I feel a kinship to “modernism" as practiced by Woolf, Joyce, Kandinsky, Stravinsky, and so on. Looking at the world through rose-colored glasses that are a little askew, intentionally. Breaking things up to see what nifty shapes they might take. Shoring those fragments against our ruins.
In jazz, some older listeners define “modern" as the music of Gillespie and Parker. They were revolutionaries, we are told, getting rid of all that stale Big Band stuff. But even that might seem antiquarian to those listeners who hear modernism" as Anthony Braxton. Both those assertions makes me bristle, because Louis and Lester and Big Sid and Bill Basie were “modern" then and remain so.
But my point of view is obviously outmoded.
The Museum of Modern Art is restoring its series of outdoor free concerts in its Summergarden. A fine thing! I did not expect them to send Mozart into the warm summer evening (although I would have loved it) but someone's idea of jazz modernism" is Andrew Cyrille and Don Byron. Fine, respected fellows, both of them . . . but when will curators and their likes realize that modernism," if you're going to connect it accurately to the climate it came from, might be something like Louis bursting out of the Henderson band or Bix in 1927?
The double standard is at work: a Kandinsky (like the one at top) remains “modern," while the free-thinking jazz modernism still practiced in New York City has, to some ears, become old."
See for yourself:
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/128d509a32b96740
My imagined series would be called KANDINSKY MEETS KAMINSKY, but would MOMA go for it?
