Jazz 2010@15

 

 My thoughts on the Jazz 2010 article: Rule-breaking in music (or art) has its own breaking point. Musical elements are not infinitely malleable. Once you have twisted something in one direction, you only have the option of moving it back to its ‘normal’ state or all the way in the opposite direction.

In terms of jazz harmony, you move back to triads or dyads and add extensions via melody, or take harmony out altogether and make it purely monophonic, as in Arabic music. Jazz operating as melody suggestive of harmony is still very alive in the art form. The solo without chord changes naturally implies harmony. Jazz has perhaps over-relied on harmony and chord extensions. A Jazz that arises from the ground up (bass/drums) with contrapuntal voices could be more interesting. Miles was correct in taking jazz to that place in the 1960s.  

The comments about the future of downloading to DVDs were also interesting—that people viewed the future as being shaped through the constraints of media. The future in this regard is that there are no constraints, as the length of an audio file or audio compilation (‘album’) is only limited by how much could be uploaded or streamed from a server.

1/20/2010

[1/20/2025: I always thought that jazz was the sound of the future because it’s a “cubist” idea, like cubism in painting redefined the notion of “representational linearity” or a logic of how a painting should be made or how music should sound as tradition or convention as a collective idea. Jazz is a going outside–or a continuum of inside-outside as tension and release. To me, this is where jazz is unique. Jazz is mostly inert now, but there could be possibilities in AI improvisations that humans interact with as human-in-the-loop, or the other way around with machines in the loop following what’s going on in the music, and controlled at the mixing board.]