Long-time Jazz listener. I love the old Blue Note (and similar-era) albums but my need to discover and listen to those has peaked. Same with 70’s fusion. Always searching and manage to find something, even post-80’s. But I’ll bet if I stratified my Jazz collection by decade the bulk of it would be from the 50’s to the 70’s. It’s easier to identify the things that have stood the test of time, as hindsight is 20/20. Some of the guys mentioned above - Scofield, Corea and Coltrane - have all done some things that are “out there” that would qualify as the dreaded “modern jazz.” The younger guys that play with Lloyd - and one day McBride & Redman (and Tom Harrell) - they will carry the torch and will be the ones to listen too. The point about sounding like classical players who switched to Jazz - applies to a lot of ECM stuff. Just some random thoughts I guess.
Is Modern Jazz an Oxymoron?
I am a huge jazz fan and 90% of my listening time is listening to instrumental jazz artists from the classic jazz era of 1950's to 1970's. Excluding jazz singers and a few more recent jazz artist who play classic jazz style I can't stand modern jazz.
My question to jazz fans is if it is my limitation or is this a common thing amongst classic jazz fans? Or did you finally come around and learned to appreciate modern jazz? If so which artists?
My question to jazz fans is if it is my limitation or is this a common thing amongst classic jazz fans? Or did you finally come around and learned to appreciate modern jazz? If so which artists?
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It's like any other age and genre. There's some great music out there and a lot of crap. Check out this clip of Jeff "Tain" Watts' group playing very modern composition in 2011. It's a very difficult piece of music with changing tempos in every section, but these guys make it sound very listenable, even to someone who thinks the 50's-60's were jazz's high point. You need to look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPpciCh4i0Q |
It is hard to put jazz into neat categories. The jazz I like has melody or rhythm or something that I can recognize, maybe described as a song. The musicians can depart from the melody or rhythm and become discordant or whatever, but remain connected to the song or composition or whatever they are playing. Jazz musicians today increasingly seem to want to be less connected to a song. They don’t seem to want any structure. They want to be able to just blow and skronk and maybe connect with one another a couple of times in a piece of music. There is no rhythm section that keeps the group anchored. Drums are now a lead instrument and the drummer is back there bashing away with no connection to what anyone else is doing. That’s the way it sounds to me anyway. I’m not a musician. That said, I do find quite a bit of jazz that does have structure, sounds nice and has musicians playing together. It’s not as common as during the classic Blue Note years, but there’s still a lot of jazz musicians doing this. That leads me to a question I’ve long wondered about. Can anyone explain to me why jazz musicians like to blow and skronk and bash so much? Is that hard to do? It seems to me that improvising in some kind of structure would require greater artistry than everyone just making noises on their instruments. Does it? |
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