[Appenianags]

I find this really interesting because I floated a few quite similar ideas on this board a while back and got sort of mildly jumped on by Terry Deane and a few others. What I was saying really was that since jazz has become part of the academy, people learn it differently and so are bound to play differently too. The opportunities to play every night, with the same people, before an audience (the Miles Davis quintet of 1956 worked at the Cafe Bohemia for 18 months before recording the "Cookin With-Workin With-Steamin-Relaxin" series of LPs, for example) are simply not there anymore. And the academic process sort of demands standardization, so jazz tenor sax students all wind up studying "Giant Steps" the same way classical clarinet folks all have to wrestle with that Mozart concerto sooner or later. The demise of the big bands, in my opinion, also contributed to this. If you're Chu Berry sitting in Basie's sax section, you're under pressure to sound like yourself, not Lester Young. They've already got one of him, sitting in the other tenor chair. With so many students nowdays "majoring in Coltrane" (as Phil Woods puts it) it's no surprise a few of them come damn close. Especially Pat Labarbera's, for some reason. I've heard a few where the resemblance is downright uncanny.

Anyway, I wasn't suggesting that modern players suck or anything, just that they play different than the old school guys. Not better or worse. Different. As I said, I took a certain amount of flack for this. Maybe I come off as being more serious in print than I am, although people who read this West Ender article I wrote a few years ago exploring similar themes http://www.johndoheny.com/JDjournalist_02.htm thought it was kind of amusing.

I don't know what the answer to this is, but I think to a certain extent it's inevitable, maybe even desirable. It's what we wanted, after all, this admission of jazz to the halls of higher learning. We spent all that effort arguing that this is an ART music, dammit! not just a bunch of illiterate negroes playing some kind of crazy jungle ooga booga. So we can't really complain when it becomes respectable and loses some of the forbidden-fruit allure it once had.

Personally I find the most interesting players are the ones who DON'T stick strictly to jazz, often through economic necessity. My favorite Vancouver tenor player, Dave Say, plays all kinds of gigs in lots of different styles, and finds a way to bring all that to the table when he plays a jazz gig. In that he's echoing the true spirit of Coltrane, who started his career honking the blues and walking the bar in Philadelphia beer joints.

The best teachers I've encountered stress the basics (tone, time-feel, tempo,articulation, voice leading) and teach the common-practise vocabulary of jazz, but stress it's evolving and welcoming nature. Like the english language, the language of jazz is incredibly expressive and adaptable. The best players speak it fluently while continuing to re-invent it.