I just had a couple glasses of wine so am going to post in this thread sans jazz.
Does anybody feel like the 'decline' of jazz was actually caused by a limit on the sounds you can make with jazz instruments?
After a while, various albums from different periods of jazz history all sound similar to me. And the history of jazz's progression has seemed not only logical, but that it's come to something of a logical end-point. In the beginning artists like Louis Armstrong started expressing themselves more vividly with their instruments. Then Charlie Parker / Miles Davis ushered in modern jazz, followed by Coltrane and Coleman's post-modern 'free' jazz which tended toward the abstract and basic noise. Now there's a fragmentation of styles and a bunch of artists who are open to playing whatever.
I don't know how you can build on what's already been done in the genre. Horatio Parker?
Have another drink, Rousseau…
The increasing abstraction paralleled what happened in classical music. Much of which I guess you would also consider noise: Stockhausen, Boulez, Elliott Carter etc. I don't, nor is Coleman, tho I don't like everything I've heard from him, and especially not Coltrane.
But that's not all that was going on in say 1965. Lee Morgan, Mingus, Horace Silver, Bobby Hutcherson, and many others were not in the avant grade. Those traditional approaches will not go away.
As for building on the genre, of course it'll happen. Not as quickly, maybe and in unforeseen ways but I it's not over by a long shot. The fusion of African and European musics, dominated by African Americans, has taken over the whole planet. No, it's not over.
Can you get to this? Problem is, you have to listen to the whole thing. Keep looking for something. It's there. Maybe a joint to go along with that wine…Coltrane was an acid head, you know.
