"Most of the true big name jazz groups are gone now. The earlys starting with Glenn Miller, The Dorseys, Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, Basie, Ellington, Cab, up to the last of them with Don Ellis, and Maynard Ferguson."
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Jazz and Big Band isn't the crossover mainstream music draw that it used to be even into the 60s, for sure.
Music in general has become very balkanized since the 60s. For example, there was a pretty good variety of music in on the pop charts back then -
From the psychedelic Blues Magoos to Tom Jones were in rotation on the same radio station.
But there's still a lot of variety of good jazz music around, Youtube is one good resource to find newer artists.
So a person can catch up on some good contemporary jazz while still enjoying classics such as:
Dave Brubeck Quartet - "Blue Rondo à la Turk" liveThere are two reasons I use jazz as my denominator. It is the only music that is truly American. And it was a creation of sounds over time that morphed into what we know today as music. It has a piece of everything in it from the early chants to the synthetic creations of synthesizers which started there with the invention of the music telegraph in the mid to late 1800’s. But that took time to refine and become techo like today and is credited to around 1980 in the mid west. (However, Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade started in 1972.)
So what started out as a humming person with a single sound possibly trying to sound like an animal, has evolved into far more with time. And after all, our modern music theory wasn’t defined until Johann Froberger, a German, in the 1600’s with his tocattas, and Jean Rousseau, a Frenchman with his operas in the 1700’s, pondered between the two of their ideas and their combined thesis actually explained music theory. So we are just really starting to understand what music is now and with time will come a better understanding of it. My only problem with us is that we give it a new name, and it may have branched out a little, but it is still the same thing Bach and the druids did a long time ago.
rwood