Why Jazz Sucks, And Is Stupid, With Video Illustrations

1) Music Without Words Is Kind Of Inherently Lame, No?

In 1967, after the death of his Orchestra’s vital com­poser, arranger, and pian­ist Billy Strayhorn (who suc­cumbed to can­cer at the age of 51), grief-stricken bandlead­er Duke Ellington and his musi­cians recor­ded the trib­ute album …and his moth­er called him Bill, an argu­ably well-chosen selec­tion of some of Strayhorn’s best-liked tunes, includ­ing of course his melod­ic dir­ec­tions to Harlem, “Take The A Train.” After the ses­sion prop­er, while musi­cians fol­ded chairs and dis­cussed plans for their even­ings, Ellington him­self sat at the piano and played a gor­geous, and plainly tortured-with-loss ver­sion of Strayhorn’s ostens­ibly exquis­ite bal­lad “Lotus Blossom.” Listening to it, Ellington’s per­son­al sense of loss is palp­able. Still. One can­’t help but think how much strongly The Duke could have sold the tune with some lyr­ics. Maybe some­thing along the lines of “I’m really sad/that you’re dead/Billy Strayhorn./You played piano/but you /didn’t play horn.” Just give a listen and see if you don’t agree. 

2) So Many Kinds Of Music Gets Categorized As Jazz That People Don’t Even Really Know What The Hell Jazz Is. What’s Up With That? 

Like, a couple of months ago, I was listen­ing to some stuff by The Boswell Sisters, a New-Orleans-originating trio of white women (sis­ters, just like the group name says) who did all sorts of synthesizing-and-innovative things with har­mony and syn­co­pa­tion and tone, vocal wise, that no less an expert than Donald Fagen (noted old white jazzbo who man­aged to have a few hit records in the ’70s) has com­pared their body of work, significance-wise, to that of the afore­men­tioned Duke Ellington. And their mater­i­al is pretty peppy, des­pite it sound­ing kinda tinny and not being in ste­reo because most of the best of it is derived from ancient tran­scrip­tions of ancient radio record­ings. Not long after that, I listened to a record by an out­fit that calls itself The Apophonics. Another trio, this one all guys, and not related, one of whom plays bass, okay that’s a real instru­ment, the oth­er of whom plays sax­o­phone, or sax­o­phones, because he switches them on occa­sion I guess. And then there’s the third guy, who plays, get this, “ener­gised sur­faces & synth.” “Energised” because they’re a British out­fit I guess. So any­ways, while The Boswell Sisters’ disc I’d had on, Airshots And Rarities 1930–1935 fea­tures twenty nifty dit­ties, from “Here Comes The Sun” (not the Beatles’ tune, but they’re lame too, but that’s for a dif­fer­ent post) to “Lullaby Of Broadway” (is that gay, you think?), On Air by The Apophonics fea­tures three “pieces,” and while the Boswell Sisters sing pep­pily, the Apophonics’s “pieces” are made up of them rub­bing and scrap­ing their tra­di­tion­al instru­ments, such as they are, and whatever the hell the ener­gized (screw you, limey, I’m using the American spelling) sur­faces are. AND YET. In the liner notes to On Air is is revealed that these pieces were ori­gin­ally heard on “the BBC pro­gramme [Christ this British spelling again] ‘Jazz on 3’.” JAZZ on 3. How is this scrap­ing and bow­ing and blat­ting and silence any rela­tion to the “jazz” that is prac­ticed by the peppy Boswell Sisters? Some musi­co­lo­gist might ven­ture that, well, the break­downs to which the Boswell Sisters sub­jec­ted the mater­i­al they chose is the most cru­cial pro­ponent of their music, and that, as dis­sim­il­ar to the Boswell Sisters as, say, Thelonious Monk might sound, his pro­ject of music­al decon­struc­tion was not inher­ently too far away from the Boswell Sisters’ pro­ject. Of course the aim might be hugely dif­fer­ent rel­at­ive to poten­tial audi­ences, but let’s put that aside for the moment. In any event, what a combo like the Apophonics is doing is con­duct­ing an inquiry into the nature of music itself, that is, tak­ing a pro­posed sound world that has been even more dis­mantled of cer­tain par­tic­u­lars than either the Boswells or Monk neces­sar­ily dreamed of, or con­sciously dreamed of, and sub­ject­ing it to a kind of impro­visa­tion­al stress test. 

Maybe that’s so, but Jesus. How pre­ten­tious. 

Anyway, Washington Post edit­or­i­al per­son and part-time post-punk musi­cian Justin Moyer put it much more eleg­antly in his recent op-ed piece when he pro­nounced: “Charlie Parker and John Zorn do not seem to occupy the same son­ic uni­verse, let alone belong in the same record bin or iTunes menu.”

As my old pal Lex G. might say, “YEP YEP.” Here’s alto sax­o­phon­ist John Zorn play­ing with the Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet: 

3) I Don’t “Get” Your Aesthetic, And If You Don’t Understand How That Invalidates Your Whole Project, I Feel Bad For You, Son, But That’s No Reason For You To Become Unpleasant

In the afore­men­tioned Washington Post piece, Moyer recalls study­ing jazz with the likes of Anthony Braxton, Pheeroan akLaff, and Jay Hoggard. “I appre­ci­ated that these gen­er­ous African American men deigned to share their art at a quite white New England liberal-arts school,” Moyers allows, and as you see there is not a trace of racist con­des­cen­sion in his nev­er­the­less quite white remin­is­cence. Like he said, he appre­ci­ated it, but “I just didn’t get their aes­thet­ic.” And for an aes­thet­ic to be val­id, a white boy has to get it. In case you’re inter­ested in the aes­thet­ic Moyer gets, well, here’s the web­site for his band, which has a cute name. Also, in the words of Mark E. Smith, “You are work­ing on a video pro­ject.” Why does­n’t this kind of stuff get grants? And also, you don’t have to get so shirty, Amiri Baraka, or do I mean LeRoi Jones? I mean, really.