zabkat support forum

Given that Funk is an offspring of Jazz with Jazz being a classical genre by itself, I wonder if I should be wondering about this categorizing.

Abstract Jazz: Magma, Henry Cow, Herbie Hancock, Peter Brötzmann, Soft Machine... the problem with Jazz is that everything can be Jazz.

And some of those are really lovely.

dunno wrote:Continuum isn't abstract Jazz in a pure sense...

Musicologists have run into trouble for years when they start trying to define the adjectives applied to jazz, never mind defining jazz itself - there's always someone at the back of the class who'll say, "Yeah, but Acid Jazz is really what Avant-Garde was intended to describe once Blue Note and the Contemporary Crossover went Underground."

That's the kid you really just want to punch in his pretentious nose.

Anyway, the "early" Bärtsch more resembles your kind of "delinquent teenagers" stuff.. it can grate on the ears after awhile. He (in my opinion) came into his own when 'Stoa' and 'Holon' laid the groundwork for Continuum. Just wish he would use "real" names for tunes instead of whatever cryptic nomenclature he thinks is hip.

I rather like finding jazz where it otherwise wouldn't really belong... Ludovico Einaudi isn't really the first name to come to mind (given his other work), but every now and then it all just comes together in a really subtle African way.

Along the same lines from Nikos' original list he included a little classic gem of Love is Like a Cigarette (which encapsulates what I meant about "real" song names above) - anyway, everyone should be tied down and forced to listen to that all the way to the end, especially the haunted singing at the end (Julie Wolfe?). It's the most laid-back thing that will really rock your world. Written by Walter Kent (he of "I'll be home for Christmas" fame), it's been covered by everyone from Duke Ellington to K.D. Lang.

Anyway, after I heard the Hanrahan cover, I went looking for other Hanrahan stuff and he proved to be a strange little cookie with his fingers in a great many pies. When I stumbled upon his bossa-nova-esque Beautiful Scars I didn't listen to anything else for a month. Sold. You didn't recommend it directly, and I don't know if it qualifies as Jazz, but thanks Nikos. (Kip is one of the like 12 lads on drums in that video - he never seems to be a frontliner himself.)

Kilmatead,

First, yes I am still around. I just haven't had anything I wanted to contribute.

I checked out your link to Kip's YouTube "beautiful scars". I can understand why you listened to it for a month. Thanks for sharing it. I guess a thanks to Niko is also in order since he started this thread and motivated you to include this song.

drac wrote:...yes I am still around. I just haven't had anything I wanted to contribute.

We finally have one vaguely decent colloquy (by our low standards) about programming, and you don't even have a bit of your usual condescendingly stick-in-the-mud mien to offer the assembly? I mean, come on... You're just not on the ball these days.

And didn't you defect awhile ago to one of Nikos' illustrious competitors? I thought we gave away your parking space to the work-experience lad...

drac wrote:I can understand why you listened to it for a month.

Truth be told, I'm more of a classical music buff, so I'm just slumming it in this thread (isn't "American Art Form" just another oxymoronic malapropism waiting to happen?)... no one wants to hear me prattle on about Bartok's "serious music" contradistinctions within Beethoven's Late Quartets, so I'm just prancing around in my populist guise at the moment (but don't tell anyone). Every now and then we need to pull out pages from our "So you're a closet aristocrat and want to survive the Révolution française?" primers. <cough>

Damn good rhythm in that song though. (Reminiscent of Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey and his Inter-Reformers Band. Jesus, what a name. They just don't make 'em like that any more.)

(And yes, there might be a tad bit o' the old jokin' and joshin' goin' on in this post. But don't tell anyone that either. We have reputations to maintain. Harrumph.)

The links posted here do not sound like Abstract Jazz to me, they're just great Jazz. and before anyone accuses me of trying to reinvent or of re-categorising music, I did qualify my perception of Abstract Jazz. nice "Jazz Stuff" posted above.

Abdullah Ibrahim Popular Jazz with a African twist
Marianne Faithfull yep, she's still got it.
Liquid Tension Experiment
Tom Waits
Freddie Hubbard
Nynke Laverman Portuguese fado by a Dutch Frieslander.
Frank Zappa American art at it's best
Afroman
Adam Sandler
Venus Hum

I don't think we are overlapping with any of you guys
personally I find songs (with lyrics) rather pointless or better, not quite the music I have in mind. The less words the merrier. And you cannot do any work with someone distracting your ears with messages of one sort or another.

Ah, Tom Waits. Jazz? In a way, but from a different perspective.

nikos wrote:personally I find songs (with lyrics) rather pointless

Voice is a instrument, which can convey meaning through note AND word thereby enhancing the theme of the music, invoking additional feelings in the listener.

Lou Reed - The Raven without words, nah....
And in greek, Harris Alexiou trumps any male greek singer, understand the lyrics, no need

George Leach

(Nikos, why didn't you list your selections alphabetically ?) :>dir /s/o/b/a-z >.txt) *dunno runs for the hills*

nikos wrote:I don't think we are overlapping with any of you guys
personally I find songs (with lyrics) rather pointless or better, not quite the music I have in mind. The less words the merrier. And you cannot do any work with someone distracting your ears with messages of one sort or another.

If you can listen to Paul Potts' performance of Ava Maria on Britain's Got Talent without tearing up then I'm not sure you have an appreciation for truly wonderful audio performances. As dunno said, voice is an instrument too.

pj wrote:...on Britain's Got Talent...

Whatever happened to that "glandularly-challenged" kid from that show? There seems to be a few of them hiding in the British woodwork.

nikos wrote:personally I find songs (with lyrics) rather pointless or better... not quite the music I have in mind

You probably didn't have it in mind to dig your own grave either, but there you go. You should know by now it's impossible to control your own threads, especially when you stick your foot in it like that.

Kilmatead wrote:

nikos wrote:personally I find songs (with lyrics) rather pointless or better... not quite the music I have in mind

You probably didn't have it in mind to dig your own grave either, but there you go. You should know by now it's impossible to control your own threads, especially when you stick your foot in it like that.

My love for Dylan and Waits and Joni Mitchell aside, I'm sympathetic to the idea that lyrics are a disappointment. Most are terrible and simply fulfill genre requirements. Zappa, though he clearly enjoyed writing them, felt that lyrics exist for those who need them. By the way, can we all agree that rock is dead?

Brig wrote:By the way, can we all agree that rock is dead?

Doesn't Mick Jagger have to keel over first? Granted they haven't released a decent album in well over 40 years (and it's questionable whether any of those were "rock" anyway), but through sheer force of will alone his continued physicality boggles the mind and qualifies as at least a minor criterion (of many) towards that decree.

While the Stones are not really alive anymore (at least they don't look like they were), Rock itself is having his second coming; or the third, after the 70s? Some of these modern bands are fishing in old waters, but they do it damn good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu31ZoY75rQ

Brig wrote:I'm sympathetic to the idea that lyrics are a disappointment. Most are terrible and simply fulfill genre requirements.

Anhedonia comes to mind Rolling Stones

Brig wrote: can we all agree that rock is dead?

Its exhausted, but not dead, Keith Richards is still snorting everything in sight. Trance, House, chill, were exhausted quicker than "Muzak" was, let alone rock.

New music, or a incremental variation of something previous has a short lifespan. If you think that western music is dead, try Indian music, as in the 1.3billion people country, now there's a different kettle of strings, and please come back to me and explain to me why 1.3 billion people love that music and you don't, heck they even have their own octave system, how different can one get. That music died after day one. One group successfully fused Indian and Western, Led Zeppelin.
I'm waiting for some genius to plagiarise, err sorry, fuse Punk with Country and Eastern (Indian).

Without words Traditional Japanese music might be your thang, I wonder where trance and chill got their ideas from ?

For Anhedonia and the sceptical of classical Vivaldi Rinaldo Alessandrini

Tuxman wrote:Some of these modern bands are fishing in old waters, but they do it damn good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu31ZoY75rQ

The originals are still around Led Zeppelin