Marc Myers' Why Jazz Happened

Marc Myers writes about jazz for the Wall Street Journal, which must be a heck of gig, considering that there really isn’t that much to write about, and hasn’t been for a long time. His own book stops dead at 1972, with no mention of Wynton Marsalis or ECM Euro-jazz, or of Weather Report, the Jazz Crusaders, or the rise of ‘electric jazz’ or ‘smooth jazz’, or the disgraceful jazz education industry. But then, he’s a journalist, and hand-feed-don’t-bite. Being rude about Wynton Marsalis is still not good for anyone’s career.

For all the music industry history, including a fascinating chapter on the effect of Los Angeles on West Coast Jazz, and the political history, Myers can’t get a coherent story going. It slips out of his grasp every time a new chapter starts. One reason is that he doesn’t engage with jazz as music, and see it as something with its own internal logic of development. He’s writing a purely externalist history, and those often feel dis-jointed.

There’s a line of ideas to be traced from the simultaneous improvisations of Dixieland to the group improvisations of Ascension


and the avant-garde jazz groups working today. That line goes through small bands - trios to nonets - in which soloing is an intrinsic part of the music.

There’s another line to be traced from dance-orchestras playing composed waltzes to the jazz dance bands, to Basie's and Ellington’s bands, which comes to an end in the mid-1960’s. Though solos were played, and often had to be offered to retain good players, these were add-ons: the tune would work perfectly well without the solo.

A small-band piece starts by stating a theme or tune, maybe twice, proceeds to divert by way of three or four solos of varying length, which may or may not refer fleetingly to the opening theme, and finishes with a re-statement of the theme. Big-band pieces are all about the written tune and arrangement, and the solos are at most twelve bars, and only one, and that close to the one on the record.

The more composed more of it is, the less it’s jazz, but if there’s no theme, chord sequence, or mood, then it’s avant-garde. Flamenco Sketches is a mood created by a pace and a sequence of changes, some from one mode to another with the same notes, and some from one key to another. It’s jazz, and can only be played by instrumentalists who are also musicians and of the highest quality.

That’s why West Coast jazz, and the jazz-y music of film and TV soundtracks, is only marginally jazz. Myers explains that this music had to be made quickly and cheaply, and therefore by technically skilled, sight-reading players who could nail the tune first time round. A lot of those men had been through one music college or another on the GI Bill, and could sight-read fluently, transpose effortlessly, and knew their C#7/5dim9 from their Emaj7dim4add13, without having to think about it. Nerds, the lot of them. They could play solos, but it wasn’t what they spent their time doing, when they weren’t in the studios. When they weren’t in the studios, they were driving to another studio, playing golf with music producers, or playing softball with their kids in the gardens of their ranch houses in the LA suburbs. That where Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell found all those effortlessly competent studio musicians in the 1970’s.

And let’s not go near the jazz-fusion thing of the early 1970’s. (Myers does, for a whole chapter.) I was there in the audience. It was not a pretty sight. Only four bands ever did it well: Miles Davis, Weather Report, The Crusaders, and Steely Dan. (Steely Dan was seen as a hip rock band at the time: looking back it’s clear they were really jazz composers who could cut a rock tune now and again.) The rest were, for all the technical virtuosity of the players, a mess. Some of the worst music ever played by superb instrumentalists came out of the jazz-rock / fusion years of the early 1970’s. If the band didn’t have Joe Zawinul or Larry Carlton in it, it wasn’t going to work.

(Digression: Guitarists and post-1969 jazz have never gone well together. Miles Davis remains the only bandleader who ever got genuine feeling and music out of the young John McLaughlin. Most big-name jazz guitarists since have lacked finesse and musicality. Except Larry Carlton, who understood that the guitar is a slow instrument and its notes should be given time to make themselves felt. Listening to his solo on Chain Reaction


I wonder how much Larry Carlton learned from the legendary Steve Cropper?)

So core-jazz is a chamber music based on recognisable tunes, themes or changes, in which extemporised soloing is an integral part, and which has a tinge of the blues, a hint or more of swing in the rhythm, and uses four-note seventh-chord based harmonies, as opposed to classical music, which uses three-note fifth-chord based harmonies. That last bit of music nerdery is suggestive rather than definitive: the point is that hard-core jazz has a distinctive style of harmony which when played anywhere else sounds ‘jazzy’.

Now add in the Romantic artistic ideal of creativity as novelty and genre-busting, rather than creative ingenuity within a genre (at which the Baroque composers excelled, for instance), and a certain amount of good old-fashioned manly competition - in other words, the twentieth-century artistic temperament - and we have a motive for continuous change. It took Jean-Luc Godard less than eight years to go from Breathless to the fin du cinema of Week-end. It’s not surprising that John Coltrane could go from bebop, through the reductio ad absurdum of bebop that is Giant Steps, and one of the most popular albums in jazz, A Love Supreme, to the free jazz of Ascension, in a mere ten years. And what the hey did anyone do after that? Miles Davis provided one answer, with time-no-changes, and then with the `electric’ period, but that was after he had tried to figure out what the rock bands were doing.

In my version of the story, jazz killed itself by using John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and others to work itself to its logical conclusion (Hegel would be so proud). The economic and social changes didn’t help, but weren’t the main reason.

In the usual version, the changing economics and demographics of American towns reduced the audience for jazz. The blatant racism of many American policemen didn’t help. And then the British invaded America in 1963 and the Beatles killed jazz.

Well, not quite.

Any form of art grows and develops with an audience, often mostly from one birth cohort, and when that cohort dies, the music vanishes, to be re-discovered a hundred years later (as happened to Bach. And Shakespeare, for that matter). Lesser talents may have to wait for the development of an entire industry devoted to re-discovering them (as has happened with the `early / period music’ movement).

Jazz always did have a small audience. White women just don’t like chamber jazz, though your grandmother might have liked Bing Crosby. (Everybody likes Bing Crosby.) From bebop onwards jazz has been adopted by people who don’t feel part of the mainstream of society. The easiest way for a white boy to show he was hipper than the average square, and could put some effortless effort into his entertainment, was to listen to hard-core jazz.

Out there somewhere was a huge audience of mainstream squares, just waiting for something that spoke to them, and that they could adopt without marking themselves as outsiders. Or worse, in America, as intellectuals.

They found it in The Beatles rather than in Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, because Lennon and McCartney simply wrote better music than almost everyone else, including Burt Bacharach. Bacharach and David wrote clever, complicated and sad music.


All the time.

Lennon and McCartney wrote songs that were more memorable-emotional-danceable-repeat-listenable and all-round entertaining. What music is after all supposed to be. And often showing a little flash of high-grade sophistication, like the incomprehensible opening chord of Hard Day’s Night, or the Palestrina-like harmonies in If I Needed Someone. Not enough to be difficult, but enough to re-assure everyone that this was not disposable Teen Pan Alley stuff.


That mainstream audience descended on pop and rock music. Record companies exist to make money, and the returns on capital from pop / rock were way higher than on jazz. When the kids who wanted to be dissenters found Bob Dylan and the `protest’ singers, jazz was robbed of most of its second-generation-dissenter audience.

Then it turned out that the Beatles and The Who and quite a few others really were pop-artists who worked in music rather than painting, and so the intellectual and the cultured could get on the pop / rock bandwagon as well. So the only young white boys digging jazz were those who came into it through the electric music of Miles Davis, or an interest in the avant-garde, or through their father's record collection.

But. But most of it was recorded, and most of those recordings were digitised, and so can be stored at a very low cost. Streaming music services create a huge demand for all sorts of sounds, and a lot of hard-core 1950’s and early 1960’s jazz is used to replace the dreaded ‘muzak’ in public places. To modern ears, it is pleasant, has a good but not obtrusive rhythm, and the solos provide a more textured background. Starbucks is never going to programme Ascension. Or even A Love Supreme. There are limits.

Jazz did what so many art forms do: it ran itself out and was replaced by something else. Now it exists in an archive, to be played when the mood is right.

One thing I do agree with Myers about: jazz played itself out in or around 1972. Take the release of On The Corner as the symbolic date. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that gets filed in the ‘jazz’ section in the record stores, but it ain’t jazz. It’s something else. Though his job may depend on him not saying so, I suspect Myers agrees with me.

Now That's What I Call A Kitchen Utensil Draw!

Yep. My cleaned-out, throw-away-the-stuff-I-haven't-used-for-a-year utensil draw.

Left to right: cheese-slicer, grater, hand whisk, tongs, strainer, egg-decapitator, soup ladle, big spoon with holes for taking stuff out of water, whisks for electric mixer, spatula, peeler, de-corer, can opener.

These things matter.

Your utensil draw says a lot about you.

Especially if you don't have one. Or it's dirty in the corners.

Which I do, and it isn't.

Just so you know.

Dysfunctional Men Don't Have Standards, But Should

There is a very good video by Monday FA Monday called Men Have Preferences but not Standards. Approach this with care, because it could trigger all sorts of hidden firecrackers you didn’t know you had.

My preferences express what I would like, but could live without. Standards are what something has to meet to be a functioning instance of what it is. Preferences are whether you want it in red or green, tall or short, shaken or stirred. Standards are deal-breakers: stuff that doesn’t meet the standards are reajected or excluded.

Would you drive a car with brakes that don’t work? Take a job that pays less than minimum wage? Go to a holiday hotel when you know there’s building going on? Buy an umbrella with a hole in it? Sit on a chair with a missing leg? Eat uncooked chicken? Go out in the equatorial sun without sun-block? Swim near the Red Flag? Marry a Borderline? (Why does that last feel different from the others? And yet it isn’t.)

A man who has only preferences can be talked round. A man who has standards can’t be. When mavens talk about “settling”, they want you to think they are asking you to go easy on your preferences, but actually they are saying you should abandon your standards.

It is dismaying that givens actually need to be adopted explicitly as standards. Monday’s examples for a potential partner are “I like spending time with this person”, and “This person is kind to me”. He points out that some men will take anybody, no matter how awful, because they believe that any relationship is a win for them. Those men don’t have standards.

Now imagine you have standards, deal-breakers. It doesn’t matter for what. Assume that you are not being silly, that your standards are what should be givens, rather than wanting something from the top one per cent. Now imagine that you never meet anyone, or find anything, that meets those standards. Not even basic stuff, not even what should be givens.

And then other people tell you that you’re afraid to take a chance, that you’re too picky or fussy, that you can’t commit, that you expect perfection. That you should be prepared to compromise and make it work. That you should take a partner who may not really like you, or has a personality disorder (remember, I’m an alcoholic, and no-one should have taken me). Because that’s what grown-ups do.

Would you think there was something wrong with you? Or something wrong with the people telling you to drive a car with no brakes? A lot of people think there is something wrong with them. I did. Until I understood what was really wrong with me, got sober, and understood that some of my actions for many years were way smarter than my thoughts. (Some of my actions were dumb, however, especially around my career.)

Towards the end of the video, Monday asks if we really are living in a world where we can either have standards or relationships, but not both. He doesn’t want to believe it, and I don’t blame him. People like him and me live in such a world. That’s hard to accept. Here’s why it’s true:

Functional people are good at recognising other functional people and also at avoiding dysfunctional people. So functional people marry other functional people, and the rest of us are stuck sharing our varying degrees of crazy, damaged and nasty with each other. So far, so well-known. Now let me throw some stats out:

Estimates vary, but about ten per cent of the population suffers from psychiatric disorders at some point in their lives.

By age 16 almost half the children in the UK will not be living with both their birth parents.

Even when they do live with their birth parents, around twenty per cent live in self-reported unhappy marriages.

Coming from a broken home, or an unhappy home, can serve as a proxy for emotional damage. Perhaps half of the population may have lacked the experience of seeing how functional adults manage intimate and domestic relationships. Never having seen this, they lack the upbringing and skills successfully to manage family life and long-term relationships.

How surprising is it that someone can go through their whole lives and never meet anyone who meets the minimum standards for a relationship? Not at all, when you understand that it’s half the population and the only available people they meet will be from that messed-up half.

Dysfunctional people need standards too. Especially if we want to have lives that are not miseries. Having and living by standards means missing dysfunctional and unsatisfying relationships with possibly high exit costs.

Wait. How is that missing anything?

Sounds more like dodging an artillery bombardment to me.

Burnout Recovery Progress

Why, thanks for asking about how my burnout recovery is going. I don’t know what the cure for burnout is: burn-in? chill-in? chill-out? rebuilding?

I’m still parking the car at the station. This does cost money but I’m not doing it five days a week. And the place I used to be able to park is now jammed with cars and left overnight. Nobody lives on that road. So it’s either park at the station or walk all the way in. And back at the end of a long day. No thank you.

The person who can most frazzle my working life went off on paternity leave, and has now gone on holiday for a fortnight. This is what happens when you have a Higher Power looking after you.

I finished a long and fact-packed presentation about the customers of the business I’m in. It was a personal goal, I used any spare moment I could, I was wondering if I’d ever get it done. But I did, and now people are telling me how much they like it.

Exercise is going well. I’ve learned to forget what I’m doing next when I’m in the gym. Focus on the reps, then the set. I’m trying to get four times a week in. I have abandoned bench press for now. This means I have lost any claim to bro-tude as I don’t do deadlifts or squats either. I’m doing dumb-bell press instead, and I’m sure it’s easier on my nerves. (Bench, squats and deadlift are all exercises which can frak you up badly if you make a bad move. Hence they take a much larger toll on your nervous system than a fairly harmless dumb-bell based exercise.)

I’ve noticed that I feel better if I get to bed at 21:00 rather than 21:30, and even better if it’s 20:30. 20:30 is going too far.

I’m learning not to beat myself up when I don’t immediately do the ironing or the washing up. Chaos is not going to descend if I leave the sheets until a weekday evening.

I had forgotten how restful two or three episodes of a good DVD series can be. I’m still inclined to let one day a week go by with scraps of this and that and far too much You Tube. Maybe I can work on that now.

And I’m slowly coming out of my scuttle - which is what we should call the routine that takes us from home to work to gym to home without ever stopping in the middle to do something random like go to a film or stop at a restaurant. That’s going to take longer.

Still haven’t beaten that afternoon slump. Still experimenting.

On the other items, morale at work is not good. The office still sucks. My social support is still close to zero.

I took a week off at the end of August, a lot of which was about finally coming to terms with passing what I thought was going to be retirement, and yet having to carry on working. I’m pretty much over that, and over myself as an “old man”. I will meditate on coping with getting older in another post. It’s a subject on which vast amounts of horse-shit has been dropped.

Why It's Harder To Lose Weight Now I'm Older

One reason is that my BMR decreases. The Basal Metabolic Rate is the energy I use to keep my core temperature up to 37C, handle basic stuff like breathing, digestion, liver function, making new blood and body cells, muscle growth, maintaining body posture, and so on. The BMR of a teenager is high, which is why teenagers can eat so much and not gain anything, while if I ate the same, I would put on pounds. Overnight. The older I get, the lower my BMR, so my energy intake has to decrease over time just to keep the balance.

The other is that it takes effort to lose weight. Self-control takes energy. We have to put our bodies into a different metabolic state so that we burn body fat (ketogenesis) , rather than the calories from the food we have just eaten. That takes effort, and it’s possible that not everyone can work the trick. I have to do early nights, so I don’t start eating last thing. Avoiding eating triggers - TV anyone? Getting through the occasional period of hunger pangs and dizziness - not easy if I'm trying to produce a tedious but detailed data request.

The last time I lost weight was nearly ten years ago (!) and it was an effort fuelled by the fear of having my GP prescribe filthy drugs with names ending in “statin” and “formin”. Over the years, the weight has come back on, but with a different body composition, so I don’t have the high(er) blood sugar that went with the last time I weighed this much.

I have tried to lose some weight now and again, but usually I get a cold after a couple of weeks, or something happens and I can’t keep the calorie-restriction going. I don’t have the fear of God to put in me. 97kgs is a floor I keep bouncing off.

What I’ve realised now, is that If I want to lose weight, via calorie-restriction and exercise, it has to be the only thing I’m doing, other than going to work and routine housework stuff. As soon as I try to do anything else that requires concentration, I fall off the weight wagon.

And like I’ve said countless times before: I’ve given up drinking, smoking, and wenching. You want I should give up chocolate as well?

Read this post from the always-honest Nick Krauser https://krauserpua.com/2019/04/11/how-i-lost-13-kilos-in-7-months/ about his weigh-loss attempts at 43. I endorse every single one of the final ten thoughts. I quote point four:

I’d never taken diet or weights seriously before. You absolutely must make it your first priority in life to make big fast improvement. If I’d had a job, or been daygaming, I’d have too little willpower remaining to expend in the gym and resisting bad food.

If you don’t believe me or Krauser, try it yourself.

This Post and the Next One Cancelled Due to Heat and Holiday

Three songs with That Early Eighties Sound

According to some academic, Eighties music is the most similar-sounding of all the decades. I present three examples:

Joe Jackson, Stepping Out


Trevor Horn with Dollar up front, Hand held In Black and White


And finally, and you may need to sit down for this, Kajagoogoo. Yes, you heard. Don’t watch the video, listen to the music.


What was it? That sound? Not all the songs had it, but most of the best ones did. It has a space in it, wide open chords, a rock-solid rhythm with a hint of swing, and for me, it’s best illustrated by the instrumental section of Too Shy from about 2:05 to 2:40. The repetition is minimalism, the keyboard chords and other sounds are there to help you drift away wondering about what might happen if the shy girl comes a little closer.

After the turmoil, inflation, and general bleakness of the Seventies, people were starting to think that their lives could actually be fun again. That Eighties sound captured the exact mix of optimism and caution we felt, and provided the soundtrack to the good times we had from time to time