I’m avant-garde, you’re avant-garde, we’re all avant-garde
> I’ve been reading a bunch of old reviews of avant-garde jazz records & listening to some old avant-garde jazz records & thinking about the concept of avant-garde in the last few weeks. There’s obviously plenty of music labelled as >>avant-garde<< across a wide variety of genres — even without getting into avant-garde writing, films, painting, etc. — but my feeling is that that concept is at best very loosely defined
> By one very boring definition, avant-garde is just ///anything that sounds very different from what came before///. So Ornette Coleman would be avant-garde because he supposedly broke with the late-fifties jazz establishment just as Frank Zappa jumped into a previously unknown dimension in the sixties
> But that definition doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. For once, we don’t typically think of foundational figures such as Chuck Berry or DJ Kool Herc, nor of pop-oriented artists who nevertheless produce music that’s strikingly different from their predecessor’s, as avant-garde. When it comes to the public/critical perception of an artist, T.I. is clearly not Marcel Duchamp
> Instead, I think it’s more interesting and constructive to think of avant-garde artists as those who are able to take a step back, take a look at their predecessors, pick and choose elements from the music that came before and jumble those up into something new. It’s like they’re able to cut the linear progression of tradition that in normal situations moves from the past to the future and tie it up in a knot
> This sounds very specific but it pops up everywhere once you start looking for it
> It is particularly evident when you look at the Chicago-based avant-garde jazz associated with the AACM that was most prominent in the sixties & seventies. An obvious example is 1979’s Air Lore, in which the Air trio performs ragtime compositions, alternating free-jazz squawks and sudden-stop breaks with parade rhythms and bebop improvisation. It’s experimental, it’s irreverent and, to some extent, it’s cartoonish
> Of course, in the AACM’s case those stylistic choices are deeply connected to a political stance that sought to bring African-American culture to the forefront and set up institutions run by and to black Americans, as articulated in George E. Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself
> I might be overstretching it here but to my ears that approach to music-making permeates everything that we call avant-garde or experimental. I think there’s only so much _experimentation_ to be done without messing around with deep-rooted genre conventions and the only way to do that is to take a somewhat distanced point of view that allows one to explicitly identify them
> Common discourse often represents avant-garde artists as triggering a huge break in tradition but their relation to those that came before is actually ambivalent in some way. I mean, yeah, a lot of them actively try to hammer down the building blocks of a genre but often the best experimenters carry a deep familiarity with tradition so as to know how to hit where it hurts the most
> Here’s an excerpt from Down Beat’s glowing four-star review of 1959’s The Shape of Jazz to Come:
“Coleman appears to have gone directly back to the basic foundation set up by Charlie Parker, to have shucked off the surface derivations which have been accumulating on it for 15 years, and to have taken off from this bare-bone launching pad on his own direction.
(…)
“Lonely Woman, on which Coleman makes formidable use of his interest in paralleling his instrument with the human voice, achieves a lamenting wail that is strikingly similar to the New Orleans dirges as they have been recorded by the Eureka Brass band and others.”
> You can also admire Coleman’s mastery of the tradition in his blindfold test a year later, right after his historic residency at the Five Spot
> The Florida underground rap scene, as well as the lo-fi //punk// rap known as >>Soundcloud rap<<, has been getting a lot of attention in recent months, especially after controversial bad-boy XXXTentacion was featured in XXL’s 2017 freshman class
> That music is definitely innovative but I think I’d hesitate before calling it avant-garde, as much genre-bending as it is. That’s not an insult — the fact that XXX’s music doesn’t sound to me like it’s *actively* trying to demolish genre constructs is not a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just //a thing//
> I struggled to come up with examples of avant-garde rap. It feels somewhat appropriate to think about artists that transcend labels such as Frank Ocean, Tyler The Creator, Death Grips or Young Thug as such but they’re not inserted into an **avant-garde scene** as much as was the case with jazz in the sixties. I think a more apt comparison would be idiosyncratic giants such as Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus or Herbie Nichols
> My hunch is that an avant-garde scene is most likely to blossom once a genre is slightly past its peak of relevancy in terms of public consciousness (which for jazz would of course be the 30s/40s). It feels like collectively questioning the foundations of a genre could be the natural progression once people start collectively asking: “why are we not as popular as we once were?”
> Hip-hop is DEFINITELY not at that point, especially now that it’s surpassed rock as AMERICA’S FAVORITE GENRE
> But of course I could be completely off-the-mark, seeing connections where there are none. As I said before, avant-garde seems to be an artificial, loosely defined concept. Maybe my definition is just not that useful when applied to hip-hop
DISCLAIMER: a lot of this is shamelessly lifted from Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, though it may have been distorted to an unrecognizable degree given that it’s been years since I last read it
