AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS
EDITION: Guimarães Jazz Journal 2024 - Câmara Municipal de Guimarães/ Associação Cultural Convívio/ A Oficina DATE: November 2024
In order to listen to music, we need to understand what surrounds us; because in art, as well as in jazz, we have to learn to idealize and manage this idealization of our thoughts, this management being provisional since it is permanently on the verge of oblivion and replacement by new ideas. In our perspective, to think about jazz means undertaking introspective explorations and reflections on our ability to imagine, create and detect technical delimitations and frontiers within a musical art form that never attempted to establish any separating lines between the various territories it has walked through over time. Jazz has always been a kind of meeting point between musical genres and people, in a spirit of free transit based on an intensive and spontaneous work determining the discovery of new specific fields of activity in music.
In jazz, when we do not have enough time to listen to it, we remain at the surface and do not go deeper; when we do not go beyond partial auditions what appears to us are mere shadows, incomplete things, specters, and reflections of sounds that, while being disconcerting and impermanent, sound manifestly similar. In such vertigo, what remains of our auditions are only flashes of assimilations (macroscopical visions, generic passages, vague perspectives) in which the acquired notions are indefinite and devoid of their respective projection of contrast, adrift in a cosmos made of a myriad of large-scale contacts that are impossible of being processed in its totality. We thus become uncapable of discerning interesting details, explorations of extreme particularities, bold passages whose outlines, albeit partial, represent solidity, knowledge, sensibility. In short, without contrasts jazz loses tension.
When it ignores the problems of its time, music loses touch with reality; therefore, it becomes deformed and drifts away from its ultimate purpose. In that process, its listeners disconnect from what they listen because they disconnect from other listeners; and, as we disconnect from each other among many interests and people like us, we can only understand jazz in small fractions. Today, what we see around the musical phenomenon are fractured situations made of inconsistent sounds; what the digital web displays and accumulates are undifferentiated musical tonalities, diluted sounds, divided musical zones, uncertain and non-sequential tonalities disseminated by amorphous fields of scattered echoes that can neither direct our ears nor guide our sensibility as listeners.
In a more radical perspective of this context, we may speculate that music is progressing towards an inexorable dilution; a dilution that liquefies our identity and that might represent over time an irreparable loss to human sensibility. History proves that it is possible to live in a sound void, in the sense that the sounds we hear do not belong to anybody and, within such a loss, it is inevitable that we end up losing a notion of unity. Considering that common elements of identity and recognition are scarce in the jazz of the present, it then becomes a musical manifestation without a center, or a centrality in permanent self-regulation. But the music that we receive does not allow us to differentiate it from the other mass-produced musical genres circulating in the free market. However, it was precisely this relation of identity with jazz and music the crucial element of reference and recognition that led us to this situation.
Having reached this point, the following questions arise: what if we did not have an idea of jazz? What if its tools of identification did not exist Or it was no longer possible to detect its presence in a more or less clear way, as was the case in the past? What would happen then?
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The current representations of jazz are more global, more diverse and, to a certain extent, more impersonal; we may also add that the present current forms of music are, in general, more difficult to discern, thus easily misleading the less attentive and knowledgeable listeners. Today’s music seems more open but it is, at the same time, much more mediated; and this communicational mediation interferes with our daily activities because the current musical production, while seeming freer on the surface, is on the contrary much more circumscribed and conditioned by technology. All of these situations either manifest themselves in a obvious way and, in many cases, represent invisible processes of propagation adapted to less sensible spirits and ears.
When we frame jazz within the scope and the magnitude of internet reality, we have the feeling that music has shrunk in size; at the same time, we sense an increasing proclivity for the combination of sounds that led to the acquisition of new dimensions. Therefore, we end up understanding that the jazz phenomenon has intensified over recent years, developing new configurations, innovative approaches and diverse movements, thus creating new polarities. In our perspective, it is important to know to what extent and in what terms this musical genre changing, that is, transforming itself and transforming us; to what extent are we being stimulated to adhere to different and increasingly more sophisticated apparatus of promotion by being confronted daily with new technological innovations. It is obvious that music is currently living in a diffuse, uncertain, ambivalent, and, like all the other dimensions of contemporary societies, highly complex situation, one whose factors and elements of apprehension are simultaneously immense and inconsistent. In that sense, we feel that the scope of ours attempts at understanding are increasingly more limited and dependent on processes of dissemination supported by the strength of the communication and information we receive; and this information is everywhere, intensely affecting all types of music – genres, formats, styles – categories that are often musical and non-musical at the same time.
A substantial part of our knowledge is supported by the evidence of numbers that the digital web displays daily, but which do not tell us anything consistent; we see the number of exhibitions, concerts, publications, records, visitors, followers, spectators, acquisitions, visualizations, likes, downloads, and many others, almost infinite, statistical categories. We are bombarded everyday by these numbers in a permanently expanding interactive space that hinders the listener’s ability to develop a consistent idea of jazz. Faced with this lack, which seems all the more critical the more we think about the technological potential of the web, it is relatively easy to become displaced, non-situated, deinstalled, in a colossal and limitless surface whose impact strikes us and transforms the base of comprehension structured over time and which, in the past, allowed us to reach an idea of jazz.
It is not surprising, therefore, that currently one of the most import issues in music is the possibility that it may be falling into a kind of artistic torpor, a disfunction caused by excessive doses of monocultural procedures, especially when it is artificially produced and processed in order to be commercialized. But, paradoxically, we accept, feel and intuit this somewhat strange process when we navigate the apparent diversity of the internet; in it, it is usual that contradictory visions arise, evident detours that the digital web can attenuate or hide. It is not enough to say that we are freer, that our thoughts and visions are wider, that our sensibilities are more comprehensive – if the fact is that the content archived on the internet permanently refers to uniform, regular and infinitely replicated processes. On the internet occurs a sort of large-scale mimesis that allows a fast multiplication of topics through intensive processes of imitation and reverberation.
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Because we live in a reality that is somewhat complacent with falsification, its implicit flaws of knowledge are irrelevant and the causes that complicate out ability to understand cultural phenomena are permanently devalued by propagandistic processes of simplification. When we look coldly at reality, we cannot but conclude that we are being colonized by a broad propaganda process that makes it difficult to escape its influence. The market is, and always was, a vast field of action that tends to colonize and scrutinize our knowledge and behavior; and its influence is at the service of culture and thought, hindering our ability to develop consistent perceptions. We know that, in order to gain autonomy and think with our own heads, we need to act in a way that allows the discovery of knowledge, skills, combinations between different forms of expression, non-conditioned by monocultural formats; we know that we must find lines of escape from a system that is always referring to copies and falsifications of reality which have the effect of transforming our levels of perception, whether in cultural, musical, social, political or economic terms; and we also sense that the more we associate our ideas to sensible elements produced by us and based on higher standards of discipline and rigor, the more prepared we will be to defend ourselves from the consequences and influences of propaganda. But the truth is that, despite all promises and expectations in the opposite sense, the conclusion we drew at the end of all these years of meteoric evolution in the digital world, is that the internet gives us a very short margin to be the authors of our own paths; and that, in this context, we are increasingly reduced to the condition of mere products of our time: that is, individuals confronted with massive doses of propaganda.
A commercially invasive element persists within music as if it were a microorganism, an element that is always reproducing itself and progressively weaking and debilitating its musical host. The propagandistic manifestations leave their marks, since they change our relations with music and how we discover it. The strangest thing about all this is realizing that propaganda is everywhere, being accepted and tolerated by everyone despite all its insanity and excesses. These reactive simplifications include everyone and, of course, also include artists and cultural agents, even those who present themselves as radical and independent. In this sense, if we think about the global individual who navigates the digital web, we understand to what extent this being is an easy prey to the chain of events, both the product and the consequence of an irreversible phenomenon of communicational interaction that tends to colonize it within a globalized territory that generates major influences and erases any idea of future – because in globalization there is only present.
The propagandistic strategies are designed to convince the individual to adopt certain behaviors, and those behaviors are but manifestations of obeyance, imitative, lethargic and negligible, neither supported by original ideas nor constructed by the minds of the listeners. From a more uncompromising perspective of this approach, we cannot help but think that this listener is an increasingly passive being, a man without qualities enveloped in a cloud of apathy that devitalizes him and takes away his own soul. Thus, we can say that the propaganda interfering with music develops a listener who is not the author of anything; an indigent person, manifestly inattentive and permanently apathetic, thus favoring the expansion of bad music and states of anomy and devaluation.
In balance, we may affirm that the listener was transformed into the object of a negative-sum disinformation game; this means that whoever wins, wins it all, subject to high levels of propagandistic radiation in an exposure process that hinders our critical capacity. This listener is thus musically obstructed, limited to the listening of the sounds that appear randomly before him because propaganda, in addition to creating dependences, overrules and contaminates the individual’s inner life. The listener has become an echo chamber, a mere receptor of suggestions and ideas propagated by total strangers; and all these procedures occur at once, accumulated inside an increasingly interactive cybernetic machine, managed by algorithms and forms of artificial intelligence supported by sophisticated technologies capable of acting in an invasive way, inducing calculated and predictable behaviors. In the face of all these factors, it is only natural that the best arguments disappear, leaving us with only the vacuity of words.
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Where machinic discourses are formatted in the shape of flat screens, there is no debate possible. On screen people talk about everything without expressing commitment to with their ideas, as if these were permanently being passed on from mouth to mouth; that is, subject to the randomness of others’ individuality and unpredictability. Without an individual contact between people that can make us more empathic and human, communicative action disappears into small nothings because the monitor replaces the need for face-to-face contact, thus dispensing with understanding. Eyes cease to be eyes as soon as the screen allows the user to hide behind fake identities and false information. On the screen relationships end with a simple touch of the finger that erases the images of the people who appear there. We do not know exactly if we can call these relationships attempts at dialogue, since cybernetic individuals no longer question us with their eyes. In the digital world gaze was robbed from the individuals, and in the face of all these experiences it is only natural that we feel the absence of the other and regret the lack of a presence. These entities were replaced by the inflationary use of discourses which have been altered through artificially structured narratives where different tools of communication are mixed; and, in the midst all these narratives, a strange emptiness persists within us.
In the face of the advances of technology we still don’t know how to protect the causes of our fallibility when applied to processes of selection and evaluation of projects which, in many cases, are carried out by generative artificial intelligence. The latter may be programmed to reject the best ones only because they are problematic and non-lucrative; and these forms of rejection tend to benefit the mediocrity that also proliferates on the internet. What has happened, which in our perspective is extremely critical, is that the worst solutions are the most tolerated and even favored. In this process new digital structures are consolidated within a web that projects itself in increasingly similar conjunctures; the shapes are fragile in their logic and scope, and this reality serves to deform and divert the musical object from its main purpose, which is to invest music with a potential message capable of expressing problems, points of view and values.
Given this scenario it becomes evident that the most valuable information is that which triggers an intense work of suppression; or, in other words, the more difficult is the access to a given information, the more valuable it is, hence its aura. In a way, the presence of censorship is always an opportunity, in the sense that when corporations, institutions or governments try to restrict and suppress knowledge, these entities are subliminally indicating what is the most valuable information that we should know, thus implying that there is something that is worth being exposed that censorship tries to hide.
We are aware that all these questions are complex and hard to explain and understand, especially when applied to art, music or other form of artistic expression; however, some say that we are trapped inside a zero-sum game whose rules we ignore, but, as strange as it may sound and against all odds, we enjoy playing it, although we do not know if somebody knows or understands where the game leads us or what is really at stake. Perhaps we are all in the middle of a game with delayed exams and there is in all this a sort of gain of opportunity that we need to take advantage from. In regards to its consequences, we have no alternative but to wait and see; right now, the most important is to win the moment and make the most of it; whether or not this experience is positive, only time will tell.
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Scientists often say that is not possible to have absolute certainty about all things, and we know that they are partially right in that assertion because how many times are we confronted in our daily lives with different perspectives on the same subject? This difference obliges us to engage in countless complementary experiments on what we think in order to reach, or not, a conclusion that is, however, never definitive. Conclusions of this kind are, by their own nature, a process that encourages doubts and not certainties, because doubts are what call into question many of our discoveries, starting with our decisions. But when we are dealing with art, music or, in this case, jazz, we feel that these questions are even more intense, since these are distinct fields of knowledge; in the face of art, people are confronted with other types of problems related to their intuitive and rational perceptions, which include several ways of seeing, listening, and feeling. Such variety makes our work of interpretation and analysis difficult, complicating the attempts we make to find the best conclusions; because masterpieces are, in their essence, an unsolved case, something that presupposes a process that is subjective, hence debatable, open and multiple in its essence. In that sense, we may affirm that the lack of certainties gives us an advantage points towards an excess of interpretations.
If our processes of apprehension are atypical, so much the better for us and for music because there are no fixed models to follow and, within this mechanics of listening, the more creative, courageous, and daring we are, the better we will be in our analytical capabilities and the more capable we will become of sparking new ways of thinking. The relations in jazz and in music may help us understand the randomness of certain processes bringing musicians and individuals together, and, in this context, we find an interesting example in the way Thelonious Monk talks of his experience of artistic collaboration with John Coltrane: “Sometimes he played his own scheme of altered chords that differed from the one that I played, and none of us played the proper chords in the piece. We walked to a certain point and, if we reached it together, we could be happy. Coltrane appeared at the decisive moments and saved us. Many people asked how could we handle so many things at the same time, but we did not have much to handle. Just the fundamental chords and then everyone went wherever they wanted.” In this dynamic, the musicians and the music are the enigmas that demand answers from the listeners.
How often is music the key that opens our minds to new doors of perception, that takes us to other horizons and new paths that we didn’t even know existed before? And yet many of these things were already in us, albeit in a larval form; they existed in our interior, ready to explode at any moment via stimuli, associations, listening experiences. In that sense, we, musicians and listeners, act as if we were predestined to go through those experiences, to the extent that we lacked something capable of triggering this process of discovery. All of these things happen as if they were an occasional and happy encounter with destiny, a moment many call an epiphany – or, in other words, a transformation provokes an eruption of feelings, emotions and sensibilities at various levels.
In this case, and considering the instability of all these elements, we may affirm with some purpose that to fail is human; that the people who know jazz in depth feel that they can easily fail. In the domain of this musical genre, our assertions are not rectilinear, or are more oblique, weird and skewed than in other domains, orienting themselves in regards to the acquisition of certainties through continuous, disruptive, holistic and circular processes. Our experience tells us that when we share our judgements and evaluations of jazz, these may configure more interesting, solid, and consistent collective visions, thus achieving a lower probability of error.
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Today, we do not know exactly where music, and particularly jazz, is going. We have some doubts as to whether it will persist in our memory because, when we listen to it, it seems like we enter a new reality, a parallel and different world, something that causes the loss of our notion of time and sends us to a field of constant listening of the present, where the past and the future are of little importance. Each audition generates a micronarrative that is usually based on a vast actuality, and actuality is the fundamental element that invests jazz with an aura of authenticity. Each music originates in facts that contain other divided facts which, in turn, reveal themselves as elements devoid of informational gravity, of narratives lacking the weight of truth. Because of all these factors, we believe less in things and in music, and we distrust more than we trust; and, just like it happens in many other dimensions of our life, we may not be able to reach any interesting conclusion, especially when we take into account that most conclusions seem pre-fabricated and biased.
We like to metaphorize the things that amaze us, and music is not an exception to that rule. In this context, myths configure a kind of aseptic approach that purifies and, in a certain way, provide answers to our doubts and interrogations with regards to our origins and purposes. When our ability to listen proves itself unable to solve our problems, we feel that we know very little about who we are, where we come from and where we are going to. Myths are constructions that reflect who we are and, in that sense, reflect ourselves, because it is us, the listeners, who are the masters of words, the people who put words to music in an attempt to explain it, attributing more or less mythological stories to the things that touch and sensibilize us. All these and other sentiments give us a strange feeling of superiority or the illusion that we are all, in a sense, fulfilling a destiny.
If we are skilled enough to confer a unity of criteria to music and jazz, perhaps we might be able to preserve all the references of the past and, therefore, to construct ideas that are not completely entangled in illusions of actuality, novelty and real-time contacts – that is., to avoid dependencies from approaches that may render us dangerously alienated. Through the defense of our older references and the refusal to forget them, perhaps we might be able, at the present moment, to better listen to jazz; and, by contact, perhaps it might be possible to create a minimal unit of more or less consistent identifying characteristics of this musical genre that may allow us to recognize its main references. The listener has, in short, to adopt judicious, critical and essentially free positions, thus transforming the act of listening into an emanation his own thoughts, capable of inducing reflection and knowledge.
Bibliography / suggested readings:
Boris Groys, In the Flow
Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
Steven Pinker, Rationality – What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
TRANSLATION: MANUEL NETO
