World Class!

I do not want to be told I am "awesome", or to be asked if I am "stoked".   This is what happened at a Vancouver International Jazz Festival concert last summer, where there was an opening emcee who did exactly that.    Jazz is supposed to be "cool"; this was was high school cheerleading.  The occasion was a concert by the wonderful pianist and composer Vijay Iyer; MacArthur award winner and now Harvard professor.   I was pleased to hear Iyer perform in Vancouver, but I was not pleased to hear his performance marred but an awesomely bad sound system, painful to the ears.  At a certain point, Iyer stopped to complain about the sound, and even asked that it be turned off, all to no avail.  The morons were in charge.  Given that it was the opening night of the Festival, I suppose excuses could be made.  But this is not the way a "world class" jazz festival should be run.

Iyer's music is interesting to my ears; he combines both a very cerebral approach to music with a more visceral, populist streak.   I later found out that one of the pieces he performed was a Michael Jackson tune; all I recognized was simplistic harmony; subject to some interesting rhythmic permutations.  

My point here is that actual jazz has now approached the status of classical music in the North America.  Rather than be simply presented to be appreciated on its own merits for both the curious and the well informed, it needs to be hyped up and broadened in its appeal to reach a larger audience. Hence a jazz festival needs to include large chunks of quasi-pop music to attract audiences, just like the Vancouver Symphony having its pops series.  I don't really blame the Vancouver Jazz Festival for that; they have to do what it takes to survive.  (The festival used to be supported generously by the DuMaurier tobacco company; when laws made that impossible, the festival lost a lot of its financial support.)
But that does not mean that we need to be treated like children when we go to a concert...

(This is an old post that I never actually posted....)