Rick Beato has done a lot of videos on various topics--I think the last one I looked at was a rant about Macs--but I am not usually tempted to watch them. He did one, nearly an hour long, on why people hate jazz, at least that was the title. Here it is:
I listened to the first five minutes and my answer is: people hate jazz because a lot of it is just as badly structured and carelessly thrown together as your talk, Rick. If you had the slightest respect for your listeners you would try wasting less of their time on pointless meanderings that have nothing to do with the topic.
One thing I find very interesting is the blanket approach to the question: why do people hate or love jazz as if "jazz" were one monolithic activity all at the same level of quality and creativity. Oh, please! If you ask me about classical music--or any music--the first thing to say is that there are all kinds of classical music, some good, some bad. Maybe you hate the bad, boring, pretentious classical music, and if so, more power to you. If you hate the good stuff, maybe it is because it is too challenging, too long, or too unfamiliar and we can talk about that. What is annoying about the way people like Rick talk about jazz is that they seem to ignore all qualitative distinctions. All jazz is good because it is jazz.
Of the nine platinum jazz records he mentions, and by the way, how does this list explain why people hate jazz? Why is it even there? But of that list, I am familiar with three records: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Bitches Brew, also Miles Davis, and Take Five, Dave Brubeck. They are all very fine recordings and it would be interesting to talk about why they are fine recordings. Another approach would be to find some examples of bad jazz recordings and talk about why they are bad. Maybe Rick does this later on, but his blatant waste of my time in the first five minutes makes me doubt it and I lost the will to listen to the rest.
about 10 minutes in he gets at something Elijah Wald has fielded in his books, jazz became less popular as it became more obviously and deliberately separated from dance and dance music much like rock would later.
ReplyDeleteHe mentions that people have a hard time enjoying something when they don't understand what's going on and that jazz reached a point where people stopped understanding what people were doing in it.
My impression has been there are three core reasons jazz fell out of favor and one is mentioned above in Beato's video.
1. Jazz became less popular as it became a more self-contained and self-referential art form. Take Five, for instance, has a moment where Desmond ostentatiously invokes "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" in his solo. Even with his sly referential solos, Paul Desmond used musical quotes he could reliably trust would be immediately recognized by ordinary listeners.
2. Jazz moved toward virtuoso display in continuous variation patterns in a way that alienated critics and audiences in the Romantic era. I.e. when jazz WAS closer to popular and dance forms it had more rather than less variety in basic form.
3. As Ray Knapp put it, as jazz became more serious and taken more seriously as an art form it took on all the ideological baggage, or was given it, by the intellectuals and fans that had accrued to German art music. I.e. exalted art religion that makes you a better person for liking it came along and that is anathema to a lot of Americans.
Thanks, Wentatchee for having the patience to listen further. I did browse around a bit, but didn't find any place where he seemed to be getting near the point. I notice this a lot: the titles of so many things on the internet are mere click-bait with no relation to the actual content.
ReplyDeleteSome very good points, Wenatchee and I like that you echo a comment made by Richard Taruskin here that we do not have the right to think of ourselves as better people because we happen to like classical music.
I believe jazz in recent times has a Smaller share of music sales than classical music. As The Hatchet notes the mainstream jazz got tangled up with the classical avant garde. At least with the avant garde they were mostly scoring their works out in great detail. The occasional aleatoric compositions have had less staying power. With jazz the players were trying to improvise what the classical composers had difficulty composing in interesting ways.
ReplyDeletePart of the problem is that as with classical music the usual tonal harmonic based jazz seems tired or derivative while the free jazz sounds unpleasant. The three jazz albums cited by Bryan were never systematically followed up, just sporadically imitated. Kind of Blue substituted melodic improvisation for harmonic improvisation, Take 5 deviated from the standard 4/4 but in clear consistent fashion and Bitches Brew represented a move to a freer funk type jazz but with more dissonance. Each of these albums were quite popular so the public can't be blamed for resistance to anything new. At this point, it seems to me that hard bop is what is keeping jazz going because it is the jazz counterpart to rock music.