Jazz & the new Cool

There seems to be something inextricably "new" about the things we call "cool". Coolness is related to novelty in the same way that, to Plato, justice was to the good. Jazz artists have it much harder today than they did in the 60's in this sense.

I saw Javon Jackson "& Friends" at the Outpost performance space tonight. Jackson (Tenor Sax) was accompanied by Benny Green (Piano) Carl Allen (Drums), Eddie Henderson (Trumpet) and Peter Washington (Bass).

When Jazz music took the anglosphere by storm, it was because of its coolness or inherent difference. I.E. Jazz aficionados fell in love with a genre of music premised on the idea that it would never grow old.

It did, and Javon Jackson has the difficult job of making music for these people. Does he succeed? I think so. "The real deal", as many people in the audience said after the show. Green was capable on the piano; exerting enough control on the tempo and demonstrating a consciousness of the melody that supported his solos. Jackson was great as well; it's amazing to see a virtuoso at work on any instrument, but the pleasure of listening to a great saxophonist is in his or her ability to toy with the melody, adding a kind of prescience to the song.

Jackson was all this, and it was a gift (as his introduction put it) to have him in "this part of the country" (as Jackson put it--I imagined him thinking: "Where the fuck am I again?" as he stared vacantly at the audience of elderly whites in front of him). Jackson, to his major credit, did not display the typical self-conscious insouciance so characteristic of Jazz artists who are all-too-aware of their audience and the sometimes-derivative nature of the music they have devoted their lives to. Jackson was at ease on stage, playing old Terence Blanchard tunes in order to satisfy his own urges, new ones. Which is what coolness is all about, no?

chiptunes

Delete The Elite, a CD with a paper cover sold by the Norwegian chiptune artist Covox, is roughly 40 minutes of what can best be called nintendo fugues. I discovered Covox in late October 2007 at the Blip Festival in Manhattan. Not to be confused with an actual "Music Festival", Blip is best understood to be a kind of illegal gathering of nerds and socially dysfunctional ne'er-do-wells under the shaky auspices of music made entirely by or with the aid of logic chips from video game console systems.
Covox's setup consisted of four Nintendo Gameboys plugged into a standard Korg-style mixer. As with concept art, much of the work had been done before the show. Covox put four gameboy cassettes of his own design (and presumably, programming) into the Gameboys and simply began to play by pressing buttons on the Gameboys.

What is chiptune music, and what is its legacy? It is easy to gloss over music generated by video game chips as appeasement of our thinly-veiled nostalgia: after all, music on video games has only gotten better over time: as video game scores approach their film counterparts in quality and duration, the interest exhibited in them by DJ's and other aspiring chiptune artists diminishes correspondingly.
This view of the music, however, pays cheap service to what will ultimately prove to be a lasting and expansive footprint. The idea of manipulating (with modern technology, let us not forget) old sounds to create new music is nothing new: this is a paradigm invented by Hip-Hop music and earlier still in Jamaican Dubstep and dancehall.

To those who look back on the 80's with a pallid nostalgia which only comes from not actually experiencing the decade in question, chiptune music is a titillating foray into prelapsarian musical modes: "Look how silly we were, playing Mario, eating pizza bagels."

Discount this explanation, however, and things grow rather uncertain. Crystal Castles is unarguably the most famous example of "chiptune" music, and they don't even use video games to make their music: they simply sample it over and over again. To purists this is enough to disqualify the group, but purity was never the mission of the chiptune movement: endless derivation was its founding principle.
Listen to Air War on Crystal Castle's eponymous debut.

Behind distorted and chopped-up recitations of Allen Ginsburg's Howl, a deceptively simple chord progression made of sounds from (to my best estimate) a cheap handheld video game device such as a Gigapet or a Tomagachi. Repetition in poetry and music are pause for meditation, and as angering as Crystal Castles can become, it is a poignant reminder that crap culture is not there because we are stupid but because it is our best synthesis of the art, music, and film that provide a kind of heuristic backdrop to our own cultural-creative impulses. The Gameboy lives.