BBC Young Musician Jazz Award Final

[Old Grumpy]

Just enjoying this on the box now (sorry for the delay - only just got to the boards).

Anyone else watching?

OG

[Serial_Apologist]

Just enjoying this on the box now (sorry for the delay - only just got to the boards).

Anyone else watching?

OG

Nothing there to suggest future directions for the music, conservatory jazz these days being on the conservative side, but I thought Ms Ridout well deserved to win.

[Tenor Freak]

Didn't watch but in response to S_A, I would not expect 21-year olds to be terribly original when it came to jazz.

[Serial_Apologist]

Didn't watch but in response to S_A, I would not expect 21-year olds to be terribly original when it came to jazz.

It's the standardised unoriginality feeding them overriding any emergent originality that worries me, and seems to take years to get back. I think the causes lie in what jazz represents in today's kind of world - an alternative option to classical composition as opposed to an alternative model for society, to misquote John Stevens, probably.

[Tenor Freak]

True enough. I'm not sure what could be done about it, however. It would be nice to have more live music venues where young musicians could learn their craft, though.

[greenilex]

Greater ethnic variety?

[Jazzrook]

The music was of a high standard(especially Ms Ridout) but all the finalists appeared to come from privileged middle-class backgrounds.
With growing inequality it seems increasingly difficult for working-class kids to break into any of the Arts nowadays.

[Quarky]

The music was of a high standard(especially Ms Ridout) but all the finalists appeared to come from privileged middle-class backgrounds.
With growing inequality it seems increasingly difficult for working-class kids to break into any of the Arts nowadays.

You guys are the experts, but I feel I have to make some comment.

Firstly, Radio 3 and classical music are the preserves of the middle class. As I understand it, classical music in the UK depends heavily on Public School involvement, whereas state schools concentrate on technology and economy related subjects.

Young musicians on R3 are processed through the Radio 3 filters, so it is not surprising that they appear to come from privileged backgrounds. But what seeems to be important that young musicians come from a musical family. This appears a fact of life, no matter what the type of music involved.

Hopefully, Jazz Now with Emma Smith and Soweto Kinch point to a more classless approach by Radio 3.

Can't agree that the function of Jazz is to provide an alternative to classical composition. This may be true for a musical elite, but without that instinctive gut youthful feeling, Jazz is cut off from its roots , imv. What would the Jazz pioneers, Armstrong etc have made of it?

[Serial_Apologist]

You guys are the experts, but I feel I have to make some comment.

Firstly, Radio 3 and classical music are the preserves of the middle class. As I understand it, classical music in the UK depends heavily on Public School involvement, whereas state schools concentrate on technology and economy related subjects.

It was not always thus, though - people on here might remember a story I told about a working class 18-year old whom I non-intentionally introduced to Stockhausen back in '72 - it just happened to be on and when I apologised and went to turn it off, she said, "What is that music, and where can we get to hear more of it?" Subsequently on returning from work one day I found that she'd discovered how to operate my reel-to-reel and was listening with rapt attention to "Kontakte". Not jazz, I know, but the same principle applies. Many of the lads I knew at the time were into Soft Machine, Zappa, King Crimson and so on, not the soft end of Prog as represented by eg Yes and Pink Floyd.

It was a different era when people were prone to identify advanced music and advanced artistic tastes with preparing for a more advanced, informed, enlightened society.

Young musicians on R3 are processed through the Radio 3 filters, so it is not surprising that they appear to come from privileged backgrounds. But what seeems to be important that young musicians come from a musical family. This appears a fact of life, no matter what the type of music involved.

Not necessarily the case. The parents of the 15-year old pianist in that Final expressed astonishment that their son had taken up jazz: "None of us are into it". Pam (the 18-year old referred to above) showed an interest in music from the age of 3, and then was violently discouraged by her father, who took an axe to the home piano after catching her trying to play on it one day.

Hopefully, Jazz Now with Emma Smith and Soweto Kinch point to a more classless approach by Radio 3.

Can't agree that the function of Jazz is to provide an alternative to classical composition. This may be true for a musical elite, but without that instinctive gut youthful feeling, Jazz is cut off from its roots , imv. What would the Jazz pioneers, Armstrong etc have made of it?

I wasn't saying classical music provided an alternative, but that I believe many youngsters see it as such when it offers a collective musical practice that is interactively rewarding and emblemises progress because it enables some semblance of advance in musical idiomatic terms they may find lacking in other genres which without guidance elsewhere (eg at home, school, college or by Radio 3) have been brought to their awareness.

Satchmo, in his pioneering years, faced and dealt with social, economic, racial and political issues quite at variance with those existing today - although many in America would probably say that those times were never fully dealt with over there and are now sliding back into contemporary reality.

[greenilex]

I agree with the phrases "interactively rewarding" and "emblemises progress" as possible reasons for choosing jazz and jazz instruments...children are great believers in progress. The examination system (I speak only as a grandparent of four relative beginners) seems to present jazz pieces from quite early on as an attractive option.

Folk techniques don't seem prestigious in the same way?

[Serial_Apologist]

I agree with the phrases "interactively rewarding" and "emblemises progress" as possible reasons for choosing jazz and jazz instruments...children are great believers in progress. The examination system (I speak only as a grandparent of four relative beginners) seems to present jazz pieces from quite early on as an attractive option.

Folk techniques don't seem prestigious in the same way?

I must admit to having no idea! Having said that there are many "musical protocols" demanding observance in certain if not all folk traditions calling for "authentic" practice. I seem to remember that the Indian musicians participating in Joe Harriott's "Indo-Jazz Fusions" were initially shocked by Joe's disregard for certain modal and rhythmic practices from their point of view, and I've heard similar from would-be Latin percussion players. Trevor Watts is very interesting when talking about working with African drummers, saying in so many words, "They just do their thing and I do mine as I see fit". Prestige could be said to apply, but from the vantage point of the traditions, which may well be very different from what we regard as our own. Along with certain other things, these aspects of generic performance weren't covered in the otherwise quite interesting discussion on jazz and mainly UK-based folk music on Jazz Line-Up on yesterday's programme.

[ardcarp]

I wrote this under the 'classical' BBC Young Musician thread:

I listened to the first two [jazz] finalists (piano and sax+recorder) and, yes they are both very talented and musical. I had to stop watching because, broad-minded though I am, I just don't 'get' the finer points of jazz. A certain harmonic and melodic orthodoxy* seemed to pervade the idiom, and I was frankly a bit bored by it. Go on, shoot me down in flames, someone!


*eg harmony (a load of shifting tritones in the piano left hand) melody (a flourish, a breath, then another flourish)

So I thought I would re-post it here, as I haven't been shot down in flames by anyone yet.

[Serial_Apologist]

I wrote this under the 'classical' BBC Young Musician thread:



So I thought I would re-post it here, as I haven't been shot down in flames by anyone yet.

Well I do have to agree! I happen to like jazz harmony of the post "Kind of Blue"/"Impressions" kind since I think that they together with rhythmic complexities and flexibilities and the relatively unexpected intrinsic to improvisation offers greater opportunities for taking the music further "out" into uncharted territories, as it used to do almost as a norm when jazz meant something different and more celebratory than either interpreting scores (however adventurous), starting supposedly without preconceptions of any overt sort (improv), or the idiomatic limitations of rock and pop musics in the 'sixties and 'seventies. Today's jazz mainstream (which the finale effectively represented) comes over as much more "contained" than its possibilities afford - and this has been the case for a good 30 years now, although from attending two of London's main venues for the music I get the feeling that the generation that came into early maturirity around the start of the new Millennium are much more comprehensively conversant with 20th century "moderns" and think in terms of much greater rhythmic complexity than the asymmetrical patterns my 1960s generation took largely I think from Bartok, who seemed modern to modern jazzers not pursuing a post-Stockhausen/Cage approach at the time, and traditions further east.

Thinking further about this it occurs to me that interest in timbre was greater a generation ago when rock was unleashing feedback into the post blues vocal growl and, in parallel with avant-garde electronica at the time, demonstrating possibilities outwith as well as additional to harmonic advance than today, when pitches seem to have come back more into vogue in the way young musicians conceive improvisationally. And that improvisational approach then feeds back into formulations for challenging compositional springboards.

The times seem to demand aesthetic complexity as their authentic response, as Elliot Carter observed. As with what modernism from "Erwartung" and "Le Sacre" onwards offered, there is so much to more to take on board from the ways in which jazz expanded and diversified from its almost unilinear evolution hitherto: New Orleans > big band/development of the solo narrative > bebop's harmonic/rhythmic idomatic expansion > modalism and free jazz > Fusion > jazz becoming pan-globalised as a universable mode of musical expression? It was catching up on where Euroclassical modernism left off (and has now retreated from influence-wise over the whole, leaving just a thin outer shell). Jazz has always operated between retaining its popular cultural links and expanding its musical possibilities; one cannot overlook the dampening, safe way making effects of consumer culture on the biggest area of the music which has to subsist to make any sense of each end of its appeal, so-to-speak.

Here in this country, perhaps, as observed above, jazz is now going to be represented by those whose parents can afford to send their musical offspring to college to learn to reproduce; but I remind myself that Eisler produced what for me was his best music, looking forward in hope of a society whose values would be its sanction, when in America, divorced from his intellectual and sociopolitical roots, and while (for me) contemporary jazz in young hands is finding niches within various musical vocabularies and cultural outlets from which to push forward, then for me personally it will stand as an equivalence of what middle-of-the-road composers such as Honegger, Martinu and Prokofiev did in their generation for their kinds of music - namely keeping the flag flying for a certain intelligent kind of accessibility capable of catching on beyond its circle of avid but hopefully discriminating progressivists such as myself.

[ardcarp]

OMG, S-A, you know so much about it! I fear my experience of jazz involved playing trad in a schoolboy band modelled on The Temperance 7*, and, later, feeling very cool listening to the MJQ.

* Played in front of The Queen once....well she rolled past in her Roller while we were playing at the roadside at the World Scout Jamboree.

[Serial_Apologist]

OMG, S-A, you know so much about it! I fear my experience of jazz involved playing trad in a schoolboy band modelled on The Temperance 7*, and, later, feeling very cool listening to the MJQ.

* Played in front of The Queen once....well she rolled past in her Roller while we were playing at the roadside at the World Scout Jamboree.

Just keeping up appearances!

(I'm old enough to remember their "Pasadena", but that's all).