Woke Jazz movement

[Ian Thumwood]

Ian, I'm listening to the Seed recording debut on the JazzWise link (for which thanks), and just past the halfway mark. It starts to take off on the ultimate number in Part 1 - Grenfell Song - with visceral scat and the trombone solo that threatens to throw things about a bit. He's very good, as in the tenor player. Cassie's comment about racial origins and identifications is right, but this music is no more American jazz than John Surman or Westbrook. Something happend in 1960s American jazz that took on avant-garde modernism on the music's own terms while shedding outmoded aspects of the bebop-derived language, and this allowed the break that gave non-black non-American jazz would-be's permission to express the music's universal potential previously locked within. The communal aspect re-emerges but briefly during the halcyon late 1960s when as Robert Wyatt put it it became possible to play anything before an audience, and this spirit transferred into the beginnings of jazz-rock so you had that lovely interpenetration of personnel and ideas between genres, infused with spirit of occasion. One only has to look at any period of social or political change - the effects on miners' wives from being co-opted into the fight against pit closures in the 1980s - to observe that consciousness raising does not limit itself to one area but reads across to stimulate broadenings of interest and outlook. While it sold the majors lent support but the imperative towards quick sales over creative development hingeing on record sales, the measure of success and musicians' material sustenance (let's face it), was bound to lead to the standardisation characteristic of much late '70s Fusion, followed by the nostalgia appeal of jazz with a confected image that followed - some postmodernist thinker once described this as culture consuming itself through misrepresentations of its own past - and integrationism through the respectability conferred by academic sanction. Thus it was inevitable that what was publicised as echt jazz would be containment in standardisable pre-free styles - Miles: "We did all that stuff 20 years ago!" - and that the reaction against that emanating from the colleges would take on the technical emphasis at the expense of edge, as you have remarked on. Seedbed and other young bands express the need jazz answers for communality, which is not met by commerciality. All this is helped by the positive aspects of social media that make transmission easier.

SA

I would have to disagree with you on this one.

Cassie's ensemble was formed in 2016, nearly fifty years after the revolution in jazz that you speak of. I don't seem what happened in the 1960's as a point of termination for jazz and maybe it seems more significant in the light of the fact that there is a far broader range of styles in jazz in 2019 than in 1965 -70 so that you will not witness Eureka moments like Armstrong, Ellington., Parker, Coltrane or Ornette in succession but a multitude of developments over a wide point in time. It is really a bit of a nonsense referring back to something that happened half a century ago in connection with something happening today even if I concur with the significance of the avant garde of that point.

The point well made by Cassie is that jazz has lost something in your opinion of the transition which saw "post-bop, non-Black, non-American jazz would-be's permission to express the music's universal potential previously locked within in." Any outside influence existed well before the avant garde anyway, whether it be Django Reinhart, Spike Hughes' "Celtic" explorations with his American orchestra, Stan Getz / Bossa Nova or the whole swathe of Cuban jazz which can be traced back to the likes of Mario Bauza in the 1930's. I do not buy your argument and I would throw back to you that the notion of "letting the lid flyoff" (as John Surman once explained) has had unexpected consequences which I feel have not been to the benefit of jazz / improvised music , etc. I think a lot of fusion and rock has had a detrimental effect on jazz although maybe not as much as the likes of Scandi-jazz, the kind of stuff put out by labels like ACT or some ECM artists where the music can sometimes be lightweight.

Like it or not (am I would consider myself to be firmly an advocate of the former) jazz is a essentially a black music and even if there have been white musicians who have enjoyed parallel and equally viable artistic lives since the 1920s, I strongly feel that the further jazz migrates from it's traditions or allows outside influences to dominate, the music does lose something. This is not saying that the music should become ossified as I think the possibilities for jazz are almost boundless - someone is always going to come up with new styles of playing and writing that would have been unimaginable 20 years beforehand. I think these changes are still happening in the music, whether it is by the likes of Steve Coleman, Tyshawn Sorey, Steve Lehman, J D Allen, Jason Roebke, etc. I feel you under-estimate the potential of jazz and that is the point I feel Cassie is also stating. For the sake of being "different", a lot of jazz is losing it's vitality and relevance. I see a lot of Scandi-jazz as the same kind of flash-in-the pan as Nu Jazz back in the late 1990s or Smooth Jazz in the 1980s.

Cassie's music does not sound like jazz made by Miles Davis in the 60's or 70's and nor does it represent a new manifestation of the young New Neos of the 1980s. As I said earlier, it sounds entirely of our time yet it is recognisably jazz. I think it is sometimes too easy to conflate free jazz / the avant garde with being innovative. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than crap avant garde music. It is the worst. The music she is creating is trying to reach out to a younger audience and by re-calibrating the music back towards it's more populist origins it is foolish to assume that the music is "less worthy" than it's more inaccessible cousins. For me, the music she produces still has that bite which is so necessary for jazz. It does have the ability to remain a not altogether comfortable listen yet it can reach out to a broader audience. Everything I have read about her or seen her discuss in interviews is so informed and I find myself thinking that she talks an awful lot of sense.

In some respects I agree with you about "difficult" styles of music, some of which I love. However, I do not see the proletariat clambering over the barricades to listen to Evan Parker. Most Working Class people will have tastes that are firmly centred around poor quality pop music. The wives of striking miners were, as far as I am aware, not re-known for their enthusiasm for Archie Shepp records in 1984 and it is hardly likely that Cecil Taylor was blasting out of any beat boxes in Orgreave at the same time. I would argue that Cassie's Paean for Grenfell is probably the kind of music that would resonate with those scandalously unfortunate communities.

[Serial_Apologist]

SA

I would have to disagree with you on this one.

Cassie's ensemble was formed in 2016, nearly fifty years after the revolution in jazz that you speak of. I don't seem what happened in the 1960's as a point of termination for jazz and maybe it seems more significant in the light of the fact that there is a far broader range of styles in jazz in 2019 than in 1965 -70 so that you will not witness Eureka moments like Armstrong, Ellington., Parker, Coltrane or Ornette in succession but a multitude of developments over a wide point in time. It is really a bit of a nonsense referring back to something that happened half a century ago in connection with something happening today even if I concur with the significance of the avant garde of that point.

The point well made by Cassie is that jazz has lost something in your opinion of the transition which saw "post-bop, non-Black, non-American jazz would-be's permission to express the music's universal potential previously locked within in." Any outside influence existed well before the avant garde anyway, whether it be Django Reinhart, Spike Hughes' "Celtic" explorations with his American orchestra, Stan Getz / Bossa Nova or the whole swathe of Cuban jazz which can be traced back to the likes of Mario Bauza in the 1930's. I do not buy your argument and I would throw back to you that the notion of "letting the lid flyoff" (as John Surman once explained) has had unexpected consequences which I feel have not been to the benefit of jazz / improvised music , etc. I think a lot of fusion and rock has had a detrimental effect on jazz although maybe not as much as the likes of Scandi-jazz, the kind of stuff put out by labels like ACT or some ECM artists where the music can sometimes be lightweight.

Like it or not (am I would consider myself to be firmly an advocate of the former) jazz is a essentially a black music and even if there have been white musicians who have enjoyed parallel and equally viable artistic lives since the 1920s, I strongly feel that the further jazz migrates from it's traditions or allows outside influences to dominate, the music does lose something. This is not saying that the music should become ossified as I think the possibilities for jazz are almost boundless - someone is always going to come up with new styles of playing and writing that would have been unimaginable 20 years beforehand. I think these changes are still happening in the music, whether it is by the likes of Steve Coleman, Tyshawn Sorey, Steve Lehman, J D Allen, Jason Roebke, etc. I feel you under-estimate the potential of jazz and that is the point I feel Cassie is also stating. For the sake of being "different", a lot of jazz is losing it's vitality and relevance. I see a lot of Scandi-jazz as the same kind of flash-in-the pan as Nu Jazz back in the late 1990s or Smooth Jazz in the 1980s.

Cassie's music does not sound like jazz made by Miles Davis in the 60's or 70's and nor does it represent a new manifestation of the young New Neos of the 1980s. As I said earlier, it sounds entirely of our time yet it is recognisably jazz. I think it is sometimes too easy to conflate free jazz / the avant garde with being innovative. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than crap avant garde music. It is the worst. The music she is creating is trying to reach out to a younger audience and by re-calibrating the music back towards it's more populist origins it is foolish to assume that the music is "less worthy" than it's more inaccessible cousins. For me, the music she produces still has that bite which is so necessary for jazz. It does have the ability to remain a not altogether comfortable listen yet it can reach out to a broader audience. Everything I have read about her or seen her discuss in interviews is so informed and I find myself thinking that she talks an awful lot of sense.

In some respects I agree with you about "difficult" styles of music, some of which I love. However, I do not see the proletariat clambering over the barricades to listen to Evan Parker. Most Working Class people will have tastes that are firmly centred around poor quality pop music. The wives of striking miners were, as far as I am aware, not re-known for their enthusiasm for Archie Shepp records in 1984 and it is hardly likely that Cecil Taylor was blasting out of any beat boxes in Orgreave at the same time. I would argue that Cassie's Paean for Grenfell is probably the kind of music that would resonate with those scandalously unfortunate communities.

I think there were a lot of different styles running concurrently in the 1960s? Don't overlook that many if not all the representatives of avant-garde advance in the 1960s came from working class backgrounds, both here and in the States. But this warrants a decent reply. I'll probably be heading out into the countryside tomorrow morning on the bike to make the most of this weather; if I've got the energy I'll get back sometime during the afternoon.

[Ian Thumwood]

I just think that musicians like Cassie Kinoshi really need to be applauded. I have lost count of the times JLU would feature artists from the UK who were on the fringes of jazz or even denied outright what they were playing was jazz because the term was too limited. How many times have you read a review in the last twenty years when a critic has used the cliched phrase "Jazz with rock attitude" and read of a new "movement" who were seeking to rid jazz of it's connections to earlier generations? Worse still, what about owners of record labels making a boast of issue jazz records which pointedly do not resemble the kind of jazz your father might have listened to ? There have been countless musicians on JLU who were promoted on a jazz programme yet sought to distance their music from being jazz? I can also recall the pianist Tigran Hamasyan stating in a workshop that he felt that post-bop was dead and the black-American model for jazz had little relevance anymore as it had been overtaken by the contribution by other musicians from across the world.

I think there is a risk of missing the point. Whilst jazz is a very broad church the largest representative proportion of jazz falls with a pretty wide parameter and the further any music goes beyond these boundaries, the weaker the music becomes in my opinion. I have recordings in my collection which range from Freddie Keppard through to people like Cecil Taylor as well as a good proportion of records which reflect how jazz has changed since I started to listen in the early 1980's. There is plenty in the SEED Ensembles disc which sounds very contemporary but is does not pander to outside influences, swings and is not afraid to get stuck in to the blues. I applaud this. Anyone who comes to jazz from this position is to be praised and it almost feels like this Woke movement is an attempt in the UK to recalibrate a music which has seriously lost it's way by rejecting the black origins of the music or at least tended to ignore those musicians ploughing a more traditional furrow. To paraphrase the earlier comment, it is jazz with jazz attitude!!

[Ian Thumwood]

This is precisely the kind of thing that I rail against....

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/lost-river-michele-rabbia-ecm-records-review-by-geno-thackara.php

[burning dog]

the cliched phrase "Jazz with rock attitude"

More often I've read of "Jazz with a rock intensity." Before the era of Jimmy Hendrix , Doors and Cream, how intense WAS rock ? It may have "earthy" like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or frenetic like the earliest garage punk-ish bands eg MC5 , but maybe a fair bit of the intensity came from rock bands who were listening to the Coltrane Quartet or similar!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

More often I've read of "Jazz with a rock intensity." Before the era of Jimmy Hendrix , Doors and Cream, how intense WAS rock ? It may have "earthy" like the Rolling Stones or the Animals or frenetic like the earliest garage punk-ish bands eg MC5 , but maybe a fair bit of the intensity came from rock bands who were listening to the Coltrane Quartet or similar!

Eat your heart out Cecil Taylor....

http://youtu.be/jkkoCiGQ4vo

[CGR]

This is precisely the kind of thing that I rail against....


https://www.allaboutjazz.com/lost-ri...o-thackara.php

I rather like it.

[burning dog]

When they say "rock intensity" I doubt they mean "rock and roll" though BN. That's pretty wild but dont know if that's the kind of intensity some PR men are talking about when advertising "modern jazz" headbanging earnestness is the combination that phrase, in that context, makes me think of - probably wrongly.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Yes, I was just looking for an excuse to post a young Jerry Lee on industrial quantities of amphetamines, demolishing the piano. Good to see the urbane Steve Allen stumped to describe the "experience"! But you're right, its not what's meant by "Rock". Early Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Jimmy Dawkins etc were pretty "intense" but I doubt if they'd count either.