> 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 !
Just using CB's post as a spring board....
I have to take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite groups, Medeski Martin & Wood. They are a jazz trio from NYC. If you associate jazz with rich white folks nodding along to snobby music and not moving their bodies please do check out MMW. Often they play with a DJ (DJ Logic) and personally I love the addition he brings to the group (but then I'm an electronica and hip-hop fan as well). MMW shows are quite a party. They did take some criticsm a few years ago for "touring like a rock band", meaning they would play loud and they would play in a rock club with a dance floor rather than a jazz dinner theatre (primarily).
MMW did open for Phish (neo-hippie rock band similar to the Grateful Dead) and they have what Jerry Garcia once described as "The Curse" to Branford Marsalis: when a band opens for the Dead (or Phish) and the fans like them they will always come to their shows, start taping them and trading the tapes, and obsess about every little minutea regarding their art form (Branford asked Garcia why all these deadheads were still coming to his shows all the time, years after his group had opened for the Dead). I just wanted to mention this as the hippie contingent often confuses people at MMW shows.
Anyway: http://www.mmw.net
Matt
-- Matt Cramer <cramer at voicenet.com> http://www.voicenet.com/~cramer/ There are only two kinds of artists: the plagiarists and the revolutionaries.
-Paul Gauguin