Showing posts with label Jazz on 3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jazz on 3. Show all posts

Monday 30 April 2012

What makes free jazz the equivalent now of punk rock in the 70s?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


May Day

Well, I often listen to all of Jazz on 3 (with the ever-present Jez Nelson), so it's not that I have a general aversion to contemporary jazz, but I am highly coloured by the experience of hearing Evan Parker, in a trio, play a small venue, when how the first set ended made me think, quite wrongly, that the second might not be so unrelenting, whereas I shouldn't have come back.

No, what I have in mind took an hour or so on the show very recently, with crass vocals - both the words and how they were delivered - and a deliberate emphasis on, whether or not people could do so (I have no way of knowing), not playing well.

There is no merit in naming the bands, but I suspect that, for the sake of good / bad publicity, some punk rockers hammed up their musical inexpertise, or did not trouble to develop any ability that they had. Some bands, as punk was never a uniform approach, achieved a raw effect by actually by putting basic rhythmic elements together with a rough-hewn melody, not peddling the others' feigned or lacking competence, but betraying a desire to create rebellious music that was worth hearing in its own right, rather than as a necessary element ina riotous sideshow. (Other bands were more musically sophisticated still, but consistent with fitting into the general picture of punk.)

This jazz that I heard on Jazz on 3, which I shall dub runk pock, was deliberately of the emperor's new clothes type, which free jazz can be at risk of seeming or being. However, although I know that I cannot play a saxophone as Parker does, I do also know when I hear what could be done by a few mates of mine and me with some musical instruments, mikes, recording-equipment, and, of course, beer: if I ever wanted to hear such a thing, I would just play the recording, and at least know that I was the one taking the piss.