I am not a jazzer. No way. Expose me to pure jazz, and I will run a mile. It just doesn’t work for me, and I have tried (as have friends). It really came home to me when I went to see Bill Bruford some years ago. There I was looking forward to this alumnus of three of my favourite bands but, No! This wasn’t right at all. It was all clarinets and marimbas.
Yet, when the music in my comfort zone gets exposed to jazz, that’s when it really gets exciting. Joni when she gets Jaco. Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major. My favourite folk dance thrives when Andy Cutting’s melodeon, the hurdy gurdy and the bagpipes, get cut with multiple saxes and it swings. Above all, at the recent live reincarnations of King Crimson, what has got me on the edge of my seat with delight, what has enthralled me and kept me guessing, has been the syncopations, the flights of fancy, the vaulting instrumentals setting off at tangents. I have to concede; it’s the jazz which makes it.
Given the recent expose from the Daily Mail that a love of jazz renders suspect the credibility of Scottish judges, and in these pages @Mike_H’s declaration that ‘It’s Jazz and Therefore of Limited Appeal Here’, it’s time to stand up even for those genres which hold no personal appeal. They are still a force for good.
Do other Afterworders have genres that leave them cold, yet from a distance bring light and beauty to the styles they love? I could imagine rap or prog being contenders.
In the meantime, here’s the aforementioned Ravel. Bridgewater Hall have programmed it not once but twice this season, starting next Thursday. I shall see it both times and I will be having to sit on my hands at the end of the first movement. (Scroll to the end and you too will ask yourself how you’re supposed not to clap at the end of this.) But it’s not jazz. Oh no. You see, I don’t like jazz.
So you basically want jazz for people who don’t like jazz.
Have you ever tried Kenny G?
😀
Wouldn’t that be jazz for people who don’t like music?
You’ll have tried the Pentangle, then?
You know, I have several Pentangle albums, love Bert and John’s solo stuff, have seen Danny in countless collaborations, but that is one where it doesn’t work for me. It should, but doesn’t.
Not a huge fan of rap and Grime is just confusing, but I suspect that might be an age thing. Drum & Bass doesn’t tickle my fancy either. But you know .. each to their own. Like more accessible forms of jazz (though not, I might add, Kenny G). Bitches Brew and some of Coltrane’s stuff twists my melon .. but it’s all good.
Genres that leave me cold, yet from a distance bring light and beauty to the styles I love?
A difficult question to answer. Metal is probably the answer for me.
Normally I give it a wide berth. All the hair, leather, studs and posturing leaves me cold.
However when performed in German by very serious chaps in suits, I am totally on board.
Rammstein do cracking videos too.
Yes, Metal is a genre I have never been fond of, right from the early days of Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Black Sabbath it failed to appeal. Nothing since like Maiden or AC/DC has changed my opinion.
But the noisier, wilder end of Prog, a good chunk of Frank Zappa’s stuff and the weird noisy stuff from artists such as John Zorn just could not exist without Metal having gone before. Even some jazz fusion like Snarky Puppy and Jaga Jazzist has roots in Metal, I think.
(Electric Masada + Mike Patton – Idalah Abal)
Bought a Part 1 of a magazine called History of Heavy Metal recently (RRP £9.99; 50p remaindered in W.H. Smith) just so I’d know exactly what to avoid. Blue Cheer and Vanilla Fudge apparently.
Don’t know if it’s a genre, but Classic Rawwwwkkkk’s recent Top 100 albums of the 1970s list was truly awful, and I’ll be avoiding 97% of them.
I’d say any of Zappa’s early LPs is a good route into jazz, classical music, musique concrete … they all have a bit of everything really.
If you can stomach Lumpy Gravy, you can stomach Albert Ayler.
Well of course Rammstein are genius level and the best album of the year is theirs – a forec of nature live too
If the premise here is that jazz is/was responsible for prog, then I must object most strenuously.
Agree. Surely classical music has a bigger shout in terms of being the progenitor of prog?
No we don’t agree, from being a slur on jazz, we now have a slur on classical. 😊
Classical is the progenitor of metal innit eh Wagner?
Who are you calling a Wagner?
Definitely not the intended premise, any more than I think jazz is responsible for Ravel, but I do think it can be thanked for doing great things to all these other genres.
Yeah well jazz-rock can be good. Classical-rock is always an abomination. Jazz-classical? … hmm …
Jazz-classical? Jaques Loussier – oh yes,
This guy is rather nifty on the old 88s too.
(Não me toques – Zequinha Abreu)
Chamber jazz is perhaps the term, and can be delightful. (Can, it’s true, be dull as well.)
Gwilym Simcock has form here.
(Minds me a bit of Keith Emerson, mind. (What you say, @mousey ?)
The Mare Nostrum trio is often categorised as chamber jazz. Three superb musicians who play music to which I can blissfully drift away to. In a world which is full of dangerous , powerful fools, that is something we all need.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RLwZS5_gZ0
Yeah that’s rather good and definitely Emerson-esque, his sort of groove, the strong independent left hand and the harmonic language. Must investigate further.
Opera for me. When I hear it in movies/tv shows I like it and I usually think I should give it another shot. Listening at home to a whole thing? No. I just get a headache.
the above is classed as jazz but I just think it is genuinely beautiful music
Lovely stuff – hints at the interpretative guitar style Walter Becker brought to Steely Dan.
Another thumbs up for Johnny and Stan . Exquisite.
!0 years later, Stan ability to sensitively interact with a great gitarist would make him a world star.
yep Stan the Man…..love his stuff
Zappa’s attitude to jazz was always that he hated the music but loved the musicians’ ability to improvise on non-jazz (ie his) compositions. See also Steely Dan.
I struggle with ‘pure Jazz’ also, but agree with the OP I like it when Jazz seeps into other genres and gets corrupted and suddenly the things I do like about Jazz – the odd rhythms, the lush chord progressions, the Bass etc come to the fore in different ways.
I’m a sucker for Canterbury scene stuff and associated acts like Henry Cow which seem to have an uneasy relationship with Jazz – and put a really weird spin on it. This is a good example – it’s not really Jazz technically, it’s not really Prog, I don’t really know what it is – and it doesn’t matter, I just like it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0km6tAEmLVw
and then of course there is The Necks, again I don’t know if they technically count as Jazz (HMV do file their CDs under Jazz) – there aren’t really any solos, they just home in on a thing and explore it for as long as they see fit which could be 15mins, could be an hour but boy this stuff is addictive.
Yes, I’m listening to The Soft Machine’s debut now.
I think the trick with jazz, and possibly The Soft Machine as well, is not to have too much of it.
Any of those Blue Note albums from the 50s and 60s with the wonderful covers would be a short, sharp, concise entry into the subject. They’re £4 or £5 in Fopp. Just pick the one with the best cover.
I’ve got about 40, I don’t feel a desperate need to buy too many more.
The two positive things jazz has brought to modern popular music are musicianship and willingness to extemporise. Classical music certainly has the musicianship, but the training in classical is almost all about accurately following a score. In jazz, the tune you’re playing is just the starting and ending point of the performance.
A possibly negative aspect is that it’s given the green light to both vocalists and instrumentalists to show off their technique to the detriment of what they are supposed to be performing.
Bands that “jam” are therefore more akin to jazz, whereas metal and prog bands tend to perform compositions the same every time with little or no variation. The instrumental solos are learned and played by rote.
You don’t actually hear much use of complex time signatures in jazz. Mostly the rhythm is kept fairly simple because that way it’s easier for the soloists to improvise.
Agree up to a point Mike but (say) Cream, Santana or The Allman Bros do very long extended solo workouts without a trace of jazz – they are just long solos. There’s no extended harmonic vocabulary on display, beyond the odd chromatic run in the midst of a mass of pentatonic widdle. Nothing wrong with that but it ain’t jazz.
Have to agree re: Cream.
Considering that both Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce played jazz in other musical ventures, there is a distinct absence of swing in Cream’s output.
Compare the JHE. Manic Depression for example. Much looser, less “white” – and that’s Mitch I’m talking about.
There’s something to be said for orchestral music essentially training people to be machinists. Jazz, pop and rock encourage all musicians to think of themselves as geniuses. Worse still, folk and rock encourages all songwriters to think of themselves as poets.
Behave….
The irony in the case of folk: to want to be a genius songwriter is about as unfolksy as you can get. Fake not folk.
I can dig traditional, for what it is, but not ‘folk’.
“Folk” these days is absolutely anything that involves an accoustic guitar…. an instrument that entered folk music in the 1940s. It’s invented tradition, like ploughman’s lunch and Werther’s originals.
When asked what folk music is, Martin Simpson replied “Music that accompanies a raffle”.
Arf, and the first prize is always a ticket for next week, the second prize 2 tickets for next week…..
I agree with most of the above. What I’d add is that jazz is a much more advanced and complex vocabulary than folk or pop or rock both in soloing and in chord progressions – for better or worse. Jazz players add extra notes (and also bend them out of shape by sharpening or flattening them) on top of yer basic major and minor chords, and have a whole set of concepts for replacing chords with outer ones too in order to create new sounding musical textures which are way beyond the standard three chord trick. So dropping a bit of it into a folk song adds a load of spice which wouldn’t otherwise be there. Too much of it and you have pure jazz which some can’t take (though I’m fine with it…). The perfect example of this is Steely Dan of course but here’s an RT performance laced with jazzy passing chords and a solo which uses be bop and cool jazz devices to sound somewhere way beyond a standard minor key folk song. You could of course strip out all that frippery and do is as a straight 4 chord ballad and it would still work because it’s a good song.
To get away from pop nowadays — and there are many good reasons to do that — I turn to those kinds of music that have the least influence on pop, like modern classical and avant garde composition, flamenco and gypsy, east European traditional etc. Stuff you can turn to for some relief.
Jazz hardliner here, meaning no matter how abstract it gets, I can still appreciate it (this also applies to all genres the line-drawers care to manufacture. I just call it music). It was helpful being introduced to black improvisation/free jazz in the early 70s and realising that Sanders/Shepp/Ayler/Coleman etc. were young radical musicians already in the process of shredding the rulebook of the earlier forms of jazz, and usually living in Europe to avoid their racist home country. My taste at the time was King Crimson, VDGG, Zappa, ELP. My dad had grown up with Ellington, say, 30 years earlier, and danced to his stuff. Now, there was no rhythm or melody (or often not) but wait! Jarrett was jazz too, as was ECM as was Miles, and none of these was shrieky. Still listen to everything I’ve ever enjoyed.
Nowadays, everything imaginable is readily available, you can choose and disregard as required, from the long history of music. The term jazz has long been shorthand for openness to anything (i.e. not pop/rock, not country/folk/blues, not classical: the record shop divisions). Even the Kenny G abominations of 70s cocktail jazz, well no-one is forced to listen to it, right?
Jazz, a force for good? Absolutely is, as is music in general.
Nice post, I concur that Jazz is definitely a cause for good.
As a term I guess it can have limitations, being so broad as to almost be meaningless.
I think it’s telling that Miles didn’t like the term & a revered outfit such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago preferred the handle GBM (Great Black Music) & others have referred to it as African American Classical Music.
What really matters when all is said & done is the willingness of its exponents ( of whatever colour) to stretch things & improvise, to ‘boldly go’ so to speak.
That notion is still very much alive & so it remains vibrant & vital.
“Nice”.
What an appropriate jazz word!
😉