To what extent do you agree with the Penguin jazz lists.........

[Tenor Freak]

Aspiring sax players who are learning from the recordings of a master.

I wonder how many non-musicians there are who really become absorbed into jazz. Almost everyone I know who is 'into' jazz plays an instrument for enjoyment, not ncessarily jazz, but simply enjoys playing some music.

Looking at the Saxontheweb Forum, hardly anyone is studying Prez, or Hawk, or Dexter in the way that sax players used to. (ie religiously.) All the past greats seem to be studied in a historical context, and that includes Trane. It's all rather more structured nowadays, like a course syllabus at university. Ironically it's much easier now to slow down recordings to copy what Chris Potter for example, is playing using digital technology. But there are also far more transcriptions available online these days.

In my own case I started on the saxophone before I discovered jazz properly and think that I'd probably still like this music even if I didn't play.

[Serial_Apologist]

It is quite fascinating contrasting what jazz musicians listen to and what jazz fans listen to. From my experience, the fans often have a more encyclopedic knowledge of the music whereas musicians seem to be a bit more selective. The people who have run workshops I have been to frequently aren't aware of other musicians who you might have assumed that would have been conscious of with some quite big gaps amongst younger players. It is intriguing because I have found that some musicians I have spoken to obsess over individual players. Years ago I had a long conversation with Huw Warren ( top bloke) about Herbie Nichols who he idolised. It is surprising because you if you are in to jazz surely you must buy in to the whole package from ODJB through to contemporary stuff. I don't find bands like AEoC any different to listening to Freddie Keppard - it is clearly the same music yet not all jazz interests all jazz musicians. I was staggered that Trish Clowes composed a piece based on a motif played by Baby Dodds which, admittedly, made her go right up in my estimation.

I haven't been to a workshop for about five years. I concur with CGR's comment about the audience for jazz being made up of increasingly instrument player audience members. The audience does seem to be getting older and there does not appear to be the student following that was really obvious in the 80's and 90's. This audience seems to have disappeared and with it perhaps the interest in listening to all the music. Increasingly it seems to be all about Miles, Coltrane, Mingus, etc and not much interest beyond. Books like the Penguin guide were great because reading always made me want to explore further. The more I read, the more I wanted to check stuff out. I am not sure that this applies to a younger audience.

On a tangent, I think that jazz is now starting to reap what it sowed in the early 2000's. I spoke at length to a Belgian woman who was organising a jazz festival around 2002/3 and she made a comment that there was a real struggle to get younger people in to jazz and that the music needed to change to retain an audience. She was dead keen on booking a lot of the then fashionable Nu Jazz acts and suggested that bands like EST were the future. Her perception was that a younger audience had no need for players like Sonny Rollins since they didn't relate to something which grew out of musical changes that were 50 years old. The problem for me is that in booking the then modish groups of that time to the exclusion of the more orthodox, mainstream jazz of the time, there is a massive disconnect. It seems that younger people are probably listening to this music in isolation and not realising what came before and, even worse, not appreciating that a lot of this fashionable stuff back then had antecedents in better, historic stuff. For me, the absence of books like the Penguin guide makes it difficult to explore jazz. Maybe I was a bit unique in wanting to checkout all kinds of jazz and would buy stuff by people I had never previously heard of on a whim. If I was stuck, there were always other , older people around who could guide me. Not sure that there is an inclination these days to check the music out quite so thoroughly and if the availability of music on a site like youtube makes newcomers less inclined to investigate when you can hear really obscure jazz in an instant. Part of the fun of exploring jazz when I grew up was that you couldn't hear the music without either requesting it on the radio or buying the record. Just a thought.

I would argue that the omnipresent pressure to develop an individual voice tends to oblige the jazz musician, especially in his or her formative stage, to focus more on specific influences, whether persons or particular eras of the music, as models for their own initial development, at any rate. As jazz has evolved into a more complex musical art form the degree of detail to be absorbed must of necessity be a selective narrowing down of choices from the entirety of choice on offer, compared to the knowledge base development of the non-practising enthusiast or general listener such as myself, who can enjoy the "luxury" of having all the time in the world to gain access the whole tradition, and hopefully the income to fund it!

I think one thing that maybe accounts in part for the changing areas of reference more and more being drawn on by upcoming generations of practitioners is that the academicisation of the tradition inevitably results in the constituents of jazz from any period being viewable as elements available for re-assemblage without consideration of the performance contexts and processes that originally brought them into being - rather analogously to the way in which Victorian architects, unlike their predecessors who would start from local vernacular or choose one model like Greek classicism, saw a divergent range of historical elements as available for assemblage into buildings in a stylistic mélange - in place of the language being shaped and advanced out of the possibilities afforded by performance relationships established between musicians, whether at a particular moment or over a period of time, as happened in earlier eras. The danger, it seem to me, is that the elements lose something of their original context-driven power, the feeling that jazz can give voice to a sense of necessity, rather than be seen as just an alternative generic career option to becoming a classical virtuoso or composer; and maybe this accounts for that loss being manifest in a lot of today's jazz.

[Ian Thumwood]

S.A.

I think the problem is more that the media seems inordinately more interested in the more commercial aspects of jazz these days whether it is singers plundering the Broadway song book or jazz musicians checking out more popular commercial styles like EDM for inspiration. The college courses have caused a sameness to a degree but I think the stuff which is "really" happening is of little interest to the media. I lot of the players I have been listening to lately like Alan Ferber, Josh Berman, Kirk Knuffke, etc just don'thave the pull f bands like GO-Go Penguin.