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

[Lateralthinking1]

Ian and S-A

I can't do justice to the last three very fine posts, given my comparatively poor knowledge. I am also pretty tired tonight so I might come back with more later. For now, I welcome from a political angle any debate about serious racism and relatively trivial racism. Many run away from it when it should simply be a natural development of 20th Century change. There is a question to be asked about whether spats, which are understandably meaningful to those involved, prevent further enlightenment and concrete reform. I doubt too that any smugness about how far we have come should be permitted to be unchallenged as it is currently.

I am firmly of the view that while most people in most countries have many reasons to be critical of their national arrangements, condemnation of indigenous culture, valid as it often is in artistic terms, is not a good way of addressing race issues. I have got myself into hot water on this point with acts as diverse as Gilad Atzmon who is not a fan of his own country and Show of Hands, who didn't please everyone by waving the English flag. I would prefer English folk music to have the ability to be white and yet non-racist, not least because it embraces universal themes, and also to be able to incorporate all elements of what makes us British now without being marketed as some kind of novelty, eg The Imagined Village. As for Atzmon, well perhaps he isn't the best example in this discussion because I would contend that his statements tend to be more in his words and less in his music. If you vehemently disagree, and think his music is defiantly non-racist, do let me know. If not, are non-musical statements sufficient?

But then one turns to a Tigran Hamasyan. There you have Armenia but so you do too with, say, Djivan Gasparyan. When it comes to world music, I don't think anyone is going to say in a convincing way that the Armenian musical tradition is racist, any more than one might be able to argue that Archie Roach, by being Aboriginal, is an Australian racist. What are we to make of Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou? Is she in the African-American tradition more than she is Ethiopian? Surely there is an example of contrasting meanings of black and meanings of roots. Things get quite complex at that point. It seems to me that it is the historical roots of jazz which lead, if not uniquely then not at all typically, to a discussion about race purely on the axis white versus black. In some ways it reminds me of McCartney's assurances that the Beatles were essentially rock n roll and Motown.

I am not quite sure where you are going with Polar Bear and St Etienne but I recognise them, albeit with some merit, as faddish. I would do the same with Light of the World or Galliano who might in their day have spoken to me of jazz just a tad more. Certainly black artists who collaborate with white artists to cover Neil Young with jazz hints represent a development of sorts but it isn't a development of the African-American roots of jazz. Soweto Kinch, of whom we have spoken before, might have a better claim but there is a lot of hip-hop in there, whatever his journey to Ronnie Scotts. What I note though is that it is the Iyers and the Akinsires who do well in the critics lists. This follows the historical pattern. At one point we were trying for a thread on Dutch jazz. It is rich and varied but how many names trip off the tongue? Could it be that there has, rightly or wrongly, been a bias against Eurocentrism rather than vice versa? One could argue that the Europeans now are simply establishing some balance.

There is surely an argument for jazz, unlike folk, to roam wherever it wishes, for the listener to decide on its authenticity, for any decision to be based on the value an individual wishes to place on roots or calling it pure? I should have thought so. World music can do that too but arguably it is rather more hampered by expectations in regard to tradition. My major concern with all of these genres, while attempting to grapple with the different ways in which they develop, is not that they go off in a myriad of directions. Rather I would hope that when they do so, and no one will stop that, there is still sight of the trunk of the tree, if I can put it in that somewhat crass way. There always needs to be a central reference point and growth needs to come from that too.

Lat

[Serial_Apologist]

Ian and S-A

I can't do justice to the last three very fine posts, given my comparatively poor knowledge. I am also pretty tired tonight so I might come back with more later. For now, I welcome from a political angle any debate about serious racism and relatively trivial racism. Many run away from it when it should simply be a natural development of 20th century change. There is a question to be asked about whether spats, which are understandably meaningful to those involved, prevent further enlightenment and concrete reform. I doubt too that any smugness about how far we have come should be permitted to be unchallenged as it is currently.

Additionally, I am firmly of the view that while most people in most countries have many reasons to be critical of their national arrangements, condemnation of indigenous culture, valid as it often is in artistic terms, is not a good method of addressing race issues. I have got myself into hot water on this point with acts as diverse as Gilad Atzmon and Show of Hands. Obviously I respect alternative viewpoints but this probably comes from the folkier elements in me as well as the worldly ones. I would prefer English folk music to have the ability to be white and yet non-racist, not least because it embraces universal themes, and also to be able to incorporate all elements of what makes us British now without being marketed as some kind of novelty, eg The Imagined Village.

There is a problem for the would-be academic (like me ) who tends to treat new musical developments from the pov of developments intrinsic to the received language, and/or protocols of performance, divorced from "externals".

This is comparatively easy with classical music and jazz, up to a specific stage, perhaps... and it is false. The language of village folk music "prettyfied" to some extent in classical music at the turn of the 20th century by Vaughan Williams and contemporaries, had already been rendered obsolete by the time VW composed "On Wenlock Edge" to words by AE Houseman in 1909. As part of the Arts & Crafts movement, that trend, which lasted up to WW2 at least, and in the past 20 years has been revived, in the New Ruralists school of English painters, and today in the opening celebrations of the Olympic Games, wipes both the whole history of white urban working class contributions to folklore, and Britain's becoming a multicultural melting pot. "Externals" have become an over-determinant factor (note, not over-determining) in the shaping of how new artistic and musical forms emerge - in many cases short-cutting whatever intrinsic potentials may still have been felt to exist in whatever genres one might put under the artists' or the academician's microscope.

Where it seems to me that this does affect one's perspectives on the preservation of "pure" cultures, comes when evaluating cultural developments in developing countries, and the degree to which one's own perspectives are identified with one's own host culture. Here, I think, "externals" demand making critical choices between those aspects of ones own culture in which mass appeal becomes evermore difficult to dissociate from its promotional interests, since those promotional interests, and the aesthetics reflecting them, are inextricably intertwined with their permeation of once relatively untrammelled, self-determining cultures, evolving at their own pace.

From such a standpoint, jazz - where it remains open to development from within its own processes, unpressurised by market desiderata beyond the basic need to make its makers a decent living - remains a safe bet. The resulting jazz can take on aspects of other musical cultures, and in today's world will probably find it impossible to do otherwise, even if it wished to.

As for Atzmon, well perhaps he isn't the best example in this discussion because I would contend that his statements tend to be more in his words and less in his music. If you vehemently disagree, and think his music is defiantly non-racist, do let me know.

Well Gilad ain't exactly my favourite favoured jazz musician, but he has used many near-Eastern references in his music.

But then one turns to a Tigran Hamasyan. There you have Armenia but so you do too with, say, Djivan Gasparyan. When it comes to world music, I don't think anyone is going to say in a convincing way that the Armenian musical tradition is racist, any more than one might be able to argue that Archie Roach, by being Aboriginal, is an Australian racist. It seems to me that it is the historical roots of jazz which lead, if not uniquely then not at all typically, to a discussion about race purely on the axis white versus black. In some ways it reminds me of McCartney's assurances that the Beatles were essentially rock n roll and Motown.

I am not quite sure where you are going with Polar Bear and St Etienne but I recognise them, albeit with some merit, as faddish. I would do the same with Light of the World or Galliano who might in their day have spoken to me of jazz just a tad more. Certainly black artists who collaborate with white artists to cover Neil Young with jazz hints represent a development of sorts but it isn't a development of the African-American roots of jazz. Soweto Kinch, of whom we have spoken before, might have a better claim but there is a lot of hip-hop in there, whatever his journey with the jazz greats to Ronnie Scotts and beyond. So what next?

I'm afraid you've lost me a little there, Lat .

Isn't there an argument for jazz, unlike folk, to roam where it wishes, for the listener to decide on its authenticity, for any decision to be based on the value an individual wishes to place on roots and call it purity? I should have thought so. To some extent world music can do that too but arguably it is rather more hampered by expectations in regard to tradition. I think my major concern with all of these genres, while attempting to grapple with the different ways in which they develop, is not that they go off in a myriad of directions. Rather I would hope that when they do so, and no one will stop that, there is still sight of the trunk of the tree, if I can put it in that somewhat crass way. There needs to be a central reference point and growth needs to come from that too.

Lat

I think this is essentially right. Where we might (?) get into some difficulties is in deciding in what that "trunk of the tree" consists.

[Lateralthinking1]

S-A - You are definitely more successfully academic than me.

This post is probably an attempt at clarification of earlier points as well as some sort of response. Ian was questioning "how you might judge those musicians who work in jazz but make a conscious effort not to follow the Afro-American root.........I acknowledge that the music almost by definition must change but........is European jazz racist - especially in those countries where there has been no multi-culturalism". He also wrote about contrasts between the extensive coverage of the John Terry incident and the absence of black football managers. I was essentially agreeing that there is much to be said for focussing on the substantial. Dealing with individual playground style cases might look like a society being prepared to get to grips even with the minutiae. It can be something of a smokescreen if far less is done about the bigger picture, ie institutionally.

From that we get to the basic fact that "racism isn't just racism". Rather, there are different depths to it. Beyond that point, we can go quickly to "where is it and where isn't it?", ie can we be more specific about location? That in turn is not far from "what is it?". Jazz was Ian's cultural reference point and that's fine. There's a jazz heritage which is the main yardstick and yet a lot more going on besides. That underpins the idea that race 'rules' are complex. And we get into all kinds of specific issues then. A British black jazz scene, Loose Tubes, and whether it is the skin colour of the participants that matters or their musical loyalty to be bop, swing etc. Whether someone can emerge from Eastern Europe and ever connect with the Afro-American root given that his country has a lousy record on race relations. Whether it hardly matters how or what you play, even if it is Eurocentric, minimalist, and mucking around with time signatures, as long as you wear all the right badges against racism at the same time.

I was trying to build on those issues by adding a few further questions. An Armenian or Australian musician who is not a jazz musician but firmly in the musical tradition of his country can be very much in the business of breaking down racial barriers via his music. Why then should an Armenian or Australian jazz musician be seen as incapable of doing so because he comes from a country which has a bad or indifferent record on race relations? In response, you might ask why it is that his music appears to deconstruct jazz but my answer would be that innovation can be positive, eg it can be simply what it is. You refer to commercialisation which is inevitably a thorn in that particular area, ie you have to ask whether the new art is diluted by a motivation to make big money, but that isn't always the case. And it is generally the case that artists don't devise the labels - European, Eurocentric and so on. Those are economically convenient bandwagons to jump on. They only become a problem if they start to influence direction at root. Even then, that is not in many instances racist. I guess these are some of the "externals" to which you refer.

I can't help but think though that behind the basic question is the age old one about "what is jazz?". Somewhere close to the concerns about possible racism and the obvious commercial aspects of the recent music is a kind of "should I really think about taking this on board if it is so far removed from what appealed to me about the music in the first place?" I also think that there is something about feeling apologetic for being white. My comments about McCartney, which you can set alongside the original position in rock/blues of Jones, Clapton etc, are about the sense in many musicians that white music is popcorn. If your sales have hovered on that cusp, as those of the Beatles did, you might feel a need to accentuate any slight black leanings. While that preciousness is understandable, it is arguably less relevant to multicultural modernism in which many do what they want, mash everything up, and don't give a damn what the music is called. As it happens, Galliano were called an acid jazz group. I was wrong about them covering Neil Young. It was David Crosby but the point remains the same. And you won't accept it as jazz at all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGv3Wswe0U0

I feel that there is something in your arguments about RVW which also allude to the above. We should all have a problem with English folk music if it is simply all basket weaving, warm beer, cricket on the village green and a redoubtable maiden aunt. Vaughan Williams speaks to me of a different kind of romanticism that comes through the landscape. I like it very much. It doesn't speak to me of a rampant nationalism or class difference even if to others it might do. I don't see it as unreal but rather a different form of reality. I don't even think of it as ostensibly white because it doesn't speak to me much of people at all. I recognise it as a strand of folk but folk too can be gritty lyrically and even urban. As for the opening of the Olympic Games, surely nothing of that is in the context of any kind of reality although I am fascinated to see in a cynical way what happens. I suppose what worries me in all of this dialogue is how we should view traditional inuit folk musicians or a classically trained black African musician with jazz stylings if we are to say that all proper music must be a certain shade of black pertaining to key places and specific moments in history.

[Byas'd Opinion]

At the moment I can only offer a collection of isolated thoughts rather than a coherent argument.

1. I was at a solo concert by Tigran Hamasayan at the start of the year. I enjoyed most of it, but I did find myself wondering just how far you could get from the blues and still be regarded as playing jazz. There was definitely more Liszt than Basie in his sound.
2. Gunter Sommer once said in an interview, explaining why he became discontented playing conventional jazz and started experimenting with free improvisation "I was playing Black American music but I wasn't a Black American. I felt like a thief."
3. Two of the most influential jazz musicians of the last 30 years, at least in terms of generating a bunch of soundalikes, are Jan Garbarek and Esbjorn Svenson, both of them European and neither of them displaying many Black American influences in their playing. But I'm not sure how much they've affected the development of jazz on the western side of the Atlantic.
4. Jazz and the blues are further from general UK popular culture than they have been since the sixties. The majority of today's rock bands, I'd argue, didn't spend their teens listening to the blues or even to bands directly influenced by the blues, but to the bands who came after the bands who came after the bands who were listening to the blues. I'm sure this must have some effect on jazz, simply because the blues feel is no longer part of the general musical atmosphere. (I must admit I haven't worked out how hip-hop, today's Black American popular music, fits into this).

[Ian Thumwood]

Some interesting points and interesting to see that you have opened the debate to include Rock music. Listening to any number of white rock bands these days, there is nothing of the blues about their playing but I always felt that the link to this music was tenuous at best anyway - perhaps exluding the Rolling Stones. The problem with white rock music is that it has no groove and is in many ways a parallel in my mind to the kind of difference you had in the 30's with bands such as Basie's and many of the featureless, anonymous white big bands of the same era. Even more than with jazz, take about the black American elements from pop and it is pretty bland. I would rather have Motown than the Beatles any day!

I agree with the point about Garbarek and EST sound-a-likes too but I feel that the former has now successfully parted company with any pretext of being a jazz musician and those musicians like Tommy Smith and Tore Bronberg who followed in his wake don't sound at all "hip" these days. If anything, the feel of the jazz being played has passed them by. No one will remember EST in ten years time.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

As for Atzmon, well perhaps he isn't the best example in this discussion because I would contend that his statements tend to be more in his words and less in his music. If you vehemently disagree, and think his music is defiantly non-racist, do let me know

i might beg to differ quite profoundly with you about Atzmon .... having heard him at three gigs in the last couple of years and scored his albums ...

his improvising is i think masterful ... his politics and analyses of Israeli Arab relationships will not convince or appeal to many but his music is powerful without the prose ... i think especially of his Parker Strings tribute



as well as his Gilad Atzmon &The Orient House Ensemble work



oh and yeah he swings ....

[Lateralthinking1]

i might beg to differ quite profoundly with you about Atzmon .... having heard him at three gigs in the last couple of years and scored his albums ...

his improvising is i think masterful ... his politics and analyses of Israeli Arab relationships will not convince or appeal to many but his music is powerful without the prose ... i think especially of his Parker Strings tribute

as well as his Gilad Atzmon &The Orient House Ensemble work

oh and yeah he swings ....

Thanks Calum for your response to my question which I accept. More broadly, I feel that all the answers to the question in the title of this thread, including mine, still leave a lot of other unanswered questions. Perhaps 'the new European jazz' should not be called jazz at all. In that way, it presumably would be no more racist than, say, Kraftwerk were? Rather it would be rootless.

[cloughie]

Some interesting points and interesting to see that you have opened the debate to include Rock music. Listening to any number of white rock bands these days, there is nothing of the blues about their playing but I always felt that the link to this music was tenuous at best anyway - perhaps exluding the Rolling Stones. The problem with white rock music is that it has no groove and is in many ways a parallel in my mind to the kind of difference you had in the 30's with bands such as Basie's and many of the featureless, anonymous white big bands of the same era. Even more than with jazz, take about the black American elements from pop and it is pretty bland. I would rather have Motown than the Beatles any day!

I agree with the point about Garbarek and EST sound-a-likes too but I feel that the former has now successfully parted company with any pretext of being a jazz musician and those musicians like Tommy Smith and Tore Bronberg who followed in his wake don't sound at all "hip" these days. If anything, the feel of the jazz being played has passed them by. No one will remember EST in ten years time.

This certainly was not the case in the 60s with the white boy blues groups around at the time - Animals, Manfred Mann, Yardbirds and then Fleetwood Mac, Led Zep et al.

[Serial_Apologist]

This certainly was not the case in the 60s with the white boy blues groups around at the time - Animals, Manfred Mann, Yardbirds and then Fleetwood Mac, Led Zep et al.

To give credit where credit was due, I think that was true in the cases of some bands, or some individuals in some bands. I recently played a disc of Julie Driscoll and The Trinity to a 43-year old St Lucia-born black lady, and she was adamant that Julie must have been black. But one remembers the gratitude of American bluesmen to the British guys hosting and backing them as less a case of "we Brits can play the Blues as well" sort of thing, than an uncomfortable acknowledgement of the deplorable status of the music in America, still, in the 60s; indeed, by way of compensation for deficiencies in the vocal department, some of the most interesting adaptations of the blues over here were, I think, in terms of instrumental techniques and improvisation: an existent niche was in place for Jimi Hendrix

[cloughie]

To give credit where credit was due, I think that was true in the cases of some bands, or some individuals in some bands. I recently played a disc of Julie Driscoll and The Trinity to a 43-year old St Lucia-born black lady, and she was adamant that Julie must have been black. But one remembers the gratitude of American bluesmen to the British guys hosting and backing them as less a case of "we Brits can play the Blues as well" sort of thing, than an uncomfortable acknowledgement of the deplorable status of the music in America, still, in the 60s; indeed, by way of compensation for deficiencies in the vocal department, some of the most interesting adaptations of the blues over here were, I think, in terms of instrumental techniques and improvisation: an existent niche was in place for Jimi Hendrix

Managed by an ex Animal, and with a white British backing group.