- Jazz didn't begin to die on Kind of Blue. That was a popular, well selling jazz record. Rather than setting Jazz on a path to irrelevance, Kind of Blue reinvigorated the genre and inspired an abundance of accessible and innovative material in the years following its release.
- Alice Coltrane is not the "Yoko Ono" of Jazz. She made a lot of good records. And Yoko Ono isn't bad for that matter. I like her solo music better than John's.
- Many people besides music critics and academics enjoy Coltrane's late period. Some of us like abrasive, chaotic music.
Yeah he lost me with that comment. Journey in Satchidananda is my favorite record, period. It was one of many records that changed my life as a young teenager, and of all of those albums it’s still the one that surprises me most every time I listen to it 18 years later.
Yes, he sure doesn't know a dn thing about jazz...
Alice and Joe Henderson were doing great stuff in the 70's together too.
Beyond the chaos of the late 60's era in jazz, there are a lot of new directions jazz has taken since then. Jazz doesn't stand still, and I think that is core to it's nature. If this guy was looking to continue second wave bop for all eternity, he should just throw on some Branford/Wynton Marsalis and pretend like the 60's never happened.
I think the thing you could say about Coltrane was the he was the last musician who could change the shape of the whole genre, the way Armstrong and Parker did. After Coltrane it was fractured, and it was Coltrane who did the fracturing.
That's crazy. People weren't exclusively playing bebop before Trane and he certainly wasn't the only person who influenced the growth of free and free-ish jazz. Likely not even the most influential.
We also wouldn't expect any genre to stay in stasis forever. Fracturing isn't even a bad thing.
> We also wouldn't expect any genre to stay in stasis forever. Fracturing isn't even a bad thing.
This is a good point. Country music is the most popular radio format in the country. Yet Carrie Underwood doesn't sound much like Loretta Lynn and one could easily like one but not the other. Yet the "real country is dead" narrative gets little airing compared to the way the analogous complaint about jazz does.
If this author wants to say "free jazz is not to my taste" or even "free jazz is too dissonant," you know, he's well within his rights to say so. But "John Coltrane singlehandedly killed jazz with A Love Supreme" seems like a thesis impossible to justify.
Definitely agree about the Alice Coltrane part. She's great. Now I'm not into Yoko's material but one could argue that her work has artistic merit other than just musical ones...
My obligatory Coltrane comment. I actually didn't hear any Coltrane or even jazz at least a decade into seriously learning/practicing music. My first introduction to legato-based guitar playing was Allan Holdsworth, who used to play these beautiful monstrous never-ending buttery lines with luscious and unusual chords in harmony. I spent a while imitating that style of playing. Holdsworth had put some really great instructional material and in one interview he mentions how he never really wanted to play the guitar, but he couldn't really afford a saxophone to play like Coltrane.
It's kinda funny because Coltrane and Holdsworth are possibly at the opposite end of a spectrum when it comes to the way they approach harmony and rhythm, and while they play completely different instruments(one being a sax and the other being an electric guitar) their melodic lines through heavy legato use might as well be played by the same person.
I think I'll go listen to 'A Love Supreme' now, followed by Holdsworth's 'Secrets'.
I think the most interesting aspects of this piece aren't about Coltrane, or even about jazz. It's an interesting essay on modernism and it's troubled relationship with it's audience.
Whilst it's beyond question that the emperor sometimes is without clothes, everyone seems to disagree on when precisely he disrobed.
Sometimes music is only "difficult" until something clicks with you. (But some music seems eternally out of reach to me and I have been known to cry "fraud!" every now and then...)
That's a more interesting question. In general I love avant-garde art but, like, after the first time someone did it I'm not sure what's increasing about a single-color canvas.
> That's a more interesting question. In general I love avant-garde art but, like, after the first time someone did it I'm not sure what's increasing about a single-color canvas.
But it wasn't impressive the first time someone did that either. It was more about the process than the piece itself and that's the very line of thought that "killed" painting and art in general. Fortunately, artists are ditching the whole "abstract pomo" thing and coming back to simple and direct ways of expression.
It's not "impressive," but subverting audience expectations can be interesting. But the fiftieth guy "subverting" expectations in exactly the same way has kind of missed the boat.
The fact that this 55-year-old recording is the year’s most significant jazz release
Is it the year's most significant jazz release this year though?
Kamasi Washington charted in the main Billboard 200, and thanks to the strength of Heaven and Earth, Washington's year old Harmony of Difference is climbing back up the ranks as well. He's selling out ~3k size venues across the country on the strength of that album, too, playing to young and old fans alike.
And even if it were the most important thing, so what? If we found a lost Beatles record in 2018 it would be one of the biggest releases of the year. That wouldn't mean that rock and pop was dead.
I think the problem in jazz music (if there is one, but let's go with it) is that it has harmonic (and rhythmical) complexity at the microscopic scale, but doesn't go for the big picture that much: the large scale structure of the composition. A lot of jazz is just theme-improv-theme type stuff. No matter what the content is, that trivial formula itself will tire the listener.
And speaking of improv, I don't care if you're a musical genius on the level of Bach, when you're ad-libbing, you're not going to come up with material that approaches that which is composed over weeks or months.
There is also only so much you can do with those "Jazz standards". Once people have heard the same song with the dominant and other chords substituted in all the common ways, and numerous alterations to the II-V-I cadences and whatnot, they heard it all. Oh goody, another rendition of Autumn Leaves ...
Jazz is basically undone by the fact that it's a form of pop music with micro-complexity at the level of individual bars and phrases heaped on it, and freedom everywhere else.
Basically Jazz composition should be approached like classical music; just with the full harmonic palette of Jazz, to make Jazz sonatas and symphonies.
Problem is, that is probably not recognizable as Jazz any more. Maybe music is only Jazz when it fits into one of the common formulas. Like if we take away most of the noodling and have much more composed notes around a much more contrived harmonic labyrinth, it won't be "it" any more.
> The fact that this 55-year-old recording is the year’s most significant jazz release tells you all you need to know about the health of jazz in 2018.
Writer has a point. As much as I like jazz, it's ossified badly as a genre. Love to see some forward motion that isn't free jazz or other noise.
How much contemporary jazz do you know? The perspective of the article seems very American to me.
Consider European jazz masters such as Tomasz Stanko [1], Enrico Rava, Marcin Wasilewski, Tord Gustavsen, Bugge Wesseltoft, Bobo Stenson, Enrico Pieranunzi, Helge Lien, John Surman, Iiro Rantala, Esbjörn Svensson, Stefano Bollani, Arve Henriksen, Myriam Alter... These represent a considerable evolution of jazz, in my opinion, that seems rarely included/considered stateside, the stature of labels like ECM and ACT notwithstanding.
Not that the US doesn't have its share of great contemporary artists; Aaron Parks, Anat Fort, Brad Mehldau and Keith Jarrett come to mind.
Oops. Yes, Rune Grammofon has a lot of great contemporary stuff. Much of it is technically not jazz, of course -- Supersilent and Biosphere, for example.
Huh? How about the huge crossover work of the last decade? Jazz is influencing hip hop left and right and there are huge crossover records like Black Radio that combine elements of both. Snarky Puppy has taken the indie genre of "giant band with 30 people" into jazz and is writing groove based music that is totally accessible to average consumers. We've got collaborations between Brad Mehldau and electronic musicians like Mark Guiliana as well as bluegrass musicians like Chris Thile. Electronic albums are including collaborations with people like Herbie Hancock. Thundercat is a big crossover hit. Jazz is more productive in this decade than most.
Jazz instrumentation is also breaking through with bands like Moon Hooch, Trombone Shorty, and Too Many Zoos.
R+R=Now is really exciting too. Its definitely my favorite jazz super group right now. I'm going to be seeing them in SF in a couple of weeks - I can't wait. I really like this tune from their album:
As a counter point, imagine if the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Tupac, Notorious BIG, etc. had an unreleased album and it was released this year. If that happened, I would guarantee that the same thing that happened with Coltrane's Album would have the same thing. Does that mean Rock, Hip-Hop, Rap is dead?
I do think jazz as a genre has an issue, but it is a much different issue. Personally, I think Jazz is way to inbred, and most Jazz artists only play to other jazz artists, and most like to keep it a niche genre.
An alive genre would be having albumns that people know; it would be scintillating with new work and its defenders not having to mine niche areas to claim relevance. Unreleased work would be cool, but it should not be dominant, because the world should have moved on.
I would agree that there is an inbreeding problem with jazz - artists doing it for artists; or worse, doing it for an aging generation. Nuances and art for arts sake lose the essential of the socio-cultural roots of jazz, which is an entertainment form that stomps its way through a dance floor or a blues howl of sorrow. Electroswing is much closer to the vibe of Dixieland than, say, the late Miles Davis.
To the extent jazz is stodgy it's because commerical interest has dried up and it's attached itself to schools instead. But what was the alternative, you wonder? Do we want to only have Kenny G?
I don't know to be honest. When I think of contemporary Jazz Artists out there, I think of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Gordon Goodwin, (to an extent) Trombone Shorty. I enjoy playing and listening to Jazz, but I personally am disappointed when I go to shows and it's obvious that the soloist is there to show off how great they are at Jazz, not to be there to entertain. Granted that could be a one off thing and not really a greater issue.
The writer is misinformed. There are plenty of musicians like Miguel Zenon, Ambrose Akinmusire, Terence Blanchard, Vijay Iyer, Wayne Shorter, etc putting out beautiful, relevant music today.
I have a deep love for Coltrane, but I'm not willing to agree that Both Directions is more significant than all the great music folks are still creating today.
I don't really get the thesis. He ruined jazz? Or he took it as far as it could go? I think Ayler is probably more atonal and challenging than A Love Supreme, for instance. And jazz lives on in both more traditional forms and in the more popular "smooth jazz."
Ultimately I can't play music so I can't really speak to the author's argument that I'm cowed by being impressed and don't know what I'm talking about. But I enjoy listening to experimental jazz. A Love Supreme was the album that made me start enjoying jazz.
But as I said, it isn't true. People kept right on experimenting with different forms. Coltrane was certainly an all-time great but I don't agree that he took experimentation to its limits and was playing noise nobody could possibly enjoy listening to, as the author seems to want me to believe.
The thing with experiments is that sometimes they fail. You can try endless variations but only a few will work. Coltrane and his generation were massively successful. And they innovated over Parker that had in turn innovated over previous generations. I'm no expert and I can understand that evolution and at the same time enjoy all that jazz. I can enjoy later music but there seems to be a somehow unbroken chain.
> He divided Beethoven’s music into an early style, imitative of Haydn and Mozart; a middle style, grand and exhortatory like the Eroica Symphony; and a late style, more private than public, that meditates on eternal questions of form.
A few things about this filter through which Beethoven is often heard:
Early on, Beethoven mastered and began to extend a particular technique of Haydn's: motivic development. There were a lot of aspects of Haydn's music which he didn't imitate, like Haydn's proclivity for witty musical jokes.
In the early pieces where Beethoven imitated Mozart, the imitations aren't anywhere near the level of sophistication of any of Mozart's music that Beethoven would have been studying. Young Beethoven in no way mastered Mozart's lyrical writing, breadth of musical allusions, contrapuntal control, formal complexity, or (especially) operatic textures and virtuosic arias. He certainly tried to emulate Mozart by attempting to write the highest quality music he could, but by any serious measure he failed to achieve this in his early period works.
At least to my ear, the beginning of Beethoven's Piano Sonata, Op. 101 is the first piece that attempts to "imitate" Mozart melodically while actually approaching the level of overall sophistication of what are considered Mozart's greatest melodies. But this is the beginning of the "late period," which is supposed to be the master composer looking inward and floating off to meditate musically by himself on Mars as a human god.
In other words, Romantic period musicophiles interpreted Beethoven as transcending all musical time and space to reflect on "eternal questions of music" at the same moment he was first able to write a single fragment of a "Mozartian" melody.
That should tell you something about the stature of Mozart.
A Love Supreme is still my favorite Coltrane album. But, I wanted to say that I can listen to Eric Dolphy (briefly mentioned here) on anything. Out to Lunch!, Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, and Mingusx5 are the places I'd start.
I think jazz is dead in the sense that it no longer attracts a broad audience, like big band music did. It happened because the most brilliant jazz musicians became elitist and avant-garde and destroyed melody.
This happened for philosophical and ideological reasons. Melody was seen as beourgois and restrictive, and destroying it a means of achieving spiritual and cultural freedom.
The problem with this idea is that human existence is by its very nature finite, and so the avant-garde is trying to live a lie.
This is not to say there are not many fine jazz musicians out there today producing interesting music. It is just that they don't write melodies that ordinary people can appreciate.
I guess whether you think jazz is dead is partly dependent on how far you're willing to stretch what you count as jazz--which, I suppose, is the problem--jazz has become so diffuse. A lot of the more recent stuff I listen to is on John Zorn's Tzadik label, which leans toward the avant-garde and 'radical jewish culture' thing. So it's already pretty tangential, jazz-wise.
But I still remember the first time I listened to a Coltrane album, I think it was Live at the Village Vanguard, and it was like a third eye opening in my head.
It's no longer very commercially popular -- there is no jazz radio station in the US that isn't smooth jazz and jazz albums represent like 1% of sales. In that sense you could call it "dead," but I'm not sure commercial success is the right metric for art music.
I think a good definition of "dead" would be that there isn't an active community of musicians that plays it anymore. (Like how a "dead language" is one where there's no community that speaks it.)
A musical genre might become traditional if there's little innovation, but that's not dead. People still enjoy playing it.
Did you mean no commercial stations? Because I can think of lots of listener-supported jazz stations that are mainstream, definitely not smooth. KCSM in my local area, for instance.
As I read what the author wrote about playing in both directions at once, I couldn't help thinking of Machaut's "Ma Fin est Mon Commencement". Time to go listen to it and then to Coltrane.
- Jazz didn't begin to die on Kind of Blue. That was a popular, well selling jazz record. Rather than setting Jazz on a path to irrelevance, Kind of Blue reinvigorated the genre and inspired an abundance of accessible and innovative material in the years following its release.
- Alice Coltrane is not the "Yoko Ono" of Jazz. She made a lot of good records. And Yoko Ono isn't bad for that matter. I like her solo music better than John's.
- Many people besides music critics and academics enjoy Coltrane's late period. Some of us like abrasive, chaotic music.