``I can do without out about 99% of contemporary jazz, but for decades people made great jazz that had a lot of crossover with other styles. Even country...'' Dennis Claxton
-------
I was lucky to have listened to jazz as a kid, and then ready for the changes and evolution of the sound until it got so far out, most people stopped listening... I really have to be in the mood for some of the late work.
Even so, I was again lucky since the bay area had a good radio station, KJAZ...which started off pretty stuff-shirt...then got much better as different DJs followed their own interests and talked about who individuals were playing in the group, when it was recorded and what some of them were doing. I used to religiously listen at night in my studio, which also had some practice rooms rented out in the same building. Every now and then I tune in on KCSM to listen to Michael Berman on Saturday nights. He took over for John Rogers. Roger went through a pretty good period for a long time and then started to narrow down and then lose interest or maybe just getting old.
Anyway, over the period from the late 60s through the middle-70s the scene was dying off, or the life was bleeding out of jazz...something. Kjaz used to go to clubs sometimes and set up a live feed, which hopefully they also recorded and kept in their library.
I don't know and have never quite figured out how both painting and jazz were alive for a long time and somehow lost it. I think part of the problem was the way you learned one or the other was from people doing the painting or the music that attracted you. You can't learn just from pictures or recordings. I mean you can start with books and records, but sooner or later you have to get in there directly in the flesh, to see how its done.
I had a couple of friends who were musicians and had a medium sized grand piano. Just going through music with them was an amazingly insightful couple of hours. What makes Bach work? How do you get that sound in jazz? Do an arabic scale and then show me how it's different from a western. Play one of the Eisler tunes slow so I can really see it? Joyce was really schooled deep into most of western music from the Gothic through Modern. She almost had a PhD, but dropped out...running out money...running out of interest in academia.
Anyway, that's my current theory. Ben Shahn wrote an interesting little book called The Shape of Content (1957). Part of it is about trying to do art in a university. He was skeptical. Part of the reason was that both his art and most of the good jazz were expressions of revolt on multiple levels. Now if the bourgeois and the academy are picking up the bill, you see the conflict.
It just occurred to me too, that this dialectic between art and politics is going on right now in the middle east and probably has been for some time. So there's probably some good art getting done.
Just read this from Mark Bennett:
``At the risk of simplification, jazz lost its vitality when it left the bandstand and entered the university, although the academy may be the only thing keeping the music alive, at least in the U.S.''
Speaking as a former art student, there is something that really kills art (creativity itself?) in the university....maybe it's true of art schools too. You don't feel it at first but eventually it starts to get to you. You have to get out if you want to stay alive. When I finally got out at first I didn't know what to do. I had to work in the garage. But I also had to catch up by going down to LA again to see some friends working.
I suspect most of the arts are like that. They need their own training systems. These American art forms evolved out of non-traditional, excluded people, who developed their own training or schooling systems. Once those systems were erased, the vitality, that special stuff, whatever it was went too.
CG