Jazz is great, when it is in New Orleans,
The same goes for rap, when it is in San Fransisco it is superb,

I did not realise that there were many stoats in West Sussex.

Hi Paddy, you've put into words a thought that's crossed my mind many times. I love jazz.... Errol Garner, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson and also trad. People seem to generalise when they refer to jazz, when in fact, there are so many types and I think that it's quite possible to like one type but not another. Not too keen on modern jazz myself as it seems to lose the melody but each to their own.

Tom mentions both Garbarek and Shorter, both outstanding, inventive and exploratory sax players, whose musical styles are worlds apart and yet both classified as 'jazz'. Similarly one could include Lyle Mays and Joe Zawinul, both incredibly inventive and yet so dissimilar in their cultural influences, styles, musical background etc. that only jazz piano aficionados might collect both and yet the same term bundles them up together.

It is perhaps more logical to view the term 'jazz' as a pragmatic & usable term for music that seeks to avoid the formulaic, that which is not easily categorised elsewhere but, and a contentious but, there is a strong argument that anything prior to the Miles Davis 'Silent Way' project, from which so many strands developed, is as formulaic and rigid as other accepted forms.

Trad, Orleans and Bebop etc. were all just either reinterpretations of blues or old standards with bus queue fiddling about posing as improvising (frequently just experiment mode/scale exercises) that the term 'jazz' remains muddied.

A rational definition of jazz would have to encompass Trilok Gurtu, Bill Connors, Hiromi Uehara, Alan Holdsworth & Tommy Smith to be meaningful. One of the reasons why it gets so muddied is that so many of the great jazz players have to immerse into other forms to make money i.e. Mark King, Sting, Jack Bruce, Phil Collins, Keith Emeron, Rhino Edwards (yes, the bass guitarist of Status Quo is an outstanding bass player who decided that money was useful)

So, what's wrong with Jazz?

Nobody knows what it is

I like music that can't be pigeon-holed

my Profile only mentions Britpop .....

Hey, I thought you weren't allowed to look at this stuff!

You'll get a slapping from the medics.

Good musos are expensive you know.

Not true actually. Jazz pays almost as badly as folk. At a guess, the vast majority of UK jazz musicians are doing it for the love of music, with the money occasionally covering the expenses.


(The op worked. I'm doing this without spectacles, which I've worn for the last 48 years.
Feels odd}.

Does anyone in the Kettering area of Northants know if Chris ans Buzz still run there Jazz club.? We had them in our local but the Landlady stopped it even though the pub was packed. so now that night it's empty and serves her right she perhaps doesn't like work

Try this - how many of the profiles were of women members? I've noted before that I saw the same thing while internet dating, i.e. "...like all music except jazz..."

So far my 'sexual divide list' consists of jazz, spatial awareness and slapstick comedy...