[NewMusic] more jazzdeath

[David Slusser]

New York Times:
December 6, 2006
Music
In the Blogosphere, an Evolving Movement Brings Life to a Lost Era of  
Jazz
By Nate Chinen

"Jazz just kind of died," said the saxophonist Branford Marsalis. "It  
just
kind of went away for a while." He was looking back to the 1970s, an
uncertain era when some jazz musicians turned to rock or funk, and  
others
pushed deeper into heady abstraction. His assessment, conveyed in the  
final
episode of "Jazz," the influential Ken Burns film, seemed as  
definitive as a
coffin nail.

But over the last six months, a far-flung contingent of musicians and
aficionados has made an effort to upend that prevailing notion, armed  
with
stacks of vinyl, high-speed Internet and a shared conviction that things
back then were really far from moribund. Along the way, they touched  
off the
year's most animated public discourse on jazz, a democratic exchange  
that
culminated last weekend in the debut of behearer.com, an interactive
database devoted to the music's most conflicted period.

The movement, so to speak, has its origins in a posting by the  
trumpeter and
composer Dave Douglas on his label's blog, greenleafmusic.com. "I'm  
reading
a new book by Philip Jenkins called 'Decade of Nightmares: The End of  
the
Sixties and the Making of Eighties America,' " Mr. Douglas wrote at the
beginning of the summer, "and I think there are some pertinent tie- 
ins to
the elusive history of the last four decades of American music. Those  
are
the decades Ken Burns couldn't handle, and this may help explain why."

That book's principal argument is that the 1970s saw the failures and
excesses of '60s idealism compounded by national horrors like Vietnam  
and
Watergate, resulting in the rise of a paranoid conservatism. On his  
blog Mr.
Douglas drew a parallel. "There's a demonization of musicians who  
pushed the
boundaries, successfully and importantly, in that period," he wrote,  
"and it
has crept into the way history is told and music is taught."

Noting that "jazz" became an impossibly broad designation around this  
time,
Mr. Douglas posed a rhetorical question: "Is there a writer who can  
take on
the project of an unbiased overview of music since the end of the  
Vietnam
War?" And borrowing Mr. Jenkins's benchmark of Richard M. Nixon's
resignation as the official end of the 1960s, he proposed a new jazz  
history
that would acknowledge "a generation of multiplicity," beginning in  
1974 and
stretching to the end of the cold war.

The call hung in the air for a while. Then, near summer's end, a  
reply of
sorts appeared on Do the Math, the blog of the band Bad Plus
(http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath). Ethan Iverson, the pianist  
in the
band and the chief blogger on the site, answered Mr. Douglas's query not
with an unbiased overview, but a catalog of hundreds of cherished albums
from his collection, complete with casual but articulate annotations.
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More:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/arts/music/06blog.html