Comment by jiberwarrior | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiberwarrior | Hacker News Reader

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> and there have not been any groundbreaking new jazz artists in the last 30 years.

I strongly disagree with this statement, the music is out there if you were to look.

Jazz has moved past the standard 'swing and ballad' forms that were popular throughout the late 20th century, and most listeners can't shake the roots of the genre from what defines the modern equivalent; It would be akin to die-hard old school rap fans denying that rap in it's current state should even be considered rap.

>That is what makes singing and rapping unique, you are able to tell a story combined with music.

What makes jazz (particularly the instrumental kind) unique is being able to invoke emotions and tell a story without being bound to some language barrier, an abstraction that transcends spoken word, that speaks to the pattern matching automata of the language part of our brains, regardless of race, language, or background.

> Jazz has moved past the standard 'swing and ballad' forms that were popular throughout the late 20th century

I mean, that's not really saying much. Jazz moved past the standard stuff with Ornette Coleman, Coltrane etc in the late 50s and early 60s. Miles Davis' Bitches Brew led to the whole jazz fusion thing a bit later.

I somewhat agree with the GP about no groundbreaking new jazz artists. There are many great musicians great at their instruments today, for sure. But I just don't hear anything radically new happening. Although I do admit that it may be due to my own biases.

If you don't look for the radically new, you won't find it, when competing with a larger volume of tracks being released that aren't radically new.

Here is just one example out of the hundreds: https://stevelehman.bandcamp.com/track/bamba

Stylistic change isn't meant to be groundbreaking anyway, I believe it is from the gradual stretching of boundaries over time that leads styles to be unrecognizable from their origins that inspires new styles to be developed.

Thanks for sharing. I'm familiar with his records with Vijay Iyer. They're amazing!

Isn’t the ability to invoke emotions without being bound to a language something that all instrumental musics have?

You are right, I over-specialized my definition I suppose, but I still stand by my point of this differentiation between instrumental music and lyrical music.

With Instrumental music, the challenge becomes conveying ideas over a non-verbal medium, a challenge which is non-existent in music with heavy lyrical emphasis.

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