Chris Fitzgerald said:
Many good analogies and points in this thread. I have no problem with any of it/them as long as everyone realizes that it's impossible to "win" a "Subjective argument". I like some guys who play slow, some guys who play fast, and some guys who play all of the above. Ear of the beholder, no?
Spoken like a true moderator. I think maybe this question is not best explained simply in terms of subjectivity, though, in the same manner that one's personal preferences are. The language analogy that Ed and I keep bringing up once again seems appropriate: language, while imprecise, is not a subjective system (not that it's something objective, of course--words are just signifiers, not "things themselves," but we have agreed upon what those words mean and the rules by which they can be meaningfully put together)--what I get when I read the snippet above from our friend in Louisville is not "oh, I dig seeing all the o's and s's he uses, and I get a real kick out of the multi-syllabic words, cool!" I mean, as a sovereign individual I *could* appreciate it on that level, and I could also say "I think what Chris is trying to say is not that he wants to emphasize the subjective nature of our argument and the beauty of tolerant pluralism in this dialogue, but that he prefers Rice-A-Roni to Hamburger Helper because of the difference in sodium content."
Both personal views about Chris's words would be defensible in terms of subjectivity ("well, that's what it meant to *me*" or "that's what *I* saw in it"), but neither would acknowledge the actual substance of what Chris said. And I think we all agree that said substance is present in his words.
So how do Chris's words carry substance? Because the language he used to express them operates according to rules created and agreed upon by all of us who use it and understand it. Same thing with culture (and art): no pre-existing aesthetic values have been handed down to us; they are rather formulated in the course of our art- and culture-making.
We learn how to understand and make use of language by using it--same with music. Anyone who has had the experience of learning to play a new and unfamiliar style of music has had this experience: at first, the music may seem like gibberish, but then, as you listen more and play more and learn more, you begin to understand the rules according to which it operates--and then the light bulb goes on, and you're no longer just letting surface sensations wash over you but are rather understanding the import--the substance--of the music. I feel like this happened to me both with bebop at an early stage of playing and with free jazz a la Albert Ayler and Charles Gayle a bit later; I know a Nigerian drummer trained in traditional West African drumming who says that Beethoven, when played for an African traditional musician, sounds literally like nothing because the rhythmic stucture is, to their ears, so much more bland, and that it took him much study to come to understand the nuances of the tonality and to dig what was happening underneath.
Either side can use this argument: either a) NHOP's playing sometimes may seem like flashy gibberish, but that's just because listener x hasn't dug deep enough into it to understand it's substance, or b) NHOP's playing is often flashy gibberish, which we can say because we've dug deep enough in our understanding of jazz to have a feeling for the underlying aesthetic principles which define its substantive elements and which have been agreed upon by those who shape the music. (I won't say one way or the other regarding NHOP, but there is a reason for which Coleman Hawkins gets his own chapter in a history of jazz and Don Byas gets one paragraph, and I think it has to do with the s-word [which is tied to the a-word, "artistry," and the m-word, "musicality"]). Let's just try not to de-legitimize the idea of substance just because it isn't possible to put it in words; very little of what goes on in our hearts and minds can be (and that's why we've got music).
[BTW, if anyone wants to hear an example of bass playing utterly lacking in substance, maybe as a benchmark for this discussion, I just recorded some stuff last night that would suffice...]
