No more Jazz!!

[chrisghost]

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.

Ah right, sorry. What you mean is probebly just him trying something and not quite succeeding.

I read about this guy asking Miles Davis about making mistakes. Miles simply replied something allong the lines of: "Sometimes I'm going for something I'm not sure I can actually do, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."

And that's the key. They were constantly trying new things, not afraid to fall on their ass in full view. Sometimes they fell on their asses, sometimes they changed music forever.

 

[chrisghost]

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

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

Sorry, TMI . . .

I don't know. It always seems to me that colored people are able to tap into something much more primal than white people are able to. Where you really feel the rhythems in your guts. What the greatest bassguitar innovators, Larry Graham and James Jamerson, invented I don't believe a white person could have ever come up with that.

If you look at the contributions of white people to music the last century it's often very rigid music like New Wave or House, or tame versions of styles developed by the black community. All the great and important inovations the Beatles made are infact mostly borrowed from black music (in an exiting new mix ofcourse).

PS. Have you ever heard any of those rediculus racist punk bands, talking horsesh*t over a musical style derived from something the people they badmouth invented, how's that for brains eh?

 

[mshilarious]

In European forms of folk dancing the head and often entire upper body is rigid, whereas African dancers are quite dynamic with their upper bodies and head. Traditional African music is much more syncopated than European folk music. These cultural cues are absorbed from birth as babies closely observe and mimic their immediate families (except Navin Johnson, apparently )

This has analogies to language and even genetics: there is a principle that states the farther a population travels from its origin, it genetic and linguistic diversity is reduced, meaning less genetic variation (different African groups are both the tallest and shortest people in the world, for example; they have the fastest sprinters and fastest marathoners, but from origins on different sides of the continent, etc.) and there are fewer vowel/consonant sounds (phonemes) used in language. Compare Amharic to a Polynesian language.

 

[Milnoque]

Jazz is an umbrella term that encompasses many different musical styles. Not all of them have their roots in Africa.

Scott Joplin was black, but the ragtime jazz he played had far more European influence than African. Django Reinhart was European and his music came out of the culture he grew up in. The music of Duke Ellington owes as much to other influences as it does his African roots.

The playing of that famous racist Benny Goodman drew heavily from the same well that klezmer music came out of.

Everywhere there have been people there have been drums and rhythms. Some of them quite lively and complex and quite removed from African influence.

We owe Africa, and Americans from Africa, an enormous debt for their part in the creation of this music, but they don't, and have never, owned it.

 

[Lt. Bob]

Ah right, sorry. What you mean is probebly just him trying something and not quite succeeding.

I read about this guy asking Miles Davis about making mistakes. Miles simply replied something allong the lines of: "Sometimes I'm going for something I'm not sure I can actually do, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."

And that's the key. They were constantly trying new things, not afraid to fall on their ass in full view. Sometimes they fell on their asses, sometimes they changed music forever.

yes ..... that's it exactly. And to me ..... that's always the way to play and it's the way I approach it every night even if I'm playing top 40 or country or whatever. You play at the limits which means you fall over the edge sometimes.

It's FUN!!!

 

[mshilarious]

Yeah I play that way too, mainly because I am too lazy to bother with following any changes

 

[Milnoque]

In European forms of folk dancing the head and often entire upper body is rigid,

This is also found in the traditional dance of some African tribes, which can be quite stylized.

whereas African dancers are quite dynamic with their upper bodies and head.

There are ballets that could be described this way. It could also be said of some traditional greek dances and those of eastern Europe, among others.

Traditional African music is much more syncopated than European folk music. These cultural cues are absorbed from birth as babies closely observe and mimic their immediate families (except Navin Johnson, apparently )

And yet, complicated syncopations are not rare in European traditions.

 

[Lt. Bob]

Yeah I play that way too, mainly because I am too lazy to bother with following any changes

 

[Lt. Bob]

This is also found in the traditional dance of some African tribes, which can be quite stylized.

There are ballets that could be described this way. It could also be said of some traditional greek dances and those of eastern Europe, among others.
And yet, complicated syncopations are not rare in European traditions.

These are good points.

I think there is at least a possibility that people who think black players have an inherent 'soulfulness' haven't actually played in bands with that many of them.
Maybe I'm wrong but that's how it seems to me.

Back in Baton Rouge I interacted with more black musicians than white sometimes.

Probably 3/4s of my piano customers were small black churches and they would frequently invite me to come play sax at their churches. I'd be the only white guy within miles!
Some of them were soulful ..... some of them sucked as bad as any white guy.

From my perspective I truly didn't see a lot of difference in the percentages of grooving black players vs. lame black players as opposed to the same judgement of white players.
That's just me maybe but I played with a LOT of black players ........ as mshilarous said ...... I think the biggest factor is the music they listened to that was their primary influence.
White players that grew up listening to the same stuff groove just as well IMO.

 

[mshilarious]

This is also found in the traditional dance of some African tribes, which can be quite stylized.

That's the point, *everything* is found in African dances, the same is not true of European dance *until* it was influnced by African dance.

There are ballets that could be described this way.

Ballet is not a folk dance. Anyway, I have seen lots of ballet, and until the 20th century you really don't get that type of movement. The most "shocking" thing to ever occur in ballet was Nijinsky's choreography for Rite of Spring, and if you watch a modern reproduction of the original show, it looks . . . quite a bit less than scandalous, and waaaaay less dramatic and dynamic than many types of African traditional dance.

Here you go--remember this is being performed by modern dancers who would have studied modern and African dance, and let's just say I hope they didn't intend for this to be funky:

 

[mshilarious]

Well I have experienced a black drummer who could groove on anything, but did not comprehend the Strokes at all I don't think it's as simple as a groove, and obviously players of all races, creeds, kinds, and religions are perfectly capable of sucking real bad

 

[chrisghost]

Jazz is an umbrella term that encompasses many different musical styles. Not all of them have their roots in Africa.

Scott Joplin was black, but the ragtime jazz he played had far more European influence than African. Django Reinhart was European and his music came out of the culture he grew up in. The music of Duke Ellington owes as much to other influences as it does his African roots.

The playing of that famous racist Benny Goodman drew heavily from the same well that klezmer music came out of.

Everywhere there have been people there have been drums and rhythms. Some of them quite lively and complex and quite removed from African influence.

We owe Africa, and Americans from Africa, an enormous debt for their part in the creation of this music, but they don't, and have never, owned it.

Yes they did. They owned it even when they didn't want it. The blues is a good example, whites thought it beneath them, blacks thought it was the devil's music. People like Son House felt great remorse for playing the Blues, he became a preacher, but came back to Blues years later.

We allready said that Jazz is a hybrid musical form, but highly American more than anything. The great inovators however were all colored: Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy & Bird, Miles Davis. Benny Goodman was very popular, but didn't change the course of music.

Same goes for soul and funk. Ray Charles, James Brown, Funk Brothers (Motown house band), Sly & the Family Stone.

 

[Milnoque]

Benny Goodman was very popular, but didn't change the course of music.

Oh yes he did. So did alot of other white guys.

 

[Lt. Bob]

Oh yes he did. So did alot of other white guys.

He absolutely did .....

 

[chrisghost]

He absolutely did .....

Do you guys truely feel his contribution was in the leugua of Louis Armstrong changing everything about sincopation in music? Or Charlie Parker reorganising the use of scales? Our Miles Davis who was involved in four major changes in Jazz, of which three he did almost single handedly?

If you do, I might have to shut up and look into it.

But I thought (?) a lot of people were involved in the evolution of swing and Benny was one of the big names in it. He made a mark of course, but, you know... a while back I heard someone say Madonna was influential, and she is, but she's not crucial in the development of music... in my opinion.

 

[Milnoque]

The swing era was what brought jazz to respectability. Benny Goodman ushered it in and was it's most important forefather. If he had done nothing else he would belong squarely in the group of luminaries you cited. But he was also the man who crossed the color barrier and brought many black players to the attention of the wider audience they would need to become the influences they became. It could be argued that we got to hear Miles and Bird because Benny did this. He was also a very important originator of bebop, and later of jazz/classical fusion.

You don't need to shut up but you owe it to yourself to go and visit his legacy. He definitely deserves to be remembered as one of the greats. Right alongside Louis, Miles and Bird.

 

[Lt. Bob]

The swing era was what brought jazz to respectability. Benny Goodman ushered it in and was it's most important forefather. If he had done nothing else he would belong squarely in the group of luminaries you cited. But he was also the man who crossed the color barrier and brought many black players to the attention of the wider audience they would need to become the influences they became. It could be argued that we got to hear Miles and Bird because Benny did this. He was also a very important originator of bebop, and later of jazz/classical fusion.

You don't need to shut up but you owe it to yourself to go and visit his legacy. He definitely deserves to be remembered as one of the greats. Right alongside Louis, Miles and Bird.

and when he came out .... his swing was the stuff parents tried to keep their kids from listening to. They'd *gasp* dance to it!

 

[mshilarious]

I'm not a big fan of swing but it's sad how dead the clarinet is as a jazz instrument. My daughter is going to switch to baritone sax (yeah!) because next year when she's in HS there is no clarinet in the jazz band

 

[grimtraveller]

but didn't change the course of music.

It's very difficult to really quantify "changing the course of music". Many innovators who are ascribed to having done so were influenced by obscure people that were never credited in a major way, some we don't even know.
In saying that, you'd have to be God with God's backward looking perspective to really be able to make that statement. I am not God but I will say this ~ from the back end of the 19th century, there have been many many individuals and groupings that form a staging post along the way of popular music changing. It becomes harder to say that anyone "changed the course of music" per se because we have so many genres and the changes that a Dizzy Gillespie might have wrought brought about a relatively small change overall across the entire scope of all recorded and performed music.

Or Miles Davis who was involved in four major changes in Jazz, of which three he did almost single handedly?

I really hope you don't include jazz rock in that list of 4 {or 3} because that's one of my bugbears in life. I have fights with people on that one !

I don't know. It always seems to me that colored people are able to tap into something much more primal than white people are able to. Where you really feel the rhythms in your guts.

See, I just do not buy that. For one thing, it assumes that that which is primal is somehow superior. On the other hand, it seems like a reaction to the old time white American and European notion that that which is primal is inferior.

What the greatest bass guitar innovators, Larry Graham and James Jamerson, invented I don't believe a white person could have ever come up with that.

James Jamerson didn't particularly "invent" anything. Larry Graham's technique was born of the necesity of putting piano strings on his bass guitar. An important thing to take on board about bass guitar in the 60s is that most of the initial bass innovators were not first and foremost bass guitarists. The bass only came into being around 1952 and was seen for a long time as a stupid novelty {jazz bass players still felt that way even into the 70s when they were forced to take up the electric bass}. Those that first took it up were guitarists, pianists, mandolinists, organists and double bass players. And over in England, the bassists that were appearing {McCartney, Bruce, Entwistle etc} were the same. The bass guitar was the instrument that possibly travelled the greatest spectrum in that decade, because it was so new, few people knew what to do with it. And as you go through each year starting from 1960, you see the bass exerting more control in songs. And lots of players were part of that development. Black ones, white ones, Brits, Americans, even Carol Kay {who played on sessions for Motown, that many thought were James Jamerson}. It's one of the great unwritten stories of rock history, the development of the bass guitar.

If you look at the contributions of white people to music the last century it's often very rigid music like New Wave or House, or tame versions of styles developed by the black community.

Hmmm, there's a smattering of truth in there. But the versions of the styles originally developed by black artists were hardly tame. A case in point is the way white English boys with a love of R&B, rock'n'roll and blues, in trying to copy those forms of music ended up idiosyncratically coming up with something that was far more powerful, inventive, eclectic, accessible and far reaching than the original influencing music. As Pete Townshend put it "R&B gave us white boys a new way to write our own music".

All the great and important innovations the Beatles made are in fact mostly borrowed from black music (in an exiting new mix ofcourse).

Not true.
Some of them were, definitely, especially in 1963 when they were covering Motown and black girl group and Isley brothers' songs that few people in England had heard of and turning the populace onto these artists. But apart from the quest for more bass in their records up to '65 {inspired by the bass content of, in the main, black American records} and the insane middle 8 of "I call your name" {a piece of hugely inventive ska that was years ahead of it's time} in '64, the Beatles were in the main musical and social chameleons that were influenced by most of the moves of the 60s, black and white, Eastern and Western, political and artistic and most of this found it's way into their music. They're actually not a great example of black influence as they were the one 60s Brit group that didn't overtly champion the blues path. Partial influence is there {Berry, Richard, Fats, Larry Williams, for example}, but they were much more diverse than even the soft lot like the Dave Clark 5 which is partly why certain people joke about them being girly pop.

 

[gecko zzed]

I don't know. It always seems to me that colored people are able to tap into something much more primal than white people are able to. Where you really feel the rhythems in your guts.

See, I just do not buy that. For one thing, it assumes that that which is primal is somehow superior. On the other hand, it seems like a reaction to the old time white American and European notion that that which is primal is inferior.

I don't buy that either. I can see how you can draw that conclusion if you compare the rigidity of, say, early Cliff Richard, to the flexibility of early afro-american music. But I think it is risky to limit your field of comparison. I agree that white music is, in general, more structured, but not exclusively so. For example, take Bartok, Debussy or Ravel if you are seeking organic and primal.