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Today I was faced with one of the numberless vicious features of the trade of journalist as practiced in Great Britain. Picture this. Popular music is undergoing one of its periodic revivals. An age of robotic dance beats and overhyped acts suddenly witnesses the success - and I mean the popular success - of genuine class acts such as Norah Jones, Joss Stone and Amy Winehouse. Good quality music is suddenly back on the map. For lack of a term to describe this melodic, expressive new trend - easy labels such as "britpop" having become both useless and discredited - journalists stick on the label "jazz", even though the music of someone like Norah Jones has no more to do with Jazz than it has to do with, say, country, rock, folk, or blues. I suppose it is a convenient label, and at least it signals that something genuinely different is here.
So what happens? A public poisoner - I mean a "journalist" - makes the extraordinary discovery that this is not "jazz" as jazz was intended in the fifties, the experimental days of Art Tatum and "Bird" Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Dear me. And the Pope is Catholic. But this is the veil of stupidity over an agenda of malice; for what the viper... whoops, journalist... in question intended, was that his production company had located an elderly but still vigorous jazzman of the period, and wanted to put the point to him.
What this amounts to, in practice, is an invitation to this gentleman to put down the younger generation of so-called jazz musicians. This is vile on a number of grounds. Firstly, as I said, it is a matter of comparing apples and oranges: to knock down Norah Jones because she does not have the experimental daring of Miles Davis or Art Tatum is not unlike knocking a Shakespeare sonnet for lacking the expansive, intellectual world-grasp of Dante's Comedy.
But worse still, it is to ask a man to do something which is both demeaning and all too tempting. First, most artists know very little about the work of other artists. Novelists rarely read other novelists; painters rarely look at other painters; musicians don't listen to many other musicians. They are always too busy with their own work. If you want a good comprehensive overview of the current status of an artform, do not go to practicing artists; they are usually the last to know what is going on. Go to a good, wide-ranging, well-informed professional critic. And journalists know this: they regularly are staggered, interviewing artists, at their lack of knowledge of what even the journos themselves know. Certainly the journo in question must have known that the likelihood of the old jazzman having anything critically worth while saying, good or bad,`about the new generation of "jazz" singers was fairly low.
The real poison is the way the question was presented: for it was presented in an intrinsically adversary way. It was a matter of "this is what is successful now, and it is not what you and your friends were doing in the grand old days." It would take a quite extraordinary clarity of mind and intellectual virtue to dodge the traps in this approach. For while it calls you to judge something of which, in all likelihood, you know little enough, it does so by treating you as the authority, the elder statesman, the wise old owl with the track record and the legendary past. This is an invitation to indulge one of the senior citizens' favourite vices, "ah, things were better in my day." What is more, the active stimulation comes from the journalist; we do not know that, if the journalist had not turned up with his loaded question, the old musician would have given the matter a second thought. In other words, the journalist has tempted the musician to do something rather shameful which the musician, alone, might never have thought of. And what is the point of this? Merely to create a controversy that will fill column space. Ye Gods.
So what happens? A public poisoner - I mean a "journalist" - makes the extraordinary discovery that this is not "jazz" as jazz was intended in the fifties, the experimental days of Art Tatum and "Bird" Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Dear me. And the Pope is Catholic. But this is the veil of stupidity over an agenda of malice; for what the viper... whoops, journalist... in question intended, was that his production company had located an elderly but still vigorous jazzman of the period, and wanted to put the point to him.
What this amounts to, in practice, is an invitation to this gentleman to put down the younger generation of so-called jazz musicians. This is vile on a number of grounds. Firstly, as I said, it is a matter of comparing apples and oranges: to knock down Norah Jones because she does not have the experimental daring of Miles Davis or Art Tatum is not unlike knocking a Shakespeare sonnet for lacking the expansive, intellectual world-grasp of Dante's Comedy.
But worse still, it is to ask a man to do something which is both demeaning and all too tempting. First, most artists know very little about the work of other artists. Novelists rarely read other novelists; painters rarely look at other painters; musicians don't listen to many other musicians. They are always too busy with their own work. If you want a good comprehensive overview of the current status of an artform, do not go to practicing artists; they are usually the last to know what is going on. Go to a good, wide-ranging, well-informed professional critic. And journalists know this: they regularly are staggered, interviewing artists, at their lack of knowledge of what even the journos themselves know. Certainly the journo in question must have known that the likelihood of the old jazzman having anything critically worth while saying, good or bad,`about the new generation of "jazz" singers was fairly low.
The real poison is the way the question was presented: for it was presented in an intrinsically adversary way. It was a matter of "this is what is successful now, and it is not what you and your friends were doing in the grand old days." It would take a quite extraordinary clarity of mind and intellectual virtue to dodge the traps in this approach. For while it calls you to judge something of which, in all likelihood, you know little enough, it does so by treating you as the authority, the elder statesman, the wise old owl with the track record and the legendary past. This is an invitation to indulge one of the senior citizens' favourite vices, "ah, things were better in my day." What is more, the active stimulation comes from the journalist; we do not know that, if the journalist had not turned up with his loaded question, the old musician would have given the matter a second thought. In other words, the journalist has tempted the musician to do something rather shameful which the musician, alone, might never have thought of. And what is the point of this? Merely to create a controversy that will fill column space. Ye Gods.
