Norah Jones

Aw sh1t, the Point!!!

There goes intimacy.

My God Norah Jones is the most boring musican of all time! What is it with people these days loving music that may as well not be there in the first place?

I don't know if it's Jazz - perhaps more pseudo-old times - but whatever it is, it's boring. It's got much more in common with lamoid white jazz - I mean, hardly any whities could play Jazz and whenever they tried, it turned into soulless cornbread ****.

I don't think jazz is coming back. I don't think jazz will ever "come back" because it's moved on so much that it's just music, either it's worked its way into popular music of continues on in avant garde circles (anyone heard Borah Bergman?). On BBC4 a few weeks ago, there was a biography of the English jazz pianist Stan Tracy; he was white, English but played with a New York edge, like he was black. Anyway, he was asked the question "did you think Jazz made a comback in the 1980s?", referring to people like Courtney Pine. He said something like "I've been playing Jazz since the 1940s and I've seen Jazz come and go. Over the years I've seen people say Jazz is making a comeback but it never does, it never will, its time is up."

I totally agree. Any time tits like Norah Jones or Jamie Cullum emerge, they're being pushed by some big record label that does some market research and promotes them like crazy. Then the dumb public thinks they're really good and buys their records when really all those musicians are representing are business investments made good by engineering a new trend to sell commodities.

Real music - real jazz - always came from the margins, from the gutter. Monk, Coltrane, Parker, Rollins, Bergman, Bailey etc., they all live(d) in near poverty. The music was expression, it was necessary. Stan Tracy played Jazz cos he didn't know what else to do, jazz was underground, dangerous, the rave culture of its day but now Jazz is consigned to the history books and occasionally, record companies push people to buck some nostalgia trend, pretend to touch base with something pure and good, when really music is out there, untapped, largely unknown.

How many of us would have been into Coltrane if we were living back in the late 50s/early 60s? I doubt very many of us.

I think you underestimate people's music tastes. People will generally listen to what they're told to. For most people, jazz is too hard a listen.

You're more likely to find a Norah Jones or Jamie Cullum record nestled between Missy Elliot and Gareth Gates.

PS: that was the first time I saw her too.

Nothing elitist about it. People are listening to Norah Jones. They get what they expect. The media machine gives people what they (think they) want.

Her music's boring, it's got no soul. It's totally dead, barren, bland.

Nothing elitist about what I'm saying in fact. Just saying that any time people say Jazz ever was making a "comeback" it didn't.

I'm aware "boring" is a qualitative statement.

And yes I'm aware of that 'scene' of Jazz, as well as more avant garde types, in Dublin. That's why I used the word "margins".

Clearly I was inferring "comeback" to mean a re-entry into the pop charts. No such "comeback" has ever been sustained in music of that type, it has remained at the "margins" with other more "avant garde" types of Jazz. Jazz, therefore, is consigned either to commercially driven novelty, tradition or experimentalism. Each one occupies a different space.