http://www.buzzfeed.com/verymuchso/whats-the-deal-with-jazz
Now, there a lot of ways one could respond directly to this article, but before I do, I'm going to let 3 people who are much more qualified than me get the obligatory part out of the way:
1: This dude on Twitter:
@sternbergh @dankois @max_read I'm just so sick of jazz SHOVED IN MY FACE all day. It's inescapable in today's culture.
— Dave Bry (@davebry9) February 15, 2013
2: This penguin
And 3: Miles "the coolest fucking motherfucker on the planet" Davis:
One of my favorite things to whine about is: why more people don't listen jazz? (waahhhh) Especially modern jazz. And while I still think the main cause really just boils down to a simple lack of exposure, one of the more nefarious obstacles the 21st century jazz faces (besides the fact that holy shit they playing jazz innnn theee fuuuuutuuuuuuure!!!!!) is that jazz just isn't considered very "cool" anymore, which is why otherwise adventurously-minded listeners don't seek it out like they used to. In fact, in some circles/cesspoolsoftheinternet it's even considered "lame".
It sucks that what's maybe most open-minded form of music gets stuck with the kind of "elitist" rep it does (not that that's totally undeserved, but still), and it sucks even more that such a historically important and uniquely African American art form gets the amount of shit that it does from people who probably have no idea what they're talking about, and, not to mention, jazz musicians actually fucking invented cool in the first place. (literally)
But the point here is not to bring up the coolness of the jazz peeps chief-coolness-compendiumators like Pitchfork already acknowledge the existence of (albeit solely in the form of of reissues of albums that were recorded during segregation)(...not that we dont' still have that!). Rather, we are here to celebrate the living, flesh eating zombie that is modern jazz, and how the people playing it are some of the coolest musicians out there.
Of course the idea of "cool" itself is a pretty problematic one, and the search for it (or "it") has led both society and advertisers down some pretty bad roads, most of which end up at Michael Bay movies. Not to sound all gushy here, but "cool" at the expense of authenticity--which yes yes is an equally problematic term I know but its a real thing goddammit it just is and I know you know it too--is bad. So "cool" here isn't about the surface sheen of 90's style "'tude" and "radicalness," but rather about jazz musicians who radiate such 'tude and radicalness, such coolness, because those things are an authentic part of their musical and/or bad selves. They don't look cool in some contrived marketing way, they are cool. Thus, as that link defined Prez's version above: "calmly audacious".
So, contrary to popular belief, coolness isn't about not giving a fuck, it's about giving so many more fucks than anyone else that you exist outside of the normal-people's fucks-giving spectrum. While the surface qualities of cool (sunglasses, ass-kicking, scoffing in the direction of The Man), are just that, surface qualities, said qualities, when they emerge from a place of authenticity, can often prompt into existence a unique type of fan response that extends the allocation fuck-giving types into an unstoppably cool juggernaut community... thing.
So, here some cool people who are playing what I would call jazz music right now:
Soil & "PIMP" Sessions
There was a more suave and black & white pic I was also considering but, like, c'mon.
Okay, maybe not that calm. The strangely punctuated group Soil & "PIMP" Sessions was my introduction which I think is sometimes called "Japanese Club Jazz". Well, I certainly hope it's called that, because that means that there are some bomb ass clubs out there in Japan that I would really love to go to because this is on some hardcore shit.
Listen to the frenzied barrage of jazz that is Memai and tell me that wasn't recorded by playing directly into a particle accelerator and smashing those notes together, Iron Man 2 style. The soloists straight murder it up, with the sax in particular compressing the unhinged, distorted skronkitude of some fiery free jazz-shit into like a minute of oddly melodic might.
They call it "Death Jazz", which, let's be honest, doesn't really make any sense (I guess the aggressiveness?). But any band with someone credited as "agitator" and "spirit" who basically just wears sunglasses and shouts a lot through a megaphone can write themselves into my book under whatever the fuck kind of label they want.
There is a unique way in which Japan distills, reflects, and distorts American culture to its own ends, through it's own sensibilities. It's more than I have room to really go into, but I think in essence, the extremes in Japanese culture stand out more than they do in ours, if that makes sense. For--to use a maybe overused--example, tragicomically chaste pop stars, but also used panty vending machines. So when, my friend pejoratively labeled Soil & "PIMP" Sessions "cartoon jazz," I think he was actually bringing a pretty apt description to the language-party that is music-nerd conversation. Cartoons, after all, are manic, goofy, and hilarious. You know, like Cowboy Bebop. Or--
THUNDERCAT
HOOOOOOOOO!!!
In the era of YouTube views, soundcloud plays, Facebook likes, and Hypemachine, err, hypes..(?) using a metric notion of "actual sales" to determine "popularity" is, uh, confusing. And besides, I'm not going to like bust out the Billboard Charts cause A. Who cares and B. that might threaten the truth of my ass-pulled-out-of assumption that, at least in certain cool kid circles, Thundercat might be the most popular jazz cat around (pun soooooo intended).
Earthlings first heard Stephen Bruner's blazing, spidery baselines darting through Flying Lotus' astral planes like an Arwing in all-range mode, and his neither-thunderous-nor-catlike falsetto musing over "MmmHmm", but its the post-millenial journey through George Duke-harmonies meets a million crazy bass tracks coming at you at once that is "The Golden Age of Apocalypse" that cements Thundercat as a truly badaas mofo.
Look, instruments maybe aren't as cool as they once were--ok not that bass was *ever*
cool, but still. When so much of the "people should play instruments" rhetoric comes down to either rockist fetishization of pointless displays of technical virtuousity or rockist fetishization of, well, playing instruments really badly, and so much of the "good music" these days comes from people who need naught but a computer or sampler... well, there's room for both ok, and can't we just get along? (JK <3 YNGWIE)
But that said, hearing/seeing someone just cut loose and play their instrument like no has ever played it before is an irreplaceable artistic experience, a principle Thundercat embodies the shit out of. You have not heard a bassist not only rock that many bass chords but harmonize them, all multitracked-like, to his own singing into an organic rhythmic and harmonic structure generally managed by only the saddest of Robert Johnsons.
And not only can he rock those rarely used bass harmonies literally better than any bass harmonies I've ever heard (since I have never heard any other one but still), but dudes singing chops take the heavy George Duke inspiration and bring us some beautifully lucid Daylight-bringing results.
Oh, that and his fucking Saiyan armor.
Rafiq Bhatia
HAS ANYONE EVER SEEN THIS GUY AND BATMAN IN THE SAME ROOM THO?
Despite the absence, from what I can find, of the dreaded j-word on his very sexy website, Bhatia's hyperreal, holographic soundscapes are firmly anchored in the jazz dimension. To pick up the live vs computer tangent above, I would say that this guitarist is, right now, putting live, improvised music and electronic post-production together in a mood-lit bedroom, cranking some D'Angelo, and giving them plenty of time to make some sophisticated sound babies more effectively than pretty much anyone. Dude is at the forefront, exploring ways to utilize the suitably Bjorkian sound manipulation power of Bjork collaborator/engineer Valgeir Sigurðsson and producer Alexander Overington in ways that enhance the fierce musical narrative of his songs rather than be all distract-y and cheesy and stuff.
Or, as he puts it, to do:
"what would we do if we knew this improvised moment existed and we had as much time as we wanted to fortify it with whatever sounds we wanted, regardless of if we know its possible or not."
A good point of comparison might be, like, the way Stanley Kubrick would push his actors into giving these wildly unexpected performances coming from places they didn't even know was there, and then enhance them even further through the mechanisms of his unique visual language via sets, composition, etc. in order to explore the narrative space in a way no one ever had before. So here, the players are the actors, and the studio all the camera stuff.
With all this shit about modernistness and electronics and [insert description of the music involving the word "angular" here], you might be getting the impression that the product is more concerned with being "advanced" than being soulful. Which is the opposite of the case! Just check out the--this word is usually used weirdly but I think it's the best choice here--cinematic cover of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" that closes its namesaked album Yes It Will here. Just like how any artist's technical facility is valuable only in its ability to better express the music's feeling, Bhatia's
technological facility serves to explore the song's soul.
Plus, since the FlyLo connection seems to be everywhere these days, there's a mean cover of "Pickled!" on his equally great Strata EP, so, like, space and stuff.
Plus, since the FlyLo connection seems to be everywhere these days, there's a mean cover of "Pickled!" on his equally great Strata EP, so, like, space and stuff.
And finally:
Kagero
Oh god Kagero please don't kill me with your coolness!
Another Japanese crew, Kagero were actually first bandthat came to mind when thinking of the cool jazz bands because they may in fact be the coolest band. Just, well--
--yeah.
Cause between their propensity for shooting ridiculously color-tinted videos with equally insane handheld camera moves--
--and their certified badass bassist and keyboardist--
--I would say that, contrary to popular belief, Jazz is, has been, and will in all likelihood continue to be, in the words a crowd of people responding to Andre 3000, what's cooler than bein cool:
Ice. Cold.
--h.s.t.
