3. Unique Voices in Jazz

RK: Many people believe or feel that there are fewer unique voices in jazz today, that the days of instant recognition for new artists -- in a way that you hear Coltrane, you instantly know it's Coltrane -- are over. Do you agree? What do you think about that perception?

DL: Well, that's exactly what we're talking about, the institutionalization of it, being taught by rote. That's the negative side of it. You come out sounding like whatever the norm is, in whatever style. And the search for individuality...let's put it this way: It becomes a longer process to find individuality. Whereas when you didn't have a school system and the books and the how-to stuff so prevalent, you had no choice but to be yourself and to carry through whatever you heard around you. If you were in New York or Chicago, you heard certain people, they influenced you, but you basically were a combination of yourself and what you heard.

Now with the whole oral tradition being put down on paper and video and so forth it becomes much more difficult at the beginning. But my contention (and this is what I teach to those who get to the level where I can really speak about aesthetics) is that there's a lot of water under the bridge. It might be more difficult to come up with unique trumpet or saxophone tones because there've been, let's say, 20 or 30 styles, whereas 15 years ago, there were only 10. That might be true, but if you look hard within yourself, and you look outside of your own little world and go a little further, there's no reason why you can't turn out something that is you. It might just take longer these days.

So I'm always optimistic that someone will, but my problem is that most of them go in there not wanting that. And that's part of the attitude of, "Well, let's be a jazz major in school," like English literature or psychology in the '60s. It has some positive things, because it does teach you a lot about a lot of music, but it's not about having an original voice. It's about vocation, not art. And the whole thing is really the difference between craft and art. We're in that age where craft is being touted and elevated to the level of art, and it's just not.

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Liebman Interview

1.	Jazz in the 1990s
2.	The Historical Continuum in Jazz
3.	Unique Voices in Jazz
4.	Changing Audiences
5.	Miles
6.	Younger Artists & Underappreciated Artists
7.	Liebman as Composer & Listener
8.	Upcoming Projects
9.	The International Scene

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Dave Liebman

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