Future Jazz (Continued)
Jazz has had many futures, each one of them a starting point for the next. Ornette Coleman was/is the future, Sun Ra was/is the future. Jazz has futurism built-in. On the first manned mission to Mars, jazz will be played.
Jazz has an innate capacity to absorb ideas about a future music, unlike most music from the classical period and before--although there may have been elements that were revolutionary at the time, such as the invention of equal temperament and functional harmony--that have squarely framed our understanding of what is deemed "musical".
Jazz as both category and frame
The frame of jazz has always had a certain "thinness" that allowed the diffuse light of other genres to be seen through it, while being an "opaque" (unique) genre on its own. Early jazz transformed the decorative filigree of the baroque and classical periods into something more cubist and modern, yet it arose almost entirely from the infrastructure built by classical composers. A lot of that has since crumbled, with new jazz using electronics as the underlying support, as well re-incorporating elements of its African roots. The "old school" moniker perhaps has been the cause of the switch from functional music theory to theories of color and texture borrowed from the visual arts, making the old shop-talk of chord changes somewhat old-hat. (Music is not about the chord changes.) And yet, that culture is still alive with younger musicians that see it as a kind of mystical science or technology, still ahead of its time (even though it is far in the past) now redounding again to futurist themes.
As much as art uses metaphorical framing to release creativity, removing frames altogether can provoke interesting reactions, similar to the use stainless steel tables in restaurants: Both restaurants and hospitals use them, but once the correlation is made, the idea seems repulsive. Claes Oldenburg sculptures always broke the frame for objects as we know them through that boundary condition. Frames can be both good and bad metaphorical traps, dictating how we understand them. One is liberating and and the other stigmatized by association. Jazz still breaks "traditions" in that some people see it as unresolved, or "anti-form".
Theories of grammar
Over the past century jazz and all its frames have been baked in, so it is more labile in terms of having the capacity for strangeness. Experimental music attempts to bridge categories or merge them, which breaks preconceived frames. The composer can suggest a new frame for the organization of sound, but since writers and listeners use different frames, they can be confusing and alien to the listener, who arrives with a fairly rigid set of expectations about what music is supposed to be. But jazz can be boring if not somewhat off-kilter, or future-facing in some way.
It is getting more frequent that people say to me that they don't "get" jazz, and immediately dismiss it as an art form. And it's not for lack of admiration for talent and skill: fewer people examine paintings older than the 1800s. In my own observation, the impressionist galleries at the Art Institute get the most traffic. People "get" these paintings. I always see them as the "pop snapshots" of the 19th Century, light and easy to relate to. The art world equivalent of jazz is Pollock and Rothko, and appropriately so, as both are residues of modernity. Debussy was a part of a zeitgeist that let 7th chords out of the prison of classical theory, that never accepted that sound as being a resolved sonority. (The major 7th was always understood as the leading tone to the tonic, according to the rules of harmony in the baroque and classical periods).
My idea of future of jazz would include more random harmonic clashes, pushing the envelope of how much odd dissonance we can stand--not only at the harmonic level, but also melodic and rhythmic dissonances.
But there is always a danger in forcing predictions. Jazz was not a future music per se, but rather more of a release of the constraints of music theory. Minor seconds were the previous limits of what was considered a sour tonality, but we have no problem with that sound now. In the future we'll break more rules, and create new ones, once the extreme has been explored and we retrench towards the center. Or it may evolve into something completely new with no reference to the past. This would make perfect sense for future generations, exploring that which "bristles with razor blades" as Picasso once said, rather than being comfortable with the status quo.
Jazz has an innate capacity to absorb ideas about a future music, unlike most music from the classical period and before--although there may have been elements that were revolutionary at the time, such as the invention of equal temperament and functional harmony--that have squarely framed our understanding of what is deemed "musical".
Jazz as both category and frame
The frame of jazz has always had a certain "thinness" that allowed the diffuse light of other genres to be seen through it, while being an "opaque" (unique) genre on its own. Early jazz transformed the decorative filigree of the baroque and classical periods into something more cubist and modern, yet it arose almost entirely from the infrastructure built by classical composers. A lot of that has since crumbled, with new jazz using electronics as the underlying support, as well re-incorporating elements of its African roots. The "old school" moniker perhaps has been the cause of the switch from functional music theory to theories of color and texture borrowed from the visual arts, making the old shop-talk of chord changes somewhat old-hat. (Music is not about the chord changes.) And yet, that culture is still alive with younger musicians that see it as a kind of mystical science or technology, still ahead of its time (even though it is far in the past) now redounding again to futurist themes.
As much as art uses metaphorical framing to release creativity, removing frames altogether can provoke interesting reactions, similar to the use stainless steel tables in restaurants: Both restaurants and hospitals use them, but once the correlation is made, the idea seems repulsive. Claes Oldenburg sculptures always broke the frame for objects as we know them through that boundary condition. Frames can be both good and bad metaphorical traps, dictating how we understand them. One is liberating and and the other stigmatized by association. Jazz still breaks "traditions" in that some people see it as unresolved, or "anti-form".
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Threadwaste by Robert Morris (1968)
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Theories of grammar
Over the past century jazz and all its frames have been baked in, so it is more labile in terms of having the capacity for strangeness. Experimental music attempts to bridge categories or merge them, which breaks preconceived frames. The composer can suggest a new frame for the organization of sound, but since writers and listeners use different frames, they can be confusing and alien to the listener, who arrives with a fairly rigid set of expectations about what music is supposed to be. But jazz can be boring if not somewhat off-kilter, or future-facing in some way.
It is getting more frequent that people say to me that they don't "get" jazz, and immediately dismiss it as an art form. And it's not for lack of admiration for talent and skill: fewer people examine paintings older than the 1800s. In my own observation, the impressionist galleries at the Art Institute get the most traffic. People "get" these paintings. I always see them as the "pop snapshots" of the 19th Century, light and easy to relate to. The art world equivalent of jazz is Pollock and Rothko, and appropriately so, as both are residues of modernity. Debussy was a part of a zeitgeist that let 7th chords out of the prison of classical theory, that never accepted that sound as being a resolved sonority. (The major 7th was always understood as the leading tone to the tonic, according to the rules of harmony in the baroque and classical periods).
My idea of future of jazz would include more random harmonic clashes, pushing the envelope of how much odd dissonance we can stand--not only at the harmonic level, but also melodic and rhythmic dissonances.
But there is always a danger in forcing predictions. Jazz was not a future music per se, but rather more of a release of the constraints of music theory. Minor seconds were the previous limits of what was considered a sour tonality, but we have no problem with that sound now. In the future we'll break more rules, and create new ones, once the extreme has been explored and we retrench towards the center. Or it may evolve into something completely new with no reference to the past. This would make perfect sense for future generations, exploring that which "bristles with razor blades" as Picasso once said, rather than being comfortable with the status quo.
