Guimarães Jazz 2007. introdution + jazz as

AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS

EDITION: Jornal Guimarães Jazz Annual Journal #2 - Câmara Municipal de Guimarães/ Associação Cultural Convívio/ A Oficina

DATE: November 2007

INTRODUCTION

The program for Guimarães Jazz has never been one that is a choice which projects or structures itself by

stepping off from one particular type of music. It is clear that the process of selection behind an event such as

this, which covers a single theme, necessarily displays an inarguable aspect of fragility in understanding. When

you support the structuring of a program that has a single concept as its base, its scope becomes more intuitive in

a reduced and limiting way, limiting future solutions.

In the beginning of the 20 th century, there were composers who already had a very clear notion about their

ability to orient their art toward a person in particular or to direct their music toward a very specific audience,

the supporter of what they were doing. Webern was the first musician able to ponder the inexistence of the other,

whereas Schoenberg was still composing for a future ideal listener. Webern assumed that this public did not

exist, in an attempt to structure his music and creative acts outside the influences of the medium in which he

worked. Following along with this idea, it might be thought that our festival program should be an action not

destined for an ideal receiver, with the need to express a position that dispenses with the particular order in

which the mechanisms that choose are always contingent and occasional impulses, many times unconscious.

How, then, to discover a different and strange dimension for this inevitable alienation that can be perceived

amongst program, music and listener? Personal taste - or better yet - the attention that is paid to a certain project

emerges in an occasional manner without apparently or intentionally having limits to genre or style. The

programming process begins with prior experiences, taking into account past events, projecting inside them the

search for a new reality. In this type of exercise, unpredictable ways of feeling emotions are melded together,

supported in the symbolic imagery of the musical object reflected over top of its past, present and future, and

allowing for moments of comparative emotional linking among the various temporal dimensions of each one to

occur.

All events have extremely subjective and complex moments, full of reflections and strategic finalities that cause

new decision-making to take place. There also exists an interior desire to have orders established, coherence

attributed and reasoned actions situated in an apparently ordered logic that is profound and difficult to

transmit. The intention is to format the various proposals that are brought up, establishing a way to make them

enticing, and engage the process of seducing the majority of people, without abdicating distance in relation to the

essential aesthetic values that are revealed in the desire to offer a diversity of projects, enabling the exploration of

other ideas with the performance of new musicians.

Guimarães Jazz, being the last festival of the year, is held after a series of similar events. Its conception has to

reflect this fact, and other programs are analyzed. Unnecessary repetitions that would show a lack of originality

are avoided, since they would translate into a depletion of the opportunities available for disseminating this type

of music. The program thus must be structured on a set of suggestions, at the same time invitations to attend the

concerts and glittering flashes meant to pique the curiosity of the public.

A song is always a reality that can not be represented. In order to be properly worked upon, the piece has to

encounter an infinite sense of its performance and the way it can be fixed in a singular identity, yet with different

moulds for its performance. A wider re-elaboration of what can be recognized in the artistic space of our ever-

changing world has to carry on. Every year, there appear new ideas and projects that unleash attentions and

interest, expressing diverse models of understanding that bring along with them certain concepts and

presuppositions that are so often repeated. The principles of “jazz for jazz's sake” and “jazz as pure art” are

references that should orient us, stripped of their habitual prejudices of recognition, putting things in

hierarchies, consecration and fashion - this strange activity of the ephemeral which obliges us to understand the

vastness of this phenomenon demanding that we know how to differentiate and individualize what brings it

about and to distinguish its more authentic manifestations. Sometimes, unfortunate and ambiguous

terminologies appear - semantic formulations that confuse without really defining positions and reflecting not

more than the relativity of all evaluations. There is a clear process of persuasion associated with writing that

attempts to convince and be convinced that there exist supreme methods of classification in which the best are

recognized and acclaimed as such. It is known that success is far from having an equivalent with regard to

quality and creativity, talent and artistic authenticity. It is always difficult to take a selective approach in

referring to new musicians. Shifts in the jazz scene are full of events that have been made banal by mass

communication, speech that serves as a vehicle of commercial interest, promotional models and market vices. It

is impossible for there to be definitive solutions in the elaboration of ideas about the quality of music when

concepts are pre-established over the actions of one's own critique, concepts that tendentially classify and place

in hierarchies. All reflections express a personal taste, an evaluation that is always debatable and contingent, and

an attempt to reach an understanding with satisfactory results, beginning with personal, pragmatic and

provisional ways of perceiving.

Art is not the realization of an ideal act because if this were so, art would be its own negation. A festival is, out of

principle, the sum of unfinished creative acts, which, for being so, comprise all types of risks and fragilities. If the

creative act could achieve an ideal state of permanence, it would not authorize successive readings or so many

other reinterpretations. Works could never become great in their universal realization and would be unable to

assume a timeless aesthetic dimension. A work embodies a type of synthesis, annexes various ideal moments

exposed in the power of a symbology that renews itself and remains up-to-date. This enrichment, this

accumulation of solutions, a consequence of successive visions, experiences and feelings, imbues jazz with the

strange ability to constantly question its public. The bearer of inquiring tension, jazz becomes music that is

indispensable for understanding our world. The degree of awe that arises when considering the multitude of

jazz's possible interpretations and the changes in circumstances that are insistently revealed when such

innumerable readings take place settle into the hectic and instantaneous human lifestyle that characterizes

contemporary culture.

That is how we can confirm that nothing is able to correspond to the expectations of we have previously

established. The “ideal” festival would be one that could appeal to the public without manifesting the slightest

influence of the forces of preconception, fashion, consecration, recognition, hierarchy, etc., transforming itself

into a neutral happening able to stimulate the need to learn and to inspire courageous and humble acts of

revelation to tackle the problems caused by its understanding. In this way, the festival would come to the

ultimate end of its existence if it were able to totally fulfill all its promises, achieving the blend of what is

expected and what is assimilated.

Jazz and art have gone along acquiring values that assure enlightened autonomy. In the midst of the abundant

symbols that transform artistic exercise into an activity that is no longer art but culture, there exists the danger

that everything may be seen as a way to encourage consumption through the adoption of exchange mechanisms

whose main goal is the tallying of just how great popularity levels and audience numbers are.

Guimarães Jazz must also be an element that spreads itself out broadly. We have encountered a broad field of

performance where musicians and listeners coexist. Jazz has to be accompanied by many of the other activities

that are essential for us to live out our structural and environmental reality where we can illustrate the conflict

concerns we all live with. Criticism, history, creative movements, polemics, monographs, essays, schooling,

improvisation, collectionism, tradition versus modernity, commercial art, pure art, social, political and economic

interests…. its games, its confrontations, its shocks are al structuring elements (among many more) indispensable

for breathing in jazz as a living musical expression. The world is in constant mutation and jazz needs to know

how to assimilate this and participate in the rapidness of this general movement that determines who we are

more and more. To be active and resistant may mean that we may still be able to convey stimuli inclined to unite

people, overcoming this homogenizing regime in which we all live.

JAZZ AS

Jazz as Freedom

Pharoah Sanders Quartet

The sense of jazz seems to have undergone some changes. To better comprehend these movements, it would be

interesting to analyze the forms that have been attained as a process of releasing and freeing, in which the many

adventures, ambiguities and ironies that have occurred along its history are featured. Along this path, which is

drawn out by the desire for change, lie an idea of self-transformation and transformation of the world that is

cloaked in fear, disorientation and disintegration. Jazz expresses life as paradoxical and discordant, a difficult

survival situation which is constantly trying to find solutions and establishing different forms of approaching and

conceiving. The political and sociological character of artistic expression is overlaid upon concepts extracting the

potential of the modern, already many times explored. The desire to change can be identified through an ironic

vision that does not deplete the strategy of redefining what has been instituted.

What is sought after is a passageway between two heterogeneous orders - that of absolute certainty and that of a

profession or act of faith. The disquiet of jazz requires time so that the music can properly be submitted to the

judgment of history. This occurs through moments of reflection and selection which establishes a regime of non-

temporality made stable in the concept of universal aesthetics. There is no stability without faith, without belief,

without a higher sense that outlives the present, retaining for later use in the memory many of the defining and

identifying elements that anticipated and aided in the determining of new expansions of this music. There is

worry about the minimum regularity capable of providing safe bedrock for evaluation, spatially-determined

chronological tools of which we will never be able to use effectively. Through time and its succession in space, we

try to resolve the gaps and difficulties in understanding contained in the projects we stumble upon. We take to

the path in this regime of uncertainty and altering, forced to act as if we knew something definitive about the

safety of concepts and the setting down of ideas. If the symbologies that are built are important for support, we

must also recognize that the definitions that we find will provide solutions for absolutely nothing. Jazz has gone

out on a path of abstraction, subjectivating itself, reaching a liberating sense of surmounting an obstacle, just as

other artistic endeavors have. It has taken decisions about its space, which along its path have not appeared

quickly or easily. It has had the opportunity to carry out a self-evaluation, a correct judgment about itself, thus

creating a state of equilibrium between what it has decided and the internal and external information

accumulated over time, and thus knowing how to assert itself with the result shored up in other more rational

and safer ideas about its evolution and progress. There is no jazz without the respect for singularity or for the

small contingent world where everything is determined, and there is no art without a community of people who

are interested in discerning these events. We are a grouping of individuals - all identifiable, representative equal

beings - with art happening and following afterwards in our midst. For reasons that escape us, we are capable of

being sufficiently free to act in a more stable way than is natural, succeeding in attaining pleasure that is brought

about in the symmetry of the object of pleasure and the person appreciating it. Without the reciprocity of will

found in the ‘listener 1 creative musician' space, there would not exist that liberating constancy that permits us to

assimilate and evaluate what we are listening to. In jazz, this relationship is much more visible in the swiftness of

movements and the substrata of the ephemeral. In improvisation, an approach that structures a creative space in

change is revealed, in which one can take voice from the voice of another, making it the building-block of one's

own liberty. These characteristics keep jazz from ever being a foreign musical form. Each one of its experiences

appears as an attempt of the possible on a limitless frontier. Its contents are not totally revealed to us and its

legacy remains to be deciphered. This situation requires us to hear it through the compelling urge to encounter

what is needed. At its centre are the music and a performance contradiction exposed in the living memory of its

ever-near languages, always able to be compared with more recent happenings. Jazz has worked these realities

by inverting the senses, using parodies transformed into serious matters or seriousness reflected in irony. No one

knows who began this circular movement in the immense libertine unbalance that its sound would inevitably

cause. Successive bumps have perturbed the stability, symmetry and security. Even the canon which was viewed

as something acquired and fixated by the core of society that regarded music and art with disparagement, which

itself at the same time was having difficult time of it and which now, curiously, is reliving those days, bogged

down in a worrisome state of affairs.

Jazz as Friendship

Ravi Coltrane Quartet

Jazz as a creative process has known quite well how to find the means for survival effective enough to establish its

artists and to compel its listeners. Beyond the desire for association etched in jazz, through its performance a

formula for instant friendship appears to have been sprung up. This music, which did not content itself with

simply existing, made itself heard and fed a community of believers attracted by the paradoxes recognized in

faithfulness to creation. It asked nothing of no one; it presented itself in a simple way, as the effort to re-

encounter the lost vision of a past religious spirit taken up the instant the force of a new, attractive, more secular

and more neutral wisdom was discovered. This solitary dedication gains importance through our acceptance of

its forms of musical resolution that, although contradictory and opposed to the more traditional ideas of history,

were presented by visions of musical structuring that intended to safeguard the perturbing link to the more

chaotic and freer side of human beings. Improvisation manifests a propensity to accept a thing that can result

from its opposite, as a truth can emerge from falsehood, contradicting its very origins.

It is known that the use of a word brings down its meanings - the causes give origin to effects that are superior,

thus impeding access to the profound truths contained in them. Jazz, not being word, can also be corrupted by

speech that disintegrates in its obstinacy of communicative impulses. It is solitary music that disassociates and

isolates itself in a healthy individualistic solidarity. The search for explanatory solutions for its forms creates

misunderstandings, separation and hostility. Theses questions recall the old and judicious necessity to renounce

one's taste, to avoid being united by wide agreements of sensibility because in that way we live in an immense

subjective world of creativity, in a state of secrecy in which we learn more from being apart than from being

together. Those who wish to stay united to the overwhelming number of elements crushed in the centrifuge will

find it practically impossible to find the space to spark experiences of artistic creativity.

Jazz calls on us to think beyond the notion of what is accepted and institutional. It supposes the existence of

disproportion, the rupture in reciprocity between all the intervening parties, pushing relationships off balance

and re-forming them into energies. From this apparent discordance are born things that are different from what

is felt in the singularity of attained autonomy, in the independence of ways of feeling and in the self-sufficiency of

the capacity to criticize culturally. These aspects stimulate us to reshape the dimensions of imaginative stretching

that penetrate many other musical areas terrains, removing influence from them and adopting semantic

structures unique to them, incorporating them usefully in their context. There is an enormous survival capacity

for creating bonds and establishing networks of interactions dealing with recognition and projection in an ideal

duality: the other of one's self and one's self made better. Such practices instigate the perfecting of the survival

mechanism which consolidates itself through the dream of immortality. When on the other side of death, there is

only a light - the ecstatic luminosity able to communicate with the absolute future from which fantasy emanates,

two senses that cohabitate in the unique original that remakes itself in multipliable copies and vice-versa. That's

why tradition appears to be always coming close to its end, yet the absolute finale never takes place, as it had be

announced at the beginning. True jazz is its own idealistic image. There is no definitive place able to furnish us

with permanent points of reference, able to finish off this volatility of genres and types. Not even harmony works

as the equilibrium in music that lives off of the audacious exploitation of limits that were pulling apart when

faced with the atonality of analytical sensibilities. The more a final classification for jazz is sought, the more its

horizons pull way and pull apart, creating new empty spaces or wide gaps in misunderstanding. The mobility of

territorialities and their remade surfaces stir up the desire to understand; the attempts to reign in moments of

difficult understanding do not provide peace-inducing certainties. For this very reason, jazz can only be projected

beyond its own lifespan in a benevolent friendship.

Jazz as Object

Jan Garbarek Group

In jazz we detect a profound dilemma, an attempt to return to the old idea that bonds are made with reality

through feeling. The aesthetic value set in ideas of harmony, regularity and organic unity seems to despise and

suspend itself. The present moment reveals itself in the ample process of interaction which no longer allows for

the application of traditional concepts of media and explanation based on dialectic contradiction and the

exploration of oppositions in symmetrically polar terms. In the apparent repetition of styles that characterize

improvised music today, a detectable form of unbalance is established in the generalized banalisation of art, a

situation manifest in innumerable realizations. There is a lack of faith, a pull back of belief in the simplism and

naiveté of the forms chosen. The way that jazz is expressed at present leads us to suppose that no one believes in

the defense of transcendence in art, generally speaking, and of this music in particular. Some pieces are art and

some people are artists, but other types of ontological problems that may come to pass are always felt in a

superfluous way.

Jazz suffers from all the inabilities and situations of change inherent in a process of rectification of the artistic

which transforms art into a tangible object, subject to a dual simplification. An occurrence as a consequence of a

general process of demystification and secularization of artistic manifestations, involving all the symbolic

activities in its fetishist detours. Its representation depends on factors of immediate and direct communicability

and not on creative activity derived from the sublime in creative projection felt via an identity that sustains and

verifies it. Everything transforms into a mechanism of merchandise-swapping: the more the principle of a ‘value

swap' destroys the very possibility of having useful value, the more that value itself becomes disguised as an

object of ‘an end result.' The culture industry substitutes the effect for the cause, maintaining a passive attitude

of adoration toward the cultural product ever closer to the concept of fetish applied to consumer goods. The

circulation of products is impregnated by a clear utilitarian objectivity that does not evoke any doubt about these

values, ones which are crammed into all types of publicity that deal intensely with these moments as if they were

objects. Its receptivity by the public is an event without relevance, an accessory moment, an event that takes place

in the middle of a process of competition amongst the various instruments of mass communication, information

and style. As we come closer to swelling layers of both the general public and those individuals who are in the

dark and unable to discern the difference between what is real and what is symbolic, works of art turn into

things, becoming objects structured in a purely commercial aspect. These works are pushed off track by the

attention and care given to maneuvers and propitious strategies meant to favor the rapid circulation of goods and

see their spiritual and transcendent scope oriented toward notions of lesser value, akin to accessories.

Art becomes dissolved in the fashion that dulls and snuffs out the strength of what is real, dissolves its radicality,

normalizing and making homogenous all things in a generalized spectacle, seeking novelty and effect - which

implies the rapid wearing out and obsolescence of works that must be continually replaced with other ones

endowed with greater force of impact and features capable of awakening new awareness. Communication also

exerts strong influence on artistic activity because publicity and information develop asphyxiating and insipid

means communication, leading down paths that seem seductive to consumers. Discovering jazz as a reality in its

irreducible singularity - integrating it into a process where elaboration of meaning is an added value to

knowledge through imaginary projection - would be one of its main ends. This music should take all pains to

succeed in pointing out another path, one that give access to a different symbolic order that might better

visualize its realness.

Jazz as Feeling

Orrin Evans Quintet

There are strange coincidences between the analytical forms applied to jazz and some general features within the

theory of art history. The experience of surprise has been one of the elements of aesthetic feeling which, since the

days of Greek Antiquity, has determined many critical approaches to art, themselves developed via the opposition

between two ways of molding the concept of beauty. In trying to establish a way to interpret the ancient world

based on the opposition of form and event, it should be noted that form is associated with the appreciation of

works of art whereas the event is more oriented toward the exploitation of the ‘surprise effect.' Thus it becomes

interesting for us to reflect on those elements that explain art and its feeling so that we can find in them a

relationship between the improvisational forms encountered in music and the implications of artistic

manifestations that this type of random-based experience can provide us.

Creating an event is not enough. For an event to exist, it must be felt as happening for each individual. However,

not everything that happens is an event. Only that which is presented as something able to reach a certain target

within each person can be considered as such. This is implicit in the concept of event, an idea of success resulting

from confidence in historical truth, explained through an instant of grace revealed in the interpretation of the

experience of victory. Attaining the most sublime sensation in artistic experimentation, one that starts off in

creative activity that becomes universal through its grandeur, is a sign that events cannot be given a rational

explanation because they emerge from an oscillation between chance and fortune as non-manifest causes in

human rationality. If behind everything there was the appearance of something evident and rational, then now

we have to consider a series of more insecure new elements that act in diverse ways - as if they could furnish

explanations on what it is like to be human, to possess certain physical characteristics and to be born in a certain

environment, or as if we had lived through a particular type of experience. The force of the word “chance” carves

out quite a few philosophical implications, which in some situations could conveniently be translated as “luck.”

The appearance of a new degree of indeterminateness has been sensed at the level of what is random, which will

also befall the event at the moment when each person, instead of becoming a prisoner of the opposition of

‘interior versus exterior' and ‘subjectivity versus the world,' finds a constructive solution that allows that person

to place him/herself in a positive way within the process that acts beyond the solution. Without this exercise,

there is no event, and there is no happening without repetition because everything that imposes itself as the best

for each person must be repeated, transformed and elaborated in that which is subjectively desired. This idea of

the event is born out of the concept of art as an individual exercise.

Certain thoughts about art manifest a way of looking at the work of art differently in relation to its form. The only

requirement placed upon the public is that of contemplation and passivity that wraps itself around the

individual. What takes place is that the piece acquires a new dimension in this contemplative perspective. Its

exercise, in the ‘process moment' that spurs creation, displays supreme care in expressing the search of

something extremely refined and takes off track the feeling toward a new context, verified in a singular entwining

of contemplation and action, separating all actions that prepare the practical and final result - the work itself.

Jazz can also be viewed through all these happenings, reaching its final moment in that which is heard in the

most active and vital manner. We perceive the work as if there were some compulsive need for repetition in it,

expressed in a degree of total dissatisfaction and re-experienced in the permanent attempt to overcome this state.

In the anguish felt over what has been already realized, determined by the successive processes of improvisation

that music excites, there is some acting upon luck, the moment when something is risked and things are put into

play, in the attempt to lock real time, like a prisoner, into the work of creative happening. Making event and form

overlap in their aesthetical dimensions in an act that refuses not to be ephemeral is the concretization of art as

feeling.

Jazz as Profaning

John Scotfield 'Real Jazz' Trio featuring Steve Swallow and Bill Stewart

Jazz can be viewed as an act that profanes. The meaning of the word “profane,” in terms of Roman law, refers to

the removal of things from the sacred or religious sphere and their use outside the realm of the gods. Thus, to

consecrate was the term defining the removing of things which humans had a right to, placing them at the

exclusive disposition of the gods; to profane was the contrary, where free use of such things was restored to

humans. Jazz can also be fit into this movement of de-consecration. The first years of its existence were seen as

acts of sacrilege expressed through troublesome attitudes that violated and transgressed the lack of availability of

certain, particular goods that were exclusively to be used by the divine. Access to music was fenced off from a

people in slavery because it was experienced as a subversive type of entertainment and a non-authorized

diversion. It is interesting for us to consider that its first performances were charged with intense religious

weight, meant perhaps to downplay the overflowing sacrilege implicit in it. The profane side gradually became

manifest through its practice, which expressed marginal and illegitimate contexts. Things became released from

the grip of ‘holy names' and were returned to the common man for his use. Skillfully, the enslaved people

managed to make the various indigenous African cultures more uniform, and through the process of religious

linking, at the same time discovered a new social and political reality that became used as a profane mechanism

of identity. Jazz acquired a liberating substratum that activated and regulated that separation. Even today, it

retains vestiges of this genuinely religious central core. As a uniting element to spur essential relationships to the

determination of a redeeming referential identity, this music never ceased to be a type of profane contagion - the

sound that un-bewitches and restores to all common people the ability to use whatever the sacred had taken away

and controlled out of its necessity to cling to power. Thus, jazz went off the path of the sacred sphere after having

been returned to the daily lives of all of us in popular forms of expression. The sacred took part in a broad process

of identification and unity and had it not done so in this way, it would have been nearly impossible to achieve.

The term religion comes from the Latin “religare” (“to tie fast”) meaning what unites the human to the divine. Its

organizations were founded in practices taken from secular endeavors, achieving mass identification for the

enslaved people who lived within a powerful country where the racial divide was a fundamental element in

structuring the means of economic production. This passage from the sacred to the profane is a game which

takes the unity of what is initially established and breaks it up into pieces. A game of freeing up societies and

preconceived notions takes place which, like the majority of games we are familiar with, have their origin in

ancient sacred ceremonies, rituals and divining practices that were within the religious sphere, in the widest

sense. This game can also represent the subversion that breaks the bond connecting myth and rite into pieces,

and that occurs via the deactivation of the other sacred bond, the one that gave origin to the first one. The game

liberates and pushes men away from the sphere of the sacred but does not intend to abolish its use. Modern men

no longer know how to play such games, and this is confirmed by the enormous number of games that invade our

space and in the mind-numbing multiplication of new and old games. The show is also an attempt to return to an

idea of the game as a subversive moment. Oddly enough, we may perceive of jazz as a happening that can still re-

establish ruptures between the sacred and the profane, creating new possibilities for subversion when setting up

forms that compel us to keep playing these old games of humanity. If jazz were able to make an appeal to all

forms of action that would refute social and religious rules, opening up new prospects for grabbing hold of a lost

feast by a return to a renewed concept of the sacred and its more propitious rites, it would assume a new rupture

just as profane as the one that started this whole artistic adventure.

Jazz as Tought

Ahmad Jamal

There currently exists a context in which many people who follow artistic phenomena find themselves: one which

is convinced that jazz today, as well as art in general, can do without theory. The role of the critic is limited to the

elaboration of a narrative chronicle via a text that expresses the heaps of news and descriptions that flutter about

without there being the least attempt to explain the difficulties of music and its proper placement, socially,

economically and politically speaking. We recognize a different time frame, but in spite of this, many written

activities are limited by a dramatically utilitarian perspective, following a vision of publicity-generating,

commercial promotion of artists that is outwardly pleasing without ever having to deal with subjective matters.

Aesthetical questions accompany the lack of interest paid to ethics in a post-industrial society which is more

attentive to poetical experiences and others more related to its own history. The idea of pushing away, seeking

detours around or distancing any thought or reflection on the more obscure questions of creation, and other

existential aspects contained therein, can be seen in the inconsistency of the narratives that are emerging today in

the inconclusive discourse of many critiques appearing after the second half of the 1980s. There has been an

overall deviation regarding what has been done and felt, clearly featuring an aggressive polemic that worries

young musicians and critics who would rather plant their reflexive roots in a more reducing vision of their work

and who protest outwardly with reasoning of a practical order. Greater tendencies in more recent art, the defense

of jazz and ultra-naturalist art that gets pushed away from any type of transcendence, not just the theoretical,

still persist in the ancient necessity to negate, transgress and act in a militant fashion. In the challenging and

apparently irreverent movement that we are witnessing, there are many cases that wish to dispense with the task

of solitary and persistent comprehension of the entire theorizing process inherent in all artistic activity. The

volatility of these processes lifts actions to the level of experiences of another type, favoring the group and their

essentially activist character.

Aesthetics are born when one deals with what is assumed to be art and the way in which the superior moment of

creation is reflected in thought. There could never exist any level of reflective inquiry if writing were made to

symbolize a regime of distancing thematics from theoretics, opting for activities more related to struggle and

competition or with other more utilitarian interests. Current movements state that all ideas surrounding jazz

structuring cannot be centered on the extremism of provocation, nor on the violence of transgressions, because

these forms have less and less significance in the present world, with this type of untimely message putting forth

a clear sensation of boredom, banality and idiocy. A type of anti-theoretical orientation can be felt prevailing over

this music. Paradoxical and contradictory features emerge in this way of acting because, although anything that

may give origin to aesthetic reflection is able to unleash just repudiation, this does not prevent value judgments

from being made about artists or about those people unwilling to develop analytical practices based on such

presuppositions. Seen in the content of prepared elaborated material is an array of devaluation, depreciation and

rejection, which all persists baselessly and without just cause, showing superficiality. When this event is

considered with more attention, its justification is not found in the fact that the one who criticizes can also

recover his own artistic license, but rather to the contrary, it seeks to insist on the predominance of an amateur

attitude that conveys personal and private judgments on taste. What is confirmed is that one likes or does not like

a certain thing, and it is impossible to go farther with that relationship within the scope of two limit-positions.

Paying attention to these movements occurring with such force in today's jazz scene, intention wants it to be

known that we are no longer cohabitating within the traditional artistic lifestyle in which the work of art was

characterized by its aura, or rather, by the cultural value that it was given as an unique and long-lasting object

that solicited an aesthetic experience based on a relationship of distance that met the person enjoying it.

Currently, we find ourselves inside another fully secularized, empty and disenchanted regime that was

inaugurated through technical reproductions of works of art, which conferred on art a merely expository value,

beginning then and continuing onward with a relationship of proximity with the public, extremely deprived of

subjective values that should be beckoned and presented with the greatest possible intensity in artistic endeavors.

Jazz as Abstraction and Loneliness

Charles Tolliver Big Band

We have heard many times that in order to comprehend a work of art it is necessary to understand its historical

context. Against this commonly placed and famously historicist stamp, it is possible to conclude that in

summarizing all contact with artistic production with this type of approach, one must insist upon the singular

and exclusive observation from the historical context as it is written, harming the intimacy with art, its prospects

for analysis, its potential for understanding and the identification of its comprising influences. The same

happens with jazz. If one wishes to understand anything relevant in this music, it is necessary to perform broader

abstractions into its encyclopedic and banal considerations, pulling it from out of the temporal occurrence in

which artistic activities are initially recorded. This necessity, formed by the will to seize what surrounds us, is so

fragile and so debatable that viewpoints can get overturned, ones that had been held up to that moment and ones

committed to the historical weight of events and that affirm that art itself is the activity which furnishes the space

that allows for unique observation. Also, given the way we achieve a new individual understanding bolstered in a

particular historical situation, we are able to establish a direct contact with the brutal facts behind the events,

which might stir us to want to maintain a certain ignorance of said facts. To the contrary, if a person reads some

literary texts or attends a screening of some representative films about a certain movement, the information

collected can provide ideas about the context, helping us to clarify the previously-observed brutal facts.

In human history, the role of music has changed, with it no longer being a vehicle to propagate the spoken word

or a means of transmitting a message, instead becoming something that retains and contains a symbology that

has ceased to be unique to it. We find that with this type of movement - one which shows the passage from a state

of general and concrete utility to a more individual and abstract developmental one - occurs in history

everywhere and in all artistic manifestations. What we have here is a type of subjective deepening in relation to

the first message that was transmitted in words. What has been perceived is a distancing in the direction of a

space of loneliness that etches versatility and flexibility upon the work of art being realized, thus distinguishing it

from other communicative expressions. The piece then acquires its own dimension existent in all unique things

and re-launches art toward the universal plane situated above all more worldly interests. Music functions as the

surface of solitude, a place of recognition and contemplation. Jazz manifests this solitary side when it does not

request for itself any type of inheritance of internal well-being whose experience is found in precise state of

superior delight. The idea of simplicity, purity and sentiment relative to the need to suspend judgment is

reinforced, taking on values that are freer and void of earth-bound commitments. The works of art can only

attain affective self-sufficiency when they reflect this ideal course that humanity can indeed tread, using this

path, one where art is the contact-spot with truth, an abstract term directed to the public that recognizes itself in

the indispensable union of an abstract dimension of subjectivity.

Jazz music is a type of solitary being that acts over subjective knowledge to conciliate morally renewed free time.

Intentionality and intimacy seem to be part of music, and only through its instrumental effects is it possible to

intimately limited by instrumentation, in music, this relationship emerges before us with greater astuteness and

immediacy. This fact leads us to believe that it is much more difficult to tell a lie through music, and because of

this, it possesses an affinity with emotive, amorphous and extremely powerful material from infancy. It absorbs a

respect to other existing languages, ones to which humans direct their attentions in their daily exploits, through

the fact that they exist.