Kamasi Washington - The Epic

d-40 i had never looked at your performance on the jazz poll thread before. sterling work

I hope you're being sarcastic. Deej was in 100% wounded narcissist identity politics posturing mode. As someone who listens to a lot of unfashionable trad jazz and loves eg Mary Lou Williams, and as someone who can see how reissue culture and rockist revisionism has skewed perceptions of the jazz canon, I still found deej's self-aggrandizing tantrum annoying and alienating. I can far more relate to the neophyte with 5 Sun Ra records than the guy who lets the tastes and mores of the contemporary jazz audience influence how he feels about the music he loves.

i think part of my resistance w/ Ra too is that like when i was learning abt jazz i was the only person i knew who really fucked w/ his stuff really heavy, & i kind of liked that about it? that he was a weird, outside artist for ppl who identified w/ weird, outside artists. but seeing him shifted to the center of the canon is just weird

― D-40, Friday, 2 September 2011 19:34 (4 years ago) Permalink

^^^Like this is a guy for whom music is beside the point.

It is? I'm still a sun ra fan, obviously where it stands in the canon doesn't impact whether or not I enjoy something. I just think it's corny when ppl act like record collector music was more central to jazz as a great recorded art than duke Ellington

At any rate I didn't even coin "spiritual hat jazz" but it's a fair critique of a trend in criticism not of music itself. Reading reviews of this album has been frustrating, as I feel as if they rarely dive into what it does rather than adding it up as a collection of influences that just so happen to be extraordinarily trendy. I'm willing to believe this project is totally great! Just that I'm not sold by the writing it's inspired. When I have four hours to finally give it a real listen I'll do that

Also I do wish pitchfork reviewed more jazz. I think. I don't keep up with it much any more, maybe most of it sucks, but If it doesn't I'd like to read anyone writing about it regularly

I think that 'record collector jazz', 'Sun Ra in the centre of the canon' thing is probably a big part of the reason why most 'normal' people turn their nose up at jazz.

Anyway, that aside, 'spiritual hat jazz' is the perfect description for this, and doesn't need to be read as a pejorative. It's great, but it does strike me as absolutely being to jazz what The Black Crows are to rock. Or maybe Primal Scream. (Actually maybe it's Wilco, and this is like Being There; a sprawling summation of all sides of a particular American music form, that celebrates them but doesn't really push them forward overtly.)

I buy maybe half a dozen new jazz albums each year - I'm a dilettante but my tastes are modernist and fusion-y by and large, and this does feel like revivalism and review. That said, it also feels like great fun, because it is.

As far as jazz in 2015, I much prefer, for instance, the Polar Bear, which does something completely different and unlike anything else I've heard.

I've convinced a couple of other people to buy this, and they both love it. Which is awesome.

I'd like to see any 'mainstream' alternative music writing venues cover more jazz.

What is it that is "reaching out to regular folks" other than its cool rapper friend marketing? Sincere question

― TheFatSJW (D-40), Sunday, October 4, 2015 8:52 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the live set was very different than the record in parts, more hip hop feel in parts, much more Meters-style funk, there was trad be-bop, more free stuff, etc but there was def a hard dancing vibe the whole time. the local NPR music station sponsored this so the crowd was probably 75% young white indie fans and older indie dues like myself and they KILLED it, it was a 4-hour party people were going nuts for this.

but the crowd was far more just a typical mpls indie rock show crowd than a jazz crowd

nobody wore a hat of any kind fwiw

you think "black crowes" stings? howzabout "this is the ryan adams of jazz"?

what was the last jazz record that made much a dent outside that particular eco-system…Vijay Iyer's?

it doesnmy sense is that the general influx of young guys and girls coming up through the jazz academies in the past 10-20 years tend to have incorporated hip-hop and…(deep breath) Radiohead. the first because it tends to be lingua franca of culture outside of school, the latter because it signifies proggy if default non-commercial notions of "good music." like I think Iyer and Brad Mehldau have recorded "exit music" or some shit…

also yeah is a 182 MINUTE TRIPLE CD album a little uneven...uh yeah..

is there at least about a great album and and half in there? I think so

is he a great live performer? yes, I also should note he's a tremendously democratic bandleader, his keyboardist/jack of all trades guy was really on equal footing, his father actually kind of stole the show when he came out fromp behind the t-shirt booth and sat in on soprano sax for the last hour and a half of the show...both drummers, the one who looked like the weeknd and the older dude who looked like he should run a pizza by the slice place in Queens, were great...the vocalist who frankly i don't love on the album was realy a nice presence and the bassist while not a great soloist (he might be TOO democratic a bandleader) was a hell of a funky dude and really in tune w/both drummers

so who knows is the the next coltrane? i don't fucking know but this felt more alive than any jazz show i've been to in recent years, it was a party and also spiritual at times. Honestly if you claim to love jazz and are going to sit around pissing on this little mini-phenomenon you should ask yourself if you really WANT jazz to be a healthy, living music or just your own little fiefdom.

also saying the dude is a Love Supreme Black Crowes is a little hard to believe when the keyboardist spent more than half the show torturing crazy Bernie Worrell sounds out of this:

http://www.oldtech.com/synth/MoogLiberation.jpg

what was the last jazz record that made much a dent outside that particular eco-system…Vijay Iyer's?

colin stetson?

was trying to say that hip-hop and radiohead seem to be common elements that jazz artists of the past 10-20 years have added, which is to say that making music that seems to ape the 1920-1965 canon the way Wynton and Stanley seem to demand has nt been the only option. In fact, now I remember that Nate Chinen talked about some manifesto or other that some well known player made making the case that fusion and other idioms is no longer verboten. was it the bad plus guy who does the well regarded blog?

Colin Stetson strikes me as not jazz

what was the last jazz record that made much a dent outside that particular eco-system…Vijay Iyer's?

Iyer got a pair of Pitchfork reviews, but that's because he's got a really, really good publicist. I don't think it translated into sales or a much higher public profile. (In jazzworld there's a snarky joke that Iyer's publicist should have gotten a percentage of his MacArthur money.)

Fire Orchestra! also had good crossover success afaik

Matthew Shipp

is he a great live performer? yes, I also should note he's a tremendously democratic bandleader, his keyboardist/jack of all trades guy was really on equal footing, his father actually kind of stole the show when he came out fromp behind the t-shirt booth and sat in on soprano sax for the last hour and a half of the show...both drummers, the one who looked like the weeknd and the older dude who looked like he should run a pizza by the slice place in Queens, were great...the vocalist who frankly i don't love on the album was realy a nice presence and the bassist while not a great soloist (he might be TOO democratic a bandleader) was a hell of a funky dude and really in tune w/both drummers

this was pretty much exactly my experience (I'm not much of a jazz guy, fwiw) except the dad was out front from the beginning, and this is hilariously otm:

the older dude who looked like he should run a pizza by the slice place in Queens

(( as long as we have a knowledgeable jazz thread going, if anyone can point me to more stuff - new or old - like the Greg Foat Group's Girl and Robot with Flowers, please do: https://thegregfoatgroup.bandcamp.com/album/girl-and-robot-with-flowers ))

This is what has got me so excited for the London show: https://youtu.be/0YbPSIXQ4q4

Here's a performance taped on the same tour I caught:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrcoUKohf6k

no idea the stature of christian scott, but he's another jazz dude who's covered thom yorke lol, but he draws a bunch of disciplines together in a really captivating way. I've seen him live several times too, and the explosive interplay between him and his band occasionally gives me second quintet vibes, my favorite vibes. i just reviewed his new album, which should be up this week

Please post a link - I like his stuff, and didn't even realize he had a new album coming since he's not on Concord anymore. I think I might grab it from Bandcamp this week.

it's really good!

Ken Vandermark has a lot of ties to Chicago rock stuff

shit watching that video forgot the trombone player was great too

wait deej you didn't even listen to the album? lmao

very busy guy, those 100 hottest sluts on instagram slideshows don't write themselves you know

torturing crazy Bernie Worrell sounds out of this:

oh man one of my bandmates had one of those!! and the craziest thing about it (and the reason we could never get it to work) was that the audio output and the power supply are incorporated into a single cable, it's bizarre.

that's crazy, were there feedback/ground problems?

There's a custom Moog cable that you need to run from the keytar to that little box in the top of the picture - the little box has a power cable that you plug into the wall, and an audio out jack to send the signal to an amplifier. It's like a custom pre-amp. But we could never find the cable required, it was some random 13-pin thing made only for that Moog model.

I was v sad we couldn't even get a sound out of it.

very busy guy, those 100 hottest sluts on instagram slideshows don't write themselves you know

― balls, Monday, 5 October 2015 15:43 (2 hours ago) Permalink

you have no idea what i do

but the crowd was far more just a typical mpls indie rock show crowd than a jazz crowd

― Ma$e-en-scène (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, October 5, 2015 8:25 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nobody wore a hat of any kind fwiw

― Ma$e-en-scène (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, October 5, 2015 8:25 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's exactly the crowd that has driven the pharaoh sanders >>> duke smellington historical revisionism i'm talking about though lol

i mean, i get it, once ken burns & wynton & crouch deify "trad" jazz (the idea that it's any more 'trad' than '70s fusion is a trick of perspective obv, there was a time when bebop was radical and a time when spiritual hat was radical and neither are true today) then someone needs to come along & find the 'jazz that seems cool still'. and so you end up w/ these alternative canons. that's good! my argument in the other jazz thread was merely that we should acknowledge that was happening, that when it comes to how people actually experienced the time things were a little different

wait deej you didn't even listen to the album? lmao

i said that in my very first post in the thread, from the beginning ive been criticizing its the way its covered not the music itself.

again this is a failing of the writing/marketing of this stuff...the only piece i read about kamasi that gave some of the real-world-context was Ben Ratliff's which at least goes into a little more depth on the scene he's emerged from in Los Angeles.

pharaoh sanders >>> duke smellington

is there anyone that actually sez this, pics or it didn't happen

the ilx jazz poll says that

there's a difference between saying what you like vs. saying what is historically important. I am more often in the mood for spiritual hats than Duke, but no way would I say that the former is more important or central to the jazz canon than the latter.

i mean, i get it, once ken burns & wynton & crouch deify "trad" jazz (the idea that it's any more 'trad' than '70s fusion is a trick of perspective obv, there was a time when bebop was radical and a time when spiritual hat was radical and neither are true today) then someone needs to come along & find the 'jazz that seems cool still'. and so you end up w/ these alternative canons. that's good! my argument in the other jazz thread was merely that we should acknowledge that was happening, that when it comes to how people actually experienced the time things were a little different

Wellll...As someone who just recently packed his iPod full of Weather Report (pre-Jaco only), Jean-Luc Ponty, Stanley Clarke, Billy Cobham, George Duke and Al DiMeola albums, '70s-style fusion really hasn't become a "tradition" in the way you can still hear dudes making brand-new albums that sound like hard bop circa 1959. Part of this is because players who gravitated toward fusion tend to update with newer synths rather than continuing to use old equipment, they adopt contemporary production techniques (with the usual jazz musician's time-lag of being 5 years or so behind R&B producers, of course), etc., etc. And even "free" jazz, while you can still draw lines from Ayler et al. to what's happening now, has changed quite a bit. The biggest change came in the '90s, when players started exploiting CD storage capacity to release 60- and 70-minute pieces that never would have made it to vinyl in the old days. But the music has also gotten even more assaultive and unremitting - I mean, Ayler had melodies; Charles Gayle doesn't. I think contemporary free jazz is still "radical" in the sense that it'll send most people out of the room faster than any other form of jazz.

Hey deej you asked me how he was reaching out to non-jazz audiences, shit tons of indie rockers have zero idea who the fuck pharoah sanders is, this was that crowd

you also ignored all my posts about the actual show and how it was a lot more funk & rnb at times than pharoah sanders

Shakey he means JAZZ IS LIKE HEROIN TO ME ! ! ! ~~~~ ILM POST-1945 JAZZ ALBUMS POLL - THE RESULTS COUNTDOWN (now counting top 25!) but i do not recall anyone saying it

I know what he means! I voted in that poll

even as a pharoah sanders fan it wont surprise anybody to learn that it was the funky stuff that drew me in.

xp

i couldnt remember if you did or not. Phil did you vote? (i know deej didn't)

Nah, I don't vote in those gigantic-ass polls. I get 1/16 of the way through the book of nominations and my eyes glaze over.

I love when people who vote in polls complain that the results aren't canonical enough, never gets old

people who DON'T arggh

A lot of these jazz cannon type lists always seem to feature Ellington at Newport and omit at least 6 or 7 of his masterworks, at least this is an impression I get.

haha both groups complain! its what ilx polls are about! Theyre never dull thats for sure

xp

man, do you guys talk to each other like this based purely on opinions expressed on this fucking board? or did somebody fuck another guy's wife? sheesh…

on the last song, and the only thing I hear that seems outside of the 'Trane playbook is the persistent use of heavenly chorales, a la the end of the first side of what's going on.

i think the axelrod influence is just as big as coltrane

honestly guys, no matter what you think of washington he's a human being and doesn't deserve to be dragged into bickering about an ILM jazz poll, have a little decency

http://payload187.cargocollective.com/1/12/402674/6056932/WE_GOT_THE_JAZZ.jpg