That's not jazz!

Apropos of a long and wonderful music discussion the other day on Mastodon, I got thinking about how, for me, recording quality (or, often, the lack thereof) makes me love a record. Just for the weird sound of it!

Would Edith Piaf or Black Flag’s seminal records have as much emotional weight if they were better recorded? Hard to say. For me personally, the imperfections are an addition to the experience, not a subtraction from it. They help fix the record in a place and time.

Some old jazz was mentioned in that discussion, and it got me thinking about how I often prefer the sound of old jazz to new jazz. New jazz is great, and I love a lot of it musically, but man are a lot of modern jazz recordings literal. Like, it just sounds like people playing in a room!

Which is fine. It’s great! There are some amazing players out there doing excellent things, and I can see them wanting to reproduce as clearly as possible what they’re doing in the room. That’s fair. And it’s not like these recordings are bad! They’re fantastic. Many of them are technical triumphs. So detailed, so nuanced, so clear.

But I am not generally one to feel real inspired about leaving things at “clean.” Clean is a place that I consider “fine.” But you know what really gets me going? Recordings that have a sound about them. You know how sometimes you’ll hear the first half-second of a song, and the soundscape just immediately localizes you in a specific moment? That.

With this in mind, the jazz-group recording that in many ways I like the best out of all the stuff I’ve heard that’s come out in the last ten years is David Bowie’s Blackstar. The backstory for that album is that he found this modern jazz three-piece in NYC that he loved, and he hired them to be his backing band for his final album.

So the songs on Blackstar are Bowie songs, interpreted through a jazz-musician prism, and with modern sounds and treatments. And it’s awesome! It’s jazz playing, but with a modern and nontraditional take on how the sounds are captured and mixed and presented.

I’m fortunate in this moment to be developing a friendship with this lovely person in Phoenixville, PA named Shawn Cephas. Shawn owns and runs a fantastic record store called Forever Changes, around the corner from the Colonial Theatre, where Shannon and I played last time we were in the Philly area.

And Shawn is BIG on jazz. Like, a huge fan, and deeply knowledgeable. So when I posted about loving the Bowie record from a jazz perspective, it was kind of trolling for him a bit — we’re connected on Instagram — and he responded! And we subsequently had the most interesting conversation about it.

I mentioned to Shawn how interested I would be in hearing traditional jazz compositions, but recorded and mixed in a modern way, where the engineer is as much a part of the sonic landscape as the musicians are. Like, what would Lakecia Benjamin’s record sound like if Steve Albini had recorded it, and brought his idea of naturalistic recording, which he is very much a proponent of, to this music? Or, like, what would the Alan Moulder mix of that record sound like? I think that would be so interesting!

And Shawn’s response was fascinating to me: “That’s not jazz!”

As you know, I have a very hard time with the idea that there are rules that say a certain kind of music has to be done one certain way. So I replied: “What if you took Lakecia Benjamin and her band, and put them in a studio … but, like, with Tony Visconti producing! And he treated the sounds on the way in, and there was stuff happening in the mix. Are you gonna be the one to tell Lakecia that the resulting record isn’t jazz?”

And Shawn’s reply: “When I said ‘That’s not jazz,’ I meant that in jazz, the engineer’s job is to highlight the instrument.”

This conversation was so thought-provoking to me. Shawn and I have two extremely different, and I think both valid, perspectives. So I wanted to leave it here, hopefully to provoke some thought within you.

There is clearly a perspective here, from someone who knows an absolute ton about jazz, that there is a right way and a wrong way to make jazz records. That there are rules.

And then there is the perspective that genres are not hidebound and rules are made to be broken. And, I don’t want to be flip about this — I’m really interested in Shawn’s perspective here! I’m not trying to be like “Shawn’s a boring rule-follower, and I’m a bad-boy rule-breaker”; that’s not the dynamic. Shawn knows his shit.

So, is he right? Are some genres such that the quality of the engineering must be executed in a certain specific way, or it’s no longer that genre? And, if so, what are those genres?

There are for sure certain kinds of pop that you will completely mess up if you mix them wrong. So I understand that argument in a personal way! I lost out on a fair number of LA pop mixing gigs when I was first getting started, before I came to the realization that I’m not good at mixing pop and should stop trying. I make it sound too alternative; I just simply don’t hear music in a “pop” way.

But then, on the flipside of that, what if a new mixing perspective would help a pop song stand out and be different from the pack? Indeed, what if it being different than it was supposed to be kickstarted a whole new subgenre or movement?

Whenever there’s a sea change in music — think of the advent of new wave, or grunge, or EDM — it’s pretty much always accompanied by a new sound, a huge part of which is intentionally new and different engineering and production decisions.

So I really don’t know where I land on this! What do you think? What feels resonant to you here? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thinking a lot about this — jamie