//onstage masturbation

That's an interesting idea...
If we take the statement that the true artist is performing for their own pleaser and gratification as being true......are not all musicians publicly jerking off?

This is one of the few things that really irked me about Wellington when I used to live there.

Thank you, MP

See? You can never "like" jazz, you have to "dig" it.

Yeah, I'm not smart enough to get it.

Of course you just "like" jazz ... but not everyone does ...

I guess that there have been those who have tried to make jazz a tad inacessible for the great unwashed ... tried to hide it behind a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo and looked down on those who jsut didn't "dig it." But like other styles of music there is good jazz (the stuff I like) and bad jazz (the stuff I don't.) And these days, as ever, the boundaries blur between the different genre.

And NZ has produced any number of world class jazz performers ... in demand the world over. A couple of good places to enjoy jazz in Auckland are the London Bar and the Jazz Bar ... I'm sure there are plenty of others ...

Bugger!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

// John Lurie is great.

Is John Lurie very trad? I only know him through films, but I always presumed his albums would be really ramshackle and dirty. If so, I'd like to hear some. :)

I think he did the soundtrack to the 'Animal Factory' (fits, connections wise), which was really different from what else I'd heard. Sorta moody trip-hop sounds, mostly.

//The jazz singers seem to have to sing a different way, with a whole lot of lyrics jammed in a small mount of time.

what? Are you serious?
are you confusing jazz with hip hop?

you have to stop smoking that stuff.

What's an example in jazz? Ella Fitzgerald? Most of the singers I can think of do lots of long held notes.

Billie 'Lady Day' Holiday - Strange fruit, is a good album to cut your teeth on if your not into the whole vocal jazz thing at least as far as the classic stuff goes.

That chick had one hell of a life, my mates got the Billie Holiday collection and it has a bio on her in it, sheesh, it would have been easier to die.

opps I mean //I like instrumental jazz not vocal jazz.

Sorry but I'm having a few cheekie reds.

it was just an example, get over it!! plus her Jagged Little Pill album was alright

yes thats what I'm talking about

I know some don't, but a lot do which turns me off!!
I think jazz is one of the types of music that doesn't need vocals, the music can speak for it self!!

//Alanis Morristte is bad for this.

i know you said you know she is not jazz...

...but still...what the hell were you thinking??
nowhere...no..nowhere...can you ever...ever, put her dirty dirty name in a thread with the word...JAZZ in it.
fucks sake tama...you really need to give up the gunga.

no... is this a rhetorical question?

Blue in Green is much more demanding than anything by Ornette Coleman.

i just find 'free' music pretty undemanding - i always hear it as someone overexplaining themselves musically. Once you've heard the first explanation you don't need it to be put any other way.

I guess its like free music is about exposing the workings. And I feel like when everything is exposed and easily seen, no demand is made on the listener.

Art that is 'anti-representation' can't be demanding - any art demands only that the audience cross a divide between signifier and signified. No signified = no 'crossing' = no demand.

with melody (at least, melody in the trditional sense) subtracted, the other components of the music become more intense and direct for me- like there's no translation process between the idea represented by the music and the listeners interpretation of it

That's what I mean. Everything is on the surface, explicit. Nothing is hinted at, all the meaning is directly accessible. At least, that's the feeling that you get (ignoring hermeneutical theories of interpretation).

'free'music is less demanding on the listener than music where the conventions are tighter but more conventional and therefore much more internalised. In the latter situation, meanings can be suggested as opposed to merely stated - the listener stands in a relation of possibility and transcendence with the music. In free music the aim is the opposite: complete immanence and necessity; it shares this modernist aim with abstraction in painting. What the everyday listener (eg the chap above) hears as a demand is actually his or her own difficulty in coming to terms with a new set of rules. That this is not in fact a demand is shown in the way the rules are explicitly present in the resulting music.