Tag: buck clayton

From Spirituals to Swing.

From Spirituals to Swing.

in 1938, producer John Hammond decided to present an ambitious concert documenting the history of “American Negro music, from spirituals to Swing.” Hence the name, and hence the historic night at New York’s Carnegie Hall that December. Intended as a tribute to Bessie Smith, who had died the previous year, the concert ended up being […]

Posted in: Jazz
Individuality: a lost art, part 3.
By February 10, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Individuality: a lost art, part 3.

We threatened to continue this diatribe, and so we will. Our contention is that creative American music all seemed to die at roughly the same time around 1980. We don’t mean that it disappeared. We simply mean that genres like jazz, country and rock all stopped evolving and either became repertory, classical forms, like jazz, […]

Posted in: Jazz, Rants
Individuality: a lost art, part 2
By February 5, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Individuality: a lost art, part 2

We mentioned in our last post that individual style, wherein a musician’s general sound is so unique and recognizable as to be unmistakably his alone, is a dead commodity in modern American music. We went on to say that one of the most fruitful periods and environments for this sort of individuality was that transitional […]

Posted in: Jazz, Rants