JRR sinking beneath the waves.

[Rcartes]

I have the greatest respect for Alyn Shipton, but can't escape feeling that JRR is becoming increasingly unlistenable of late. Particular beefs for me are the endless dire girl vocalists; a recent example being that dreadful, incompetent warbler on Alex Hitchcock's Azalea on 31 October and the absolutely frightful and interminable track from the Mahavishnu Orchestra last week: I think that last was the worst thing I've ever heard on JRR.

I suppose it's partly an age thing: I was brought up on mainstream, bebop and hard bop, but increasingly I found I was falling out of love with pretty much anything after that. I remember having a bitter argument with a friend sometime around the late 1960s: he suggested that jazz, having gone through a very fast development since the early part of the century, had essentially run its course. I strongly disagreed at the time, but on reflection, I think he was right, and that nothing really new has happened since then: it's all, essentially, repeating itself; competent, often well played but essentially empty (I blame Coltrane, but that's just my endpoint)

And since more recent listeners seem to be happy with that, we get requests that are essentially not much good, really (there are exceptions, of course: Andy Sheppard, for example, and Colin Steele are often worth listening to, but I had to think hard even to bring up those two). I may still keep up with JRR on the Player so I can catch tracks that - for me - are worth hearing and as a way of avoiding the worst of the more recent stuff, but it is rather sad: I used to look forward so much to Saturday evenings at 5 pm, that was the one fixed point of the weekend. Oh well, at least we still have Youtube, which seems to contain pretty much all I want to listen to in jazz.

Back in the 60s and 70s there were endless squabbles between the boppers, with whom I stood 100%, and the mouldie fygges (extreme traditionalists who objected to the presence of saxophone players in jazz bands, which led on one famous occasion to Bruce Turner being met on arrival in Birmingham by a sign saying GO HOME DIRTY BOPPER - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldy_figs). But now I'm beginning to feel I've become a sort of latter-day mouldie fygge myself: what a sad fate for one who always thought he was a progressive!

[Joseph K]

But now I'm beginning to feel I've become a sort of latter-day mouldie fygge myself: what a sad fate for one who always thought he was a progressive!

Indeed.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

John Coltrane ate my budgerigar. Bastard. Well, he'd run out of those big boiled sweets he mainlined.

Seriously & strangely, as someone who used to joke "if it ain't on Bluenote, it ain't worth listening to (my "joke"), my impression is that JRR has been going through a purple patch lately, particularly in the artists and areas I favour. And those I don't care about are soon over. It's JAZZ requests and hence open to all areas of that much plowed land. And as Alyn says, he can ONLY play what listeners request, be it Alma Cogan or Albert Ayler. Or Alma Ayler.

Whether jazz has "run its course" is perhaps more that its changed its course. That lived base has almost gone and it's now institutionalised, diversified, endlessly recycling itself and totally in another "place" to Live at the Village Gate 1959. Debate.

I'm not sure how secure JRR is given the vagaries of programming and "demographics", but it's an institution I would greatly miss.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

And to add, there is something special about this music coming through "radio". I don't know if that's a age thing (me) or the communal nature of the medium. Example: I remember Peter King talking about Charlie Parker and then "KoKo" being played. Although I've known & played that record for 50 years, the sheer force, "newness" and invention was still astonishing, coming over the "airways".

[antongould]

John Coltrane ate my budgerigar. Bastard. Well, he'd run out of those big boiled sweets he mainlined.

Seriously & strangely, as someone who used to joke "if it ain't on Bluenote, it ain't worth listening to (my "joke"), my impression is that JRR has been going through a purple patch lately, particularly in the artists and areas I favour. And those I don't care about are soon over. It's JAZZ requests and hence open to all areas of that much plowed land. And as Alyn says, he can ONLY play what listeners request, be it Alma Cogan or Albert Ayler. Or Alma Ayler.

Whether jazz has "run its course" is perhaps more that its changed its course. That lived base has almost gone and it's now institutionalised, diversified, endlessly recycling itself and totally in another "place" to Live at the Village Gate 1959. Debate.

I'm not sure how secure JRR is given the vagaries of programming and "demographics", but it's an institution I would greatly miss.

I am with you BR

[Serial_Apologist]

Often I think about how fortunate we of that post-1945 generation were to have grown up through that period when music and art in so many ways was still "moving forward " in that today much misused term, and not only in jazz. Recordings often reached these shores sparsely and belatedly, so unless one lived near Dobells one heard new tracks alongside old on the wireless but was "behind" on where Coltrane was at by the time one heard the track recorded 3 years earlier. Catching up on the latest innovations sometimes meant risking huge leaps into unknown territories, but one then found out there were always more gradualist people such as Andrew Hill to assist one's journey. Simplistically my contention is that the arts reflect where life is, and if civilisation is not "moving forward" arts remain stuck in a rut, condemned to recycle past moments when it maybe did reflect progress. Many of the best of today's crop have studied what is now regarded as a genre, or choice of music making in preference to a career in orchestral music. This entails a tendency towards standardisation our generation tried to get away from as being redolent of a second-hand imitative form that really belong elsewhere, instead of jazz being, as Nikki Yeoh said, an African-derived form evolved through trial and error contact with cultures it encountered worldwide through migration that has become a universal way of practice and expression, maintaining the celebratory call and response of interactive creativity in the moment, and negotiating its self-defining constraints while challenging the overweening dictates of marketability.

[Ian Thumwood]

As Bluesnik said, the programme is determined by what listeners want to hear. I think it has always been eclectic and has had a broad base of styles of jazz. Oddily enough, the last request I made was last year which was an Andrew Hill track that I wanted to be played for a mate of mine who was instrumental in getting me in to more advanced styles of jazz.

I can sort of appreciate the lack of enthusiasm for some contemporary jazz although I was becoming increasingly of the opinion that the jazz that matters to me these days does require a lot of effort to track down. I had thought about requesting something by some of the more unusual jazz artists who seem to go unrecognised in the UK such as Guillermo Klein, Nicole Mitchell, Alan Ferber, J D Allen, but the newer material often involves longer tracks. I would have to say that the two current trends in jazz at the moment are either groove-based material or the younger crop of musicians who work firmly within the mainstream but who are extremely conservtive. I have the new albums by musicians such as Emmett Cohen, Camila Meza and Gilad Hekselman and they all have bags of technique yet lack that "shock" value that defines a lot of jazz as being "great." I think that I have bought fewer new releases in 2021 that at anytime in the past although I do think that the pandemic has probably contributed to this.

I really disagree with the sentiment that nothing has happened in jazz since the 1970s. It was a unrealistic statement and doesn't reflect the fact that jazz has taken many different trajectories in the last fifty years that you would need to be curmudgeonly to dismiss. From a perspective of freer elements of jazz, I would struggle to entertain any idea that the first efforts in this oeuvre can really old a candle to more contemporary interpretations by players as diverse as Henry Threadgill, William Parker, Matthew Shipp, etc, etc.

There is also a tendency to look at older styles of jazz with rose-tinted glasses. Someone mentioned the Avid reissues being great value for money on another thread and I must admit to having bought quite of these to plug gapsin my collection. What you do find is that some artists were also producing some pretty anondyne stuff in the 50s and 60s. The Avid Oscar Pettiford disc is a good case in point. Some of the music is ok yet I find quite a bit of it to be twee and to have been poorly served by the passage of time.

[Alyn_Shipton]

I'd have no idea if RCartes has ever requested anything, but if not, therein lies the problem.
Also, the music people listen to at festivals, gigs (now particularly that they are back) and on newly discovered records often informs their choices.
We are getting more requests in now for more different areas of jazz than we have for some time. The "incompetent warbler" on Alex Hitchcock's album was also a fine cellist. And I wanted to represent the diversity of approach on one single album - was the following track with the brilliant Noah Stoneman on piano such a disappointment? And the Mahavishnu track is fifty years old - people have been listening to and loving this music for decades.
So let's have requests for what you think is missing instead of a "sinking beneath the waves lament".

[Alyn_Shipton]

PS Ian, some rather good Emmett Cohen about to come up in the next couple of weeks. He can't be that bad if Ron Carter is playing with him in NY this week...and RC is full of praise and enthusiasm for him.

[RichardB]

he suggested that jazz, having gone through a very fast development since the early part of the century, had essentially run its course. I strongly disagreed at the time, but on reflection, I think he was right, and that nothing really new has happened since then: it's all, essentially, repeating itself; competent, often well played but essentially empty (I blame Coltrane, but that's just my endpoint)

One of the reasons why the jazz tradition produced so many of the greatest musical creators of the 20th century is that it was always spearheaded by artists who felt compelled to push the music further into previously unknown territory. At a certain point in the 1960s this desire to innovate started to break the bounds of what had previously been thought of as jazz. IMO any "emptiness" comes from people still staying inside those bounds 60 years later. It might sound like jazz but it has nothing to do with that outward search.

[Ian Thumwood]

One of the reasons why the jazz tradition produced so many of the greatest musical creators of the 20th century is that it was always spearheaded by artists who felt compelled to push the music further into previously unknown territory. At a certain point in the 1960s this desire to innovate started to break the bounds of what had previously been thought of as jazz. IMO any "emptiness" comes from people still staying inside those bounds 60 years later. It might sound like jazz but it has nothing to do with that outward search.

Richard

This is a massive stereotype which does not really reflect the reality. I always see jazz as being a matter of musical problem solving and not really some kind of Darwinian development to the "perfection" of Free Jazz in the 1960s. Pick any decade from 1920s through to 1970s and there were always musicians or groupd in jazz whose approach was conservative or even pitched at a level which ignored the direction more innovative musicians were taking. I think the only generation of musicians that were ever effectively swept aside were those players from the late teens and twenties who were not equipped to take up the challenges offered by the likes of Armstrong. My persepctive is that the current generation of players have been very much market-driven with a view to prominence with this very much been reflected by the glut of female singers and the popularity of piano trios in the first decade of the 2000s which resulted in a lot of very bland and derivitive jazz. I have to say that I am not hearing much jazz in 2021 which replicates the jazz of the 1960s and where the music is working within this kind of mainstream, there are plenty of musicians who still have something to say. Jazz covered the same territory in about fifty years that Classical music took about 500 to complete. In doing so, plenty of jazz were left which has left a lot of room to explore.

Jazz is still being pushed out into interesting directions yet if you want to find this music, it is no longer put on a plate as was the case in the 1980s. You have to check out what the smaller labels like Cuneiform and Pi are issuing because so much of the most creative jazz these days rarely makes it to the maintream jazz press. Where I would disagree with your statement the strongest is with regard to jazz composition which is currently at a level it never got within sniffing of in the 1960s. You just have to look who the hard fought innovations of the likes of Duke Ellington and Gil Evans have flowered in to a multitude of possibilities. Composers like Muhal Richard Abram's work largely post-dates the 1960s and it you count writers as diverse as Maria Schneider, Guillermo Klien, Mike Gibbs, Henry Threadgill, James Darcy Argue, Jomh Hollenbeck, Steve Coleman, Steve Lehman, Bob Brookmeter, Alan Ferber, etc you will quikcly come to the conclusion that jazz composition has certainly not stayed within the bounds of the last 60 years. The sort of avant garde jazz that emerged in the 1960s is as relevant today as Ragtime was back then. Anyone directly channelling Albert Ayler in 2021 would equally look retrospective although it is likely to remain part of a tenor saxophonist's DNA.

I concur that there is plenty that has happened which has discredited jazz since the 1960s and that the 21st century seems to have mainfestly backed the wrong horses when lauding groups like EST who were seriously over-praised or promoted any number of bright young things who have not really established ant identity. If you want an indication of how vibrant the "jazz mainstream" is, for my money soloists like Jason, Moran, Mary Halvorson, JD Allen, Dave Douglas, Ambrose Akinmusire, Gerald Clayton, etc to name a few who have emerged since the 1990s will always have a place amongst the pantheon of great jazz musicians.

[RichardB]

some kind of Darwinian development to the "perfection" of Free Jazz in the 1960s

I hope you're not ascribing that opinion to me because it absolutely misrepresents what I was trying to say. I agree with you about the compositional stream emerging from jazz in the hands of people like Abrams and Threadgill (and Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell etc.) - but while in the 1960s it was pretty clear still what was jazz and what wasn't, that is no longer really the case, for example where the aforementioned artists are concerned. You in the past have been very insistent on drawing boundaries between jazz and non-jazz, which seems to me a waste of time and energy.

[Serial_Apologist]

The difference in my view is that over time, innovations in jazz tend to get absorbed into a middle way type of mainstream, part of the making of a musical art form whose properties have since its origins at various crucial stages given grass roots expression to a Modernist drive to social, racial and political emancipation. Modernist because it takes on board the truths that authentic expression of this drive will necessarily embrace the complexity written into the situation it is having to deal with. As the modern American composer Eliot Carter said, you face pretty daunting complex issues and choices in living in today's world which were never properly engaged in the music composed in the 1920s and 30s, which sought some kind of simplified down or reduced common format or idea around which to find common collective ownership. The same went for jazz in the period Carter was speaking of in regards to the changes his own music was going through, and he was stimulated by Bebop, the new jazz of the time.

What is it that drags potentially radical advance to a standstill, even in so on-the-spot a musical form as jazz, is a question worth asking, and one does not have to go or think very far to see just what those forces are - the imperative some of us have dubbed Capitalist Realism to use music as a prism through which to offer a simplified window on contemporary reality. Such is the richness of jazz, as a genre if you will, that there will always be those who hanker after retaining the practices and inner characteristics of the music that first engaged them, as listeners or performers. There will be the tendency to standardisation as jazz is rightly seen as a creative alternative option to other forms of musicking which can be taken up through learning about it on college courses. But the truth is that it was not until the arrival of the "neos", (eg Marsalis brothers) and with their influence and promulgation through the jazz press, that the idea that two preceding stages in the evolution of jazz, Free and Fusion, had been mistaken pathways. Since when the music has, dare one say, rather cautiously re-incorporated what was at that point (early 1980s) ruled out of court, and Branford M. can ironically do a programme on Radio 3 about Ornette's The Shape of Jazz To Come! Because jazz, as we are currently being told via the personality of Carla Bley, lies equally between so-called serious concert music and black street music culture, it will always contain its retrospectivists, radicals and middle wayers, reflecting its unresolved internalised politics. Just to look at the music and make claims for today over the eras when it spoke as a radical music for its people is to undervalue jazz where it counts most.

[Rcartes]

I'd have no idea if RCartes has ever requested anything, but if not, therein lies the problem.
Also, the music people listen to at festivals, gigs (now particularly that they are back) and on newly discovered records often informs their choices.

The "incompetent warbler" on Alex Hitchcock's album was also a fine cellist

So let's have requests for what you think is missing instead of a "sinking beneath the waves lament".

Alyn, I've made many requests over the years and had quite a few played, the most recent success being my request for Wardell Gray's Twisted some months ago; I'd hoped you might follow it with Annie Ross's version based on Wardell's solo, but perhaps that was being too greedy.

PS: The"incompetent warbler" on Alex Hitchcock's album might also be a fine cellist, it's only a pity she didn't stick to that: there have been far too few cellists in jazz, the only one coming to mind is Fred Katz.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Ron Carter was a school cello who switched to bass. But did record on cello with Eric Dolphy on those Prestige New Jazz dates. And again there's Oscar Petiford, and I think Red Mitchell made an album on cello. So cello fellows!