... Has the Creative Vein Run Dry?

Jazz today has become exactly like any other musical genre, that is, the codification and repetition of inventions made by others.

In this regard, it is no different from blues, funk, or classical music, just as it is no different from liscio or salsa.

What has been missing from almost all musical forms is the reference world, that is, that human and cultural, economic and social collective that expressed itself in that way.

Thanks to music schools, today a young person can learn to play flamenco, or dixieland or free jazz, like tango, etc.

By studying the artists of those musical forms, examining the creative process, and practicing technique with adequate school programs, one can assemble a repertoire of songs, standards, or happenings that mimic that grammar, without having moved from the region in which they were born and without necessarily having involvement with the facts related to the origin of that music.

This fact has nothing to do with the quality or the skill of the musician and their music, but in some way this music has lost its roots, and the progress we are witnessing is uniquely directed toward a technical direction, complicating a language that can no longer speak in its natural simplicity.

In fact, the new course does not limit itself to making the language more complex, but to find a new sense of creativity, it mixes these languages together, until there will be a global jam, which with the improvisational characteristics of jazz will have become a great gym for physical exercise and for deepening theoretical knowledge, historical and biographical knowledge, exactly as happens in a museum, where every way of being must be finished, dead, in order to be preserved.

OBVIOUSLY I do not agree.

First, I don't understand what there is to it in a musical genre........

When you talk about the lack of a reference world.....but in which world do you live? In which era, to be more precise? The fact that you do not share the historical "moment" does not mean it doesn't exist.

Since when has studying become a bad thing?

It goes without saying that I also do not agree with the last part of your post; in my opinion, you are a bit distracted, or at least looking in the wrong direction.....

This is regardless of the musical genre, obviously.

I'll drop some links quickly to make it clearer.

Here is Jason Moran, one of my favorite pianists; if you don't know him, I hope you can appreciate and love him.

The gentleman in question was given a prize of 400,000 dollars because, as a leading exponent of jazz culture and therefore American culture, his livelihood must be guaranteed so that he can dedicate himself totally to his artistic evolutionary path.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhal8JXZQgw

and this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ivHY0HbeMk

there would be much more.

Jazz means interpreting the present by turning toward tomorrow through the practice ALSO of improvisation......if we use other parameters, it would no longer be jazz.

Anyway, I don't understand why the distinction into genres must always become a class distinction.

Obviously nothing personal.

Bye

Feliciano

Open content (youtube)

Open content (youtube)

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Open content (youtube)

Feliciano wrote:

It goes without saying that I do not even share the last part of your post; in my opinion, you are a bit distracted, or at least looking in the wrong direction.....

Here is Jason Moran, one of my favorite pianists; if you don't know him, I hope you manage to appreciate and love him.

The gentleman in question was given an award of 400,000 dollars because, as a leading exponent of jazz culture and therefore American culture, his livelihood must be guaranteed so that he can dedicate himself totally to his evolutionary artistic path.

It's not that you don't share it... you haven't really understood what jazzmania wrote, which by the way is a concept so banal as to be true by definition.

You can even give 400,000 dollars to a Neapolitan woman, but even in 10 years she won't dance the samba better than the poorest of the Brazilians.

Can you be a little more precise?

I also believe that the premises of the discussion have been misunderstood; I listened to some of the posted links, but it's always the same things, for decades; no one seems to be inventing anything truly new, practically since the '70s. I think that no musician today would feel they are participating on the front line of change by playing like Bill Frisell... It's a 30-year-old style...!

In any case, I think it is more interesting to look outside the USA, where there has always been more openness to cross-genre contamination and unprecedented paths. America, regarding jazz, is more conservative (see the history of Free), perhaps because it considers jazz its "national" music and therefore ended up institutionalizing it and giving it an academic guise as well.

what a difficult topic...

how severe we are...

It's been quite a while since I've followed concerts, but I remember that listening to Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Paul Bley, L. Butch Morris, David Murray, A. Braxton, John Scofield, Bobby Previte, Evan Parker, but also Lovano, Pieranunzi, Galliano, Trovesi, and so on, didn't make me feel old-fashioned and it didn't seem like witnessing boring self-celebrations marking the end of music!

Now instead I read that it is over

Well, thank goodness there are Sanremo and X-Factor!

I'm joking, it was just to lighten the mood, I understood the point, but I think one should be sure to have listened to everything being proposed in order to judge.

What Jazzmania says makes sense, but it could turn out to be ungenerous towards certain musicians.

Not being able to define Jazz as a music that, due to technical requirements, is presented as such, does not mean that this is a virtuous and gratuitous hodgepodge of styles; it could also be something else that perhaps we are not understanding...

One cannot deny a priori that someone has something of their own to say and that it is an unartificial expression of their way of life, meaning Stuyvesant is right, but careful not to try to recognize Samba at all costs!

p.s. Stopping at the '70s seems exaggerated to me, as does saying that Frisell plays in a thirty-year-old style...

a timeless theme, what was done before is always better and the future is always seen as a "decline" (not only in music)

it is like an unconscious push (in my opinion) that always spurs us to do better (without criticism one does not improve)

it is a discussion for its own sake, everyone has their own opinion

tastes are tastes and the fact that jazz (in part) is somewhat "massifying" does not mean it sucks

good artists are always there, you just have to know them

just as there are artists "within everyone's reach" and they too must exist without being criticized

There will always be extremely talented musicians with overflowing hearts in all contexts; my observation was that the era of human communities that produced THEIR own music has ended (for now). Today, everyone plays everyone else's music, sometimes even better than the originals, somewhat as if an advertising designer were repainting a Van Gogh in a "hyper-realistic" way, without a single smudge, on a pure linen canvas prepared with all the knowledge available today regarding ancient painting materials.

There are fantastic people like Andrew D'angelo, I don't know if you know him; I happen to play in some jams with musicians who touch me deeply, but no matter how much one can personalize what they do, one is always in an individual context immersed in citations; it is no longer a world that expresses itself despite the difficulties and sufferings it is undergoing.

I believe that the only places where this still happens are dangerous to frequent, and it is possible that this crisis, which is arriving like a runaway locomotive, could bring back certain conditions—conditions in which music returns to being a form of redemption and consolation.

GnazzJazz wrote:

p.s. Stopping at the '70s seems exaggerated to me, just as saying that Frisell's playing is a thirty-year-old style...

I was only alluding to the fact that, in the last twenty years, it doesn't seem to me that there is the same speed of evolution, or propulsive drive if you will, that jazz has had more or less from the first Davis until the mid-'70s; not that today it is exactly "stagnant". If you browse the discography of the "new releases" in the catalog, you also find many retrospectives, whereas I believe that in the past more was invested in the search for new paths, even on the front of genre cross-pollination. That's all.

As for Frisell, I meant to say that even in the very early '80s he already had the characteristics that make him recognizable today. But between the present and his beginnings, in terms of time (32 years), there is the same distance as between Pat Metheny and Charlie Christian... This just to stick to the subject of jazz evolution. In rock, if it's any consolation, it's even worse: just think that between Little Richard and Pink Floyd there are a dozen years, while today's rock is almost the same as 20 years ago... I don't know if I managed to explain myself.

Any cultural product (jazz included), today, is destructuring, reworked, packaged, and sold.

No music possesses any longer any traditional or authentic connotation, but all have been expropriated and manipulated:

Salsa was born in the poor neighborhoods of Puerto Rico and Cuba, tango in the slums of Buenos Aires, Algerian rai in the bars and cabarets of Oran (the second largest Algerian city), etc.: all musics have lost their profound cultural meaning and have become hybrid products of the globalized market.

The cultural dimension, today, is based on homogenized information that is independent of its national, social, political, and/or religious context, from which many musical (and non-musical) expressions drew origin and meaning.

Any musical expression is a form of spectacle, stripped of any cultural context.

No matter how much one strives to search, rummage, differentiate, etc., the impoverishment of any expressive form takes on a global dimension; probably, in jazz, it is even more evident since, more than a music with precise roots, it is a music with more ramifications.

Comparing it to a tree, it is like a baobab... in whose greatness, it presents branches (as Australian aborigines claim) that seem like roots... and when the ramifications become extensive and stratified, it is not possible to explain the evolution linearly, nor to identify a unique sense of what is happening.

Gerardo wrote:

What is becoming of jazz at this moment? Are the great musicians who made music history in the twentieth century now just a memory? Has everything already been said? In this period, is smooth jazz considered jazz; can one speak of jazz or does it have nothing to do with it?

Almost all the greats are dead and those who remain are of a certain age... the young ones look back to the greats of an era that has long since passed. Am I missing something that is not being talked about much? Does jazz have a creative movement, or has the creative vein run dry?

I am not so catastrophic. I listen to all jazz, from ragtime to the electronic experiments of George Lewis, and it seems to me that jazz is still very much alive and still has many things to say, certainly more than any other music. I also listen to classical and "light" music, but the creative research, the curiosity towards new paths, the 360° openness in constructing one's own poetics that contemporary jazz musicians possess, does not seem to me to be found in any other musical form of our time. Of course, results vary and certain works may perhaps be understood and gain value in the future. Rather than the musicians, I find that jazz listeners are much more "closed-minded"; for the majority of them, jazz corresponds or should correspond to a specific style (dixieland, bebop, swing, free, fusion, etc.), whereas the essence of this art has always been precisely the freedom to enter and exit any musical form, making it become something different from the original.

Some names: the aforementioned George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, Tim Berne, Henry Threadgill, Bill Frisell, Louis Sclavis, and in Italy, that whole troupe revolving around the El Gallo Rojo label.

Clearly, all of them require a certain level of listening effort, but that is natural when seeking new paths; otherwise, as Miles Davis used to say, you go and get one of his albums from the fifties and listen to "My Funny Valentine" again. What sense is there in demanding that in 2012 a young person tries to mimic such masterpieces of the past?