Bill of Goods

I will be heading back to Africa soon and will have some more interesting things to post. In the interim, I am writing one of my periodic musings (i.e. rants) about the music scene. Here goes...

We have been sold a bill of goods that music is perpetually evolving. Today's is better than yesterday's, more advanced. It's not true. I learned the conventional wisdom in school, that you can trace the evolution of jazz in a straight line from Armstrong to Parker to Coltrane. An overall trend towards ever-increasing sophistication in rhythm and harmony. You could fill a library with books analyzing the history of the music from New Orleans to Swing to Bop to Cool to Hard Bop to Modal to Freedom as if one style follows directly, naturally, from its predecessor and obviates the need to go back. In reality, things stagnated after Ornette, Trane, Ayler, Taylor, and the Art Ensemble, and the creative scene of my younger days has long ago been snuffed out by musical Reaganomics. Today you need a Master's Degree in performance to play jazz so your fellow musicians won't give you "the ray", and the University of the Streets has been shuttered for all intents and purposes. 

I was listening to Sam Rivers on my iPod the other day and had an epiphany of sorts. Listening to Sam play his tenor on Fuschia Swing Song (tunes written as far back as the late 50's), I heard him play so much music on his SML in 1965 that I realized NOBODY HAS EVER GOTTEN BEYOND THAT. Listen to Ellipsis. SHEEE-IT. Sam himself never got beyond that. 

My recent experiences in Africa reinforce the plateau state of yet another musical style, Afrobeat. Fela Kuti has been gone for 15 years and the music has not advanced much since then. Yes, there has been a Broadway play cheesifying his life and there are Afrobeat revival bands in the US, Europe, and Japan, but who wants to listen to a revival band made of copyists who learned their instruments in school when you can go back and listen to one of Fela's original records or his original band and offspring? His son Femi has been flirting with rap and hip-hop which I hope is just a way to make money and not a serious musical direction - because that music just can't compare. By my reckoning hip-hop has dominated commercial pop music longer than rock 'n roll at this point, even in Fela's home country of Nigeria, and musically I can't figure out why. Can't be about the music. Must be about the commercial. 

The conclusion from all this is that music definitely does not evolve in a straight line, and at present the creative music world is at a plateau. The result of obsession with too much technology - the hardware and not the software. The lack of live gigs has driven performing musicians into academia where they teach what can be documented, reproduced, and tested - that's why so many of today's horn players sound like John Coltrane ca. 1960 and none sound like Ornette or Ayler; originality is dissed rather than respected. Can you play your horn at Grade 8? Who cares? Did Tina Brooks pass his exam before recording True Blue? Music cannot be separated from its social context and that is why creative music has stagnated. The social milieu that created Bird and Trane no longer exists; we can only listen to their recordings, transcribe, analyze, and reproduce the sound. A society that measures your worth by how fancy your hand phone is doesn't have much space for musical innovation. 

One thing I have learned is that making music is actually a social process and something big is missing if you only concentrate on the technical. Music cannot be separated from its environment. Did you download that from the cloud and play it on your iPad? Was that a D7m5 or did Diz use another enharmonic spelling? Was that an E natural or an F flat? Do your ears care?