[Dixielandjazz] Taking Sides

[David Richoux]

The way I see it, Ken  - *

The early forms of Rock and Roll were directly influenced by what we  
call OKOM. The "Trad Revival" of the late 1940s and the Jump Blues/R&B  
in the same era also mixed with Western Swing/Hillbilly music to make  
Rock and Roll - almost a straight line of progression. This happened  
concurrently and somewhat independently in several parts of the world  
(major US cities and in the UK) and the rise of "Teen-Age" focused  
radio DJs made it all more successful.

The events that changed "Modern Jazz" more than Rock-Fusion was the  
development of "Free Jazz" in the early 1950s (even more than Be Bop  
in the 1940s.) (IMO) Be Bop at least still continued the idea of song  
"Tune" structure with chord progressions - Free Jazz was more related  
to Modern Composition and experimental music than the "popular form."

That is my theory and I am sticking to it!
Dave RIchoux

* a slight modification to a very famous line in 1960s modern rock - I  
wonder if anybody else on this list will get it ;-)

On Jun 22, 2009, at 5:16 PM, Ken Mathieson wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> The Mouldy Fig v Modernist arguments still appears to rage. I can't  
> get my head round this at all. To my way of thinking, everything  
> that happened in jazz up to about 1970 developed out of what went  
> before. It was all the one music at different stages of development:  
> Horace Silver and Thelonius Monk (to name just two) couldn't have  
> done what they did without Jelly, James P and others having done  
> their thing first.
>
> The thing that held it all together was the swinging time feel,  
> which gradually evolved but remained essentially the same driving,  
> flowing approach. The big change came with the introduction of rock  
> and world rhythms, which essentially displaced jazz's most important  
> ingredient. Try making a goulash without paprika or a bolognese  
> sauce without tomatoes: it becomes something different. That's what  
> has happened in a lot of what now passes for jazz. Personally, I  
> thought the Dave Brubeck Quartet was a fine jazz outfit, if given to  
> a bit of heavy-handed bombast from time to time. Certainly the  
> musicianship of Paul Desmond, Gene Wright and Joe Morello was beyond  
> reproach and all of them, including Brubeck, had clearly listened to  
> and learned from the tradition that preceded them.
>
> There is nothing quite like Dixieland sympathetically and well  
> played, and swing, bop and beyond couldn't have emerged as they did,  
> without the preceding traditions being absorbed and mutated, but  
> nothing stands still for ever without stagnating. When I first  
> started investigating jazz in the 1960s, I was listening to Bunk  
> Johnson at the same time as Charlie Parker and heard them both  
> playing the blues. And when Ornette Coleman came on the scene, I  
> felt he had much more in common with the early New Orleans styles  
> than with bop, hard bop, cool school etc from which he was supposed  
> to have developed. The reverse also applies: try voicing some of   
> Bix's lines for 5 or 6 horns in parallel harmony and you'll hear  
> sounds more in keeping with Gil Evans and the "Cool School" than  
> with early New Orleans or Chicago jazz.
>
> Essentially my view is that jazz is all the one music as long as it  
> retains a swinging time feel. I can enjoy all its constituent styles  
> individually, but see them as part of a larger whole: For me the  
> best definition of jazz is still that it's "just another way of  
> playing music."
>
> That should get the flamers going.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ken Mathieson
> www.classicjazzorchestra.org.uk
>
> _______________________________________________
> To unsubscribe or change your e-mail preferences for the Dixieland  
> Jazz Mailing list, or to find the online archives, please visit:
>
> http://ml.islandnet.com/mailman/listinfo/dixielandjazz
>
>
>
> Dixielandjazz mailing list
> Dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com