Comment by GoofballJones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GoofballJones | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I love jazz. I love Monk. What I don't care for is the jazz musicians and "purists" who, in essence, is like "if it's not jazz, IT'S CRAP" attitude. Especially when they compare jazz to rock. Listen to the "Wrecking Crew" backing musicians from the 60s complain about the rock music they "had" to play on and how simplistic it was...yet were frustrated by how popular it was. They would say how they could play circles around rock musicians...that is until someone like Hendrix and EVH came along. They basically shut up after that because some said "okay, then listen to EVH and replicate THAT for me on my record" and of course, they couldn't.

Even today you can hear people like Quincy Jones (on his interview from a few years ago) bad mouth all the rock musicians like the Beatles and even Michael Jackson and say they couldn't play and their music was terrible and blah blah blah and the "if it's not jazz, IT'S CRAP" thing all over again.

It may be fair also to say that musical intolerance comes in many flavours. Jazz elitism may be rife in certain circles, while in others, strident purism of other types dominates equally gallingly.

For example, the rock "feel/vibe purists", for whom the peak of all possible things is David Gilmour holding a sustained note from the blues scale - anything more strenuous, or of different feel, is considered extravagant, self indulgent, or missing-the-point, man.

Each faction holds some kernels of truth, but when personal bias turns those kernels into hard prejudice, the only lesson left to be learned is that we're all doing our own slightly different versions of more-or-less the same thing - "art", as per life.

You see the same odd and ironic relationship between some classical musicians and more popular musicians. I’ve known people who are real into techno who thought classical music lacked any creativity because it was all written down, and then I know exquisite classical musicians who think rock and electronic music is a bunch of garbage.

Old men pine for their glory days. Miles Davis confessed a bittersweet nostalgia for hard bop even as he pushed himself and his collaborators into a then-uncertain jazz-rock.

The young folks who idolise them confuse that nostalgia for capital-t Truth and I think that has led to a nucleus of purism. (I say this as a reformed purist myself.) But it’s a nucleus with the tiny scale that connotes…most of the top pros in the most straightahead jazz today have diverse musical interests and ambitions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com