- Forum Clout
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Wait, huh? This is sort of the problem with this conversation. Jazz and classical are extremely broad terms. Most classical music is one person in front of a piano, much cheaper than the quartets, quintets or big bands that clubs employed in the early days of jazz. I’ve also never heard of jazz being played by one person, especially back then. So obviously yes, orchestral renditions would be more expensive, but most clubs were not doing these instead having one piano player.
Oh boy this is gonna get me going. The only “powers that be” that exists in art is the “industry” which is the universities, art critics, and patrons who shape tastes in art. Profit is also a major incentive in this but etc…technique plays a factor too. Lets take visual art. In the Renaissance we relearned the idea of controposto (making the body anatomically accurate) like the ancient Romans were able to do and it ushered in an age of realism. Then around the 1900’s after we went to Africa and saw how “unique” and primitive African artworks were we adopted that (see: cubism or any Picasso portrait.) The goal for artists, broadly, then became “how can i express emotion through the most abstract of means?” No longer did you need to paint a large beautiful landscape to invoke emotion…what if you could just do it by painting a circle on a canvas?
My whole spiel about that is how it relates to music. Around the 1920’s you saw a major abstraction of music that was reflective of the changes in all arts. Its where you have shit like free jazz which follows no coherent scales and is chromatic. (What people think of when they see Jazz - chaotic unstructured noise.) But then you have Jazz music that is just like classical - I.e, that the musicians who composed it have an extreme understanding of music theory and are freestyling or writing extremely complex musical pieces under what you’re flat out hearing.
It should also be noted that classical arrangements vs jazz arrangements are MASSIVELY different in terms of their compositional structure. When you think of an orchestral classical song a lot of the instruments accompany each other to form a cohesive sound or chord (for lack of a better word.) With Jazz it often feels like instruments aren’t “in sync” with each other due to the constant call and response rhythms that form a disconnected but overall cohesive sound. The whole point is that a small classical band is a lot more restricted than a small jazz band, where each player serves a unique role and has a chance to improvise and play around with their instruments.
Most jazz musicians go through the exact same thing as Beethoven. Most are players since extreme youth and faced massive trials to get where they were, especially those who were considered the best in their field. My personal opinion is that Jazz has nothing to do with the degeneration of music and it’s not even the first step. The first step was, honest to god, fucking Elvis and pop music in general like the Beatles. The commodification and accessibility of music starting around the 50’s - 60’s killed the artform. Lets put it like this: No kid in the 20’s looked at some fuck like Miles Davis and thought “I want to be just like him!”, no, they wanted to play the Trumpet like him and be as talented as him. After the 60’s? Every kid didn’t want to play as good as the Beatles but he as famous as them, have the women, etc. That’s why most if not every band to get popular is extremely derivative. Rock isn’t even close to the degeneration of music because it was the next progressive step of classical music after jazz. There are hundreds of rock albums that might as well be classical compositions from the 1700’s only they use electric guitars. A lot of talented fucks in that field. But you can’t name the next logical progression from there because there is none. Virtually every music genre is completely perverted and, going back to my whole abstraction of art point before, no one is writing extremely complicated “talented” music pieces because they can get the message across through a simple rap beat.
