro americans making money on the marketplace of the “white culture”).

 

[RBrownBass]

Man, I LOVE that solo with the eBow!

Where can I hear more of that, and who did you study with or listen to in becoming so fluent in that eastern feel?

I think you're quoting someone else- I didn't post any music here.