ANDY EDWARDS DECLARES WAR ON JAZZ SNOBBERY

 Andy Edwards is a manic YouTuber , a retired fusion drummer, music educator who presents the public with a wild assortment of critiques about nearly all things music; the depth of his love , no , let us say passion for music is obvious, his jeremiads are full of distractions, meltdowns, excoriations and self-recrimination, but his knowledge of the genres he concentrates on is incontestable. His the kind of music buddy you want to have, a contrarian who can make a good argument for his against-the-grain views. I can't stand his opinions most of the time, and I can't get enough of him most of the time. He is a Brit, he is Brit centric and proud, and he's a hoot,

On this posting in 2024, he insists that jazz has become an elitist music, the ad-libs of snobs and the snot-nosed.  So jazz has been absorbed by the mainstream and is now considered High Culture. It's a tendency that is , in many cases, inevitable. If the form as any resilient character as it gains popularity, it will be canonized and presented to the world from that point as being among the best things that society is capable of, elegant, inventive, beautiful. This happened with Theater, a wholly disreputable art form intended for lowlifes, beggars, fish merchants, the rabble in general, dealing with popular themes of lust, betrayal, revenge, always revenge, and expressed in loud and exclamatory terms to an audience that was in large part illiterate. Shakespeare wrote his plays to enthrall, distract, beguile, amuse and overall entertain an audience with it in mind to make a living, not create art that defined Literature as we understand it. History seems to have an unpredictable irony, as the elevation of art forms originating in the lower and marginalized quarters of society being elevated, after generations of changing standards and fresher habits of analysis, to the become something associated with a more sophisticated class of humanity.

Being in- the -moment is what jazz is about, but not the only thing, since brilliant improvisors required a musical super structure on which to create their spontaneous counter-compositions. Interesting that a body of chord-heavy songs with fleet, rhythmic melodies became the initial properties jazz players based their explorations upon. So composition, IE, composing music for improvisors, is no less a part of making it possible for soloists to be brilliant. The composed piece, setting the mood, establishing harmonies, rhythm, gives the soloist a more diverse field of expression. The metaphysical beauty of "in the moment" hasn't been destroyed, but in fact exists when the improvisors first states the melody as written and then essentially recreates it in the solo space he's given.

What possessed jazz in the beginning has perhaps moved onto rap, I suppose, but as any art that survives the faddish conditions of their origins and remain somehow credible generations from their starting point, the nature of that art changes with the prevailing conditions of overall culture of the time and that art becomes institutionalized, i.e., classified, historicized, studied, defined, given a set of formalized aesthetics . It becomes the stuff of graduate programs, references used in political and philosophical discourse. This certainly happened to jazz as it ascended to High Art, it happened to the great vulgarian enterprise of rock and roll ( it went from being the expression of confused, angry, impatient and passionate youth to being a branch of literature), and one can see it happening with rap and hip hop: the spontaneity of each becomes mythology. So where is jazz now? As it happens, there is quite a lot of exciting work being created by established artists , and a good number of younger improvisors emerging from across the world who are keeping a jazz tradition alive by insisting on their native voices being wedded to the musical form. Jazz as we understand is becoming jazz as we don't understand , which I regard as signs that there remains much to be created, much to be heard, much to learn. Where is it now? Not standing still, that's a fact.