but there are clearly, from my experience, different ways to listen to and experience jazz. the staid, religious like reverence of the audience in cool jazz, heads slightly tipped back or sometimes bowed, listening intently, eyes closed with a whoop let out every so often is or was considered white, head music. but, like i said, someone who's read this more recently than i should correct me because this may well just be something i picked up back when i was into punk and not able to appreciate the jazz milieu i was surrounded by at the time. i remember the way white people listened to jazz --with their heads--and i was always shocked because i couldn't understand how anyone could listen to what they listened to and not want to move. but, i was a kid. so, when i read about the history, the commercialization and the production politics years later, maybe i imposed that on what i read.
and yeah, doug, about marsalis. i bought some of his stuff years ago, when i first heard of neoclassical. i thought it would appeal to me b/c it was hailed as getting back to jazz roots and enough with the white rock lite butt kissing fusion, yadda. i was disappointed, to say the least. it's music that does target the well educated, musically trained audience. that's not awful, but wasn't what i initially liked about jazz.
kelley
>I think this is a mistaken way to look at it. What was going on was a
>split in the black community between its intellectual and cultural
>elite, its avantgard and its ground in mass experience, and that was
>reflective of the rest of the country as well. But there is nothing
>non-black about it. If anything it was a kind of black arrival or
>confrontation with Art. Monk, Powel, Parker, Gillespie, Percy Heath
>are very black, and fully conscious that they were meeting something
>for the first time, as if they were a delegation out to meet Modernity
>on its own terms. It wasn't just some vaguely popular music
>anymore. It was like for keeps, in a way that straight popular
>entertainment is never for keeps.
>
>I think it was Carmen McCray who was talking about hearing Monk in the
>late Thirties or early Forties and the weird sounds she heard. She
>said something to the effect that she thought they were making creep
>show music, like for horror movies. In other words they were
>experimenting with surrealism---how to get out there in sound. This
>was a completely different impulse than playing something to dance to,
>or sing along with. If you think about that a moment, you can see this
>is what an art impulse might look like, pure weirdness. Nothing seems
>to fit together and it doesn't seem have any purpose. It's not
>beautiful, its edgy, and disconnected.
>
>I've never written about jazz before and its like I am trying to
>explain something that can't be explained. On some level, when I
>really started listening to it, it open a door on the same kind of
>world that abstract painting opens. It's a confrontation with the
>conflicts in modernity, with a world that is supposed to make sense
>and doesn't. It's a depiction of the landscapes that are there and are
>not there, at the same time.
>
>In any event, it died sometime in the mid-Seventies. You could
>probably pick a point in Miles Davis that would work as a marker, say
>after Bitches Brew or somewhere in there. But see this is exactly
>the same era that Modernity itself was put into the dust bin. Paz
>called it the death of the future, and I still think that is just
>about the best way to describe it. Miles said in an interveiw once,
>you know it gets old after awhile, getting up there and playing the
>same thing, year in and year out, it just gets old.
>
>So the confrontation with Modernity, fell along with its dragon. I
>mean there are a long list of reasons, and I am still trying to sort
>them out. It seems to me that in that equation is where you have to
>start all over again, and for some reason it just isn't getting
>done. Its pretty easy to lay out the capitalist media reasons, but
>somehow that isn't enough.
>
>Chuck Grimes