Ted Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…Why did that happen? Why? I’ve got a larger theory — which is still very primitive — about these 50-year cycles between hot and cool in society. I think we’re in the middle of a hot phase right now. It’s a culture of anger we live in. I don’t think anyone can deny that. But I do believe that you had this birth of the cool with Miles Davis recording that around the year 1950, and for the next 50 years we had a cool society in which cool jazz was at its peak. There were certain cool techniques that you used in your day-to-day life, which were irony, humor. You would deflect aggression with irony or with a joke. Then around 2000 — and people will say 9/11 made this happen, but I think the roots were already before that — everything changed. People now pride themselves on their frankness. “I’m going to say it just the way it is. I’m going to say it right to your face.” And so it goes, from cool to hot. Back to your earlier question, when did jazz stop being cool? Well, as cool itself phased out, jazz lost a lot of its audience, and jazz itself had to embrace more of a hot dynamic to thrive in the new setting. Can jazz today still sound hot in a musical world where basically all the rhythms have been tried out? People have heard everything. If you play Varèse, “Ionisation,” for someone today, they might like it even. It doesn’t sound that weird, but they’re not deeply impressed. It doesn’t sound that radical. They’ve heard rap. They’ve heard electronica. Are the rhythms of jazz just boring in 2019?…

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