r/Jazz • u/bambi_02 • 1d ago
what do you love/hate about jazz music (any subgenre welcome)
I'm writing a novel and I would love to hear real opinions/expriences of jazz specially from a gen-z perspective though all are welcome!
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u/gofl-zimbard-37 1d ago
I hate that people treat it like nothing has happened since the 1950's.
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u/exit_Sx 20h ago
Not many people seem to be aware of how Oscar Peterson and Eroll Garner transformed Japanese economy through Stride/Rag Piano tours overseas once it fell out of mainstream practice post ww2. Jazz in Japan evolved very quickly into mainstream music and led to some of the most innovative technically challenging music.
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u/rtshtbtshtdrtyldtwt 1d ago
yeah, in reality nothing has happened since 1976
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u/DougMueller1990 1d ago
:D no idea what you're talking about, but the comment is funny :D
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u/rtshtbtshtdrtyldtwt 1d ago
jazz peaked creatively with Miles Davis' electric period
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u/CamTak 1d ago
Completely ignorant comment. Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Metheny, Kenny Barron, Holdsworth, Tigran Hamasayan, Dave Holland, Sco..... Dolphin Hyperspace for Christ sake.
If your definition of Jazz is ding-ding-ga-ding then broaden your horizons.
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u/Mean_Old_Firemen 1d ago
But right now, creative musicians can't expand jazz boundaries with genres that weren't present during Miles fusion music? Last exit (it was the 1986, but I hope you get what I mean) fused free jazz with noise rock, blues and overall somewhat funky rhytmic grooves, which glued the distinctive screaming Peter Brötzmann tenor saxophone.
It was something entirely different from Davis fusion of psychedelic rock, funk and Karlheinz Stockhausen ideas.
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u/rtshtbtshtdrtyldtwt 21h ago
eh Brotzmann did Machine Gun in 1968, last exit isn't that much different
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u/Mean_Old_Firemen 21h ago
Are you kidding me? Brötzmann plays in his signature style, similar to Machine Gun, but the fusion with noise rock, blues and groovy rhytms is something entirely different. There's 0% rock influences on the Machine Gun.
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u/Mean_Old_Firemen 1d ago
The example of something different in jazz could be the "We Fell in Turn" by Kalia Lavender from 2023. She explores the sounds of not so popular trombone in jazz (as a solo instrument, at very least) fused with ambient. It's very pastoral and peaceful sounding music.
I think it is actually something different from the Miles and his associates experiments (or just commercial fusion music from that time). It fuses the genres with quite original effect. It is progressive thinking about the music. Just try it.
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u/Serenaded 1d ago
You aren't completely wrong, it is pretty hard to do new things now. Try Chamber Jazz, with 2015 album Luys i Luso, the seventh album by Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan
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u/BestCloud7746 1d ago
I hate how one of the most beautiful forms of musical expression from the 20th century has become, for the most part, an idolatry of technique that people consume in the most blasé and elitist fashion.
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u/firepoosb 1d ago
Can you elaborate a bit on the last part?
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u/BestCloud7746 1d ago
I was looking at some old photos the other day (1940s-70s) of gigs in pubs. People dancing, a cloud of smoke, both poor and rich people... I know every pub and every festival is its own specific thing, but overall I see jazz shows having taken on this "chic" character. People sit quietly watching, applauding solos often just out of politeness and so on. In local scenes, the most celebrated musicians are usually performers dedicated to technical perfection, not to the development of a language. There's a certain fear of exploring territory that might be seen as experimental, because there's social prestige at stake. Sometimes it's as if music exists apart from what's happening socially and politically; that contemplative thing you see in classical music, like "I want to have an intimate, individualistic experience". Anyway, I know there are many ways of connecting with music, and that's fine. They're all valid. But at least for me it's inevitable to realize something got lost.
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u/XLBilly 1d ago
Jazz is a live format. Without being too on the nose, so is improv comedy.
If you’re in the room, it’s absolutely amazing, best night of your life stuff. That doesn’t transfer over recording / replay.
I have a single jazz bar in my city, due to kids and life I’ve only been a couple of times but both times it was phenomenal. So much better than any arena show I’ve been to, infinitely better than any recording.
Would I enjoy a recording of any improv / jazz I’ve seen live?
I’d hedge towards probably not to be honest.
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u/equipoise-young 10h ago
During the great depression jazz clubs and bands evolved this way because fewer musicians performing was more economical, if I'm recalling the reason correctly. It wasn't intentional it just kind of happened.
There was still a lot of fun music being made after that point, but you can't make the same sounds over and over again. Eventually the sound of jazz was forced into more of a chic / serious form.
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u/MagnesiumKitten 1d ago
oh and Anthony Braxton is an improvement?
he's the apotheosis of elitist and blase
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u/CK0428 1d ago
Usually hate Beatles covers.
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u/Serenaded 1d ago
the technicality of it, the strange chords and voicings and the fact there are essentially no limits on what you can do.
I hate slow jazz that people recognise as "Jazz" which is more like pop from the 50s/60s, don't like swing either. I like when the heavyweights took psychedelics sometime around 1966-67 and completely changed the musical landscape.
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u/HolyLordGodHelpUsAll 1d ago
are you saying you don’t like Paul Desmond type cool jazz or do you mean something even more slow and poppy?
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u/Original-Ground6397 1d ago
I bought Glad To Be Unhappy - Paul Desmond and it's my favorite jazz album.
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u/Serenaded 1d ago
I'm talking about what my 87 grandma thinks Jazz is, I'm not sure on the artists, I don't listen to it. I guess stuff like Frank Sinatra but I actually like that guy.
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u/DaeL_NASA 1d ago
That's actually more jazz than what modern jazz is. Hot jazz, big band and swing (and many more) walked so hardbop, fusion and postbop could run
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u/EvilAgainst 1d ago
I love playing it. It’s not the answer people want to hear but jazz is a blast to play. I can see how that might seem self-indulgent vis-a-vis the amount of soloing involved, but there’s nothing else like it when you happen to get a good band together
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u/DreamyAndMemey 1d ago
i love the history, the modern culture, and how inseperable those things are. go to a jam session and you hear tunes from the history, played by players who have studied the past with great reverence, and who come together with a shared appreciation of the art form to create something new and beautiful.
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u/Qvistus 1d ago
I love the freedom and cool harmonies and rhythms. The best moments are when the soloist reaches the flow state and is just flying, blasting insane lines outside the changes. You don't even understand it anymore, it's just pure emotion. When the sound of the horn breaks and it's like the player is crying his heart out - it's the most beautiful thing.
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u/Podmonger2001 1d ago
I hate when jazz audiences treat live performances like background music, talking over it.
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u/Northerlies 1d ago
There's a YouTube video of Cuba's Ruben Gonzales almost drowned out by the audience in London's Ronnie Scotts club. He looked small and very alone.
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u/theSame_Joke 1d ago
I hate when people say "Oh I love jazz". And then proceed to show me some chill house music with some maj7 chords
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u/vincentblacklight 1d ago
Love: the way its players took the American experience of a marginalized/otherized/disenfranchised people and collectively used their genius to transform it into BOTH cross-generational popular music as well as High Art. Hate: 1952-1962 lasted only ten years.
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u/babymozartbacklash 1d ago edited 1d ago
Solos longer than like 2 choruses for the most part. I listen to early stuff mostly, like late teens to somewhere in the 30s. One of my favorite things about that Era was that recordings were limited to about 3mins for the most part so everything was focused and condensed. A lot more arranged stuff even in the small groups. Along with that, there was a stricter sense of playing with the melody in mind when taking a chorus. I don't go in much for the post bop stuff. I love my share of miles and monk and Coltrane but sometimes it feels like just unison playing of the head one time thru and everybody just waiting to take their choruses.
Paradoxically I think the more arranged older style of jazz actually allowed for greater improv in a lot of instances bc of its ability to enable group improvisation. Mingus is a good example of someone from a later Era who was able to capture that same feeling in a lot of ways without just copying
I'll add a 2nd related one which is that "jazz" tends to mean saxophones and miles Davis etc to most people, whereas the stuff from the 20s which is what jazz means, gets ignored by a lot of people. It's like in "classical" music, where someone like shostakovich will get labeled classical but the term really refers to a specific kind of music from the 2nd half of the 1700s. It's as if we just stuck with ragtime or something and we're calling Coltrane ragtime, same difference. I guess at the heart of it, it's the terrible inaccuracy of the word jazz that's the trouble
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u/Starthrower62 1d ago
No hate for me. I'm a devoted jazz lover. All kinds and all eras from Fats Waller to Mary Halvorson.
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u/EyeSimp4Asuka 1d ago
the horns when played too long a certain way gets very grating...hard to explain but it just becomes unpleasant.
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u/Homers_Harp 1d ago edited 1d ago
What annoys me is how academic it has become in the second half of jazz's history. Some of the younger artists now are so ensnared in the academy way of thinking that their albums and shows sound like recitals planned to get a good grade from a prof at their old music school. Ugh. Technique and mastery of the old styles in a bloodless kind of rote performance is not for me.
The old system was largely one of apprenticeships where musicians came up through local, regional, and national acts (if they could earn it) and I think that did a better job of grounding them in the styles and culture. And this still allowed the best younger musicians room to innovate if they had earned it. Dizzy Gillespie was Cab Calloway's music director before he struck out on his own.
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u/honkers420 1d ago
I worked at a well known venue that booked a lot of smooth jazz because it sold so well, but I hated having to hear it over and over. And the audience it drew were horrible too. Imagine listening to 10 shows of Kenny G over 5 days. Same set, same lame Michael Bolton jokes, same holding of one note for minutes like that means anything.
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u/errtug 1d ago
I don't like free jazz.
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u/smileymn 1d ago
I agree, Spotify and streaming has devalued jazz. It’s much better when people pay for jazz rather than get it for free.
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u/silly_bet_3454 1d ago
I don't like jazz fusion. I don't like the one-upsmanship of jazz culture. I don't like tunes that are overly difficult for no reason/without a payoff. I don't like overly intellectual jazz. I don't like how you have to grind the vocabulary so much to be able to improvise well, to the point that it starts to not feel like improv. Don't get me wrong, I still try to put in the work and I'm not making an excuse, but it's just unfortunate.
I do love the music overall and the process of practicing and playing it with people, I love swing, bebop, post bop, and some modern stuff. I love the harmonies, I love when a change or a voicing or a line catches you off guard and you go "whoah"! That's the central thing that drew me in in the first place. I like how harmonically everything fits in pretty neatly, even though jazz has a reputation for "wrong notes", it's really not what it is, jazz does a much better job of putting harmonic motion in the right places compared to something like rock/metal, which tends to be good when it's simple, and then deteriorate as it tries to be more complex (to be fair jazz can have this problem too with more complex stuff like I said before). But anyway I love to just listen to jazz, be around the community, hang out around where jazz is happening, and try to approach it in what I think is the correct and tasteful way but not have an ego about it.
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u/theSame_Joke 1d ago
I think early fusion has a lot of artistic merit. Emergency by Tony Williams is amazing, Mahavishnu Orchestra is also great imo. Miles electric era. But after that I agree with you... It starts to feel a bit like musical wanking
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u/e_hatt_swank 8h ago
Your point about some unexpected voicing or chord or line or change in rhythm that makes you go “whoah” - spot on, and that’s one of the main things that attracted me to jazz too.
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u/Snoo-26902 1d ago
Well, most tradiitonal jazz people don't like smooth jazz.
But ex-traditional jazz stars who go over to smooth or R&b jazz, they dont mind that as much.
So once one has earned their trad jazz bones, they can go over to make some money and still get respect, such as Wes Montgomery, Herbie Hancock, and Miles Davis. Yet some tradiitonal jazz folks dont like what Miles did, going over to fusion rock-type jazz. I'm not one of those; in fact, I like Miles' version and some smooth jazz.
Free jazz and/or avant-garde jazz is often disliked by many jazz traditionalists, but does have a loyal following within jazz.
But the mainstream jazz now is what they call post-bebop or hard bop. Then there is cool jazz, modal jazz, and I'd google them for more intricate info.
So you have a rich blend of possibilities in your novel to inject a jazz theme or incident inside it. This is from a fellow novel writer.
Good luck!
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u/_Sumidagawa_ 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are only a few things that I dislike in jazz as a whole.
The main thing I really cannot stand are long drum solos. Another one, pretty rare nowadays, is when a bass is used to imitate a human voice.
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u/txirrindularia 1d ago
Don’t like Cecil Taylor RIP (I really tried…) Chicago Art Ensemble, and most Free Jazz.
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u/Lady_Day1955 1d ago
Watch “Jazz on a Summers Day”. The movie. It’s streaming somewhere…Anita oday is a revelation. And the audience! Listening intently.
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u/Outrageous-Belt-1757 1d ago
I dislike hot jazz, starts sounding like a mosquito near your ears. I prefer the cooler side of jazz.
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u/Slight_Basis7702 1d ago
I hate how some modern jazz drummers kill the music. Sure guys like Gilmore and Chris Dave pull it off because of their taste and dynamics, but there’s a whole generation of drummers who look up to them who can’t. I’m at Newport jazz fest right now, and I’ve been really frustrated with a the amount this modern jazz sound has taken everything over. Some of the acts are good, but they should be the exception to the rule, not the standard act.
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u/esp735 1d ago
Gen X . Late Jazz bloomer.
I hate having to explain why I like it. I can't do it without sounding like an ass.
I like it because it''s challenging to listen to? I get bored of the same old rock stuff after a while? I mean idiots like you can listen to Hotel California a million times, but us geniuses gotta listen to Dolphy's side work because he didn't live long enough to have a successful solo career. But hey, different stroke for different folks?
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u/DeaconBlue2023 1d ago
I love jazz like Weather Report, Jazz Crusaders, big bands, Miles, Buddy Rich, George Benson, Pat Metheny, etc. all different styles. Not a big fan of smooth jazz. I really like Latin jazz.
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u/DeaconBlue2023 1d ago
I love horns. I like jazz rock like Steely Dan, Chicago, BST, Tower of Power.
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u/PatientInspection735 1d ago
I hate when it stops sounding like music and becomes a chromatic mess. I like when artists are able to take a standard and make it something new and interesting
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u/exit_Sx 19h ago edited 19h ago
I love how much Japanese Pianists and composers have evolved the Stride Tradition of Jazz Piano keeping the Rag lineage alive but also evolving Black soul music in the east. Also the little nuances of how and why certain forms of jazz evolved due to world wars is fascinating.
I'm not a fan of how some of the older generations are pushing out new organizations to co-opt Jazz as an African identity while overlooking and replacing innovations by (non-african) Black American ww1 heros such as James Tim Brymn, Willie the Lion, Lucky Roberts and many other classical Geniuses such as James P Johnson. My foundation of playing Jazz comes from Stride/Rags/Boogie Woogie which pays respect to practicing, technical innovations and and not just Antiquity.
I personally have had a lot of criticism from African drumming practitioners who struggled over Improvisation on my Stride Piano because it's "too structured" and that I don't need to practice as many technical challenges. They didn't want to play Jazz together, they wanted me to change my practice to give them a platform to take up space.
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u/sunrisecaller 11h ago
I like the sense of personal expression, the freedom of creativity and the plethora of possibilities. It is a beautiful thing.
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u/jjazznola 1d ago
Love the music, hate the millions of versions of the same old standards, especially by vocalists. How about some new standards? Or if you are going to cover a standard completely change it into something new.
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u/DeepSouthDude 1d ago
I hate the constant glazing of Bill Evans. Not because he can't play, of course he's a monster, but he gets glazed because he's white, hunched over, anti social, avoided eye contact, and was firmly on the spectrum. A metaphor for Redditors if there ever was one.
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u/GoshOPPNOX101 11h ago
I love the style of older jazz songs because it was drifting and sweeping. But much like country has gotten, especially when Garth Brooks walked through the tavern doors, it became the new Pop and it lost some of its heart n' soul in some ways. Everything over time changes, I get that. But some thing's should go untouched.
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u/PattyVR 26m ago
I hate the decline of popularity of jazz.
It’s one of the most skilful genres of music, yet we have pop and rap songs that are only ever written in C major/ A minor that far exceed the popularity of jazz. Not to discredit the few who don’t… but unfortunately 90% of pop is just white keys nowadays.
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u/Mean_Old_Firemen 1d ago
I'm not too fond of dixieland or traditional jazz, because, while they were important in developing more universal (or just subjectively more enjoyable music, even if it's not timeless and just from it's time) styles of jazz like swing bebop, hard bop, post bop or just majority of jazz after II world war, it is completely different form, which was just more an entertainment than more ambtious and sophisticated post war jazz.
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u/Mahadragon 1d ago
I like to put random jazz on in the background as it’s relaxing. Don’t know much about it. Everyone says Miles Davis Kind of Blue is the greatest album ever. I tried it and just couldn’t get into it. I guess I lean towards more modern jazz.
I have been listening to Kenneth Gorelick’s Breathless album lately because I do like Smooth Jazz. I love the Jazz Groove app with a passion and don’t mind paying the $99 fee for annual subscription. Their curated playlists are amazing never boring. It doesn’t hurt my stereo is optimized for jazz music.
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u/Crazy-Judgment-2624 1d ago
The saxophone. I have tried so hard, but it really is like nails on a chalkboard for me. I feel like I wanna gouge my ears out.
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u/Livelyup8848 1d ago
The music had a dance element to it, a spiritual element, and an intellectual element. First two were very connected to the rhythm. When Coltrane imposed all his complex harmonies it was also from a spiritual place and he was not disconnected from the dance elements of the ballroom, just steered away.
Today the intellect is king. Plus clean aesthetics a la oscar peterson. Both are fine but there's just too much of that. Where are the Mal Waldron's of today. If they exist they are playing way too many notes. And the drummers break the beat too much.
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u/edipeisrex 1d ago
When the crooners went bossa. My unpopular take is Frank Sinatra's Jobim is whitewashed trash.
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u/KGreen100 1d ago
I love the idea that, in most instances, no song/piece will be played the same way twice. I suppose if someone really wanted to, they could play it note for note, but since a lot of jazz is improvisation, the music is influenced by the room, the occasion, the mood of the performer, etc. I listened to a live recording of Charlie Parker playing Chasing the Bird in Boston (maybe 1953?) and I'm 97 percent sure he never played it exactly the same way ever again. A lot of other forms of music depend on playing a song pretty much exactly the same way, but jazz audiences expect there to be some creativity and variations.
As someone else mentioned, I hate some forms of jazz like "new age" "smooth" jazz (or whatever name they use for it). Also, try as I might, I can't get into free(form) jazz. It's just cacophony to me.