Is Modern Jazz an Oxymoron?
It's like any other age and genre. There's some great music out there and a lot of crap. Check out this clip of Jeff "Tain" Watts' group playing very modern composition in 2011. It's a very difficult piece of music with changing tempos in every section, but these guys make it sound very listenable, even to someone who thinks the 50's-60's were jazz's high point. You need to look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPpciCh4i0Q |
It is hard to put jazz into neat categories. The jazz I like has melody or rhythm or something that I can recognize, maybe described as a song. The musicians can depart from the melody or rhythm and become discordant or whatever, but remain connected to the song or composition or whatever they are playing. Jazz musicians today increasingly seem to want to be less connected to a song. They don’t seem to want any structure. They want to be able to just blow and skronk and maybe connect with one another a couple of times in a piece of music. There is no rhythm section that keeps the group anchored. Drums are now a lead instrument and the drummer is back there bashing away with no connection to what anyone else is doing. That’s the way it sounds to me anyway. I’m not a musician. That said, I do find quite a bit of jazz that does have structure, sounds nice and has musicians playing together. It’s not as common as during the classic Blue Note years, but there’s still a lot of jazz musicians doing this. That leads me to a question I’ve long wondered about. Can anyone explain to me why jazz musicians like to blow and skronk and bash so much? Is that hard to do? It seems to me that improvising in some kind of structure would require greater artistry than everyone just making noises on their instruments. Does it? |
