{"id":266,"date":"2019-07-31T15:19:18","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T14:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=266"},"modified":"2019-07-31T15:19:18","modified_gmt":"2019-07-31T14:19:18","slug":"they-call-it-jazz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2019\/07\/31\/they-call-it-jazz\/","title":{"rendered":"THEY CALL IT JAZZ"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\nwasn\u00b4t that long ago that jazz was thought of as a musical genre that was only\nheard in hotel lifts or being sung by a lounge lizard in some pretentious\ncocktail bar or being played by a part time pianist in that posh coffee shop\ndown in the shopping precinct. I have paraphrased the thoughts, there, of Tom\nBall, writing in The Times this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\nwent on, though, to offer evidence that jazz has found a new credibility among\nthe younger generation, with Spotify reporting that 40% of the on-line\nstreaming of jazz music is being done these days by those under thirty years\nold. Even rock festivals, like Glastonbury, have helped introduce jazz into\nmainstream pop culture, with acts such as Comet Is Coming and Ezra Collective\nhaving played the venue this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According\nto Ciro Romano who founded Brighton\u00b4s annual festival, Love Supreme in 2013,\njazz artists are playing to mainstream audiences of numbers unimaginable a\ndecade ago. The Love Supreme audience has grown from 10,000 in its year of\ninception to more than 50,000 now, only eight years later. Romano suggests this\nmight be because \u00b4the music is much more dancey now and melds with other genres\nlike grime and hip-hop.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\nis not unusual these days, for instance, to see a young audience queuing round\nthe block waiting for the doors to open at regular jazz club events such as that\nat The Steam Down, a weekly meeting in Deptford. Not only are audiences on the\nincrease but also there is an increase in the number of players performing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wayne\nFrancis, who opened the venue two years ago, says \u00b4there are so many young\nmusicians coming through. I can only see it growing.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe\nI have missed Tom\u00b4s point in what is a well written and obviously well sourced\narticle on the current state of jazz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\ninference I draw, though, from his report is that jazz, once a unique, if\nmystifying, genre all of its own, is now attracting new audiences by\nincorporating mainstream echoes of everything of which jazz had once been the\nantithesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surely\nEllington and Basie and Davis and Coltrane were seeking out new pastures ungrazed\nby the herd?  Granted, those new pastures\nmight have often seemed impossible to ring-fence and even harder to sell as potential\nfor real estate as there were no words that could advertise such a new and\nvolatile landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jazz\nhas long been riven by the sneers of its traditionalists and the bombast of its\nmodernists. I never knew in which of those two halves of the field sat the\nlikes of the artists I considered to be jazz, such as Ella Fitzgerald, or Louis\nArmstrong or from a slightly later generation the likes of Cleo Laine and\nJohnny Dankworth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When\nI began co-presenting  the \u00b4all across\nthe arts\u00b4 radio programme with Steve Bewick on Crescnet Radio a few years ago I\nalso started listening in to his sister programme, Hot Biscuits Jazz Club on FCUM\nRadio. Each week he would play names recognisable to me from my brief forays\ninto jazz, such as Jamie Cullum and Duke Ellington. He would also play\nrecordings of live concerts in local venues by up and coming or old and only\njust still going British jazz acts. On thinking back on that programme now, I\nremember Steve would also play recordings of what he thought of as beat poetry,\nand often several minutes, though it felt like hours, of what he would loosely\ndescribe as jazz fusion or jazz funk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\nrealise now that even then that made me slightly uncomfortable and would make\nme wonder about what they call jazz. I was worried, even then, that jazz was\nstriving so hard to be all things to all men it might be in danger of losing\nits identity, or even worse, of selling its soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All\nthose worries reached a crescendo recently when the Heineken Jazz Festivalbrought us yet another diversion to\nadd to the sidetracks and detours all across the arts that we had been\nfollowing that week. The evening brought us two acts, each of which was of the\nhighest quality; though I remain to be convinced that Judith Hill and her band\nreally belong under a jazz banner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Judith Hill<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I\ncannot deny her vocal range or her instrumental aplomb on keyboards and guitar,\nbut I wonder when a line-up of guitar, electric bass, percussion and keyboards\n(and two go go dancers) might have ever been listed in any Haynes\u00b4 Encyclopaedia\nOf Jazz. Her \u00b4family\u00b4 band played it loud and proud as they strutted their\nstuff and the timing of the band was always tight. There were around a thousand\npeople in the audience, at what is surely one of the smallest stages on the\nHeineken global itinerary, and they were going wild !<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judith\nappeared on the American version of The Voice as long ago as 2013 and, although\nshe was largely overlooked by the judges, she made a huge impression on the\nshow\u00b4s audience, and has since built a massive fan-base, You don\u00b4t get to\nheadline festivals like this as an unknown, though, and she certainly deserves\nwhatever fame she has already acquired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nsecond act here at the Heineken Festival was Maceo Parker and his band, and after\ncompleting the first number Maceo announced that he and his band were going to\nbe funky, and funky they were indeed. There will be some readers who remember\nMaceo as an American \u00b4funk and soul jazz\u00b4 saxophonist and recall that he played\nwith James Brown in the nineteen sixties, adding prominent riffs on several of\nBrown\u00b4s hit recordings, with his saxophone sounds couched in alto, tenor and\nbaritone. Parker then played with Parliament Funkaholic, who were popular in\nthe nineteen seventies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since\nthen, he has toured as a solo artist or with occasional ensembles, such as\ntonight\u00b4s, that would be best described as jazz fusion perhaps, and were\ncertainly some distance removed from The Nat King Cole Trio or The Glenn Miller\nOrchestra, (though there are some who would deny that even these two artists\never represented \u00b4real jazz\u00b4!). Nevertheless, Maceo and his men also drove the\nArrecife crowd wild. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Maceo Parker<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As\nI looked up and around me I noticed that absolutely everybody was shuffling and\njiving to the infectious rhythms, and I pulled myself, slowly, out of my chair\nand jigged along with them until the end of the performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So\nthat was the music, and they call it jazz,\u2026. but not as we know it !<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a9 Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It wasn\u00b4t that long ago that jazz was thought of as a musical genre that was only heard in hotel lifts or being sung by a lounge lizard in some pretentious cocktail bar or being played by a part time pianist in that posh coffee shop down in the shopping precinct. I have paraphrased the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-jazz-grime-hiphop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}