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Monthly Archives: December 2007

Musical threshold


There are only a couple of occasions every year where I overtly choose to tolerate bad music. One time is during solo car trips when radio-flipping passes the long and monotonous miles. The other is during the Grammy’s. I’m not convinced that you can really enjoy music in America without at least being mildly curious about the Grammy’s. Whether it truly remains the biggest night in music is certainly debatable; I find it a more celebratory occasion for CéU to sing while walking down the street. In her head.

But there is no denying a few things about the Grammy’s. The performances are (almost) always top notch, showcasing a variety of talent from a broad musical spectrum. It’s true that I don’t like a lot of it, regardless of talent (I don’t like some good stuff, and some of the stuff I like isn’t good), but I wouldn’t know that if I never listened to any of it. I have to give props even to certain songs/repertoires I cannot normally stand (Celine Dion and Barbara Streisand), from incredibly talented performers.

This of course is not quite the bad music I am referring to, where I would say that the likes of Nickelback and Green Day (and that poorly aging guy who won the American Idol show a few years ago – awful) are pretty awful to my ears. I believe that the term is best summarized by Michael Bolton (haha, how ironic) from Office Space.

Nevertheless, it’s part cultural experience and part genuine interest in sampling the spectrum randomly that keeps me tuned to pop music culture.

"Jazz"

Alright, I’ve probably said it before, and it really won’t be the last time, but I thought I should address the term “jazz.”

It’s a term for a musical tradition that is probably based on a blues scale, is marked by a syncopated rhythm among others (of which I am thinking of swing in a sense), incorporates improvisation, and is played by certain standard instruments (though notable exceptions certainly exist). There is an element of African polyrhythms, but like many other features of a particular period in jazz, this is not always strictly the case.

Aside from the political and social landscape of jazz and various jazz movements which are critically important to telling a proper story of its progression, these are some of the elements that mark the music. It is not in an attempt to be elitist that some things are excluded from this label, but in the spirit of using genres as categorization tools, they won’t be useful if we don’t adhere to something; it’s also true that too many such labels also easily lose their meaning — avant-garde jazz, free jazz, cool jazz, post-bop, pre-bop, hard bop (but no soft bop), etc.

What you hear on contemporary jazz radio isn’t jazz — it’s actually more suitably classified as R&B. It was an art form that has required jazz like instrumentation for a very long time, incorporating elements of soul, blues, and pop music. It’s often missing the traditional element of vocal song that most people associate with R&B (Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Shai, etc.), but if you listen to a contemporary Mindy Abair (gasp) record, you’re likely to hear something not dissimilar to what you’d hear on a Babyface album. While I’ve always known that “jazz” ain’t jazz, I didn’t really make the connection until listening to Every Time I Close My Eyes to realize that “jazz” is just R&B.

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