Hope for the future!

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by Gurn Blanston:
Ahmad,
Don't know if you are asking ME, but I must say that I have a healthy respect for jazz, and even like a lot of it. Of course, spectrum-wise, it must be somewhere in between. It certainly cannot be liek "classical" for the simple reason that it is the antithesis of classical, i.e. - it is much more free-form, and the whole point of it is to appear to be improvisation (I think it mainly is, but I may be wrong). The closest that "real classical" comes to that is probably the fantasia, which even then is only meant to SOUND like an improvisation, not to actually be one. But to get to the point of what we were talking about before, it takes a tremendous amount of musical talent and ability to appear to be spontaneous, so the least I would say is that it is extremely musical, and I respect it for that.

In my opinion, in the hands of the hands of its three greatest soloists, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and sometimes with others, jazz is equal to classical music. And I don't know if this is true in the latter two cases, but some of Armstrong's solos were created and rehearsed by him beforehand, thus were not strictly improvised, although he was of course a great improvisor also. And in any case, if we were to hear Beethoven or Mozart improvise, I don't know that we would think it wasn't 'classical' music because it wasn't written out beforehand.

Most people today, if they know Armstrong at all, know him as a genial old gent from the time when he had lost his trumpet lips embouchure from too much touring and had lost his creativity from an excess of marijuana smoking. It is difficult to imagine the impact he had in his youth, when he took a simple folk music and turned it into high art by the singlehanded impact of his creative melodic and rhythmic genius and his astonishing trumpet technique with which to express his ideas. Some of his solos in the 1920s were 30 choruses long, and could not be captured on the 3-minute recordings of the time. Those that were captured are sublime and are equal to classical music as they are. I have no doubt that the longer ones were just as good or better. When he toured Europe in 1931, he was welcomed like a god.

Although the real strength of jazz is its soloists, the big band style is also pretty hefty in the hands of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Gil Evans, to name only a few, and this is composed and written out. The collaborations between Miles Davis as soloist and Gil Evans as arranger and leader of a big band are superb. I have no doubt this music will still be enjoyed in 500 years.

Chaszz



[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited October 27, 2003).]

[Chaszz]

P.S. I should add that the creative use of rhythm in jazz makes the rhythm in classical music seem elementary and ponderous. And the rhythmic creativity is fused with the melodic and harmonic creativity in an unmatched way. There's a part of a 1927 Armstrong solo that I just recently understood rhythmically after 45 years of listening to it.

Chaszz

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited October 27, 2003).]

[Stargazer78]

Originally posted by mrfixit:
Someone took me to a rock concert the other day , but it was a mixture of techno and Rock. It was played far to loud i am sure it did long term damage to my hearing. The rock parts where aright nothing speical, but the techno was awfull. I can understand why people need drugs to listen to that crap. It was so repetitive. Well it was a learning experience, and i try to keep a open mind, but i am not going to anything like that again.

In defence of Rock, i can assure you most rockers would have hated that concert just as much as you did...