I just don’t get it. Today, on NPR, there was a review of a jazz soprano sax player’s (Stanley Newsome?) new album. It is just the sax. No bass, drums or anything else. To my, evidently unsophisticated, ear it sounded like a bunch of nearly random squeals and squeaks. To the reviewer it was simply awesome. How does one learn to appreciate this stuff? Most music, even music I don’t particularly like, I can appreciate. Hard core jazz is a different story. No melody, no beat that I could discern. Is it based on math or something? It just doesn’t evoke any emotion at all. Do I need to smoke some really good weed or something?
Homer Simpson said it best
Homer: Jazz, [pfft] They just make it up as they go along
Not all jazz is the same, just as not all rock is the same. Listen to different genres before dismissing all of it as unworthy. I don’t mind swing; I prefer bop and post-bop. I love Brazilian and Cuban jazz. I cannot abide traditional jazz (from the 1920s era) and really hate the type of jazz you are describing, where someone like Ornette Coleman is squealing on his sax and everyone else is playing random bits of music. I don’t understand it, and it’s not pleasing to my ear.
Oh, and someone should confiscate all of the soprano saxophones on the planet, place them in a pile, douse them with gasoline, and let her rip. I’ll be in the front row, cheering.
Jazz is about breaking rules established within the traditional / classical music canon. Some jazz sub-genres only break a few rules, like swing jazz, so they sound very familiar and accessible, kinda like an Impressionist painting only breaks a few Classical Art rules so feels accessible. Other jazz sub-genres break many more rules, 'till you end up with styles like Free Jazz, which, yeah, can sound like stomping on geese if you aren’t careful - just like some types of Modern Art seem to get so far away from normal definitions of Art that they don’t feel worth the trouble. Sounds like your soprano sax player was closer to Free Jazz than Swing Jazz.
If you want to learn, start with stuff you like. If you aren’t sure what stuff you like you can check in with us Dopers for recommendations or rent/buy that Ken Burns’ documentary Jazz - to jazz geeks it greatly over-simplifies the history of the genre and leaves out a bunch fo key names, but you can get a sense of the various sub-genres and which ones appeal to you as starting points.
If you like music and have a sincere curiosity, it is entirely worthwhile - jazz is cool. I write a column in the SDMB’s online 'zine, ***teemings ***- I have thought about writing a column contrasting the differences between a rock lead and a jazz solo - the differences touch on some of this stuff…
That’s not very environmentally friendly. Please recycle them, the Earth will thank you.
I’m not familiar with the artist you are describing, but I imagine the album to be similar to Anthony Braxton’s work (especially his For Alto) and John Zorn’s Classic Guide to Strategy, among others.
I’m not really sure how to explain it, but I guess it’s sort of like what Yngwie Malmsteen is to guitar or Diamanda Galas would be to voice (though the albums I mentioned above, as well as the one you describe, seems to play with silence as a compositional technique more than what you would see in virtuosic examples in other instruments, it’s probably closer to Derek Bailey on guitar).
Probably it is best appreciated by saxophone players (though not exclusively, I like the albums I mentioned above, and I am no musician, but I know I’m not really getting everything there is to get). It seems to be all about getting interesting sounds out of the horn, and/or interesting sonic combinations.
If you’re interested in getting “into” that sort of thing, I would def recommend For Alto, but try Eric Dolphy, who was more conventional, but flirted with that sort of thing (the albums Conversations, Iron Man, and Out to Lunch are all classics, and “Love Me” from Conversations is a solo sax piece that might be more approachable.)
I hope I’ve helped somewhat.
Ahh, SAM Newsome. You are forgiven though, because half of the jazz musicians seem to be named Stanley or Stan.
Am I right in suspecting that every one of those annoying squawks(assuming this is the style I lovingly call “blowing small rodents out your spit valve”) is meticulously written down in the sheet music?
If its all about breaking rules why not just play truly random notes? I am not a musician but I have to assume that there’s some sort of logic or sense behind what note is going to come next. I like the comparison to visual art. There’s a lot of what I would consider crap out there that artsy folks would say, in artspeak, is just too deep for me to understand. But that’s a whole different thread. Anyway, if you have to be trained or educated to enjoy something (note that I didn’t say ‘appreciate’), I’ll take a pass. I never studied music but I still liked Mozart the first time I heard it. Pleasing to the ear, like Chefguy said.
Nonsense. You were “trained” by growing up in the Western world, and so you liked Mozart the first time you heard it. Some people like sounds and music that goes against the norm. If you don’t, that’s fine.
I might even say people who like more avant garde stuff have to like it on a more instinctive, less “trained” level (if the music is successful, that is).
Is it your contention that a preference for consonant harmony and tonal resolutions is purely a product of one’s culture? Because that’s demonstrably false.
Well I don’t know about demonstrably (I guess with newborns or something?), but you’re probably right. I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
By the time you get to Free Jazz, it sometimes feels like that is what they are doing 
Word of advice: don’t start with Free Jazz.
Go buy Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and give it a listen. It is jazz and it is sublime, melodic and brilliant - like a David Gilmour solo taken to the next level. If you like that, branch out from there.
Fair enough - again, don’t start with Free Jazz.
Listen to Kind of Blue and see how that pleases your ear. Otherwise, you are basically starting this thread to equate all jazz to Free Jazz and then to say I Hate Teh Jazz! But if you are genuinely curious, you will find that there are most likely varities you DO like if you open your mind to them. Only a small niche of jazz is random squonks and squeels - don’t paint the whole category with the same brush…
One of the most interesting things I learned when studying music theory is how universal some concepts are. For example, the Pythagorean harmonies: take two frequencies with a whole-number ratio and play them at the same time, and they will sound very consonant. Take two frequencies with an “ugly” ratio and they sound horrible together. That has nothing to do with tunings or temperaments or scales that vary across cultures, it just is. Our brains are wired that way, the same way that certain color combinations match or complement each other by virtue of their fundamental properties, even though different cultures may have preferences for different specific combinations.
Jazz can be pretty weird. I don’t really know much about it. I do like a lot of (what I think is called) “smooth” jazz, which has a lot of pretty accessible sax melodies and a slow-tempo bass and rhythm backup, and fairly simple harmonies. I’ve also suffered through a performance at a tiny Brooklyn club that consisted of two hours of dissonant screeching backed up by (I’m not making this up) a cheap 1980’s drum machine. It was like somebody gave Lou Reed a trumpet.
If you want to try something that will please your ear right off, try Chet Baker or early Miles Davis, or Brubeck or the Getz/Gilberto album. It’s nearly impossible to dislike Take Five or Blue Rondo by Brubeck when you first hear them. And Getz/Gilberto is sublime. The writing of Jobim combined with the vocals of Joao and Astrud Gilberto and Getz’s sax is the very definition of mellow.
I don’t want to speak for him, but even though the OP’s subject line said “what’s up with jazz?”, he says that “hardcore jazz is a different story”; I assume he probably knows Kind of Blue (who doesn’t?) or other examples he likes.
I still say go with Eric Dolphy as an example of a “border”-musician, if you’re interested at all in getting into free or avant garde jazz.
Heck, just follow John Coltrane - from his very accessible work on Kind of Blue, to his first combo that he lead with the CD Blue Train, which is also very accessible, on through works like My Favorite Things and A Love Supreme through Giant Steps, which gets pretty freakin’ out there without being full-on, Ornette Coleman-meets-Eric-Dolphy Free Jazz…
Oh, the snark on this one is delicious!
Well that IS probably a better person to follow, but Dolphy is more than just a side man on Coleman’s Free Jazz (heck, he’s a side man on Coltrane’s later stuff, and may have even been an influence!)