Just my two cents, although it may be a bit off topic: It seems to me that after the experiments of the bebop and free jazz eras, some musicians felt that jazz had become too complex and disconnected from a wider audience. In response, they began to move toward a more accessible, groove-oriented sound. Miles Davis' "So What" is part of this evolution. The music on this record is much more accessible than your average Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie record. Then that evolution led to soul jazz in the '60s, which is probably my favorite style of jazz, although I recognize that the most groundbreaking period of jazz had already passed by then. If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend listening to Jimmy Smith's The Cat and Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder - both fantastic examples of the style!
Never really thought of 'So What' in this way, but you may be right (and I guess the entire jazz-fusion movement later can also be thought of in that terms, especially in light of all the jazz purists who thought the genre was being "sold out" by merging it with rock and funk). But then it was already too late, I think, because R&B and then rock'n'roll ended up filling the popular niche which jazz had left and it was impossible to properly recapture it again. Haven't heard Jimmy Smith's The Cat yet, but I do enjoy his Back At The Chicken Shack from the previous year, and yes, it's very accessible - but it also came out in the year of I Wanna Hold Your Hand, so...
That’s a great point about fusion and the idea that jazz was "selling itself" by merging with rock and funk. It reminds me of something I've had in my head for a while—a kind of visual metaphor for how these two genres evolved.
Imagine two lines: One line angles upward, from bottom left to top right - this represents rock music. It started out simple in the '50s with Elvis and Chuck Berry but gradually became more harmonically and structurally complex in the '60s with artists like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Nice.
The other line angles downward, from top left to bottom right - this represents jazz. It was at its most complex in the '40s and '50s (bebop, free jazz), but over time, it moved toward simpler, groove-based forms, first with soul jazz, then with jazz-funk and fusion.
These two lines intersected between 1969 and 1971. That was the moment when rock musicians reached jazz-like levels of complexity (Zappa, King Crimson, ELP), while jazz musicians embraced rock’s rhythmic drive and accessibility (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters).
So in a way, fusion wasn’t just jazz adapting to rock - it was a meeting point where both genres had evolved to the point that they shared more common ground than ever before.
As for Jimmy Smith—Back at the Chicken Shack is a fantastic album! The Cat is in a similar vein but has a slicker, more cinematic feel, thanks to Lalo Schifrin’s bold horn arrangements. Definitely worth a listen!
Great record and a breaking point in Jazz history. This is the culmination of Jazz as a massive cultural force and beginning of journey from "music for the masses" to art for intellectual "elite".
30s were a golden times for big band instrumental music. And yeah, Jazz between two world wars is when it was ruling the World.
I usually say I love jazz, but I'm a liar. Actually, I only like a very small, very simple subset of jazz. For one thing, it has to have vocals, which excludes a lot of pre-war music (and, of course, most of "serious" jazz). Which is why Goodman's performance of "Sing, Sing, Sing" leaves me pretty cold. It's way too long for my tastes, and without vocals, I find even less to interest myself in it. I much prefer Andrews Sisters' version - this is the kind of jazz I like, vocal, fast and short.
I guess it's telling that I'm a huge fan of neo-swing, that great blend of swing and rock'n'roll that most serious jazz and even swing fans absolutely hate. But for me, it takes all I like about jazz (a set of instruments, themes from "good old times" and general feeling), and leaves out all things I don't care about (like improvisation).
If I had to pick out a pre-war jazz-adjacent band, I'd choose Miles Brothers, or their German counterparts, Comedian Harmonists, whose vocal harmonies probably paved way for Beach Boys (and Manhattan Transfer, another of my favourite kind-of-jazz bands). Or even the lesser known Cats & The Fiddle (I'd love to see their live shows! The few surviving recording from various movies are wild enough as it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-qluLmB4Ak)
It's funny, I was just thinking it'd be cool if I could ask you "What's your take on Jazz?" Then again, you did do a post on Lady Day's God Bless the Child recently, but this current post on instrumental Jazz goes into whole different dimensions of general genre discussions.
I definitely echo your reasons on why Jazz is an exception to major genres being recommended in to beginners in their initial "palatable prime" form. Though, I will suggest that Hip-Hop is somewhat an exception too, and even Rock is a bit of an exception. For Hip-Hop, it's because by the time of the late 80s/early-mid 90s people know as its golden age, its prime form actually went back all the way to the mid 70s... it's just that that was in its live form (documented by copious rough cassette recordings) that it was prime already, whereas it took technology and studios' will to catch up with samplers and stuff to what the DJs were already doing long before. As far as Rock, it seems to be most super-exposed from its start (unless you count the Black-only R&B that was basically Rock n' Roll for like a decade earlier, as I'm sure you know the recordings of better than me!). But, even with Rock it seems the post-British Invasion "Classic Rock" is remembered in society more than the late 50s era. But still, yeah, your point stands that Jazz is the most extreme in this discrepancy, with its bebop and post-bop era being recommended more quickly than its swing era. I was thinking this was the equivalent of, not only like if more difficult Classic Rock was recommended before more palatable Classic Rock, but if 80s-90s Alternative/Grunge was recommended before Classic Rock... and if 2000s-2010s artistic revival Hip-Hop was recommended over its 80s-90s golden era of releases... A whole different, arguably inferior, generation of the music being recommended before its original heyday where it captivated the masses and even its cliches were not all set in stone yet.
Regarding the sound quality reason for swing era Jazz being more passed over, I think this is one case where having the right reissue (remastered properly from best sources) can make a difference. It was a revelation to me, for example, when I learned that digital transfers that *retain* the noise from their sources, rather than use noise reduction, actually also retain more of the life of the record (though, ironically, the Carnegie Hall concert you're covering the song from here I found best regarded in its Jasmine release, which does use significant noise reduction). Obviously, working from the lowest-generation, best-preserved source magnetic tape or whatever from before that was invented is crucial for an optimal remaster too.
As far as the album focus that draws more "serious music" people, I will say I find it cool that concert recordings (like the one you focus on a song from here) are a way to "albumize" pre-album era music (whether that pre-album era is due to technology available or whims of a genre's early form).
You provide a strong layered perspective on how Benny rather than one of the original black Jazz pioneers became the first to play at Carnegie. What you say is true about the limitations of prime Jim Crow era (even in the north; elsewhere on Carnegie Hall's own Manhattan were the locations of the legendary Cotton Club with its sickening racial displays and policies). And you note importantly that Benny Goodman's band was integrated.
As far as the particular distinctiveness of Sing Sing Sing... are you sure it's not because that song has been featured in Chips Ahoy ads (I'm showing my 90s childhood here) and movies as the cliche exciting swing? Of course, the opposite argument could be made too, that it attained that status *due to* its distinctiveness. Also, I consider that with your volume of exploring music, you may have listened to enough swing Jazz to be informed from your own experience of what grabs you or not (though you can never discount the power of younger imprinting experiences!).
Interesting you focus so much on the drums; I always thought the horns riff was the most recognizable part of the song. But I can completely see why it's the drums that make the party happen, even though I still think the horns are at least the conscious identifier. And, indeed, now that I think about it most of this 12-minute performance is not using that horns melody directly anyway.
Piano inclusion story is cool, didn't know that.
For your last, "therapeutic" note... that's the way with the early dance and fun form of all the major genres. R.E.M.'s Murmur can't hit as fully as Johnny Be Good. Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly can't hit as hard as Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock. The party-era joints hit you somewhere instinctual that the later second-generation artistic masterpieces have too much "baggage" to achieve.
"Digital transfers that *retain* the noise from their sources, rather than use noise reduction, actually also retain more of the life of the record..."
I got that revelation when I simultaneously picked up two partially overlapping Blind Lemon Jefferson CD compilations one day - one was smooth and the other was fried-chicken-crackly, but the voice and guitar were ringing rather than muffled. Got a much better appreciation for fried chicken since that day. :))
Never saw any Chips Ahoy ads until today, so you may be right about this one, but at least I'm a bias-free test subject and I testify that 'Sing, Sing, Sing' was always distinctive to me even without that background. Speaking from the elevated position of somebody who just recently went through 40 hours of Benny Goodman singles. :))
Ah, so you too are part of the pro-noise folk! A great story to go with that (and now I want some fried chicken ^_^)
Yeah, so you don't have that Chips Ahoy baggage. And yeah, that's a pretty fair Benny binge, about 4x what I've reached with my current Thelonious Monk one!
I liked introduction to the text very much — however, what I should say is that free jazz (since you mentioned there Ornette etc.) is normally considered by jazz lovers as something like Further Mathematics, and before introduction to it according to them you really need to hear a list of classics by Miles, Coltrane, Mingus etc. At least this opinion is shared by really many, and as for me this is purely ridiculous — you really CAN enjoy Albert Ayler, for example, even if you don’t know ANYTHING about jazz, and probably your enjoyment level then would be even HIGHER, than for Coltrane or Miles, or someone else. Same surely goes to Sun Ra and some other stuff. Demented dixieland orchestra sound, psychedelia — for all this, as a listener you shouldn’t study musical theory that much, aren’t you?
It's not a question of studying musical theory. If you can enjoy Albert Ayler from a "clean slate" perspective, without having heard any other jazz or any other music as a whole, for that matter, I'd say it's a precious gift that separates you from about 95% of humanity (and I guess you should be grateful to God or Nature for that). But just as most people will feel more comfortable with "Ulysses" if they know at least something about Greek mythology and other classical matters, so is it natural to transition to Ayler if you have at least a vague idea of what he was working "against".
You yourself say "demented dixieland orchestra sound", but then you at least have to know what the dixieland sound IS in the first place to understand that Ayler played a "demented" variant of it, no? This is precisely why I say that most people should begin their jazz journey with Armstrong, not Ayler (and not even Miles).
I hate to drive down a cul de sac when it's not the main point of the argument, and I don't disagree with anything you've said about jazz George, either in this response or in the article/review itself, however if Joyce hadn't called the novel Ulysses no-one in the wide world would ever have guessed or inferred any parallels with The Odyssey. Joyce himself once said that the idea never got further than the title!
You're absolutely right, but I wasn't actually referring so much to the much-discussed structural analogies between Ulysses and The Odyssey (which can certainly look forced and far-fetched), but rather to the numerous allusions, references, and influences to classical subjects in the text itself. I mean, at least "Dedalus" should ring a bell, shouldn't it?
I almost always enjoy your writing, but you have surpassed yourself this time. Bravo! I will listen to this album at the next opportunity.
Just my two cents, although it may be a bit off topic: It seems to me that after the experiments of the bebop and free jazz eras, some musicians felt that jazz had become too complex and disconnected from a wider audience. In response, they began to move toward a more accessible, groove-oriented sound. Miles Davis' "So What" is part of this evolution. The music on this record is much more accessible than your average Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie record. Then that evolution led to soul jazz in the '60s, which is probably my favorite style of jazz, although I recognize that the most groundbreaking period of jazz had already passed by then. If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend listening to Jimmy Smith's The Cat and Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder - both fantastic examples of the style!
Never really thought of 'So What' in this way, but you may be right (and I guess the entire jazz-fusion movement later can also be thought of in that terms, especially in light of all the jazz purists who thought the genre was being "sold out" by merging it with rock and funk). But then it was already too late, I think, because R&B and then rock'n'roll ended up filling the popular niche which jazz had left and it was impossible to properly recapture it again. Haven't heard Jimmy Smith's The Cat yet, but I do enjoy his Back At The Chicken Shack from the previous year, and yes, it's very accessible - but it also came out in the year of I Wanna Hold Your Hand, so...
That’s a great point about fusion and the idea that jazz was "selling itself" by merging with rock and funk. It reminds me of something I've had in my head for a while—a kind of visual metaphor for how these two genres evolved.
Imagine two lines: One line angles upward, from bottom left to top right - this represents rock music. It started out simple in the '50s with Elvis and Chuck Berry but gradually became more harmonically and structurally complex in the '60s with artists like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Nice.
The other line angles downward, from top left to bottom right - this represents jazz. It was at its most complex in the '40s and '50s (bebop, free jazz), but over time, it moved toward simpler, groove-based forms, first with soul jazz, then with jazz-funk and fusion.
These two lines intersected between 1969 and 1971. That was the moment when rock musicians reached jazz-like levels of complexity (Zappa, King Crimson, ELP), while jazz musicians embraced rock’s rhythmic drive and accessibility (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters).
So in a way, fusion wasn’t just jazz adapting to rock - it was a meeting point where both genres had evolved to the point that they shared more common ground than ever before.
As for Jimmy Smith—Back at the Chicken Shack is a fantastic album! The Cat is in a similar vein but has a slicker, more cinematic feel, thanks to Lalo Schifrin’s bold horn arrangements. Definitely worth a listen!
Grant Green released a lot of great soul jazz records too, including I Want to Hold Your Hand.
Great record and a breaking point in Jazz history. This is the culmination of Jazz as a massive cultural force and beginning of journey from "music for the masses" to art for intellectual "elite".
30s were a golden times for big band instrumental music. And yeah, Jazz between two world wars is when it was ruling the World.
I usually say I love jazz, but I'm a liar. Actually, I only like a very small, very simple subset of jazz. For one thing, it has to have vocals, which excludes a lot of pre-war music (and, of course, most of "serious" jazz). Which is why Goodman's performance of "Sing, Sing, Sing" leaves me pretty cold. It's way too long for my tastes, and without vocals, I find even less to interest myself in it. I much prefer Andrews Sisters' version - this is the kind of jazz I like, vocal, fast and short.
I guess it's telling that I'm a huge fan of neo-swing, that great blend of swing and rock'n'roll that most serious jazz and even swing fans absolutely hate. But for me, it takes all I like about jazz (a set of instruments, themes from "good old times" and general feeling), and leaves out all things I don't care about (like improvisation).
If I had to pick out a pre-war jazz-adjacent band, I'd choose Miles Brothers, or their German counterparts, Comedian Harmonists, whose vocal harmonies probably paved way for Beach Boys (and Manhattan Transfer, another of my favourite kind-of-jazz bands). Or even the lesser known Cats & The Fiddle (I'd love to see their live shows! The few surviving recording from various movies are wild enough as it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-qluLmB4Ak)
That's fine, of course. You should probably be a big Louis Jordan fan, too.
Oh, yes, I quite like him, as well as jump-blues heroes.
It's funny, I was just thinking it'd be cool if I could ask you "What's your take on Jazz?" Then again, you did do a post on Lady Day's God Bless the Child recently, but this current post on instrumental Jazz goes into whole different dimensions of general genre discussions.
I definitely echo your reasons on why Jazz is an exception to major genres being recommended in to beginners in their initial "palatable prime" form. Though, I will suggest that Hip-Hop is somewhat an exception too, and even Rock is a bit of an exception. For Hip-Hop, it's because by the time of the late 80s/early-mid 90s people know as its golden age, its prime form actually went back all the way to the mid 70s... it's just that that was in its live form (documented by copious rough cassette recordings) that it was prime already, whereas it took technology and studios' will to catch up with samplers and stuff to what the DJs were already doing long before. As far as Rock, it seems to be most super-exposed from its start (unless you count the Black-only R&B that was basically Rock n' Roll for like a decade earlier, as I'm sure you know the recordings of better than me!). But, even with Rock it seems the post-British Invasion "Classic Rock" is remembered in society more than the late 50s era. But still, yeah, your point stands that Jazz is the most extreme in this discrepancy, with its bebop and post-bop era being recommended more quickly than its swing era. I was thinking this was the equivalent of, not only like if more difficult Classic Rock was recommended before more palatable Classic Rock, but if 80s-90s Alternative/Grunge was recommended before Classic Rock... and if 2000s-2010s artistic revival Hip-Hop was recommended over its 80s-90s golden era of releases... A whole different, arguably inferior, generation of the music being recommended before its original heyday where it captivated the masses and even its cliches were not all set in stone yet.
Regarding the sound quality reason for swing era Jazz being more passed over, I think this is one case where having the right reissue (remastered properly from best sources) can make a difference. It was a revelation to me, for example, when I learned that digital transfers that *retain* the noise from their sources, rather than use noise reduction, actually also retain more of the life of the record (though, ironically, the Carnegie Hall concert you're covering the song from here I found best regarded in its Jasmine release, which does use significant noise reduction). Obviously, working from the lowest-generation, best-preserved source magnetic tape or whatever from before that was invented is crucial for an optimal remaster too.
As far as the album focus that draws more "serious music" people, I will say I find it cool that concert recordings (like the one you focus on a song from here) are a way to "albumize" pre-album era music (whether that pre-album era is due to technology available or whims of a genre's early form).
You provide a strong layered perspective on how Benny rather than one of the original black Jazz pioneers became the first to play at Carnegie. What you say is true about the limitations of prime Jim Crow era (even in the north; elsewhere on Carnegie Hall's own Manhattan were the locations of the legendary Cotton Club with its sickening racial displays and policies). And you note importantly that Benny Goodman's band was integrated.
As far as the particular distinctiveness of Sing Sing Sing... are you sure it's not because that song has been featured in Chips Ahoy ads (I'm showing my 90s childhood here) and movies as the cliche exciting swing? Of course, the opposite argument could be made too, that it attained that status *due to* its distinctiveness. Also, I consider that with your volume of exploring music, you may have listened to enough swing Jazz to be informed from your own experience of what grabs you or not (though you can never discount the power of younger imprinting experiences!).
Interesting you focus so much on the drums; I always thought the horns riff was the most recognizable part of the song. But I can completely see why it's the drums that make the party happen, even though I still think the horns are at least the conscious identifier. And, indeed, now that I think about it most of this 12-minute performance is not using that horns melody directly anyway.
Piano inclusion story is cool, didn't know that.
For your last, "therapeutic" note... that's the way with the early dance and fun form of all the major genres. R.E.M.'s Murmur can't hit as fully as Johnny Be Good. Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly can't hit as hard as Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock. The party-era joints hit you somewhere instinctual that the later second-generation artistic masterpieces have too much "baggage" to achieve.
"Digital transfers that *retain* the noise from their sources, rather than use noise reduction, actually also retain more of the life of the record..."
I got that revelation when I simultaneously picked up two partially overlapping Blind Lemon Jefferson CD compilations one day - one was smooth and the other was fried-chicken-crackly, but the voice and guitar were ringing rather than muffled. Got a much better appreciation for fried chicken since that day. :))
Never saw any Chips Ahoy ads until today, so you may be right about this one, but at least I'm a bias-free test subject and I testify that 'Sing, Sing, Sing' was always distinctive to me even without that background. Speaking from the elevated position of somebody who just recently went through 40 hours of Benny Goodman singles. :))
Ah, so you too are part of the pro-noise folk! A great story to go with that (and now I want some fried chicken ^_^)
Yeah, so you don't have that Chips Ahoy baggage. And yeah, that's a pretty fair Benny binge, about 4x what I've reached with my current Thelonious Monk one!
I liked introduction to the text very much — however, what I should say is that free jazz (since you mentioned there Ornette etc.) is normally considered by jazz lovers as something like Further Mathematics, and before introduction to it according to them you really need to hear a list of classics by Miles, Coltrane, Mingus etc. At least this opinion is shared by really many, and as for me this is purely ridiculous — you really CAN enjoy Albert Ayler, for example, even if you don’t know ANYTHING about jazz, and probably your enjoyment level then would be even HIGHER, than for Coltrane or Miles, or someone else. Same surely goes to Sun Ra and some other stuff. Demented dixieland orchestra sound, psychedelia — for all this, as a listener you shouldn’t study musical theory that much, aren’t you?
It's not a question of studying musical theory. If you can enjoy Albert Ayler from a "clean slate" perspective, without having heard any other jazz or any other music as a whole, for that matter, I'd say it's a precious gift that separates you from about 95% of humanity (and I guess you should be grateful to God or Nature for that). But just as most people will feel more comfortable with "Ulysses" if they know at least something about Greek mythology and other classical matters, so is it natural to transition to Ayler if you have at least a vague idea of what he was working "against".
You yourself say "demented dixieland orchestra sound", but then you at least have to know what the dixieland sound IS in the first place to understand that Ayler played a "demented" variant of it, no? This is precisely why I say that most people should begin their jazz journey with Armstrong, not Ayler (and not even Miles).
I hate to drive down a cul de sac when it's not the main point of the argument, and I don't disagree with anything you've said about jazz George, either in this response or in the article/review itself, however if Joyce hadn't called the novel Ulysses no-one in the wide world would ever have guessed or inferred any parallels with The Odyssey. Joyce himself once said that the idea never got further than the title!
You're absolutely right, but I wasn't actually referring so much to the much-discussed structural analogies between Ulysses and The Odyssey (which can certainly look forced and far-fetched), but rather to the numerous allusions, references, and influences to classical subjects in the text itself. I mean, at least "Dedalus" should ring a bell, shouldn't it?
Yes, absolutely fair point!