Lundvall/Redman/Ratliff round-table discussion

From Jerry Jazz (a site I didn't know and which seems quite interesting), a discussion involving Bruce Lundvall (head of Blue Note Records), Joshua Redman (Warner Bros. saxophonist) and Ben Ratliff (jazz critic for the NY Times).

It's not particularly interesting, but there are a few good moments.

Redman on jazz in an increasingly fast-food society:
That poses a great challenge for jazz, and creates a tough climate for an art that in its essential nature is a music of tremendous substance and subtly. Jazz is a very textured music. It is heavy in nuance, and also very detailed. It communicates outward, but is very introspective at the same time. It requires patience and participation from its audience. Jazz isn't the kind of music that pushes a listener's buttons and creates certain immediate emotional responses. It is the kind of music that can deliver as much passion, intensity, emotion and inspiration to its audience as any other music, but it requires an audience to participate, to really listen and put themselves within the music, and to be patient with it. You have to work for your pleasure in jazz as a listener, and that does run counter to a lot of the trends in our culture. I think it's a tremendous challenge.

Lundvall responding to whether or not "people who buy Norah Jones subsequently get into Coltrane, Greg Osby or Jason Moran:"
Probably not, but I have a good example of what Joshua was saying. Virtually every week I receive a phone call from one of the film studios who want to use Norah Jones in a soundtrack. I frequently tell them I want to get Jason Moran or Jacky Terrasson or Cassandra Wilson or Dianne Reeves or many of my other artists. They are not interested. They want Norah Jones.
(Lundvall later repeats that Norah Jones sales are not trickling down)

I always wonder about this kind of thing. I think it reflects a kind of jazz snobiness. I have one Cesaria Evora album and I've seen her live once. I can easily imagine Cap Verdean music fans deriding me because I have not explored other Cap Verdean musicians. More generally, I don't see the logical basis for this "gateway" argument. Being a music fan is a time- and money-consuming affair that most people don't have time for. Perhaps because they have a family to raise or perhaps because they are too busy reading books or going to art galleries. Casting aspersions on people (an amorphous mass consumer regarded as dumb, lazy and easily manipulated - sub-human cattle as it were) because they have just Diana Krall, Norah Jones, "The Best Of Mozart" and a Rolling Stones album (or whatever) on their shelves has always seemed quite shallow to me.

This air of superiority sort of ties in with the Redman comment above, this "jazz is too complicated for the lowly masses" argument. I've addressed this before: some forms of jazz are complicated, yes, but some are relatively simple and accessible, as is the case for most musics, be they hip-hop, rock or classical. Jazz does itself a disservice by constantly highlighting how profound it is and how much it demands from the attentive, and by association profound, listener. It's a disservice because it's simply not true, in objective (some jazz, thankfully, is made to be commercial, easy, danceable) and subjective senses (what's mind-numbingly complex for one neophyte might be quite immediate and clear to another).

Lundvall on CD length:
There is too much to choose from now, too much information, and CD's are far too long. No one can focus on a seventy-four-minutes of music, and chances are it is not going to be good all the way through. People should make shorter records with better content, and keep the extraneous stuff off of it. Period. Not everyone wants to hear seventy-four minutes of a vibraphone player.

I'm happy to hear this. There's a reason that at school classes are 50-55 minutes long, that people take regular coffee breaks, etc. Sometimes one might enjoy stretching the limits of endurance (a six-hour Morton Feldman string quartet performance, for example), but one wouldn't want to make that the norm. Personally, I feel most satisfied with 40-50 minutes of music where I can just put the CD in the player and enjoy it from start to finish, with no filler of course, but also without unnecessary alternate takes or pointless studio babble disturbing my listening pleasure (Verve Elite Edition Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster, I'm looking at you).

Ratliff on nostalgia:
And I do think that for most people there is only a certain time of their lives when they go out and hear music a lot, and when they are involved in some sense with music as its evolving and being created. That is their golden moment and they keep referring everything back to that. When they get into their forties and fifties they slow down and don't go out so much. They have mortgages and things

Definitely. That's why I quickly tire of "they don't make 'em like they used to" arguments. If you can't or won't follow, don't blame it on the music.

Lundvall on the weight of history:
As for young people and what jazz they listen to, an example I can think of is that of my personal trainer, who was heavily into rock and roll. I began spoon-feeding him CD's and he soon became a devoted jazz fan, but he was only buying Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, etc. I asked him if he was listening to any of the young artists, and he said he liked them but he had to start with the legendary people. He felt he needed a knowledge base before he could enjoy contemporary jazz artists. Javon Jackson once said to me, "I am not only competing with Joshua Redman and the other young tenor players, I am competing with guys who are no longer alive." I believe he is absolutely right.

Lundvall on royalty facts and figures:
I also want to mention that in every case where Blue Note artists were signed before 1970, we have brought the royalty rate to ten percent. So, from these reissues a lot of money has accumulated for many of the artists no longer with us. As a result, we have been able to pay out significant royalties -- I recall one in particular where a check was written to the family of Hank Mobley for something like three hundred fifty thousand dollars as a result of the revenues these reissues have brought in.

Redman on jazz evolution:
You can't tell the story of the development of jazz today the way the story was told from 1900 - 1960. You could tell the story of the first sixty years of this music in a neat, linear way. One style led to another which led to another, and there is a clear sense of what the next new big thing was, and who the leaders of that movement were. New Orleans jazz naturally led to swing, which naturally led to bebop, which became cool and hard bop, which became modal, which became free jazz, and with it you are left with a sense of what the next great "thing" in the music was. I think that the time where you can explain jazz history in a kind of modernist perspective -- where one thing leads to the next in a natural sense of progression and evolution -- has come to an end . You can't tell the story of jazz in those neat, simple evolutionary terms now. I don't know that there will be another great revolution in jazz in the same way that bebop was a great revolution it was, and because of that, there may not be the same kind of mythic figures in jazz the way Bird and Diz and Ornette were. But that doesn't mean that the music today is stagnant, or that it is not developing or any less creative. It may just mean that we have to view it through a different lens, and use a different paradigm to describe it.

It seems to me that this has become the more-or-less consensus opinion on jazz history, but I'm pretty sure it's false. Firstly because the next style does not (or at least, should not, if the audience is mature, which is not always the case) obliterate the preceding style. Styles (or more generally, conceptions of music) cohabit and overlap in shifting configurations, go underground and re-emerge in different forms. Then again, maybe it is easy to say this from today's vantage point, when buying a recording from 1930, 1950, 1970, 1990 or 2003 is essentially the same thing (tying in to Lundvall's Javon Jackson quote about competing with all the dead guys, to which he could add the back-catalogue of guys still living, like Sonny Rollins).

Secondly, a linear history can only be made in hindsight and when the jazz community was relatively small. In hindsight, the history books have been written, the derivative and uninteresting has been more-or-less forgotten (although a lot of good stuff is just as easily forgotten), the heroes stand tall. Back then, I get the impression from my readings that the pool of high-level jazz musicians was quite small: everyone was buying a lot of the same records, people were literally play "opposite each other" in New York clubs, there were relatively few media outlets.

Now, jazz is quite global, releases pour in, media outlets are numerous (around the world and in cyberspace), the notion of scene has broken down. Hindsight might well have nothing to gaze out upon from a lofty plane. Sure, there are a few releases that get talked about a lot (Jason Moran, Dave Holland, Keith Jarrett, Norah Jones, Diana Krall...), but 10 hard-core jazz fans can produce a list of 50 great recordings from the last few years with relatively little overlap. I'm over here in my little niche of Belgian jazz, sometimes hearing some really great things, but who else is hearing what I am? Others are deep into the much bigger French or Italian scenes. Even America isn't a monolith: it is itself regionalised and incapable of seeing all of its own talents (which is why so many New York musicians get discovered on Barcelona's Fresh Sound New Talent, or Ellery Eskelin is on the Swiss Hat Hut).

Okay, that was a ridiculously long post for something I first claimed was of little interest. I hope this had some added value.