Andy Warhol once said he liked to be bored by art, and certainly popular arts have been the most open to accepting boredom as a possible, sometimes probable audience reaction.
Jazz seems less able to deal with this as a critical response. A jazz fan’s confession of boredom can always lay him or her open to the charge it’s he or she, and not the music, that’s at fault – maybe you lack the experience to know what to look for or you expect something that is not there.
This is the ancient paradox of music, which is while it appears rich and full of meaning, no community of listeners can agree with any precision on the exact nature of that meaning because all community members are not alike. A community may agree a particular work is “significant” if it moves and interests them, but detailed, specific descriptions of their subjective reactions may differ considerably. Most lay listeners are aware of the roles of form, structure, rhythm, and melody at a subconscious level; if they did not, the prospect of listening to music would not offer much pleasure for them. For example, when a piece of music becomes embedded in the memory, so that the listener “knows what’s coming next,” he or she has already grasped something of its structure.
Music seems to create its effects without any mediation or explanation. Lay listeners are not usually aware of any interpretation on their part, of any cognitive process that contributes to their understanding of the music. The music plays, the body moves, and they involve themselves in it by means of empathy, identifying with its expressive aspects and, if the music moves them, allowing themselves to be aroused emotionally.
Today, for example, with world music enjoying a considerable following in terms of albums sales and concert attendances, it is worth noting that the prospect of an audience enjoying songs in languages they do not understand would hold little promise for them if the melodies, rhythms, and harmonies did not move or stimulate them in some way. In 2004, Youssou n’Dour released his best-selling album Egypt, a celebration of Sufism that includes several religious texts of profound socialistic and ritualistic function. But as popular culture critic Charlie Gillett, author of the classic rock text The Sound of the City, pointed out, “Our appreciation of Youssou’s music has never depended on understanding what his songs are about, even though their meaning is paramount to him and to his Wolof audience. We are convinced by his commitment, and gladly surrender to the melodies and rhythms in which he envelops himself.”
The greatest artists are those who appear to reveal basic emotions common to all people — be it Mozart, Youssou n’Dour, or Louis Armstrong — while, in contrast, most people seem to agree on music that fails to touch the heart or seems dull and lifeless, regardless of the ingenuity of its construction. The key point here, perhaps, is that if the music does not evoke an emotional response from an audience, boredom is probable response. For example, the classical composer and music critic Constant Lambert, an early champion of Duke Ellington, failed to be moved by some of Stravinsky’s neoclassical works, because the composer’s ideal was to create works in which the personal dimension was eliminated, causing Lambert to condemn them as “mechanical.”
Equally, in jazz it is perfectly possible for a musician to do everything “correctly,” executing everything the right way, playing within the conventions of a certain style in an idiomatically correct manner to a high level of proficiency and yet the results can appear mechanical or fail to evoke an emotional response from the listener thus boredom becomes a possible response to the music.
Another reason why boredom can result is that a particular style has been so extensively exploited over the years it is almost impossible to come up with a fresh, surprising or original statement within the idiom. For example, listening to the recordings of the great New Orleans jazz masters can be a moving and exhilarating experience, but since the 1920s there have been so many recordings and bands playing within the conventions of its style the idiom has become exhausted and it exists today more as a historical endeavour. The long road that began near Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall now stretches back over a century and at some point along this route the proliferation of the art form has led inevitably to its devaluation – as it does in all the arts.
At the height of bebop in the 1940s and 1950s, improvisers learned to fit the elements of their style together in a way that created something exceptional; they were imitated by other members of the musical community, and key elements of their playing were quickly assimilated into the broader syntax of the music. Certain key phrases or licks, exercised within the parameters of the bebop style, had, even by the mid-1960s, become widely disseminated and imitated. Today, like an inverted triangle, hundreds of thousands of students and thousands of teachers study this narrow repository of stylistic inspiration (the pantheon of truly “great” bebop players in all of jazz is probably less than 15 musicians), which has resulted in both a similarity of concept and execution from many musicians who perform in this style.
Simon Frith argued in his book Sound Affects that guitar-based rock music had become almost exclusively self-referential by the end of the 1970s: “There was no music a rock musician (however young) could not make that did not refer back, primarily, to previous rock recordings; the music was about itself now, whether it liked it or not.” The similarities with the bebop idiom are all too plain: the music is about itself, with solos by many jazz musicians seeming less art, more the product of assiduous assimilation of the bebop masters that refer back to the golden years of jazz in the 1950s and early 1960s.
As the Italian musicologist Marcello Piras has noted: “The vast majority of jazz teachers push students toward copying this standard language, the results are endless repetition and boredom, no new genius ever surfaces, and audiences still purchase the classic jazz recordings, yet nobody steps back. No doubts, no ifs and no buts.” The result is that the bebop/hard bop based styles are increasingly sounding like a historical endeavour, the Trad jazz of the new millennium, interesting to behold but no longer able to offer the sound of surprise.
. . .
This is the first in a series of articles by British jazz writer Stuart Nicholson commissioned for the SIMA website. Stuart’s most recent book Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has it Moved to a New Address) is published by Routledge. He is also the author of Jazz Rock: A History, Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography of the First Lady of Jazz, Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington and Jazz: The 1980s Resurgence.