Kind of Blue

@simonmoon This, “No, no, no!”  business, this “(Tubular Bells) is firmly in the prog-rock genre, or progressive music genre” business, is all a bit much.  
Tubular Bells sounds like Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Terry Riley, etc., stuff typically referred to as “contemporary classical,” “minimalist,” etc.  
When we get into the ‘60s and up to today, the whole thing of “avant-garde,” “classical,” and “jazz” gets pretty well intertwined to where I think we can just avoid this “No, no, no!” genre-mongering ideation.  
If someone thinks something sounds like jazz, so what?
It’s music.  
We can listen to music on it’s own terms without bending over backwards to pigeonhole something with generic, over-simplified label-mongering, “genre”-mongering (i.e. ‘No, no, no! Tubular Bells is firmly in the prog-rock genre, or progressive music genre.”). 
How is it constructive to do that? Is it helpful for either the artist or the listener to have someone from the peanut gallery “telling” everyone what a piece of music “is” via a generic label of “genre?”  
If you poured your heart, mind, body and soul, blood, sweat and tears into creating something, would you appreciate it being summarily reduced to some generic label?  
Or would you rather your creation was taken on it’s own terms for the thing it is?

Especially in the ‘45-‘75 chronological range, there is an enormous amount.
Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Mary Lou Williams, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Donald Byrd, Andrew Hill, Pharoah Sanders, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Hank Mobley, Eric Dolphy, Art Blakely, Roland Kirk, Sonny Sharrock, Don Cherry, Albert Ayler, Sadao Watanabe.

@stuartk I’ll clarify.
You may have experienced this scenario one or several times in your life:
Someone says, “you should check out (insert artist name). You’d like it. They are (insert genre/sub-genre label, a label that may or may not have one or several hyphens).” You say, “ok. Will do,” then go and check out said artist, only to find the label/genre used to describe it seems wildly inappropriate. You say, “what? THIS is (genre/sub-genre label)?!?! This doesn’t sound like (genre/sub-genre label)!!”

On top of being lazy, conformist, and disrespectful to the specificity of an artist’s personal and individual expression, that type language and communication is not even useful, practical or helpful.  
It’s the opposite - very often, it’s just unhelpful and inefficient communication.

For instance, on this very thread, a perfect example is shown of the unhelpful, inefficient communication that occurs when this sort of label-mongering is flippantly (and with an almost indignant air of authority) employed.  
This was actually uttered, “(Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield) is firmly in the prog-rock genre…”    
“Prog-rock,” is a term most commonly associated with music like Yes, Rush, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, etc.   
Imagine a person (understandably) being under the impression that “prog-rock” sounds like Yes, Rush, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Jethro Tull.  
Now imagine what they would think after checking out Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield, doing so thinking that it would sound like Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, or Jethro Tull.  
If you know what those bands sound like, and you know what Tubular Bells sounds like, it’s easy to see how, in this instance, objectively bad communication took place.  
Such is the nature of walking around and tossing out willy-nilly these generic, cookie-cutter labels to describe music.  
“Indie-psych-folk?”  
WTF is that?  
It’s nothing. Just worthless word salad. That’s just one of many examples of worthless label-mongering that commonly occurs in communication about music.

You seem to think valuing the individuality of an artist, putting our big-boy pants on and “using our words” to describe music instead of lazily trotting out generic label-mongering, and taking issue with poor communication is “extreme” and an instance of one “getting their undies in a knot.”

@stuartk Having a system that allows customers or patrons to efficiently locate a thing (dedicated aisles in a grocery store, Dewey Decibel system in a library, etc.) is helpful.  
Describing music to another person is different.  
Conflating the two things is false equivalence.

“And, as a creative person whose played guitar for 50 years, has a studio art degree in drawing/printmaking and enjoys photography and writing poetry, implying I'm  someone who disrespects/devalues the arts or artists is absurd
As you sound emotionally triggered by this topic, I don’t see much possibility for rational conversation.”

After you said such qualms were “extreme” and “getting undies in a twist,” I went on to further clarify why I took issue with label/genre-mongering. You took it personally (i.e. ‘…as a creative person whose played guitar for 50 years…’).  
I’m the “triggered” one, the one with comprised rationality.
Sure. You bet.  
The ol’ “you’re emotional/irrational” dismissal bit. An oldie-but-goodie.

Instead of saying an artist is (blank), what if we…Egads! Heaven forbid!…described the music?  You know, with words.  
That’s an option.  
Is I already said, applying some generic label contrived by record companies/radio stations/Rolling-frickin’-Stone magazine God-knows-how-many-years, labels invented to make it easier for them to become more rich, labels that rarely, if ever, provide an accurate/useful description, we could just use our words to describe something.  
Just a thought.

I love talking about and describing music. 
I see the act of describing a “genre” (and the subsequent stringent segregation and put-everything-in-a-box attitude) as being useful only to a person for whom doing so helps them maximize their profits (corporate marketing execs, radio station programming execs, etc.).  
As I said before, outside of someone with such an occupation where the shoving of a square peg in a round hole helps them make more money, choosing that type of ideation and communication regarding music in lieu of thoughtful descriptions of music (you know, art made by individual human beings with individual feelings, thoughts and views) is not a positive thing for music.  
The genre-mongering itself is the bad thing.  
I think a person should use their words instead of mindlessly shoving the work of an individual human into an ill-fitting category of “(blank)-(blank)-(blank),” with all the hyphens and everything.

It seems like we’re simply incapable of considering that it is not the definition of the “genre” that is the problem, but the “genre”-mongering itself that is the problem.

In lieu of talking about how to define a “genre” and then describing music in those woefully over-simplified, dismissive, unhelpful/inefficient terms, a person could simply address music by saying things like,
- “it’s not particularly aggressive, more mellow, but with similar song structures to their previous LP”
- “to me it sounds similar to Bitches Brew but more tightly structured, more conventional harmonic relationships / composition,”
- “it reminds me of Ace of Spades but with more overt melodicism,”
- “it has harmonically sophisticated melodic composition provided by rich, lush orchestral instrumentation with simple percussion arrangements and impressionistic lyrics that depict desolation, squalor with a touch of gallows humor”  
- “the harmonic composition and song structure is unremittingly formulaic, be it I-IV-V, or I-VI-IV-V, and the arrangements and lyrics are rich in vapid cliches,”. 
- “it has pedal steel guitar, brilliant James Burton-esque guitar, but employs more orchestral accompaniment and more sophisticated harmonic composition than a typical Merle Haggard record”

@viridian Kind of Blue or “free jazz” is the cliche you’d be happy to never hear again?