Music you are prejudiced against

[pattycakes_]

i'd put money on this not winning you over but it's nearly 30mins of pure cosmic rawness. bobbing and weaving in and out of a pure fire set of sidemen aka the ultimate quartet to do ever it. he'd gotten a love supreme out of the way. it was time to go stratospheric. fuckin elvin with the rhythmic martial arts. mccoy stabbing the fuck out of those disharmonics. garrison with the low end glue tying it all together. a fire's been lit and it just keeps growing. john sounds like he's trying to go in every direction at once. the head? what head? it's a pyromaniacal wrestling match.

 

[linebaugh]

once i start hearing instruments that way (programmatic, i guess you could say?) i just wish i was listening to electronic music, since i think it can be much more evocative and less limited by narrow physical constraints.

to defend the sax as sax, I think theres no more evocative acoustic instrument. The timbre options available to a saxophonist are vast- it honks and squeals and hums and sings and growls. Sometimes I catch bits that sound like like the human voice. it sounds like an organic being. this coltrane song captures it well, feels like following the entire life cycle of a jungle cat in fast motion from birth to death.

 

[linebaugh]

Why focus on the solo?

That alice coltrane tune has one of my favorite sax bits- after listlessly noodling about he locks into those arpeggios that sound like the quantized runs of a synth arp. And the hanging melodies after are fog piercing.

 

[thirdform]

someone should break down their favorite jazz sax solo for me and yyaldrin and explain whats happening, what you hear in it that you enjoy. without recasting it in light of a different genre if possible. and saying more than just "he blows with so much emotion man" or something to that effect. a listening map.

I don't zone into the solos as a rule but it's just melodic content isn't it? Usually the best sax or trumpet solo is able to integrate varying harmonic temperalities and shift between keys and modes. Wayne Shorter in Art Blakey's jazz messengers is a good example. staccato rhythmic jerks incrimentally building up to a melodic drama. In electronic music one rarely listens for the melodies as they are highly simplistic as a rule - this is actually electronic musics strength, because its neither improvised nor composed, but sequenced.

 

[thirdform]

you can't faithfully write down an electronic music score. i mean, this is why most of it in the classical realm is music for tape. Because it's rarely got anything to do with *playing* instruments. Yes, Jean Michel-jarre and many others went back to synthesisers as modernised pianos, but that has always meant the only thing synthetic about their music is the initial surface. like synthetic clothing or food. whereas true electronic music is actually completely a new synthetic creation with no analog equivalent.

That's why I don't think it makes sense to judge jazz by the standards of electronic music.

 

[thirdform]

I like both electronic music and proper music because I'm multilingual. But I'm not sure how one would open themselves up to that in such a late development. But also because I'm a big fan of electronic music sounding more and more like a new language, esperanto if you will, I tend to recoil from electronic fusions. I don't dismiss them but I don't seek them out.

 

[mvuent]

Why focus on the solo?

to defend the sax as sax, I think theres no more evocative acoustic instrument. The timbre options available to a saxophonist are vast- it honks and squeals and hums and sings and growls. Sometimes I catch bits that sound like like the human voice. it sounds like an organic being. this coltrane song captures it well, it feels like following the entire life cycle of a jungle cat in fast motion from birth to death.

i just think this goes back to what i was saying earlier. sure, i can look for jazz that doesn't center around solos, or that sonically doesn't resemble standard jazz instrumentation... but do i really like jazz then?

I don't zone into the solos as a rule but it's just melodic content isn't it? Usually the best sax or trumpet solo is able to integrate varying harmonic temperalities and shift between keys and modes. Wayne Shorter in Art Blakey's jazz messengers is a good example. staccato rhythmic jerks incrimentally building up to a melodic drama. In electronic music one rarely listens for the melodies as they are highly simplistic as a rule - this is actually electronic musics strength, because its neither improvised nor composed, but sequenced.

yeah totally. a big part of why i don't get much out of solos or jazz in general (and most classical) is that my ears aren't that attuned to the melodic and harmonic distinctions prioritized in traditional western music theory. roman numeral chords, scales, counterpoint. as i get more discerning along those lines i expect i'll get more out of "proper" instrumental music.

 

[thirdform]

like the later 'intelligent' junglists were actually using the technology in a quite original way - trying to make the breakbeats sound fluid, which had actually never been done before. a lot of 80s electrofunk/boogie is curiously funky, but in this really machinic way. some people pulled it off to a really high standard - photek rings around saturn etc, but others fell by the wayside or ended up as advert music in 1998 - looking at you Peshay with all those horrid porn sax over really boring shuffly beats.

The problem is however dialectically speaking sometimes an original use of technology can paradoxically be the conservative move. sometimes it's good to use the technology in one mode of being and rinse that out to its full potential.

 

[linebaugh]

i just think this goes back to what i was saying earlier. sure, i can look for jazz that doesn't center around solos, or that doesn't sound like jazz instrumentation... but do i really like jazz then?

that is jazz, man

 

[pattycakes_]

yeah totally. a big part of why i don't get much out of solos or jazz in general (and most classical) is that my ears aren't that attuned to the melodic and harmonic distinctions prioritized in traditional western music theory. roman numeral chords, scales, counterpoint. as i get more discerning along those lines i expect i'll get more out of "proper" instrumental music.

i don't know shit about theory and love it. sometimes the more you know about how it's made the harder it is to let it do what it's trying to do. but looking at the comments on the average coltrane vid you see plenty of theory heads all chiming in with how insane he was. like check this from the wiki about the one i posted above

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_at_the_Half_Note:_One_Down,_One_Up (whole thing is great, elvin broke his kick pedal part way through and still punches like tyson)

David Pope, Professor of Saxophone at James Madison University,[10] called the recording "one of the most profound documents of myelin in action... We can hear [Coltrane] building circuits, correcting mistakes, repeating complex ideas - all in real time."[11] Regarding the climactic section of the title track, Pope wrote: "It should be obvious to anyone with a reasonably developed ear that he is working through some extremely complex melodic material here, stopping and starting, increasing the speed, and eventually shifting into a gear that most of us will never know. I believe that we are actually hearing him put the finishing touches on a few pieces of neural circuitry... The level of physical intensity here is amazing, but what is happening inside his mind is the improvisation olympics."

 

[thirdform]

my problem with a lot of people writing about electronic music is they don't really understand tech. So when the jazzy heads (not talking about free jazz here, but jazzy which is different) people say they are progressing the music, they resurrect this dualism between sophistication and ruffneck boysterousness, which is true of course but part of what those guys like Kirk Degiorgio mean is trying to humanise the unyieldy tech because it isn't meant to be humanised in that way. So actually calling it unoriginal is a misnomer.

But of course not everything *original* should be valourised, as every marxist knows capital murders old labour in favour of presenting us with the new, no matter how derivative or rote it may be.

 

[WashYourHands]

Cosey FT on horns was an ear opener. Equally, a tune like TG's Tanith flexing softly, like Lalo Schifrin on a bad trip.

 

[john eden]

The conjunction of “indie” and 1990s new lads did not produce a single thing of merit. Except the strings in “Wonderwall”.

 

[john eden]

Also I can’t be arsed with dancehall made after 2008 but that is age rather than prejudice probably.

 

[john eden]

Oh and Pizza Express Jazz Club.

 

[DannyL]

Yes, to second Jon, Britpop. Oasis, Blur, and all the second tier wannabe rubbish. What's worse is the way this is served up on TV every year as some kinda ground zero musical revolution. It says more about the age and backgrounds of meeja people that anything else, white people who went to University in the mid-90s. Shut up and fuck off and take your 5th hand Kinks rip off with you.

 

[WashYourHands]

War criminals, all of them. Add Suede and those cunts who went on about their teeth being nice and clean. Clean teeth keep you going, granted, but that lamb chopped sideburns brigade can do one.

 

[kumar]

as far as pre-free jazzy jazz goes i suppose i rarely listen to it these days but it provides a framework for pushing the limits of human athleticism thats infinitely preferable to say ynwie malmstein style nerd rock. although i suppose it became codified into a framework in that sense after a long period of being sex and drugs and violence music.

with someone like art tatum for instance, you do have to strain to hear it on its own terms, and im not clued up enough to get how boundary pushing he would have sounded in 1937. but theres loads of pretty mind bending moments in his playing. all the impossibly minute subdivisions and just on time glides between phrases are crazy. i mean theyre endless iterations of classics but with this fizzing amplified granular detail that stops it from being boring. they sound like a deep fried meme of a jazz standard.

but jazz up until the 60s feels more like say football. the economics of it, the status of the virtuoso, it seems like a simpler period where theres a more or less widely agreed upon standard of success. theres not really divergent undergrounds that you get in music that followed. the poor blind son of a mechanic can end up playing to packed baying audiences at the shrine auditorium in the same way that my grandad could appreciate maradona.

but putting aside listening to it on its own terms, much of the charm/shame is it being panto music that you can listen to wearing a three piece suit. there was an art tatum cd in the romantic french cafe i used to wash dishes in which probably brainwashed me.

 

[DannyL]

War criminals, all of them. Add Suede and those cunts who went on about their teeth being nice and clean. Clean teeth keep you going, granted, but that lamb chopped sideburns brigade can do one.

There's no excuse for this. Mockeny piano, "fags"., jolly bants in a mobile bed! Like The Monkees but with none of the charm. The worst. Should be in The Hague.

 

[WashYourHands]