Comment by halostatue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by halostatue | Hacker News Reader

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I grew up playing music (eight years piano, variously oboe, clarinet, and several years vocal).

I don't like jazz. I think that a lot of it is self-indulgent noodling.

I can appreciate the talent of some of the artists, but I can't get into it. I feel the same about country music and rap: there is artistry there, but I can't stand 90%+ of it and don't want to waste my time listening to it to find the really good stuff from the derivative, self-indulgent crap.

Yes, I pay attention to the lyrics (because of my time as a vocalist), but I also pay attention to the music.

I think most people don't like 'jazz' because it's an ill-defined "style" that ranges from reasonably well known swing and "standards" to obscure fusion or acid jazz. The more obscure you get, the more inside baseball the discussions become and the less accessible they are to people who might just "like" the sound of a particular song. (The same could be said about the more obscure corners of 'rock'.)

Agree with the self-indulgent part. It's sophisticated to like jazz so people try to like it. And then they do because one can grow to like anything.

From TFA, "... the American ears are getting lazier and lazier."

I'll agree with that, but I don't consider it a bad thing. Jazz seems to meander and is only impressive once paid close attention to. I want music to come and hit me; I don't want to have to work for payoff.

That's really quite the generalization. Some forms of jazz are very much like that, yes; however, there are many forms of jazz, particularly focusing on those from 1910-1950, which are very structured in form and don't really lend themselves to being "self-indulgent".

It'd be like me saying that all rock is talentless because it's all just a "fuck the man" wall of distortion. Yes, there's some rock music that's like that, but rock is an expansive genre and claiming that all or even the majority of rock is like that would be very naïve.

I read a book on Duke Ellington in which he expressed concern for the emerging BeBop style's destruction of Jazz. It seems like he foresaw the move from structured, dance-able music to explorative music as isolating the music from the larger population. It's interesting that I didn't understand his opinion until just now. I'm still not sure I agree with it, but I can see how making music less dance-able could turn off people.

Whatever bebop did to "destroy" the jazz that came before it very likely would have happened anyway. The big band jazz of the sort Ellington was best known for was dying out, primarily for financial reasons, and an increasing number of people who wanted to dance along with music were dancing along with rock rather than jazz.

But, looking back at the big picture that even Ellington couldn't see at the time, I don't think that bebop destroyed jazz at all; it was the next evolutionary step, just as Ellington's jazz was a step beyond Dixieland-style jazz.

I'm in 100% agreement. Btw, the book I referenced is "Beyond Category" by John Edward Hasse.

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