Candy or Medicine (with thanks to Ryan Beckley)

As promised, more time and brain space as the school year draws to a close has allowed for a little more thought about my central thesis of Jazz is not for wankers (although it can be, but not exclusively. In Australia the term encompasses a broad spectrum of society)

The words that germinated the idea of writing some of my views down for public consumption, rather than restricting myself to late night ravings to a sympathetic audience are courtesy of Ryan Beckley a junior studying jazz guitar at The New School in NYC. He managed to encapsulate some of the issues with the music, the ‘scene’ and what to do……….

“Obviously jazz today has a pretty pathetic social environment - the music is mostly heard by a combination of other musicians, music students and a rare handful of enthusiasts who genuinely enjoy the music and are aware of contemporary jazz. So while the music today is some of the best ever made, it goes largely unheard.” This fact has little to do with the music and a lot to do with jazz's fringe social status. “Jazz could never rise to social relevance without sacrificing its musical integrity. ”(Beckley, 2010).

He then goes discusses the separation of music into understanding and experience.

“This separation results in what T Adorno called the "castration" of music: the mass-market listener can either enjoy or understand music, but the two modes cannot be fully reconciled and in neither case can the music convey a deep message. Obviously, given the choice between the pleasing abandon of experience and the frumpy, candle-lit pretention of understanding listeners have gravitated toward experience.”(Beckley, 2010).

So the question that I feel the need to ask is………..

Is music candy or medicine with little in between? (Beckley, 2010) Alternatively, is there a common ground, a space in which the intellectuals and those that dance around their bedrooms to You Tube clips of experiential pop music can exist?

I confess to both the intellectualism and the dancing (bad though it is) and often get equal amounts of pure unadulterated pleasure from very intense modern jazz with poly rhythms, discordant harmonies, weird ass time signatures that change every 4 bars and totally manufactured, auto tuned, saccharine laced pop music.

My personal view is that all music is experiential but how we choose to access it will dictate the social or intellectual gravity it’s given, but access it we must. Let me know what you think……..