[Dixielandjazz] Jazz is Metal

[Stephen G Barbone]

Not for the faint of heart. <grin>

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace,com/barbonestreetjazzband

January 3, 2010 - NY TIMES - By Ben Ratliff
Jazz and Metal, Riffs in Arms


JAZZ is metal.

Well, of course it isn’t, really. They don’t sound alike on their  
outer layers. And their audiences don’t overlap. From the evidence of  
hundreds of jazz shows I’ve seen all over the country this past  
decade, a whole lot of Americans over 60 feel a tremendous fondness  
for jazz and help it survive. Most of those same people, I’d guess,  
would feel a virulent loathing for metal, if they ever were forced to  
encounter it.

Currently, making it in jazz means playing a circuit of sit-down  
supper clubs and comfortable midsize theaters booked by nonprofit arts  
presenters, and, in summer, at European festivals. If you make it in  
metal, you play a circuit of decent-to-horrible stand-up clubs. (And,  
in summer, at European festivals.) The aesthetic ideals couldn’t be  
more different: jazz is about subtlety and, one wants to say, beauty;  
metal is about intimidation, alienation and assault.

But then again, over the last decade jazz and metal have become harder  
to reduce and easier to like, in a sum-total kind of way. And in the  
process they’ve generated more and more points of comparison.

Jazz stages and metal stages are places where a certain kind of  
experimentation happens: brainy and cabalistic, with a hint of a  
smile. Both increasingly depend on educated virtuosos. In both genres  
you can develop curious harmonic worlds, warp the tempos, brush  
against folkloric or conservatory music, play many notes very speedily  
and engage sturdy American grooves or a more studied system of fitting  
odd-number beats into even-number meters. Pat Metheny, jazz guitarist,  
meet Paul Masvidal of Cynic; Jeff (Tain) Watts, jazz drummer, meet  
Tomas Haake of Meshuggah. Both forms seem to have a neatly divided  
audience: maybe two-thirds respectfully fixated on the music’s past,  
one-third concerned about building paradigms for the future.

Both have become increasingly local and international at the same  
time; they depend on the scenes of certain communities — whether  
Brooklyn; Chicago; or Savannah, Ga. — but their audiences are  
everywhere. As of the late ’00s both have been the subject of serious  
academic conferences. And aside from a few tanklike, old-favorite  
examples — Metallica and Keith Jarrett, say — if you want to keep up  
with either, you have to listen to cuts on MySpace pages and go to gigs.

Jazz and metal are both diversifying at a fantastic rate, feeding on  
their old modes and languages, combining them and breaking them down.  
(In both, the fans have become more suspicious of genre heresy than  
the musicians.) An album by a typically ambitious ’00s metal group —  
like Baroness, Isis, Krallice or Nachtmystium — might put a dozen  
kinds of metal in a supercollider, as well as kinds that lie outside  
the genre, spewing them all out in complicated, episodic song  
structures. So too with some of the better current jazz groups,  
including Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Marcus Strickland’s Twi- 
Life, Stefon Harris’s Blackout, Mostly Other People Do the Killing and  
the similarly named groups Bad Touch and the Bad Plus.

Traditionally, jazz and metal were vernacular arts in which working- 
class players could make their mark, but, for better or worse, that’s  
changing. It really does matter, in jazz, where you went to high  
school and college, which summer workshops you attended as a teenager.  
Likewise, I’ve got the names of five prominent, and totally beasting,  
young New York metal musicians who attended elite private schools. I  
won’t release them.