Epistemic Status: Not a cohesive theory of community art perception/criticism, just speculation that two or more things are related
For those who haven't seen it, Scott posted his latest piece on architecture, last night, a review of Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus To Our House.". The comments are pretty similar to past comments. I'm less interested in the question of why people do or don't like modern architecture (there's a lot of variation in quality, and tastes vary - of course it's polarizing) than the variation in discernment over McMansions, a type of architecture defined by qualities that are a) bad and b) to me, fall in to the category of "once you see it, you can't unsee it."
For our purposes, I'll use the guide from McMansion Hell (https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149284377161/mansionvsmcmansion, https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149563260641/mcmansions-101-mansion-vs-mcmansion-part-2), which includes simple heuristics like Relationship to the Landscape: Often, a New Traditional mansion carefully considers its environment and is built to accentuate, rather than dominate it. A McMansion is out of scale with its landscape or lot, often too big for a tiny lot. and Architectural and Stylistic Integrity: The best New Traditional houses are those who are virtually indistinguishable from the styles they represent. McMansions tend to be either a chaotic mix of individual styles, or a poorly done imitation of a previous style. This house in Texas invokes four separate styles: the Gothic (the steep angle of the gables), Craftsman (the overhanging eaves with braces), French (the use of stone and arched 2nd story windows), and Tudor Revival (the EIFS half-timbering above the garage), each poorly rendered in a busy combination of EIFS coupled with stone and brick veneers. (Follow the links for annotated photos.)
These criteria are really heuristics - part two includes a house that could go either way, with arguments on each side - but they aren't "rocket surgery" to apply, it's just a matter of discernment; why can't everyone learn to apply the criteria, whether or not they share the opinion that McMansions are bad architecture? The criteria of mixing styles can require more consideration than the others - it takes some scrutiny to determine if stylistic elements were mixed in a thoughtful manner - and whether or not the styles are complementary is a matter of taste, but most of it is pretty simple.
[Edit 1: I was thinking of this at the time, but too lazy to go back to the ACX post to incorporate it - this is similar to how an artist friend of Scott's discribed how she identified an AI-generated image as AI art and why she disliked it. Once you see it, can you unsee it? Does it change how much you enjoy the image?]
This reminded me of a video jazz musician and YouTuber Adam Neely made on the question of whether Laufey's music is within the jazz genre. TL;DW, no, he puts her alongside 1950s pop that borrowed from the same set of musical styles as jazz of the period, but applied those stylistic elements to pop songs, rather than a musical form defined more by improvisation (especially group improvisation) than aesthetic. One clip used in the video is someone asking why it matters if jazz musicians don't recognize Laufey's music as jazz - good point; why are we asking the question, in the first place? My speculation is that Laufey's fans want her music to be considered jazz, not pop that has stylistic elements in common with jazz, because jazz has cultural cachet and drawing a distinction between jazz and superficially similar pop music would be perceived as gatekeeping or snobbery. In light of the precedent of 1950s pop, this is rather silly - jazz musicians aren't turning their noses up at Sinatra and Bennett - but, in addition to being denied the cachet associated with jazz appreciation, I can imagine that being told you lack the discernment to tell jazz from non-jazz feels like being told you lack taste.
Discernment and taste are distinct phenomena; if Scott tells me that he agrees with the criteria for distinguishing McMansions from other architecture, we establish inter-rater reliability for this, but he disagrees that they're bad design, I'll accept that he is capable of discerning the style, while declaring our tastes to be different. But Scott writes that architecture buffs tell him about superior modern architecture he might like and he can't discern the difference. To what extent is the discussion of architecture unproductive because people are conflating discernment and taste?
If you can't discern the difference between two things and someone else says that they have strong opinions over their respective quality, do you question your discernment or their taste? In the absence of a prior that you need to cultivate your abilities of discernment, I would speculate that you are more likely to question the other person's taste and are liable to come to the conclusion that their discernment is arbitrary, from which it follows that they're engaging in snobbery. Counter-Snobbery would be to reject the "arbitrary" distinction or, if conceding that there is a distinction, embrace the supposed "lesser" of the two things.
If you can't discern the difference between two things and someone else says that they have strong opinions over their respective quality... what do YOU do?
[Edit 2: While this was in the mod queue, Scott published a new post on theories of taste. Some of the commenters are commenting along the lines of a causal relationship between developing abilities of discernment with changes in taste, without using those terms. Interestingly, neither Scott nor a commenter went back to that section of the AI art post, even though the new post begins "Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments to AI Art Turing Test..."]
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Notes -
I'm glad you mentioned Laufey because I wanted to make a post about her shortly after that video came out but never got around to it. Anyway, I think that a big part of the problem when it comes to determining whether or not something qualifies as jazz is that, like with most genres, it's hard to define jazz to begin with. Most books on the subject start with a perfunctory description that goes something like this: Jazz is an African American music, is based in the blues, is heavily improvised, and relies on a swing feel. But none of these elements are exclusive to jazz, and none applies to all jazz.
African Americans were obviously central to the development of jazz throughout its history, and continue to be central in the present day. But people of all races and ethnicities have participated in its development as far back as New Orleans, and since then it has seen continued development from nationalities across the globe, from Euorope to Africa to Japan. And it isn't especially popular among African Americans today, much as it isn't especially popular among any demographic group, at least in the US.
We associate jazz as having derived from the blues and being closely associated with it, but what is the blues, exactly? A scale? A lyrical style? A feeling? An attitude? Trying to define the blues is fraught with the same problems as trying to define jazz. And whatever the blues is,there's plenty of jazz out there whose incorporation of it is arguable at best, and plenty else with no discernable bluesinfluence whatsoever. Not only that, but pretty much every style of American music, from rock to soul to country, derives from the blues to the same degree that jazz does, so this isn't exactly a unique feature.
The level of improvisation in jazz runs the gamut from styles that are almost wholly improvised (such as free jazz) to styles with little to no improvisation at all (much of the very early New Orleans stuff wasn't improvised). And there's plenty of other music from around the world that's improvised; even classical music, the composed music par excellence, often includes improvised cadenzas.
Swing presents even more problems than the blues does when it comes to defining it, and titans such as John Coltrane and Duke Ellington have openly questioned its necessity to jazz.
I'm not going to belabor the point by going into too much detail, but writers have added additional components to this list such as the use of certain forms, certain harmonic devices, a vocalized tone, rhythmic elements, focus on an individualized sound, etc. but it's never clear what role all these features are supposed to play, or whether there's some kind of magical combination which is distinct, if difficult to describe. The focus of more contemporary critics, Neely included, tends to be more on participation in a "jazz tradition", defined by the scene and by the audience. As far as Laufey is concerned, the argument is that she isn't jazz because she isn't part of the community of jazz musicians (she didn't get her start in jazz clubs, she doesn't collaborate with established musicians, etc.) and that she doesn't attempt to appeal to a jazz audience. Her press comes from mainstream publications, not jazz critics. This is all, of course, independent of what her music actually sounds like.
For all of their faults, any of these approaches allows us to come up with a reasonable, or at least workable, definition of jazz. And then someone insists that Kenny G is a jazz musician and the arguments start flying. Mr. G is in fact an acoustic musician who plays the soprano saxophone, a traditional jazz instrument that is most closely associated with Sidney Bechet and John Coltrane, two undisputed jazz legends. His has a distinct sound, at least occasionally plays with a swing feel, has at least some blues "feeling", came up on the edge of the jazz tradition (he got his start as a teenager in Barry White's band), etc. These definitional exercises are useful, but they have their limits.
For the record, I'm not going to argue that Kenny G is a jazz musician; his style is more adequately described as instrumental pop. But his connection to jazz is more direct than one would think. If we trace the lineage back, we find two converging streams. Before going solo, Kenny G played with the Jeff Lorber Fusion, who were peers of the later-period fusion acts like Bob James, Earl Klugh, and Fourplay, who trace their lineage back to people like Joe Sample and Donald Byrd, who played a more smoothed out version of the soul jazz of Shirley Scott and Richard "Groove" Holmes from the late 1960s, who in turn are successors to organ grinders like Jimmy Smith from the early '60s, who came out of the more blues-oriented wing of hard-bop, which is jazz qua jazz. On the other hand, his solo work is the direct successor to the instrumental pop of the 70s, which was popularized by people like George Benson, Maynard Ferguson, and Chuck Mangione. But these people started their careers as straightahead jazz musicians before chasing pop hits. They did this, at least in part, in response to Wes Montgomery's recordings of contemporary pop songs for Creed Taylor's CTI label in the late 1960s. Montgomery is a jazz legend in his own right, though his CTI recordings aren't of any particular interest to most jazz fans. And then there's John Klemmer, whose 1975 album Touch is probably the most direct progenitor of the Kenny G sound (song titles like "Waterwheels" and "Glass Dolphins" say it all), but I don't know where he fits into all of this.
To say that the situation is complicated is an understatement, but when trying to define and discuss genres and influences everything is bound to be complicated, because influences come from all directions. The remarkable thing about the whole Kenny G controversy, though, is that his audience didn't seem to care whether he was considered a jazz musician or not. I grew up during the height of his popularity, and while he was far more mainstream than Laufey will ever be, no one really seemed to love his music. His audience, to the extent that he had one, was the kind of person who didn't pay to much attention to the music they listened to. He was background music for people who only listen to music as background. He was played on radio stations that marketed themselves as "the station everyone at work can agree on", which eventually evolved into a "smooth jazz" format that revolved around Mr. G himself. He was at his most ubiquitous at catered events; anyone who attended a wedding, football banquet, or charity fundraiser in the 90s would be forced to suffer through his mindless wailing during dinner, and on at least two occasions I heard the DJ announce to the room that "this is Kenny G and gosh, doesn't this make great dinner music" in a patently self-congratulatory manner.
The problem with Kenny G, from a jazz fan's perspective, wasn't that his fans were impostors who were misidentifying themselves, but that the music industry was incorrectly marketing him as a jazz musician. It wasn't so much that he was being proclaimed the Savior of Jazz the way Laufey is (he wasn't), or any other active attempts, but the more subtle, lazy stuff. His recordings were sold in the jazz section of record stores. He won Grammys in jazz categories. He appeared on the Billboard jazz charts. Stuff like that. This might not be so much of a problem, but for all of his popularity, there was a significant backlash among jazz fans and non-fans alike. As my friend's dad so eloquently put it when I suggested that if his son could be as famous as Kenny G if he practiced his instrument enough, "Kenny G doesn't play the saxophone; he play the kazoo". Or as my own father put it when I asked the context of his breaking the record for the longest-held note (Did he make a recording of it? Did he bore a concert audience for 45 minutes?): "He was in a music store and got his horn out and started playing it. A crowd started to gather around him, and after 30 seconds they started throwing stuff at him".
This backlash created a concern that jazz would only be marginalized further, as potential fans would be turned off by association. As guitarist Pat Metheny famously put it when describing why jazz wasn't popular in the United States:
Metheny (who is, in my opinion, the greatest guitarist of all time, period) made these comments in 1987 as part of an interview for an Iron-Curtain era Polish children's program, so this was well before the mainstream backlash in the US started, and it is unlikely that anyone here would have heard them contemporaneously. But when the video clip was posted to the internet in 2000, Pat was asked about it on his website, and his reponse stands as one of the greatest takedowns in internet history, so brutal that it deserves to be read in its entirety. But when it comes to the question of whether Kenny G is a jazz musician, Metheny writes:
Laufey, however, faces the opposite problem. Jazz fans, critics, and musicians don't have a problem with her music. No one is making fun of her music, and it would be hugely surprising if she ever faced the same kind of backlash that Kenny G has faced. Neely isn't concerned that Laufey being categorized as jazz will tarnish the reputation of the genre; he's concerned with definitional integrity. There's a tendency among some groups to view definitional labels as an indicator of quality, or lack thereof. The whole "popitmism" debate of the 2010s was an attempt to rectify what was seen as decades of denigration of pop music. By the 1970s, rock had established itself as serious music for serious people, and anything that didn't meet certain criteria could be casually dismissed as "pop" music and ignored entirely. We don't need to consider the artistic merits of Paper Lace or Bo Donaldson & the Haywoods because it's accepted as axiomatic that they don't have any. When a pop artist does come along that we feel has value, like Madonna, we can retroactively define her as rock and lobby the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her induction to legitimize our opinion.
What the poptimism movement sought to do was to remove the idea of genres as value indicators. It may be pop music, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that, and it doesn't excuse the critic from evaluating it on its own terms. In later iterations, the concept was taken as a license by some to assume that popularity was synonymous with quality, and a backlash set in. The ultimate problem was a misinterpretation of the logic; if a critic gives a pop album a bad review, is it because the took it seriously and rejected it, or because they're simply refusing to take it seriously? And how do you show that you're taking pop music seriously unless you're heaping praise on pop albums? It didn't help matters that some "rockist" critics (the term is either proud or perjorative, depending on who is making the argument) stubbornly clung to the old paradigm that pop artists simply weren't deserving of serious treatment. As more serious people like Ted Gioia got involved—he said poptimism had caused music criticism to devolve into lifestyle reporting—poptimism's influence waned. By this time, Zoomers were starting to come of age, wholly influenced by the idea of gatekeeping.
So Neely, or I, or anyone from our generation doesn't understand why Laufey has to be jazz. People born between 1981 and 1995 aren't supposed to view genres as quality indicators. Laufey being jazz does not mean that Laufey is good. Kenny G might not be jazz, but if he is, he still sucks. But there's also a bit of bullshit to this argument. Jazz is difficult. For most people, Dixieland conjures up images of old cartoons, and the big band era brings to mind senior citizens. Prewar jazz has been reified to a degree that makes appreciation among the youth difficult if only due to its cultural connotations. Postwar jazz is too esoteric. It was created at a time when it was moving further away from mainstream musical sensibilities and toward the avant garde. Even at its most accessible, it involves harmonic structures that are quite different from most contemporary pop music, and the centerpiece is long improvisations that require close listening to fully appreciate. The upshot is that if someone who mostly listens to Thelonious Monk and Anthony Braxton tells you that the new Taylor Swift album is good, it carries different weight than someone who listens to Ed Sheeran and Lady Gaga telling you the same thing.
The argument over Laufey is even further complicated by the fact that singers have always had an uncertain status within jazz itself. More recent singers like Diane Reeves have managed to stay firmly within the jazz camp, and older ones like Sarah Vaughan and Blossom Dearie mostly have, but even stalwarts like Ella Fitzgerald have trouble staking a solid claim. Neely places Laufey in the traditional pop category, but pretty much everyone in that category shares the same uneasy relationship. The problem is that most of these singers came to prominence in an era where American musical theater provided most of the repertory, whether it be in jazz or pop music, and the boundaries between the two were much more blurred prior to the mid-60s. The other problem is that improvisation is an important part of jazz and singers are expected to sing composed melodies with composed lyrics. There isn't a ton of room to maneuver. Scat singing was developed as a sort of workaround, but it's still hard to see the voice as an instrument on par with, say, the trombone unless you're willing to make certain allowances.
A singer like Frank Sinatra is a case in point. Is he jazz or traditional pop? He first came to prominence with the big bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, so he has a jazz background. But that was at a time when jazz was America's Popular Music, and the material done with singers was often "sweeter" than the purely instrumental stuff. When he went solo in the 1940s the Axel Stordahl arrangements didn't try to be jazz, and by the early 50s he was largely a novelty act. When he resurrected his career with Capitol beginning in 1953, he was most often paired with either Nelson Riddle or Gordon Jenkins. Riddle favored more jazz oriented arrangements, while Jenkins had a lush, Hollywood style. He'd use a variety of arrangers throughout the rest of his career, some more jazz-oriented than others. But in the 1960s he made a famous string of recordings with the Count Basie Orchestra that are unquestionably jazz, and he'd record an album with Duke Ellington in 1968. He was never a great scat singer. Was Sinatra a jazz musician? Sometimes.
So I've now reached the part of the essay where it's customary to offer my own opinion on whether Laufey is jazz, but I'm not going to do so because I don't know. I will say this: I'm not going to cynically toss her into the deep end of the jazz pool the way Metheney does with Kenny G in order to force comparisons with Diane Reeves or Sarah Vaughan. I don't know what this would accomplish. I'm not going to say she's not jazz as opposed to traditional pop because those lines have always been blurred more than Neely leads his viewers to believe. I'm not going to say she isn't jazz because she isn't part of the jazz community, for the same reason I wouldn't say that Charles Mingus wasn't jazz if I found out that he was similarly disengaged.
I'm not going to say she definitively is jazz, either, because I haven't heard enough of her music to make that determination. From what I have heard, it sounds like she's on the periphery, akin to someone like Norah Jones or Eva Cassidy. But I'm glad that a popular performer is at least taking an interest in jazz that suggests they actually listen to it regularly and not just say they're influenced by it to gain cultural cachet. I'm glad that at least some teenage girls are excited to hear Misty, not as an academic exercise but as a genuine emotional experience. I'm glad that a popular musician is viewing the voice as an instrument to be explored and not as a vehicle for sub-Mariah Carey histrionics. Whatever Laufey is, I think her emergence is a good thing.
Thanks for posting this so I didn't have to. You've done a better job than I would have I think. It seems rather obvious to me, as a fomally trained jazz and classical musician, that Laufey isn't concidered jazz by most of the 'snobs' because she isn't embedded in the culture, world, and history of jazz. Downthread there is a discussion of Jaco's best album, this is a good example. Even part time jazz folks will know who the single name "Jaco" refers to, what instrument he plays, and what his best album is. (I like his self titled debut solo album personally.) Being a part of jazz seems to me to require knowing all the Names, their instruments, albums, and history etc. If you love it, it comes naturally over a lifetime of listening and playing. I'm not sure Laufey would know who Jaco is, but I hope she does.
Much is this discussion is counfounded by the fact, which you mention, that pre-bop/pre-war jazz was the popular music of its time. It was also dance music. People left their homes, went to music halls, and listened to this music live. The recording technology of the time just can't do justice to the experience of actually hearing a group live, in a good hall, when it was the most popular music in the country. Laufey's music, if it is adjacent to jazz, is adjecent to this stuff. Not the post-bop stuff meant to be listened to on the (then much better sounding) record players of the 50s and on. I love Minugs, Coltrane, Parker et al, but I can't imagine trying to introduce this music to someone that isn't themselves a musician at some level.
Which brings me to my final point. There just aren't that many musicians anymore, and post-bop jazz is "art for artists". Someone mentions people hearing it for the first time not liking the parts with "all the solos", probably trading 8s. Its impossible to communicate that this is the best part to people who can't judge how difficult it is to play. And to be fair some of it really is just chops for the sake of chops.
I think Laufey absolutely could be jazz though. Its possible she already has the background; I don't know enough about her personally. She does have a good amount of classical training, and many, many jazz greats started as conservatory kids. Maybe she'll find a drummer and bassist and cut a jazz trio album. Maybe her current fans will even buy it. We'll see.
site note, my current favorite jazz kids are Domi and JD Beck: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ANPbOxaRIO0
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Having skimmed the Neely video again, he references criteria from Ken Burns' documentary that was purposefully narrow, so as to exclude fusion: swung rhythms, blues influence, and improvisation. Neely gives examples that would generally be regarded as jazz, but fail the improvisation criteria (a through-composed Ellington performance), or meet the criteria, but wouldn't generally be regarded as jazz (a hip-hop performance), but accepts it as an approximation for what distinguishes "mid-century pop" and Laufey's reinvention thereof from jazz as musical forms. I think this is reasonable.
(In)Accessibility takes multiple forms - almost all jazz is tonal music played with relatively soft timbres on instruments selected for consonance with each other, so a random jazz song is more likely to be inoffensive to the ear than a random song from a genre that achieves its "edginess" by way of harsh timbres and unsubtle dissonance. Anyone who can work with background music can let "Bright Size Life" be that music (and, if a reader has never heard that album, it's voir doir for Rov_Scam calling Metheny as an expert witness, as well as the best recording of the short-lived, "tortured artist" virtuoso bassist Jaco Pastorius, playing a bass guitar modified to be fretless, prior to this being commonly accepted as a valid substitute for acoustic upright bass*) - identifying the ways in which "Bright Size Life" was innovative requires prior knowledge of its context, but does "accessibility" mean "low barrier to enjoyment" or "low barrier to intellectually appreciating at the same level as an aficionado?"
*A handful of esteemed bassists had toured and occasionally recorded with bass guitars, primarily for convenience, but Pastorius was a pioneer in using bass guitars as a primarily creative choice.
When I said that jazz was difficult, I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't easy on the ears. It's difficult in the sense that it's hard for someone accustomed to pop music to appreciate, especially if they don't have any musical training. One common complaint I've heard from friends who listen to rock and try to get into jazz is that they like the part at the beginning where everyone plays together, but they get bored throughout the endless soloing. When I tell them that the solos are more or less the whole point (not entirely true, but you get my drift), they give me an odd look. If you're used to structured music with to-the-point melodies and solos that don't go on for more than 8 bars (giving you a taste of possible variation but not getting off track), it's understandable why someone blowing out 5 choruses followed by another guy doing the same thing may seem tiresome. I don't think it's a coincidence that people who already like jam bands tend to also like jazz.
As for Bright Size Life, I bought that album on vinyl at a used record shop back in the 2000s and when I took it home to play I noticed that someone had stashed ripped out pages from a porn magazine in the sleeve. I decided to hang on to them as an investment and they're still there to this day. And how can you say that this is Jaco's best work and not his solo album? It's obviously very good, but he's clearly a sideman here and doesn't get to show his full potential. Pretty much every track on that Jaco Pastorius exhibits a new possibility for what the bass guitar can be, particularly "Portrait of Tracy". And "Opus Pocus" is probably the only example in recorded music of menacing-sounding steel drums.
If it's easy on the ears, you can expose yourself to it until you passively begin to appreciate it on an unconscious level or find something that gives you a musical foothold. (I disliked violin-centric music until I heard this Julia Fischer performance of the Third Movement of the Brahms Concerto in D - it turns out that the things I disliked about a lot of violin performances weren't universal.)
His showcase album is the best recording of him showcasing his superior potential to innovate; "Bright Size Life" is the best example of him playing superior jazz bass.
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So I'd imagine if you quizzed ordinary folk on the topic in any American town or city, they'd classify the major musical genres as something like:
Jazz is primarily horns (Saxophone and Trumpet)
Rock is primarily guitar music
Pop is synthetic backing tracks with a focus on vocals
Classical music is primarily violins (by which the average person means violins, violas, cellos, etc)
Hip Hop has rapping in it
Country is anything with a southern accent
These classifications are obviously wrong, but also obviously more useful on a quick and dirty basis than a more accurate definition by genetic descent or multi-factor testing. For the most part, if one listens to music in the context of TV/Radio/Store Muzak, you'll correctly classify the vast majority of music you hear using this simple testing criteria, and you'll use very little of your brain's processing power on the task.
There are still genres that are gate-kept as quality indicators by people, which retain some degree of cache to their names. It's simply that Jazz is no longer one of them. Jazz has no cultural cache, no aura of Cool, to grant or not-grant, for people born after 1990 or so, except in some LARPy or RenFair kind of way. Inasmuch as there is a continuing Jazz tradition, it is just that, a tradition, a music that can be defined by genetic descent from some prior pure Jazz.
My wife is once again stressed by a big project at work, and once again rewatching Sex and the City, and she recently got to this episode, in which Big [b. 1955] takes Carrie [b.1966] to a jazz club, where she takes up with the club owner. By this point in history, a jazz club is already retro, but Big is also nearing fifty and a bit of a throwback himself. This seems, in my mind, to be the last time that I can think of that jazz was presented in popular media as genuinely Cool, rather than as pure LARP. (Coincidentally, this was also Jim Gaffigan's sole episode of SATC, in which he dated Miranda and had no lines, simply pissing, shitting, and farting in front her as his entire character arc)
So for someone born after the year 2000, whose parents might have watched that episode, they'll view Jazz less as a genre than as a mood. Popular American music genres are all, in my view, better classified as moods. There's pop with a jazzy mood, there's rock with a jazzy mood, there's hip hop with a jazzy mood. Any other classification runs into too many problems of edge cases, because genre isn't exclusive. Show tunes are clearly a cohesive genre, but show tunes contains all genres.
Jazz doesn't have any cachet among the general public, I'll grant you that. But it does have cachet among critics and musicians, and I think that's where the problem lies.
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