Pat Metheny on Kenny G and other Jazz greats

mattsmith said:
I
No one on this thread is a jazz snob/ not a single one. And that includes the talented jazz drummer here playing his usual counter snob routine, when he's really just playing everyone on this thread like he has so many other times elsewhere on the Internet, and for reasons I've never entirely understood. I've found it as always fascinating how quickly a certain few will leap on that jazz snob term to solve any number of personal issues.
Click to expand...

True.

And if you do a search on this thread for the word snob, no one called anyone else in thread a snob.

Which sort of makes me wonder why anyone feels the need to defensive over it, because the term wasn't used toward anyone.
 
What exactly is a snob, I asked myself? So I looked it up on the internet and here's what I found:

snob–noun

1. A person who imitates, cultivates, or slavishly admires social superiors and is condescending or overbearing to others.

2. A person who believes himself or herself an expert or connoisseur in a given field and is condescending toward or disdainful of those who hold other opinions or have different tastes regarding this field: a musical snob.

And I find it interesting that the example for the second definition would be "musical snob." So anyway that's what I found when I looked snob up on the internet.
 
con struct said:
What exactly is a snob, I asked myself? So I looked it up on the internet and here's what I found:

snob–noun

1. A person who imitates, cultivates, or slavishly admires social superiors and is condescending or overbearing to others.

2. A person who believes himself or herself an expert or connoisseur in a given field and is condescending toward or disdainful of those who hold other opinions or have different tastes regarding this field: a musical snob.

And I find it interesting that the example for the second definition would be "musical snob." So anyway that's what I found when I looked snob up on the internet.
Click to expand...


That is funny . .

Anyway, I was called a snob. I am so uncouth and uncultivated that it is kind of a compliment.
 
I'm a bit of a beer snob.

I thought I was a bit of a coffee snob, until I met some people who were much more snobby about their coffee than I could ever be. heh....

I loathe a lot of cheesy music, but I admit, there is some cheesy music I really like.

Just if you serve wine and cheese, I'd prefer a beer if at all possible, but I'll drink the wine if not.
 
I'm not snobbish at all but then I get accused of lacking standards.

Ken, bear in mind that there are oodles of comments on Kenny's YouTubes praising him for playing such beautiful "jazz". Of course, it would be weird if public perception was homogeneous but, then again, no one would call Metallica's music jazz.
 
ahhh. pet metheny's live gig looks pretty fun. i watched a kenny G video, it reminded me of titanic for some reason. it's not that i hated it, but that isn't what the word jazz brings to my mind. i thought it would be something more like this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjwVwASlVn4

if i'm honest i don't listen to jazz as much as i should, but i do get to hear jazz-type-stuff when i get in my friends car (he plays sax). he likes weather report, which is cool. though i guess they aren't considered jazz (fusion?).

imo it seems a bit rude to assume that jazz has more snobs than other genres. i've followed 'metal' for years, but some of the people that talk about it are crazy annoying. including some of the musicians.
i don't really know what i'm talking about when it comes to jazz which is why i don't post in threads with the word 'jazz' in the title. i find it's usually better to spectate than take part.. to each their own.
 
Loved Matt's story.....

Reminds me of a firsthand encounter I had with a real true jazz snob from back east who was backing a big name from the States at last years international jazz fest that I was playing the opening spot for with a very good Canadian group. The dimissive attitude and general who are you at the soundcheck was talked about from the other guys in the band for weeks after. Truly high level snobbery at its finest...

How did I deal with it? Simple after a few nasty comments thrown my way about how distracting it was for me to start preparing my kit backstage for our soundcheck which the backup group had already gone WAY into on OUR time at this point I said fine and waited till the jerk got over himself and his superiority issues to continue on after he finally spit.

Want to know how it played out later? After a smokin set and a big drum feature in our opening set all sly grins and smiles of "i'm a jazz player of real true distinction over you" directed my way quickly turned to a very grumpy drummer hanging over a amp backstage who's face and body expressions clearly said it all. Lesson learned that I learned long ago and guess who taught me it Pat Metheny in a wonderful conversation we had when I met him backstage as a panel judge at a performance with a Canadian band I was in back in 88 at the Montreal Jazz Fest..... interesting.

Moral of the story....stay humble, treat people nice and ditch the attitude and always remember to just believe in yourself and keep it real at your personal best and acknowlege there's many more doing the exact same thing out there...many you'll never meet with many having something to offer you can learn from to add to your own playing experience down the road. No room for snobbery or superior attitude issues over others but at the same time that doesn't mean you can't be firm and vocal about what you really believe in and what you stand up for in the music you love...there's a BIG difference in my view between the two mindsets and approaches to both being a person and for the respect of the music you love as a musician which can be a passionate POV and a insecure real jazz snob in contrast.
 
Pollyanna said:
I'm not snobbish at all but then I get accused of lacking standards.

Ken, bear in mind that there are oodles of comments on Kenny's YouTubes praising him for playing such beautiful "jazz". Of course, it would be weird if public perception was homogeneous but, then again, no one would call Metallica's music jazz.
Click to expand...

Polly, we've seen that Metallica can be smoothed jazz, and I know it could be 'jazzed.' :)

I like little Metallica with my eggs and bacon in the morning. Gets me going. My eggs are jazzed enough, I don't need my Metalllica jazzed as well. :)


Stan's story reminds me that often when you play at venues where there are several bands coming on one after the other, you meet the drummers who are really snide. I always give the drummer, and the band, before me praise and the one that follows me a good word. Most guys say, "no one ever does that." And I've never had any drummer that followed me tell me I played well.
 
Last edited:
Deltadrummer said:
Polly, we've seen that Metallica can be smoothed jazz, and I know it could be 'jazzed.' :)

I like little Metallica with my eggs and bacon in the morning. Gets me going. My eggs are jazzed enough, I don't need my Metalllica jazzed as well. :)


Stan's story reminds me that often when you play at venues where there are several bands coming on one after the other, you meet the drummers who are really snide. I always give the drummer, and the band, before me praise and the one that follows me a good word. Most guys say, "no one ever does that." And I've never had any drummer that followed me tell me I played well.
Click to expand...

Ken sorry, but I doubt that those eggs are really jazzed. That's faux jazzed eggs. Different animal entirely :)

Come to think of it, I don't remember much interaction with other drummers at those multiple band gigs.

I vaguely remember a couple of quick, friendly exchanges during the changeovers (my memories of them are hazy and it was probably the roadies - lol).

The only flak I remember copping was from the fading rock star who told me that our band was totally f****d after our set. I can't remember clearly but we most likely had a sloppy night :) But then again, he'd become a hopeless alcoholic. He then went on stage, completely off his brain - he played bum notes, forgot arrangements sang horribly out of tune. Sad really - he was great in his heyday. Guess it went to his head.

Now that you mention it, the multi-band gigs were weirdly anti-social. I think it was that status thing where the band before us was "lesser", just as we were "lesser" than the band following. Bone-headed childish attitudes in hindsight. Guess we were all bone-headedly childish :)

During the punk era my weird band formed some friendships with punk and new wave groups we gigged with. We were neither punk nor new wave but since we were clearly not "establishment" we were accepted. There wasn't that competitive side at all in that scene - everyone was just out to enjoy themselves. A few of those people went on to do well for themselves in music too.
 
Last edited:
DrumEatDrum said:
True.

And if you do a search on this thread for the word snob, no one called anyone else in thread a snob.
Click to expand...
Yeah I get that. After the edits, if I were to do a search today , you would find that no one currently calls anyone a jazz snob. Sure, now there's only the pointed personal attacks stereotypically attached to the term jazz snob remaining after the phrases were eliminated over the past 3 days/not by you/. But again/because I want to be totally fair here/ if I were to use the search engine/ at this very second/ to locate two words/in this case jazz and snob/ within the context of a single post, I would in fact discover that everything in my post had been strangely out of context, because as of today at 4:55 Eastern European time, there is no evidence of these terms existing other than those I have used to disingenuously marginialize a contrary opinion.

I watched that gimmick over at MX for years. There's nothing new about it.

Moreover, pointing out the obvious has never made anyone in a real life situation defensive, merely someone who points out the obvious. Only on the Internet is this gimmick even used, because it would never fly in a face to face encounter.

No defensiveness at all fellas. just keepin it real.

In the meantime, I'll just pop on my copy of David Sanborn's Smile. Now that's some smooth jazz. Funny though how that was once called crossover fusion. More later.
 
Deltadrummer said:
I like little Metallica with my eggs and bacon in the morning. Gets me going. My eggs are jazzed enough, I don't need my Metalllica jazzed as well. :)
Click to expand...

Mmm...Metallica and breakfast....


Fade to Black Coffee
Master of Pancakes
For Whom the Breakfast Rolls
And Just Toast For All......
 
oh my DED, do you do this professionally? haha!
 
All due respect, I don't think there any mis-understanding or name calling going on here.

Almost everyone in this thread agrees Kenny G is crap, the only disagreement is over how to classify just how much of crap it is.
 
DrumEatDrum said:
Almost everyone in this thread agrees Kenny G is crap, the only disagreement is over how to classify just how much of crap it is
Click to expand...

I don't think Kenny is crap, although I might use that term as short hand in conversation at times. He and his band are skilled musicians, just that the music is way too bland and shallow for my tastes. Kenny's stuff is all about twee romance - like one of those dime a dozen rom coms.

That's why WAWW was used - because it's the same thing, just as twee as the G Man. So it was an apt choice, just that the jazz community looked at his efforts in symbolic terms. The only thing that lame song had going for it was Satchmo's wonderful gravel, along with the kind of sentiment that we all feel when the rose coloured glasses are on.

Really, it's not smooth jazz so much as smooth fusion, anyway. It's a close cousin to some of the blander music of Pat, Larry Carlton, Stan Getz etc.
 
Pollyanna said:
I don't think Kenny is crap, although I might use that term as short hand in conversation at times. He and his band are skilled musicians, just that the music is way too bland and shallow for my tastes. Kenny's stuff is all about twee romance - like one of those dime a dozen rom coms.

That's why WAWW was used - because it's the same thing, just as twee as the G Man. So it was an apt choice, just that the jazz community looked at his efforts in symbolic terms. The only thing that lame song had going for it was Satchmo's wonderful gravel, along with the kind of sentiment that we all feel when the rose coloured glasses are on.

Really, it's not smooth jazz so much as smooth fusion, anyway. It's a close cousin to some of the blander music of Pat, Larry Carlton, Stan Getz etc.
Click to expand...


That's the whole thing. It's not whether or not it's good music. It is whether or not it's jazz.

What are the implications of expecting jazz musicians to sell 5,000,000 copies every time they put out an album. Well, it is going to delude the genre because most of these artists do not sell like that and they never did.

The question is What is jazz and Who gets to define it? Of course ultimately that has to be defined by the artists not by a label head telling you to play your music over Louie Armstrong. I know the three of us are in agreement on that from your recent posts. Should have brought in the Henry Cow earlier Polly. :)

People get caught up in the jazz snob bias, or in other words, jazz was a popular music and now jazz snobs look down on popular music or else they argue that you really can't have an objective opinion about music because everyone listens to what they love. But as Stan said, oh once or twice in these threads, those people usually do not have any investment in the music. I was more eloquent and said those people were talking crap. "You can take the boy out of Brooklyn . . .but . . . If you go down that road, you'd have to ask why jazz guys like Bird, Monk and Evans didn't write more popular ditties. Well, Evans wrote Waltz for Debbie. Beautiful tune. Never reached the top 20. Listen to the Johnny Hartmann version. Tony Bennett also recorded it with Evans.

People believe jazz is not popular because jazzers are biased against popular music; but I gave two examples of jazz players, Brad Meldhau Wonderwall and Joshua Redman The Crunge who have worked with popular tunes. People could seek that out if they really want to hear current popular standards done by jazz musicians?

Doesn't get anymore pop than any of this.

There's Jazzentine cover of Nothing Else Matters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jscBpOUl7FY

or Casandra Wilson's cover of Last Train to Clarksvlle or .(or Time After Time http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySVWeao57m8 )

Vanessa Rubin Sting's It's Probably Me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLfO...A2E3A080&playnext_from=PL&playnext=2&index=16

Diana Krall Temptation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NdJFmyLmMo

Kurt Ehrling Undun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Bk35_f4yI

Gretchen Parlato Bjork Come to Me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPIrK6a_YMs

Kevin Mahogony I'm Walkin'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjgncJouwoQ&feature=relate


From the pop side . .and listen to those musicians.
 
Last edited:
Thing is, what are the qualities of jazz that define jazz? A lot of people just think of music lead by a sax or trumpet, or like your friend they just think of it as bop.

There's a heap of overlap. Bop bands have long included includes Latin tunes and I've heard many jazzified version of pop tunes (eg. Eleanor Rigby) and TV shows (the Odd Couple, the Flintstones - which Wy tells me had Earl Palmer on drums).

Then Miles and co did the straight 8 thing. Some said it wasn't jazz, but it was miles [sic] closer to jazz than rock. Then you had the fusion bands - heaps of 'em - from the radical like the MO and RTF, to the more radical Canterbury scene with Soft machine, Hatfield and the North and Henry Cow, to the funky - Herbie, to the smooth and funky - Larry Carlton, Lee Ritenour, and things shifted further from jazz again with pop crossover - Steelies, BS&T and Chicago.

Unless you look at the swing and jazz ballad people, jazz is generally associated with instrumental music.

I'm just thinking aloud here - I don't have a clue lol
 
The thing is in order to define jazz we would need to find the "Number One Tune that Defines Jazz." Let's get Abe.

they're good questions, Polly.

Since many players don't want to define it, you run into the problem not only of how to define it but whether or not it can or should be defined. We're all to familiar with that. One persons jazz is going to be different than another person's jazz. It is such a wide and varied genre. Unless you decide that you are going to get over the hump as a group and talk about it in that context, then their is no use going further because someone is always going to raise an objection, and in essence that is what has happened in this thread. Whose to say Kenny G is not jazz? you would have to recognize Metheny's criticism as a valid one before you could talk about jazz as a genre, and there is not even a consensus on that.

The next question is, why is it important to define it? Matt's Dad could answer that question and I know Jay's answer to that question. You could answer, "so you know who to book at a jazz festival. :p Many jazz festivals have quite a number of artists from other genres.

I think a big part of it is how jazz artists approach structure. In jazz, structure is something that is malleable, as opposed to classical music where form or structure is functional. likewise for the harmony. I think rhythmically it is more syncopated than rock, well at least after those Brits had at it. I just had to say that.

The other thing that you touched on is the idea that Miles or Tony deciding to do the straight 8ths. I wonder who it was. I bet Stan knows. It's still Miles and his Quintet doing it. Someone who has made a reputation as a jazz artist and put in the time to really develop the genre. Not someone who just comes in at the last minute and dubs himself over a legend. Same thing with Weather Report. You had top notch jazz guys in that group. Not only are they working from that jazz mindset but there persona is permanently enmeshed with jazz history.

I think that part of the problem is that since jazz is associated with instrumental music, anything instrumental becomes jazz. But my acquaintance from work was more than happy to say that Kenny G along with Chuck Mangione and George Benson was Adult Contemporary. Maybe you have to not be so attached with the outcome to see it clearly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top