>
>An indication of this authority is the point I made earlier, that it would
>be almost impossible to find anyone from anywhere on the political,
>cultural and artistic spectrum to take issue with claim that jazz is
>america's classical music.
I disagree. Several people even here, including me, have been attacking this Marsalian line. Making jazz into classical music preserves it the way an emblamer preserves a body. That is why, in part, Marsalis ain't got no swing. It may be that jazz has exhausted its idiom and outrun its milieu, and that museums are all that is left for it; there are signs that support that--a damn shame if true. But classical music it's not; at its best, it doesn't involve more or less precise renditions of more or less complex pieces from standard scores produced by performers who creativity is a matter of fidelity to someone's idea of a composer's intentions. It involves active creativity right then and there, living interaction by performers whose own intentions matter often more than the "compsoers" whose work they exploit. I don't say one is better than another. They're different.
when one really looks critically at much of the
>jazz canon rather than being a kind of flower blooming in the rubbish heap
>of an historically oppressed culture it reflects the inevitable
>pathologies, arrested development, and reliance on obvious,
>unsophisticated, limited and frequently trivial musical techniques and
>strategies which one would predict.
Unlike, for example, grand opera, which is musically, etc. so sophisticated . . . . Well, sure, although you implicitly reduce jazz to black music, which you know better than to do. I mean, for example, although I acknoeledge that Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerakld are greater singers and artists, my favorire female jazz vocalist is Helen Merrill.
and in any event most of everything is rubbush, including classical music. Including the work of the masters of the clasasical canon. I mean, Mozart wrote 41 symphonies, plus or minus; and half a dozen or so a genuinely great works of art, and 20 or so are utterly forgettable. The rest are somewhere in between.
>why the defense and promotion of jazz should
>regarded as a central priority for reactionaries and progressives.
>
Hey, John; I just love the music. It's not even a political thing in any direct way, at least for me. The politics and history of it is interesting, but mainly I just love the music. I promote it because I hope to get other people as excited about this wonderful stuff as I am, and to help keep it around in a living form. It's not out of a sense of obligation to the oppressed, for example.
--jks _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com