Why is Jazz hated so much here?

[Mr Arkadin]

Well Paul, you should definitely follow your musical path - doing something that you have no heart for will result in truly soulless music. Regarding the lack of comments maybe others follow the old English saying:

"If you're not going to say anything nice about a person (or in this case a person's music), then don't say anything at all."

i could comment on the recording quality, mix or other technical aspects i suppose, but i don't think i could comment on your music as it's really a genre i don't enjoy.

[paulrmartin]

But I am not looking for a comment on my music! I am asking for help on frequencial balance. Of course, if you don't enjoy listening to a particular style, why torture yourself, right? I can live with that. Others don't feel so tortured.

I have a hard time believing my mixes come out perfect every single time I do a jazz track.. Wouldn't you feel the same? I can also live with members not being so loquacious but I have a hard time with somehow being ignored in my venture to learn to mix and master better. Reading books is ok but it's just not the same as getting hints from people with hands-on experience which we are all supposed to have here.

[kensuguro]

whoa, this thread blew up in my absence.. let me have a jab at it.

Well, first of all Paul, my not responding to your recent music posts means no more than that I was really busy with coding at work... so I definitely will get to them when I can give them a real, serious listen. You know me, I have much respect for your craft, and I believe they require that much concentration.

Now, on jazz as a whole. I've only recently started really getting serious about jazz performance. I guess many of you may know from my music that although my spectrum is quite wide, the basis focuses strongly on jazz and funk. (more towards funk, I think) But up untill this point, most or all of it has been sequenced work, and most of the "interesting" portions were brought out by using sound textures and other sonic gimmicks. (I love messing with texture)

But then jazz, atleast to me is on a different vector. Jazz is a test of mind, it's like a puzzle. It's sort of like doing math without scratch sheet of paper. There's so much that needs to be figured out before a chord gets voiced, or a solo is constructed in real time. There's so much that needs practicing. Jazz is like a sport. You may think you can't do a 360 dunk. Well, if you practiced and worked out for 4 years, maybe you would. That's the sort of world jazz has presented to me.

Is jazz accepted and cherished in the moderm musical world? It's not. And that is the fact. Fusion, at its height in the 80's (weather report, etc.) was so hot it'll burn you fingers off if you touched it. Fusion nowadays is mostly crap, and so I don't blame people hating it for what it has become. Modern jazz is also sort of borderline... I like to think of jazz as a starting point that should be kept pure and accessible. It's sad that modern jazz and contemporary jazz has tried so hard to make it inaccessible to maintain its avant garde status...

But the bottom line is, apart from the motorskills and simple "drilled in" type skills of jazz, I think jazz is an extremely high level understanding of traditional music theory that everyone should be taught.

Anyway, though, it's back to blues for me. Going back to jazz has given me the oppurtunity to visit back to blues. Something I've known, but haven't really dug deep into. And there's so much good stuff there. All the call and responses, and the basic phrase building and phrase linguistics.

[Nestor]

Ken, you definitely are a Funky man with a twist of jazz and some fusion too.

[dawman]

Kensuguro,
I once told you your Rhodes style was reminiscient of Gayle Moran w/ Micheal Tilson Thomas and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Look 4 Mahavishnu Orchestras CD called Apocalypse. You should listen to the style she plays. It is quite unique. When an average Rhodes patch makes you listen, it must be the player, or the ideas @ work.

[Nestor]

This is an "amazing" CD, wow!, it's a classic...

[braincell]

Hello,

Much like classical music, jazz is finished. The problem is that the audience mostly worships dead composers and rejects living ones, thus the musicians emulate the dead ones leading to no innovation. Once a genre fails to mutate. It is DOA.

[wayne]

Hard, but fair. And efficiently put, thanks Braincell

[Liquid Len]

Hello,
Much like classical music, jazz is finished. The problem is that the audience mostly worships dead composers and rejects living ones, thus the musicians emulate the dead ones leading to no innovation. Once a genre fails to mutate. It is DOA.

Just an opinion.

I listen to music purely because I enjoy it. I could care less about 'fashions'. What music do you think is 'good'? In 20 years from now by your logic it will be 'crap'. And as far as I'm concerned, if it's crap in 20 years, it's really crap NOW, people just haven't figured it out yet.

Change and permanence are both good things, both part of life, when you make them an end in themselves you become stuck in past, or obsessed with simplistic hype and fashion snobbery. Music is not SIMPLY that which is played in bars and clubs. I remember back in 1984 when someone tried to communicate that idea to me the first time, that the only good music is modern dance music. What a strange idea!

[wayne]

But luckily, calling anything "jazz" or "classical" is such a broad generalisation that it fails to mean much.

Pidgeonholing music has always been a very strange thing - there are crews who stand by their genre and don't stray, on principle. That's ok, and it's a matter of taste, to a point. Good music is just that.

If you've never been taken by the hand and shown where your thing is in a style unfamiliar to you, then it's an uphill road - there is a lot of tasteless music to wade through out there before you strike the real thing.

[Nestor]

Some recommendations for those entering into Jazz, Jazz-Fusion and related styles (which by the way, are many, many...)

I would recommend searching for one of the many great Afro-Latin-Bebop groups out there. This music just takes your cranium up, and gets your brain plugged to the amazing positive energy of Latin-Joy!

Herbie Hancock: a must for pianists to get to know, and of course, for composers with open ears on harmony, to learn from a new world and perspective. This man is musically speaking, of an outmost exceptional quality. Those who have had the chance to see him live, can understand what I mean.
Marcus Miller: for a great bass player, extremely musical and funky, his style is diverse, and nonetheless, wonderfully black, as his skin.

Michel Petrucciani: already gone, one of the greatest pianists around, fantastic. He played in a rather classical way but with a particular style of himself. Highly recommended.

Grover Washintong: his first period is great, after that... well... not.

Pat Metheny: That’s a serious thing... something to listen and study, one of the best composers of all times, and a very good guitar player too. He has approached jazz in so many different and extreme ways, that you would be surprised, from the sweetest to the wildest. He has also played with all soft of musicians from every style. If I were to choose one from this entire long list, it would be him.

Tom Scott: A great sax player.

Chick Corea: well, most people will know about this giant, but if you don’t know, we could say he is one of the guys who created school in Jazz.

Joe Henderson: A superb sax player, much in the style of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, sort of a follower we could say. He is a very sensitive man and so is his way of playing, warm and emotive at all times.

Well..., there are so many that I will just make a list, but will not write comments to each of them as this could take forever and I have things to do... Nevertheless, I would recommend you to approach at least, a song per name in the list, to amaze yourself at HOW BIG a difference there is in jazz music between styles, groups, players and time periods:

Dizzy Gillespie

Machito

Antonio Carlos Jobim

Astrud Gilberto

Tito Puente

Chucho Valdéz

Stan Kenton

John McLaughlin

Don Grolnick

John Scofield

Peters Drury

Layla Angulo

Bernadette

William Cepeda

Nelson Gonzalez

Fernando Knopf

Aconcagua : Latin Jazz

Angel David Mattos

Anthony Panacci

Arturo Stable

Eduardo Lis

Gabriel Rodriguez

Jeno Somlai

Nick Cuda

Peter Smith

Roberto Occhipinti

Bill King

Dave Plotel

Dave Plotel

Gary Guthman

Gordon James

John Chiasson

Michael Winkle

Mike Cowie

Richard J. Price

Adam Smale

Barry Romberg

Ben Ball

Bubbha Thomas

Carlos Aguirre

Chantal Chamberland

Chris Glik

Chris Tarry

Dwyer Jones Whitaker

Erik Friedlander

George McRae

Greg Lyons

Heillig Manoeuvre

Joe Huron

Joe Hurt

Joe Sealy

Paul Novotny

Mané Silveira

Minino Garay

Jaco Pastorius

Mark Hasselbach

Igor Jazz

Michael Brandeburg

Roberto Occhipinti

Teco Cardoso

Léa Freire

Kenny Kirkwood

Barry Elmes

Benito Gonzalez

Bill King

Bob Brough

Dave Young

Dmitri Matheny

Hugh Brown

Jason Crawford

Vladimir Cetkar

David Parker

Tom Van Seters Quintet

Gregory James

Takeshi Asai

Steve Yeager

Sonny Greenwich

Roy Patterson

Ruben Salcido

Bobby Ramirez

Lissette Torres

Mark Towns

Marcos Valente

Jeff Berlin

Bill Bruford

Allan Holdsworth

Bill Connors
Jerry Goodman
Billy Cobham

Jan Hammer

Frank Gambale

Scott Henderson

Shawn Lane

Well, I’ve to tiread already... And this is such an small list... I think it is not even the 000000000,1% of the jazz that there is in the world to hear at. And I have not yet started with the myriad of new musicians...

Yet the list is only about individuals, not groups. This should be another list.

[kensuguro]

Much like classical music, jazz is finished. The problem is that the audience mostly worships dead composers and rejects living ones, thus the musicians emulate the dead ones leading to no innovation. Once a genre fails to mutate. It is DOA.

perhaps it is, I fail to follow most of what became of jazz post free jazz / free form jazz.. and then the rest seems to be more or less "machine" jazz.. But I think that's looking at jazz in the real world. I think jazz has become something you just do for fun, for your own mental health and growth.. kind of like working out, or playing team sports just for the heck of it. I personally don't think I'm doing it to necessarily change anything. I'm just trying to learn as much as I can of what's already out there, and that's already more than a handful..

I think jazz still lives on, in more evolved forms like funk / hiphop rnb, etc.. those in turn spawning new offsprings.. (although it's dumbed down a bit) so jazz itself may have gone down to a weak pulse, but the chain reaction as a whole I think is still intact.

[braincell]

agree with that Kensuguro.

For me the artists such as Kenny G and piano bar players ruined jazz. Whenever black people invent a great music like the blues, jazz and r&b; white people copy it and destroy it. Jazz once had a vitality, a grit and street smarts. It comes from suffering, poverty, not being educated and heroine. Now it's just elevator music. Someone will slam me on this and point out exceptions. This thread started out with the misconception that everyone in this group hates jazz. I don't think we hate jazz, it just isn't what we listen to. I respect jazz, the original jazz ,not copies. I fully understand that jazz fans and musicians are bitter and angry about the demise of jazz. That is the way music goes. It was vibrant at a time. I don't listen to much of the music that I listened to in the 70's. It's time is over. I try to be open minded about music but not when it comes to jazz because it is perpetuated by fanatics. The same reason I will never buy an Apple or any Apple product.

[Mr Arkadin]

Wow, there's so much great music that to dismiss it by saying 'It's time is over' is incredible to me - i cannot imagine my life without the genius of Thomas Tallis or Bach, or Harry Partch and John Cage, or Led Zep and The Beatles. At exactly what point does the music become irrelevant to you: ten years, twenty? Radiohead have been around a few years now, are they past there sell-by-date according to your dating system? As much as i love the Italan Futurists i cannot subscribe to their view of destroying the past, as appealing as that initally sounds. And i don't want to get into the whole black/white argument too much, but isn't rock'n'roll considered to have been 'invented' by four dudes (Presley, Cash, Perkins and Lewis) combining country with Blues music?

PS. i still love the stuff from my childhood, also from before i was born and also lots of new music too, for me good music has no cut-off point.

[braincell]

They didn't invent that music at all It was taken from what was then known as "race records". Nearly every song Elvis ever recorded was written by Otis Blackwell a black man who is nearly anonymous.

[Zer]

www.smoothjazz.com

[Mr Arkadin]

A few of my favourite jazz moments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMBHkntOMtk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezbJkZouXX4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoRv--cosIo

[darkrezin]

my 2 pence worth:

Jazz is essential listening, I could never stop listening to people like McCoy Tyner, Grant Green, Elvin Jones, Joe Zawinul, Jaco, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and all the other cats who made the incredible jazz of the 60s and 70s. Of course there was a lot of dorkish and lame jazz/fusion made in these periods and especially later in the 80s (digital recording + cocaine = almost exclusively bad jazz) but that does not negate the good stuff which is priceless musical heritage for me. Good music is timeless no matter what the form or function. It's valuable education... some of the music of that period is so incredibly advanced and sophisticated and emotionally deep compared to the music we hear today.

This doesn't mean that I want to make straight jazz or fusion now in terms of form or sound - this seems pointless to me. Apart from anything else you cannot do it properly without good quality tape IMHO. However the music I make is definitely influenced by it in terms of musical philosophy - for me harmonic depth is the most satisfying thing you can have both as a writer and listener. I find the rhythmic elements very important and also it reminds me that music is about expression - it's too easy with modern technology to get too into 'off-line' methods which can easily distance you from really expressing yourself through music.

I don't tend to listen to much modern acoustic jazz except stuff like Dave Holland. But there's lots of good modern music which uses jazz elements but says something relevant to the modern world - certain underground hip-hop styles, the London broken beat scene (Bugz in the attic especially Kaidi Tatham, Dego, Mark de Clive Lowe and others) as well as more unclassifiable artists like Jon Hassell.

[darkrezin]

One of my favourite jazz moments:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=EQrdx1bNDPE

This has one of the greatest minimoog solos ever..

pretty bad quality video - there's a good quality bootleg of this floating around - George Duke/Billy Cobham band Montreaux 76 - it's worth hunting down, best gig I've ever seen!

[smileforpulsar]

I would agree that there are many kinds of jazz out there. I personally like the earlier stuff...Swing etc....
i think perhaps the reason why many people seem to judge modern jazz negatively is due to the more sophisticated tools like more elaborate harmonies ; like altered chords and chords with extensions (u know stuff like added 9 or added 13th...etc). it is more understandable to the trained ear rather than the popular crowd. Different time meters like 7/8 s are perhaps not popular between the masses.
Future? i think there will be more fusion with world music. if u travel u will see this as a trend.
So hey, I say jazz is cool - i don,t like all but it is so versatile that i think it would be hard to judge it.
cherio