Ronan Guilfoyle: Blog

Went to see a concert by what was advertised as a 'cutting edge' group from New York tonight - the Will Vinson/Lage Lund quartet. All great players - especially Lund whose command of the instrument is amazing - but as to the music......... I just found it very dull after only a few minutes. There's a new orthodoxy, a new mainstream that's appeared over the past five years or so, that involves a line-up of guitar, saxophone, bass and drums. This instrumentation seems to have overtaken the old trumpet/tenor/paini/bass/drums convention, and become the combo du jour of the younger generation. Hardly surprising i suppose since there are now so many guitarists.

But the problem with this genre isn't the instrumentation per se, it's the sameness of the music. These groups have taken the Mark Turner/Kurt Rosenwinkel quartet as their starting point  - unfortunately it seems to be their finishing point too.  Whereas Mark and Kurt created this sound - brooding, dark-tinged lyricism, lots of straight 8s - themselves and it was personal to them, the generation behind them (and I guess it was ever thus in jazz history), just took this as a model to be slavishly repeated with no personal wrinkles at all placed on it.

One of the worst things about this music is the sameness of everything - a very narrow emotional and sonic bandwidth. Tempos are all medium, dynamics are nearly all mf, emotions are kept in check - no wildness here. It's a shame - these guys can all really play. But the lack of imagination and lack of exploration of things outside their comfort zone ensures that rather than their music being 'cutting edge' it is in fact toothless. It brought home again to me the importance for every musician to find something that's truly personal to them rather than trying to reproduce what they like in others.........