Jazz Musicians as Not Refle

[Chris Stolz]

OK.  I would like to clear up what I meant with my comments about
jazz music.  I meant to say that jazz music was not obsessed with
irony the way so much of what passes nowadays for countercultural
music-- white rock and roll especially-- seems to be.  And in my
ind an obsession with irony is connected with self-loathing which
the writer/artist can't productively express.  Hence the '90s
rock and roll self-styled dweebishness (founded by Nirvana and
slavishly imitated), which is the result of counterculturalists
all too aware of their own powerlessness.   Pynchon is
also not obsessed with irony-- it's certainly there, though.

Coltrane's later work is on a level of complexity on par with the fugues of
Bach and he and Monk and Davis were well versed in musical
theory.  I didn't mean to  imply that these guys were
idiots-savant.  I think that the polyphonic, multi-layered
rhythms of jazz and its marvellous balance of improvisation
within large structural frameworks is the closest non-literary
analogue to Pynchon's work (more, even, than film).  

chris

 
-- 
chris stolz		16 oakview pl. sw calgary ab canada t2v-3z9
cstolz at acs.ucalgary.ca	(403) 281-6794


"But you must admit that our ignorance is manifestly of a very rich 
and varied sort?" said Ulrich.


			Robert Musil, _The Man Without Qualities_