Editor's Idea: November 1986
ISSUE 3, November 1986
Editor: Richard Cook
As we approach the end of one of the strongest jazz years in the UK, it might seem churlish to raise a questioning note. But we are obliged to wonder just how well 'jazz' is doing here.
Newly-sired pundits have been championing jazz's fresh new health over a great deal of media time. Jazz collections have been a feature of major record companies' reissue programmes like never befre; Get Wise! even purported to give us a new jazz compilation. Jazz DJS have plundered 30 years of music in search of a new perfect beat. We have seen a token jazz revival feature in almost every magazine on the stand. But something is not quite right.
A hungry baby like British jazz still needs the right diet. Gorged on instantaneous media attention, our infant new jazz can look very shaky on its feet. The whole new jazz scene - it's hardly a movement, with the country itself pulled apart by recession - is already rife with contradictions and different reasons to be.
There is more young jazz here than there has been for three decades, and the people we've been talking about all year are a vital show of health. Most of them just want to get on annd play. But the glare of the music business won't leave it at that, and a rolling bandwagon can run people over too.
Two things in particular make cause for concern. The insistence on whipping together every kind of 'etchnic' rhythm under a jazz heading is doing the music very few favours. Jazz isn't samba, the same way that samba isn't jazz. The great global soup of danceable rhythms is becoming a confusion, not a force against snobbery. Pan-cultural crossovers are fine when they don't obscure the spirit and dignity of the music's root. Suddenly, everything seems clouded.
There is the talk that gets us called 'elitist'. Quite the reverse. In fact, it's the speakers of the revival (a wrong but useful word) that are forging a new elitism. Jazz is not only Blakey, Morgan and Nascimento: it's also Leo Smith, Martial Solal and Barbara Donald. But what room is being made for them and their work? A new conservatism is at work in the core of this return to jazz - as if it's wrong to be too serious about listening, to want to be literate about the music.
I'm not interested in a jazz reawakening that has no space for Albert Ayler. If we do not accept the extremes and difficulties of the music, the interest is worth nothing. The new barriers must be destroyed at once.
R.D. Cook
Editor: Richard Cook
As we approach the end of one of the strongest jazz years in the UK, it might seem churlish to raise a questioning note. But we are obliged to wonder just how well 'jazz' is doing here.
Newly-sired pundits have been championing jazz's fresh new health over a great deal of media time. Jazz collections have been a feature of major record companies' reissue programmes like never befre; Get Wise! even purported to give us a new jazz compilation. Jazz DJS have plundered 30 years of music in search of a new perfect beat. We have seen a token jazz revival feature in almost every magazine on the stand. But something is not quite right.
A hungry baby like British jazz still needs the right diet. Gorged on instantaneous media attention, our infant new jazz can look very shaky on its feet. The whole new jazz scene - it's hardly a movement, with the country itself pulled apart by recession - is already rife with contradictions and different reasons to be.
There is more young jazz here than there has been for three decades, and the people we've been talking about all year are a vital show of health. Most of them just want to get on annd play. But the glare of the music business won't leave it at that, and a rolling bandwagon can run people over too.
Two things in particular make cause for concern. The insistence on whipping together every kind of 'etchnic' rhythm under a jazz heading is doing the music very few favours. Jazz isn't samba, the same way that samba isn't jazz. The great global soup of danceable rhythms is becoming a confusion, not a force against snobbery. Pan-cultural crossovers are fine when they don't obscure the spirit and dignity of the music's root. Suddenly, everything seems clouded.
There is the talk that gets us called 'elitist'. Quite the reverse. In fact, it's the speakers of the revival (a wrong but useful word) that are forging a new elitism. Jazz is not only Blakey, Morgan and Nascimento: it's also Leo Smith, Martial Solal and Barbara Donald. But what room is being made for them and their work? A new conservatism is at work in the core of this return to jazz - as if it's wrong to be too serious about listening, to want to be literate about the music.
I'm not interested in a jazz reawakening that has no space for Albert Ayler. If we do not accept the extremes and difficulties of the music, the interest is worth nothing. The new barriers must be destroyed at once.
R.D. Cook