In Memorium, Jazz

The subject of my meta-ish-photo above is memory [I'll return to that originally intended theme at some point], but it could equally be about jazz, as the elements of its iconography are a number of themes expanded, repeated and improvised on. I was watching The Young Jazz Musician of the Year on BBC Four earlier, with, I have to say, decidedly mixed feelings. The quality of musicianship and performance exhibited by the young performers really can't - and shouldn't - be questioned, but the nagging sensation left by the music itself is one of stagnation. As I said to my late, great friend Johnny G - an erudite and learned jazz-fiend nonpareil - a couple of years before he died: practically all modern jazz is stuck in a kind of post-bop limbo: a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the dead-end that was free jazz. But music moves on. The true disruptors are also the true creators of their particular era, pushing the edges of their form whilst staying roughly within some sort of 'structure', be it rhythmic, melodic or harmonic: employing consonance or dissonance; shifting time and tempo, or any combination thereof to, well, upset the current apple-cart and get people's attention.

Armstrong, Gillespie, Monk, Kirk, Coltrane, McLaughlin. All [and many, many others] took the then standard forms of their eras and twisted them to their limits, and each in their turn became the standard forms of their genre. The problem we seem to have had - at least for the last forty or fifty years or so - is that the standard form is still pretty much the standard form, as if the very genre of music that historically posted itself outside the mainstream has become precisely that: the mainstream, and locked within it, apparently for good. The only 'out there' developments in recent decades have been in the realms of pop and electronic dance music, the latter a form which, at the moment, seems to be uniquely capable of the kind of continuous re-invention that jazz used to exhibit. That both are musics to be danced to is significant: the lounge jazz of post bop is music to eat a comfortable meal to, a soothing background ambience rather than the in-your-face-assault that jazz always was and should in essence be: just like rock & roll, punk or EDM. Needs a jump-start, methinks...