Quote:
Originally Posted by Billy B  Ingrid,
I guess I must be getting old. After the gig a few nights past I was at the bar, imagine that, eavesdropping on a couple of the young guys. They both have college teaching jobs and are great players. The crux of their conversation was on academics. I suddenly realized that an entire generation has evolved that never heard Miles, Dizzy, Woody Shaw, Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, etc. Their entire point of reference is from recordings and books. They speak of the best place to get a degree, the best place to teach. The same conversation the legit guys were having when I was their age. Has academia provided the vehicle for the preservation of Jazz or has it become an elitist club that limits the common man's accessibility to this music called Jazz? |
This is at least partly a natural progression. My students today have no way to experience what I experienced (seeing Miles, Dizzy, Joe Henderson, Don Cherry, Woody Shaw, Mingus, Ellington, etc). Part of it is being in Des Moines;if you were in a bigger urban enviornment you would know people who had access to these giants. Oral tradition is very important. We're just about to hire at our school a sax player who played both with Count Basie and Earl Hines; that's an experience you can't duplicate and he'll be able to impart direct first hand knowledge from those masters to our students. But eventually those guys will be gone too, and then what do you do? At least in jazz everything (more or less) is recorded and if you have the ability to transcribe recordings you can get to the real meat of the tradition. Sam Rivers used to say, "If you can deal with records you can sit at the feet of the masters."
Michael McLaughlin
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin