Thanks to Nate Dorward for drawing my attention to the following article that's just appeared on the One Final Note site. Though my first reaction on reading Adam Hill's piece, which I'll take the liberty of quoting from below (though do the site a favour and use the link to the Webpage – we can all do with the hits), was along the lines of "oh dear, but never mind", a closer reading of the text raises some uncomfortable questions that perhaps ought to be addressed.
After an opening paragraph describing the "hype" associated with eai – we'll return to that ever-problematic term later – Hill's second and third paragraphs run as follows: "The records are sold by jazz shops on-line and off, written about by jazz magazines both on-line and off, and commentary about them has dominated the discourse of quite a few of the jazz-themed digital discussion groups. Oddly, though, the music, by any definition, is not jazz, and after listening to about three dozen of these records, it's difficult to see much, if any, relation to jazz. In fact it seems to be loved for what it is mostly lacking, which are some of the very basic elements of jazz in all its traditions—melody, grooves, swing, and rhythm." Insofar as improvised music was a logical outgrowth from free jazz – and several of its most notable practitioners still to this day reveal ample evidence of a solid technical grounding in jazz (Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann..) – it's hardly surprising that albums on Erstwhile, For4Ears, Cut, Grob, IMJ, Hibari or any other small eai-ish label you might care to mention should be discussed in jazz-related publications, though Hill must also be aware of an increasing number of newsgroups and sites devoted to the discussion of this music. If eai-related discussion has "dominated the discourse of quite a few of the jazz-themed digital discussion groups" it's as much due to the dearth of exciting new "jazz" (another term that we perhaps ought to define more carefully) as it is to the tireless efforts of eai apologists/activists like Jon Abbey.
Bagatellen readers may smile wryly at my taking sides with Jon here, but, to paraphrase the first rule of orchestration ("know thy instrument"), it's a question of "know thy repertoire", which Abbey undoubtedly does. Hill admits to having listened to "about three dozen of these records", which, assuming he's referring to a phenomenon that began about five years ago (see his first paragraph) amounts to about seven albums a year. I myself edit the Paris Transatlantic website, a modest affair, and write reasonably regularly for The Wire and Signal To Noise, so I can't compare myself to the case-hardened jazz journalists I meet each week who go around local emporia with duffle bags full of new CDs to exchange for cash, but I do know (since I happen to make a note of these things) that I have acquired – received free, or bought – no fewer than 2600 CDs since the beginning of 1999, well over two thirds of which are filed in my own idiosyncratic system under "free jazz / improv". I respectfully submit that a total of three dozen discs is hardly scratching the surface.
Hill continues: "To my ears (and quite a lot of this music must be listened to with headphones in order to be heard), it is music with no soul, no heart, and certainly no hips." Well, on the subject of headphones he certainly has a point, but I would refer readers back to my own discussion of eai in a recent Bagatellen feature. I suspect that Hill is using the "eai" term to refer to predominantly lowercase (quiet, reductionist, minimal, call it what you will) music. I rather doubt he'd have to listen to Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma through a set of cans. No soul, no heart and no hips, eh? Forget the hips for a moment – this seems to be saying it's all too cerebral. I somehow imagine that Hill would have no difficulty welcoming the recent ensemble works of Anthony Braxton, Scott Rosenberg, Scott Fields and Denman Maroney under his jazz umbrella, but surely their music is at times as thorny as Milton Babbitt's. As far as the hips go ("it don't mean a thing if ain't got that swing"..), I also wonder whether Hill's definition of jazz would stretch wide enough to include the plethora of soft crossover jazz funk albums that clogged the remainder bins back in the 1970s and early 80s (Spyro Gyra, anyone?). Anyway, back to the text.
"While it has always been difficult to write clearly and concretely about abstract music" (amen!) "there has been no shortage of vague, ponderous prose when it comes to eai." Once more, I think Hill has a point – and I'm not prepared to go trawling through the Bagarchives to dig up examples of ponderous prose from some of our recent altercations – I'm half-tempted to return to my favourite warhorse of terminology here, but compared to the dull post-Hentoff (no disrespect to Nat, either: I grew up reading his liners) "this-happens-and-then-that-happens" kind of jazz writing, I think much of the discussion that has been spawned by recent outings on labels like Erstwhile has been quite instructive, to say the least.
"Jazz of today seems to have let many of these people down, and rather than listening again to Hot Fives and Sevens or Live at the Plugged Nickel they break out their special limited edition Amplify 2002 because it's cutting edge and current," continues Hill. Well, I'm afraid in many respects jazz has let me down – though I can happily cite dozens of recent examples that haven't – jazz (I'm talking Matthew, not Brad) has, like almost every other genre of music, fallen victim to the market saturation engendered by the advent of high-performance technology. With a good pair of mics and a DAT machine and a few basic software programmes, any concert in the world can be recorded and released commercially, and even musicians who in my opinion should know better – Parker (both William and Evan), Shipp, Vandermark, to name but three – have been offloading onto the public the kind of work that thirty years ago would never have made it out of the studio / concert hall. Want examples? How about the tepid McJazz of most of the releases on the Thirsty Ear Blue Series? Or the recent ragged outing by Zu / Spaceways on Atavistic? (Damn, Ken should seriously consider giving some of that prize money to the folks at Atavistic so they can invest in a decent A&R department). It's funny though that Hill refers to Hot Fives and Sevens or Live at the Plugged Nickel... couldn't he cite a more recent example of "classic jazz"? What about Ivo Perelman's Suite for Helen F, Mat Maneri's Sustain, Alan Silva's "Treasure Box", Dominic Duval's Rules of Engagement... but perhaps these aren't accessible enough for Mr Hill. Anyway, he continues: "This is what happens, I can only surmise, when enough highly intelligent men with enough disposable income have reached their middle years and need to find some way to feel cool again, and so they sit in rooms or cars with high-end audio systems, and cock their ears to listen to the dramatic uses of spatialty [sic], the correspondence of textures and silence, the metaphoric suggestiveness of barely audible sonic events." Quite apart from the (presumably unintentionally) sexist implication that no women listen to eai, I'm inclined to wonder what kind of car stereo I could possibly afford that would allow me to enjoy Tomas Korber's recent For4Ears album in rush hour traffic. Maybe I should go visit some local dealerships instead of writing Bag features.
"If one is to spend time and money listening to hours upon hours of sine waves, lap-top plops and fizzes, scrapes of disembodied guitar, string-plings from the inside of a piano, and abrasions of drum skins, one has to invent and embrace a highfalutin justification, and veil it in obscurity until it tends towards dogma. (Pretentiously they love to use the verb 'document' for recording, and their festivals are 'curated'.)" While being the first to recognise that some pretentious nonsense has been written on the subject (and on William Parker, Anthony Braxton and even Norah Jones too, if you know where to look), I question the verb "has to" in the above phrase. In normal circumstances (ie when I'm not reviewing a record or concert for a publication), I don't feel under any obligation to say why I like certain kinds of music – I actually have and enjoy listening to the first Norah Jones album, by the way – I like it, voilà, fuck it. I like Radu Malfatti, Steely Dan, Kevin Drumm, Shuggie Otis, the Beach Boys, Steve Coleman, AMM, Arthur Doyle and Sun Ra for all kinds of reasons. Of course, if it's a review, I tend to choose something that I like not only because I like it (shooting an album down in flames is by and large a pointless and demeaning exercise) but want to explain why I like it. Or -- witness the huge review of the Amplify box that triggered a lengthy discussion in these pages back in January -- explain why I would like to like it more and perhaps cannot.
Anyway, Hill continues: "But what eai enthusiasts won't tell you, but most fans of jazz will discover for themselves if they dare, is how fucking tedious this music actually is." I would never dare to presume I could speak for "most fans of jazz", though several of my acquaintances (possessing copies of Live at the Plugged Nickel to boot) find much to enjoy in eai. Funny, somehow I can't imagine an art historian writing "most Edward Hopper fans will discover for themselves how fucking tedious Mark Rothko is", or a cinema critic writing "most Truffaut fans will discover for themselves how fucking tedious Chris Marker is". Yet, for some reason, this stuff really rubs some music critics up the wrong way. But anyway, the expletive says it all – Hill might as well have put the pen down there and then, instead of citing two what I consider to be atypical examples of the genre, Duos For Doris (on Erstwhile) and the CD that accompanied the Improvised Music from Japan book. (In particular, a piece on that disc that featured Radu Malfatti on trombone and Taku Sugimoto on guitar – hardly eai, one supposes, unless the mere presence of an electric guitar qualifies the music as such.. in which case I love the eai back catalogue of Charlie Christian, Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery..).
But wait, there's more! "Perhaps the only thoughtful discussion (and criticism) of this music, has ironically come from Eddie Prévost, percussionist of AMM [..] Lamenting the lack of expressiveness in the music, Prévost said, 'The primary characteristics of this music are its determined equalization of tone, timbre, activity, dynamics, and it's [lack of] volume. All 'reductionist' instrumentalists seem bent on producing similar sonic effects—no matter what the source material. What is produced seems too often dull in its lack of differentiation (The Wire 231).' You might think that such controversial remarks would engender an interesting, provocative discussion of the music in succeeding issues of the magazine, but alas, it didn't." They certainly did in the circles I frequent (and in the Letters Page in The Wire, as I recall).
"And so the glorification of this opaque, haphazard music continues on, and critics like me are dismissed as philistines. It seems particularly ripe now for a sort of Sokal hoax." (I take it Hill read and enjoyed my spoof Erstwhile press release a few months back? Hmm, maybe not..) "Perhaps a mischievous (but well-known) musician will fill a seventy-seven minute disc documenting the hum and surge of a refrigerator and the sound of ass-scratching, send it in to IMJ or Erstwhile, and soon after experience the rapture of critical praise for its reverberant beauty and austere references to man vs. machine struggles and all its attendant colors and textures." Hardly likely, as (I can tell you from personal experience) Jon Abbey's ear for quality product (oh, sorry Adam, let's call it music) is far too acute and well-trained. "Or," concludes Hill, "you could just turn on a tape machine, get out a dog whistle, and blow, blow, blow, while the yammering mutts encircle you, wagging their tails, and cocking their ears." That's funny too; I've often compared the team of Wire journalists to a pack of slobbering dogs trying to get hold of the next big bone ("who's gonna review the new Erstwhiles, David?!"). So I'm quite happy to be counted among the yammering mutts. Even yammering mutts, though, have to heed the call of nature from time to time, and I have to say that if journalism like this were the only tree for miles around, I wouldn't even bother cocking my leg up on it.
~Dan Warburton
Posted by dan on May 4, 2004 11:00 PM.................................................. © 2003, 2004 bagatellen ..................................................