Jazz Conversion

[Serial_Apologist]

....I think klezmer has definitely had a huge affect on jazz - swing.....

You wish!

[eighthobstruction]

....I'm sure Bluesy will back me up on this, knowing his love of the accordian and tambourine solo's....

[Serial_Apologist]

....I'm sure Bluesy will back me up on this, knowing his love of the accordian and tambourine solo's....

Due wish!!!

[Ian Thumwood]

I'm sure you're quite right about pop music, Ian, but unfortunately 99% of people seem to prefer its lazy, repetitious banality , and neevr think of 'moving on.'

This is true but I think that the argument is actually broader insofar that the things people value in music now is much different than say in the 1980s. This it really true of jazz where the whole notion of lenghty improvisation has gone out of fashion and the concept in jazz which seems to matter most these days is how the music grooves. So much contemporary jazz is "groove orientated " these days that it seems to be at the expense of everything else. The people who are "serious" about jazz at the moment are either from the avant garde or heavily inolved with composition. You can understand why a musician like Keith Jarrett has been driven to make comments about how jazz as a creative process is dead. With this in mind, I think that you can appreciate why younger people listening to jazz latch on to players like Robert Glasper who have one foot in Rap even if it seems strange coming from the perspective of my generation of jazz fans who are suspicious of this. It should be easy for audiences to cross over today and alot of jazz sounds more like pop music than anything innovative. By contrast, I can also appreciate why todays better jazz is so esoteric.

[smittims]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'groove-oriented' Ian. Are you, for example, suggesting that Jazz has become commercially-predictable or 'dumbed-down' (i.e. less demanding of the listener's intellect)?

[Ian Thumwood]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'groove-oriented' Ian. Are you, for example, suggesting that Jazz has become commercially-predictable or 'dumbed-down' (i.e. less demanding of the listener's intellect)?

Smittims

That is effectively a good summary of how I feel about a lot of jazz. I think the whole aspect of being funky or soloing over a groove that is given more credance than the soloist is pretty much where a lot of jazz groups are at the moment. Off the top of my head, I am thinking about groups like Exra Collective, Snarky Puppy, etc but this kind of "feel" in jazz is endemic these days.

I always understood that" jazz evolution " sought to freer up rhythm and started with the likes of Armstrong as the older, more ragtime influenced music gace away to a smoother rhythm. Since then, things have progressed through the likes of Basie in the 1930s, Be-bop in the 40s , etc before things started to be "felt" rather than made explicit in the 1960s/ For me, this continued with musicians like Paul Motian who always swung but who were craftiliy subtle about how they did this. Nowadays, it does feel like jazz is taking a backwards step as the old habits of fusion seem to be returning back into fashion.

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'groove-oriented' Ian. Are you, for example, suggesting that Jazz has become commercially-predictable or 'dumbed-down' (i.e. less demanding of the listener's intellect)?

Back in the 1960s rock-type rhythms began being taken up by jazz drummers; many older reviewers were very critical, stating that such rhythms, unlike the swing "ten-to-ten" pattern as elaborated by bebop drummers like Max Roach and Art Blakey and their successors, had or would have a restricting effect on improvisation, since it would have to fit into their apocryphally rigid mould. As leader of the jazz-rock band Nucleus Ian Carr was clear in his views on the matter: "The whole point of rock rhythm is that it works off a slow pulse, and the subdivision of the pulse gave rise to an enormous number of asymmetrical rhythms - most of them new to jazz ... [T]his asymmetry also extended to whole structures which might include bars of unequal length, and/or irregular groupings of bars"*.

It is nevertheless true that many jazz-rock drummers have unfortunately been content to lay down a rock-influenced rhythmic base without variation or interest in listening to what the improviser comes up with and feeding into the results, the hallmark of genuine jazz drumming. So the constant resulting reiteration of the "backbeat" (stressing the third beat of a 4/4-based bar structure) becomes tediously dominating and limiting.

I asked the drummer John Marshall, a noted British exponent of not just jazz-rock drumming but someone widely versed through the jazz spectrum from Swing to Free, what therefore was the secret of success? And he told me "If you start playing in that sort of area, it's similar in some ways to playing Latin. You're playing in patterns. You set these rhythmic patterns up. Jazz doesn't do that: you've just got a pulse, basically. The danger is that you set up the pattern, and that's as good as it gets. Then they play some solos over it and everybody's happy. That's, in a way, the easy way out. The difficult thing is to maintain the intensity and power of that pattern, and the flavour of that pattern, and yet interact with the soloists, and the soloists likewise interacting. There is a way of doing it, but a lot of people don't. And the reason why the jazz-rock thing, according to my opinion, became uninteresting, is because people didn't deal with that. You set up the groove and just sort of play over it, and it becomes routine. Nucleus was about dealing with that, and when I was with Soft Machine, we were trying to deal with the same problem. Keep the intensity, but keep the improvisation. It's quite difficult, and different people do it in different ways. Weather Report had their way of dealing with it, Miles [Davis] had his way. The successful people dealt with it"**.

*Carr, I, (1987) from Jazz The Essential Companion, Grafton Books, London, PP 257-258.

**Marshall, J, interview at his home, February 17 1998.

[Ian Thumwood]

It is interesting the way different musicians "feel" time but the John Marshall quote sums up the issue with fusion nicely. Nowadays, I think that the whole raison d'etre of many jazz groups is that the groove is more important that the solos. Not sure just how interested younger players are interested in creating labyrithine solos like Coltrane, Rollins and Jarrett that have a sense of architecture. How would a great improvisor like Lee Knoitz be considered by some of today's players more impressed with Robert Glasper lazily tossing off a groove in contrast to the "problem solving" approach of a Konitz, Bley, Jarrett , Rollins or Coltrane ?

[smittims]

Thanks, that was most informative. It reminded me of the 1970s when I was first listening to jazz and there were still people around who denied that many contemporary musicians were 'really' jazz. To them the only 'real' jazz was e.g. King OIiver and early (not late) Armstrong.

[Ian Thumwood]

Worked out how to post videos on the new system.

As per my post above, I was staggered to hear this tune at the T20 cricket a few years ago. I think that the production values of this music are incredible and would argue that it sounds evern better when played on a large PA system like somewhere at the Ageas Bowl. For me, this is really indicative of how younger people "hear" music these days where the production values are off the scale but the music is pretty shallow. Incredible to note the number of people involved in this production. A fascinating insight into the way music works these days.

[Serial_Apologist]

Worked out how to post videos on the new system.

As per my post above, I was staggered to hear this tune at the T20 cricket a few years ago. I think that the production values of this music are incredible and would argue that it sounds evern better when played on a large PA system like somewhere at the Ageas Bowl. For me, this is really indicative of how younger people "hear" music these days where the production values are off the scale but the music is pretty shallow. Incredible to note the number of people involved in this production. A fascinating insight into the way music works these days.

Had you heard some of the music Richard B had composed and posted on the What Are You Composing? thread you would have been even more amazed at the harmonies, sonorities, combinations and audible degrees of separation which can be achieved by digital means in the hands of one person or group of musicians in real time perforrnance scores and/or improvisations. These pieces in my opinion represent a next step beyond 1960s works such as Messiaen's "Couleurs de la Cité Céleste" for conventional instruments, which I feel the French master would have appreciated.

[Ian Thumwood]

I think the realm of techolofy is a double edge sword. Creative minds will always use this to the advantage of the music. With regards to the Little Mix/ Daivd Guetta track, my point is that the whole process of production is targetted at a audience who appreciate this quality above all else. I think it is an amazing piece of sound engineering with the production having several layers to it. However, to return to the theme of the thread, how do you sell jazz to someone whose musical values are the polar opposite to the spontaniety of jazz. I think that the likes of David Guetta represent a polar opposite to jazz and this music is offering a really fixed performance which does not even exist in pre-composed Classical music. This is what jazz is up against insofar that this kind of production has no place in the music. I do not know how it is to compete with such a polished, machine-made product.

Yoi might be interested to look on line about this track. The number of "composers" is quite staggering but nowhere in eithr the Wicki notes about the song nor a profile of David Guetta does it mention musical instruments. I assume the strings at the beginning are sampled - there is no reference to studio musicians being involved.