Quote:
Originally Posted by JunkyT  If we as Jazz musicians think of our music as "art music", we are doomed.
Jazz is soul music. And I don't mean like Otis Redding. I mean music that comes from, and should stir, the soul. Why should that be "unaccessible (sic) intellectually to most of the American public"?
Read some of the writings of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, hell, even Wynton Marsalis. They all talk about playing music FOR the audience, not for themselves or other musicians.
IMHO. ;) |
But unfortunately there isn't an audience anymore as there was when Louis, Duke, Horace and Blakey were around. Even into the sixties and seventies there was a network of clubs around the country where a band like Horace Silver's or Art Blakey's or Coltrane's or Miles' could get steady year 'round work. That enviornment has collapsed. Part of the challenge of jazz education is to create an audience for real jazz again. Without an audience it's a museum music. I think the biggest challenge that jazz as an art form faces is that the enviornment that forstered its development, indeed made it possible, has completely disappeared. Jazz musicians are now a fauna without a natural habitat.
That being said, jazz is indeed an art music, African American art music to be specific. It has standards and requirements as stringent as any in the history of the world. Whether it can survive as a live and vital form or just as an academic and museum form remains to be seen. One thing that I find encouraging is that it has become an underground and alternative art form again, like in the bebop days. I doubt Charlie Parker ever sold more than 5000 copies of any recording.
Michael McLaughlin