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Maybe your criteria are flawed. Instead of thinking about an "advancement of the genre," you should be asking if there are any true individual voices out there. I definitely think that there are. The genres you mentioned seem to have sprung up around one or two influential individuals who ended up with a lot of followers. It's like Mingus said: "If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats."
Anyway, genre is easy to talk about in retrospect. Trying to define the character of the era when you're living in it is more difficult.
I don't agree that originality and innovation are dead ends unless lots of people start copying them.
Sure there are lots of people playing backward looking jazz (tonnes of jazz today sounds just like Miles Davis' Sorcerer album), but there are also lots of interesting new voices, and also people who are taking older styles and reinvigorating them by adding new elements.
Hi Nick....Can you provide some examples? I'd like to know who the latest, cutting edge, players are.
I think it's safe to say that if someone does something that is realy outstanding: innovative, creative, soulful, and just damn good, they're going to influence lots of people and, whether they mean to or not, change the course of a genre.
I think there are lots of individual voices out there. But I get the sense that jazz is much more fragmented then it was in the past. And since the 90s, the Wynton Marsalis doctrine has promoted the idea that jazz stopped in 1959. I'm just not convinced that much is really changing. I think there are people who are doing interesting, individual things, but everyone seems to be using the same musical language. Can you provide some examples of contemporary players who are doing something really new?
One person I can think of is Bill Frissell. He does a lot of avante garde electronic stuff and also country/jazz hybrids. Definitely individual....but it doesn't seem to have sparked a change in the course of jazz.
Dave Douglas is another one. I don't know that his playing in necessarily influential, despite its technical proficiency, but I'll bet we'll start hearing echos of his compositional style in the future.
I don't know much about them, but I've heard that Greg Osby and Steve Coleman both have rather specific jazz concepts and have attracted small cadres of followers.
The avant garde in general seems to get short shrift; I know Ken Burns hardly mentioned it at all in his big jazz documentary. But folks like Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, Horace Tapscott, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler have had a big influence on a lot of today's players. Unfortunately, some have picked up on the easiest and least interesting elements, but there are a lot of others who've taken the whole "free playing vs. tight composition" and done some really interesting stuff: Jason Moran, the whole "New Dutch swing" scene (Willem Breuker, the ICP Orchestra folks), and tons of players here in LA who haven't been heard much outside of our fair city (Dan Clucas, Killsonic, Vinny Golia, Bobby Bradford, etc.).
There was an article in Jazz Times a few years ago where they asked Wynton Marsalis and John Zorn about the future of jazz. Marsalis felt that it would move away from the "head-solo-solo-solo-head" form and more into longer compositions. I don't tend to agree with him about a lot of stuff, but perhaps he's right on this prediction.
Well, that's a lot of rambling. I think I was just taken aback at how disappointed some of you sounded when writing about the state of jazz today. I dunno...individual tastes will vary, but in my opinion, there's still plenty of interesting stuff happening out there.
Popular music, and that includes jazz, is a product of at-large pop culture. The pop cultures that created bebop and cool jazz, not to mention 60s rock and roll, simply don’t exist anymore. I know Eliot doesn’t agree with me here, but I think that pop culture has been so shallow, so ugly and so focused on materialism and celebrity for so long now that there are no possibilities for creative and cerebral music like jazz. Popular culture isn’t about being “cool” anymore, it’s about being obnoxious, and that’s not where jazz comes from. Jazz is music for grown-ups.
I don’t think that when jazz stopped being dance music it was a bad thing. That began to happen just as southern R+B was morphing into rock and roll – the new dance music. Turning jazz into music for listening was what allowed the greatest jazz to develop – late-era swing, bebop and cool/modal jazz. You could listen to it, and it was good. The same thing happened to musette – it stopped being dance music, went to ground for a couple of decades and reemerged as music for listening. Musette today is sophisticated and elegant in a way it never was when it was dance music – it’s great music to listen to.
Nowadays jazz isn’t even music for listening. I don’t know - what is the purpose of modern jazz? Compare the older styles to what has passed for modern jazz since the “fusion” era – noisy atonal music that sounds technical and indulgent and academic. Very little American jazz today is pleasant to listen to, in the way that for example Stan Getz was. That’s what really killed jazz as it was. I still remember my dad throwing out his brand new copy of Miles’ “Bitch’s Brew”.
You can hear a high grade of swing, bebop and cool jazz in most university music schools, which is a good thing. I suspect (and hope) that there will come a day when the world will be interested in this kind of music again. So, personally, I don’t think there is any popular music of any kind being produced today that will be remembered in the way that things like “Kind of Blue” or “Sgt Peppers...” are remembered. Though I hate the word, let's call these kinds of artifacts "classics".
Idiosyncratic dead ends – exactly right!
Cheers
Scot
Monk: "What!?!? what do you mean, where is jazz going? Maybe it's going to hell...you can't make music GO anywhere!"
Hi Scot- we are a long way from the '60's in SO many ways...
The music of Louis, Django etc. is as alive as ever, to me...oh, you mean actual living performers?
What Allan Holdsworth does is real true harmonically innovative groundbreaking improvisation. I'd mention him along with Miles as people who build on the past.
On the other hand, look what happened to classical composition evolving from Baroque through Romantic/Classical/Wagner/Ravel/Stravinsky/Bartok, then the Schoenberg school which produced a lot of interesting music that is totally inaccessible to most people. Not a lot of people walk around whistling Holdsworth tunes, which means 'selective appeal' to quote Spinal Tap, so adventurous listeners as always have to seek out the good stuff-it's not going to bite you on the ass via the mass media.
I like to listen to Elliott Carter for certain things and Benny Carter for certain other things. VIVA LA DIFFERENCE!
George Garzone is a monster player building on Coltrane's legacy. Kenny G sells more records. So what...like Monk said, you can't make music go anywhere. We are lucky to live in a time where it is easier to be informed about music (and lots of stuff) than ever before.
Caution: gross generalization and opinion spewage to follow:
If America (just to pick on my own country) created self-respect for it's own culture (or what might be left of it before it was paved over to create the local mega shopping mall) instead of the dumbing-down of society that has happened since forever, there'd be more people enjoying and supporting the arts (read musicians who actually play music with their hands on actual instruments as opposed to belly button auto-tune bimbos) with their entertainment dollar.
The other thing: it's not your fault if you don't like something, and I don't mean to infer that, for example, studying 12 tone music is going to make you a fan of it...I happen to like a lot of the music of Alban Berg (his Chamber Concerto is fantastic) but I don't understand it- I just enjoy it 8) Don't we all love when non-musicians say they like our music?
We all, to some extent, create our own worlds by what we choose to pay attention to. Cool, innit? :twisted:
Maybe in 20 years this will be remembered as the 'smooth jazz' era. I'd say we all pretty much prefer chunky!
I've never heard Django play a note without commitment.