> >>> dhenwood at panix.com 01/19/01 10:48AM >>>
>
>The culture surrounding jazz has always mystified me. Though it's a
>kind of "popular" music, there's an air of painfully high seriousness
>among
>afficionados. Jazz DJs assume a tone of almost funereal reverence
>when they identify what they've just played, and read the name of
>everyone associated with the recording except the janitor who swept
>the studio. It's like they're trying soooo hard to be taken seriously
>that you almost suspect them of a cultural anxiety about not being
>really serious. I mean, not everything has to be on a par with the
>Hammerklavier sonata.
>
>(((((((((((
>
>CB: I know where you are coming from.
>
>Actually, the original culture surrounding jazz was Black people partying.
>It was a component part of Black highlife and merriment. If you want to
>get the feel of the culture that generated jazz, you would have to go to a
>Black cabaret or house party in the 'hood. It is not serious , but fun.
>However, jazz is now hip hop. The blues is dialectical, and things change,
>just as Black life has.
>
>Black is beautiful !
yeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhhhppp! but i agree with doug and whoever is making the argument coz i worked in a jazz club back in the daze *sigh* of my youth, back before it became cool and a mark of upper middle class distinction -- well in the town where i worked anyway, which was way behind the rest of the country. the man i worked for played in NYC back in the forties-- his wife was a painter, he a musician, lived in the village and hung out with people that formed the jazz culture there. we hosted artists swinging through on their way home from wherever -- so they played on sunday and monday nights, mostly.
i think the reading of liner notes is 1. because they can get away with it -- subculture thing and 2. most anyone who digs music digs the liner notes (tho it doesn't b/c part of a public ritual) which leads to 3. the public ritual is that it's such a small community that it's like reading a lineage or giving you clues the milieu that influenced production which is actually interesting, doug, since it can be a ritual, in some sense, that questions the typical view of art as the production of a "lone" creator or small group of creators, rather than art as something produced by many people. yadda.
kelley