One main reason if not the main reason for musical innovation is survival as in making enough money to live on.

At some point in the early 60's most of the jazz cats realized they could not make a good living recording yet another version of Stella or whatever. Plus after 10 years of doing those standards in studios and concerts they were simply burned out, bored, you name it with that stuff so they started branching out.

That's why Miles suddenly quit doing that stuff and turned to [*****] Brew and despite many pleadings from all quarters he refused to play another lick of his old standards. The majority of the record buying public didn't need more recordings of different versions of those tunes.

For me, I'm tired of that stuff too but I still play it from time to time. I'm much more into the modern post bop stuff by all the smooth jazz artists like David Benoit, Foreplay, Spyro Gyra, David Sanborn, etc. It's hard to realize that stuff is already old enough to be considered classic music now. Fourplay released their first album in 1991. It's now 2013, how many years is that again?

I've accumulated a whole collection of live jazz concerts from You Tube. They are mostly the big jazz festivals like Montreal, Playboy, Newport, the North Sea one etc. There's been very little straight ahead in any of those shows for the last 10-15 years.

And why is that? Just mho of course but I think the audience for that style has left the building and has retired.

The reason you don't hear too much modern jazz in clubs is it's pretty complex stuff, you can't have a bunch of good players show up for a gig with no rehearsal and read South American Sojourn by Spyro Gyra or Watersign by Jeff Lorber from a fake book like you can with tunes like My Funny Valentine or Footprints.

Moderators, the forum is censoring [*****] Brew? Really?

Bob

Last edited by jazzmammal; 05/21/13 03:23 PM.
Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.