In our opinion many of the new released albums of the year, particularly the ones related to or involving jazz, are not worth hearing. Especially young women release albums that are called to contain quality jazz music, but in reality they do not offer anything that can be recognized as artistic, technically mature or any other value with such an approach. We still try to understand who finds unrhythmic and inharmonic albums necessary.
Here are the names of those infamous artists and their albums: jazz vocalist Monika Rayn – Now; Tamuz Nissim – Echo of a Heartbeat; Debbie Cunningham – A Million Kisses, Jeff Baker – Phrases, vibraphonists Giuseppe Mazzamuto – Mediterranean, Steve Hobbs – Tribute to Bobby, pianists Manu Guerrero – Nuevo Mundo, Elliot Galvin – The Influencing Machine, Matthias Bublath – Live at Jazzclub Unterfahrt; Martin Lutz – In Denmark I was Born…, Oddgeir Berg – Before Dawn, Eric Lensink – Baby One More Time, Michel Camilo – Live in London, and so on.
We took numerous interviews from these so called “jazz musicians”, but the thoughts and ideas they expressed were as boring as the music the produce.
Once Pat Mathan said: “It’s a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It’s becoming quantized, diced and defined. It’s becoming an idiom. To me if it’s anything, jazz is a verb? It’s more like a process than it is a thing”.
“Maybe I’m getting old or I’m to much a purist but a lot of stuff that is coming out these days is not real jazz in my opinion and don’t really interest me. Sometimes those productions sounds like it is composed and played by mathematical specialists or it is ripped of every nice harmonic movement. It can go even worse when they add rap or even opera to it. Sometimes it seems that jazz is one big receptacle which is used to throw everything in that is not easy to label. A lot of jazz critics are getting really excited when some self proclaimed jazz musician starts to mix-up Arabic sounds with jazz. You can be sure they will promote such an act. That is fine with me but please, don’t call it jazz”,-shares his thought and worries European jazz drummer René de Hilster during an interview with us.
Jeremy Palt,who is known for being a hypocritical person with outstanding knowledge and skills in jazz as a trumpeter, believes that this issues is not new in jazz world. The situation is so dramatically dreadful that even he cannot distinguish any prominent album of 2017.
We hold the believe that the root of this problem comes from process of mixing jazz with other musical genres, including rock and pop music, which did not bring about any positive results. Today it is even more difficult to accept that many excellent trumpeters, including Eric Truffaz, mix jazz with rap and presents it to people. Maybe uneducated youngs and foppish women are satisfied with the thought that the music they produce is a diamond on the top of the pile of trash rap music. However, as in math, changing the position of addends does not change the sum the same way bad-quality music can never be called a masterpiece.
Small recording studios have their huge contribution in this process because many of the poor-quality recordings are released there, and by saying inefficient recordings we do not mean the recordings themselves but their contents.
It is not fair to steal the shine of such talented jazz musicians like Billy Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Milt Jackson, and Bobby Hutcherson.
You have a chance create your own opinion about the albums of jazz music representatives listed above as by opening our website and clicking on New CDs you can download all of them for free. Hope you will find them enjoyable and you ears will not get popped.
We promise to help you keep track on upcoming albums.
Simon Sargsyan; Jazz critic