Date:	06-May-1998 17:13:45
From:	Deborah Bender (dbender@co.sarasota.fl.us)
	Love "straight ahead" but find that there is a shortage of new people today who take the straight ahead into today's sound...you find a lot of re-releases and re-re-realeases of great stuff from the 50's and 60's ....and it is truly great....but let's also take the great sounds of the 50's and 60's straight ahead and blend it with today's jazz for a new, distinct sound. I realize that straight ahead is a "musicians music" and have been told that it's not a mainstream music....but if we had new talent that took the best of Chambers, Mingus, etc.........

 

Date:	06-May-1998 20:55:57
From:	Walter Price (lw627329aol.com)
	The jazz industry! What I mean is the whole combination of promoters, magazines and various literature, radio, and really the majority of people who are suppose to be keeping jazz alive. First, sad ass jazz concerts or festivals that contain blues, new age, old broke soul artists, harp playing, and then we see the featured jazz artists!!! Then we go home and say that was worth my 50 bucks to see Grover Washington for 30 minutes. The jazz conncert/festival motto slogan should be "I went to a jazz concert and hey I actually heard jazz!!!" WHO TOOK THE JAZZ OUT OF JAZZ? Second, magazines that bring all those musical genres under one cover, then criticize every fusion artist, build up artists NOBODY EVER HEARS OF, and then writes bold articles like John Scofield is the greatest contemporary guitar player every other issue mixing in Joe Henderson and Sonny Rollins-how bold, and then go about their discovery of every 17 or 20 year old who plays the saxophone or drums. You pick up the magazine for its cover on David Sanborn and you get 30 pages of "up and coming jazz stars." Well why not talk about the alreaday jazz stars. Then those awful jazz reviews that also include those obscure artists again. WHO TOOK THE JAZZ OUT OF JAZZ? Those every anoying jazz critics who have remembered every cliche criticism of every artists. EXAMPLE-Every jazz critic says Miles Davis was selling out in the latter part of his career, David Sanborn made better music 10 years ago, and Steve Swallow is the best electric bass player around. GIVE ME A BREAK!!! If they are so objective, how can everyone of them have such similar criticisms using the same words and phrases. Will a real critic stand up and say something original or bold(and I don't mean "Joe Lovano is the most underrated jazz artist today"). Just tell us who is playing on the CD and talk about the singles musically-then just do recommendations-leave your personal agendas out of your criticisms. The critics want to be stars and they shoot themselves in the foot by these personal agendas, cliche critcisms, and nothing new or informative to say or write. THEY BRING DOWN JAZZ SO MUCH. IF YOU WANT TO BE INTRODUCED TO JAZZ AS A NEW LISTERNER DON'T ASK A CRITIC-THEY WILL HAVE NEW LISTERNERS RUNNING-ALWAYS PANNING THE JAZZ STARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DOES ANY JAZZ CRITIC ADMIT TO LIKE KENNY G. AND DISLIKE SUN RA OR CHARLES MINGUS NEVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Radio-just so sad its a lost cause!!!. Does anybody in jazz radio play anything funky anymore!! In Western New York you will never hear Marcus Miller, Miles in the 70s, and god forbid rap and jazz. Does anybody in jazz radio play singles longer than 10 minutes? Does any Jazz DJ get excited about the music, if the soft jazz doesn't put you to the sleep the unispired DJ most certaintly will, as a matter of fact do any young jazz DJs actually like jazz. I guess will have to put up with the old guys that mumble on the radio and gets mad if you can't recognize Ben Webster. And yes they play every obscure artist that has a new album. Don't bother to listen to 50s jazz one minute and Pieces of a Dream the next minute-formatted and categorized-one local jazz station- 20 different formats!!!!!! I wish the majority of jazz people in the industry would just go to their real calling-rock and roll, pop mainstream, because they make it obvious they don't give a damn about jazz and they don't know what the hell people want or they and the parent record companies don't care as long as jazz pays their salaries, concert tickets, and the big companies get 5 dollars a week in profit from their jazz department. WHO TOOK THE JAZZ OUT OF JAZZ?

 

Date:	06-May-1998 20:58:33
From:	Walter Price (That's lw627329@aol.com)
	Just correcting the E-mail address

 

Date:	12-May-1998 11:31:23
From:	Chris S (cslawec9@idt.net)
	Walter, I agree with just about everything you said here. "Who took the jazz out of jazz" might well be the rallying cry for a separate conversation about today's deplorable state of jazz radio too. God help us.

 

Date:	18-May-1998 12:35:26
From:	Lu Figgs (lfiggs@fuse.net)
	I agree with much of what Walter Price had to say, but to go a step further, print media is pretty much like every other American business...bottom line oriented. Because of this they have "music" critics instead of jazz critics,people who have actually no affinity for jazz and are either converted fom some other genre or subjected to the whimsy of sponsor- ship. I was a DJ for almost ten years on "jazz" radio when we were the only full time jazz station in town (incidentally,I am an elderly guy who does not mumble,know the music and I DO dearly love finding new young talent). My bane was a program director who fancied himself not only a critic,but professed to KNOW what the public was capable of digesting musically. As far as print media goes, I am reminded of what the late, great Duke Ellington said,"Most often people who write about jazz, know a lot more about writing than they know about jazz." One last thing. I am NOT a Kenny G fan.

 

Date:	25-May-1998 21:33:52
From:	Karen Angela Moore (MOORETUNES@aol.com)
	I think the biggest problem is the severe disection of the music itself...disection in many ways. First - All this academia and microscoping of Miles and Coltrane solos. Man - what is that? Let me paraphrase Mile - "who knows what jazz is? You can't put you're finger on it, you can't touch it, you only know what it is when it's happening." I've been around alot of well schooled musicians that can't play. Can't swing. Second - the disection of the whole genre...the general labels we have or have chosen for the splinters of our genre suck. I mean - everytime I turn around there's another little name for US! It fragments us a group. It separates us when we really all have the same goals - don't we? AND! It gives the critics something to latch on to instead of really listening to what it is we're doing. Jazz is - Jazz isn't. That's it. Improv - rhythms - melody - skill - guts - sweat - and a state of mind. OPEN! I don't like electronic music - not even jazz stuff. I don't even want a computer NEAR my music unless I have in studio stuff - but you know - if someone can put it out there on a synth and a drum machine - so be it. We need to work together to make our whole pie bigger - not just our own piece of it.

 

Date:	22-Jul-1998 22:56:42
From:	reid (rtt5@gte.net)
	Karen, I like your attitude and a lof of what you wrote. I think there's a big preoccupation with what is and what is not jazz. I tend to feel that musicians are worrying about if they're actually playing real jazz; they don't want to step outside of the defintion. I don't think that's something they should be worried about. Just play music that they think is good. If it ceases to be jazz, so what? As long as it's interesting and moving, it shouldn't matter.

 

Date:	05-Aug-1998 09:27:16
From:	David Whiteis (whiteis@ipfw.edu)
	Right on, Karen & (I think) Walter... Walter, I'm a tad confused as to where you stand on the issue of eclecticism. I've attended jazz festivals where "broken down old blues guys" made eloquent & timely contributions; even more to the point, I've seen innovative bookings & specially-commissioned pieces at jazz festivals where the entire spectrum of the music, from "the roots to the future" (as the AACM puts it) was featured. History, after all, never ended -- it's a constantly-flowing river, & all of its gifts & delights are relevant & enlightening. Your comments toward the end, about the segregated & elitist nature of much jazz radio, were very much to the point; but unless I misunderstand your earlier argument, I disagree w/ you when you seem to imply that jazz festivals should be exactly as segregated & elitist as jazz radio too often is. (Do I make myself clear?) Karen, I share your distaste for most synth-stuff -- but I also recognize that this is more my own problem than the musicians'. I remember being priviledged to interview J.J. Johnson for DOWN BEAT one time, & he was eloquent in his argument that change --iconoclastic, radical change-- is not only good & necessary; in fact it represents the heart & soul of what jazz has always been about. "Jazz has never been a 'good little boy' sitting in the corner, doing what he's told," J.J. said, sitting at his MIDI console. HIs attitude was -- let a thousand jazz flowers bloom! After all --even the most stodgy purists embrace Wes Montgomery (electric guitar) & Milt Jackson (vibes w/ a mechanically-created vibrato)-- I believe that in twenty or thirty years, synthesized instruments (maybe even --Jah hdlp us!!!-- synthesized drums!) will be considered as "authentic" & capable of soulful jazz expression as these already-existing electronified instruments. Personally, I'll still be sitting in my cranky li'l corner, listening to Coltrane & (acoustic) Pharaoh Sanders on my headphones... but that's the way it goes.

 

Date:	02-Sep-1999 16:35:13
From:	ladybop
	The biggest shortcoming of jazz coverage in today's print media is that there AIN'T NONE! With the exception of a few jazz oriented magazines, and an occasional feature here & there in the newspapers.