I’m not dead, just hibernating. Too much heat. Too many hours of daylight. Far too much whining. Have I mentioned that my wife is a saint?
In any case, we’ve been enjoying the Ken Burns Jazz documentary. Netflix On Demand is sometimes too awesome for words. We’re up to disc three of the series and I’m remembering how much of an impact this film had on me the first time I watched it on a tiny TV in my spare room studio. I have to say that the effect isn’t really in the pictures but in the story telling. No surprises there, but I was amused to see that with a much nicer TV and sound system it didn’t radically alter the impact.
The first time I watched it, I was floored by all of the nuances of the story. The plot of the music and its development are a subject that sums up so much of American history and tracks through the 20th century. But this time through, I’m almost sad.
Jazz (the music) hit at a time when anything could happen in the arts because we hadn’t yet hit what I see as the ultimate extremes. We were still working our way out to the edges and exploring. Music and art could grow because there were hard limits. There was something against which to wage an artistic war. I’ve mentioned a thousand times before that when we decided that anything was OK in music and art, we lost the desire to search. With nothing to contain or put constraints on the effort, no effort was needed. That perceived absence of a territory to explore has in some way taken away the potential for epiphanies.
The best example of this from the film, so far, is the story of a concert violinist who went to a club, heard a band, and gave up the violin for the saxophone. Switched instruments just like that. Gave up a tradition and training that took most of his life to cultivate to follow a completely new path. Lying in bed that night, I tried in vain to figure out what it would take for me to do that. What kind of life shattering sound would I have to hear to give up all that I have known and change phase that way?
I wonder if it’s just me. If it’s a nostalgia for a time that I didn’t know. Is it possible that it wasn’t that big of a deal and maybe the fact that the incident was singled out in the film made it seem like more than it is? Again, I don’t know. I have thought for a long time that we exist in after the concept of rules where art is run by fashion. What else could explain the hundreds of subcategories of music that revolve around the same nugget of an idea but twisted ever so gently? Look at the millions of flavors of “techno” that, without serious and deliberate study, are indistinct to most listeners. Not to pick on techo as the same can be said of the various flavors of folk and rock music that have been climbing out of the walls. We spend far more time classifying and trying to distinguish between the like styles than we do exploring or reaching out for some kind of new expression. For all the hype around living in an information age where anything is possible, our art surely doesn’t indicate it.
Pretty harsh words for a guy who likes nothing more than to take a six string, set it to an open tuning, and wail until the walls shake. Yeah, that’s been done before. But isn’t that the point? Where is our J.S. Bach? Where is our Louis Armstrong? Where is that person who will synthesize what happened after 1960, or hell, even 1980? Leaps and bounds of technological development with nothing to be shown for it but a million banks of Fender Rhodes piano patches and more ways to play through a fake Marshall stack with a minimal noise floor and no pissed off neighbors. Who is going to take all of what was done and roll it up into something?
This has nothing to do with Money or Record Labels or The Academy or the vast perceived freedom of The Internet. This has nothing to do with a paradigm shift or The New Way. All of this has to do with the missing link. The music that will tie it all together and make the forgotten worthwhile. To make every thud of a DnB and endless chorus by a jam band come together and make sense together. Maybe things move too fast for that kind of evolution. Maybe music is burning through generations faster than ever. Listen to the “dated” sound of most stuff from the 1980s when synthesizer technology was barely into the main stream. Something has to place itself as the junction of these streams, doesn’t it?
I guess I’m surprised that it hasn’t happened. Though mostly, I’m sad because I don’t think that it will. And the six or seven people who read this blog should be bummed out because I’m not done talking about this yet. There are at least five more installments. Stay (open) tuned!
