S-A,
I don't think you could really call Azimuth anything other than jazz but I think the recordings were pretty typical of the mind-set in the late 70's / early 80's when the American model sounded like it had lost it's way amongst the aural glue of Fusion and when the "mainstream" seemed to involve musicians from an earlier generation continuing to produce great jazz (in a variety of styles ) in line with the tenets of their youth. I'm sympathetic to your argument to a degree and around this time ECM was at it's zenith producing jazz (and other music) that really mattered. I seem to recall a chapter in mike Zwerin's "Close enough for jazz" where he castigated the current American scene of the time and pointed out the the 1980's would seem to be dominated by labels such as ECM who could produce a wholly new esthetic to jazz.
However, that was thirty years ago and I think that jazz has woken up since the mid-80's and the baton has been picked up from where it was dropped in the late 60's. Nowadays, it is ECM that is beginning to sound very much behind the curve and I suppose that the new artists on the label over the last few years like Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, Aaron Parks and Tom Berne seem to reflect the fact that the "new" jazz that matters is now back with the US.
Curious to see Carla Bley thrown back in to the mix here as I grew up believing she was part of the avant garde movement in the 60's and she was one of the stepping stones for me in to getting in to more contemporary jazz as a teenager in the mid 80's. At that time, her music sounded punchy and great fun but I now would consider her music to be an idiosyncratic version of the jazz mainstream. She is a bit of a heroine for me and I have a number of her records in my collection. Bley has an uncanny knack of writing interesting and extremely catchy tunes . You can download a few of her leadsheets from her entertaining website and this is fascinating as the music is not too far removed from the kind of jazz you find in the Real Book. It doesn't have the complicated harmonic substitutions of other contemporary composers like Harrell, Douglas, Metheny or Binney whose music I gave attempted to play. Carla Bley is a maverick but perhaps not quite as radical in some respects as the Azimuth stuff. However, I think there is still alot of church music / gospel in Bley's writing which, for me, squarely nails it to the great jazz tradition.
I don't think you could really call Azimuth anything other than jazz but I think the recordings were pretty typical of the mind-set in the late 70's / early 80's when the American model sounded like it had lost it's way amongst the aural glue of Fusion and when the "mainstream" seemed to involve musicians from an earlier generation continuing to produce great jazz (in a variety of styles ) in line with the tenets of their youth. I'm sympathetic to your argument to a degree and around this time ECM was at it's zenith producing jazz (and other music) that really mattered. I seem to recall a chapter in mike Zwerin's "Close enough for jazz" where he castigated the current American scene of the time and pointed out the the 1980's would seem to be dominated by labels such as ECM who could produce a wholly new esthetic to jazz.
However, that was thirty years ago and I think that jazz has woken up since the mid-80's and the baton has been picked up from where it was dropped in the late 60's. Nowadays, it is ECM that is beginning to sound very much behind the curve and I suppose that the new artists on the label over the last few years like Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, Aaron Parks and Tom Berne seem to reflect the fact that the "new" jazz that matters is now back with the US.
Curious to see Carla Bley thrown back in to the mix here as I grew up believing she was part of the avant garde movement in the 60's and she was one of the stepping stones for me in to getting in to more contemporary jazz as a teenager in the mid 80's. At that time, her music sounded punchy and great fun but I now would consider her music to be an idiosyncratic version of the jazz mainstream. She is a bit of a heroine for me and I have a number of her records in my collection. Bley has an uncanny knack of writing interesting and extremely catchy tunes . You can download a few of her leadsheets from her entertaining website and this is fascinating as the music is not too far removed from the kind of jazz you find in the Real Book. It doesn't have the complicated harmonic substitutions of other contemporary composers like Harrell, Douglas, Metheny or Binney whose music I gave attempted to play. Carla Bley is a maverick but perhaps not quite as radical in some respects as the Azimuth stuff. However, I think there is still alot of church music / gospel in Bley's writing which, for me, squarely nails it to the great jazz tradition.
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