[Dixielandjazz] Post-Genre Music?

[Charles Suhor]

On Dec 31, 2006, at 5:49 AM, DWSI at aol.com wrote:

> All of the talk about getting the youth into OKOM seems to assume our
> musical category is a sub category of the bigger category generally 
> called  "jazz."
> At Rutgers Unviersity, where I manage the adult education courses in  
> writing,
> (when I'm not playing ragtime piano), one teacher came up with a course
> called Post-Genre Poetry. In it, he assumes that poetry has moved 
> beyond genres,
> or types or categories of music, and now poets are more or less free 
> agents.
> As  I think about it, isn't that what has happened to an awful lot of 
> art
> forms?  We've heard of fusion, and cross-over, but what if there isn't 
> any more
> need for  the traditional genres? What if it's just "music" from here 
> on? Does
> this work  for anyone out there?


Interesting question. The traditional genres of jazz, classical music, 
poetry, painting, etc., will always of course be etched in history. As 
the story goes, the innovators challenged the boundaries assumed by the 
previously formulated ideas of a genre and were therefore usually 
maligned until others literally “got the idea” of the new conception.

But the formulations were never all that descriptive. They always 
“leaked,” being too concept-bound to cover the range of artists and 
works that were out there, boots on the ground. There were always 
mavericks who didn’t quite fit the mold. To me, players like Pee Wee 
Russell, Boyce Brown, and Theolonius Monk were mutations rather than 
exemplars of the genres of their time. Same for Gerard Manley Hopkins 
and Emily Dickinson in poetry. Inimitable, because they were SO 
individual that to imitate them would be tantamount to identity theft.

Post-modernism as I understand it tried to make room for the 
diffuseness of contemporary arts like Post-Genre Poetry—and maybe, jazz 
since the 70s. I haven’t followed poetry that closely but it seems to 
me that what has happened in jazz is an openness to “genre-jumping,” as 
my son used to call it. And maybe what has happened is not so much an 
absence of new definable genres as it is a synthesis of familiar 
elements from existing genres--all those "fusions"--you name 'em.

The recent changes aren't neat as the “traceable next step” theories 
that we’re accustomed too (and maybe, have accepted too readily) in the 
history of the arts. But in a way it’s nice to relax the compulsive 
category-making that we’ve inherited in Western society and experience 
all music as “just music,” as raw experience. We can even revisit the 
musics we’ve long known and bring a fresh, original mind to them.

Charlie Suhor