Is it possible to be 'trained' to like music? Are musics absorbed? Grown? Interned?

[ouchmonkey]

I recently downloaded Miles Davis' 'Bitches Brew' and ............... I found it quite difficult ... impenetrable even. Not unpleasant, just so unlike anything I've really listened to before that I couldn't quite get my head round it ...

see this kind of thing is why people say they hate Jazz and have trouble with new musics. People bang on about 'Bitches Brew' for a number of reasons, most of them to do with the 'not particularly jazz' elements of it - it uses a lot of electric instruments, uses rock rather than jazz time signatures and could claim to be the first jazz remix album as it is built from long free improvisations (rather than improvising from the bedrock of canonical song arrangements) the tapes of which were then cut and edited into the finished album. It is noisy and kinda formless, it ain't welcoming.
At the time there were a lot of people who hated it said it wasn't jazz at all and that Miles had gone too far and so on.
I have some sympathy with this because A; although he's good Miles is very overrated and B; if you're feeling sufficiently curmudgeonly you can see his career (and influence) as following the path of Jazz from being the most popular form of music and the first great American art form to being something cold, distant, overly cerebral, sterile and unwelcoming.

I'm just sayin' is all

 

[Pigeon]

if you're feeling sufficiently curmudgeonly you can see his career (and influence) as following the path of Jazz from being the most popular form of music and the first great American art form to being something cold, distant, overly cerebral, sterile and unwelcoming.

I'm just sayin' is all

I think that's completely off the mark: it was precisely because of Davis' reluctance to be co-opted into the Academy that he started soaking up influences from outside the jazz world- Sly Stone, Hendrix etc- amd making records like "Bitches Brew" and "On the Corner".

 

[Blagsta]

Listening to Bitches Brew by Miles Davis as a route into a bit of jazz music is akin to reading Ulysses by James Joyce to get into Irish writing. You listen to the early Miles Davis, when he was doing be-bop/swing-influenced material and it's not even in the same universe as his later stuff.

I much prefer Bitches Brew to his earlier stuff. It's akin to stuff like TG's Heathen Earth IMO.

 

[ouchmonkey]

I think that's completely off the mark: it was precisely because of Davis' reluctance to be co-opted into the Academy that he started soaking up influences from outside the jazz world- Sly Stone, Hendrix etc- amd making records like "Bitches Brew" and "On the Corner".

*ahem* if you're feeling sufficiently curmudgeonly

problem is Sly and Hendrix were so much better at it weren't they?
I've never understood why people thing this is "a good thing" it lead to fucking Fusion for God's sake.
again if you're feeling sufficiently curmudgeonly or uncharitable you could compare it to Bowie deciding he could make a Drum & Bass record.

 

[Paulie Tandoori]

I much prefer Bitches Brew to his earlier stuff. It's akin to stuff like TG's Heathen Earth IMO.

I've liked/loved most of what i have heard of Miles Davis, altho i have shied away from some of his later fusion efforts quite deliberately, after having Weather Report and other similarly 'difficult' music foisted upon me a few years back, not much of which i enjoyed at all.

Bitches Brew and TG are similar to me insofar as being 'mood' music, as in you need to be in a particular kind of mood to listen and enjoy it (some semblance of narcotic instability is often a bonus ime). First time i really 'heard' BB was when i put it on one morning trying to come down off of some mental lsd by sitting in the bath. It didn't help me come down at all but instead was one of the most transcendant experiences of my entire life (seriously), listening to this absolutely bonkers music, immersed in hot water with my eyes shut and my mind in another universe. And each time i listen to it now, i can still vividly remember those feelings and let my mind fly away again.

 

[Blagsta]

They're similar IMO because they're concerned with texture and abstraction rather than more rigid rules of musicality. I find both incredibly emotional, but I'm well aware I'm a bit odd.

 

[Paulie Tandoori]

That's a good concise way to describe the music, very eloquent if may I say so. As for oddness, I really wouldn't like to comment

 

[Blagsta]

heh

 

[tufty79]

mrs q - i'll play you the national.
and you will love them

seriously though - everyone i've evangelised them to has ended up evangelising them as well...

 

[Swearing Nonna]

I've trained my 24 year old daughter to like Erasure from a very early age! So much so she came to see them with me last week, she danced and sang all the way through and got admiring glances and touching of fists from 'old' people there

I've grown used to jazz over the last 5 or so years and I no longer run screaming from a room when it comes on but still wouldn't listen out of choice, would need another couple of decades maybe to get to that stage

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

Interesting.

My folks never listened to music and never had any records. Not at all sure how I ever got into Pussy Galore. I didn't have any friends who liked even anything slightly like the same kind of music until I was about 20.

I think I just read music papers etc and would buy records blindly (somtimes going on the covers).





I do remember buying 'it will come' 12" by the wooden tops and hating it so much that I got a sick feeling in my tummy that I had spent money on such shit. I took it back.
It's now one of my favorate records but I only have the 7''.

Grrrr, I want it back.

 

[Boogie Boy]

Birth of Cool and Kind of Blue are both worth listening to as well.

Absolutely, and I would add 'Porgy and Bess' to that list. I know that Dub is a fan of 'Sketches of Spain' but I really don't think it is a great starting point for Miles Davis. 'Kind Of Blue' is an absolute must because it is so accessible, whereas I have always found 'Sketches of Spain' utterly unconvincing.

BB

 

[Pigeon]

*ahem* if you're feeling sufficiently curmudgeonly

problem is Sly and Hendrix were so much better at it weren't they?

Well, TBH you seem to be conflating 2 different things there: your opinion that electric Miles wasn't as good as Sly or Jimi and the claim that the electric period represents the slide into sterile "intellectual" musicianship.

Whatever your subjective opinion is about the quality of the music, the objective fact remains that Davis was incorporating influences from rock and soul precisely because he didn't want his music to be the preserve of a self-appointed jazz intelligentsia.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Yes. I hated classical till I took a music survey course at uni, and was forced to listen to the stuff till it came out my ears. I had to know each movement, etc, so I listened to these things over and over.

So I still hated it for awhile, due to overexposure, but ever since about a year later, I've loved classical.

 

[wtfftw]

I think that as you become more exposed to one type of music you do gain more of an understanding of it.

Say previously, I didn't like dance but then say, I went to a hard house club and quite enjoyed myself (drugs aside) but in a larger club I'd find that I don't enjoy funky house and then over time I'd find that I prefer bouncy hard house to proper dirty hard house. So rather than not liking dance it turns out that I like hard house.


I wonder about if stuff is easier once you're used to it. With the whole M.E thing I'm extremely noise sensitive at times so the manshape doesn't get to play music he likes often. In trying to resolve this problem I've found that music I already know is a lot less painful to listen to (possibly because some sounds are expected and therefore don't jolt my brain) so um, I guess for healthy people after a certain amount of exposure you could grow to like what made your brain lurch previously. iyswim.

 

[gentlegreen]

I can't stand opera or football, I doubt there is anything that could change my mind about them. (The sound of female opera singers causes me physical pain as does "rave" music.)

My dislike of opera is partly for the same reason I dislike literature and film - I'm not part of the "love and hate" of day to day life so certainly don't want to get deeply into an exageration of it.... certainly not worth learning languages for.... I'm afraid that I don't "get" sport at all - either from a spectator's or a participant's point of view.

If by "rave music" you mean "electronica" generally, that's my music these days ... though now I don't go out any more I don't listen to much full-on dance ...

I was a teenager 10 years later than you, so it was punk / new wave that turned my tastes on their head.
My own tastes have changed hugely over the years - from exclusively 20th century "British" "classical" music in my teens in the 70s, via Motown, Stax, prog rock, punk / reggae .. modern Jazz (Miles, Mahavishnu) .... was into baroque (not classical / romantic) for a bit .... the rave scene and the associated large amounts of ganja made the biggest change - though I see my love of organ music and 70s synthesiser music helped set me up for it.

The one big change I recognise is song lyrics - I have to get into a certain abstraction to enjoy music where the song lyrics speak of things youthful .. as well as of the human emotions I'm not part of... which possibly explains why I from time to time rediscover my love of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - who sings in at least 3 languages I don't speak ....

Music for me is like an intravenous version of literature in its conveying of emotion - but diluted ... "One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain" ....

/3am waffle

.

 

[ouchmonkey]

Well, TBH you seem to be conflating 2 different things there: your opinion that electric Miles wasn't as good as Sly or Jimi and the claim that the electric period represents the slide into sterile "intellectual" musicianship.

Whatever your subjective opinion is about the quality of the music, the objective fact remains that Davis was incorporating influences from rock and soul precisely because he didn't want his music to be the preserve of a self-appointed jazz intelligentsia.

Well then. We're almost in agreement. I am indeed of the opinion that Miles' use of Hendrix and Sly as influences wasn't as good as their stuff or, indeed, his own earlier stuff.
I am not conflating these two things because I don't contend that the one caused or was a symptom of the other, it's just my opinion that both are true.
the objective fact does indeed remain that he incorporated these influences because.....etc but my subjective opinion is, I guess, that he failed.
I'm not saying that Bitches Brew is shit even, just that's it's difficult and I was originally moved to post that because it seemed a ludicrous starting point to get into Jazz from.
Or even to get into Miles. 'Kind Of Blue' is really the obvious starting point no?

 

[Pigeon]

I'm not saying that Bitches Brew is shit even, just that's it's difficult and I was originally moved to post that because it seemed a ludicrous starting point to get into Jazz from.

Ah, right. Agreed.

 

[weepiper]

there are so many factors - one of the main ones I think being what you grow up around. There's a 'language' to different kinds of music in the broadest sense (ie pop, classical, jazz primarily) and I think if you grow up around one, its forms and structures are familiar to you, otherwise they do need to be learned I think. Doesn't mean the unfamiliar forms are alien to you - as you say, you can learn or get used to them - but I think growing up in a 'classical' household must surely predispose you to understanding if not liking classical music more than if you grew up in a 'pop' household?

Mr weepiper grew up in a house where the only kind of music he was allowed to listen to was classical - his mum was a concert pianist, and he started violin lessons aged 4, ended up going to music college to do performance etc etc. ANY other kind of music was actively looked down on by his mum as 'lesser' or 'unworthy'. When he became a teenager and had his own spending money he rebelled massively and started listening to anything and everything. Now the music he plays himself on the violin most often is traditional/folk tunes, and the music he listens to most often is the Cardiacs. He still has a soft spot for classical music but I think because he has studied it in such great detail he doesn't really want to listen to it much anymore.

 

[Skim]

I'm not well disposed to a lot of jazz - it's all a bit fire-in-a-pet-shop to me - I can't see any way round this

Best description of jazz ever

I do try to understand jazz, but then that feels like the wrong way to approach an unfamiliar genre of music. After all, it's something you should be feeling, not thinking about. (For me, anyway.)

I didn't grow up around jazz and have never had any friendships with people who like jazz, so I've got no happy associations with the music in the first place. I just have bad associations with jazz – like being in Pret a Manger or that time I had to have sex listening to Aker Bilk

Perhaps if I loved someone who could help me to appreciate jazz, things could be different. But it would only work if I developed an emotional response to the music in the first place. You can train yourself to like and appreciate a particular type of music, but it's empty if the music doesn't move you.

 

[Orang Utan]

The key word is appreciate - I like to enjoy music, not merely appreciate it and acknowledge its value as an influence on music I love.