HT Bryan Townsend--Rick Beato proposes why people hate jazz (they don't understand it) cross referencing accounts in classical music of why virtuoso variation forms have been frowned on for two centuries

So Bryan Townsend linked to a video explaining why people hate jazz.  He couldn't get past five minutes into it.  I ... skimmed into about ten minutes.  

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/08/rick-beato-on-why-people-hate-jazz.html


I had some comments over at The Music Salon blog that I'll duplicate here:

about 10 minutes in he gets at something Elijah Wald has fielded in his books, jazz became less popular as it became more obviously and deliberately separated from dance and dance music much like rock would later.

He mentions that people have a hard time enjoying something when they don't understand what's going on and that jazz reached a point where people stopped understanding what people were doing in it.

My impression has been there are three core reasons jazz fell out of favor and one is mentioned above in Beato's video.

1. Jazz became less popular as it became a more self-contained and self-referential art form. Take Five, for instance, has a moment where Desmond ostentatiously invokes "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" in his solo. Even with his sly referential solos, Paul Desmond used musical quotes he could reliably trust would be immediately recognized by ordinary listeners. 

2. Jazz moved toward virtuoso display in continuous variation patterns in a way that alienated critics and audiences in the Romantic era. I.e. when jazz WAS closer to popular and dance forms it had more rather than less variety in basic form. 

3. As Ray Knapp put it, as jazz became more serious and taken more seriously as an art form it took on all the ideological baggage, or was given it, by the intellectuals and fans that had accrued to German art music. I.e. exalted art religion that makes you a better person for liking it came along and that is anathema to a lot of Americans.

There's finally an academic monograph out on the album Time Out, and in that book the author pointed out that in "Strange Meadowlark" Paul Desmond's solo quotes from "Santa Claus is Coming to Town".  So, there, I've corrected my early morning mis-typed reply!  The overall point I mentioned remains, Desmond's musical quote jokes could be esoteric to us in the present but wouldn't have been esoteric to people familiar with jazz from that time or even popular Christmas songs from the 1940s through 1950s.  

That general observation ties back to how connected jazz was and is not connected to wider popular culture.  

Point 2 merits an expanded take, and I don't know if I have the willpower to expand upon it much.  If you were to read Elaine Sisman's wonderful monograph on Haydn and variation technique you would learn that in the early nineteenth century virtuoso variations came to be viewed with disdain by music critics and practicing musicians.  Sisman merely alluded to a process that spanned the nineteenth century that gets a more detailed treatment, where improvisation is specifically concerned, in a book by Dana Gooley.  

Dana Gooley's book on improvisation and the Romantic era nearly everyone agreed Hummel was the master of improvisation in his era and he was famous for taking requests from audience members of popular arias and tunes which he would then improvise into fantasias as concert-closers.  It was the early Romantic ideal in which a virtuoso performer and known composer solicited democratic audience feedback (from, of course, a predominantly middle-class to upper-class and professional music set of demographics).  Gooley makes a case that from the 1820s onward improvisation became less and less publicly acceptable.  The last virtuoso improvisers who were widely regarded as epic exponents of the practice included Hummel and Mendelssohn but these composers would be regarded as second rate compared to the "real" geniuses of the nineteenth century.  In Gooley's telling the enemies of public improvisation could include Robert Schumann, who was an avid improviser early on and began to reject it later in his career, or Lizst, who never exactly gave up improvising as part of his compositional and personal practice but felt awkward about having it be part of his public concerts. 

To translate all of that into more 20th and 21st century American musical terms, 19th century music journalists and composers began to get sick of what was the equivalent in their day of the jazz bros of classical music all showing how they could play the nineteenth century's version of "Giant Steps" in every key at breakneck speed.  Why did Hummel get a pass?  Because Hummel came from the old kappelmeister tradition which, at the risk of putting this too simply, the kappelmeister skill set was more the church music and court music practices where you might have to make up a ton of music in very short order that made sense within the liturgical year (this still happens!), whereas the public Romantic virtuoso concertizing approach tended to have grab bag pieces that made use of popular songs from, say, Italian or French opera.  Someone like Hummel could figure out what tunes were popular in the places he was visiting and make a point of working out how to incorporate those regional tunes into his improvised piano fantasias.  That he was brilliant at it had a side effect, as other Romantic era ideologies emerging in the wake of Herder's views gained prominence a Hummel who had a personal style but could, when appropriate, have a chameleon-esque side, was maybe too cosmopolitan and eclectic in some ways to fit into an emerging nationalist ethos?  Speculating a bit there, I admit.

Commenter Maury over at The Music Salon blog pointed out something else, that sales for jazz are even smaller than sales for classical lately.  That is something I noticed, too, in the last few years.  If classical music is axiomatically presumed to be the musical art of the "one percent" it might be more accurate to say that it's the music of the "two or three percent" while jazz is the music of the one percent in sales terms. 

I mean, I think it's awful that Kind of Blue has become hold music on some calls I've had to make in my lifetime!  I don't think we can underestimate how many Americans can hate a putatively American musical art form if it's been made into the hold music of America.  How many times have you heard soporific post Third Stream post Weather Report shlock jazz waiting for customer service reps to finally get to you?  

However complex jazz gets in harmony or melody, post bop and post bebop jazz has very often calcified into what in classical music traditions would be called the continuous variation approach to theme and variations, which, as I've been merely outlining above, was the bane of concert life for the Romantic era.  It took chops, yes, but it was often just chops that the average virtuoso brought to a concert.  Elaine Sisman's book on Haydn and variation technique makes a vital point that what eighteenth century listeners and musicians wanted variation technique to "do" would be for a musician to choose a suitable theme and then bring out by way of variations unrealized possibilities and pleasant surprises in a variation movement.  Haydn was regarded as the master of this kind of musical surprise and of choosing the kinds of themes through which happy surprises born of latent and not immediately observable possibilities could be made.  

To put this in jazz terms, the reason Coltrane's take on "My Favorite Things" is so iconic in jazz isn't necessarily because, as is too easily written by jazz fans, the song is said to be pallid or trite, but because Coltrane, being a capable and thoughtful musician, saw unrealized possibilities in the song that he chose to bring out.  To put it another way, it's easy for Beethoven cultists to rip on Diabelli by way of valorizing Beethoven's Diabelli variations.  But if the theme had no potential at all then why on earth did Beethoven compose so many variations on it?  I think Diabelli's Op. 29 guitar sonatas are at least interesting and No. 3 in F major is actually pretty good and I can say that without necessarily dissent from the commonplace observation that for all his talents Diabelli was very often a complacent hack as a composer!  Still, it was also known that Beethoven only wanted Diabelli engraving his music.  Stuff to keep in mind.  Important parts of the canonized music of the nineteenth century depended on the help of some other musicians who have long been dismissed as hacks.

So all of that is to suggest that when people ask why people hate jazz now a lot of the reasons can turn out to be why Romantic era music journalists hated virtuoso display variation showboater pieces in the concert scene literally two centuries ago.  If jazz "has" become the "classical music" of American music then the jazzbro hard bop scene has in too many ways become a distillation of all the same excesses that existed in the post-classical proto-Romantic and early Romantic era in Europe, which would be easier to hear than not for anyone who has spent a couple of decades keeping some tabs on where jazz has gone in the last forty years (anywhere?) compared to early nineteenth century virtuoso display pieces.  

Let me put it this way as a guitarist, opulent frippery for the sake of opulent frippery has always been a weakness in the guitar literature, regardless of whether or not we're talking about classical or jazz!  Opulent frippery can happen in R&B and soul, too, of course, which is what I discussed in "Tropes of Soul" a few years ago, wherein I pointed out that Aretha Franklin and Mahalia Jackson applied ornamentation to "Silent Night" in ways that showed they had a clear command of ornament as a text-painting craft in the singer's art, whereas Aguilera, Carey and Bolton have had a more one-size-fits-all approach to florid ornamentation of a song.  As a contrast to hyper-competent vocal ornament grunge probably sounded "raw" and "real" to ... too many people in the 1990s ... because I hated nearly everything about the grunge era and could only kinda put up with Soundgarden because they had less tedious grooves than Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the former of the two being Boston songs reworked into minor modes and the latter being Led Zeppelin 34.6.  I might have to save an essay comparing Jeff Buckley and Mariah Carey as exponents of extravagant virtuoso display for some other time ... since ostensibly this whole blog post essay was supposed to be about why people are thought to hate jazz.  

We live in an era in which even a jazz great like Miles Davis can seem too calculated to be "expressive" if instrumental jazz is compared to, say, Sly and the Family Stone.  To the extent that jazz became a musical art that, as Raymond Knapp put it, was lionized on the basis of adherence to the ideals of German Idealism and Romantic era ideologies of authenticity and expression in abstract instrumental music, jazz paradoxically came to be praised as something like a sacramental "thinking person's" musical art that transcended "pop" and thereby became everything the jazz dudes might at one point have said was "square" about classical music or other non-jazz styles.  The more jazz became about an idealized and reified conception of improvisation as the direct expression of "soul" and of a democratic participatory society the more it paradoxically became German Romantic in ideological terms because, as Dana Gooley has charted the trajectory of the philosophy of aesthetics about improvisation in Romantic era treatises, improvisation as the direct expression of a musical artist's soul that democratically eliminated social boundaries was what many a Romantic era theorist claimed improvisation was doing in German contexts and, well, at the risk of stating the obvious, it's hard to get whiter than nineteenth century German music unless we want to be WASPier than WASPs.  

Gooley's book mentions that American musicology has tended to define improvisation studies so much in terms of African diaspora musics (which is fine in itself) that American scholars have let slide digging into the centuries long traditions of improvisation in church music because, well, Romantic era philosophers of the arts stopped paying attention to the continuing and vibrant traditions of musical improvisation that kept going on in Christian liturgical music as the Romantic era cult of the singular genius began to evolve.  

So those are some assorted thoughts on theories about why people hate jazz but more thoughts about how jazz has in the last sixty years paradoxically embodied many of the vices of virtuoso display variation pieces that were the bane of Romantic era music journalists two centuries ago.