This genre we call ‘jazz’
A post by my friend Alex Hitchcock over at the Cambridge Varsity Blog has got me thinking about Jazz and genre. Jazz is a genre that I love as well as a word that I hate to use.
“What is jazz?”
A reasonable question you may argue. Not so. Forget genre. It won’t even begin to inform you about the richness of music.
For me, genre is a by-word for a watered down stereotype. It is a reductionist term that does help anyone. Musicians, listeners, fans or those whose minds and ears are open enough to search for new music. People don’t discover music by genre anymore. When was the last time anyone typed ‘rock’ into Spotify?
I’ll repeat the tired old line. In the past jazz has been the popular music, the current music of the young generation. The music of today is a shadow of its former popularity and glory.
That may be the case but my experience is that it is a vibrant music with a huge amount to offer to those willing to roll up their sleeves and find it. But they are not willing to make that effort because of the preconceptions they have about the genre. It stands for cocktail piano, it stands for chaotic noise and it stands for stuffy black and white music from the past. How could such a thing be relevant to the young Radiohead fan?
Time and time again I’ve had ‘the music’ conversation with someone. You know how it goes. Someone asks you what your into and for some reason you say jazz. Perhaps you say it in the desperate hope you’ll find a kindred spirit but more often than not you’re met with a sigh or at best a slight feigning of interest. Next time you’ll make the same mistake again. How else are you supposed to describe your music tastes?
It shouldn’t be that way. Jazz is a much wider church than people would imagine - actually forget about the whole church thing, just pull it down - and hope is on the horizon. Robert Glasper is being positioned as some kind of saviour of jazz, bringing his crossover influences and crossover fans to the genre. In a sense this is true but I would be tempted to argue that there is nothing ‘crossover’ about his music in a world where there are no genres to cross-over.
His upcoming album ‘Black Radio’ is the perfect example. The artists he is collaborating with have all made their names in other genres apart from Jazz but Glasper argues that they are all jazz musicians at heart. Jazz is the background and the spirit to the record even though it touches on a huge range of influences. The ‘jazz’ is the spirit of collaboration, mutual respect, and sense of the unknown which permeates the record.
Playing someone Glasper’s collision of Maiden Voyage and Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place gives them a taster of the huge amount of history, innovation and tradition that is present in the one track from ‘In My Element’. It begs the question. What kind of music is that? Well iTunes calls it Jazz. Whatever that means.
In the postmodern world that we live in, art and music can’t be neatly collected together anymore. I offer no alternative name for ‘jazz’ but I do know that it is time to find some way of removing all those negative stereotypes so more people can discover this amazing music. #BAM may or may not be the answer but its time to stop trying to box jazz up into a genre. It represents so much more than that.
Update: I’ve been pointed in the direction of a pertinent quotation from Kassabian’s ‘Ubiquitous Listening and Networked Subjectivity’.
as John Hartley puts it: “genres are agents of ideological closure—they limit the meaning potential of a given text, and they limit the commercial risk of the producer corporations” (128). In this sense, genres might be understood to discipline reception.
Should have just quoted this instead and saved everyone some time. Anahid Kassabian is spot on.
