To the extent that the ongoing genocide receives much attention in the press (which is generally not to any great extent), attention is often paid to how China's economic relationship with the Sudanese government limits the ability of the U.N. to engage in strong sanctioning activities against Sudan. China's position vis-a-vis Sudan is a crucial consideration that should not be understated.
Another factor less commonly reported is the U.S. government's conflicted relationship with Sudan, with the Bush administration one of the few around the world that has publicly decried the situation in Darfur and called it genocide (one of the only things I'll give the Bush adminstration credit for), but at the same time the administration sees the government in Khartoum as a critical ally in the War on Terror, largely for having expelled Osama bin Laden and cracked down on Islamic militants after the cruise missile attacks during the Clinton administration.
The Middle East Times has just posted a good overview of the situation: http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070616-055135-9519r
Here's one interesting section from the article:
"Marc Lavergne named intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh and Nafi Ali Nafi, one of President Omar Al Beshir's key advisers, as Khartoum's leading strategists on Darfur and who are also well-known in certain Washington circles.
'These people regularly visit Washington and they are in permanent contact with the US, which considers them their special partners,'said Lavergne.
Thomas-Jensen also underscored the fact that Ghosh was flown into the US by private CIA jet for a week-long series of meetings in 2005 with US officials, causing much controversy within the Bush administration.
'By agreeing to divulge everything it has about Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Palestinians, Algerian Islamists, and a bunch of other troublemakers in the world, the Sudanese government is providing an enormous service to the US government and is irreplaceable,' said Lavergne.
To placate its critics, Sudan has suggested that Darfur rebels are of the same ilk as Al Qaeda and is seeking to maximize the benefits from its decision to expel Bin Laden and align itself with Washington."
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Friday, June 15, 2007
Birds and Human Culture
I just encountered a news article titled "Populations of 20 Common Birds Declining."
Here's the link to the article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070615/ap_on_sc/bird_declines;_ylt=Ak4_Jo3UQ3p_LV8enwJjoWwPLBIF
As an avid bird watcher, stories such as this are seriously depressing to me.
It might seem unusual for me to be talking about birds on this blog where I normally discuss topics related in some way to human culture, except that it is human cultural processes that are largely responsible for the decline of the North American bird populations mentioned in the article.
There is no single way in which humans affect animal populations such as these. Birds with specialist ecological strategies have been especially affected as their habitats have been fragmented by suburbanization and sprawl. Climate change, largely human induced, seems to be partly to blame for some species' declines. Globalization is involved as well, with the introduction of new invasive species that have outcompeted some native bird species, and in recent years with the introduction of the West Nile virus, which has devastated many North American bird populations. (The article doesn't discuss it, but corvids, such as crows and blue jays, have been especially hard hit by West Nile virus.)
There is some good news as well, though there are patterns to the good news. Some birds have done well because of changes in human cultural practices. Many species that had been particularly affected by past uses of the pesticide DDT have made dramatic recoveries since DDT was banned for use in North America (the article mentions the double-crested cormorant, but the U.S.'s national symbol, the Bald Eagle, is another example). Changes in farming practice over the past century have also benefitted some birds. Over the past century, farming has become more industrialized and concentrated. One result is that alongside larger energy inputs to farming and greater total crop yields, less total land is devoted to farming in North America than 50 years or a century ago, and there is more total forest land (even though much of it is fragmented by roads and sprawl). Some birds have been able to benefit from this, with the recovery of wild turkey populations over the past half century being perhaps the most dramatic example. Finally, birds with generalist ecological strategies have tended to do quite well and even increase in numbers. Suburbanization and sprawl has simply presented one new type of ecosystem for them.
Here's the link to the article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070615/ap_on_sc/bird_declines;_ylt=Ak4_Jo3UQ3p_LV8enwJjoWwPLBIF
As an avid bird watcher, stories such as this are seriously depressing to me.
It might seem unusual for me to be talking about birds on this blog where I normally discuss topics related in some way to human culture, except that it is human cultural processes that are largely responsible for the decline of the North American bird populations mentioned in the article.
There is no single way in which humans affect animal populations such as these. Birds with specialist ecological strategies have been especially affected as their habitats have been fragmented by suburbanization and sprawl. Climate change, largely human induced, seems to be partly to blame for some species' declines. Globalization is involved as well, with the introduction of new invasive species that have outcompeted some native bird species, and in recent years with the introduction of the West Nile virus, which has devastated many North American bird populations. (The article doesn't discuss it, but corvids, such as crows and blue jays, have been especially hard hit by West Nile virus.)
There is some good news as well, though there are patterns to the good news. Some birds have done well because of changes in human cultural practices. Many species that had been particularly affected by past uses of the pesticide DDT have made dramatic recoveries since DDT was banned for use in North America (the article mentions the double-crested cormorant, but the U.S.'s national symbol, the Bald Eagle, is another example). Changes in farming practice over the past century have also benefitted some birds. Over the past century, farming has become more industrialized and concentrated. One result is that alongside larger energy inputs to farming and greater total crop yields, less total land is devoted to farming in North America than 50 years or a century ago, and there is more total forest land (even though much of it is fragmented by roads and sprawl). Some birds have been able to benefit from this, with the recovery of wild turkey populations over the past half century being perhaps the most dramatic example. Finally, birds with generalist ecological strategies have tended to do quite well and even increase in numbers. Suburbanization and sprawl has simply presented one new type of ecosystem for them.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Generation Gaps, Popular Music, and Affluence
In my previous two posts ("Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop" and "Miles Davis' Ferrari, or Popularity and Art") I argued that one of the important factors in the waning popularity of jazz, especially big band swing, beginning in the mid-1940s was a generation gap. The popularity of swing had been related to its role as dance music, appealing to and depending upon a young audience’s attendance at dance halls. Swing had been the popular dance music of the 1930s and early 1940s, but by the mid-1940s, the music was associated with those who had been young and sounded out of date to the youth of the time, and it began to give way to new forms of dance music.
(I’m not suggesting this was the only factor. Big bands were expensive to maintain, being comprised by definition of many musicians. They required large attendance at dance halls to be maintained. When the oil and automobile industries began buying up and dismantling many of the private trolley companies in a variety of American cities in the mid- to late 1940s, one effect was to make it harder for youth to attend dance halls in the same numbers – favoring smaller ensembles that were more cheaply maintained.)
Swing waned in favor of the new rhythm and blues music, which in turn gave way to rock and roll in the 1950s. The name “rock and roll” might have stuck around, but styles waxed and waned, with the intense popularity among 1950s youth of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and even Elvis giving way to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and James Brown (just to name three intensely popular acts associated with somewhat different varieties of 1960s popular music).
But then something different happened. Most popular acts of the 1960s saw their popularity wane and disappear eventually as with previous acts, but the most popular acts of the 1960s never lost their audiences. The youth of the 1960s continued to enjoy popular music beyond their youth as most individuals of previous generations had not (i.e. popular music became seen as something more than a frivolity for kids to listen to). Further, over time acts like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or James Brown became dissociated from a specific generational cohort in the sense that later generations of youth have continued to discover and maintain the popularity of such acts to a much greater extent than with previous popular music.
There is a similar but distinct phenomenon in visual popular culture. Certain films, images, and styles (from the 1950s on) have become stylized as tropes of “youth” and/or “rebellion” – the images of Rebel without a Cause or The Wild One, Che Guevara tee-shirts, Mohawk haircuts or dyed hair, the “Goth” look, piercings, etc. These are modularized visual tropes that any youth can use to make a visual statement about their individuality that will be understood by nearly everyone precisely because modular and not individual. They are also tropes typically picked up and later mostly dropped.
This is different from what has happened with popular music since the 1960s, when popular music is associated with youth, but as a sort of sign and symptom of youth that isn’t dropped and isn’t expected to be. Further, popular music styles have continued to change, as in earlier decades, but each style adds to a repertoire rather than replacing the previous popular style. 1960s popular music co-exists with 1970s “classic rock” (which as far as I can tell never experienced a dip in popularity – with many acts getting as much or more radio play as during the 1970s) with 1980s New Wave (and many contemporary “alternative” bands sounding virtually identical to New Wave bands).
What made the popular music of the 1960s and later different from what came before? Better, what made youth, at least in the industrialized world, different beginning in the 1960s?
Much has been written of the “Baby Boomers” who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as the “Me” generation. In the May 26, 2007 issue of The Economist (p. 33), the anonymous columnist “Lexington” presents an interesting perspective on the issue in a discussion of Brink Lindsey’s book The Age of Abundance. Lexington writes:
“The industrial revolution in America was driven by a bourgeois Protestant ethic that celebrated work and frowned on self-indulgence. Those who invested their pay earned respect as well as compound interest; those who wasted it on whiskey and cards forwent both. But over the years, thrift combined with technology and capitalism produced such vast returns that thrift went out of fashion. The 1960s saw the coming-of-age of the first generation whose members had never known scarcity, and therefore did not fear it. Spurning their parents’ self-restraint, the baby-boomers rebelled against every form of authority and sampled every form of fun.”
This is a highly partial account to be sure. Before the mid-20th century, many who did their best to be thrifty earned neither respect nor compound interest, and many coming of age in the 1960s were well aware of scarcity. What Lindsey and Lexington are speaking of, then, is a largely middle-class phenomenon, but nonetheless real and important for that. What Post-War affluence led to for the middle-classes at least was not the elimination of the distinction between work and play, but a change in the relationship. Play was no longer a temporal stage, something that one mainly engaged in as a child before transitioning into adulthood and work and responsibility. Instead, one could thoroughly engage in play while being and becoming an adult. With the distinctions between work and play or between responsibility and play no longer tied to temporal stages of life, the line between youth and adulthood was blurred as well, leading to the marketing of continual youth (and the marketing of elements of popular culture associated with “youth” to youths born decades after the fact because of the dissociation of the tropes of “youth” from the particular sets of youth originally associated with them.)
(I’m not suggesting this was the only factor. Big bands were expensive to maintain, being comprised by definition of many musicians. They required large attendance at dance halls to be maintained. When the oil and automobile industries began buying up and dismantling many of the private trolley companies in a variety of American cities in the mid- to late 1940s, one effect was to make it harder for youth to attend dance halls in the same numbers – favoring smaller ensembles that were more cheaply maintained.)
Swing waned in favor of the new rhythm and blues music, which in turn gave way to rock and roll in the 1950s. The name “rock and roll” might have stuck around, but styles waxed and waned, with the intense popularity among 1950s youth of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and even Elvis giving way to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and James Brown (just to name three intensely popular acts associated with somewhat different varieties of 1960s popular music).
But then something different happened. Most popular acts of the 1960s saw their popularity wane and disappear eventually as with previous acts, but the most popular acts of the 1960s never lost their audiences. The youth of the 1960s continued to enjoy popular music beyond their youth as most individuals of previous generations had not (i.e. popular music became seen as something more than a frivolity for kids to listen to). Further, over time acts like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or James Brown became dissociated from a specific generational cohort in the sense that later generations of youth have continued to discover and maintain the popularity of such acts to a much greater extent than with previous popular music.
There is a similar but distinct phenomenon in visual popular culture. Certain films, images, and styles (from the 1950s on) have become stylized as tropes of “youth” and/or “rebellion” – the images of Rebel without a Cause or The Wild One, Che Guevara tee-shirts, Mohawk haircuts or dyed hair, the “Goth” look, piercings, etc. These are modularized visual tropes that any youth can use to make a visual statement about their individuality that will be understood by nearly everyone precisely because modular and not individual. They are also tropes typically picked up and later mostly dropped.
This is different from what has happened with popular music since the 1960s, when popular music is associated with youth, but as a sort of sign and symptom of youth that isn’t dropped and isn’t expected to be. Further, popular music styles have continued to change, as in earlier decades, but each style adds to a repertoire rather than replacing the previous popular style. 1960s popular music co-exists with 1970s “classic rock” (which as far as I can tell never experienced a dip in popularity – with many acts getting as much or more radio play as during the 1970s) with 1980s New Wave (and many contemporary “alternative” bands sounding virtually identical to New Wave bands).
What made the popular music of the 1960s and later different from what came before? Better, what made youth, at least in the industrialized world, different beginning in the 1960s?
Much has been written of the “Baby Boomers” who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as the “Me” generation. In the May 26, 2007 issue of The Economist (p. 33), the anonymous columnist “Lexington” presents an interesting perspective on the issue in a discussion of Brink Lindsey’s book The Age of Abundance. Lexington writes:
“The industrial revolution in America was driven by a bourgeois Protestant ethic that celebrated work and frowned on self-indulgence. Those who invested their pay earned respect as well as compound interest; those who wasted it on whiskey and cards forwent both. But over the years, thrift combined with technology and capitalism produced such vast returns that thrift went out of fashion. The 1960s saw the coming-of-age of the first generation whose members had never known scarcity, and therefore did not fear it. Spurning their parents’ self-restraint, the baby-boomers rebelled against every form of authority and sampled every form of fun.”
This is a highly partial account to be sure. Before the mid-20th century, many who did their best to be thrifty earned neither respect nor compound interest, and many coming of age in the 1960s were well aware of scarcity. What Lindsey and Lexington are speaking of, then, is a largely middle-class phenomenon, but nonetheless real and important for that. What Post-War affluence led to for the middle-classes at least was not the elimination of the distinction between work and play, but a change in the relationship. Play was no longer a temporal stage, something that one mainly engaged in as a child before transitioning into adulthood and work and responsibility. Instead, one could thoroughly engage in play while being and becoming an adult. With the distinctions between work and play or between responsibility and play no longer tied to temporal stages of life, the line between youth and adulthood was blurred as well, leading to the marketing of continual youth (and the marketing of elements of popular culture associated with “youth” to youths born decades after the fact because of the dissociation of the tropes of “youth” from the particular sets of youth originally associated with them.)
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Miles Davis' Ferrari, or Popularity and Art
As I discussed in my previous post, “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop,” Clive James laments in his recent book Cultural Amnesia that bebop led to a growing seriousness in jazz that led to the erosion of jazz’s popularity – a trend continued with those musicians who followed in the 1950s and 1960s. (I also discuss in that post what I find wrong with this formulation, both with regard to the supposed “seriousness” of bebop and the causal role of bebop in a decline in jazz’s popularity.)
In a similar vein, during the course of the 10th and final episode of Ken Burns’ documentary Jazz, as a variety of commentators discuss (mainly what they see as wrong with) jazz in the late 1960s and 1970s (with several interviewees especially attacking Miles Davis’ electric music and the music of Cecil Taylor – see my earlier post, “Vitriol and Jazz”), Wynton Marsalis claims that jazz just went away for a little while (until its reemergence in the 1980s, led by none other than Marsalis).
James and Marsalis are addressing different periods and different particular musicians. I suspect the two would strongly disagree on details. Where James is ambivalent about Charlie Parker and clearly doesn’t at all like the music of John Coltrane or Miles Davis in any period, Marsalis has no problems with Parker or Coltrane (e.g. the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s recording of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme under Marsalis’ direction – a recording I’m fond of, by the way – if I had to choose, I’d go with Coltrane’s original, but there’s no reason to choose) or much of Davis’ music.
Still, the form of their arguments is similar. Certain musicians (Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the other beboppers or post-1969 Davis and the other producers of fusion jazz) began to make music that was too serious or too difficult or otherwise too different from the jazz tradition. The result was that the jazz audience significantly shrank or disappeared.
As I discussed in my earlier post, “Vitriol and Jazz,” my reaction to those who continue to bash fusion jazz or free jazz thirty or forty years after the fact is to get over it – if you don’t like Davis or Coltrane or Taylor or Ornette Colemen or Anthony Braxton or whoever, just don’t listen. James’ and Marsalis’ argument here, though, is a little different (and my reaction is a little different). For anyone who feels personally betrayed by the directions a musician takes – get over yourself, and maybe seek counseling. The argument of James and Marsalis is more that the beboppers or the fusion jazz players killed jazz by killing its audience.
My reaction to this is twofold: 1. That’s not true; and 2. So What?
1. There’s no doubt that the overall popularity of jazz began to wane over the course of the 1940s, but as I discussed in “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop,” this decline in audience is correlated with rather than caused by bebop. For that matter, bebop wasn’t really swing’s main competitor (and so can’t really be blamed for its demise) – as James points out, bebop wasn’t dance music. It was largely art music (even if art music that was entertaining and had a sense of humor), where swing (even when practitioners like Duke Ellington had great concern for artistry) was largely dance music at the time. Instead, the loss of audience was to new forms of dance music – rhythm and blues and other forms of music that would form part of the roots of rock and roll, musical forms associated with the youth of the time, in contrast with swing which had been identified with youth but now more with those who had been young.
Further, a number of “difficult” or “serious” jazz albums over the following decades sold quite well. (That is, bebop and its successors didn’t have the audience that swing might have had in the 1930s and early 1940s, but “serious” jazz maintained a strong audience over a period of several decades.) James includes an amusing quotation attributed to Miles Davis in his essay on Davis. Davis said, “If I don’t like what they write, I get into my Ferrari and I drive away.” If he were alive today, I suspect that’s about how he’d react to arguments that his music was at all too difficult for audiences or that his music drove fans away from jazz. A number of albums by “difficult” artists have sold quite well: Davis’ Bitches Brew and Coltrane’s A Love Supreme are among the top selling jazz albums of all time. (I’ve read a variety of writers claim that one or the other is the top selling jazz album of all time, but I’ve also seen that claim made for a number of other records – the only thing that’s completely clear, given a lack of highly accurate sales records for jazz recordings, is that these albums and artists had and have a tremendous audience.)
Did jazz just go away for a little while in the 1970s? Hardly. Weather Report constantly toured and played to large, packed arenas, i.e. they had an audience comparable to that of major rock bands of the time. Other fusion groups, like Davis’ bands, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, Chick Corea and Return to Forever, also had large audiences.
I think that Marsalis is engaging in a bit of sleight of hand. I get the distinct impression that for him, fusion was not jazz. If you count it out, then jazz went away for a little while. (I don’t even think that’s accurate, as a number of “straightahead” jazz artists did well during the decade also.) This seems like sophistry to me, and the effect of defining jazz in narrow ways, and excluding anything that strays too far, is to limit the recognition of a variety of contemporary artists who are making interesting and exciting music.
2. Though neither explicitly says so, the thrust of the arguments put forth by James or Marsalis implies that size of audience and degree of popularity are a marker of artistic worth.
Certainly a musician has to be somewhat concerned with audience, at least any musician making a living from their music. But popularity and the aesthetic quality (both in the sense of the objective qualities of a work and its aesthetic worth) are separate issues. Likewise, obscurity is no mark of high or low aesthetic value in itself.
My main point in mentioning that albums like Bitches Brew or A Love Supreme are among the highest selling jazz albums of all time was simply to counter claims that the music of people like the beboppers or Davis or Coltrane led inevitably to a loss of popularity. However, high record sales don’t make these good recordings; nor, if they had sold poorly would they have been bad music on that count.
The high popularity of these recordings and of fusion jazz in the early 1970s is of anthropological or sociological interest as a cultural phenomenon. In terms of artistic merit, though, the recordings exist objectively as aesthetic objects independent of their high or low popularity.
In a similar vein, during the course of the 10th and final episode of Ken Burns’ documentary Jazz, as a variety of commentators discuss (mainly what they see as wrong with) jazz in the late 1960s and 1970s (with several interviewees especially attacking Miles Davis’ electric music and the music of Cecil Taylor – see my earlier post, “Vitriol and Jazz”), Wynton Marsalis claims that jazz just went away for a little while (until its reemergence in the 1980s, led by none other than Marsalis).
James and Marsalis are addressing different periods and different particular musicians. I suspect the two would strongly disagree on details. Where James is ambivalent about Charlie Parker and clearly doesn’t at all like the music of John Coltrane or Miles Davis in any period, Marsalis has no problems with Parker or Coltrane (e.g. the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s recording of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme under Marsalis’ direction – a recording I’m fond of, by the way – if I had to choose, I’d go with Coltrane’s original, but there’s no reason to choose) or much of Davis’ music.
Still, the form of their arguments is similar. Certain musicians (Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the other beboppers or post-1969 Davis and the other producers of fusion jazz) began to make music that was too serious or too difficult or otherwise too different from the jazz tradition. The result was that the jazz audience significantly shrank or disappeared.
As I discussed in my earlier post, “Vitriol and Jazz,” my reaction to those who continue to bash fusion jazz or free jazz thirty or forty years after the fact is to get over it – if you don’t like Davis or Coltrane or Taylor or Ornette Colemen or Anthony Braxton or whoever, just don’t listen. James’ and Marsalis’ argument here, though, is a little different (and my reaction is a little different). For anyone who feels personally betrayed by the directions a musician takes – get over yourself, and maybe seek counseling. The argument of James and Marsalis is more that the beboppers or the fusion jazz players killed jazz by killing its audience.
My reaction to this is twofold: 1. That’s not true; and 2. So What?
1. There’s no doubt that the overall popularity of jazz began to wane over the course of the 1940s, but as I discussed in “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop,” this decline in audience is correlated with rather than caused by bebop. For that matter, bebop wasn’t really swing’s main competitor (and so can’t really be blamed for its demise) – as James points out, bebop wasn’t dance music. It was largely art music (even if art music that was entertaining and had a sense of humor), where swing (even when practitioners like Duke Ellington had great concern for artistry) was largely dance music at the time. Instead, the loss of audience was to new forms of dance music – rhythm and blues and other forms of music that would form part of the roots of rock and roll, musical forms associated with the youth of the time, in contrast with swing which had been identified with youth but now more with those who had been young.
Further, a number of “difficult” or “serious” jazz albums over the following decades sold quite well. (That is, bebop and its successors didn’t have the audience that swing might have had in the 1930s and early 1940s, but “serious” jazz maintained a strong audience over a period of several decades.) James includes an amusing quotation attributed to Miles Davis in his essay on Davis. Davis said, “If I don’t like what they write, I get into my Ferrari and I drive away.” If he were alive today, I suspect that’s about how he’d react to arguments that his music was at all too difficult for audiences or that his music drove fans away from jazz. A number of albums by “difficult” artists have sold quite well: Davis’ Bitches Brew and Coltrane’s A Love Supreme are among the top selling jazz albums of all time. (I’ve read a variety of writers claim that one or the other is the top selling jazz album of all time, but I’ve also seen that claim made for a number of other records – the only thing that’s completely clear, given a lack of highly accurate sales records for jazz recordings, is that these albums and artists had and have a tremendous audience.)
Did jazz just go away for a little while in the 1970s? Hardly. Weather Report constantly toured and played to large, packed arenas, i.e. they had an audience comparable to that of major rock bands of the time. Other fusion groups, like Davis’ bands, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, Chick Corea and Return to Forever, also had large audiences.
I think that Marsalis is engaging in a bit of sleight of hand. I get the distinct impression that for him, fusion was not jazz. If you count it out, then jazz went away for a little while. (I don’t even think that’s accurate, as a number of “straightahead” jazz artists did well during the decade also.) This seems like sophistry to me, and the effect of defining jazz in narrow ways, and excluding anything that strays too far, is to limit the recognition of a variety of contemporary artists who are making interesting and exciting music.
2. Though neither explicitly says so, the thrust of the arguments put forth by James or Marsalis implies that size of audience and degree of popularity are a marker of artistic worth.
Certainly a musician has to be somewhat concerned with audience, at least any musician making a living from their music. But popularity and the aesthetic quality (both in the sense of the objective qualities of a work and its aesthetic worth) are separate issues. Likewise, obscurity is no mark of high or low aesthetic value in itself.
My main point in mentioning that albums like Bitches Brew or A Love Supreme are among the highest selling jazz albums of all time was simply to counter claims that the music of people like the beboppers or Davis or Coltrane led inevitably to a loss of popularity. However, high record sales don’t make these good recordings; nor, if they had sold poorly would they have been bad music on that count.
The high popularity of these recordings and of fusion jazz in the early 1970s is of anthropological or sociological interest as a cultural phenomenon. In terms of artistic merit, though, the recordings exist objectively as aesthetic objects independent of their high or low popularity.
Democracy and Capitalism
Patricia Cohen has an interesting essay on democracy and capitalism published by the International Herald Tribune.
Here's the link: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/13/news/letter.php?page=1
Here's the link: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/13/news/letter.php?page=1
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Humans as Predators
Science Daily has posted an interesting article: "The Fisherman is a Predator like any Other."
The article reports on a recent study of commercial fishers off the coast of Peru, specifically studying their movements over the sea in search of their prey (in this case anchovies) over a period of a few years. The researchers compared the search strategies of the human fishers with those of non-human predators searching for prey (the article specifically mentions albatrosses and seals) and found that the search strategies employed by all the predators, humans included, paralleled one another.
The article reports on a recent study of commercial fishers off the coast of Peru, specifically studying their movements over the sea in search of their prey (in this case anchovies) over a period of a few years. The researchers compared the search strategies of the human fishers with those of non-human predators searching for prey (the article specifically mentions albatrosses and seals) and found that the search strategies employed by all the predators, humans included, paralleled one another.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop
In my previous post ("Vitriol and Jazz"), I addressed among other things what I see as inaccurate characterizations of bebop and later jazz in Clive James’ recent book Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts.
At the same time, James does have some interesting arguments about the motivations behind the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other bebop musicians during the 1940s.
James rightly points out that these musicians were concerned with producing music that could be taken seriously as art. Also, given the realities of race in America at the time, and given the perception at the time and now of jazz as “black music,” they were also concerned to produce a legitimate black art. James sees all of this as important, good, and laudable.
James deals adeptly with something that requires a certain sensitivity and care. On the one hand, jazz is black music in the sense that historically the vast majority of prominent jazz musicians have been black, and the individuals who most profoundly shaped and transformed the music have been almost exclusively black. My own highly partial (in both senses of the word) list would include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman. There have been prominent and important white jazzmen (and it has been mostly men’s music) – Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and Jaco Pastorius just to get started – but the names on the second list don’t carry quite the same historic weight as those on the first. On the other hand, jazz has no color. After all, it’s comprised of sound. As James points out, Armstrong recognized Beiderbecke not as a good white trumpet player, but simply as a good trumpet player. There’s nothing inherently racial about the music itself – and to go that route leads to a reduction of art to racial essentialism and stereotype.
So, jazz has been simultaneously black music in a sociological or historical sense and without essential or inherent basis in race in an ontological sense. It’s easy to over- or under-emphasize either point.
To get back to an earlier point, James rightly points out that among the concerns of Parker, Gillespie, et al. was to produce music that was art and music that was black art. James is ambivalent about the results. He sees the price of legitimacy as art being a seriousness to the music, with a loss of joy and spontaneity.
I have two reactions to this. The first was a major topic of my previous post. I don’t think this accurately characterizes bebop. While Parker, Gillespie, and others were clearly serious about making music, this doesn’t mean they did so without a sense of humor and that their music is all work and no play. Again, song titles like “Scrapple from the Apple” or “Disorder at the Border” should tip us off, and if that’s not enough, listen to the music. As I’ve written about before (see "Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz" and "The End of the History of Music"), one of the qualities of bebop, especially embodied in a soloist the caliber of Parker, is that the individual soloist, by improvising using the notes of the chord changes rather than embellishing and varying a more structured melody, is even more freed in improvisation than in previous forms of jazz – and joy and spontaneity were a big part of this in the hands of Gillespie and Parker.
Second, while the characterization of the beboppers as concerned to produced art is accurate, it does beg the question why jazz musicians would suddenly be concerned with producing art. The unstated implication is that Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington weren’t trying to make art – they were just making entertaining dance music. Well, they were concerned with making entertaining dance music, but they were also concerned with artistry – and it’s for their superior artistry that they’re important in the history of jazz and art. (Just think how many swing band leaders made entertaining dance music that is barely remembered if at all now.) Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were interested in making art, but they were also interested in making entertaining music (albeit not so much dance music). There are clear and important differences in the music of Armstrong and Ellington and the beboppers, but their motivations as artists and entertainers doesn’t seem so distinct to me.
Which brings us to another point James argues. James sees bebop as the beginning of the erosion of the popularity of jazz – again because they became such serious artists. However, if earlier musicians were also seriously interested in artistry (and I think it’s clear they were), and if the beboppers weren’t actually so stern and serious (and they clearly weren’t), then this starts to seem not so convincing.
I’d say that James is here confusing correlation and causation. The bebop period of the mid-1940s into the 1950s is associated with a period of waning popularity for jazz (even though it remained a fairly popular genre).
Part of the wane in popularity may have stemmed from the new sound and “difficulty” of bebop (I've written before about the topic of "difficulty," though with regard to ethnographic writing. See "Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing." In that post, I was largely drawing upon "Defining Difficulty in Poetry" on "Reginald Shepherd's Blog."). Certainly more difficult music will tend to appeal less broadly. The music of Harry Partch or Karlheinz Stockhausen will probably never have a very large audience. During the 1960s, the more accessible music of Cannonball Adderley had a much larger audience than that of the more difficult Cecil Taylor.
But there are other, more important, causes for the ultimate decline in jazz’s popularity. Swing jazz had been the music of youth throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. By the mid-1940s, swing was identified by youth as the music of the previous generation. It was no longer hip and young and was giving way to newer genres, such as rhythm and blues, and ultimately rock and roll.
At the same time, James does have some interesting arguments about the motivations behind the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other bebop musicians during the 1940s.
James rightly points out that these musicians were concerned with producing music that could be taken seriously as art. Also, given the realities of race in America at the time, and given the perception at the time and now of jazz as “black music,” they were also concerned to produce a legitimate black art. James sees all of this as important, good, and laudable.
James deals adeptly with something that requires a certain sensitivity and care. On the one hand, jazz is black music in the sense that historically the vast majority of prominent jazz musicians have been black, and the individuals who most profoundly shaped and transformed the music have been almost exclusively black. My own highly partial (in both senses of the word) list would include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman. There have been prominent and important white jazzmen (and it has been mostly men’s music) – Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and Jaco Pastorius just to get started – but the names on the second list don’t carry quite the same historic weight as those on the first. On the other hand, jazz has no color. After all, it’s comprised of sound. As James points out, Armstrong recognized Beiderbecke not as a good white trumpet player, but simply as a good trumpet player. There’s nothing inherently racial about the music itself – and to go that route leads to a reduction of art to racial essentialism and stereotype.
So, jazz has been simultaneously black music in a sociological or historical sense and without essential or inherent basis in race in an ontological sense. It’s easy to over- or under-emphasize either point.
To get back to an earlier point, James rightly points out that among the concerns of Parker, Gillespie, et al. was to produce music that was art and music that was black art. James is ambivalent about the results. He sees the price of legitimacy as art being a seriousness to the music, with a loss of joy and spontaneity.
I have two reactions to this. The first was a major topic of my previous post. I don’t think this accurately characterizes bebop. While Parker, Gillespie, and others were clearly serious about making music, this doesn’t mean they did so without a sense of humor and that their music is all work and no play. Again, song titles like “Scrapple from the Apple” or “Disorder at the Border” should tip us off, and if that’s not enough, listen to the music. As I’ve written about before (see "Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz" and "The End of the History of Music"), one of the qualities of bebop, especially embodied in a soloist the caliber of Parker, is that the individual soloist, by improvising using the notes of the chord changes rather than embellishing and varying a more structured melody, is even more freed in improvisation than in previous forms of jazz – and joy and spontaneity were a big part of this in the hands of Gillespie and Parker.
Second, while the characterization of the beboppers as concerned to produced art is accurate, it does beg the question why jazz musicians would suddenly be concerned with producing art. The unstated implication is that Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington weren’t trying to make art – they were just making entertaining dance music. Well, they were concerned with making entertaining dance music, but they were also concerned with artistry – and it’s for their superior artistry that they’re important in the history of jazz and art. (Just think how many swing band leaders made entertaining dance music that is barely remembered if at all now.) Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were interested in making art, but they were also interested in making entertaining music (albeit not so much dance music). There are clear and important differences in the music of Armstrong and Ellington and the beboppers, but their motivations as artists and entertainers doesn’t seem so distinct to me.
Which brings us to another point James argues. James sees bebop as the beginning of the erosion of the popularity of jazz – again because they became such serious artists. However, if earlier musicians were also seriously interested in artistry (and I think it’s clear they were), and if the beboppers weren’t actually so stern and serious (and they clearly weren’t), then this starts to seem not so convincing.
I’d say that James is here confusing correlation and causation. The bebop period of the mid-1940s into the 1950s is associated with a period of waning popularity for jazz (even though it remained a fairly popular genre).
Part of the wane in popularity may have stemmed from the new sound and “difficulty” of bebop (I've written before about the topic of "difficulty," though with regard to ethnographic writing. See "Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing." In that post, I was largely drawing upon "Defining Difficulty in Poetry" on "Reginald Shepherd's Blog."). Certainly more difficult music will tend to appeal less broadly. The music of Harry Partch or Karlheinz Stockhausen will probably never have a very large audience. During the 1960s, the more accessible music of Cannonball Adderley had a much larger audience than that of the more difficult Cecil Taylor.
But there are other, more important, causes for the ultimate decline in jazz’s popularity. Swing jazz had been the music of youth throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. By the mid-1940s, swing was identified by youth as the music of the previous generation. It was no longer hip and young and was giving way to newer genres, such as rhythm and blues, and ultimately rock and roll.
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