No more Jazz!!

BIT_IFFY said:
If there is one style, type or genre of music i truly hate, its jazz. Not tryn to troll your thread, i just dont understand or get jazz.
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Man, I cant believe it. Probably its not the right time, but someday you will indeed enjoy BAM :D everyone should! Dont try to understand jazz, you wont be able to. Just chill out and listen
 
BIT_IFFY said:
If there is one style, type or genre of music i truly hate, its jazz. Not tryn to troll your thread, i just dont understand or get jazz.
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What's to get or understand ? Just listen to the stuff. You either dig it or not, as the case may be.
Having said that, the term 'jazz', a bit like the term 'rock' simply is too large and unwieldy to mean any one thing. By 1975 'jazz' had gone in so many different directions. I used to have this encyclopedia of jazz and the guy that wrote the entry for "Davis, Miles" said something really interesting when it came to his output from 1970 onwards. It was summed up in this one sentence - "His post 1970 recordings will be of little interest to jazz afficianados". But Miles considered himself jazz.
It's the same with 'rock'. People use the term as though it meant one thing and we all had a common shared understanding of the meaning. It doesn't and we don't.

gecko zzed said:
And as the blues sprang from the slaves in the south a couple of hundred years ago, maybe that should now be called "The Blacks".
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I think we Blacks had the blues !
Mind you, R&B was called "Race music" for a long while.

chrisghost said:
It's probably just a matter of your ears being attuned to it. I suspect most people who're into Jazz are brought up with it.
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I don't know. While I do think that one tends to have an affinity for music one heard while growing up, like LT Bob points out, kids tend to gravitate towards music with upfront and obvious beat and very defined melodies and/or hooks and generally repetitive moments, whereas alot of stuff that falls into the wider jazz genre do not have upfront and obvious beat {often quite the opposite post 50s}, almost no hooks or easilly followable melodies and aren't repetitive due to much of the improvisational element. Of course this depends on the piece.
I wasn't brought up with it but I grew to love it. What really opened me up to that strand of music were bands like Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin that would do lengthy songs that were more than just an 11 minute riff.
 
Wiki says some stuff about jazz here:Jazz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of note is that there are two definitions in there which say jazz was born out of a fusion of African and European music, e.g. 'Berendt defines jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music"'.

The article also notes that "But for some African American musicians, the music called jazz is a reminder of an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions."

If those African American musicians feel that way, then they feel that way: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so is the perception of oppression. But would that not then be true for any form of music that has a 'mixed' heritage? I'm not sure why jazz should be the focus here, and not,say, the blues, or shape-note singing.
 
gecko zzed said:
Wiki says some stuff about jazz here:Jazz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of note is that there are two definitions in there which say jazz was born out of a fusion of African and European music, e.g. 'Berendt defines jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music"'.

The article also notes that "But for some African American musicians, the music called jazz is a reminder of an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions."

If those African American musicians feel that way, then they feel that way: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so is the perception of oppression. But would that not then be true for any form of music that has a 'mixed' heritage? I'm not sure why jazz should be the focus here, and not,say, the blues, or shape-note singing.
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If you're interested there's a great documentairy by Ken Burns on Jazz, it's very long though, like 8 hours, but very gripping.

What I heared is that the word Jazz basicly means something like "to speed up", I see no harm in that?

Lighter skin colored people in New Orleans (where it all began), the creole, had their own class at one point. They looked down on darker skinned people, might even have them as slaves. They had their own classical orchestra's and veneus and tried their best to be "sophisticated". After some war they were all thrown together in one class and that's how european instruments got mixed with the blues, which evolved into Jazz, in a nut shell.

Personally I would say that it's a great legacy of colored people to have so drasticly changed ALL music, dispity their hardships. It's not like the hardships are erased after this name change. I'm afraid I'm kind of missing the point of why this name change is nescecary. Then again, it's probebly not my bussiness.
 
I'm personally over the thin-skinned overreactions to anything that could conceivably be taken as an insult.
I'm gonna call it jazz and anyone that wants to take offense at that can kiss my butt.

Like that school that rejected the name "Cougars" for their school sports teams because some older women might find it offensive. First off most cougars I know are proud of it and secondly most older ladies that aren't cougars hardly even know what it means. That was dumb as hell and so is this idea that we ought to call jazz BAM. Further ..... at this point in history white musicians have had as much input into the development of jazz as black players.
 
mshilarious said:
Which is why jazz sucks so bad now :laughings:
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maybe ...... but I'm a jazz player and I really don't care for some of the pioneers.
Coltrane and Parker do little for me. Lots of the time Parker was just playing bursts of noise ..... Coltrane too.

I prefer guys like Rollins and Yusef Lateef .... both black so that doesn't tie into the discussion but just an idea of what I like in jazz.

I don't buy into the idea that just 'cause someone is black they have soul or are jazzy.
but then, around 50% of the musicians I've ever worked with are black so I may have worked directly with more brothers than is common around here.
 
Lt. Bob said:
Lots of the time Parker was just playing bursts of noise .....
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WHAT???????????? He 's a mayor step in the evolution of music. Jazz, and music, before him and after him are two completly different things. Miles Davis wouldn't have done what he did without Charlie Parker.
 
If there are no black musicians in a jazz band it's suspect--they could be great but the percentages are lower. I think black musicians culturally absorb some aspect of music in their homes when they are very young and their minds are like sponges that *most* white musicians do not get. And you could probably argue the same thing about some forms of white folk music, but those rhythms are dying off much more quickly in whitebread culture. So to some extent white jazz cats are playing a second language rather than a native language.

Of course whites have brought their own internal cultural rhythms to jazz which were and are an expanded vocabulary, and that's cool. I think the problem is in the second generation, where for example you got white musicians listening to first-gen fusion and then going off on their own without any appreciation for the origin of that music. They are speaking from a limited vocabulary, like they read a great novel but they could only ever use the words in that novel. The same thing happened in blues rock music--if you have made no effort to dig Son House but went straight to SRV, chances are your music is boring in a way that SRV's was not (his was boring in a special, original way :D).

So being black gives a musician a bit of a leg up on black styles of music, but if they don't do anything interesting with what they have then it's still boring (Wynton Marsalis).
 
chrisghost said:
WHAT???????????? He 's a mayor step in the evolution of music. Jazz, and music, before him and after him are two completly different things. Miles Davis wouldn't have done what he did without Charlie Parker.
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I didn't say ALL the time or even a majority of the time nor did I say he wasn't a turning point nor did I say the only thing he played was noise ......... I said lots of time which in no way degrades his historical significance. But when he's improivising it's not infrequent that he plays blasts of nonsense which are simply any note at all as fast as he can play 'em.

He was an innovator and one of the very pivotal figures in jazz ...... that doesn't make him Saint Parker with perfection being the only thing he plays.




I'm a long time jazz sax player and I can play that shit and I recognize when he's playing awesome stuff and when it's crap.
Superstar though he was ...... he was also capable of playing crap just like any other player.
There's a tendency to take the giants of jazz and elevate them to the level where ANYthing they played is automatically awesome.
It's just not so.
 
mshilarious said:
If there are no black musicians in a jazz band it's suspect--they could be great but the percentages are lower. I think black musicians culturally absorb some aspect of music in their homes when they are very young and their minds are like sponges that *most* white musicians do not get. And you could probably argue the same thing about some forms of white folk music, but those rhythms are dying off much more quickly in whitebread culture. So to some extent white jazz cats are playing a second language rather than a native language.

Of course whites have brought their own internal cultural rhythms to jazz which were and are an expanded vocabulary, and that's cool. I think the problem is in the second generation, where for example you got white musicians listening to first-gen fusion and then going off on their own without any appreciation for the origin of that music. They are speaking from a limited vocabulary, like they read a great novel but they could only ever use the words in that novel. The same thing happened in blues rock music--if you have made no effort to dig Son House but went straight to SRV, chances are your music is boring in a way that SRV's was not (his was boring in a special, original way :D).

So being black gives a musician a bit of a leg up on black styles of music, but if they don't do anything interesting with what they have then it's still boring (Wynton Marsalis).
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hmmm ..... interesting. I think it's possible that the gospel influence with that 'loose' feel does teach grooving and feeling better than growing up listening to Pat Boone.

I think maybe the reason I don't see it that way is 'cause I come from Louisiana in the shadow of New Orleans where everybody grew up with the black music influence in their homes ...... back and white.
I'm white and the earliest music in our house was Fats Domino and Little Richard and some gospel. That's what my parents listened to and most of my friends.
Further .... I'm not sure where you're from but the black and white communities are very intertwined musically and have been as long as I've been playing.
But this may be changing now I suppose since it's going 2nd generation as you say ..... but white players back home can funk it up as well as any black player and , believe it or not, I've know quite a few black drummers and bass players that can't groove to save their lives.
Play just as white as can be.
 
gecko zzed said:
'Berendt defines jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music"'.
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Which kind of makes sense. The reality is that no Afro American music of the 20th century developed or could have done so without some regard for or fusion with "white" forms of music or the instruments that were around.
It's harder to have these discussions now because despite all things, the races have moved a long way together in the last 120 years. Things were a lot more clear cut prior to 1899. For worse, not for better.

Lt. Bob said:
I really don't care for some of the pioneers.
Coltrane and Parker do little for me. Lots of the time Parker was just playing bursts of noise ..... Coltrane too.
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Pioneers of new forms and moves may be originators, but it doesn't follow that what they produce is good to listen to {or reads well, or looks good, depending on what it is that is pioneered}. I was in a three piece band once and the guitarist was a Charlie Parker nut. He said he was tired of blues based rock shit and everything was Parker. We played some Parker stuff and I thought to myself that if this was where we were headed, I wouldn't be headed that way long. It was as boring as watching Hilary Clinton washing the middle toe of her left foot. The band never got off the runway and of the regrets I have in my life thus far, that doesn't even make the bottom rung !
Some pioneers actually tried to make attractive music. Some just pioneered.
Coltrane was pretty good in bits. But free playing was difficult to sustain repeated listens. Great being there live, not so great all the time on the old tape player......

chrisghost said:
WHAT???????????? He 's a major step in the evolution of music. Jazz, and music, before him and after him are two completly different things. Miles Davis wouldn't have done what he did without Charlie Parker.
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There's some truth in this. But then, Parker washed out relatively quickly. Miles made good, attractive {most of the time} accessible music for close on 50 years. No easy thing. It's arguable that Parker didn't have what it took to keep ahead of all the games in town.

mshilarious said:
I think black musicians culturally absorb some aspect of music in their homes when they are very young and their minds are like sponges that *most* white musicians do not get.
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It really depends on which ones you're talking about. The simple fact of history is that most lovers of jazz were not and still aren't black. I wonder in how many homes jazz, in it's varying shades, was actually constantly played in. In England, there are so few black jazz lovers. It was funny going to see Miles Davis, Sam Rivers, Alphonse Muzon, Roy Haynes, Tony Williams, the Marsalis brothers, Ron Carter, the Art ensemble of Chicago and many other black jazzers and my mate and I used to be among the other 7 black people there !
mshilarious said:
So being black gives a musician a bit of a leg up on black styles of music, but if they don't do anything interesting with what they have then it's still boring.
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I wonder.......few black American artists seemed to get reggae. And relatively few that made it in the Motown & Stax era seemed that enamoured of the blues. Like not at all. Going as far as describing it as "embarrassing".

Lt. Bob said:
There's a tendency to take the giants of jazz and elevate them to the level where ANYthing they played is automatically awesome.
It's just not so.
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That's often the thing with improvised music. When you're in that zone, as the improviser, you're creating on the fly and you're not necessarilly consciously thinking through what you're doing. So it stands to reason that some of it could be awesome and some of it could be crapacious. If I like it, it was wondrous. If I don't..........:D
Lt. Bob said:
I don't buy into the idea that just 'cause someone is black they have soul or are jazzy.
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I agree with this. It's a ridiculous argument that people have been getting away with for too long. But because so many people, both black and white, espouse it, many believe it and many white people then act like it's actually true.
It's odd what people believe. In my younger days, I was reluctantly at this party. I remember feeling really ill and weak at the time but I'd made the effort. Anyway, I was standing around wishing someone would give me a lift home when this guy {I vaguely remembered him from school many years earlier} came up to me, grabbed my hardware {or was it my floppy disc ?} and said "is it true you guys have bigger ones than white guys ?". He obviously hadn't seen some of the movies I had !
The problem with historical racial arguments in something like music is that most conclusions are just too simple to be true for something so fluid as influence and spread of an art form involving human beings.
 
Grew up in VA, things pretty divided there then. Schools integrated a few years earlier, but the people weren't really.

I think it might have to do with language rather than strictly listening to music, anybody can listen to music and "get" it, but maybe not use an expression the same way. It's like how an English actor can do an American accent that can fool most Americans, but very few (if any) American actors can do convincing English--mainly because they fail to recognize regional differences that native English are very clued into.

Or because they suck real bad, like Kevin Costner :p

So I don't try to pretend, my conception of jazz is expressed with a surf sound . . . although I don't surf either. Well, bodysurfing, to the extent that letting my fat buoyant ass ride a wave until it beaches me like a whale is bodysurfing :o

Sorry, TMI . . .
 
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