TOTALITARIAN ART

 Miles Davis and totalitarian art… 

Or this famous “Test on the jazz” until you wait so much:

The jazz was at the same time the means of revolt of a caste, the blacks, its artistic expression, for a long time also its artistic representation most notorious if not the most completed, and paradoxically the means of recognition of another caste who was radically opposite since white and middle-class for him.

        Among its artists most popular Miles Davis remain the symbol most representative of this paradox and, even if it is not interesting to insist on internal contradictions of the character, one can nevertheless wonder about his frantic search of success and the means implemented to reach that point.

Indeed, as well in her life and especially in her music, Miles Davis forever be the revolutionist as he claimed to be, one could even say that under cover of a élitiste popularization despite everything, he made only insert the nail of conformity a little further.

        Neither revolutionist, nor cursed artist, Miles Davis remains the federator symbol, that of the accession of a new class to a new culture, the jazz. Thus when it draws, in the rock'n'roll inter alia, its inspiration, galvanizing of old topics as Bach did it before him when it improvised its greater runnings away on airs of songs of cabaret, Miles Davis does not move absolutely towards a revolutionary design of a splendid and incorruptible total art but well towards a form of personal expression which is before very commercial. 

What interests it indeed it is the celebrity, the celebrity and the capacity, supposedly to satisfy a desire revanchist of racial equality…
Its artistic adventure has nothing to do with that of a Parker, a Powell, of Coltrane, while at the same time it shared a long time the music of the latter. By exposing, by thus affirming its aesthetic standards it is not a total art but a totalitarian art of which it is made the cantor, all the more insidious as it succeeds in still passing for this revolutionist that it forever be.

The Jazz, completely comparable with this contradictory course, is for a long time an established religion whose followers as much as the large priests pride themselves more than ever of this musical elite which allows them to consider with height the other musical forms of expression, to look at them as minor when they do not say openly that their listeners are only cretins. 

This absolute sectarianism is all the more paradoxical as he claims total freedom in addition. Totalitarian art to which we referred, had at least the excuse of a dictatorship behind him, the jazz not.

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Towards "a conceptual jazz"...

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        Following the example conceptual artists who marked their time insofar as one does not even retain their name without obstructing itself to plunder them with business ends, the jazz has to him also its cursed musicians, for good, which, despizing not only modes but also success, worked out a music personal, truly revolutionary, and for this reason disturbing, so much so that it is never heard.

Albert Ayler remains within this dissidence an artist who would deserve to be more often listened. Alas, it is quite obvious that its removed from rim versions of “All the tings you are” for example, have nothing to dohas nothing to do with the asepticized products which made flora at its time, front, and today still.

        The modal jazz invaded planet for a long time, the bastard styles and the most worked out at the same time, fusion, jazz-rock'n'roll, etc…, generated generations of musicians virtuosos and technicians, erudite monkeys without heart which are satisfied “with the manner of” approximate and which allure a public unceasingly more demanding, because, like precisely points out it Martial Solal, “Now one cannot do anything more”, specifying thereafter that a solid technique, a knowledge of the running away and counterpoint, are not to neglect if one wants to deserve his place with the Pantheon of the new artists. It is right undoubtedly insofar as the musical attempts at today, which do not have really anything to see with a merry happening bordelic and amusing but rather with this measured with compasses jazz to which we refer, go very well and gradually encircle a new public, expert with his manner and requiring as it should be.

        Do not prevent, one can consider it regrettable that so many richnesses remained under the bushel and worse still were used to produce only that. Admittedly, as one can consider it regrettable that Jean-Paul Belmondo, after having turned “Breathless” then could appear in “Morfalous”… 

Of course, but for what that is it used? And then it is another history…