Charles Mingus once said something to Ellington, and I’m paraphrasing: Duke, let’s get together and do something avant-garde. Ellington responded: Come on, Charles, let’s not go back that far ~~~
The avant-grade “resistance” is now the establishment. They are fully owned by institutional power like the government, mainstream media, big tech, NGOs, and academia. The MacArthur Genius grants are another example of leftist subversion patronage networks: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/macarthur-fellowship-leftist-patronage-network
I'm nervous of culturul discussions going to quickly to politcs. But I have a question I've been pondering for a while. Jonathan haidt says "It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable."
But when "liberals" have institutional power, as you say, they become a kind of "conservative"as they want to preserve the status quo. Doesn't this lead to conservatism being Avant-garde? Is that why modern expressions of conservativtism seem so different to to our traditional image?
There are different kinds of openness to experience. Stephen Brooks in his book on Texas, Honkytonk Gelato, pointed out that Texans have a high tolerance for the bizarre but little tolerance for the exotic.
Liberals tend to be more open, but power attracts the kinds of people who are more interested in power for its sake. Since it is ostensibly "liberal" institutions that are in the ascendent, they have gradually been taken over and corrupted by those who are ambitious, who seek power and wealth, more than they are liberal.
Every liberal grant has to be tied to a cultural experience. They are not really open to new ideas unless they can tie it to a suppressed community. It's all political. (Cecil and Ornette and Threadgill definitely deserve their sponsorship, to be clear. And Taylor wanted a grant for Andrew Cyrille, his drummer, in the 1960's. Grants are equivalent to mainstream acceptance is essentially a false correlation.Taylor and more than a few artists had and have teaching positions. Braxton and Frith are not commonly recognized names outside of the new music world, still. Some Europeans, like the late Willem Breuker, had quite a few grants in the Netherlands. Grants usually mean that you can be struggling getting airplay.) There has been a rush from dissonance, exacerbated by the dominance of minimalism, techno, industrial, which have been popularized and incorporated into popular culture.
Liberals have turned into finger-wagging moralists so smug and dour that they make The Church Lady look like Lenny Bruce by comparison.
Meanwhile, the pranksters, the rule-breakers, the subversives, the Tellers Of Forbidden Truths, are found on the alt-right, and the Dirtbag Left.
This is not because of any inherent liberal censoriousness or conservative love of truth, but is an artifact of their respective relationships to power.
Funny my observation is different from Haidt’s - most liberals I know think they “crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel” but they are copying what everyone else does. So when they respond to surveys they say what they think they are.
The trouble with being 'open to experience' is that some experience can kill you,or even worse mean you have to live the rest of your life socially dead. In the REAL world.
That is to be expected if you are really “avant garde” or the vanguard for new, unexplored territory. I can’t claim to have this appetite myself (other than vicariously), but I suspect that for the true avant garde, the risk—whether physical or social—is part of the allure.
Art Buchwald, the humorist political columnist, had a good piece on this and rock music back in the 1960s. Milos Forman, the Czech director, also did something like this in Taking Off.
If I remember correctly, Art Buchwald had a rock musician who sold out the counterculture to go platinum. There was a real fear of the counterculture, but the idea of the essay was that all it took was money.
Milos Forman had parents searching the depths of the underground for their runaway daughter, trying to save their marriage and finally being reconciled with each other and their daughter when she turns up with a well off music promoter. (I suppose this could be an inversion of the theme.)
Being co-opted was a common theme in the late 1960s. That was a point in the movie Where It's At. There it was the counterculture son of a casino owner. Dad wasn't happy with his son's lifestyle, but his son shows him by taking over the casino.
Got it… when I took up guitar at 16 my parents were hesitant to support this overtly, it was associated with drug use and overdoses. When I was able to competently perform a melody/ chord version of “Days of Wine and Roses” the pursuit became a bit more acceptable for some reason
Around the time of the Occupy movement lots of media commenters made fun of teen anti-capitalist protesters wearing all the latest branded clothing,and when they encamped outside St Paul's Cathedral the journos told us with glee,how the local McDonalds was raking it in as they all got their lunch there!
Ted, I am one of the founders of a little organization called the Spirit of the Rovers Supporters Trust. This is a trust that represents 440 owners of a small third tier soccer club in Canada called TSS Rovers. We have just finished our short season in British Columbia League 1, where our men's team managed to win a league and a playoff championship. In creating this club, our founders and our community owners repeatedly say that "What we are doing is community and relationship, and the football comes along for the ride." Our group of active and vocal supporters, who create chants and banners and pop smoke canisters when we score have a mantra of "Assume your talents are needed, proceed until apprehended." We have a banner that reads "TSS Rovers: Punk Football" Now, what does a small Canadian soccer club have to do with the avant-garde? We are engaged in a project to reclaim experiences of community from the social dynamics you talk about here. We are not interested in becoming a big corporate concern or a major league team. We are owned by community, and we co-create community and story with our players and fans and rivals and friends. Anyone who comes to our games or figures out what we are doing tells us "this is the future of Canadian soccer." And thus, avant garde in our own little way. Perhaps the avant-garde of my youth was about tension with no release, tearing down the oppressive structures of modernism without caring what happened next. But the avant garde now I think can be a defiant resistance of the segmentation, corporate ownership, virtual time-sucking and algorithm-derived culture that we are soaking in. We cleave open spaces for the authentic experience of unpredictability, community, ownership and love. Look there. Look to the scenes that are actually giving people stability and relationship and meaning in a world where corporate nihilism segments and dictates taste. The capitalists have appropriated "don't give a fuckery" and so let them have it. Care about something, not for likes and views, but because the real world of experience is a worthy pursuit in itself. At the moment I think that's our avant garde.
Avant-garde hasn't disappeared, but its meaning -- and sound -- has morphed, at least in music: less world-building, more incremental and development of new angles on what Mr. Moore refers to below as "common practice." In the jazz/jazz-adjacent arena, John Zorn, Tim Berne and Steve Coleman didn't rely on grants or sinecures. Nor did the AACM members during the first half of their careers. Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano and Dave Holland remain road warriors in their 70s. I'd posit Wynton Marsalis' oratorio "Ever Fonky Lowdown" as 21st century avant-garde -- I've never heard anything like it for sure. I disagree with Lucy Sante that big cities are ipso facto too expensive to sustain a scene. Younger practitioners like Kevin Sun work day jobs to meet big city rent, while continuing to compose, perform, and in Sun's case, run a label that documents the Brooklyn community in which he operates.
Wynton Marsalis is a poseur whose music has no content worth listening to. Anthony Davis is wonderful and the Art Ensemble was a great experience. I loved Sam Rivers and Cecil Taylor. I took Lucy Sante to an out jazz performance; his only comment was that it was going so fast. I have no idea what he thought, however. Bill Frissell is for real but Joe Lovano has turned into a disappointment. He was great at the Coltrane anniversary at the Blue Note but after that he rarely got started. The George Adams-Don Pullen quartet with Dannie Richmond and Cameron Brown was like a blues band: tight as a knot. They were always exciting. On the other hand I used to love David Murray but James "Blood" Ulmer was nothing but noise
I'm not sure I understand your point. The opinions and feelings that you express mostly reference music of the previous century, and a lot of critical cliches of the period, particularly "Marsalis as poseur." I'll await your opinion on "Ever Fonky Lowdown." Agree on Anthony Davis, whose opera "X", which was first performed in 1985, made a huge impact when finally staged last year at the Met. Sorry Lovano is a "disappointment" for you, but the point isn't whether what he does is to your taste, but that he continues to find new "streams of expression," as he puts it, without grants or the kind of support that Ted Gioia is talking about in this article. He and Frisell and Dave Holland all continue to be grass roots practitioners. Unfortunately, George Adams and Don Pullen and Dannie Richmond are no longer with us, and we can't see what their development would have been. And Lucy Sante's opinions about out jazz or avant-garde jazz, whatever you want to call it, are immaterial -- no disrespect to them, as I've learned from their work, but they were involved in the visual arts specifically, where the notion of "avant-garde" meant something very different than in the realm of jazz and improvised music.
Great to see you here - the other Ted. Been following you for decades. I’m struck that Julian Lage, who’s mainstream - he filled Town Hall in NY a few months ago - plays with the likes John Zorn and Kris Davis. (She sounds avante garde to my amateur ear). She played in his band in his packed house performance - did her avante garde thing. He played on her Diatom Ribbons with its paean to Cecil Taylor. I wonder what a real jazz expert would make of this. Everything’s getting incorporated, lines blurring?
I often think that the music Warp put out in the 90s—Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher et al was pretty avant-garde but because it was positioned as dance music it doesn’t always get recognised as such. Today Aphex Twin just retreads old themes but Autechre grew more bizarre while Squarepusher will alternate between weird compositions for organ and music written on software he designed himself.
I was thinking about Aphex Twin too (although I disagree he’s retreading old themes today - I saw his performance last year at Field Day and it absolutely blew my mind) he’s an artist in the true sense, doesn’t care if anyone listens to his music, and concentrates on making it for his own experiments - if others like it, that’s a side effect.
"An avant-garde needs a scene, and the cities are too expensive for scenes now. An avant-garde needs an excess of time, and that’s in short supply nearly everywhere."
Perhaps that's why so many cool music scenes happened in the Midwest (Cincinnati, Akron, Ann Arbor), places where it is cheaper to live. The ONCE Festival came out of Michigan, and it still echoes all these decades later, at least for some of us.
yes!! so many great bands came out of Akron, OH. I also think about the emergence of punk bands/Nirvana/the movement out of the Pacific NW as well where it was much more affordable to live.
"Everything changes but the avant-garde," French poet Paul Valery said almost a hundred years ago. Times certainly haven't changed. If you set out to shake up the mainstream, it's going to smell like it (at least most of the time), thus defeating your intention. Shaking things up has to come from another place, has to be grounded in something. Wallace Stevens said too much imagination doesn't work, and too much reality doesn't either. The two have to work together in order to shake things up.
Money drives the global art scene and global art scenes cripple local ones. Art without money behind it is outsider art, which is only recognized by academics. You can write a thesis about an outsider and get more recognition than the artist.
The High Museum in Atlanta has an extensive collection of outsider art that it's still building on, based on genuine aesthetic appreciation, not "academics."
There is an interesting Sorelle Amore you tube video in which she describes in detail the process by which Art gets taken up by the extremely wealthy and turned into a bankable commodity. It's clever,it's complex, and the chosen artist doesn't even have to be any good at art ie like D.Hirst,or even create the art object himself,there are places in Italy or China that will turn out your scripture or painting for you.
My neighborhood in Ohio is being overrun with Californians. Many friendly. Some with music studios they brought with them after retiring from the entertainment business. I expect the trend to continue, here and elsewhere in the great Midwest - an area poised for a rust belt renaissance.
I think it is inevitable. A cousin of mine who has been a design and photography teacher in CA for a long time, while doing his own fine art and industrial music on the side, is planning to move back to the area. Of course the people moving here or moving back are part of what is driving up the cost of living, homes & property taxes especially, but it is still much cheaper and the quality of life here is great, as in much else of the Midwest. People are starting to realize that, and the fact they can build a life of their own here, even one centered in the arts and humanities.
Artist-y type people are annoying but they revive run down areas and get them vibrant and alive again,only downside is the dumb losers who lived there when it was grim and rundown have to move somewhere else.
Yes It can happen elsewhere! NY is about there. But as the comments suggest the revival is happening in the Midwest and other areas where houses are cheaper. Asheville Has a vibrant art and music Scene and some of it is pretty out there. Same with Minneapolis. I saw a band called The Nunnery that was pretty unique and sounded incredible. A one woman show. She had a unique approach, or should I say and old one, to success. Free shows then she sold CD’s and T-shirts. Classic but different in the terms and conditions of today’s music.
Perhaps avant garde in the traditional sense is just no longer possible. Once you accept pure noise as music on one of the spectrum and silence on the other is even possible to push artistic boundaries in the same way that Stravinsky did with his 'Rites of Spring' or Coltrane and Ornette Coleman did in 60s? Once you've accept Pollack's splatters or a minimalist color field as an image is it possible to shock anyone?
Agree. As Ted notes above, noise may be universal but it doesn't communicate much, if anything. There has to be some context, something to compare the noise against.
If we'd asked 100 average people 100 years ago what makes up music, the three common denominators might have been melody, harmony, and rhythm. It seems the avante-garde deconstructed all three a long time ago.
We only needed the most fragile amount of any of them to consider a thing "music." Once it's totally deconstructed..then what? The gap between organized/traditional music and noise is wide but not particularly deep. More and different noise is--at the end of the day--still noise.
I attended a noise-jazz show years ago, and the most shocking thing about it was how un-shocking it was. Perhaps it was more shocking 60 years ago? Maybe they were trying to deliver a meta-commentary? I don't think so; they were pretty serious. It was definitely an "emperor's new clothes" moment.
Absolutely*. But when their music first came out they were very much in the avant garde in the sense that they were pushing boundaries in a way that just isn't possible today since there are no boundaries.
* There's room for argument with Coltrane's post-quartet work.
I had a similar thought, though the tendency for all the young old timey musicians to cosplay in depression era clothing drives me a little nuts and undermines claims to their being uncontrived.
Playing real music of any genre with the goal of expressing an idea or emotion rather than making a product may not be avant garde but it's certainly countercultural.
Anyway smart,clever young men and women who enjoy complexity now do computer coding. I bet if Mozart had been born in 1980 he'd have latched on to computer coding. The avsnt-garde isn't in music any more,it's in digital work and it's VERY DANGEROUS for us.
There's lots of us who do both. I'd rather spend my time playing music rather than writing code but I just can't give up those little luxuries like rent and groceries.
The computer industry is an interesting place with a lot of interesting people. Or at least it was back in the day before big money was involved. There's a great book called "What the Doormouse Said" which discusses the early history personal computers in SF and the cross over between the research labs, the Berkeley Free Speech movement, and the rest of the 60s counterculture.
But, too often, the rules that are broken are all the same rules, and they're all broken in the same way. How many avant-garde art pieces strike at traditional or conservative mores? If you're self-consciously avant-garde, you're probably playing to a stereotype of the avant-garde. That's boring.
To my mind, a song like Jermaine Stewart's 1986 pop hit "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off" is more avant than a lot of self-consciously avant-garde stuff. It's an unabashedly exuberant song that unironically praises erotic subtlety and discretion. Lots to savor there.
But there's another layer that makes it truly enthralling: Stewart was queer and publicly owned his queerness, adopting many of the queer signifiers in dress and manner. But instead of singing about how oppressive traditional sexual mores are — as too many self-styled rebels do — he embraces the beauty of traditional courtship. He's shattering the stereotype of queer culture as a lurid rebellion against sexual restraint.
Now that was something genuinely fresh. Kinda still is.
It's sounds a lot like what they call model collapse in training artificial intelligence systems on their own output. At first, the avant garde had artistic conventions to absorb and push against, but pushing against the avant garde gets one hash or perhaps rehash.
To locate the contemporary avant garde, or at least one manifestation of it, perhaps you should shift your focus away from its traditional strongholds. Possibly the most electrifying performance I've ever witnessed was Aaron Dilloway and Victoria Shen (noise musicians from Ohio and the bay area, respectively) on a shared bill earlier this year in St Louis. St Louis and other cities in the midwest / rust belt are home to thriving, highly localized noise and free improv scenes that operate almost entirely outside of the mainstream culture industry.
Exactly. I'm a native Ohioan and noise music is perhaps in my blood, as I came up under a very strong scene here in Cincinnati grounded by the folks behind the Art Damage radio show (which I later participated in). So much talk of the arts presumes people are living on the coasts when there is this whole country in between those places. I have been to a couple noise / improv shows here in the past year and your point still stands. The difference between here and what our host is talking about, is that the shows in the Midwest are mostly self-organized and outside of places any art grant would touch, for the most part. The audience might be as small, but its mostly middle-class people and kids, not anyone bought and paid for by the 300 art dealers. That said, it might also exhibit some of the same issues as the punk scene that Annie mentioned above, in that, it can be insular and somewhat dogmatic in what is considered part of the noise / improv genre. My taste for harsh noise is low. I only put a Merzbow record on when I have guests at the house who need to leave. But still, I think there is something to the actual landscape here in the Midwest that makes this music appealing. Even popular post-industrial musicians like Trent Reznor came from Pennsylvania, moved to Cleveland where he rubbed elbows with people in the same scene as Pere Ubu.
Thanks Justin.... and, please forgive me for not mentioning this earlier, but, speaking of Pennsylvania, I hope that the foil to the argument of the present essay may be found in Everett PA next weekend..... actually, beginning on Thursday, at the Voice of the Valley Noise Rally.... https://voiceofthevalley.net/
Thanks for this Ron! The Voice of the Valley sounds like a fascinating time. I see that there are about twelve bands from Ohio (and others from Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia). Noise is alive! I hope your set on Friday goes well, and would love to hear a report of the festival.
I always liked Sun Ra's music. He and his soloists could (emphasis on "could") play both inside or outside. They could go from surfing the waves on Saturn, stop on a dime, and play like the Fletcher Henderson band. Sun Ra incorporated the history of Afro-American music into his performances. Sometimes even within a single performance. Listening to their music you get a full sense of the avant-garde through the expansion of the tradition, instead of playing loud and making noise.
Thank you! I grew up in the 80s where rebellion in art and music was invigorating and inspiring. I lucked out when I transfer to NTSU (now the University of North Texas in Denton, TX). I was assigned to live in Bruce Hall which at that time was home to musicians (and many visual artists like myself) totally entrenched in the Jazz Studies programs. It was surreal, thought-provoking, loud, and one of the most influential times in my life. Where else could you enter the cafeteria and see musicians playing concertos using perfectly-tuned glasses of water as their instruments? There was no AC and that meant everyone had to leave their windows open and rely on box fans for relief from the stifling heat. Everyday was like living in a Zapa-topia with musicians of all kinds practicing their art at the same time-multiple time signatures, different genres, every instrument. It was AWESOME.
My grandfather and grandmother met each other in Vaudeville. My grandmother a singer and dancer and my grandfather a jazz saxophone and clarinet player with a love of Big Band and Dixieland. I hadn't been trained in music yet I LOVED music. The 80s were an exciting time. I was a visual artist (designer, illustrator and painter) and the "Brucelings" were my people. It WAS the home of the Avant-Garde.
Your article brought back so many memories and reminded me of a time when art and music were exciting. I'm a 60 year old man now, married with grown kids. I became a graphic designer to support my family and when this World Wide Web thing showed up I jumped on the bandwagon and have spent the last year collaborating with others to create the profession of UX Design. To nurture my insanity I kept painting in my off hours, showing in low-budget galleries, creating abstract art originally inspired by my love of music and Jazz. Bop sang the music of my soul as well as punk, alternative, and experimental music.
From an art perspective, I was highly influenced by The Futurists, their manifestos, Dada for their daring, and folk art for the naivete. The Art of Noises by Luigi Russolo was life changing and the Futurist Manifestos are still sitting in a prominent placement on the shelf by my desk; Ornette Coleman's Tone Dialing on regular cycles on my turntable; and of course Bop Essentials the background of my studio.
Thank you for reminding me that it was time to again seek out my people and return to the tribe of the Avant-Garde.
Thinking about the relationship between avant-guarde artists and patrons. Didn't the early impressionists rely on certain patrons who purchased their art and kept them active in the pursuit of their dreams? Who are those kinds of patrons today? Perhaps they are not the 300 you mention in the post but who might they be?
It may be of interest to see what characterized those who supported he Impressionists vs. the majority of patrons who sponsored those painting in traditional genres.
Cardiff City Museum and Art Gallery in Wales UK has got a fabulous lot of Impressionist Art,all the big names Monet,Morisot etc. This is because two extremely wealthy spinster sisters got into collecting Art after their Fathers death freed them up to live how they wanted. Their vast fortune came from industry,not sure if it was coal or other,but all interlinked anyway. They were regular subscribers to Monets art dealer and often got first pick of anything going. In WW1 they made their mansion home into a hospital and learned to be nurses,and were good at it. By all accounts they were nice people. BUT in reality,if you join up the dots all those "free spirits" (as Paul MacCartney wrote "I don't care too much for money" (I'm worth £700million)were funded by miners in South Wales earning the most meagre wage going and when they struck for just a few pence a week more our Mr Churchill wanted to send the army in to shoot them. But they wouldn't let him. Duh.
Charles Mingus once said something to Ellington, and I’m paraphrasing: Duke, let’s get together and do something avant-garde. Ellington responded: Come on, Charles, let’s not go back that far ~~~
Amazing quote, was that conversation the origin of Money Jungle, I love that album.
Duke for the win!
That's so funny (+ witty)
Great!
The avant-grade “resistance” is now the establishment. They are fully owned by institutional power like the government, mainstream media, big tech, NGOs, and academia. The MacArthur Genius grants are another example of leftist subversion patronage networks: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/macarthur-fellowship-leftist-patronage-network
I'm nervous of culturul discussions going to quickly to politcs. But I have a question I've been pondering for a while. Jonathan haidt says "It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable."
But when "liberals" have institutional power, as you say, they become a kind of "conservative"as they want to preserve the status quo. Doesn't this lead to conservatism being Avant-garde? Is that why modern expressions of conservativtism seem so different to to our traditional image?
There are different kinds of openness to experience. Stephen Brooks in his book on Texas, Honkytonk Gelato, pointed out that Texans have a high tolerance for the bizarre but little tolerance for the exotic.
Liberals tend to be more open, but power attracts the kinds of people who are more interested in power for its sake. Since it is ostensibly "liberal" institutions that are in the ascendent, they have gradually been taken over and corrupted by those who are ambitious, who seek power and wealth, more than they are liberal.
Every liberal grant has to be tied to a cultural experience. They are not really open to new ideas unless they can tie it to a suppressed community. It's all political. (Cecil and Ornette and Threadgill definitely deserve their sponsorship, to be clear. And Taylor wanted a grant for Andrew Cyrille, his drummer, in the 1960's. Grants are equivalent to mainstream acceptance is essentially a false correlation.Taylor and more than a few artists had and have teaching positions. Braxton and Frith are not commonly recognized names outside of the new music world, still. Some Europeans, like the late Willem Breuker, had quite a few grants in the Netherlands. Grants usually mean that you can be struggling getting airplay.) There has been a rush from dissonance, exacerbated by the dominance of minimalism, techno, industrial, which have been popularized and incorporated into popular culture.
Liberals have turned into finger-wagging moralists so smug and dour that they make The Church Lady look like Lenny Bruce by comparison.
Meanwhile, the pranksters, the rule-breakers, the subversives, the Tellers Of Forbidden Truths, are found on the alt-right, and the Dirtbag Left.
This is not because of any inherent liberal censoriousness or conservative love of truth, but is an artifact of their respective relationships to power.
Funny my observation is different from Haidt’s - most liberals I know think they “crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel” but they are copying what everyone else does. So when they respond to surveys they say what they think they are.
Haidt hates Dylan. He has no credibility.
Dylan or Haidt have no credibility?
The trouble with being 'open to experience' is that some experience can kill you,or even worse mean you have to live the rest of your life socially dead. In the REAL world.
That's why a healthy society has a balance of different personality types who respect one another. Some to innovate, some to conserve.
That is to be expected if you are really “avant garde” or the vanguard for new, unexplored territory. I can’t claim to have this appetite myself (other than vicariously), but I suspect that for the true avant garde, the risk—whether physical or social—is part of the allure.
If the Establishment is good at nothing else, they are very good at identifying whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
Art Buchwald, the humorist political columnist, had a good piece on this and rock music back in the 1960s. Milos Forman, the Czech director, also did something like this in Taking Off.
A synopsis?
If I remember correctly, Art Buchwald had a rock musician who sold out the counterculture to go platinum. There was a real fear of the counterculture, but the idea of the essay was that all it took was money.
Milos Forman had parents searching the depths of the underground for their runaway daughter, trying to save their marriage and finally being reconciled with each other and their daughter when she turns up with a well off music promoter. (I suppose this could be an inversion of the theme.)
Being co-opted was a common theme in the late 1960s. That was a point in the movie Where It's At. There it was the counterculture son of a casino owner. Dad wasn't happy with his son's lifestyle, but his son shows him by taking over the casino.
Got it… when I took up guitar at 16 my parents were hesitant to support this overtly, it was associated with drug use and overdoses. When I was able to competently perform a melody/ chord version of “Days of Wine and Roses” the pursuit became a bit more acceptable for some reason
Around the time of the Occupy movement lots of media commenters made fun of teen anti-capitalist protesters wearing all the latest branded clothing,and when they encamped outside St Paul's Cathedral the journos told us with glee,how the local McDonalds was raking it in as they all got their lunch there!
Ted, I am one of the founders of a little organization called the Spirit of the Rovers Supporters Trust. This is a trust that represents 440 owners of a small third tier soccer club in Canada called TSS Rovers. We have just finished our short season in British Columbia League 1, where our men's team managed to win a league and a playoff championship. In creating this club, our founders and our community owners repeatedly say that "What we are doing is community and relationship, and the football comes along for the ride." Our group of active and vocal supporters, who create chants and banners and pop smoke canisters when we score have a mantra of "Assume your talents are needed, proceed until apprehended." We have a banner that reads "TSS Rovers: Punk Football" Now, what does a small Canadian soccer club have to do with the avant-garde? We are engaged in a project to reclaim experiences of community from the social dynamics you talk about here. We are not interested in becoming a big corporate concern or a major league team. We are owned by community, and we co-create community and story with our players and fans and rivals and friends. Anyone who comes to our games or figures out what we are doing tells us "this is the future of Canadian soccer." And thus, avant garde in our own little way. Perhaps the avant-garde of my youth was about tension with no release, tearing down the oppressive structures of modernism without caring what happened next. But the avant garde now I think can be a defiant resistance of the segmentation, corporate ownership, virtual time-sucking and algorithm-derived culture that we are soaking in. We cleave open spaces for the authentic experience of unpredictability, community, ownership and love. Look there. Look to the scenes that are actually giving people stability and relationship and meaning in a world where corporate nihilism segments and dictates taste. The capitalists have appropriated "don't give a fuckery" and so let them have it. Care about something, not for likes and views, but because the real world of experience is a worthy pursuit in itself. At the moment I think that's our avant garde.
Christ I love you
Avant-garde hasn't disappeared, but its meaning -- and sound -- has morphed, at least in music: less world-building, more incremental and development of new angles on what Mr. Moore refers to below as "common practice." In the jazz/jazz-adjacent arena, John Zorn, Tim Berne and Steve Coleman didn't rely on grants or sinecures. Nor did the AACM members during the first half of their careers. Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano and Dave Holland remain road warriors in their 70s. I'd posit Wynton Marsalis' oratorio "Ever Fonky Lowdown" as 21st century avant-garde -- I've never heard anything like it for sure. I disagree with Lucy Sante that big cities are ipso facto too expensive to sustain a scene. Younger practitioners like Kevin Sun work day jobs to meet big city rent, while continuing to compose, perform, and in Sun's case, run a label that documents the Brooklyn community in which he operates.
Ted P you've been aware and part of the scene for decades so I really respect what you're saying here.
Wynton Marsalis is a poseur whose music has no content worth listening to. Anthony Davis is wonderful and the Art Ensemble was a great experience. I loved Sam Rivers and Cecil Taylor. I took Lucy Sante to an out jazz performance; his only comment was that it was going so fast. I have no idea what he thought, however. Bill Frissell is for real but Joe Lovano has turned into a disappointment. He was great at the Coltrane anniversary at the Blue Note but after that he rarely got started. The George Adams-Don Pullen quartet with Dannie Richmond and Cameron Brown was like a blues band: tight as a knot. They were always exciting. On the other hand I used to love David Murray but James "Blood" Ulmer was nothing but noise
I'm not sure I understand your point. The opinions and feelings that you express mostly reference music of the previous century, and a lot of critical cliches of the period, particularly "Marsalis as poseur." I'll await your opinion on "Ever Fonky Lowdown." Agree on Anthony Davis, whose opera "X", which was first performed in 1985, made a huge impact when finally staged last year at the Met. Sorry Lovano is a "disappointment" for you, but the point isn't whether what he does is to your taste, but that he continues to find new "streams of expression," as he puts it, without grants or the kind of support that Ted Gioia is talking about in this article. He and Frisell and Dave Holland all continue to be grass roots practitioners. Unfortunately, George Adams and Don Pullen and Dannie Richmond are no longer with us, and we can't see what their development would have been. And Lucy Sante's opinions about out jazz or avant-garde jazz, whatever you want to call it, are immaterial -- no disrespect to them, as I've learned from their work, but they were involved in the visual arts specifically, where the notion of "avant-garde" meant something very different than in the realm of jazz and improvised music.
Great to see you here - the other Ted. Been following you for decades. I’m struck that Julian Lage, who’s mainstream - he filled Town Hall in NY a few months ago - plays with the likes John Zorn and Kris Davis. (She sounds avante garde to my amateur ear). She played in his band in his packed house performance - did her avante garde thing. He played on her Diatom Ribbons with its paean to Cecil Taylor. I wonder what a real jazz expert would make of this. Everything’s getting incorporated, lines blurring?
I often think that the music Warp put out in the 90s—Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher et al was pretty avant-garde but because it was positioned as dance music it doesn’t always get recognised as such. Today Aphex Twin just retreads old themes but Autechre grew more bizarre while Squarepusher will alternate between weird compositions for organ and music written on software he designed himself.
I was thinking about Aphex Twin too (although I disagree he’s retreading old themes today - I saw his performance last year at Field Day and it absolutely blew my mind) he’s an artist in the true sense, doesn’t care if anyone listens to his music, and concentrates on making it for his own experiments - if others like it, that’s a side effect.
Very good point!
"An avant-garde needs a scene, and the cities are too expensive for scenes now. An avant-garde needs an excess of time, and that’s in short supply nearly everywhere."
Perhaps that's why so many cool music scenes happened in the Midwest (Cincinnati, Akron, Ann Arbor), places where it is cheaper to live. The ONCE Festival came out of Michigan, and it still echoes all these decades later, at least for some of us.
yes!! so many great bands came out of Akron, OH. I also think about the emergence of punk bands/Nirvana/the movement out of the Pacific NW as well where it was much more affordable to live.
"Everything changes but the avant-garde," French poet Paul Valery said almost a hundred years ago. Times certainly haven't changed. If you set out to shake up the mainstream, it's going to smell like it (at least most of the time), thus defeating your intention. Shaking things up has to come from another place, has to be grounded in something. Wallace Stevens said too much imagination doesn't work, and too much reality doesn't either. The two have to work together in order to shake things up.
www.jim-frazee.com
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Back in the early sixties, composer Charles Wuorinen said “How can you have a revolution when the revolution before last said ‘anything goes’?”
That is vastly more succinct than my own contribution on this subject. Thank you.
Money drives the global art scene and global art scenes cripple local ones. Art without money behind it is outsider art, which is only recognized by academics. You can write a thesis about an outsider and get more recognition than the artist.
The High Museum in Atlanta has an extensive collection of outsider art that it's still building on, based on genuine aesthetic appreciation, not "academics."
All art museums are by nature, academic institutions.
There is an interesting Sorelle Amore you tube video in which she describes in detail the process by which Art gets taken up by the extremely wealthy and turned into a bankable commodity. It's clever,it's complex, and the chosen artist doesn't even have to be any good at art ie like D.Hirst,or even create the art object himself,there are places in Italy or China that will turn out your scripture or painting for you.
"An avant-garde needs a scene, and the cities are too expensive for scenes now." Right on, Lucy Sante.
My neighborhood in Ohio is being overrun with Californians. Many friendly. Some with music studios they brought with them after retiring from the entertainment business. I expect the trend to continue, here and elsewhere in the great Midwest - an area poised for a rust belt renaissance.
Fellow Ohioan here. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? Enjoyed reading your thoughts.
I think it is inevitable. A cousin of mine who has been a design and photography teacher in CA for a long time, while doing his own fine art and industrial music on the side, is planning to move back to the area. Of course the people moving here or moving back are part of what is driving up the cost of living, homes & property taxes especially, but it is still much cheaper and the quality of life here is great, as in much else of the Midwest. People are starting to realize that, and the fact they can build a life of their own here, even one centered in the arts and humanities.
Artist-y type people are annoying but they revive run down areas and get them vibrant and alive again,only downside is the dumb losers who lived there when it was grim and rundown have to move somewhere else.
What neighborhood are you in? I am noticing this with film as well.
SO true I watched it kill the Bay Area and drain its lifeblood
That's really sad. San Francisco and Oakland have historically been cities with very vibrant literary and musical scenes. If it happened to them..
Yes It can happen elsewhere! NY is about there. But as the comments suggest the revival is happening in the Midwest and other areas where houses are cheaper. Asheville Has a vibrant art and music Scene and some of it is pretty out there. Same with Minneapolis. I saw a band called The Nunnery that was pretty unique and sounded incredible. A one woman show. She had a unique approach, or should I say and old one, to success. Free shows then she sold CD’s and T-shirts. Classic but different in the terms and conditions of today’s music.
Perhaps avant garde in the traditional sense is just no longer possible. Once you accept pure noise as music on one of the spectrum and silence on the other is even possible to push artistic boundaries in the same way that Stravinsky did with his 'Rites of Spring' or Coltrane and Ornette Coleman did in 60s? Once you've accept Pollack's splatters or a minimalist color field as an image is it possible to shock anyone?
Agree. As Ted notes above, noise may be universal but it doesn't communicate much, if anything. There has to be some context, something to compare the noise against.
If we'd asked 100 average people 100 years ago what makes up music, the three common denominators might have been melody, harmony, and rhythm. It seems the avante-garde deconstructed all three a long time ago.
We only needed the most fragile amount of any of them to consider a thing "music." Once it's totally deconstructed..then what? The gap between organized/traditional music and noise is wide but not particularly deep. More and different noise is--at the end of the day--still noise.
I attended a noise-jazz show years ago, and the most shocking thing about it was how un-shocking it was. Perhaps it was more shocking 60 years ago? Maybe they were trying to deliver a meta-commentary? I don't think so; they were pretty serious. It was definitely an "emperor's new clothes" moment.
I agree with your overall point but Rite of Spring and Coltrane aren't "noise" and they communicate loads.
Absolutely*. But when their music first came out they were very much in the avant garde in the sense that they were pushing boundaries in a way that just isn't possible today since there are no boundaries.
* There's room for argument with Coltrane's post-quartet work.
I wonder if the more 'pure' Americana we are hearing might really be avant garde? Perhaps real is more important than contrived. Only a thought.
I had a similar thought, though the tendency for all the young old timey musicians to cosplay in depression era clothing drives me a little nuts and undermines claims to their being uncontrived.
Playing real music of any genre with the goal of expressing an idea or emotion rather than making a product may not be avant garde but it's certainly countercultural.
Anyway smart,clever young men and women who enjoy complexity now do computer coding. I bet if Mozart had been born in 1980 he'd have latched on to computer coding. The avsnt-garde isn't in music any more,it's in digital work and it's VERY DANGEROUS for us.
There's lots of us who do both. I'd rather spend my time playing music rather than writing code but I just can't give up those little luxuries like rent and groceries.
The computer industry is an interesting place with a lot of interesting people. Or at least it was back in the day before big money was involved. There's a great book called "What the Doormouse Said" which discusses the early history personal computers in SF and the cross over between the research labs, the Berkeley Free Speech movement, and the rest of the 60s counterculture.
"Avant-garde experiences allow rule-breaking."
But, too often, the rules that are broken are all the same rules, and they're all broken in the same way. How many avant-garde art pieces strike at traditional or conservative mores? If you're self-consciously avant-garde, you're probably playing to a stereotype of the avant-garde. That's boring.
To my mind, a song like Jermaine Stewart's 1986 pop hit "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off" is more avant than a lot of self-consciously avant-garde stuff. It's an unabashedly exuberant song that unironically praises erotic subtlety and discretion. Lots to savor there.
But there's another layer that makes it truly enthralling: Stewart was queer and publicly owned his queerness, adopting many of the queer signifiers in dress and manner. But instead of singing about how oppressive traditional sexual mores are — as too many self-styled rebels do — he embraces the beauty of traditional courtship. He's shattering the stereotype of queer culture as a lurid rebellion against sexual restraint.
Now that was something genuinely fresh. Kinda still is.
It's sounds a lot like what they call model collapse in training artificial intelligence systems on their own output. At first, the avant garde had artistic conventions to absorb and push against, but pushing against the avant garde gets one hash or perhaps rehash.
To locate the contemporary avant garde, or at least one manifestation of it, perhaps you should shift your focus away from its traditional strongholds. Possibly the most electrifying performance I've ever witnessed was Aaron Dilloway and Victoria Shen (noise musicians from Ohio and the bay area, respectively) on a shared bill earlier this year in St Louis. St Louis and other cities in the midwest / rust belt are home to thriving, highly localized noise and free improv scenes that operate almost entirely outside of the mainstream culture industry.
Exactly. I'm a native Ohioan and noise music is perhaps in my blood, as I came up under a very strong scene here in Cincinnati grounded by the folks behind the Art Damage radio show (which I later participated in). So much talk of the arts presumes people are living on the coasts when there is this whole country in between those places. I have been to a couple noise / improv shows here in the past year and your point still stands. The difference between here and what our host is talking about, is that the shows in the Midwest are mostly self-organized and outside of places any art grant would touch, for the most part. The audience might be as small, but its mostly middle-class people and kids, not anyone bought and paid for by the 300 art dealers. That said, it might also exhibit some of the same issues as the punk scene that Annie mentioned above, in that, it can be insular and somewhat dogmatic in what is considered part of the noise / improv genre. My taste for harsh noise is low. I only put a Merzbow record on when I have guests at the house who need to leave. But still, I think there is something to the actual landscape here in the Midwest that makes this music appealing. Even popular post-industrial musicians like Trent Reznor came from Pennsylvania, moved to Cleveland where he rubbed elbows with people in the same scene as Pere Ubu.
Thanks Justin.... and, please forgive me for not mentioning this earlier, but, speaking of Pennsylvania, I hope that the foil to the argument of the present essay may be found in Everett PA next weekend..... actually, beginning on Thursday, at the Voice of the Valley Noise Rally.... https://voiceofthevalley.net/
Thanks for this Ron! The Voice of the Valley sounds like a fascinating time. I see that there are about twelve bands from Ohio (and others from Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia). Noise is alive! I hope your set on Friday goes well, and would love to hear a report of the festival.
I always liked Sun Ra's music. He and his soloists could (emphasis on "could") play both inside or outside. They could go from surfing the waves on Saturn, stop on a dime, and play like the Fletcher Henderson band. Sun Ra incorporated the history of Afro-American music into his performances. Sometimes even within a single performance. Listening to their music you get a full sense of the avant-garde through the expansion of the tradition, instead of playing loud and making noise.
Thank you! I grew up in the 80s where rebellion in art and music was invigorating and inspiring. I lucked out when I transfer to NTSU (now the University of North Texas in Denton, TX). I was assigned to live in Bruce Hall which at that time was home to musicians (and many visual artists like myself) totally entrenched in the Jazz Studies programs. It was surreal, thought-provoking, loud, and one of the most influential times in my life. Where else could you enter the cafeteria and see musicians playing concertos using perfectly-tuned glasses of water as their instruments? There was no AC and that meant everyone had to leave their windows open and rely on box fans for relief from the stifling heat. Everyday was like living in a Zapa-topia with musicians of all kinds practicing their art at the same time-multiple time signatures, different genres, every instrument. It was AWESOME.
My grandfather and grandmother met each other in Vaudeville. My grandmother a singer and dancer and my grandfather a jazz saxophone and clarinet player with a love of Big Band and Dixieland. I hadn't been trained in music yet I LOVED music. The 80s were an exciting time. I was a visual artist (designer, illustrator and painter) and the "Brucelings" were my people. It WAS the home of the Avant-Garde.
Your article brought back so many memories and reminded me of a time when art and music were exciting. I'm a 60 year old man now, married with grown kids. I became a graphic designer to support my family and when this World Wide Web thing showed up I jumped on the bandwagon and have spent the last year collaborating with others to create the profession of UX Design. To nurture my insanity I kept painting in my off hours, showing in low-budget galleries, creating abstract art originally inspired by my love of music and Jazz. Bop sang the music of my soul as well as punk, alternative, and experimental music.
From an art perspective, I was highly influenced by The Futurists, their manifestos, Dada for their daring, and folk art for the naivete. The Art of Noises by Luigi Russolo was life changing and the Futurist Manifestos are still sitting in a prominent placement on the shelf by my desk; Ornette Coleman's Tone Dialing on regular cycles on my turntable; and of course Bop Essentials the background of my studio.
Thank you for reminding me that it was time to again seek out my people and return to the tribe of the Avant-Garde.
Thinking about the relationship between avant-guarde artists and patrons. Didn't the early impressionists rely on certain patrons who purchased their art and kept them active in the pursuit of their dreams? Who are those kinds of patrons today? Perhaps they are not the 300 you mention in the post but who might they be?
It may be of interest to see what characterized those who supported he Impressionists vs. the majority of patrons who sponsored those painting in traditional genres.
Cardiff City Museum and Art Gallery in Wales UK has got a fabulous lot of Impressionist Art,all the big names Monet,Morisot etc. This is because two extremely wealthy spinster sisters got into collecting Art after their Fathers death freed them up to live how they wanted. Their vast fortune came from industry,not sure if it was coal or other,but all interlinked anyway. They were regular subscribers to Monets art dealer and often got first pick of anything going. In WW1 they made their mansion home into a hospital and learned to be nurses,and were good at it. By all accounts they were nice people. BUT in reality,if you join up the dots all those "free spirits" (as Paul MacCartney wrote "I don't care too much for money" (I'm worth £700million)were funded by miners in South Wales earning the most meagre wage going and when they struck for just a few pence a week more our Mr Churchill wanted to send the army in to shoot them. But they wouldn't let him. Duh.