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- ^What jazz critics look like when other jazz critics are talking.
Jon Wertheim: Dave, what are your criteria for a great artist? As we review new records and go to shows by contemporary jazz players, there's always a temptation to predict the next Monk, the next Mingus, the next Miles. Should this temptation be followed?
David Prentice: Ah, what a frustrating question. Well, as somewhat of a critic, I do think that critics should exercise caution when trying to predict who will be a great artist. Critics have an influence on what people listen to. I chose to listen to Ambrose [Akinmusire] because critics were saying big things about the record. You need to just to hear for yourself. Now, I totally agree that Ambrose is worth the praise, but what if the critics were wrong? I just spent all my time listening to a guy who isn't good when I could have directed my attention to someone who is truly great.
I guess I'm more a fan of descriptive criticism rather than prescriptive criticism. I don't like to talk about good and bad. When something isn't working, I'll explain why. When something is, I'll explain how it works. And otherwise, there are so many aspects of music to analyze that assessing the value of certain artists feels like a waste of time.
But I realize merely avoiding the question is completely unsatisfactory. We listen with the hope of discovering the truly great artists. That's part of the pursuit. So it would be fitting to come up with a definition of a great artist -- something that's objective as possible. And I think this objective method exists, but it would be hair-pullingly difficult to nail out. And even when one person may be objectively right, people will rarely agree.
First of all, here are two criteria that you can't rely on:
1) Influence. Obviously, if you're trying to predict who the next great artist will be, then you can't rely on how influential they are. If they're young, they likely haven't had that much influence yet. Bird was Bird before bebop was bebop, you dig? Influence also doesn't measure the greatness of older artists either. You could argue that influence is greatness in its own right. I don't disagree. On the other hand, there are many great musicians that don't enjoy the influence they deserve. That doesn't make them any less great.
2) Popularity. Again, this one's kind of obvious. Musicians who are great are usually popular or well-known, but greatness and popularity are not necessarily connected. Look at Lenny Breau. One of the greatest (leave that vague for now) guitarists ever, and his greatness is immensely greater than the number of people aware of the fact. On the flip side, there is Kenny G. No further comment necessary.
With that out of the way, I have one question for you. When you say "the next Monk, Mingus or Miles," do you mean by this an artist that possesses the same greatness (whatever that may be) in our own time relative to the greatness the artists possessed in their time? Or are you referring to an absolute kind of greatness -- greatness of all time? Since styles change so much, I don't find greatness (or any quality) commensurable between eras and time periods. But I do think it's worthwhile to say that so-and-so is to our time (style, genre, scene, music) may be what Miles was to his time.
Alright, now for the main course. What makes a musician great?
Well, I'll begin in a place that's completely abstract and vague. The greatest musicians create musical worlds. Musicians can be innovative, original, unique in all musical domains. They can be technically and theoretically proficient, and so on and so forth. But only the greatest musicians create self-contained (thought not isolated) worlds -- systems of musical laws, values, images, order, concepts, vocabulary, and so on.
Let me perform a thought experiment. I'm listening to Miles, Monk, and Mingus. There's an evil genius screwing with my ears to make all music, good and bad, sound like dissonance. (Luckily, however, I know that I exist. Thanks, evil genius.) What might I pinpoint to be the source of such greatness?
1) I hear technical mastery. Yes, but technical mastery has nothing to do with the music itself. It is only something that enables one to play a certain way. (Exit the experiment for just a second. Go away, evil genius. Case in point: shredders.)
2) Their sound is completely original. Getting closer, self. But I've heard many people who play in a way that nobody else does, and they sound like this because nobody else would seriously want to play that way. That said, many great artists do play in a way that sounds radical, but great music needs more substance than simply sounding original.
3) Okay, I've spent months listening to the works of these three artists -- how excruciatingly painful. But I've noticed that some dissonance possesses a very distinct system of logic that extends throughout all the musical, conceptual, theoretical, harmonic, rhythmic particulars. These systems don't seem to exist in the dissonance of Glenn Branca or Buckethead. And yet I also hear a high level of individuality and technical mastery that's necessary to achieve such a deep world of sound.
4) At the same time, the artists with deep worlds of dissonance are remarkably connections with other, very different, musicians that also create deep worlds of dissonance. What's more great than systematic dissonance that is simultaneously individual and universal?
I'll leave it at that, although I'm sure there will be things to add and clarify. Who knows, maybe I'll take the whole thing back. But I'm eager to hear what your criteria are. Plus, I want to go listen to music now, and enjoy the fact that I can enjoy music, that no evil genius exists. Seriously, though, I have to work this vague thing out with specific examples, which I'll present in a later reply.
Jon Wertheim: Wow. I would say there's a lot to unpack there, but you did a great job of unpacking already. So I'll let your analysis stand on its own (which it's totally capable of doing) and address the question you posed to me about halfway through your response: When I asked you about a modern-day Miles, Monk or Mingus, did I "mean by this an artist that possesses the same greatness (whatever that may be) in our own time relative to the greatness the artists possessed in their time? Or are you referring to an absolute kind of greatness -- greatness of all time?"
Well, I have two things to say in answer to that. First, I'd like to try to actually address your question, and second, I'd like to raise one related question of my own.
What I meant was, indeed, a relative greatness. I agree with your points about changing times and circumstances completely. Take the music industry itself: would Mingus be seen differently today if he'd never been signed to Columbia Records and gotten all that high-quality publicity? I think so. Mingus might still have recorded Mingus Ah Um, and it would undoubtedly have been as amazing in content as it actually is, but would we have seen a 50th anniversary edition in 2009? The same could be said for Kind Of Blue or Giant Steps or... the list goes on.
Today, that major-label publicity/promotion machine is almost gone, and with it is an idea of artistic greatness. This is less about the labels not putting in the time and more about independent musicians having the internet to do their stuff. A Columbia Records can still pull its weight for an artist, but where in 1959 (or even 1989) those resources vastly outweighed indie jazz musicians, in 2011 a major label can spend thousands of dollars in press and see an indie jazz musician getting the word out just as effectively with nothing but thirty-five bucks for a CD Baby account and maybe some cash for a high-level blog.
Another thing about that phrase "another Mingus" or "another Miles" or "another Monk," though, isn't only that it doesn't take into account all of these circumstantial differences, but it also demonstrates what I view as the biggest weakness in jazz criticism and journalism today, one that I've dealt with before but has never really gone on to be discussed in the jazz community at large.
That's the role of "jazz masters." To say that Ambrose Akinmusire, to use one of your examples, is the next Miles is to do what? To elevate Akinmusire to the status of a legend? Or to hamper him by comparison to the greatest of the great? I've talked before about how the generation before Ambrose's, the Kurt Rosenwinkel/Joshua Redman/Brad Mehldau generation, was held back for years from taking their place as influences (rather than the influenced) by the Wynton Marsalis ethos of overarching respect for history. How can Joshua Redman take his place as a jazz elder when Sonny Rollins constantly lurks in the background? And how can Sonny Rollins be viewed in contemporary terms (which he should be, as he's still making music today in which at least his own saxophone attains incredible heights) when he's already been canonized as a "jazz master" and his recordings from the 1950s are seen as the complete picture of his work? The same could be said for Brad Mehldau and Herbie Hancock or Walter Smith III and Wayne Shorter, or even someone like Jackie McLean, whose later recordings (which are spotty, sure, but hold some gems, like Jackie Mac Attack) are pretty obscure in comparison to the recordings he made for Prestige and Blue Note forty years before?
So, at the risk of moving away from the original question and into more tangential realms: What do you think? Is this even a problem, or is it just my crankiness about jazz journalism?
David Prentice: I agree. This is a problem in jazz criticism. I don't see the quantity of coverage as the problem though. Contemporary players are written up enough in newspapers, blogs, All About Jazz, and various other places online. But beyond reviews and interviews, I haven’t found many essays, analyses, or histories. I wish writers would focus their scholarly projects toward contemporary music. I haven’t come across one jazz journalism/criticism/scholarship book about the generation you’re talking about.
One possible reason for the emphasis on older players, besides Wynton Marsalis and neo-traditionalism, is that jazz today is fragmented. The internet, and the decline of the record biz, only makes the fragmentation worse. So, what does each style/player/artist have in common? Well, the same linkage to the jazz tradition, and of course that brings you back to the masters.
Consider the first post-bebop era, after the demise of Charlie Parker, in the late 50’s to fusion. First of all, no matter what kind of jazz you played, your influences were the beboppers and the legends that came before. So that has the effect of placing more emphasis on a few masters. Secondly, aside from the groups of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman -- who, I think it’s safe to argue, dominated the music, press, and industry -- the music was fragmented into many sub-genres, with their own masters who didn’t command enough attention to get as much mention. In the musical world, they’re very important. In the critical world, they still haven’t been given their full credit.
Look at Wes Montgomery. Few guitarists are as influential. Yet how many books can you find about him? Not many.
Another example: Lennie Tristano. Now, there’s been more literature on Tristano’s tremendous body of work. But, in my opinion, he should be regarded as a pillar of bebop piano, equal to Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Yet he was completely cut out of the jazz narrative until recently because of the fact that he was a member of a sub-genre dubbed the ‘cool school’.
Then there’s the question of how carefully these sub-genres are defined, which I won’t get into. I’ll just say that, if Chet Baker and Warne Marsh fall under the same stylistic umbrella of ‘cool’ you’re kind of simplifying things a bit, don’t you think?
Although, to continue with the Lennie example, I don’t think it’s a burden to be eclipsed by other influences in the jazz media. Great musicians are still great, and if people don’t realize it now, they will later. Tristano’s popularity, I think, has been rising. Among contemporary musicians, he’s also more influential than before. Just think about Mark Turner’s concept.
But Mark Turner has his own world, separate from but inspired by the experience of Lennie’s world of music. Coming back to my “worlds” concept/metaphor, I think great artists create musical worlds so vast that, if you tried, you could find your own sound that world. Influence doesn’t have to mean predominance, really, it just means that you’ve inhabited one’s musical world in some way. You can try to replicate it, or you can use that experience to make your own.
Jon Wertheim: Right, okay, I agree, but I'm not sure you've answered the question. You say that contemporary jazz musicians are "written up enough," which I would agree with, and you go on to say that there aren't all that many scholarly analyses of the players I mentioned, which I would also agree with. But I agree to both with caveats. My caveat of the first point is, yes, they are written up a lot, but how are they written up? As players in their own right, or in the Young Lions's case, as jazz masters and influences in their own right, or are they compared and contextualized to the point that they lose their future-ness? I'll get back to that, as I know I have to define that for it to make any sense at all, but first let me present my second caveat, which is that, I think, you do see these players in more scholarly works, and I use that term loosely so I can include jazz histories like the recent Jazz (by Giddins and DeVeaux), but do you see them placed on the same plane as a Rollins or Monk, or do you see them almost as footnotes to the Marsalis section that inevitably closes out these histories? In that, the Giddins/DeVeaux Jazz was brilliant; it closed with Jason Moran as the next major voice, something I agree with and respect on their part.
But back to my really vague first caveat, and it connects to my mention of the Giddins/DeVeaux book. I think that something Marsalis did in the 1980s, and it wasn't really his fault, was stop jazz history (I'm about to summarize the post I linked to above, by the way). It wasn't really his fault because, for one thing, it wasn't only him, and, for another thing, no one would have cared if Columbia Records hadn't made him a jazz superstar. But he, in those years, did emphasize respect for tradition over innovation, and allegiance to "the masters" over exploring new musical territory, and he still does that in some ways. And he defined a generation of players who were like him stylistically but not necessarily mentally. I'm talking about Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Brian Blade, Kurt Rosenwinkel. And what do we see now? All of those guys did the opposite of Wynton. Redman went into funk and then more progressive jazz (as did Branford Marsalis), Mehldau, as we know, explored rock covers and a fusion of pop and jazz, Brian Blade works with Wayne Shorter dong far-out stuff, Rosenwinkel is Rosenwinkel... But those guys are still seen, not as jazz elders but as the newcomers. That impression is just starting to fade, thanks to The Revivalist and A Blog Supreme and more forward-thinking articles in DownBeat (although those are rare and often too little too late - we got the whole Marsalis family last month, and now James Carter? Give me a break).
But really, put in the perspective of the arc of jazz history, these guys form what is a missing link in that narrative. We had (I'm generalizing here) New Orleans and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s, we got Duke and Count Basie and Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman in the 1930s, then bebop in the 1940s, hard bop in the 1950s, free jazz in the 1960s and 1970s, then Wynton Marsalis in the 1980s - but where are the 1990s? We skip right to Glasper and Jason Moran and, oh, hey, there's the '90s! Thanks to Wynton, our reverence for the masters (which always existed as respect which facilitated progress but only the 1980s become worship that could not be contradicted) has out the players who came about in the 1990s in this awful limbo state. Rosenwinkel and Redman and Mehldau are grouped with Moran and Glasper, even though they're actually an entire evolutionary stage behind, history-wise! Now I'm not saying they're dated, because they aren't. But it works both ways: the guys like Wayne and Sonny are denied their more recent innovations by the jazz scholars and the guys like Redman are denied the role of their old ones. Meanwhile, Moran and Glasper are even further from being recognized as influences and major jazz forces, although, as I said, that's starting to happen slowly but surely. And even the guys who were totally with Wynton, the hardcore traditionalists like Benny Green and Christian McBride, are stuck in this limbo, because they have no peers in the eyes of scholars - Redman and Mehldau aren't there to hang out with them because they've been shoved into a later and incorrect space in jazz history, which results in a historical episode, the Young Lions, which isn't really factual because it's way too narrowly defined (take Joe Lovano as an example: he came of age in the 1980s, but is rarely included in the Young Lion narrative because he doesn't fit into the mold; likewise, as Ethan Iverson has pointed out, too many free-jazz and avant-garde musicians and composers of the 1980s are routinely overlooked, for the same reason).
Anyway, what I'm trying to say, and I'm getting too worked up about it, is that the evolution of jazz history was tangled in the 1980s with regards to the idea of a "jazz legend" or "jazz master," and needs to be unraveled. So to pull everything back to a little bit to what you said above, I blame the internet and general fragmentation less than a prevailing attitude established before the jazz blogosphere existed, which then become a misguided common knowledge and then was canonized by that jazz blogosphere when it did come into being. And, as Ethan has pointed out a few times, it doesn't help that people either deify Wynton or condemn him totally. I think the biggest mistake was assigning his words more importance than his music, which started in the 1980s and is still happening today. Nate Chinen, in his most recent JazzTimes article on the new Smithsonian box of jazz, notes that Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, Cassandra Wilson, Kurt Elling, Chris Potter, Mark Turner and Kurt Rosenwinkel were all left out of that set. What do they all have in common? They were a part of the Young Lions movement in the 1990s.
David Prentice: Whoa, man, slow down! Haha. Okay, now I get what you’re getting at. Let me try to break it down a little. Your central claim (if I’m understanding correctly) has three parts:
1) Wynton Marsalis, and neo-traditionalism in general, redefined jazz in terms of the “jazz masters” and their styles.
2) Jazz historians explain the subsequent (post-Wyntonian, heh) generation in terms of this conception only.
3) This interpretation overlooks (or at least misrepresents) the subsequent generation because their stylistic innovations didn't fit the master-derived conception.
I agree. At best, jazz history tends to contextualize jazz post-1980s in terms of its relation to the jazz tradition, which either oversimplifies the style or footnotes otherwise noteworthy development. Some will continuously refer to these artists as if they just arrived yesterday, are just emerging, even though they've been around for at least a decade. (Is that just a critic's stock line?) At worst, this development is completely ignored. (Like in that article about the Smithsonian collection of jazz, or whatever.) New artists, to be worthy of inclusion, must fit a style derived from the past -- which, as you say, halts the movement of history. The jazz history infinite loop!
Given this, I'm not surprised that Giddins and DeVeaux choose Jason Moran as their ending point. You were telling me about how he carries on the legacy of Monk, for example, by staging the 1959 Town Hall concert. Doesn't this fit within the traditionalist narrative?
Anyway, I think one could argue the concept of a jazz rebirth of the 1980s sets up a false dichotomy. It posits that jazz, during the fusion era, was dead, and then Wynton brought it back, and it’s been that way ever since.
If you examine the history closely, though, it’s clear the style was still alive during this time, and its disappearance was merely marginalization. First of all, fusion cats were jazz cats. Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and others. They didn’t forget the more traditional approach -- listen to Keith Jarret’s trio stuff. Isn't it interesting that the polar extremes of the jazz/fusion debate turned out to be Miles Davis (the jazz master who ironically suppressed the legacy of jazz masters) and Wynton Marsalis (the newcomer who ironically suppressed the legacy of some newcomers) and that they beefed with each other. Was that the reason? I don't really know -- I don't know my history.
Secondly, take the musical influences of the 90s generation. They favored a generally post-bop style in their early years because they learned from older, less well-known players, who continued to play in the old style. Kurt Rosenwinkel, in this interview, describes playing with old-school cats at jam sessions in his teens; or, later on, learning from bebop pianists like Frank Hewitt and Barry Harris. It was these older, lesser emphasized players, who kept the tradition alive and brought it to the new generation. I'm sure there were similar influences for the other members of that generation you mention.
In fact, the more I think about it, the importance of Wynton as a musical influence is overstated. Musical influence has been confused with influence in the media, in scholarship, and in the industry. Interestingly, he seems to be more influential as a critic, spokesperson, and commentator than as a player. Ever since he did JAZZ, he's been tied to that, and the film's shortcomings are his. (I really wish someone like Billy Taylor had led that project. Just think about how awesome it would be! After all, he was alive for most of it!) Beyond that, I don’t see much evidence to suggest that he led or influenced an entire generation of musicians.
Okay, well, so, we agree. It’s a problem and it’s frustrating. Hopefully, you and I will be two of the dudes who help to correct the interpretive errors of the last 30 years. (I will get on that, once I learn how to write.) But when/if you/we undertake this endeavor, we will nevertheless encounter the problem of what we choose as criteria for a “jazz master,” and how to deal with “masters” when contextualizing new artists.
Musically, the influence of the masters isn’t a pressing problem in my opinion. Today's players are inspired by their elders but don't suffer under their legacy. They've progressed the tradition of the legend status of the greats. Anyway, I gave you my (rather abstract) answer to the issue of greatness in my first response. What about yours?
Jon Wertheim: Well, re: Moran in the Giddins/DeVeaux book, I was actually trying to make the opposite point you've suggested, that it's a break from the trend of ending with traditionalism. I don't have the book in front of me, but I do know that they spend a lot of time on Moran's work interpreting hip-hop and other genres - I'm not sure they even mention the Monk thing, as the book may end in 2006 (I may be misremembering), and besides, Moran hasn't, and told me he probably won't, record that Town Hall work.
But that said, you got my point exactly, and I'm safe in saying you summarized it better than I said it originally. I'd add that your characterization of jazz in the 1980s - when people assume it was "dead" - as the time of fusion is one of the misconceptions I'm talking about. See, the fusion guys, like Herbie and Wayne and Tony Williams, they had it good. But the vast majority of overlooked musicians in those years weren't fusion guys OR the bebop guys like Barry Harris - they were free jazz guys like David Murray or Julius Hemphill (I recommend Francis Davis's wonderful book on jazz in the 1980s, In The Moment, if you want to brush up on the way jazz looked in that decade).
And I'd argue that there's ample evidence to suggest that Wynton was part of a movement in the 1980s and 1990s, and so was Branford. I think his skill level, which is high, and his way of playing jazz, which is masterful but very rooted in tradition, place him right there with early Redman and Mehldau and all of them. But on an equal basis 0 that's what I want to emphasize. But he got the major label deal before anyone else, he got the publicity before anyone else, he got the attention before anyone else. But he never set out to be an influence, he was happy to be the influenced. But the jazz community, and Columbia, wouldn't let him. And this is kind of a nice transition to your question to me, what are my criteria for a great artist?
I think that, looking at Marsalis's style today, it's hard to hear that style in other trumpeters. You hear a lot of Clifford Brown, you hear a lot of Miles in his playing. So let's take Ambrose Akinmusire, a guy greatly influenced by Clifford Brown, and Nicholas Payton, a guy greatly influenced by Miles. Same influences, they both came around after Wynton got his fame - did they go to Wynton? No, they didn't. They went back to the source. Marsalis, compelling as he may be on his own records and in his own world, just didn't have the special something that made his use of Brown and Davis stand out as different and important enough to merit using him as the next degree away from Brown and Davis, the way, say, Sonny Rollins used so much of Coleman Hawkins and then Joshua Redman used Sonny more than pure Hawk in forming his own style.
But that's all with hindsight, and sort of dodges my own question.
I guess now I'm thinking over the new records I've heard that I've immediately classified as great, as sure to stand the test of time. Walter Smith III's Live In Paris (2009); Charles Lloyd'sRabo De Nube (2008); Joshua Redman's Back East (2007). So why, if I choose those as three "great" albums of today, aren't Smith's III, Lloyd's Mirror and Redman's Compass (all from 2010) on there?
I think part of the reason I classify those albums as great is because the artists themselves are great. But I think another reason I classify those artists as great is because not every one of their albums is good (or at least I don't think so). Maybe this is my beef with Kurt Rosenwinkel - a small beef, but a beef nevertheless. It's that all of his albums are great, and so, in the end, none of them are. The greatness of each one cheapens the greatness of the next. Sure, I'd put some of his albums in the "great" category, but great relative to Lloyd and Redman and Smith, not to himself. And so, after way too much explaining, there's one criterion: an artist must be great in the context of the music around them, not the context of themselves.
And that leads to another criterion: That context around them needs to be music and life. Take Sonny Rollins, who used bebop and the avant-garde when they were topical (using developments in music) and also explored civil rights issues in his music (context of life). Same with Max Roach, same with Coltrane. I think that "life" component is essential, and for me it's what makes Jason Moran great while Robert Glasper is just good; Moran's music isn't only music, it's theater and photography and painting and spoken word, as well as genre upon genre (hymns, blues, hip-hop...). It has a three-dimensionality built onto the music, which I feel Glasper doesn't have.
So, to cut through all of what I just said: two of my criteria for greatness in jazz are, first, standing out from the musical context of their day, and second, adding to that musical context with an element of life in general. And I touched on but didn't explain a third: imperfection. So, maybe those are my three basic criteria for jazz greatness.
And I've mentioned some names already, but let me choose my "great" artist of today based on those principles (hey, you get Kurt, I need someone too, and I don't think it will be all that surprising). I choose Jason Moran as the jazz musician I think will be viewed, years from now, as the next step in the line of jazz legends, from Louis Armstrong to Duke to Miles to Monk to Wynton (yes, even Wynton)...
Moran has everything. He stands out from the musical context of 2011, or even 2005 or 1998, by contributing something fresh and unique (but always recognizable) to every project. His lines can be crisp and icy or warm and lush or bleakly aggressive, but whatever they are they mesh perfectly with their environment without sinking into the background. He doesn't adapt to any situation because he doesn't allow himself to be placed in situations disadvantageous to his art, which I respect. He uses other elements of life in his music, too: clothing and demeanor (as he told me: "I don't think the stage is my living room, I think it's a f**king stage!"); multimedia (like the projections behind the Monk project); and visual arts like theater and painting (Artist In Residence, from 2006, makes those connections explicit). But with the free stuff, with certain solos, certain choices - well, I would say he takes risks. And that's the third criterion, the clincher. He takes risks, he's not always right, he's not always perfect. With someone like Kurt Rosenwinkel, I expect the record to be great and, boom, it's just as I imagined it. With Moran, I know the record will be great but when it comes it's a whole journey finding out how and why. He draws you into his greatness.
Now to the question at hand. I like your point about music being connected to the music around, whether topically or otherwise. That's a specific incarnation of the coexistence of the 'individual and the universal' in musical worlds. Masters are connected to the universe of music while creating their own. I also like that you included a relation to "life" as a criterion. Musical worlds are not just musical; they connect to a range of experience and meaning. What you seem to value is that music transcends itself -- that it is part of a greater meaning.
To be transcendent in life and music the artist doesn't need to intend to connect their music life or other music. But the musical impulse does need to originate from your experience. Masters possess that magical ability to transmute experience into sound. Sonny's example is one where the artist intends to relate to specific styles and political events. Music, as with art, however, can embody a period in time without the intent on behalf of the artist. Charlie Parker, on the other hand, was musically conceptual, but didn't think much about life. Yet it's astonishing to see how significant his music is to the historical conception of the '40s and the '50s. Think of the meaning it brought the Beat movement -- even though they extrapolated ideas that ran contrary to the intent of the musicians.
As for imperfection. I'm not really sure I understand how you can apply this criterion. I count perfection/imperfection as a criterion that falls under skill/technique — which I don't consider applicable when talking of greatness. (That said, most masters will be extremely technically proficient, as that ability allows them to play their ideas. New skills accompany new sounds. And poor skill prevents mastery. That's probably why many regard skill and greatness as the same.) Is there musical (i.e., non-technical) perfection/imperfection? I can imagine, but perfect and imperfect are so different for each individual. What evidence can you provide when making a statement like, "every note that cat played was the 'perfect' note"? Perfect note in terms of what?
In any case, I agree Rosenwinkel's music contains a high degree of perfection. Not a boring or absolute degree of perfection, though. His sound has become refined and streamlined, but it's not rigidly symmetrical and uniform. There's always a loose end or two in the solos. And his perfection is more than perfection for its own sake, but facilitates expression.
Which takes me to the idea of heartfelt humanity. Now this is an important element in great music, fo sho'. Kurt expresses so much in the music. Imperfection may be human, but not always. You don't want music to sound like a logarithm played by a computer-saxophone. That's boring perfection. You want to sound like a human singing melodies.
Okay, I'll end it here. Incomplete and imperfect. There's a lot more to say, and I haven't really responded to a handful of the ideas you put forth. Maybe a part two sometime? This has been fruitful. At least I now know I should read some of those books you mentioned. (It's been years since I picked up a jazz book!) Stay tuned for the next topic!
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