{"id":428,"date":"2012-06-18T22:45:26","date_gmt":"2012-06-18T22:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=428"},"modified":"2012-06-21T15:12:30","modified_gmt":"2012-06-21T15:12:30","slug":"heyyy-watermelon-man-the-whole-world-hears-you-playin-that-jazz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=428","title":{"rendered":"Heyyy watermelon man, the whole world hears you playin’ that jazz!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Summer travels have delayed me from commenting on a very important cultural event, the First International Jazz Day, held on April 30\u00a0in the General Assembly of the UN in New York City. Despite the event’s extraordinary demonstration of the creative and pan-cultural range\u00a0that the language of jazz possesses today, this first-of-a-kind event was undercovered\u00a0by the\u00a0mainstream press. Even Down Beat<\/em> caught up with the event in its\u00a0July issue. One\u00a0man on the actual beat\u00a0was\u00a0Howard Mandel, perhaps the dean of my generation of baby boomer jazz critics.<\/p>\n

I’ll\u00a0refer Culture Currents\u00a0<\/em>readers to Mandel’s blog page (below), Jazz Beyond Jazz,<\/em> with its direct link to his vivid,\u00a0in-the-pocket review of the huge event with a mind-tripping the lineup of artists.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Herbie Hancock at the first International Jazz Day (courtesy of City Arts, New York’s Review of Culture)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Herbie Hancock, who has become the Louis Armstrong of his generation as a jazz ambassador to the world, was responsible for\u00a0pulling this together as an actual event, attracting\u00a0artists from many nations and musical vernaculars, and orchestrating\u00a0 a true phenomenon: The simulcast event actually\u00a0reached 195 nations and improbably\u00a0had musicians in locations around the world\u00a0playing together Hancock’s famous jazz boogaloo\u00a0“Watermelon Man” in tandem with his performance of it at a sunrise concert In Congo Square, New Orleans.\u00a0What a\u00a0trip that moment must’ve been.<\/p>\n

To repeat: a famous jazz theme played together throughout the world at sunrise\u00a0at Congo Square, New Orleans.<\/em>\u00a0Wrap your head around that\u00a0— because it resonates like music of the spheres, music of our sphere, I should say. And the symbolism of the italicized phrase is how this all reverberates.<\/p>\n

Internationally telecast or film distributed concert films my reach\u00a0global audiences. But how often do so many musicians around the world played together — as one?<\/p>\n

Is there any performance event comparable in this sense? What does it say about how we (the global we) communicate, or fail to? How could any communicative medium transcend the myriad of political, cultural and linguistic barriers that have always stymied other discourse\u00a0from accomplishing something comparable. Perhaps I can imagine\u00a0the art of\u00a0dance doing it, free as it is, in essence, from linguistics. But dance has never attained a common\u00a0language that has grown as universally as jazz as a global tree-like phenomena, defined by its increasingly diverse sonic vocabulary.<\/p>\n

And this development,\u00a0from its American genesis,\u00a0has led to instances where the influences that shaped and constantly\u00a0reshaped it, incorporating elements of many traditions — African,\u00a0European, Afro-Cuban,\u00a0Brazilian and\u00a0Spanish just to name a\u00a0few.<\/p>\n

So there\u00a0is something truly global about the music we call jazz, because it doesn’t depend on a spoken\u00a0language.\u00a0Quiet as it’s kept,\u00a0it long ago became\u00a0a\u00a0universal musical language\u00a0while remaining\u00a0the quintessentially American music — in its democratic ways of doing things. That’s a great part of its attraction and it’s profundity, at its best.<\/p>\n

It is simultaneously the art of musical motion in the\u00a0moment, as in improvised swing and the myriad\u00a0ways that jazz musicians redefine,\u00a0 personalize, exoticize\u00a0and essentialize\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 that ineffable yet always palpable thing called swing. I sure ain’t trying to\u00a0define swing\u00a0 in words. We can all just circle around it, feed off of its power, like a living, breathing body pulse that dances in the air among us. You just know when you hear it and feel it.<\/p>\n

More on that,\u00a0when I do a survey of Milwaukee’s impressive new generation of jazz musicians.<\/p>\n

But for now, let’s hope that this\u00a0International Jazz Day — which dignitaries from the UN eloquently celebrated — is an annual event\u00a0and that it helps the world to understand what playing\u00a0and working together creatively can mean.<\/p>\n

I’ve written a whole\u00a0book on that subject, titled Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy,<\/em> which I hope to publish\u00a0soon. So I won’t belabor the issue further now.<\/p>\n

Do youself a favor.\u00a0Go out an find some live jazz\u00a0and hear and feel\u00a0what the global we is\u00a0talking about. What all those great musicians were talkin’ about:\u00a0“Heyyyyy, watermel-on man! (Watermelon, watermelon!)”.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Zre on thatSernational-jazz-day-concert-review-few-elsewhere.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summer travels have delayed me from commenting on a very important cultural event, the First International Jazz Day, held on April 30\u00a0in the General Assembly of the UN in New York City. Despite the event’s extraordinary demonstration of the creative … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-6U","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":435,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}