Derek, Thank you or your reply, but it is difficult to give measured comment with knowing who you were listening to on this occasion. It is not usually the up-market restaurants in Paris (was this in Paris?) that the best jazz is usually heard. Indeed it is not usually in the up-market Parisian restaurants where jazz is presented where the best food is eaten either. A mix of devotions usually results in a mixed outcome for both jazz and food. It is obvious that you have forgotten the music, have you forgotten the food and the wine equally so?
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Allan > > I don't know the name of the group I was listening to. But > it was in a fairly up-market Parisian restaurant and I was > assured by aficionados of the form that I was listening to > very good jazz. (I should add that I have not exactly lived > my life in a cupboard and I have heard various 'famous' jazz > groups many times, like everyone else. It's not all that > easy to avoid them in this world - regrettably. Don't ask > me their names though. I do my best to forget everything > anyone tells me about jazz.) > I did not mean to suggest that you have been living in isolation, but you do seem to suggest that you have been deliberately isolating yourself from hearing jazz. > No I don't think these musicians 'were capable of typifying > in a single instance all the possible instances of jazz > performance' (btw you're not an analytical philosopher by > any chance? I seem to recognise the idiom). But they were > reasonably representative of what jazz is as a musical form. > Do I need to spend interminable evenings listening to every > jazz band in creation before I can comment on jazz? (God, I > hope not!!) > No, I am not an analytical philosopher, but it would be reasonable to ask if you have had contact with the all of the varieties that are usually included within the broad church of jazz, some of which the practitioners and listeners strive to exclude from that church as a separate faith and practice, rather than being a sect within a single divinity? I find it difficult to comprehend dismissing all of variations that have been produced within and from jazz, some of which may be considered to have emerged adjacent to jazz. But then again you are probably not doing so, but it is difficult to conceive what you are condemning with the term jazz as impoverished and which musics you would consider rich and engaging and for what reasons, which is one point of asking about criteria. > As for 'criteria', that gets us into very deep waters > philosophically speaking. Do you have clear criteria to > distinguish art from mediocre music (or mediocre visual art > or literature.) I don't, and have never encountered any that > I found convincing. (And not knowing where Frances' learned > experts' live, I can't ask them.) As I said, I was simply > giving you my opinion and you are quite welcome to disagree. > (You obviously do anyway). For me, as I say, jazz is an > impoverished musical form. It is to real music as thin gruel > is to a wonderful tasty meal. It is empty, meretricious, > even cynical, music (cynical because it poses as something > complex but appeals to quite simple, basic instincts). It is > the reverse of what music should be. It is tedious, > unexpressive, flat, and wearisome. For me an evening of jazz > is sheer musical torment. It is a slight step above pop or > rock but that, in my book, scarcely rates as much of a > compliment. > Everyone has an opinion, or so it is said, but having an opinion is not the basis for dismissing a musical or aesthetic practice. Yes, I do disagree with the wholehearted dismissal of jazz. This is something that Adorno did, and he also stepped from particular instances to a general condemnation in terms not so very dissimilar to your own, except fro the metaphor of the tasty mean. I disagree with Adorno, substantially on the ground that his own aesthetic criteria and assessments of jazz undermine themselves; both are based on contradiction and present that contradiction as the aesthetic criteria of judgement. For example, the relation between the whole and the part, or freedom and determinacy - structure, or explanation and choice. Each opposite of his unresolvable philosophical dualisms undermines the other, leaving a contradiction which Adorno proposes as its own criteria of success and judgment of success. But that is probably not what you are doing, I am simply pointing to a similarity in your approach to jazz; a general condemnation of a heterogeneous practice, some of which is better than others, or worse than others. > Glad to have had the opportunity to say a little more on the > topic. Agreed, though I have been just as vaguely generalising as you have. Toodle-pip, Allan
