The opening note of Jazz, Ken Burns’ […] series for PBS, comes from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who’s not playing but lecturing. “Jazz music objectifies America,” he tells us, then offers a lesson about what jazz really is. The form’s great power emerges from musicians who “negotiate their agendas with each other.” According to Marsalis (he’s Lincon Center’s artistic director for jazz), that negotiation, that handing off and passing around of inspiration — that jam — is jazz’s transcendence.
Most jazz musicians would agree. As the cliché goes, it’s one thing to do a show for your paying customers, playing what they expect and have paid to hear, but after the squares go home, you can stop blowing shit and make another kind of music altogether. Yet many musicians would also agree that, more often than not, it’s a lot more satisfying to play that personal kind of music than it is to sit and listen to it. Jazz musicians involved with each other in intimate creativity may well be negotiating their way to improvisational sublimity, but they’ve often left the audience out of the musical deal. This is a central but rarely acknowledged tension in Burns’ documentary treatment.
Charles Paul Freund, “Epic Jazz”, Reason, 2001-01-03.
February 5, 2020
QotD: The decline of Jazz
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