Magazine - The Burden Of A Song

For its supporters, the advent of modern jazz signified progress, both artistic and social, a necessary and inevitable evolution in creative vision and technique as well as in racial opportunity and parity. This position met with fierce and often bitter opposition from partisans of older jazz, the small group collective improvisation model associated with New Orleans and Chicago in the 1920s. Proudly calling themselves moldy figs, this group argued that the earlier music evinced qualities of warmth, intimacy, and soulfulness that disappeared in the noise of mechanistic big bands and the cool, detached, affectless posture of the beboppers. 

The figs saw themselves as defenders of authentic jazz, which, in their unyielding formula, required proper instrumentation, a front line of trumpet, trombone, and clarinet, but not saxophone, blues harmony and tonality, and a natural swing feeling... A group of 14 or 16 players, in the traditionalists’ view, was simply too big to swing with the nimble and relaxed feeling of a group of five or seven rhythmically agile players. And bop groups, though properly sized, gave off a nervous, frustrated, neurotic vibe that countered the warmth and genial humanity that were the hallmarks of New Orleans and Chicago jazz.

Jazz’s modern traditionalist polemical war played out in Down Beat and Metronome, the latter adopting a strong modernist orientation led by critics Leonard Feather and Barry Ulanov, and in newer, more specialized traditionalist publications such as Record Changer and Jazz Information.

Source: Jazz in the Late 1940s: American Culture At Its Most Alluring by John Gennari

Magazine - The Burden Of A Song

• Release on:  November 13, 2015
• Released on: No Thyself album
• Genre: Rock

"Magazine was one of the first post punk bands, edgy, nervous energy of punk and added elements of art rock, particularly with their theatrical live shows and shards of keyboards."

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