Bill Frisell on genre

 In an interview posted at Grammy.com centered around his new album and other topics of the day, Bill Frisell touches on one of my recurring topics, and unsurprisingly, we are in total agreement.

 

On Harmony, you interpreted songs ranging from Pete Seeger to Lerner and Loewe. On Valentine, you draw from a similar well — there's a Hal David and Burt Bacharach song sharing space with a traditional hymn. To you, how does American folk music connect to the Great American Songbook?

I've always had a problem with how we put [them in separate categories]. I know we need words to describe things and we have to talk about the music, but when we put these labels and names on it it always has the effect of making it smaller than what it really is. To me, they're all part of one thing, whether it’s Beethoven or Monk or Robert Johnson or Jimi Hendrix or Morton Feldman. It's all music and it all fits together in my imagination.

A word from Duke Ellington

 image source

Found in the liner notes of Herbie Hancock's "Gershwin's World" -

"It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line. - Duke Ellington

Herbie Hancock on genre

It's been a while since I've brought in the big guns to explain my program, but here's one of the greatest living musicians in today's New York Times putting in his two cents on one of my favorite topics, the futility of genre, and one I haven't really gone into much, jazz as the perfect vehicle for exploring combinations of music.

Genres made it easy to put things in categories so that they could be promoted. One person’s face could be recognized for one category, and another person’s face could be recognized for another category. It was just to make some sense of it all. But when it starts to interfere with cross-collaboration, and the fact that that too can be musical, then it becomes a problem. I can only say that the word “jazz” today is much broader than it has been in the past.

You know, the most important thing is the spirit of jazz — which is about freedom, about improvisation, about courage. I mean the courage to play something that you haven’t played before, to create something on the spot. And it’s also about sharing, because onstage we don’t compete with each other. Each of us expresses ourselves from our own being, and no two people are alike, so the idea of being judgmental is not on the table.

A word from John Zorn

...and a preview of this week's webcast.

From the liner notes to John Zorn's Spillane album.

Chuck Berry talks about genre on Soul Train

Laquinta asks "Do you find blues more soothing than today's sounds?"¹ to which Chuck Berry replies "Well, to me, each type of music is a feeling, and blues, there's nothing that can replace it when you're blue. And there's nothing that can replace rock when you're reeling, and so on..."

More thoughts on genre

Oy, I've been neglecting the blog a bit!

Well. I just finished putting Saturday's show together, and it's a bit all over the place, as usual, I guess, but perhaps a bit more so.

A last minute search to clear up some foggy notes I had made for last week's show led me to look up the liner notes for John Schott's Shuffle Play album which contains the following statement from the composer

For a brief moment at the birth of recording, before the existence of the recording “industry,” notions of style, genre, and even taste evaporated. Sound was documented pretty much at random, with a quasi-democracy characteristic of the New World.

Now we find ourselves perhaps at the other end  of the recording "industry" I think some of these notions of style, genre, and taste are (or at least should be) changing. So if Franz Liszt and Julius Hemphill and Billy Bragg can share space in my head, perhaps they can in yours too.

Anyway, the notes as whole are pretty interesting and a pretty much in line with my own thinking, and you can check them out here.

Down with Poptimism!!

(in which I lapse into grandiosity)

For those of you lucky enough to receive the Somerville Community Access TV newsletter, you read a blurb for my program (not written by me) which I think made it out to be more exclusive and snobby than I intend it to be. (This is mostly my fault since I've been terrible at describing the show, and also missed a deadline to submit some promotional copy of my own. I'm not mad at anyone over it) To be clear, I'm not aiming for the select few, but I (and I'm sure everyone on Boston Free Radio) am trying to bring forward an alternative to pop radio hegemony. I certainly don't want to be one of those dj's who are too cool to even like the music they play.


Which brings me to