chet wrote:givemenoughrope, there is no universal law that dictates that jazz music is more complex/difficult to play/meaningful/intellectually stimulating than rock music.
There are plenty of jazz pieces that are simple, or without much meaning, or just plain stupid, just like in rock music.
It seems to me -- not a jazz musician, but whatever -- that jazz is much harder to play than rock music is. I'm not disrespecting rock musicians when I say that. Personally, I listen to about equivalent amounts of material from both genres. But just look at someone like Nels Cline, who plays both jazz- and rock-guitar. Way more skilled and versatile than 99% of rock guitarists. Same for John McLaughlin. Or Duane Denison. Jazz musicians *have* to practice ten to twelve hours a day just to get their chops into working order.
Again, I don't think technical skill is the be-all, end-all. Look at Ricky Wilson. His playing just as great as Cline's, in its own unique way. And he didn't even know how to tune his guitar, for Chrissake. That's the sort of off-hand brilliance that jazz today just could never produce in a million years, even if it tried.
But there is something wrong with a system in which Mike Watt has to slave away for little money, while someone like Wynton Marsalis is feted ad nauseam for playing music which is canned, stagnant and uninspired. Like someone was coloring in a coloring book, careful not to bleed his Crayola-spew outside of a handed-down set of lines and curves.
Then again, that's probably why there's so much quality rock music out there right now and such a small amount of interesting jazz being played today. Jazz is almost a dead genre at this point. Whatever auspicious circumstances were able to make it such a towering force in the '40's thru the '70's have been attenuated to such a degree that the lion's share of people who "love jazz" (like myself) haven't even listened to any albums post-Bitches Brew. And there's something real, real wrong w/ a situation like that.
