From: charless@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Charles R. Sullivan)
Subject: Keith Jarrett in NYT--letters 9/6
Organization: University of California, at Berkeley
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 18:15:47 GMT

Today (Sept. 6, Sunday)'s New York Times has four letters replying to
Keith Jarrett's recent article (which wildman@athena.mit.edu (Timothy Worsley)
posted).  I'll briefly summarize them, and add my unsolicited opinions
about them.

Merryl Goldberg (who is writing a PhD dissertation on this very topic)
thinks Jarrett exagerates the compromises musicians make to be popular,
or at least thinks it is not as bad a thing as Jarret thinks.
Regarding the choice a musician might make to use less dissonance so as 
not to lose the audience, Goldberg says this does not mean a loss of
musical freedom or voice, but rather, "musicians conceptualize performances
as a working partenership with the audience rather than a forum for the
promotion of musical purity."

Dave Rubin give examples of musicians he thinks have overcome the problems
of being popular vs. being true to their art--Ella Fitzgerald and
Louis Armstrong.  IMHO Fitzgerald does not belong up with greats such
as Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and, yes, Jarrett and Armstrong.
And to say that Armstrong overcame the dilemma between popularity
and true art without any difficulty is a gross oversimplification.
From what little I know, it seems that Armstrong did struggle with
that problem, and just did a good job of appearing not to.

Frank Feldman points out that Jarrett's example, "John Coltrane
could not have led a television band," is silly because, though 
Coltrane would not have, that is just because he was an introvert,
and a musician of (I_H_HO) equal stature, Dizzy, would have "had
a gas doing it."

Irving Louis Horowitz gets the prize for flaming  (and I thought that
only happened on the network).  He starts right off with
"Historically those who have spoken of jazz 'losing its soul' invariably
are reflecting upon lack of audiennce for their own brand of jazz."
He complains that Jarret did not identify a single individual musician,
club,  record company, or whatever, guilty of what he is talking about.
(I would have complained that he was too specific, being very clear who
he was talking about even if he didn't name names.)

Then, in true net flame style, Horowitz goes on to twist a Jarrett quote
out of context and use it against him:
"With every Jarrett recording revealing longer and more amorphous 'solos'
with an absense of structure becoming a celebrated norm, it is little
wonder that studio technicians were wandering off reading newspapers."
[Jarrett had talked of
'studio musicians reading newspapers in the control rooms 
(and getting paid handsomely for it,
you might say being paid for their patience).' ]
He then makes the valid but gratuitous point that Jarrett might have produced 
better music if he worked in the era of 3 minute maximum recording times as
he would have been forced to focus his music better.  He actually 
says Jarret would have been 'a great' in this case.  Horowitz's
closing:
"Jazz has not lost it's soul, Mr. Jarrett has lost his way.  And what a 
great loss that has been."

Charlie Sullivan               charless@power.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote