On Fri, 05 Jul 2002 22:48:36 -0700 skip Heller wrote:
on 7/5/02 2:30 PM, Remco Takken at r.takken@planet.nl wrote:
If something is not new, it can still be good, ofcourse, you are completely right. But, by its nature (of non-newness), it can NEVER be 'avantgarde'. Because that means you're setting new standards, good or bad.
Then someone kindly explain to me why a lot of 40-yr-old musical tactics (as set down by Ornette, Cecil, Ayler et al) are still being referred to as avant-garde? At this point, those guys are as fixed in the jazz firmament as Lester Young or Dicky Wells, but nobody calls those guys avant-garde. I sense a sort of double-standard.
I think it is because for some people (with romantic bendings) playing for sparse audiences equates on the edge (avant, experimental, etc). And I think that these people cannot imagine themselves not listening to music that pushes the limit steadily, hence the tendency to qualify what they listen to as avant, even though its label of freshness has long passed the limit :-). My feeling is that music that still cannot create any momentum after so many decades is just an acquired taste, and there is nothing wrong with that (30% of what I listen to falls in that category). But why keep on calling it avant, is a mystery to me (as if music had to be avant for being worth listening to). A huge majority of the music that we call avant these days is just repeating patterns and approaches developped many decades ago. Many of these artists may still have trouble to pay the bills, but it does not make their music automatically avant. Patrice.