Pre-50s Jazz is better than Post-50's Jazz; Who's with me on this one?

In fact, I believe it was before the '50s that the bebop movement started, which was where much of the extreme experimentation began...without Bird as a precursor, would Coltrane or Ornette Coleman have had the template with which to tweak?

I think it was during the fifties that many of the beboppers began sort of mellowing out their freakery and sorting it out into more structurally friendly stuff, such as Kind of Blue fr'instance. In fact, it seems like jazz has grown around a wax-and-wane style fluctuation between experimentation and simplification, and it were the artists who had feet in both sides of this divide (such as Mingus and Monk and Miles) who remained vital through all of these fluctuations.

this is all just based on the albums that i have heard,is possibly to do with personal taste,but that's how it seems to me...

So hard to choose really.

Duke Ellington & Count Basie Orchestras to thread, pronto!!!

Lester Young and the Kansas City 5 should be notified as well.

Does ANYONE here want to come out in defense of Kenny G?

This is the archetypal milestone in the Geir Theory of Musical Evolution.

Personally I just don't have very much pre-50s jazz, so I don't feel I can say very much about it yet. The Completely Hot Five and Hot Seven box is wonderufl though.

Yes. Wonderufl.

Garbarek

Jesus, this list is addictive.

Anyway, there are plenty of times I'm tempted to agree w/ Custos if his implication is that the big band set-up offers the best possibilities for sheer musical thrills and inventiveness. Like anytime I'm listening to Ellington. God his groups were unbelievably great. It's sad that due to economics it's really not feasible for large groups like that to work and tour regularly. I was reminded how pleasurable large jazz ensembles can be last week when I saw the ICP Orchestra, a fantastic 10 piece group who have reached a high point of dextrous improvisation and intuitive group interplay.

Really, every decade has incredible stuff (even the 80s had Dave Holland/M-Base/Keith Jarrett etc.), though the stuff I is mostly 50s/60s and 90s through now.

I read an interesting interview with Greg Osby recently where he was talking about hiring Jason Moran without hearing him because his influences were earlier pianists like Art Tatum, James P. Johnson, and Jaki Byard whereas all of his late 80s/early 90s peers were listening to Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett. I think most musicians start out listening to bop and Miles/Coltrane post-50s stuff because that's still the style people are playing for the most part, but I think it's really important to go back and absorb the earlier stuff too. It's just as important to be able to swing and play melody as it is to be able to depart from it, and vice versa.

Me either...but I think there's more jazz from 1960 and before that I couldn't live w/o than since then. Luckily, I can pick and choose music from all time periods and don't have to take it all lock, stock, and barrel.

Kenny G isn't jazz, Kenny G is adult contemporary.

However, Herbie Hancock released three of the best jazz albums ever between 1983 and 1988.

this is bcz doh is the tonal centre in standard western harmony (including bebop, give or take all sorts of complicated caveats) => ie (give or take more caveats) when a sequence of chords following traditional western harmonic patterns (which most pop music still does, for example) reaches a chord which has doh as its "defining note"* you get the sense of an ending or local closure...

*(ie doh is not only IN the chord but the most important note in the chord)

however with a modal scale, the tonal centre — the point of return, to signal ends and local closures — is one of the OTHER notes of the ordinary scale i.e. NOT doh but re, mi, fah, sol, lah or ti => this in fact fucks gently with the standard sense of anticipation locked into standard western harmony, and thus produces very interesting effects in the music, of suspension and unfinishedness, unendingness sometimes (plus all kinds of other things in the patterns and shapes soloists are going to choose which i canb't think of a layman's way to describe...)

As I understand it, which is not very far, a mode is a collection of particular notes, usually fewer than those in a scale (a scale is, e.g., do-re-mi, etc.), and improvisation in a given mode will include only those notes. The effect is to change the aesthetic characteristic of the 'melody' in the solo - different modes can give you a sound you might think of as bluesy, stranger, more melancholy, Asian-sounding, etc.

The solos on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue sound different from those played by Charlie Parker in the 40s because he is not playing certain notes when within a given mode. And (this could be completely wrong) I think the modes change within a solo such that within a given piece the notes he is not playing are changing. The effect, at least with Miles, is that the music has more dissonant edge than did earlier bop and a sort of "cool" aura (which may just be Miles' tone, and shouldn't be confused with either "cool jazz", a bop-swing mixture, or Miles' Birth of the Cool album, a more bop-like effort). Or, another way to think about it, and this could be even more off-base, is that in bop the solo follows the chords, while in modal music the chords follow the solo.

as for the modal thing,i understand what you are saying in theory,although whether i could listen to something and tell whether its modal or not is another matter
i'm listening to in a soulful mood by charlie parker at the moment...
i have kind of blue as well,so i'll stick that on later...
what are other well known "modal" albums?
anything by mingus?
coltrane?
(as you can see my jazz frame of reference is small,but i'm working on it...)

Coltrane and Bill Evans played modal music with Miles' first quintet and then on their own, Coltrane during some of his early classic-quartet period.

Doesn't the 1950 demarcation make sense because it's the approximate halfway point in jazz's lifespan? And wasn't "jazz" before R&B and rock & roll just another word for what young city dwellers went out on the town to see live? Didn't it go from being a mass culture (and an "age" in the '20s) to being a kind of adult subculture (or whatever) from the '50s through now, at least in America? Didn't it go from being body music to mind music, in the broadest sense, in part because bop and other stuff killed big bands, "the twist" killed couple-dancing, the backbeat killed swing, and James Brown killed 'em all (and not necessarily in that order)?

The first 45 I ever played a hundred times was Duke Ellington's "The Mooche/Skin Deep" (no year on it) when I was 7, so I have to admit sympathy for Custos on this one...

The main characteristic of modal music is simply that chords (or the implied scale, which is the same thing) change very much less frequently - in some tunes not at all, although that would be rare in jazz, even modal jazz. (The archetypal modal jazz tune is "So What" (16 bars of D Dorian/8 bars of Eb Dorian/8 bars of D Dorian).

But I would assert that you could know jazz up until 1950 and you'd know "jazz" as an art form better than if you knew what happened after. Up til '50 would include Monk and Charlie Parker, Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Basie, Lester Young, Holiday, Charlie Christian, Armstrong, Bechet, Webster...you'd certainly know it well. Whereas post-'50 you have Davis, West Coast jazz, Chet Baker, Coltrane, Ayler, Ornette, '70s loft jazz, M-Base, Wynton Marsalis: a pretty impressive list but not as essential as the pre-'50 list.

"Modal" is perhaps the most over-used term ever. The above poster is right, it mainly refers to music which has fewer chord changes. It also refers to music which uses earlier scales--scales other than the common ones used in most pop music. The big thing to remember when you're talking about jazz is the Lydian system, the whole-tone system of organizing music. The idea of resolution. For ex., in the key of A, the traditional way of resolving is to create a leading tension back to "home," A, by going thru the cycle of chords in which E, which contains a G sharp, "leads" you back to A, G sharp being a HALF tone below A. In the whole-tone system this rather banal way of going back to the home note isn't used--no cheap pull of that half-tone back to A--and therefore, more harmonic variety, more "stacking" of chords, more everything.

Anyway, what I was actually trying to do there — I think possibly not at all successfully — was to give Robin an idea what modes were starting with something I thought he might already know and be able to do, while reading this thread (ie assuming he doesn't read music, for example, but CAN sing a major scale, and can sense a cadence w/o knowing that's the name for it). I strongly suspect yrs and Jess's explanations — certainly much more scholarly and professionally exact than mine — are just so much (haha) Greek to him.

Using the 'danceability' of music as a way of arriving at a value judgement is overrated, possibly.

With the exception of a number of vocalists, band leaders, and a few individuals like Parker or Armstrong, most of the figures around prior to 1950 did better work post-1950 in my opinion. In fact, If I could only listen to jazz from one decade, I'd probably pick the 50s.

Digression:

[This brings to mind a lot of touchy race issues. That "classic" (pre-free) jazz is "America's Classical Music" as Marselis asserts, both honors blacks in a politically correct way and consigns their music to the museum of a canon, which effectively kills the possibility for a continued progression in jazz.

Bebop (as defined as Charlie Parker's incorporation of intense theory into his playing) was arguably a reaction against the white's co-opting and sanitizing of big-band styles. Compare Glenn Miller to Fletcher Henderson and you'll see what I mean. Parker and friends decided they would play music that "no white man could play," which worked for a while, but then white players began to catch up so then you had free jazz and "energy" music taking social unrest to a whole new level of expression (Ayler/Sanders/etc often refused to share a stage with whites during this period). Meanwhile, egged on by the creativity of the likes of Eric Dolphy and John Gilmore, Coltrane began to push jazz into the realm of spiritual awakening--something "pre-1950s" conceptions of what is important in jazz discount.

Personally, for all his positive contributions, I largely blame Miles Davis in his ruthless quest for fame in the form of failed "Fusion" and in "Cool Jazz," for creating the precedent for both the worst prog wankery in the 70s and the "smooth" stylings of Kenny G. Despite his making "On The Corner," "Bitches Brew," etc., Davis seemed more intent on capitalizing on jazz's potential popularity than tapping into its' civil-rights or community building subtext. Something the young lions routinely gloss over as well. Granted, its only one current running through jazz history, but it seems pretty significant.

In any case, jazz is rich with complexity, I'm glad I don't have to limit what I listen to/for.]

I have no doubt in my mind that America is a better place to exist now than it was in the first half of the century. But what was lost? And how? My god the nightlife you see in '40s movies seems to be utter history, a relic of a time before TV when people actually WENT OUT. There's no way that couldn't affect the music...

Hugh Masakela - Stimela (Coal Train)
Stan Tracey - Hexad Live, The Poets Suite
Ornette Coleman - Song X
Dudu Pukwana - In the townships.

Kenny G is not jazz he is evil.

I can find jazz I like from the earliest recordings (tiger rag 1911), right through to the 80s. My knowledge of 90s jazz seems to be limited to showboating berkley music graduates who deserve a kick in the nuts.

Jazz is such a large canon there's plety I'm hot and cold on and I don't hink any period shines but particular performances from each era shine. Styles blur and overlap.

On the Parker tip there are a lot of bad recordings of Parker not at is his bed, he's held up as a god by the generation of musicians who immediately followed him. Find him doing a live version of I've got rythmn and you will see why a whole generation went oh wow. (check it on this verve jazz masters record, I'm sure its elsewhere)

Modal jazz can't be viewed purely in terms of the classical modes. Other patterns were used. For example, Bill Evans, who's contribution to KOB was at least the equal of Miles, was particularly interested in the scales (or "modes") that can be built from the melodic minor scale and these don't correspond to any of the classical modes. For technical reasons "modes" derived from this scale do have some of the characteristics of a whole-tone scale.

Jess I'm not sure if your referring to George Russell's Lydian Chromatic concept - I've never read his book.

I do think understanding some of this technical stuff contributes to yr enjoyment. However, I am a firm believer than people are entirely too hung up on the harmonic aspect of jazz, important as it is. The main thing is to appreciate the rhythm section first. Then you can get with how the soloists navigate the changes while maintaining the groove, the swing...the way Cannonball Adderley does his little turnarounds on "Kind of Blue" is a good example, he's very graceful and forceful at the same time. Charlie Parker was very good at it too--in fact there isn't anything pertaining to playing music that Charlie Parker wasn't really good at.

so i FINALLY got round to writing up some of what ArfArf and i were discussing above (subs only for now as always):
https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-not-to-write-20654246

rip george gosset :(

I think that jazz from the third week of Nov. 1943 will always be better than the jazz of from the first week of Aug. 1956. You might disagree, but you'll be wrong.
― Horace Mann (Horace Mann)

that's a silly statement, due to the afm recording ban there's not good enough evidence from the third week of nov 1943 to judge. you like james p johnson a lot or something?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTDRcIWG-_M