Cool Talk

Ever since Terry Teachout’s “Can Jazz Be Saved?” there’s been a serious debate raging through the jazz blogosphere over, well, how to make jazz relevant again. I didn’t start Inverted Garden because of the Teachout article and its aftermath, but it definitely gave the last little push I needed to actually register a TypePad account and a Go Daddy domain name.

I can’t claim to have followed the debate over The Future of Jazz everywhere for the last few months, but I think these recent posts illustrate a few different ways people are taking it.

Vikram and Matt at Twenty Dollars have compiled a YouTube-supported argument that Hollywood and pop culture portray jazz as profoundly uncool and its fans as a bunch of dorks. I don’t find the post all that persuasive, but it’s worth checking out for the comment section where Vijay Iyer works himself into a frenzy and then brings in the 800-pound themes, asking if the “uncoolness” of jazz has to do with the music’s economic prospects (bleak) and race (black). (In my first post, I mentioned Madavor (“Teddy Bear and Friends”) Media’s acquisition of Jazz Times as a sign of a potential “uncool” (or, really, an insular and distant from the world) apocalypse, but even if Jazz Times starts catering to an increasingly stuffy audience, I don’t think the entire music will follow suit—it’s just going to take new media outlets to spread the word.

Patrick Jarenwattananon, NPR’s jazz blogger, finishes up his excellent Jazz Now series with a selection of some of the best reader comments. Particularly relevant to this thread:

Commenter Dave Rohner noted via e-mail that he thought "the key to attracting a young audience is intensity." To flesh out what I think he's saying, if you present any sort of passionately-felt music -- in the correct environment -- the young audience will follow. I like this; I think people are drawn toward any sort of strong musical conviction, whether uptempo, languid, or somewhere in between.

I really like what Patrick is saying here and I think it ties in nicely with my last post on booing. The way to build an audience that looks to jazz as a serious contributor to the larger culture isn’t to convince them that it’s “cool”—suave, relaxing, above-it-all—but to show them that it’s engaged in a mad quest to understand, in the words of David Foster Wallace, “what it is to be a fucking human being.” Anyone who has seriously listened to Monk, Mingus, and Coltrane knows that obsession and passion drive their music, not coolness. (My friend Andrew Kambour once shut up a group of jazz dissenters who asked him to turn off a Coltrane record by snapping, “this is a man communicating directly with God!”)

For more on the Jazz Pitchfork idea, DJA (Darcy James Argue, who will likely be mentioned often in this blog so will henceforth go by initials) mentioned this post from non-jazzer FISTFULAYEN that addresses the “how to get the word out” question from the other side of things.

And last, but certainly not least, my good friend, former roommate, and fellow music blogger Will C. White gives me a big shout-out in the wrap-up of his “orchestra” pronunciation poll. (If you’ve ever wanted to hear the varied ways in which Americans from Aaron Copland to Charlie Rose to Larry David say “orchestra,” then this is not to be missed.) Will is an extraordinary composer and conductor and anyone interested in music, whatever genre, should poke around his media offerings. As a start, I’d recommend his tango-tinged “Desiderata,” written for “Two Girls, One Keyboard.”

Comments

[BWSlocombe]

I thought Hollywood thought:

"if peeing your pants is cool..."

[il maestro]

Wow, to be mentioned in the same blog post as DFW and TT! On the latter, I can't help but quote Nico Muhly's obnoxious yet hilarious recent tweet:

What is Terry Teachout? Is it a person or GLBT Educational Initiative?

PS. I'm glad to see that one BWSlocombe has ceased causing mass confusion in the blogosphere by signing his comments "will".

[Cicily Janus]

Hey Eric,

I'm, as per my usual, a few months late to reply. Thank you for the blog. This is great.

I wanted to comment on this train of thought you've presented here. First off, I think your blog raises great questions, concerns and answers. I'm a HUGE fan of DJA and his blog as well, as a matter of fact he's included in my book as one of the greats alive today. I have an immense amount of respect for him.

onwards: As a former musician and now a jazz writer, I agree completely with the ideal that if music is presented with the intensity as that one blog reader's comments mention, it will be noticed and stomped on by the listeners feet as they begin to feel it in their souls. But there is one particular passage here that hits home with what I'm living for and why I write about jazz,

"...the way to build an audience that looks to jazz as a serious contributor to the larger culture isn’t to convince them that it’s “cool”—suave, relaxing, above-it-all—but to show them that it’s engaged in a mad quest to understand, in the words David Foster Wallace, “what it is to be a fucking human being.” Anyone who has seriously listened to Monk, Mingus, and Coltrane knows that obsession and passion drive their music, not coolness."

This is exactly what I go for when I write. It isn't about the here and now, it's about the sustainability of the future.

Looking to market an art or any kind of media for that matter as something that is "cool" and only going by that invisible factor/measurement/commercial viability for the "youth's" sake is asking for it to be short lived and forgotten.

The historical longevity of something that has been deemed "cool" by a generation often doesn't stick with the further generations as something they can relate to as this aspect of life, the cool factor is a fluid, ever changing concept.

But, as pointed out here, if you can show that the "it" factor of an art or music or anything for that matter is something that binds us all together, as in the humanity of an art or the spirit and soul of what makes us unique in the bigger scheme of things, is to find that universal appealing truth and one that all generations seek to find out for themselves within their personal struggles and everyday confinement of the capitalist society we all live in. But to find this is to validate their causes, their worth and their sustainable visions as creative beings.

Therefore presenting jazz, at least now, in the world we're confined in today, as cool, is not the way to go.

Instead, as musicians, fans and carriers of the torch, we need to give the newcomers to the music and those who have lost touch with why they came to it in the first place, something they can feed off of...an almost barren and open religion that speaks to them in ways that one that follows archaic rules and words can't give...If we allow that gift of the untainted value of an unspoken breath of air that is more about touching the soul of the person who played it than the "commercial" coolness factor, I believe you'll find that sustaining this genre of music won't be so difficult.

It's just a matter now of reaching those that are untouchable, the ones who have closed minds, broken ears and further more, a deep and darkened denial that clouds their perspective of what is new to them, not necessarily new to the world. As Wynton told me in an interview, "sometimes following the people is not the way to have them follow you." Jazz is not the new "black" as the fashion world would say...Jazz is what it always has been: an art that reaches well beyond the soul and into that space rarely seen but often heard crying out for an audience who will listen.

[Eric Benson]

I love that Wynton quote, both because it speaks to the individualism at the heart of the music and because I can hear Wynton saying it. We definitely don't need more followers, but I think it's also important to be in active conversation with the outside world. One persistent knock against jazz is that it's too inward-looking—obsessed with its traditions, its great men, and those darned standards. I think that's more perception than reality, but one of jazz's great tasks of the moment is showing the non-jazz audience that it's engaging actively, deeply with the here and now.

[Cicily Janus]

Thanks for replying Eric. I agree totally. When we let our past rule our future then we lose what's important to us. Our voice is then a mirror to what was instead of a projection of what could be. Being hung up on the past is something I believe we, as a country, do with almost everything that is "culturally significant." Look at the "We Love the 80's" programs through VH1, the numerous programs

We should certainly take note and revere our predecessors and devotees to jazz as the amazing talents they were, but to continue this unhealthy reverence for all things past and to ignore the present is a tragic socially accepted norm.

Of course the problem with living in the "here and now" is the "acceptance" issues...People worry, I think needlessly, about others opinions as well.

Marcus Miller, in his interview for the book, also said this:

"There’s a lot of guys I talk to and they’ll say to me I like what you do but it just feels so for the moment and you know, temporary...it doesn’t have the depth. Then they'll go on to say,I would rather play the music I know has depth.
What they don't realize is that they're trying to take the short cut. Just because other people did the hard work for you doesn't mean you can just do what they did. Charlie Parker didn’t know his stuff was going to be classic,there was just no way to know that. He just played from the bottom of his heart and he ended up being classic. He did it the right way. Coltrane didn’t know that when he was playing in the Village Vanguard and was finding those new ways to express himself...that people would be listening and there would be tenor sax players for the rest of the time trying to imitate that he was just playing from his heart."

Maybe if others, including fans/listeners, adopted this perspective, we wouldn't be so "STUCK" in this timeless romantic notion that all things from the past are better than the present.

What the jazz community is offering up now, from Darcy James to the Aaron Parks to Sean Jones to the Noah Preminger, Ben Monder and Maria Schneider's of the world, is astounding. It's a matter of passing the word around in a better, more accepted fashion and garnering some of those millions of dollars spent on the entertainment industry. Afterall, these artists work and have worked their minds, fingers and wits into the ground in order to even get to where they are now. It's just a matter of finding ourselves within their music without demanding that they lose themselves to the commercial success band wagon that the rest of the country seems to be riding.