I just returned from the Festival da Jazz, the three-week Jazz Festival in St. Moritz, where I attended 4 concerts, all in the Dracula Club. The thing about the Dracula Club is that it’s way too small for the number of people they let in (I don’t know how they get away with it), which has the disadvantage that you barely have room to stand or sit, but the advantage that you stand right next to the band; there is no stage, it’s just a room. During Arturo Sandoval’s concert I leaned against the piano, and during Fred Wesley & the New JBs I stood right next to the drums. Charlton Singleton from Ranky Tanky, the first concert I attended, said that the atmosphere in the club reminded them of the early days when they used to perform in their friends’ living rooms. The fourth concert I saw was China Moses. In addition, Theo Croker appeared with both China Moses and Arturo Sandoval as a special guest.
China Moses and Theo Croker performed “Jazz is Dead” from his recent album. China introduced the song with an explanation about how they disliked the term “Jazz” and how she does not consider herself a jazz singer, but rather a pop singer, or still better, simply a singer, songwriter and record producer. Of course, the rejection of the term “Jazz” by many “Jazz musicians,” particularly African Americans, is not a new issue. The term “Jazz” was coined not by the musicians who invented “Jazz* but by white Americans, and as noted by Lewis Porter (2018), its earliest printed uses are in California baseball writing, where it meant “lively, energetic.” It was first applied to music around 1915 in Chicago.
While the controversy over the term “jazz” is tangled with the history of racial discrimination against African Americans, many musicians’ refusal to be labelled by a specific music genre is a much more general phenomenon. Arturao Sandoval, during his concert earlier the same evening, protested the labelling of his music as “Latin jazz.” “Latin,” he complained, was a language spoken in ancient Rome and had nothing to do with the music he plays. If anything at all, musicians playing his kind of music would refer to it as “Afro-Cuban Jazz,” but more generally it would simply be dance music.
The theme runs through almost all genres, even those dominated by white men: Most heavy metal bands don’t consider themselves to be heavy metal bands (see O’Neill 2018). Last year, Justin Bieber complained that his album “Changes” was nominated in the category Pop Music and not R&B, whereas in 2020, Tyler, the Creator, criticised the Recording Academy for putting him in the Rap category and not the pop category. In the age of music streaming, classification of music genres is done be artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, which may lead to more objective labelling, but doesn’t solve the basic issue.
It is the music industry and the paying customers who want categorisation. The latter want to know what they can expect for their money, the former want to market the records to the targeted audience. That the expectations created by the label limit the musicians in their creativity and development is understandable. A vivid example of this is the reaction Bob Dylan caused when he performed at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965 for the first time with a band and electric instruments. Many of his fans didn’t consider this to be folk music and booed him.
Fred Wesley and his JB’s didn’t seem to care much about how their music is labelled, at least not on this night, and just laid down some solid funk. Same here, whether Jazz is dead or not, live music is what counts. In the last four weeks alone, I’ve been to concerts by Nina Attal, Alice Cooper, Whitesnake (with Tanya O’Callaghan on bass!), Grupo Dar Vida, Gov’t Mule, and this weekend Ranky Tanky, Fred Wesely & the New JB’s, Arturo Sandoval and China Moses. The month before I saw Beethoven’s Missa Solemnise performed by the Zurich Symphony and the Glarisegger Choir. Admittedly, jazz and especially the classical audiences give the impression that they listen to dead music because they have forgotten (or never learned) that music should not be experienced only intellectually. As Pete Townshend of the Who put it: “Rock ‘n’ Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” Long live the music!
References:
- O’Neill, Andrew. 2018. A History of Heavy Metal.
- Porter, Lewis. 2018. Where Did ‘Jazz,’ the Word, Come From? https://www.wbgo.org/music/2018-02-26/where-did-jazz-the-word-come-from-follow-a-trail-of-clues-in-deep-dive-with-lewis-porter