Steamer said:
Because Pat's simple logic of the whole situation seems painfully obvious to those coming from a similar point of view on it. Not just me but many others jazz musicians out there feel exactly the same and express a similar point of view about it either in public or in private.
Stan and Ken - since you are both coming from the same place I'll give a dual response,
Pat's logic is certainly simple - that the music scene is getting more artificial. Hardly an insight. Welcome to the 1980s ...
Pat appears to be saying, "We're as mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more!". Surely not ... not
now. The horse bolted OVER 30 YEARS AGO. It's game set and match. The suits won. It's over. By attacking a business rival in that way he's acting like one of the suits IMO
If you want music created for love, with NO eye to the marketplace, then you have to actively search, as has been the case for a long time. It's out there but the music that comes to us in everyday life is usually the plastic stuff.
I am currently listening to Captain Beefheart's
Bat Chain Puller). The music that really gives me a buzz has
never been readily found on the radio anyway - on
any station.
So in a way it's situation normal for me, which is maybe why I'm less miffed about it than some others. When you've always been an outsider it's hard to shed tears for those who feel they are gradually being marginalised. I used to find outsiderness saddening but it's ultimately liberating.
Deltadrummer said:
I don't know that you would find Kenny G in the jazz section. ... many people get their music and they find Kenny G in the pop section where he belongs, and where his easy listeners would look. They would never look for him in the jazz corner of the room.
Ken, since he's a crossover artist he will naturally appear sometimes here, sometimes there. From an online music retailer's website ...
Kenny G has single-handedly transformed jazz into a genre that actually sells records in numbers normally associated with modern pop stars (over 30 million sold so far). Unlike such Smooth Jazz pioneers as Grover...
See? It's just marketing BS. Many musicians refuse to be pigeon-holed and for good reason. Genre labels carry certain semantics that can give entirely the wrong impression. The semantic of "jazz" has changed as did "metal". Maybe metal has it right with their numerous micro-genres? That really helps their audience know what they are going to get. A jazzer can try to explain the difference between the sub genres but only the musically informed will get it.
Strangelove said:
It's not really any genre causing it, but the whole music industry is folding up. I personally blame it on all the producers and so called industry experts that decide what we want to hear.
Well said, Doctor.
The majors wanted to squeeze out the independents - like major supermarkets setting up near a family-owned small business and undercutting them. There was a whole consumerism thing in the 70s/80s about upgrading your hi-fi to get great sound. It tied in with the record companies who saw the cash cow coming and raised the production bar. Suddenly it wasn't enough to get into a studio and play the songs and hope to get the magic take. You had to slice and dice it and process the music within an inch of its life. That can be cool in its way too, but it became
compulsory.
Musos incurred huge studio debts they incurred and became tied to the label. All this raised the sonics bar to a level with which the indie labels couldn't compete. Then there was an expansion of pay-for-play radio. Bands were inconvenient and hard to control so the companies groomed beautiful "stars" with functional vocal ability. They found that backing them with drum machines and sequencers were easier to control and cheaper than live musos.
Now people's ears are conditioned to expect machine-like perfection. The beautiful rawness of Mitch Mitchell playing with Jimi would now be deemed "unprofessional" and "sloppy". It's way underground, a minority interest, just like a lot of jazz.
As I say, we live in an increasingly mechanised world and it almost seems apt that people are embracing increasingly mechanised music.
To put it bluntly ...