Why is the new European Jazz ashamed of it's Black American roots?

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

I think that the idea of improvising over simple structures probably dates from Miles'"Kind of Blue" but whereas musicians like Coltrane could use this as a stepping stone for more expansive soloing, the kind of jazz to which I refer is more resctictive in it's scope. Listening to how a musician like Herbie Hancock can expand on a simple idea and make it complex get to the nub of what jazz should be about. Sticking to the sequence of a loop could appear to be a step backwards despite the fact that this "jazz" does sound more contemporary. Just didn't feel like these musicians were ever "in the zone" in some respects when they soloed.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Read the final paragraph of my Post #7.

A thousand apologies, Ian: I don't know how I missed the relevant statement about "reluctant" being perhaps more appropriate - probably shouldn't've gone to specsavers.

I've never spoken to LD to know his opinions whilst your implications about using other sources for inspiration was stressed by Hamaysian and his bassist and drummer for that matter. They clearly believe they are playing jazz even if it has little reference to any Black, American music. I repsect their choice to try to produce music which is original and different and concede that using Armenian influences will certainly add to picquant new flavour to the music. Fair play to them in this respect. The music is not for me though.

Fair enough.

[Ian Thumwood]

FH

Check this out:-

[Serial_Apologist]

Interesting, Ian - thanks. I did enjoy that performance. Orchestrated, the fact that that piece (which I would think was through-composed rather than improvised, though I could be wrong) would make a great proms encore piece, orchestrated as a Toccata, does back up your impression of this being something other than jazz as we know her. I'm reminded of piano pieces composed by Alberto Jinastera the Argentinian composer in the 1940s, though the musical language in the latter case was of course always Latin American.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

FH
Check this out:-

Hmm. Is this an improvisation, or a piece based on improvisation or a "composed" piece? The first six-and-a-half minutes sounded to me like someone improvising on features they'd heard in Bartok or Shostakovich or Szymanowski (with a bit of Chopin's Revolutionary Etude thrown into the mix): "improvising" in the sense that the over-repeated riffs (especially that 5/4 rising and falling pattern: too many straight lines!) would've been trimmed in an a written-out composition - not improvised in that he didn't respond to the frog calls a couple of minutes in.
Not really Jazz, was it?
The last four minutes were better, but again a lot of redundant repetitions (as if waiting for someone to put another line around it): all rather mediocre - can't summon any passion for or against it. Just a nice lad showing off on the piano.

[Serial_Apologist]

Just a nice lad showing off on the piano.

All the grimacing (minus yelps) brought Keith Jarrett on one of his solo voyages to mind for me - another one who goes in for lengthy ostinati.

[Lateralthinking1]

Thought I would give these clips a go. Just a few, less than well informed, impressions.

I see the phrase 'Modern European Jazz' and start with a few assumptions. It will be airy, easily accessible, possibly a bit boring two or three minutes in although the better stuff will retain atmosphere and hence hold attention. A zone in which I expect youngsters to have a least as much pretension as talent. And New Age like!!!

Hamasyan has a beautiful tone to his playing. It suggests class but I'm not sure he is quite there yet. He is also to my mind very irritating indeed to watch. The second clip was much better than the first. I couldn't believe how plodding the other musicians were in the former. A rock band hinting that they might break into funk, never doing so and sounding like a metronome. It might have worked had there been any sense of tension but there wasn't.

The latter clip begins classically and then becomes more what I would hear as jazz. Is that the illusion of the title? If so, that's another problem. In both the clips, I get the impression that there just isn't enough imagination in the gimmickry. He would be far better off without it but perhaps he worries about then being just light.

The Danielsson clip was nice. I doubt that is enough. An above par new age piece that belongs firmly in the 1990s which presumably isn't where it was born. For a musical magpie, there is absolutely no need to fight to get into it unlike areas of be-bop and more traditional jazz improvisation, for good and for bad.

And I think that's it really. With this modern European stuff, I start with a feeling of "I think I am going to like this piece". Sometimes I then do. Often it is a disappointment. Elsewhere I might often begin with an "I don't think I am going to like this" and then stick with it finding that actually I do like it. That is, as long as I can find some sort of connection with a part of its colour and complexity so that I then wish to follow it through.

[Ian Thumwood]

Lateral

I think Hamasyan is thinking about the music in an original fashion and his sets also involve him singing along with the music using wordless vocals and the effect can be erie. I doubt if there is anyone else using Armenian influences in jazz. The difficulty for me is that if you start to take other influences that owe nothing to jazz's black heritage you are on sticky territory. It is interestign to compare this work with John Surman whose influences similar involve a large chunk of folk music yet, as was proved at the gig I went to hear him perform in June, the underlying influence in his baritone playing in particular is Sonny Rollins. Surman's generation of player seems to me to be firmly anchored in the roots of what jazz is all about and I very much felt the same when I heard Enrico Rava and Aldo Romano play this month. These are all European musicians who seem to understand where jazz comes from.

An interesting point that I picked up on during the brilliant BBC 3 documentary last Monday regarding racism in football which was prompted by the recent furore with John Terry and , to a degree, with the Liverpool vindication of Suarez which, I feel, should have resulted in a fine and points deduction for Liverpool. Several black players were interviewed and all commented that they had little experience of racism in the game. Indeed, the whole issue seems to have been trivialised by the tweets of Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole which get reported in the papers despite the fact that neither player is a shining beacon within the game. All told, PFA Chairman Clark Carlisle proved to be an eloquent and intelligent commentator and perhaps better reflects the kid of personality who commands respect that we should be looking out for in the sport. However, it was a comedienne who made a remark which I felt was extremely salient and this was that whilst many protagonists may no longer make blatant racist remarks, there is still an underlaying latent racist aspect in the sport. The issue of not interviewing black candidates for managers was identified although the comedienne's comment about football commentators describing African national teams as being niave. I felt that was a brilliant observation - especially as so many of these players now perform for some of the best teams in Europe. In conclusion, it was stated that white people may no longer make blatant racist remarks, but their behaviour, conduct and sub-consciousness is still racist even if they may not totally be aware of the fact.

I turned the TV off after watching this programme and found that it was so powerful that I have been discussing it eslewhere on a football forum I also like to comment on. This ultimately made me think how you might judge those musicians who work in jazz but make a conscious effort not to follow the Afro-American root. In their favour, I commend these players for being original but how far within their subconscious is the thought as to why they have taken such a decision with their direction in music. I acknowledge that the music almost by definition much change but I wonder how much the European perspective of jazz would stand up to a similar degree of investigation carried out by Clark Carlisle last week. By the definitions of Carlisle's documentary, is European jazz racist - especially in those countries where there has been no multi-culturism.

[Serial_Apologist]

white people may no longer make blatant racist remarks, but their behaviour, conduct and sub-consciousness is still racist even if they may not totally be aware of the fact.

I turned the TV off after watching this programme and found that it was so powerful that I have been discussing it eslewhere on a football forum I also like to comment on. This ultimately made me think how you might judge those musicians who work in jazz but make a conscious effort not to follow the Afro-American root. In their favour, I commend these players for being original but how far within their subconscious is the thought as to why they have taken such a decision with their direction in music. I acknowledge that the music almost by definition much change but I wonder how much the European perspective of jazz would stand up to a similar degree of investigation carried out by Clark Carlisle last week. By the definitions of Carlisle's documentary, is European jazz racist - especially in those countries where there has been no multi-culturism.

My assessment would be that by absorbing non-black, non-American influences, European jazz exponents. far from disowning the roots of the music, aren't racist by attitude, thought or practice. Quite the reverse. In bebop's early days here, many of the white British exponents claimed that the race issue never arose in their considerations when working with black musicians like Joe Harriott and Harry Beckett; their respect for them was as individuals and musicians of calibre. One well-known bass player expressed his disappointment in Gary Crosby's and Courtney Pine's establishment of The Jazz Warriors in the late '80s as an institution specifically geared to introducing young black musicians to the practices and models of jazz and creating a British black jazz scene. Posters may remember the controversy surrounding the fact that the contemporary Loose Tubes did not include any black musicians, although it may be remembered that many of the musicians who came to prominence out of the JW soon established unproblematic working relations with white British musicians.

What I think was important was the social and political phenomenon of black British musicians establishing a footing in jazz. One of the problems to be overcome was established indigenous musicians who regarded their black colleagues as "just good musicians" failing to acknowledge their disproportionately small number in jazz in this country. In the 70s blacks here had got shunted into restrictive roles by the music business: black music was "dance music", with image tied to the two main categories engineered by business promotion, reggae or soul. The few contemporaries of Joe Harriott who sought to challenge the stereotypying, such as Rico Rodrigues, put their creative individuality as erstwhile jazz improvisers into reggae, or ended up playing wine bars until Gary Crosby came along and said, look, something must be done about this. Inevitably some of the young players gravitated towards American models, having no historical continuum with the Surmans and Tippetts who were unselfconsciously making an English form of jazz. Jazz is a form and ethos of performance involving an instantaneous degree of interactiveness in performance unequalled in any other branch of Western music, mostly and notably without resort to a conductor - contextualised, its forms and formats, derived ultimately from the meetings and schisms between races of African and European descent in and around the Mississippi Delta, comprise an aesthetic socio-political phenomenon constantly pressed upon our awareness by virtue of the still unresolved situation of racial inequality. It retains its ethos in taking on influences beyond those original to itself on its own terms - spirituals, blues, European instruments, harmonies, notations, Debussy, Stravinsky, abstraction, electronics, Spain, Africa, Latin America, English, Irish, Scottish, Scandinavian and Armenian folk idioms.

My argument is essentially that jazz evolved to the point at which it was capable of taking unto itself idioms and genres existent in their own right, but, most importantly, on jazz's own terms. This represents, as it were, an internationalist, universalising trait that was intrinsic to jazz from the very start, when black and white musicians playing each others musical dialects in vital interaction with each other, and audiences, created a dialect of individual/collective expression that stands in autonomous relationship with more heavily promoted and/or subsidised forms. If and when discrimination against blacks ceases, jazz will continue as an aesthetically valid way for people to play music together, primarily, as an alternative to the sausage machine of examinations and competitions, the sad route to classical professionalism.

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

I think you have presented a very good argument and I agree totally about jazz finding inspiration from outside it's own traditions. However, I feel that some branches of jazz in Europe are now starting to think along their own terms and the medias haven't helped by promoting jazz which is celebrated for merely being different as opposed to actually saying something. For me, one of the prime people to blame for this is Stuart Nicholson although I find another writer, John Kelman, equally unjusdemental. (albeit I find him to be a true gent whenever I have debated things with him online!) It is a bit disappointing to see some European acts lauded when they are prettyaverage.

The point I initially made in the original post wasn't something I came to myself but was prompted by two separate conversations that I was party to. Both expressed concern that the music was sounding increasingly limited as the improvisation was based on loops of short measures. The other was prompted about the desire to employ odd time signatures which discouraged more traditional (i.e. Armstrong - Coltrane) notions of swing. The latter comment was made by a friend who idolises Tony Williams, a drummer who was a creative force in how swing was defined.

For all the many changes that seems to take play in European jazz ( you just have to think about the kind of stuff put out by ECM and ACT or artists as diverse as EST, Polar Bear or St Etienne), the music seems merely modish and there are no major league improvisors of the calibre that hae emerged across the pond during this period. Taking American examples from the last twenty years as diverse as Dave Douglas, Chris Potter, Ambrose Akinsire, Vijay Iyer, Danilo Prerz, or Jason Moran, the European model seems deficient every time. That said, those European players who emerged in the 69's now seem even more precious and significant that ever. The curious point is that the comments I heard about the convervastoire at Lyon was that the jazz courses there were encouraging a more Euro-centric approach. The upshot of my argumeent is that perhaps you ignore the "cultural" element of jazz at your peril - the further you depart, the less successfuly the music is an credible jazz. I would put it to you that the simplification of jazz as an instrument for exploring time signatures or a mininalst approach to form is not where the music is likely to be "happening" in the future. Granted, the likes of Keith Jarrett have had success at simplifying the music but he is still honest to the origins of the music. Dilute jazz too much and it doesn't really amount to much.