Frank Zappa, Yes, Genesis...these types of bands were once popular. The ordinary person gave complexity a chance, and actually liked it. The 80's onward has been a nose-dive in the complexity department. Audiences today are agressively anti-intellectual. Who's at fault?
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Double Bass Why isn't Jazz that popular? (DB forum thread)
- Thread starter gai113
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Frank Zappa, Yes, Genesis...these types of bands were once popular. The ordinary person gave complexity a chance, and actually liked it. The 80's onward has been a nose-dive in the complexity department. Audiences today are agressively anti-intellectual. Who's at fault?
This is another reason I like Jazz. I'd like to tour japan and Europe and play jazz. It would be fun.
I already did the big money gigs, I am over that stuff.
The listener is at fault. When I was a teen and had a job and was making my own money, I went crazy buying records--yeah I bought a lot of hard rock but I bought prog rock, old blues, new blues, swing, bop jazz, free jazz, fusion, avant-gard, classical, Indian music, Arabic music, Japanese music, American Indian chants, Tibetan Buddhist chants--I bought everything and I listened to all of it. I educated myself musically. That's what you have to do. If I only listened to stuff my friends listened to, I wouldn't be playing double bass because nothing they listened to had double bass in it. comes a point when you have to branch out on your own, you have to embark on a musical journey. Christ, it's a blast to do that so how can anyone be so vapid as to never bother??
All that music is still out because I see it AND you can order stuff off the internet. I wish I had an internet resource to peruse when I was a kid. I had to drive 50, 60, 75 miles to find record stores whose import bins I hadn't completely raided down to nothing. I didn't care what my friends thought, I didn't care what the media thought, I didn't care what anyone thought. I wanted that music. Sure, I encountered stuff by sheer chance that I became a big fan of--bossa nova for example--but that's part of it, keeping your ears open for anything new, anything that offers new possibilities.
Listening to the same garbage I was listening to at 14 is pathetic. So when I see 40 yo women crowding into see fat, balding NKOTB, I can't respect that. Jesus, time to grow up. If you want more than the mediocre crap the industry pushes into your face, you have to stop buying that junk first. So, no, I don't blame the industry (although I'm no fan of it), I blame the listener. If you want more than pop garbage, stop listening to pop garbage. If you like pop garbage then that's all you're going to get. Trash music for a trash culture.
I have Eddie Gomez CDs that he recorded in Japan that aren't available in the US unless you order it off the internet. Great stuff and no one here ever heard of it. They're too busy thinking the jerk they saw on "Idol" last night was the greatest thing ever. Stupid.
Well, firstly there's so many kinds of music that fall under the general title of "jazz" - I think the majority of people, whether through culture or education or whatever, prefer music where they can let their hair down, not think too much and just move with the music...certainly, in all forms of music a tune you can remember or hum afterwards is more likely to be popular than one where you have to apply intellectual effort to gain full enjoyment. Call it laziness if you will, but a lot of "jazz" seems to be more for the enjoyment of the musicians on stage (and perhaps in the audience) than for the general public. Jazz these days often seems to preach to the converted, in that it appeals more to those who are already jazz afficionados than to Joe Public.
Frankly, I think jazz these days is in danger of becoming too derivative. If you're the child of a 40yo mother whose idea of a night listening to good music is to go to a NKOTB concert, what are you learning about music from her?
For instance, I knew this girl who was Italian and in love with everything Italian--which is fine, the Italians gave us the instrument of our passion, after all. But when I asked her if she had ever heard recordings of Enrico Caruso, she did not know of whom I spoke. Enrico who? So, here I am without a drop of Italian blood in my body trying to educate an Italio-phile about a great Italian singer I'd been listening to since I was a teen and a saw record album of him in a store once and bought it on a whim. Her parents obviously never taught her about Caruso and maybe they didn't know who he was either. I'll bet they know who he is in Italy.
Now my parents didn't teach me about Caruso directly but they had a lot of opera albums which I listened to as a boy. Then my mother bought me a book called "Minute Biographies" about all these different famous historical figures with their lives all summed up on a page with an image of that person. Very good for a school kid. I was about 11, I think. One vignette was about Enrico Caruso and the name stuck. Seven years later, I bought a record album of his arias just to finally hear him.
For instance, I knew this girl who was Italian and in love with everything Italian--which is fine, the Italians gave us the instrument of our passion, after all. But when I asked her if she had ever heard recordings of Enrico Caruso, she did not know of whom I spoke. Enrico who? So, here I am without a drop of Italian blood in my body trying to educate an Italio-phile about a great Italian singer I'd been listening to since I was a teen and a saw record album of him in a store once and bought it on a whim. Her parents obviously never taught her about Caruso and maybe they didn't know who he was either. I'll bet they know who he is in Italy.
Now my parents didn't teach me about Caruso directly but they had a lot of opera albums which I listened to as a boy. Then my mother bought me a book called "Minute Biographies" about all these different famous historical figures with their lives all summed up on a page with an image of that person. Very good for a school kid. I was about 11, I think. One vignette was about Enrico Caruso and the name stuck. Seven years later, I bought a record album of his arias just to finally hear him.
Is the 40 year old listening to the music of their high school years any different then the previous generation still going to see The Drifters or Temptations with one original member?. It has just happened that taste are becoming more narrow with all the broadcast options instead of everybody being exposed to a little of everything on TV talk/variety shows and radio.
Dimmik I agree with you that jazz is tending towards stagnation. There are still some very creative and masterful cats out there but it's less than in the heyday during the 50s and 60s.
As for its being the public's fault that pop music is so derivative, I think you're right that things would change if the public took the time to educate themselves the way that you, and many TBers, have. And, it does seem to me that progressive rock is less popular today than in the 70s. But I don't think we can expect that the layperson care about music as much as musicians do. Personally, I'm disappointed that most folks can't appreciate a good Charlie Parker solo, or for that matter, a Caruso performance, but, personally, I can't fault them for not having the interest and motivation I have. There are plenty of things I don't care enough about to become educated on. For example, I don't expect a horse trainer to get bent out of shape because I'm not very educated about horse training. I imagine that it's very important to them and full of interest, to them, but not so much for me, so I'm not likely to ever be able to fully appreciate the art of horse training. I'm alright with that and hope that the horse trainers are too.
As for its being the public's fault that pop music is so derivative, I think you're right that things would change if the public took the time to educate themselves the way that you, and many TBers, have. And, it does seem to me that progressive rock is less popular today than in the 70s. But I don't think we can expect that the layperson care about music as much as musicians do. Personally, I'm disappointed that most folks can't appreciate a good Charlie Parker solo, or for that matter, a Caruso performance, but, personally, I can't fault them for not having the interest and motivation I have. There are plenty of things I don't care enough about to become educated on. For example, I don't expect a horse trainer to get bent out of shape because I'm not very educated about horse training. I imagine that it's very important to them and full of interest, to them, but not so much for me, so I'm not likely to ever be able to fully appreciate the art of horse training. I'm alright with that and hope that the horse trainers are too.
But horse training isn't something ubiquitous in society, it's not something everybody NEEDS to have experience of simply because most of us don't own horses. But we ALL listen to music and need to be educated in music. Look at it this way: schools teach us to read and write and they give us a few novels and what not to analyze but after that, we're on our own. Your school isn't going to hand you "Naked Lunch" or "Howl" or "Tropic of Capricorn" or anything by Anais Nin or Rabelaise (whose Gargantua series sometimes shockingly graphic). It's up to us to take our literacy out into the world and read this kind of stuff on our own. And what if you met someone in his 40s or 50s who hadn't read a book since the ones he was assigned in high school? Well, he's dreadfully, woefully undeveloped, I think we can agree. I'm not saying he had to read Nin and Burroughs and Miller but he should have read SOMETHING! Should we blame the lousy education system or is he at fault? I say he's at fault.
My personal, biased, limited opinion is this: the masses as a whole are mediocre (even if the person itself is not mediocre, many people become mediocre because they're too preoccupied with fitting in even at a loss of their own individuality and maybe genius potential), and as such they cannot comprehend beyond what most other mediocre people tell them to like (i.e. social pressure). And since jazz seems to be out of fashion these days, the masses gravitate away from it. Plus, jazz is hard enough to get as it is; a non-musician will find it too mentally tiring. I believe that most masses want to be entertained with simple things; thinking and analyzing has become too boring and exhausting for the average Joe.
Couple that with the steady decline of artistic understanding and appreciation in the general population (i.e. the masses), and all you get as popular mainstream music is basically a sterile marketable product.
Myself, I admit I still don't get plenty of jazz music and I still need more time to get used to it (I'm pretty much a rocker at heart... and a "rasta-mon" as of late) because it is very different from what I'm used to... but I'm trying my best, and eventually I think I will develop an appreciation and understanding, and I even hope I get good enough to play it.
Couple that with the steady decline of artistic understanding and appreciation in the general population (i.e. the masses), and all you get as popular mainstream music is basically a sterile marketable product.
Myself, I admit I still don't get plenty of jazz music and I still need more time to get used to it (I'm pretty much a rocker at heart... and a "rasta-mon" as of late) because it is very different from what I'm used to... but I'm trying my best, and eventually I think I will develop an appreciation and understanding, and I even hope I get good enough to play it.
Is that all they listened to in all those intervening years? Then, no, probably not much different. But then the Drifters and the Temptations had a much more diverse fan base than NKOTB (virtually nothing but tweeny girls who had no interest in the music but just wanted to sigh over the dreamy boys) and therefore, I think, more inherent worth.
I mean, when I was 14, I was listening to ELP and King Crimson as well as Blue Oyster Cult and Gentle Giant. I saw all of them live at some point and still would. But these were bands with some substance and they certainly weren't all that I listened to in the subsequent years.
I had to order a satellite radio subscription for my car. Radio without it is just not worth listening to. I agree that tastes are becoming narrower but if we don't find a way to stop the slide, what's going to happen to us? I don't think all is lost. We can be saved. The tricky part is that we need to be saved from ourselves.
its rare to hear jazz on the radio. A local college station here does often play jazz though. I played in jazz band in high school and have always like it. To be honest though outside of going to my local Italian resturants I don't hear it much. In all honest I think a huge portion of the music industry is just what ever is popular at the time. I mean there's a lot of stuff that's popular that's flat out horrible or uninteresting to me but sadly the average listener cares more about looking cool driving down the road blasting a popular song than having their own identity or their own opinion of that song.
Dimmik, you make a very good point and you almost convince me. Certainly horse training isn't as significant to most people as music is. And I appreciate your analogy to literature. Honestly, I'll have to ponder it a bit because I'm not sure that music and literature are a perfect analogy. For instance, I have friends that were tone deaf as children and their mother made them take piano lessons, which kind of worked. As adults, they could hum a pop tune that they heard. Before the piano lessons, no way. To follow your analogy, my friends would have been dysxelic and so reading Shakespeare would have required a superhuman commitment to overcome both their disability and the language disparity. Still, I'm citing the extremes and maybe I should focus on the average. On the other hand, reading is a pretty basic and necessary skill in our society; is appreciation of music? You tell me.
CarltheGroover: I agree that most folk are mediocre. That's kind of sad to people who care a great deal about a subject, but makes sense from a statistical view and isn't prejorative. The average IS the average regardless of the topic. I'm thinking that there has to be an *average* or *mediocre* appreciation of music. At best, I expect that the *average* is going to appreciate broadway and Disney musicals. The cure to this situation is further education and we can't do that by criticizing and insulting the public, but by slowly indoctrinating them into more sophisticated music, regardless of the genre or their specific tastes because a more educated public is a more sophisticated music audience, which frankly, provides musical artists a more appreciative audience while reducing pure *entertainers* their audience. Again, no judgement on *entertainers*.
CarltheGroover: I agree that most folk are mediocre. That's kind of sad to people who care a great deal about a subject, but makes sense from a statistical view and isn't prejorative. The average IS the average regardless of the topic. I'm thinking that there has to be an *average* or *mediocre* appreciation of music. At best, I expect that the *average* is going to appreciate broadway and Disney musicals. The cure to this situation is further education and we can't do that by criticizing and insulting the public, but by slowly indoctrinating them into more sophisticated music, regardless of the genre or their specific tastes because a more educated public is a more sophisticated music audience, which frankly, provides musical artists a more appreciative audience while reducing pure *entertainers* their audience. Again, no judgement on *entertainers*.
Actually, there was no analogy. I was simply giving an example of being given a certain skill set in school that you have consistently throughout your life, for whatever reason, refused to use. It has nothing to do with being tone deaf or dyslexic (which are in no way analogous since one is common and the other is a disability that requires special schooling). You have a choice of what you choose to listen to, to read, to watch, etc. Those choices should mature over the years. You shouldn't be watching Sesame Street when you're 20, you should have moved onto other things. You shouldn't have never read another book after you left school or still be reading Dick & Jane. You might go back to revisit those things because they have a certain nostalgic value. Music is no different. You have to move onto other music. You can go back and listen to something you liked as a kid, we all do it, but it's for the nostalgia and hopefully not because we never listened to anything else all these years later. But it is your choice whether you do that or not. It's not schooling, it's not the media, it's you and I think upbringing has something to do with it either because your upbringing instilled healthy values or because you realized your upbringing was crap and you're not going to be the way your parents were--either one--but you and only you make that choice.
Ric5
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- Jan 29, 2008
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Jazz is popular around here--maybe not as popular as teen pop music, but people love classical and jazz too. Just because you don't see jazz musicians on products or endorsements doesn't mean less.
Ha maybe so but not always. I say jazz conveys or articulates things pop music can't. Likewise pop evokes emotions etc that are appropriate for tht music & audience. so I guess it's up to what the audience wants to hear and feel, when, & how.
No, what's on the radio is what the labels are pushing, or the genre /niche the station has strategized to reach an audience with, then support w advertising.
Carlthegroover is correct that mediocrity is a standard and I think schooling is largely responsible for setting society's bar of mediocrity. But it takes a conscious choice that you don't want to be mediocre. This forum wouldn't exist if every single member didn't make that choice not to be mediocre. Why does one band make it and one doesn't? Because one band was happy playing cover songs and playing house parties on Saturday nights like a million other bands were doing but the other band didn't want to be a nameless, faceless after school band so they wrote their own material and got rid of the bad musicians and hired in good ones and honed their craft. Eventually, they get noticed.
So it takes a commitment that you don't want to be mediocre. Don't you hate talking to somebody about jazz and this person knows nothing but is talking like he's some kind of an authority? His knowledge is clearly mediocre but he's using it to try and sound like he's well-learned but he's talking about nothing the slightest bit interesting. And isn't it great to talk to someone about jazz who actually knows about jazz and actually stimulates you intellectually because he has obviously studied the subject before he opened his mouth?
But it's not that society embraces mediocrity as a standard that is troublesome. Schools largely determine that and as long as the bar is set reasonably high, we'll be alright. But the bar is being lowered and our level of mediocrity is sliding further down. Here's an example:
[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]
This is no lie. Several school districts in my area no longer teach cursive writing. They have somehow decided that it is useless. And there is a huge disconnect between the schools and our various institutions because if you go to a bank to get a loan or to remortgage your house or something, they hand you a million forms to sign and will not accept printing your name, you have to sign in cursive even though many schools are no longer teaching it. Obviously, neither is aware of the other's priorities.
I think it infects other areas such as our music. If you don't believe me, listen to Lil Wayne and remind yourself while you're doing it that this guys sells millions of CDs and makes millions of dollars doing this stuff while Eddie Gomez can't even get American stores to carry his CDs.
So it takes a commitment that you don't want to be mediocre. Don't you hate talking to somebody about jazz and this person knows nothing but is talking like he's some kind of an authority? His knowledge is clearly mediocre but he's using it to try and sound like he's well-learned but he's talking about nothing the slightest bit interesting. And isn't it great to talk to someone about jazz who actually knows about jazz and actually stimulates you intellectually because he has obviously studied the subject before he opened his mouth?
But it's not that society embraces mediocrity as a standard that is troublesome. Schools largely determine that and as long as the bar is set reasonably high, we'll be alright. But the bar is being lowered and our level of mediocrity is sliding further down. Here's an example:
[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]
This is no lie. Several school districts in my area no longer teach cursive writing. They have somehow decided that it is useless. And there is a huge disconnect between the schools and our various institutions because if you go to a bank to get a loan or to remortgage your house or something, they hand you a million forms to sign and will not accept printing your name, you have to sign in cursive even though many schools are no longer teaching it. Obviously, neither is aware of the other's priorities.
I think it infects other areas such as our music. If you don't believe me, listen to Lil Wayne and remind yourself while you're doing it that this guys sells millions of CDs and makes millions of dollars doing this stuff while Eddie Gomez can't even get American stores to carry his CDs.
BANG! I bet if you polled the non-musician population this would be the most common response. Jazz is the sountrack of a bygone era. I like Jazz and I also like Gregorian chants but I doubt either will ever top the pop charts in today's world.
