Artistry vs craftsmanship, the arrow of time and why jazz in its current incarnation is irrelevant

I've been doing some heavy sledding lately in terms of thinking about defining one's terms in relation to a lot of artistic ideas (and I suppose probably shouldn't because it only gets me in trouble), but... I do feel compelled. And I do because it's sort of an important/a big deal to have worked out what you're all about and why you're doing what you're doing and I'm finding that a lot of things that I've held to are simply... morphing into other things and aren't what they used to be.

What am I talking about? Well, to get there, let's start with the best definition we can come up with for somebody who is an artist in the musical sense. To be that, you need to create your own music and usually, although not always, be able to perform it. The key element is that you create, but even then, I'd go a step further; there's the matter of what you create, of course, but also whether it touches the public... at all. Is it all about popularity? Hardly! I wouldn't define the obvious sellout and panderer as an artist, but... there is a need to have some effect on the culture in which the artist finds one's self or... they're rendered fairly irrelevant.

Let's compare that with craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is the skill that people have - the level of their technique - that allows them to realize things... that already exist! You can admire the craftsmanship involved in the making of a Tiffany lamp, while recognizing that the person making the lamp... didn't invent the lamp, or even the style of the lamp (Tiffany did!).

Now, it would be great if our definitions held firm and fast because it makes any conversation easier to have, but when you try to apply definitions to the arts it can be fraught territory to be sure. For one thing, artistic pursuits, by their very nature, are an area of intense subjectivity - the very idea of trying to split hairs in an area so personal and necessarily idiosyncratic can become a fool's errand and yet we need some common ideas about what we're discussing to even do so at all coherently. Thus I made those definitions above just to sort of plant a flag so that you understood this key differentiator in my thinking. It's a starting point.

Keeping the above ideas in mind, let's talk about jazz. The audience for it is incredibly small and getting smaller. Covid isn't helping, but of course, there's no place in the performing arts where is it is helping because it... cancels performances. So, a music that barely exists in the public realm is even more invisible. But here's the interesting thing, in many respects, the jazz world only partially cares... it's hard to hurt your performances... when there weren't all that many in the first place. Jazz has become, mainly at this point, something that exists in colleges and schools far more than it exists in the popular imagination, if it does that at all. Since there isn't an audience to play for... jazz musicians for decades now have become comfortable with playing for each other and within academic settings. Jazz has increasingly become about the craft of playing it correctly (what colleges excel at) rather than creating new music that would be heard by and effect... regular people. Jazz people have long since given up on anybody outside their scene and that pretty much by definition, makes you self-indulgent.

The paradoxes don't end there though - nor does the lack of self awareness. The nature of jazz makes it one of the highest forms of live music - musicians able to improvise over its complex harmony, elastic rhythm and doing so in real time - where no two performances can ever be the same, is what makes it extraordinary and not terribly accessible. It IS an amazing thing - one of the great feats of intellect, and at its best, artistry. But for some time, those of us who have spent a lifetime listening to it and practicing it are noticing an odd - and again paradoxical - thing. The greater the emphasis on craft... the less you seem to get emotionally from performances. Young player after young player are coming up with extraordinary command of their instruments - better than anything that has come before - and they can play all the music that has come before them. It's extraordinary. But what's even more extraordinary is that... it leaves you totally flat. They all sound very similar - like somebody playing an etude perfectly... but soullessly. But they're BETTER???? But... it doesn't work. It's an amazing display of technique... that comes across as musical masturbation.

Why????

I think there are a few reasons. For one thing when somebody plays the music of Charlie Parker or Clifford Brown now... they're sort of like the craftsman making the Tiffany lamp referenced above. Bird and Clifford and 'Trane and Monk... invented this stuff AND played it, but their achievement, first and foremost... was that they created it. And they were creating something that at least some people listened to... and was a reflection of the culture that they lived in. That culture hasn't existed in 60 or 70 years, so... music reflecting that time wouldn't exactly be relevant or important if it was invented today.

Look, there are orchestras put together to play music with period instruments so that you can hear the music as it must have sounded when it was originally composed centuries ago when there was no ability to record anything. This is a worthwhile endeavor from an intellectual point of view, but even if you get everything right - and even if you see it in the same sort of building and everyone were to wear period clothes... it wouldn't matter. We'll never here Mozart the way people in Vienna did in the 1780's, because... we're not them. Things have happened since that time that have influenced us - their culture, knowledge and experience was entirely different from ours - and we can't process it the same way those audiences did. We've heard jazz and funk and rock and everything else... all of that is in our head because those things happened and are part of our experience. None of that happened to the Viennese of the 1780's. In short, the arrow of time neither stops nor ceases moving forward.... ever. It's he same reason thinking that laws can be made that don't evolve is an intellectual dead end. It's impossible because language and meaning constantly evolves as do the societies which they were meant to order. Judgement and nuance have to take over along with the realization that no style can last forever... because styles are reflections of where a society is at any given time. The ideas that animated and laid the groundwork for jazz haven't existed in a very long time. Recreating jazz now is, for the most part, an act of craftsmanship, and rarely one of creativity.

So, where does this leave me as a lifelong jazz musician? Well, I've always had a problem with this now ascendant, pedantic and essentially conservative approach to a music that was in its heyday, neither of those things. When I was learning jazz, many of my teachers always thought that we were learning this music not so that we could endlessly repeat it, but so that it could be the foundation of more new music to come - that we learned jazz to enhance future creativity... not to forbid future creativity, which seems to be the current mantra. So, I'm fine with the fact that within much of what constitutes the jazz world I don't have a home. Again, that's okay - I don't want to be involved with what they're doing they've essentially betrayed what they're supposedly supporting... by staying still. I also have no interest in the "technique at all costs - technique equals expression" school that has taken over in the jazz and classical music worlds - and in much of the composition scene as well. Although I love harmony and delving deep into the weeds on those topics, my musical output is not something I want to be like some sort of dissertation. Complexity by itself, doesn't necessarily provide a payoff. If it ends up being about head vs heart, heart has to win every time. The emotional payoff is still why I'm involved in music and so these days I find myself veering towards tonality and simplicity more and more in everything I do and in finding a style of my own to further explore, because that... is a creative act.