Re: Good music is alive and well in America

Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2003 16:11:49 -0400
Newsgroups: rec.audio.pro
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email-address-deleted (R Krizman) wrote:
><< email-address-deleted (R Krizman) wrote:
>
>>I just got back from the Crescent City and the first weekend of JazzFest, and
>I
>>must say that there is yet hope for us all.
>
>Those were all great musicians. Weird though, I kept looking for a
>jazz musician in the bunch, and I couldn't find one! But that's
>another problem altogether.
[...]
>JazzFest is short for Jazz and Heritage Festival. It's difficult to draw hard
>lines. When you're dancing back from the cemetary and the horns are scatting
>over some funky second-line rhythm is that jazz? It is in my book.
I've never heard that phrase "dancing back from the cemetery", but I
kind of like it -- what does it mean?
It's ok...I'm over it now. [The following is not aimed at you, Rick.
I'm sure the festival was great, and that you dug the truly diggable.]
Every kind of eclecticism under the sun has taken over the jazz
category. But there's a cost. The best jazz pianist I knew (until
his death last September) lived in a refrigerator a lot of the time.
The best saxophonist we knew was homeless most of the time until he
died. All the musicians knew these cats and looked up to them. So
why didn't anyone invite these cats to play at a Jazz Festival? Oh
wait, there's a band who jams on one-chord vamp songs with world beat,
mixes it with Mahler, and calls that Jazz. Oh, WELL.
I'm not against eclecticism, but I am against mere eclecticism. The
great thing about jazz, real jazz, is that it achieved a level of
sophistication (think Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker,
John Coltrane here) that has been unequalled since. Somehow people
got the idea that when they put lots of different things together in
the same work, they were brilliant. Let them experiment, but until
they can actually synthesize something that has the slightest harmonic
and melodic sophistication, then they haven't achieved anything of
lasting importance.
So when the really good jazz musicians die homeless because nobody
invites them to jazz festivals, I get upset.
[...]
>Plus, we can only be thankful that there was no "soft jazz" (there's an
>oxymoron fer ya) audible anywhere on the Gulf Coast.
I'm hip to that.