What's with all the jazz tribute albums?
Oh jazz tribute albums and concerts. You're so much fun to pick on:
It's boring and expected.
It trains the jazz audience to expect the same old repertoire.
It's such a cheap and unimaginative way to try and piggy-back on someone else's name value.
It's blatent pandering to blue hairs or hipsters.
I have no interest in hearing the "latin side" of anything that wasn't already latin.
And so on and so forth.
But I can only go so far with the shit talk because I've had some great experiences with tributes. I can't deny that Dave Douglas's "Soul on Soul" is absolutely one my favorite albums and it's a Mary Lou Williams tribute. Now technically the majority of the album is original music that he wrote while thinking about her or something like that but nonetheless it still counts as a tribute album.
Another experience that gives me pause happened while attending a jazz contest in Chicago a few years ago. I got to hear a peformance of a quintet lead by Nicholas Payton that was billed as "An evening of the music of Miles Davis." It was a young band and they obviously had no intention of giving a faithful tour through the canon of Miles Davis. From best I could tell, they basically played whatever they felt like and then somebody in the band would quote a Davis "melody" at the end. I think they were a little over serious in their demeanor but they played some fantastically difficult music that actually upset some people. It certainly went over most everyone's head and I can't say that I followed the whole time.
I think that the reality is that tributes are easy to market and people like them. No harm there. My favorite non-Black House organization, the SFJazz Collective, uses the popularity of tributes to attract popular attention and funding in an ingenious way. Each season they do half originals and half arrangements of a famous jazz composer. I also have to applaud the efforts of Hermon Mehari and Mark Lowrey locally.
Truth be told, most any jazz show or album could be called a tribute to somebody.
Distribute, attribute, contribute, retribute, can their be a maltribute?
Posted by: russell | 07/14/2011 at 04:34 PM