Why do jazz musicians like Swedish extreme metal?
> A big issue with music criticism is that oftentimes critics are not clear as to what exactly they are assessing when they review an album/song
> How much a critic likes an album is usually a response to two different questions: A) What should this album achieve? B) To what extent does it achieve it? It’s somewhat rare that a review will clearly and separately articulate A and B, especially when A clashes with what the album itself set out to do
> That is not how >>regular people<< approach music. More often than not, when one considers a single specific genre, the criteria for judging whether album X is better or worse than album Y are more or less clear to every listener
> In fact, we may as well use that as a definition of what a _genre_ is. Instead of the usual formal definition (rock = distorted guitars, blue-based riffs; hip-hop = rapping, bass-heavy beats; etc.), we could flip that around and go with: “we call X a genre if listeners generally agree about what they are looking for when they listen to X”
> Eric B & Rakim’s Paid In Full is better than M.C. Hammer’s Feel My Power. That is not a debate. In hip-hop, if your flow is tighter, your wordplay more complex, your beats more creative and your style more authentic than whoever you’re comparing yourself to, it’s pretty much a done deal that you’re better than them
> Whether Paid In Full is better than Big Daddy Kane’s Long Live The Kane is a much more heated discussion, though I think you won’t find much disagreement over what you’re supposed to be judging (flow, wordplay, beats, style, etc.)
> It gets harder when you try to compare different genres. How does one compare, I don’t know, Eminem’s technical proficiency to Juan Atkinson’s techno futurism? I can’t think of any intuitive set of criteria that isn’t useless and/or arbitrary
> That is particularly evident in year-end/decade /all-time greatest record lists, such as Rolling Stone’s infamous “The 500 Greatest (mostly anglophone, mostly rock) Albums of All-Time”. What is interesting, though, is that there actually *IS* some genre overlap — and often not where you’d expect
> Of course every list of all-timers will include the consensual magnum opus of different genres (Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue and Coltrane’s A Love Supreme; at least one of Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers, Tupac’s All Eyez On Me, Biggie’s Life After Death or Nas’ Illmatic; etc). I mean, it has to look like they at least tried
> But also every, every, EVERY rock drummer will cite jazz showman Buddy Rich as an inspiration; avant-garde rockers will namedrop avant-garde tenor Albert Ayler; and occasionally Swedish extreme metal act Meshuggah garners a mention from a jazz musician
> Those are NOT obvious references for someone who’s looking at those genres from the outside. They are not widely known as the BEST ____ IN HISTORY. They are not even crossover acts, or at least weren’t for most of their careers
> I suspect what’s going on here is that those names pass the test according to the sensibilities of both genres, albeit for different reasons. Buddy Rich’s ability to play precise patterns at breathtaking tempos fits perfectly into classic rock’s virtuosic tendencies — even though he loses points in the jazz context for overplaying and showing little regard for the group mentality that is intrinsic to the genre
> That would mean that the rock musician who loves Buddy Rich is not *ACTUALLY* listening to jazz most of the time, at least in the sense of being inserted in the >>jazz ethos<<. They are approaching Buddy Rich with the same preconceptions of what’s good and what’s not, what they’ll like and what they won’t, that one would approach a rock album with. In fact, they’re transporting him into the rock world, where a different set of rules applies
> Is that bad? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like that might be ///misrepresenting/// jazz and driving attention away from better musicians. Or maybe this is just me the jazz-lover-who-prides-himself-of-his-laboriously-catalogued-record-collection rationalizing a petty, tribal “stay out of my turf” stance. In all honesty, both explanations may be true
> A few years ago, music critic Hank Shteamer (a fan of both jazz and metal who writes the excellent Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches blog, which you should read right now) hosted a fascinating series of interviews with jazz/metal musicians about the intersections between both genres. Here’s jazz pianist Craig Taborn:
“There’s a part of me that isn’t so [approving of] the benediction of some more arty guy that [says], ‘Now metal’s cool’. I’ve never been into that, because I’ve been into metal all along. So, like the people who flow in, or the people who are like, ‘Oh, Meshuggah’s great, but that’s the only metal band [I like]” or “I don’t like the screaming’. I’ve had a lot of jazz guys say that, and I’m like, you know, ‘Fuck you — don’t listen’.
“I think Meshuggah’s great; I think it’s a very specific and unique statement. It’s not the only metal that’s out there, but I know a lot of people who only [listen to it] because it appeases enough of their sensibility. But, you know, there’s all this stuff out there to listen to. And I’m like that with anything, going the other way too. Like the metal guys who are like, ‘I don’t really listen to jazz, but I like Zorn, and Zorn’s jazz’. And I’m like, ‘Well, he’s great; there’s a lot of things he does that are great. But there’s a lot of other stuff’”.
