Is Modern Jazz an Oxymoron?

It is hard to put jazz into neat categories. The jazz I like has melody or rhythm or something that I can recognize, maybe described as a song. The musicians can depart from the melody or rhythm and become discordant or whatever, but remain connected to the song or composition or whatever they are playing.

Jazz musicians today increasingly seem to want to be less connected to a song. They don’t seem to want any structure. They want to be able to just blow and skronk and maybe connect with one another a couple of times in a piece of music. There is no rhythm section that keeps the group anchored. Drums are now a lead instrument and the drummer is back there bashing away with no connection to what anyone else is doing. That’s the way it sounds to me anyway. I’m not a musician.

That said, I do find quite a bit of jazz that does have structure, sounds nice and has musicians playing together. It’s not as common as during the classic Blue Note years, but there’s still a lot of jazz musicians doing this.

That leads me to a question I’ve long wondered about. Can anyone explain to me why jazz musicians like to blow and skronk and bash so much? Is that hard to do? It seems to me that improvising in some kind of structure would require greater artistry than everyone just making noises on their instruments. Does it?

An important part of being a good listener is having a little humility about it all. We may not like it, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it is no good.

Hey frogman, Take your own advice and learn a little humility. I did not dismiss all contemporary jazz as no good or just skronking and bashing. I did note that the trend in contemporary jazz is for more skronking and bashing and asked a question to try and understand this trend.

Please read my post again and apologize, if you have the humility and integrity required to do so.  My guess is that you have neither.

It’s my turn to apologize for questioning your humility and integrity, frogman. Your post was not what I expected to read this morning. I should be more careful about what I assume about others from their posts.

Now, back to jazz and the enjoyment we get from it.

All beautiful music. My kind of jazz. Ingrid Jensen is in the group Artemis which jjss49 recommended earlier. It’s a really good album (to my ear). I also recommend it.

ARTEMIS - The Sidewinder - YouTube