You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - The Worst Parts of Jazz - #93

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

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This is Adam Maness, and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. Today we're going to talk about the worst parts of jazz. Oh my God. I hope this is like a list of 70 because I have tons for this. Well, you know, I mean, this is a daily podcast. And we, you know, most days we're talking about fun practice techniques and good things.

But, you know, inevitably we're going to make it today 100 or whatever we're on. Now, disclaimer, we love jazz. We are professional jazz musicians. We love this music, we love the community. We just did a whole episode about how great it is to meet other jazz musicians around the world and fans of the music and how cool everybody is. And this is the yang to that. Where there's good, there's evil. Yeah, if you can't poke fun of yourself, you're not doing it right.

That's true. All right, cool. Well, this will be fun. Let's throw shade on jazz and ourselves. Let's do it. Simultaneously. Okay. Number one, worst part of jazz.

This is in no particular order, obviously. Right. The self-congratulatory attitude that we have. It is the worst. It's one of the worst parts of that. You know, typified by such things is, yeah, man, you bad. No, I'm bad. No, we're bad.

You know, this music is so important. We're so great. How'd I sound? How'd you sound? It is bad. This is the most important art form ever invented. You know, we are great. We are important.

Could we be any more insecure? I know, exactly. Well, you didn't joke about that, but that probably is true. This comes out. I mean, we are just silly human beings that work hard at this thing. And then if we don't feel like we've got the credit we deserve, we have to get it to get it out of you. Right.

How do I sound? And then, I mean, I've heard some of our greatest, you know, leaders and fantastic artists of our music on big concerts, you know, basically lecturing to the audience in advance, like we're not, like, you know, just to congratulate the art form, not even themselves. I mean, I think most jazz musicians are actually very humble. up to a point, but we're very insecure about our art form for whatever reason, and it comes across in a very strange way. I was playing this outside festival, big outside festival.

We were opening for this famous... Like a Cecil Taylor Festival or an outdoors? No, it was like an outdoor general music festival. I was playing with a jazz singer, and we were opening for a very famous hip-hop artist at the time. And there was a DJ for the jazz station introducing us. The crowd is all like 18-year-old, 19-year-old fans of the kids. hip-hop artist. They don't want to hear any complicated jazz arrangements and improvise solos.

Yeah, no. So the DJ from the jazz station goes up and she says, all right, listen up. You're about to hear some jazz. You're to pay attention and learn something. I thought they were going to start throwing batteries at us. Honestly, it was awful. Like the group right before us were three enormous dudes with no shirts and tattoos everywhere, dancing around the stage, you know, sing hip-hop,

and we get up there with like some pretty thick 13th chords. And there's a lecture beforehand. It was bad. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the whole self-congratulatory thing, you know, the apex of that is something that I hear just way too much. And that is the great Adam Manus, the great Peter Barton, the great Miles Davis. Well, he really was great. But I mean, well, you know, we call every.

one the great, you know, just so because I guess our music doesn't stand on its own. Well, this brings us to our second point, second worst part of jazz. There's another. Which is lionizing. We tend to do this. We tend to lionize, you know, the best musicians from our genre in a way that, I mean, it can only be second to like. Mother Teresa.

Yeah. No, classical music and bluegrass are also pretty bad at this. But jazz is one of the worst. I mean, it's amazing that anybody tries to make music anymore. after Thelonius Monk lived. You know what I mean? Because he apparently did everything. But, I mean, I love Monk and I love Trane and I love Louis Armstrong and I love all these guys.

No, no, no, you love the great Thelonius. I love the great Thelonius. I love the great Duke Galaxy. But we do tend to put, you know, our artists on pedestals and even modern people. I mean, we put like how they're, you know, his name and he's just, I'll never, I don't know, it's not totally true. Right, right. You know, it's not.

Well, I mean, we, I think that the, the, the, the, the high. level of lionization of a jazz musician I've heard is there's a church in San Francisco, the John Coltrane Church, the Church of John Coltrane. Now, I'm a member of that church. Okay, sorry. No, I mean, it's all good, man. You know, religion is in the eyes of the beholder. I mean, that's talking about putting on a pedestal, you know.

Yeah, no, we all do it too much, man. It's kind of part of the tradition of the music at this point. Okay, next, what I think is just a horrible part of jazz, and I try not to participate in this, That's snobbery. You try not to participate, please, man. I try not to, but I'm at such a high level that I can't help it. No, I mean, this is, this goes along. Look, all these are part of the same, you know, just lack of self-awareness.

And so, but the snobbery is just like, you know, our music is so much better than anyone else, except classical music. We're equally great and better than everything else. And you know what? I mean, jazz is great, but not everyone thinks that. And I think the way to their hearts and ears is not by telling them how much they have to study. Because, I mean, once you become a snob about something, you can't just enjoy it. So, like, you know, wine. It's just like a wine snob.

Yeah, wine is great until somebody tells you, you know, you say, oh, I love this glass of wine. Really? What are you, what, do you, do you, can you pick up on the black currents? Yeah. The whiff of three musketeer? Oh, you love it. How many of this vintage have you drank? That's right.

Yeah. No, I had a point in high school where I literally couldn't listen to anything that wasn't jazz recorded from 1949 to 1960. Like, that was it. And anything else was total crap, according to me, my 16-year-old. You know what I mean? Like, it gets bad. You weren't just a jazz snob. You were like a sub-genre jazz snob. I was like a bebop slash hardbop snob. It was terrible. Yeah. I mean, I think that the pinnacle of snobbery for us, too, is like anything that we're such. snobs in the jazz world that anything, the very few recordings that are commercially successful, we have to say, are horrible. Because they're snobs. So obviously, anything smooth jazz,

any smooth jazz musicians are horrible. And it's actually not true. I mean, like, Kurt Weillam is an amazing musician that just popped in my head. No, David Sanborn's amazing. David Sanborn, you know, many things that are in there. And then in terms of commercially successful recordings, actually, these are some of the greatest recordings ever, kind of blue, you know, the Coln concerts by Keith Jared. But your typical jazz snob is like, oh, Keith Jarrett's wonderful, but only on that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that's sold 134 copies. Yeah. That's his best, you know, but you know, but you, yeah, but have you heard Derek LeQuest? Out of South Montreale, Montreale. Probably not.

Snobbery, yeah. Yeah. Do you consider yourself a snob? Oh, absolutely. Okay. It's a horrible part of jazz, but we're part of it. Yeah. Okay. No, go ahead, please. Well, that leads us to, uh, uh, Well, I have this one. Okay. This leads us to our third point, which is... Fourth. Fourth point? Oh, this is our fourth point.

Sorry, it's complicated, pointless soloing that lasts forever. Now, I would never personally do this. I don't know. Well, you're not playing the piano right now, so it didn't last forever. So you finally ended. No, we get a bad... I think we're very defensive about this, because this is what I think most, like, normal people who don't listen to a lot of jazz think jazz is.

Right. So we're like, no, it's this beautiful. and there's these, you know, contours to the solos, and there's these intricacies, and there are. Well, not really. Come on. On a macro level, no. If we're feeling reflective and we're being totally honest.

Well, it's funny because you say we're defensive about this, but jazz musicians, especially snobby jazz musicians, are actually very offensive in this regard, and that we do it and we offend our listeners' ears with this. I mean, just, yeah, I mean, pointless solo, like, get in, say what you're going to say. I mean, you know what it is? There's so many great jazz players.

It's amazing that lack the tack to understand the arc of a solo at a particular time. You know, like what is the length of this? It only becomes pointless when you get past the point of that particular moment what needs to be played. Right. So it's not that it's not good things that are continuing to be played. I think if you talk to listeners, they're like, oh, no, it was all great. It just went on and on. It doesn't mean that they have a short attention span.

It meant that for that time as a listener, that moment, that hall, that club or whatever, it was going on too long. Yeah, there could be a 20-minute solo that's just perfectly timed. I mean, that Paul Gonzalez solo at Live at Newport. Yeah. I mean, that's a long solo. I don't think anyone would ever be like, oh, it was too long. No, not at all. It feels right.

It's organic for the moment. That's the thing is you have to know when it's right. Yeah, but I mean, there's definitely, I mean, complicated pointless solo is like a big problem in our music. One of the worst parts of it. We're laughing, but we need to eradicate that. No, I think, you know, one good thing to think about is, and I love playing with singers for this, is that, you know, if you leave the singer out hanging too long

with a long, complicated solo, you're going to lose the crowd. It's going to seem disjointed. So it's good to play with singers and try to work on your tight chorus. You know, your tight half chorus. Those or the tight fills around them. I think that really can help you understand the arc of a solo and how to get it done. Absolutely.

So this leads to the next one, next horrible part of jazz. And that's just not giving a beep about your audience. This is something we're famous for. We've even tried to promote it as part of the music, you know,

to the point of like, you know, Miles Davis turning his back on the audience and bragging about that. I mean, we're so great. We're so snobby

that we don't even care about our audience. Oh, we don't have an audience. We don't care about that either. But we're so insecure. Actually, we do. Yeah. Yeah.

There's nothing wrong with considering the fact that you're playing to people and what their experiences are. I actually really like this part of it. I like this part of being a jazz musician because I like to think about possibly the expectations my audience has and then mess with those a little bit. And hopefully they're delighted by that. You're not going to please everybody all the time, obviously. But I'm not all about, that's one thing I think I can kind of diverge from this list. I'm definitely not all about leaving the audience out there. Yeah, and I mean, we're not saying a horrible part of jazz is challenging the audience.

That's something different than not caring about the audience. And I think that's something with Miles Davis that was kind of misunderstood. The whole turning the back to his audience was really, I think, part of his schick. He was actually very good at entertaining the audience. Yeah, he was creating a vibe. In a similar way that Keith Jared and some other musicians might have learned from Miles, actually. And no coincidence in Miles Davis is also one of the most palatable jazz musicians of all time. I mean, his recording and the sound of it and live performances and his classic records and really everything was, yeah, some of those pleasing things to people.

His back has turned, but he's playing the most beautiful, lyrical, melodic passages as his back is, you know. Exactly. Should we do a final one? Should we go dark or leave it there? You got it, man, you got it. Okay, what we were thinking, one of the worst parts of jazz is the money. Lack thereof. And this is kind of a joke.

I mean, you know, in some ways. It's funny, like every time I play music and get paid for it, I feel like I'm being overpaid in a way, because I really just enjoy this so much. We enjoy this. We love talking about it. You know, we're a little underpaid on this podcast, I might say. We're going to talk about that. No, but I mean, it really is a joyful thing. So all the things, sometimes to get to the gig and all that is the part that I'm like, okay, yeah, pay me to travel to the gig, but I'll do the gig for free. So, I mean, the money is what it is.

I think that if we could fix some of these earlier points, the snobbery, the lionization, the complicated, pointless solos, I think that there's a direct correlation between the amount of money you get paid and the amount of complicated, you know, pointless soloing. Well, I think the good news is that most jazz musicians care way more about being lionized than they do about money. Well, then we're succeeding. Yeah, exactly.

Mission accomplished. All right, well, we will try to only do this like every hundred episodes or so. It's good to get it out. Yeah, we get it up. If these are the worst parts of jazz and then everything else is great, then we're doing good. That's right. You'll hear it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hear It podcast. If you liked what you heard, please leave a rating or review.

Yeah, I liked what I heard. I'm going to leave five stars, but you guys can do whatever you want. Today's episode was brought you by Open Studio. Jazz Lessons from Jazz Legends. Check out our brand new All Access Pass. All Access. What is that? Like one or two courses you get? Dude, I said All Access.

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