Will West Coast Jazz Get Some Respect?
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On a separate note, I always saw Chet baker and Gerry mulligan as "real" musicians but was taught early on that Brubeck was "staid" and boring. After judging it myself I guess you could say his soloing was a little underwhelming but he was incredibly creative in a way that a lot of the "serious" musicians weren't. Jazz people can be such losers sometimes
I mean, it is true that a lot of his solos get busier and bangier until he's hammering out polyrhythms at the end. I just take it as part of the ride when listening to Brubeck.
But I really don't want to listen to other jazz artists emulate that, especially knowing how little chance there is that they'll have the same creativity and sense of rhythm that Brubeck had. (Edit: based on the experience of hearing the banging without the creativity/rhythm-- it's not fun.)
But also compared to other prominent pianists of the time like Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, etc
Big band is hard to learn from. The large ensembles like Basie's and Duke's have persisted in popularity, but classic "big band" are very much of their time.
The bebop guys will always occupy the position in jazz that Bach occupies in "classical". They're foundational musicians in a continuous tradition and one learns a lot about the music by studying them.
By "canon" do you mean respected musicians? Or do you mean that PLUS players whose work is considered essential to learning how to play the music? The answers will be different. Keith Jarrett is great and esteemed but unless you want to sound like Keith Jarrett, he's not essential to study.
Finding repertoire is a perennial challenge. Adding new material takes more effort than just a quick agreement on the bandstand and flipping through the fake books. A lot of material is unpublished, out of print, surreptitiously Xeroxed, etc. But there's a lot of exciting material spanning an entire century.
And the west coast is well represented.
Of course big-band is unique in that it involves improv soloing but is much more about the arrangements, especially the newer stuff. It's like playing chamber music in that way, but of course people still love chamber music. It's never hard to fill an empty seat in our band.
Come to the Midwest.
Rock used to be this way too. It’s hard to believe now, but there was a real wall between punk and metal in the mid 1980s.
In punk circles grudging respect was given to Motörhead and a few thrash acts but everyone else was seen as hair-obsessed posers or dinosaurs. Neither camp would admit to liking anything “mainstream.”
20 years later Chris Cornell is covering Billie Jean (https://youtu.be/R0uWF-37DAM?si=V3Pqtq-3GDHqxJBd) and all kinds of unusual collaborations were kicking off. It was frankly refreshing.
https://genius.com/Ripping-corpse-rift-of-hate-lyrics
I think that is what the lyrics here are referring to.
This has never occurred to me before, but I don't think ive ever met a jazz lover I liked.
This surprises me. Ill think about this a bit, perhaps a cognitive psychological rabbit hole is in order.
It can be a sub-type of zealot who self-installs opinions and parades them like secret knowledge or a grand epiphany. I know a guy whose entire jazz discourse is like this. It's remarkably similar to astrological codswallop or political zealotry.
We can dig the music and make the world a better place without being an ass about it.
Any opinion of actual jazz musicians formed on the basis of this film can be safely disregarded ab initio. Music snobs exist, but that movie is full of strawmen. A real shame as it was otherwise very well-executed but stuff like the finger-bleeding scene ripped straight from a Bryan Adams song does it no favors.
That included decades of Japanese jazz musicians, conservatory-trained session wizards without a hard-luck backstory like Michael Brecker, etc.
As much as modern music sharing/streaming has its downsides, the best thing it ever did was make everything discoverable and make the opinions of gatekeeping assholes irrelevant.
You don't need respect. Respect doesn't even pay the bills. You just need listeners and a way to sell to them.
I think Guaraldi is almost like a jazz version of Erik Satie, who’s been discussed here a few times. His music seems very simple, almost simplistic, but his taste and feel are superb. It’s just really good and easy to listen to, which unfortunately means it gets dismissed as “easy listening”.
Yes, I agree with you, it shouldn't and doesn't need to be.
But some things like music be it Jazz or something else isn't always just matter of listening but way of self establishment, way of life living or pursuing life, way how they seeing themselves and communicate themselves to others. I'm not in to this or studying this or anything else, but it's known behaviour model and you find studies if you like to read about it more.
Right, some Jazz aficionados tend to be like hipsters. Who despise and keep unorthodox anything but their likes would grok. A way of self establishment and having reason to keep themselves different. At least a bit better than others. I'm not claiming everybody are, but I certainly have met few of those quick to classify someone things they like.
I find my self like more West Coast Jazz bands and artists performances older I get. And if I'm not completely wrong it might be a more common trend their share has increased over the past ten or so years playing in radio stations too at least where I live.
I don’t think the alternative is “difficult” for its own sake. Rather, those who would use the term as a pejorative are likely seeking new experiences and viewpoints in their music and get bored by same old diatonic melodies over plain inoffensive grooves. Novelty is a source of dopamine for some.
A lot of jazz music is difficult to the untrained ear, and I have distinct memories of hearing albums that I now feel are too conservative but in my youth thought they were too chaotic. I now understand that it was never difficult from the performer’s perspective - just high level musicians playing the music they hear. I wish everyone could hear jazz just once through the ears of a jazz musician.
This might sound self centered, which is a frequent stereotype leveled against jazz musicians, but on the other hand, why bother? There are other things we could be doing with our time. And I don't think that playing "difficult" music is incompatible with delivering a high quality performance, which is always my mission.
The accusation usually levelled at cutting-edge jazz (fairly or unfairly) is that it’s so niche that it is difficult to get; that it’s left behind any pretence at being popular music. Many listeners would even go further and sneer “they’re just playing notes at random!” or “you’re just pretending to like it!”
I do wonder whether good-sounding, easy-to-get music is purely a matter of fashion (being just different enough to be interesting, but conventional enough to be accessible), or if to some degree there’s another axis of skill/difficulty in great pop music, of making it catchy and universal.
To me that's OK. When jazz ceased to be responsible for forming the backbone of popular music, it triggered a more experimental period, including some ventures that were pretty far out, such as free jazz and free improv. Jazz also experienced a shift in focus -- not uncontroversially -- by becoming an object of academic study.
I think we're in a period right now when bands are seeking more audience friendly material. Now, the big-band I play in is in some sense "enthusiast" music. We have a small but loyal audience of people who happen to like this kind of stuff.
But in another of my bands, two of the players are actively composing new material, and it's arguably listen-able by any standards. Maybe we're in a third era, where we're free from responsibility for making popular music, but also free from responsibility for establishing the stature of jazz as a "serious" art form, and can return to the business of pleasing ourselves and our audiences.
All the local high schools in the Seattle area had/have serious jazz programs that sent students to The Essentially Ellington competition/festival - the one the movie Chops is about.
Seattle probably has the most overall bands sent of any city in the country. I guess we sent 4 this year - https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/4-seattle-a...
Fun fact, the song "Buffalo Soldier" was directly inspired by The Banana Splits theme song.
Note that this isn't my personal take. I love Art Pepper. I can tolerate some Brubeck. But I admit there was plenty of slop in the record stores, too.
Meanwhile:
> The nonet recorded 12 tracks for Capitol during three sessions over nearly a year and a half. [Miles] Davis, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, and Bill Barber were the only musicians who played on all three sessions […]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_of_the_Cool#Recording
Mulligan also has multiple writing credits.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/jazz-has-a-storied-past-in-seat...
Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Kenny G all honed skills on the West coast.