Hip Genres & Musical Styles: Which Is The Worst??

also there are like a zillion local mini-scenes where free improv + noise are in constant communication and collaboration xp

but only one of you can be the most annoying person in the room about it, i have my bet on you :)

― ꙮ (map), Wednesday, 24 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

So have I! I always back myself :)

The average person is probably thinking of someone who is in the jazz charts doing a copy of Bill Evans. We can both play this game.

― xyzzzz__

we should just find an average person and ask them what they think of when they think of jazz

i'd say maybe _a charlie brown christmas_ but probably people think of that as christmas music, not jazz music

and most early Merzbow is literally improvised noise made with junk objects!

― broken breakbeat (sleeve), Wednesday, 24 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

That stuff comes out of a dada-ist approach. It's not rooted in jazz.

https://masamiakitamerzbow.bandcamp.com/album/door-open-at-8-am-remastered-bonus-tracks

the recorded wolf eyes + anthony braxton performance is all-time

borbetomagus too

― c u (crüt), Wednesday, 24 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I know that record but I don't see any long term associations here. Braxton has composed classical works too iirc.

This thread is really paying off thanks folks

i asked a random co-worker what she thought of when she thought of jazz and she said stan getz

it turns out she likes jazz

oh well, i tried

I def think of "improv" and "free jazz" as two very different things, both w/varying degrees of crossover to noise (which, again, I differentiate from "industrial")

Jazz is about cow

Surprised northern soul got three votes. The people may be insufferable but the music is sublime

― ian, Tuesday, May 23, 2023 5:13 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yeah this is weird. I hate it when a DJ plays....classic R&B and soul records!!!

Huh

My huh was an xpost to myself sirry

oh okay yeah i agree w/you

we should just find an average person and ask them what they think of when they think of jazz

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81xLhMMoRRL._AC_SX355_.jpg

i like the cut of his jib

T/S: Acker Bilk vs Herbie Mann

Average person would say Charlie Brown music

Snoopy music surely

when I was teaching (adults) in China I would sometimes ask students what music they liked, about 10% said "jazz" - by which they generally meant kenny g.

T/S: Acker Bilk vs Herbie Mann

where does al "he's the king" hirt factor into this?

lol I was gonna mention him

also Herbie Mann rules, c'mon, sure there is schlock but a lot of cool stuff as well

Not about music, just a knee-jerk reaction I had to that album cover. Something about the facial hair. The late 60s Mann band with Sonny and Linda Sharrock got pretty ferocious at times.

yeah, see also this insane LP
https://www.discogs.com/release/1366821-Herbie-Mann-Gagaku-Beyond

otm some herbie mann was decent early new age/jazz fusion. kinda ecm lite. very not bad.

also yeah- push push is one of the worst covers ever.

lol I also love hot bear disco Herbie but ymmv

stone flute is a great herbie mann album, lots of atmosphere

If you say GAPDY to the average person, they think of cargo shorts.

Landfill GAPDY

I think improvisation comes from an entirely different outlook than what it is to make industrial music or noise like Merzbow.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, May 24, 2023 12:47 PM (ten hours ago)

are you talking about free jazz or "improvisation" in the white Euro tradition ... because free jazz (even though there have been some solid musicians who are white and from Europe who play "the music") comes from an African-American tradition where the "outlook" (and idk if you can even just say there is a solitary outlook) is a bit different? I mean, there are certain similarities between what I think of as the free jazz "outlook" and one of the "outlooks" of noise/industrial -- which has to do with a certain amount of "catharsis" (for lack of a better term), though a tendency of free jazz is to see it more of a spiritual "positive" exaltation, whereas noise can be more of an exorcism kinda? Whereas the white Euro practitioners tend to be more cerebral and controlled in how they feel/talk about what they're doing and why ... that's just my off the cuff take on it

Average person would say Charlie Brown music

― INDEPENDENTS DAY BY STEVEN SPILBERG (President Keyes), Wednesday, May 24, 2023 2:03 PM (nine hours ago)

or ... Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong ... in re stuff like this commercial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQJUpg0vU_I

more jazz that an average person would be familiar with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c4_b5PHWg8

are you talking about free jazz or "improvisation" in the white Euro tradition ... because free jazz (even though there have been some solid musicians who are white and from Europe who play "the music") comes from an African-American tradition where the "outlook" (and idk if you can even just say there is a solitary outlook) is a bit different? I mean, there are certain similarities between what I think of as the free jazz "outlook" and one of the "outlooks" of noise/industrial -- which has to do with a certain amount of "catharsis" (for lack of a better term), though a tendency of free jazz is to see it more of a spiritual "positive" exaltation, whereas noise can be more of an exorcism kinda? Whereas the white Euro practitioners tend to be more cerebral and controlled in how they feel/talk about what they're doing and why ... that's just my off the cuff take on it

― sarahell, Thursday, 25 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Free jazz comes from jazz, as does Euro improv; they are both departures not only because of the "free", but because they pare it down to the act of improvisation. By doing so they can incorporate a lot more "outlooks".

Look at Braxton and the Chicago crowd who did look toward what was happening in European composition. Cecil or Sun Ra were looking back toward Ellington and also forging a path in answer to developments in composition in Europe (Ra played a solo recital; Taylor's unit records and then throwing that vocal poetry concrete record). Alice Coltrane or Ayler has a spiritual dimension but it's their improvising in a group context that allows for the expression of that dimension.

Equally the free improv guys would reject jazz but it's clearly bullshit, they might've been antagonistic but they were clearly developing the music with jazz in the background. Abe and Takayanagi's duos would not have been possible without improvisation. "Mass" projection might go down well with a noise crowd but they might walk off during "Gradual Projection". Only by looking at this stuff as an improvisation can you really join the dots.

"Noise" has a different set of roots: avant-garde electronic pieces from Varese/Nono/Xenakis, Concrete, things like Metal Machine Music, dada's junkyardisms, free jazz and improv too. But in the end -- generally speaking -- it's a lot more sculptured and has a "cathartic" sounding outcome from the off. A noise record will seldom play with the quiet.

my kneejerk reductive distinction is that "free jazz" often seems to implicitly reject notions of linear time and past vs future in a still-pretty-radical kind of way while euro style improv has a tendency to see itself as a some sort of eternally progressive vanguard in the modernist tradition (which i guess is a thing) or at least as some kind of pure postcagean endpoint that lesser music hasn't caught up with yet (even though much of it is a heritage industry at this point)

this is probably unfair to some of the musicians but not to some of the fans

I can't imagine there are too many "euro style improv" fans who aren't also fans of free jazz tbh. I see the same faces at both gigs.

A noise record will seldom play with the quiet.

I guess I am thinking of something different re: "noise" because I very much disagree with this

also this owns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUI26elO_Eg

From an interview with Bill Dixon:

https://jazztimes.com/archives/bill-dixon-veiled-odyssey/

That same year [1951] Dixon met Cecil Taylor, with whom he began to play occasionally and hold long discussions on “the plight of the black artist in America” and the future direction of jazz. At the time he was not consciously trying to create a new music.

“No, that wasn’t it at all. It’s very simple. I no longer felt the need to be playing the standard literature within the vernacular. I felt that you can’t improve on that, so there must be something else. Because how many times can you play ”Round Midnight’ or any of those beautiful tunes? All the pieces that we liked were already heavily identified with someone else’s rendition anyway. What are you going to do? Change a key every eight bars? We tried all of that. We did a lot of crazy things in those days, trying to formulate a way of thinking for yourself. We listened, we analyzed. It didn’t just happen with people standing up and blowing their brains out. This is what a lot of people don’t understand.”

hey xyzzz -- I feel like you have a fairly thoughtful and knowledgeable post re free jazz and the Euro offshoots and some of the main practitioners as far as the improvisation aspect goes. So, I'm not going to get into other things like "swing" and "playing time" and how some free jazz musicians had those jazz basics under their belts and incorporated them / played with/off those, whereas once you move further into "pure improv" territory (generally whiter and often younger) there is a tendency to disown all "gambits" and familiar structures that come from jazz. I know tarfumes knows this stuff too, so if he wants to bring it up ...

But I think you don't have that same knowledge of industrial/noise ... so you are making assertions that those of us who are more familiar are having some "wtf" type responses to ... along the lines of when I accidentally besmirched Tropicalia upthread by assuming it all sounded like The Girl From Ipanema

xp - Dixon was definitely a solid thinker as well as player -- sorry if I oversimplified earlier

euro style improv has a tendency to see itself as a some sort of eternally progressive vanguard in the modernist tradition (which i guess is a thing) or at least as some kind of pure postcagean endpoint that lesser music hasn't caught up with yet (even though much of it is a heritage industry at this point)

― your original display name is still visible (Left), Thursday, May 25, 2023 4:27 AM (two hours ago)

this is well put!

sorry if I oversimplified earlier

No apology necessary! The problem is, a fair number of histories of the music tend to be reductive (e.g., “A BUNCH OF DUDES SAID FUCK IT, WE’RE GONNA SCREAM ON OUR HORNS! AND EVERYONE HATED IT!”) and simplistic, and romanticize things in such a way that reinforces inaccuracies.

yeah, and that point about histories also brings to mind something that has made me struggle with this thread ... that in some of these genres, we are discussing only the "household names" and making generalizations based on a handful of musicians, while there are (or were) hundreds (if not thousands) of others making music in said genres ... as in, perhaps the musicians that are serving as the basis for the generalizations aren't necessarily representative of the genre as a whole?

euro style improv has a tendency to see itself as a some sort of eternally progressive vanguard in the modernist tradition (which i guess is a thing) or at least as some kind of pure postcagean endpoint that lesser music hasn't caught up with yet (even though much of it is a heritage industry at this point)

This is what's so interesting to me about talking to Peter Brötzmann — although he plays with all the Euro improv dudes (the ones who are still alive), he definitely considers himself a jazz musician where lots of them don't or didn't (Derek Bailey telling me that for him, jazz was dead by 1953!), and he considers a lot of their attempts to get "past" jazz and into "pure music" or whatever fairly absurd.

sorry to barge in with a tangential question -and maybe wrong thread- but what is the distinction between "free jazz" and "collective improvisation"? i'm always reminded of this amg review of an old keith jarrett album:

For many years, the trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette has been taking jazz standards and expanding them via improvisation into an entire language that reflects not only the history but also the eternal present of jazz. Many have wondered if Jarrett would ever return to the "free" style of playing he did in the 1960s on releases for Columbia, Atlantic, and Impulse! It would be both impossible and unreasonable to expect a musician like Jarrett -- and his sidemen for that matter -- to return to the fold of an innocence they lost long ago, when they were lesser musicians than they are now. Inside Out, recorded over two nights in July 2000 in London, bridges that gap: It is completely improvised save for one tune -- an almost unbearably beautiful reading of "When I Fall in Love" -- done as an encore. Here are Jarrett, Peacock, and DeJohnette as they haven't been heard from in years, starting from silence, digging deep into the history of jazz, blues and even R&B to invent spontaneously a musical language that is trio-specific, communicative on the deepest levels of nuance, sonances, and spirit. The opening track, "From the Body," begins as a careening trip through the blues, from Memphis to St. Louis back through Mississippi to New Orleans and coming to rest in Chicago. Given how close the dialogue is here, and the expansive harmonic invention at work in the middle registers of the piano and the bass, it becomes a blur -- it's impossible to really know who is leading or following or if such a hierarchy even exists anymore. When the blues disintegrate gradually -- and momentarily -- and are replaced by what is defined in the vernacular as "free" playing, the dissonance is traipsed upon only slightly. It's not as if it doesn't belong or isn't welcome, it's just that it's a minor concern because these guys know where they are going or at least want to go. It's familiar but not well-tread or predictable; it's invigorating, knife-edge improvisation. By the time the title track fades in, listeners know that the entire fake book has been thrown out the window and the standards have been erased (or at least left in the hallmarks of collective jazz memory), in favor of this language that calls upon their dignity and verve while establishing its own propriety and basis of utterance. Does it swing? Hell yes it does, if your definition of that word is something other than cut, 4/4, or waltz time -- though some of the music played here engages those very signatures exquisitely. Most importantly, the trio of Jarrett, Peacock, and DeJohnette offers a new kind of free jazz -- one that is lyrical, tonally accessible, and musically elegant, tailored by the ears and executed with the grace of the heart. Many younger players who believe that the only way to improvise freely is to tear their chosen instrument to shreds and bleat every ounce of pain and suffering that can be extracted from it need to hear this record, badly. In it they may find the true secrets of the masters, and the sheer poetics of the improvisational artistry that is jazz.

does it need to be total skronk in order to be free jazz? or are these just scholarly terms for pedants to distinguish between stuff they like and stuff they don't?

(because honestly, if you had told me inside out was free jazz, it would have been confusing because it sounds like any other keith jarrett trio recording. maybe i'm wrong though and it doesn't need to be skronk in order to technically be free jazz)

"Hipster music" is usually shit that gets to be a pain in the ass and I dunno apart from the pioneers I don't think of dub fandom as a burdensome experience like some genres.

I don't mean the originators are burdensome - I mean that amassing records or knowledge is burdensome.

Entire books have been written, etc., but...

does it need to be total skronk in order to be free jazz? or are these just scholarly terms for pedants to distinguish between stuff they like and stuff they don't?

No, "total skronk" (aka "fire music") is one free jazz mode. But what Ornette Coleman did — highly melodic heads, eccentrically swinging rhythms, improvisation untethered to chord changes — was another. What Cecil Taylor did — piano concertos based on small melodic motifs repeatedly analyzed and reinterpreted — was another. What Wadada Leo Smith does — extremely patient improvisation based as much on powerful silences as individual notes — is another. What Roscoe Mitchell does — extreme juxtaposition, short vs long, loud vs soft, high vs low notes — is another. "Collective improvisation" is what it sounds like; a group of players start from zero. These are to some degree "scholarly terms" in that critics and professors use them more often than musicians do onstage. Young players may describe themselves as "free jazz" players, but older ones are likely to just say they play music, and not want to put labels on it.

These are to some degree "scholarly terms" in that critics and professors use them more often than musicians do onstage.

well, musicians often use these terms or refer to the musicians known for playing music in said styles when they are "offstage" and when they are booking gigs ... as in the conversations that lead up to getting onstage and playing.