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Post by daveyboy on Jun 25, 2009 11:22:41 GMT 10
isaacs and lloydswanton, thanks muchly for your thoughts. Some very interesting perceptions there.
I think what Lloyd has articulated is closest to what I was grasping at with my "excruciating" comment, but Mark (I'm assuming isaacs is Mark Isaacs? Ah yes, I see it now) you have given some real meat to chew on. Might do just that and get back to you with further thoughts.
But do either of you, or anyone else, think there's anything in my theory about Australian jazz people using the first name because it has the effect of making us feel less distant? Even though, as people have pointed out, this practise is not unique to Australia, there's nothing to say that Australian musicians aren't using it, even if only in part, for different reasons to their overseas counterparts.
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Post by isaacs on Jun 25, 2009 11:38:24 GMT 10
But do either of you, or anyone else, think there's anything in my theory about Australian jazz people using the first name because it has the effect of making us feel less distant? Even though, as people have pointed out, this practise is not unique to Australia, there's nothing to say that Australian musicians aren't using it, even if only in part, for different reasons to their overseas counterparts. Who says we feel distant anyway? In the age of the internet and affordable overseas travel, that is turning into the hoariest of old chestnuts. No, if you want to desperately grasp for some uniquely Australian nomenclature in the world of music, it was you who said it mate. Musos. |
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Post by utensils on Jun 25, 2009 11:43:41 GMT 10
Despite my earlier doubts I have enjoyed this topic. Lloyd's contributions got me thinking about a guy who I used to work with from NYC. We both had an obvious love of jazz however being from the source he belived that he had some sort of proprietal right over the whole jazz scene & history. I remember when we had our last child 'Leo' he wrote on the congratulations card, "Congratulations but Leo, that aint Jazz!!" expecting I suppose for me to call the child Miles, Duke, Charlie, Elvin or the like. The funny thing is however that since that time I keep finding out about jazz players who have Leo as their name. Some of them really great players, Leo Smith & Leo Taylor to name 2. In fact my Leo got to meet Wadada Leo Smith at an outdoor concert in the Blue Mountains and he was a very generous, humble man and a fantastic trumpeter and musician. There's also a classic line in the Simpsons where Lisa meets a kid called Thelonious and comments "I suppose the cultural appreciation is worth the beatings". Yep, plenty of kids called Miles these days, though it probably wasn't such a good idea for Gil Evans to call his son that... And with that name, it probably wasn't such a good idea for Miles Evans to take up the trumpet. |
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Post by utensils on Jun 25, 2009 11:44:39 GMT 10
Despite my earlier doubts I have enjoyed this topic. Lloyd's contributions got me thinking about a guy who I used to work with from NYC. We both had an obvious love of jazz however being from the source he belived that he had some sort of proprietal right over the whole jazz scene & history. I remember when we had our last child 'Leo' he wrote on the congratulations card, "Congratulations but Leo, that aint Jazz!!" expecting I suppose for me to call the child Miles, Duke, Charlie, Elvin or the like. The funny thing is however that since that time I keep finding out about jazz players who have Leo as their name. Some of them really great players, Leo Smith & Leo Taylor to name 2. In fact my Leo got to meet Wadada Leo Smith at an outdoor concert in the Blue Mountains and he was a very generous, humble man and a fantastic trumpeter and musician. There's also a classic line in the Simpsons where Lisa meets a kid called Thelonious and comments "I suppose the cultural appreciation is worth the beatings". Strange that there don't seem to have been a lot of baby Cecils... |
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Post by utensils on Jun 25, 2009 11:48:37 GMT 10
How about nominations for the worst jazz name to call your child?
My suggestions:
Muggsy
Spankey
Wingey
Bix
Kenny G.
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Post by utensils on Jun 25, 2009 11:56:38 GMT 10
But do either of you, or anyone else, think there's anything in my theory about Australian jazz people using the first name because it has the effect of making us feel less distant? Even though, as people have pointed out, this practise is not unique to Australia, there's nothing to say that Australian musicians aren't using it, even if only in part, for different reasons to their overseas counterparts. Who says we feel distant anyway? In the age of the internet and affordable overseas travel, that is turning into the hoariest of old chestnuts. No, if you want to desperately grasp for some uniquely Australian nomenclature in the world of music, it was you who said it mate. Musos. When Jack DeJohnette and Ron Carter and Keith Jarrett start playing in Australia several times a year like they do Japan and Europe, I'll agree we don't feel distant. Come on! |
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Post by isaacs on Jun 25, 2009 11:59:08 GMT 10
Who says we feel distant anyway? In the age of the internet and affordable overseas travel, that is turning into the hoariest of old chestnuts. No, if you want to desperately grasp for some uniquely Australian nomenclature in the world of music, it was you who said it mate. Musos. When Jack DeJohnette and Ron Carter and Keith Jarrett start playing in Australia several times a year like they do Japan and Europe, I'll agree we don't feel distant. Come on! They are the ones who are distant. I feel sorry for them. It's probably why they call each other by their first names. |
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Post by alimcg on Jun 25, 2009 19:07:49 GMT 10
How about the practicalities of it all:
There are lots of "Joneses" but not many "Elvins"; Lots of "Johns" but not many "McLaughlins"; plenty of "Marks" (or Marcs), but not many "Isaacs" or "Hannafords".
I know this is hardly conclusive, but let's face it, not many of us want to use the full name every time, especially when we're talking with people who share our lingo. If I were talking to my mum I'd say "Miles Davis" (and she'd say "Who?"), but talking here I could safely say "Miles". If a first name is clearer than the surname, it makes sense to use it, and the perpetuation of lingo means we've somehow been left with "Jack" instead of "Dejohnette"... Go figure.
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Post by bobbob on Jun 26, 2009 9:14:55 GMT 10
AND NOW MICHEAL IS DEAD.
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jec
Junior Member
Posts: 52 
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Post by jec on Jun 26, 2009 9:32:30 GMT 10
I think its pretty clear why those musicians go to Japan and not Australia. The dollar of course. From what I know jazz in Japan is a huge industry far larger than here. Therefore the top talent chases the money. Isn't that the case?
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Post by lloydswanton on Jun 26, 2009 14:24:50 GMT 10
Lloyd, firstly it's great to read a post like that. Thanks heaps. I hope you'll stick around these parts. I've always enjoyed your quite frequent letters to the editor in the SMH so I'm glad you consider our little forum worth the effort. You'll get considerably more space here, and guaranteed publication. I'm glad you feel as I do that daveyboy's post was a worthy and important one to respond to. It's interesting that on the face of it you and I drew seemingly opposite conclusions from the phenomenon he cited. I felt the first names indicated that people in the world of jazz found the artists they admired personally knowable. And that the music has had an informal tradition in its presentation such that first names were a natural corollary. Your thesis on the other hand turned on hero-worship, the idea of the "one-and-only" and unshakeable tenure in the Pantheon. This seems an absolutely correct analysis to me. We can apparently confidently use first names - even very common ones - because there is no other "Jack" or "Keith". Of course there are other Jacks and Keiths playing jazz - I'd wager they would be legion - but none could possibly ever measure up to "our" Jack and Keith. I am fascinated that - to use political metaphors - I concluded that the use of first names was because of a propensity to democratise, whereas you saw it as the systematic entrenchment of a kind of hereditary aristocracy. The two seem mutually exclusive, but I wonder if they are? The mistake I made was to concatenate formality and reverence in a way that could imply that informality might mean less reverence. But this doesn't bear more detailed examination. That would mean that classical people revered their greats more than jazz people did theirs, simply because classical dudes did not use first names. But I have always believed the opposite: that jazz people show far more reverence. In an article a decade ago in Jazzchord I wrote of an apparent heresy in not.....wholeheartedly endorsing every note Coltrane ever played and went on to opine that Jazz is currently very subject to this sort of concatenation of supreme geniuses and Supreme Beings, partly I think because its geniuses are still warm and may yet be seen to arise and roll back the stone. History usually sorts it all out. The fact that no more than five or six of Mozart’s forty-one symphonies are ever played or recorded indicates that Mozart was probably no God. Anyone who has ever heard Beethoven’s Battle Symphony will acknowledge what a travesty it is. I have also elsewhere commented that it is quite acceptable for classical people to hold even more radical views about the Greats. Glen Gould hated Mozart period. Vaughan Williams loathed Beethoven. Tim Stevens cannot abide Shostakovich. But in jazz even mild questioning of the Fathers is howled down. It is unheard of. Let me now try and promulgate the view that Duke Ellington is overrated and see how far it gets me. Strangely, the greatest sin is to say something by a jazz great is "not jazz" (Wynton has never heard the end of that one, but it's not even a judgement that is inherently pejorative unless jazz people also place the artform itself on the same unassailable pinnacle as they do its practitioners) I would like to venture a view that fuses both my unpacking and Lloyd's of the "first name" phenomenon in jazz. Jazz canonises its major artists in a singular way that presents an inherent contradiction encapsulated in the use of first names. First names signal both the incontrovertible and singular distinction in which they are held but also the desire to temper such a potentially disempowering reverence with a dose of the egalitarian. Perhaps this phenomenon has its roots in the African-American culture in which jazz was born. One might speculate that those who were once slaves might in a sense be especially prepared to once again have permanent Masters, but ideally ones that weren't called anything like Mister. [By the way Lloyd, I also find it excruciating to describe anyone as playing "keys". And I share your lack of interest in Jarrett's work of the last twenty years, for me it's thirty years] Thanks Mark, you've provided some very perceptive insights, though I did have to look up concatenate in the dictionary. I guess it really comes down to personal perceptions in the final analysis, doesn't it? Jazz is such a hybrid music, and it can certainly therefore radiate ambiguities as a consequence. It has always occupied a grey area between folk music, entertainment, and "serious" music, (which to me is one of its most attractive aspects), and perhaps more than some other musics, is not only open to vastly different interpretations from outside, but also from within. Jazz has always simultaneously craved the status of the academy on the one hand (the kiss of death IMO) and also the right to continue as a subculture, with its own mores and formalities and lingo. So, as we've seen here, many really like this first-name arrangement, others simply see nothing in it, and view it as no more than convenience, and still others, like myself, are less comfortable with it and decline to use it in discourse. Although I've always said "triple double u" rather than the ridiculous "double u double u double u" (is there any other example where an abbreviation takes longer to say than the words it is supposedly abbreviating?), I've never found it much of an effort to say "Miles Davis" instead of simply "Miles". But maybe others are more time-poor than I. I will decline your invitation to debate Ellington, not for lack of stomach for slaughtering sacred cows (Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, anyone?) but because I must confess he's an artist I don't know enough of. In my collection I only have one sensational triple disc of the so-called Blanton-Webster years, an album of everything he did with Jimmy Blanton, and the duo album on Pablo in the 70s with Ray Brown. About which I will say it's distinguished by one of the most unpleasant recorded piano sounds I've ever heard and wonder whose responsibility that was. If it was at Ellington's urging, I can't help wondering if declining top-end in his hearing might have been the culprit. But I do feel deeply that for jazz to have any ongoing relevance, it must open itself up to some very tough criticism. Jazz did a great job of asking difficult questions about the world for much of the last century, and earned a legion of lovers as a consequence, but now the big issue, as it diffuses and reaches a crossroads in so many areas, is whether it is willing to ask similarly tough questions of itself. |
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Post by lloydswanton on Jun 26, 2009 14:40:59 GMT 10
Who says we feel distant anyway? In the age of the internet and affordable overseas travel, that is turning into the hoariest of old chestnuts. Having had the dubious privilege of doing the gruelling Australia/northern hemisphere run two to four times a year, for the last eleven years, and then seeing the smorgasbord of music that is constantly passing through the major (and many not so-major) centres there, I'd have to say I still feel distant. The internet etc have brought us closer to the rest of the world, but they have also brought the rest of the world even closer to itself. I think the net effect is that proportionately, we're still just as far behind the eight-ball. |
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Post by utensils on Jun 26, 2009 14:44:36 GMT 10
I think its pretty clear why those musicians go to Japan and not Australia. The dollar of course. From what I know jazz in Japan is a huge industry far larger than here. Therefore the top talent chases the money. Isn't that the case? I don't doubt that's the main reason they don't tour here. The question, though, concerns whether we in Australia feel distant from the rest of the musical world in this respect. |
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Post by isaacs on Jun 26, 2009 14:53:34 GMT 10
But I do feel deeply that for jazz to have any ongoing relevance, it must open itself up to some very tough criticism. Jazz did a great job of asking difficult questions about the world for much of the last century, and earned a legion of lovers as a consequence, but now the big issue, as it diffuses and reaches a crossroads in so many areas, is whether it is willing to ask similarly tough questions of itself. Absolutely, top question Lloyd. Its downfall - as will be the case for all of us - is its defensiveness which is always the ultimate barrier to self-examination. Let's start a shopping list. Here's three of mine, nothing new, I've said them before many times: *Its dumfounding obsession to demolish a PR Godsend who also happens to be a motherfucker player, Wynton Marsalis, for daring to propose a definition of jazz *Its vitriol towards anyone who dares achieve mainstream success playing mainstream jazz (James Morrison, Don Burrows) *The unaccountable way "fusion" is made a dirty word despite the absolute masterpieces from Weather Report, Return to Forever, Pat Metheny etc (and I realise this may appear to contradict my first point since fusion is excluded from Wynton's definition of jazz but I am not defending the totality of Wynton's definition of jazz, just his right to make it) Anyone like to add? |
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Post by isaacs on Jun 26, 2009 15:02:22 GMT 10
I will decline your invitation to debate Ellington I wasn't really looking to debate Ellington. I merely ventured a hypothetical example of an iconoclastic position for which scant tolerance would be afforded. No-one should assume that this putative position reflects my personal opinion. It might, or it might not. |
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