on 7/6/02 11:35 AM, Ken Waxman at mingusaum@yahoo.ca wrote:
Skip (et. al):
Not just a "double standard" but a code word as well, sort of like "urban music", "radical feminist" or "chosen people".
If Ayler, CT and others are continuously labelled "avant garde" the labeller can use this as a way to warn people that what's being played isn't "normal jazz" like Lester Young or Dicky Wells played for instance.[remember these are their definations, not mine].
For example, Toronto (and Canada's) largest newspaper employs the type of critic who sees (hears?) the music as nothing but good time, party sounds, characterized by technical facility.
Whenever he has to review -- or more likely preview -- an improvised music happening, his report slips in the words "avnat garde" along with "screaming", "dischordant", "screeching", "difficult" etc. so that the mainstream "jazz" fans know that this is a performance or CD to avoid.
What you've got there isn't criticism or journalism -- it's irresponsibility, and unfortunately common to those jazz crits who can't see past the 1960's hard bop realm. Personally, I think of Joey Baron as the emblem of the avant-garde of the 1990s. His playing style is its own paradigm, but he's so congenial that he doesn't automatically rate critical "avant garde" status. But there seems to be an unspoken consnsus among mainstream critics that "avant garde" must mean difficult. I am also of the opinion that much of what people think is radical really isn't. I never saw Cecil Taylor as a radical departure from anything. That he showed up when he did doing what he does, it seemed to me to be the most logical progression from Hoarce Silver, Errol Garner, and Monk. Sure, it might be more dissonant, but dissonance happens in the progression of just about any music. You want atonal? There's less reference to tonal center in the average squealing feedback guitar solo than in those early Cecil performances, something jazz crits don't generally mention. But Cecil is "difficult", whatever the f^&k that means. Same goes for Sun Ra. But again, "difficult". To me, what Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins managed was way more radical -- to take the overall contour of jazz soling and transform it from the Louis Armstrong vibe and develop it in a direction that mandated a new growth on every front of jazz playing. That's way more severe than dispensing with harmony or symmetrical rhythm. That's forcing the hand of everybody who improvises to develop a voice wherein that improvisor's own imagination has to be as strong as his influences. Still the toughest battle in the war. skip h