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It's been an interesting decade for Latin jazz. Omar Sosa, Yosvany Terry, and Danilo Perez are playing incredible new music.

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On a similar note, I was able to see Nestor Torres at my University playing with some extremely talented Jazz musicians. Most of it was improv, amazing show!

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Really? Difficult to tell, when all you give us to go on is statements like these: Quote:



Sure, fusion happened during the '70s...but so did the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the World Saxophone Quartet, Air, the downtown loft scene...there was a ton of great jazz in the '70s if you know where to look.

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Completely disagree, but I've already addressed this point.

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Sure Steve...Armstrong is the meat and Coltrane is the crumbs, right?


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What I find most odd about your assertion is the rod you use to measure it. What exactly is "vitality", and how on earth could you show it on a graph? Seems to me it could mean one of two things: either popularity/acceptance, but I know (assume?) you're not that thick...mass appeal (or lack thereof) is a terrible way to assess the quality of an art form; or it's simply personal taste: jazz after the '40s isn't as vital to you...but that in no way diminishes it's vitality to someone else, particularly someone 10 (or 20 or 30) years younger than you.


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You say fragmented, I see diversified; and diversification, if anything, causes the art to flourish...not the opposite. You prefer the trunk of the tree, fine...but that trunk has branches that spread farther than the seedling ever dreamed.

I don't know how you can hear David Murray's playing, or (I'll use a younger guy) Rob Brown's playing on O'Neal's Portch and say jazz isn't evolving and growing.


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I'm not defending "modern" jazz in this particular exchange as much as challenging you're assertion that jazz started losing steam after the '40s...you left me a heck of a lot of guys to use as examples.

It seems like you and I get into this same exchange every year (I think in this same thread) and it usually ends with me listing a bunch of albums from the last ten years or so. I assume those lists are still there, and the music in them is a vital as ever...although somehow I doubt they'll convince you!

General observation: when a musician is being innovative "the people" turn away. Only the better educated, experienced, curious listeners (most critics among those) keep tuned.

Another loose remark: Duke Ellington really wanted to be a classical composer. He showed us a bit of what he had actually been wanting to do after the 40's, when he had earned enough (money and reputation) with pleasing the crowds to allow himself to do that.

Another personal opinion: Louis Armstrong was an entertainer. Absolutely Brilliant at doing just that.

Clarke68, you're just reacting without listening to what I'm saying. There is good jazz being made today and there are great musicians. I don't disagree with that. The problem is that no artform can be truly vital when it is marginalized as a niche. That's the difference with jazz in the first half of the 20th century and the second half. For jazz to rise again, it needs to engage the public... and that doesn't mean just becoming a jazzy version of rock or becoming more commercial. It means becoming something that everyone can relate to and be uplifted by. It used to be that. It isn't any more. As long as jazz continues to dwindle down to smaller and smaller pieces of the pie, it doesn't matter how targeted those pieces are. It will still dwindle away into nothing.

I'm not just picking on jazz when I say all this. The same could be said of classical music and country music. (With the exception of bluegrass which seems to be more popular today than ever, not less.)

Kees, Louis Armstrong was one of the most innovative and blindingly creative artists who ever played jazz. Without him, there wouldn't even be jazz. He was also a brilliant entertainer.

See ya
Steve

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I know this was not directed at me, but I would like to react on this.
I heartily disagree with you here. I know of no artform that embraced the general public without withering an dying from doing just that.
If jazz (or any type of music or art) becomes something that everyone can relate to it will, almost by definition, be mediocre and stagnant.
The general public does not like to be surprised, chalenged or put on the wrong foot when listening to music. They don't want to put an effort in it, however rewarding that may turn out to be afterward.
They want to be entertained in the easiest way possible.
They would not allow jazz to be innovative and alive.
Jazz is better off being as independent as possible.
Just my 2c.

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Um, where'd you get that? Duke was already leading bands in high school, and he passed up a scholarship to art school to pursue music. If his later work took on longer forms, it's because he realized one thing about cultural economics pretty early: In the first half of the 20th century (and sometimes even now, sadly enough), classical chauvinists would always condescend to jazz, and therefore writing longer form pieces would help "legitimize" his music. Geez, the Pulitzer Prize committee passed on giving Ellington an award in the early '60s, by which time no sane person was disputing his genius. He'd already been on the cover of TIME magazine—after Dave Brubeck, incidentally, which is a whole 'nutha story about cultural politics.

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Examples?

Of course you realize that jazz was *created* specifically as an artform of the common man designed for mass distribution. Art of the 20th century is pretty much all about public artforms: architecture and urban planning, industrial design, illustration, graphic design, popular music, cinema, radio dramas, Broadway plays, etc. Technology was designed for the dissemination of art and art was designed to be disseminated.

The history of the first half of the 20th century is fascinating. It may have been one of the greatest (and briefest) cultural peaks in the entire history of civilization. The ultimate decline that hit jazz, hit everything else at pretty much the same time. Ironically, the technology designed to disseminate the art continued to progress, but the art itself withered. I'm hoping the internet will change that eventually. That's my job, in fact.

See ya
Steve

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I think it's even simpler than that. I think that he had ideas that were too big to fit on the four minute side of a 78. Even in the Cotton Club days he was creating complex medleys that spanned sides. The LP era freed him up to think in larger chunks than four minutes at a time.

See ya
Steve

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How would you know?

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You will have to do a lot of explaining to make this an even remotely acceptable statement for me.
My first reaction was: what a load of bull...... But I kept that in check in the nick of time.
Maybe I learn something here.

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It seems you know it all.
But no matter how hard I try, I don't seem to be able to make anything out of it.
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Probably just me.
Sorry.
But I'm real glad you've got it all figured out.

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"the technology designed to disseminate the art" ?
There was technology designed to take art apart???????
Maybe my English severely lacks here, but again, I seriously don't get it.
Sorry.

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Sounds like an interesting job. What is it exactly?

Sorry for my not understanding your wise (and no doubt knowledgeable) words all the time.
A fountain of wisdom in front of me and I don't get it.
Believe me: Ultimate Frustration.

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What I simply meant was that Ellington after a while wrote all these Suites (after the 40's that was), that are pretty classical in structure.
Something must have motivated him to do so, and I think he probably just liked to write pieces like that. I have read that he was very proud of them.
And I personally like them the best of all he did.

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Lacking English is fine, but this is the Internet. Everyone knows the definition of all words on the Internet. Especially English ones.

Dictionary.com:

dis·sem·i·nate
–v.
to scatter or spread widely, as though sowing seed; promulgate extensively; broadcast; disperse:

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Thank you.
I got a translation that said something like: "spread in little pieces".
I never knew it could mean "broadcast" , but even then I still don't get what Bigshot means with his statement.
It would be even more helpful if you could explain that to me.

Basically, it's a lot easier to get art (in this case music) to the people these days than it was before. The availability of music has increased, while (in his opinion, which I profoundly disagree with) the vitality of that music has decreased.

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Of course, he was proud of them; the tunes that came out of The Far East Suite or the "Black" section of Black, Brown and Beige (to name just two) are fantastic. But one thing you'll learn from any reading about Ellington is that he was pret-ty shrewd when it came to presenting his art. We now know that it's quite possible for jazz folk to do longer pieces and not call them "suites," so my guess is that in the cultural climate of the time Duke was hedging a little. Actually, the writer Paul Bowles wrote an unfavorable review of the first performances of Black, Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall; Bowles thought they were simply (I'm paraphrasing) smaller pieces unnecessarily stretched out.