<div dir="ltr">As in any language, musicians listen to what is going down and when someone says something cool, they nick it! Anyone who had teenage boys during the! Monty Python era will know this to be fact :-) Louis and Bird nicked ideas from operas, many musicians of the early era worked 6 days a week in all sorts of ensembles and genres and musician circles, so it's really hard to say who or what was original or influential or outright expropriated, like Esther Jones.</div><span>
</span><div><br></div>As for tampering with the sacred :-) when Sun Ra began teaching his band to play Fletcher Henderson charts he said it was more important to convey the original intention, and what shocked and excited an audience in 1930 wasn't going to have the same effect on 1980 ears, so he upped the rhythms,fuel-injected the solos to post-coltrane stratospheres, and "corrected the harmonies"<div><br></div><div>Lovin' the discussion</div><div>Gary</div><div><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Sat, Apr 15, 2017, 11:15 AM Ken Mathieson <<a href="mailto:ken@kenmath.free-online.co.uk" target="_blank">ken@kenmath.free-online.co.uk</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi All,<br>
<br>
I've been enjoying your interesting, not to mention inflammatory, posts<br>
recently but have been too busy with other priorities to get involved.<br>
However I'm a bit mystified by some of the narrow definitions of jazz.<br>
I've never understood this as I've always thought of jazz as being "the<br>
one music", at least until the supplanting of swinging jazz time with<br>
rock rhythms by younger generation musicians whose rhythmic point of<br>
reference was rock and pop music, not jazz.<br>
<br>
Jazz didn't produce any unique harmonic or melodic concepts, nor was<br>
improvisation an innovation of jazz - it has been around since man's<br>
first musical tinkerings. On the other hand, what was unique to jazz was<br>
its swinging rhythmic pulse in all its developments over the decades:<br>
that was something new and distinctive and it seems to me that the<br>
increasing tendency towards rock rhythms has effectively thrown the baby<br>
out with the bath water.<br>
<br>
Jazz's enduring developments grew organically out of what went before,<br>
so Miles Davs couldn't have played as he did without Louis and others<br>
doing what they did in earlier decades. My own band's repertoire is<br>
based on the "one music" principle and our programme for a recent<br>
concert was as varied as you're likely to find:<br>
<br>
Jelly's Grandpa's Spells, followed by Bechet's Old Stack o' Lee Blues,<br>
followed by Jobim's Waters of March, followed by Sam Jones' Del Sasser<br>
(popularised by Cannonball Adderley), followed by Bix's In a Mist,<br>
followed by Ellington's Jack the Bear, followed by Benny Carter's Easy<br>
Money, followed by Don Redmond's No One Else But You, followed by<br>
Charles Mingus' Jelly Roll and closing with Jelly's Black Bottom Stomp.<br>
<br>
In the band's 13 year existence, only one punter has ever complained<br>
about our choice of material or interpretation: he wanted to hear<br>
Morton's tunes EXACTLY as they had been recorded 60 years earlier, since<br>
that was what he was used to hearing and any deviation from that was<br>
"tampering with sacred music!" I know Morton took his music seriously,<br>
but I'm pretty certain the wild-living Jelly (maybe there's a clue in<br>
the nickname?) would have been amused to be told his music was sacred!<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
Ken<br>
<br>
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