ask deej

but id want to understand it in a way that observes how certain artists impacted it in as accurate a way as possible

xp Dude then you should write about it all the time! Pitch every review/story with it!

i always resent when ppl say jazz is dead...it's not dead, it's music that's so of the moment to me, esp more free/improv stuff, it's always alive when you are seeing a great jazz group playing, it's never the same

from a narrative perspective its pretty dead

i do agree that its innovations in that regard are as alive as ever, though @ m@tt

it's always alive when you are seeing a great jazz group playing, it's never the same

this is true

fwiw seeing the Arkestra at ArthurNights is one of my all-time favorite concert memories

one of my fav records of 2010 - rag by davu seru/george cartwright, review half down the page, peeps should check it

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=37038

altho Dan has a fair point that there's kind of a domino effect into how jazz's developments rolled over across other genres (which raises the question of where do you draw the line cuz if you keep going all the way to British invasion bands... I can't really think of one that bears any sonic resemblance to Duke Ellington)

Well, "British Invasion" is misleading there; I'm really thinking of the reintroduction of more complicated doo-wop-esque harmony back into rock music, which was really more of an American thing with The Beach Boys and The Byrds but happened at about the same time as the British Invasion and was processed by a lot of the bands that came after them.

The basic point is that Ellington introduced a harmonic language that was embraced, transformative, and is still in use across multiple genres including pop, classical, R&B, hip-hop, etc. None of what we listen to today would exist without what he did; this is why he is a larger, more important influence than Sun Ra (who is a pretty big influence! We may be saying similar things about him in 30 years but I don't know that he's baked deeply enough into the musical infrastructure to reach the same level of stature).

Also really the only reason jazz is dead is because people keep saying it is.

suxx that james moody died this year -- saw him play back in like 2000!!

the other thing ellington did that was incredible was how he found this apex of the point where individuality meets group dynamic during jazz's most popular era ... that he would compose pieces specifically for individual artists in his band, taylored for their respective styles, it captures the central tension of jazz's relationship w the music it was rebelling against

i mean you could say kind of blue reached a similar apex but jazz as a populist movement was already on the wane at that pt

well fwiw, in strict musical terms yeah Ra's influence will never approach the scope of Ellington - his shit is just too weird, too dissonant, too idiosyncratic.

funnily enough while I am sure Dan is correct about the formal impact of Ellington's innovations still being felt in contemporary music, I bet the percentage of currently performing artists who are actually familiar with Duke's music is probably roughly analogous to the number who are actually familiar with Ra's lol

xp

lol btw, thank you Google Ngram thread:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=Duke%20Ellington,Sun%20Ra&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1900&year_end=2010

lol

Way back in 1910 a very small % of ahead of the curve music critics were really on top of Sun Ra.

what is that?

That is a graph showing the hit rate of "Duke Ellington" vs "Sun Ra" in published material indexed by Google Books, normalized for publishing volume across decades.

see here: Google Books Ngram Viewer

thats amazing

by comparison:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=Gucci%20Mane,Lil%20B&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1900&year_end=2008

(sorry, I just had to post that because LOL)

lol

lol

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=whiney%2Cdeej&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

what happened in 1923 is what i'm wondering.

should be vs. shakey

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=shakey%2Cdeej&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

sorry, deej

this is rlly interesting actually

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Duke+Ellington%2CMiles+Davis%2CJohn+Coltrane&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Really disappointed by the decline in deej criticism in the latter quarter of the twentieth century.

woah shakey is way more relevant with the young ppl of google :/

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Duke+Ellington%2CMiles+Davis%2CJohn+Coltrane%2CCharlie+Parker&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

who would be up w/ those four as far as revolutionizing jazz? louis obv

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Duke+Ellington%2CMiles+Davis%2CJohn+Coltrane%2CCharlie+Parker%2CLouis+Armstrong&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

basically that site is a full-on stats boner

xp: yeah Louis; possibly Scott Joplin if you are looking at ragtime? Also I tend to think of Dizzy in the same breath as Miles and Charlie; maybe Dave Brubeck as an outlier

i remember a fascinating piece in one of the jazz mags talking about how there were no white jazz artists who really created a sea change as far as style, could be considered up w/ the greats in terms of being sea change-type performers, with the possible exception of bix biederbecke. it was an interesting piece

eh I think that is a standard critical position. the guy who taught my history of jazz class in college said the same about Bix. he def. has his adherents.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Scott+Joplin%2CDuke+Ellington%2CMiles+Davis%2CJohn+Coltrane%2CCharlie+Parker%2CLouis+Armstrong&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

joplin registers way at the bottom

i think brubeck is probably a bit overrated, biederbeck a bit underrated

woah

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=sun+ra%2C+max+b%2C+cop+shoot+cop&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

ha I was also going to bring up Biederbecke but figured "too in-the-scene"

two most important yet underrated trumpet players ime are beiderbeck & fats navarro

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Bix+Beiderbecke%2CFats+Navarro&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Dave+Brubeck%2CBix+Biederbecke&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

lol

haha
wasnt brubeck one of the first jazz dudes to like tour colleges & shit ... i mean he even had a 'live at oberlin' album

yeah, his Wooster performance is basically the reason why my dad likes jazz today

fats navarro & tadd dameron cd i have is one of my favorites ever. highly recommended

this actually brings up something interesting about 'influence' arguments ... how some artists are influential by dint of popularity vs. others who are influential by doing something so structurally significant to the art form ... that sort of stuff is fascinating to me. its like 'deep' influence vs. 'wide' influence or something

well it's only gonna be structurally significant if other artists pick up on it and run with it

trying to think of artists who are popular among musicians but were never popular commercially (probably applies to a TON of rap dudes. also to Sun Ra lol)

Neu!

wasn't brubeck kinda influential in that whole button-down "third stream music" thing that supposedly was taking classical type hongro compositional shit and marrying it to jazz?

(tho ellington already did that i guess)

modern jazz quartet too i imagine --