On Wed, 4 Jul 2001, Colin Buttimer wrote:
quoted 5 lines (and really, is there any jazz musician who escaped the 80s> > (and really, is there any jazz musician who escaped the 80s
> > unscathed?)
> Ooh um. Ronald Shannon Jackson? John Zorn? Ornette Coleman? Anthony Braxton?
> Miles Davis (except DooBop)? Herbie Hancock (er except Dis is Da Drum), Sun
> Ra?
I think your exceptions kind of illustrate my point, which is that the 80s
were a time in which a lot of jazz musicians got involved in rather dodgy
endeavors (it was also the decade of the saxophone quartet fad, but that's
neither here there- and yes, I know that a handful of musicians made some
fairly good records in this style; I personally feel Braxton should be
credited with inspiring this, just as he was for the late 70s burst of
unbearable solo saxophone records). At any rate, take for example most
jazz records on Gramavision, or the bulk of the Soul Note and Black Saint
discographies of the middle-late part of the decade. On the underground
front, the 80s marked the emergence of the "downtown" scene and related
satellites, which had some good ideas (c.f. the early releases on the Bay
Area Metalanguage label) that were promptly run into the ground in favor
of pan-everything eclecticism and the dreaded world-beat influence.
By the way, using auteurs like Braxton, Sun Ra and Ornette as paragons of
a jazz trend is a little misleading, don't you think? (and by the way, I
don't like Zorn). It's like using Confield as an example of why IDM isn't
dead (when in fact, it demonstrates that IDM is dead by virtue of its
existence, because it's not really recognizably IDM).
-rob
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