Is the future of Jazz electronic?

  On 3/28/2016 at 10:02 PM, beerwolf said:

 

  On 3/28/2016 at 1:57 PM, Salvatorin said:

What pains me is that jazz, worldwide, while being a syncretic back and forth of european diatonic pedagogy and africa originated pentatonic improvisational expression, held a wealth of deep musical theory that lent popular music, up to the 80's, harmonic depth. Then punk and grunge happened and any folk understanding of anything other than the simplest of melodic structure died. Even the majority of you watmmers and idm-folks with your fascination with texture and semi-rhythms mostly utterly fail to access the realms of harmonic complexity that centuries, millenia, of innovation (not just western either) have produced.

 

Wonderful to read. Great job, or should I say.....a meritorious endeavor!

Yeah great post.

(I tried to make a similar point recently and got called a snob.)

it is rather condescending. also that bit about punk and grunge somehow ending millenia of intellectual music... come on. Effortless, easy entertainment will always be more popular. That's how it's always been. It's not like the radio was filled with geniuses until sid vicious came around and ended the history of music

Well it's like classical music, it's a treasure, it's still performed, hopefully it always stays around, it has made an influence and that influence and input will never die, but it's forever looking backwards. That's the opposite of what jazz stood for, it was about doing what hadn't been done yet! I could be wrong, but in my mind jazz isn't so much a genre as an era. To me jazz is about river boats, dance floors, dingy clubs and back alleys, show tunes and standards, it just isn't the same world anymore. It's also about the black community and their struggle and identity in America, things that in my mind their own community have replaced with other expressions.

I love jazz and hope it always is preserved, represented and reinterpreted. It's our heritage and their legacy.

  On 3/27/2016 at 9:46 PM, Richie Sombrero said:

lmpyloo + salvatorin is th fuckng boss

  On 3/29/2016 at 12:27 AM, Jdub said:

Well it's like classical music, it's a treasure, it's still performed, hopefully it always stays around, it has made an influence and that influence and input will never die, but it's forever looking backwards. That's the opposite of what jazz stood for, it was about doing what hadn't been done yet! I could be wrong, but in my mind jazz isn't so much a genre as an era. To me jazz is about river boats, dance floors, dingy clubs and back alleys, show tunes and standards, it just isn't the same world anymore. It's also about the black community and their struggle and identity in America, things that in my mind their own community have replaced with other expressions.

 

I love jazz and hope it always is preserved, represented and reinterpreted. It's our heritage and their legacy.

This is the Wynton Marsalis view of Jazz, and it's a total bummer.

Essentially, this view maintains that Jazz is a sound, a finite set of rhythms (mainly, the "tresillo" rhythm that economic migrants brought to New Orleans from Havana and underpins all of the popular dance styles of the era, from Tango to Guaganco to the New Orleans "big four"), as well as a finite tonal legacy (consisting mostly of the Blues, some European Classical elements and the harmonic forms of Tin Pan Alley...i.e. the pop music of the day...but we'll get back to that in a paragraph or two)

This view maintains that Jazz was like Pogs: it was relevant for a brief moment, but now it's a quaint relic. According to Stanley Crouch (the Godfather of this stuffy purism), Jazz more-or-less died with Bitches Brew, when Miles "sold out" the tradition.

Fuck that. The supreme irony of this view is that, in reality, Jazz started with improvising musicians using the raw materials of popular music to sculpt new cultural statements. Also, it was originally dance music. It was never meant to be this academic, anti-septic thing that it turned into...this grotesquely inbred masturbatory exercise of people ONLY studying Jazz musicians of the "golden age", all in order to play "All the Things You Are" at brunch gigs for the rest of their life.

Jazz is an approach. It was never about strict adherence to a canon of songs, or a particular sound or whatever. It was about using the tools of composition and improvisation to do whatever you want. The raw materials that you use are completely arbitrary: it was a mere accident of history that Tin Pan Alley was the pop music of the day, that got used as clay for the sculpture of Jazz.

Jazz could have sprung up at any point in history, and it would sound completely different depending on when. Some Jazz musicians know this and act accordingly, and some treat Jazz like it's a Civil War reenactment, where they get together and ape the sounds of the past.

I listened to the new Ben Monder record last night, and it reassured me that Jazz--the approach, not the backward-facing bebop-reenactment fetishism--is alive and well.

I fuck with heptatonia secunda heavy.

But...

Feel like the most jazz thing to do is ditch the term and fully dismantle the canon.

At some point you have to make moves without thinking of the various contexts.

Ironically, jazz from the very beginning prescribes its own dismissal.

Also, I feel like there is an instance here of using jazz as an umbrella descriptor for general music methodology.

Many would say jazz is bringing multiple compositional awarenesses together into a spontaneous conversation, but not every instance of the former is the latter.

Also, today there are so many other considerations that have moved beyond harmonic awareness, considerations that aren't taught at ANY conservatory.

I'm saying you can learn how to play Ellington from going to a university, but can you learn how to make the recording SOUND like jungle music? Couldn't the sonic texture of recorded sound, call it artifact, be just as important as the harmonic content?

This was what I wanted to learn most when I was in music school, but not a single person had a clue.

Therefore the future of all music is electronic inasmuch as it is an expanding of possible considerations, many of which utilize electronic vehicles. These new processes generate harmonic phenomena which would have never existed before, and, reverting to the umbrella usage of jazz, this further generation of phenomena is another layer that the human compositional mind can improvise against.

To sum my thoughts up:

If "jazz" in the 20th century was the human compositional mind interacting with other minds...

"Jazz" now is the singular human mind interacting with the artificial mind.

  On 3/29/2016 at 2:28 AM, LimpyLoo said:

 

  On 3/29/2016 at 12:27 AM, Jdub said:

Well it's like classical music, it's a treasure, it's still performed, hopefully it always stays around, it has made an influence and that influence and input will never die, but it's forever looking backwards. That's the opposite of what jazz stood for, it was about doing what hadn't been done yet! I could be wrong, but in my mind jazz isn't so much a genre as an era. To me jazz is about river boats, dance floors, dingy clubs and back alleys, show tunes and standards, it just isn't the same world anymore. It's also about the black community and their struggle and identity in America, things that in my mind their own community have replaced with other expressions.

 

I love jazz and hope it always is preserved, represented and reinterpreted. It's our heritage and their legacy.

This is the Wynton Marsalis view of Jazz, and it's a total bummer.

 

Essentially, this view maintains that Jazz is a sound, a finite set of rhythms (mainly, the "tresillo" rhythm that economic migrants brought to New Orleans from Havana and underpins all of the popular dance styles of the era, from Tango to Guaganco to the New Orleans "big four"), as well as a finite tonal legacy (consisting mostly of the Blues, some European Classical elements and the harmonic forms of Tin Pan Alley...i.e. the pop music of the day...but we'll get back to that in a paragraph or two)

 

This view maintains that Jazz was like Pogs: it was relevant for a brief moment, but now it's a quaint relic. According to Stanley Crouch (the Godfather of this stuffy purism), Jazz more-or-less died with Bitches Brew, when Miles "sold out" the tradition.

 

Fuck that. The supreme irony of this view is that, in reality, Jazz started with improvising musicians using the raw materials of popular music to sculpt new cultural statements. Also, it was originally dance music. It was never meant to be this academic, anti-septic thing that it turned into...this grotesquely inbred masturbatory exercise of people ONLY studying Jazz musicians of the "golden age", all in order to play "All the Things You Are" at brunch gigs for the rest of their life.

 

Jazz is an approach. It was never about strict adherence to a canon of songs, or a particular sound or whatever. It was about using the tools of composition and improvisation to do whatever you want. The raw materials that you use are completely arbitrary: it was a mere accident of history that Tin Pan Alley was the pop music of the day, that got used as clay for the sculpture of Jazz.

 

Jazz could have sprung up at any point in history, and it would sound completely different depending on when. Some Jazz musicians know this and act accordingly, and some treat Jazz like it's a Civil War reenactment, where they get together and ape the sounds of the past.

 

I listened to the new Ben Monder record last night, and it reassured me that Jazz--the approach, not the backward-facing bebop-reenactment fetishism--is alive and well.

 

yeah, I probably come across potentially very ignorant saying such things :)

just some thoughts I had, people are still doing it

Nah I mean I think it's probably just a semantic disagreement

Nothing you said was ignorant

I think these disagreements evaporate as soon as you imagine the world without labels or genres

  On 3/28/2016 at 7:58 PM, Gocab said:

Supersilent?

https://youtu.be/_fsZ-CmSVOA

Supersilent.

Dang, they're amazing live.

check out some of the solos in this badboy

Thats the way eye like it

  Quote

 

In the past even the future was better.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/35328-Sun-Ra

;)

and well said about the Bitches Brew analogy, Limpy.... that album is the fuckin tits, although i tend to delve into my old man's record collection if a jazz mood takes hold; Gerry Mulligan, Modern Jazz Quartet, Ben Webster, Thelonius etc, so i cant really comment on contemporary releases let alone the future.

what if the future of electronica is acoustic? sorry thats the inane joviality of mary jane speaking

its like any musical form,,,,, there are some indispensable releases that have accrued over time, but what they consist of is entirely subjective

this thing swings, I really like all the delay on the sax, way ahead.

technically electronic music is the future for all genres of music... brah