I’ve noticed a lot of young musicians coming through the studio these days that have a refreshingly punk rock approach to jazz… embracing mistakes, celebrating a sort of organic looseness, and having an overall vibe that reminds me more of the early 2000’s indie rock scene than the sometimes self-conscious ‘gotta fix everything and make sure it meets “the standard” of a good jazz recording’ ethos that I feel my generation has (or had) a tendency to get caught up in. Maybe the devaluation of recorded music (important distinction from live music which I expect to increase in social value in the future) has given them a freedom to ‘care less’ in a good way… so they actually make records that have more life, spontaneity, and vulnerability!
John good to get your report from Bunker! Every time I’m there with you guys there’s something going on and it’s often a recording of Gen Z musicians. Thanks for your perspective
What's interesting about that is that if you listen to the classic Blue Notes of the '50s and '60s, most of them were recorded in one session, and it was all go-for-broke - at least some of it was rough around the edges, and Rudy Van Gelder, as I understand it, tolerated no bullshit - it was all get it down as best as possible with what sometimes wasn't enough rehearsal time. So if anything, these younger musicians are tapping into that same setting. It might be 65-70-odd years after, but the same spirit is there: No futzing around, get it out as authentically as possible.
I totally agree, Brad. Recently played a gig upstate and a young fiddle player sat in with us. He had chops, paid attention to the groove and was fantastic!
Those were the salad days, my friend. And the parents shows at PS 9. I’ve got a cool music venue in Spencertown that I help book. We have all kinds of great music. Knocking around dates with Peter Bernstein. Would love to have you come up and play. We have a small grant and a Steinway piano. Ping me at: puffdusty @ Gmail dot com.
I’m not fully convinced that what you describe is indifference.
It may simply be saturation.
The modern condition is not necessarily that people care less deeply, but that they are exposed to vastly more books, recordings, archives, clips, essays, traditions, and possible rabbit holes than any previous generation in history. The result may appear superficial because one is forced into constant triage. You end up knowing a little about a great many things, which can itself become dangerous.
I also wasn’t sure the argument entirely resolves itself: the same digital environment producing fragmented attention also seems, according to your own observations, to be producing astonishingly sophisticated curatorship and archival literacy among younger musicians.
So perhaps young musicians can simultaneously skim more broadly and obsess more deeply. Or perhaps the issue is ultimately less generational than individual.
I know how you feel about AI and I'm with you on that. But AI can be helpful when searching for that Henry James quote. I hope my quoting an LLM doesn't make you sick.
This is what ChatGPT says:
One of the closest authentic Jamesian formulations comes from The Art of Fiction (1884), where he talks about the novelist’s and reader’s capacity for experience, curiosity, and perception. He frequently praised what he called the “faculty of appreciation” or “faculty of wonder” as essential to imaginative life.
And this Claude:
That's right — James's The Art of Fiction is one of the foundational essays of Anglo-American literary criticism, and the passages you're pointing to are some of its most quoted.
The famous formulation is his advice to the aspiring novelist: "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" That whole section is essentially an argument that the novelist's first qualification is a heightened receptivity to experience — an alertness, a permeability, a refusal to let impressions slide past unregistered. The "faculty of appreciation" language fits squarely in this register; for James, perception is almost a moral activity, not just an aesthetic one.
He pairs this with his attack on the idea that a novelist needs to have lived a conventionally "wide" life to write well. His example is the young woman who glimpses a Protestant household through a doorway and, from that single impression, can imagine an entire milieu. The point being that imaginative life isn't a function of accumulated incident — it's a function of how finely you register what you do encounter. Experience, he says, is "an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness."
This is also where he stakes out his case against prescriptive rules for fiction — against Walter Besant's lecture (which prompted the essay) and against the notion that novels must be "moral" in some narrow didactic sense. For James, the morality of fiction lies precisely in the quality of the mind producing it: a fine intelligence registering experience finely is itself the ethical accomplishment.
It's worth noting that the "faculty of wonder" phrasing, while consonant with James's thinking, isn't a phrase I can confidently attribute to The Art of Fiction specifically — James used a lot of variations on this idea across his prefaces and notebooks, and the New York Edition prefaces (collected as The Art of the Novel by R.P. Blackmur in 1934) develop the same themes at much greater length. If you're tracking the exact phrase, it may turn up there or in his criticism of other novelists rather than in the 1884 essay itself.
Anyway, I'm happy you're on Substack. It brightens up my life.
So many things to say to this. Yes, absolutely the youth are DEEP into the music. Jazz is not dead and it doesn’t smell funny.
Social media is both evil and amazing. It has led me to things that I never would have seen or read otherwise and it has given me the most crippling ennui. But I am grateful for it.
As we discussed after your wonderful show last night in Connecticut, I think the power of Substack in particular is the greater focus on stopping and reading and engaging with an idea. And as you said, Facebook and IG and TikTok feed on dopamine and are very successful in ensnaring both young and old people for hours on end with quick fixes. They now have these interstitial videos on Facebook especially and also YouTube Shorts targeted to me like your shark videosthat feature young men bothering young attractive woman in simulated pick-up scenarios or man-on-the-street interview videos. It is hard not to click on some of these short form videos but when I get on Substack I get lost in a world of ideas; not my base instincts as a mammal.
Anyways bravo as always for giving your honest and fresh perspective on the scene from your eyes. It’s so good to finally have a place after all these years to engage with the real you and not just the idealized version of you presented on your official social channels. It is refreshing and highly enlightening!
Agree here, “When you focus on the easy hit, your sense of curiosity and wonder gets compromised.” I certainly feel hypomania with FB and Instagram. Less so here on Substack, although the platform is starting to clog my email inbox. Trying to manage. And YES, encouraged by the younger players, they have a lot of available on demand information to negotiate.
Love this! Great artists will always evolve with time, technology (excluding ai) and cultural changes. I think Jon Batiste is a great example of a young(er) artist pulling inspiration from a vast range of influences and creating some remarkable work (his next two albums will be explorations of Mozart and Thelonious Monk, respectively).
Shout out to other younger artists I've been loving lately - Julius Rodriguez, Samara Joy and Jacob Collier.
Nice. Just woke up to a sunny day on the Oregon coast, waves breaking on the rocks, a black coffee in hand and this article to begin the day. A great start. Thanks.
I agree that so many younger musicians are going deep, although the idea that ready availability of everything makes it harder to go deep isn't necessarily ageism. There's some social science literature suggesting that feeling abundance makes us less able to savor experiences. See, for example, Quoidbach, et al,"The Price of Abundance: How a Wealth of Experiences Impoverishes Savoring," 41 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 393–404 (2015).
But then I should admit that when I was in college from '89-'93, I would buy a new jazz CD every two weeks, and those albums are still etched in my mind like no others. :)
Prof Kerr! I remember you from your days at GW. You were (and presumably remain) a great lecturer. If you're still lecturing on computer crime, I imagine that's been a wild ride since my days as an aimless law student back in the early 2010s.
aside - I was in one of the law revue cover bands, and your former colleague Peter Smith led us in a rendition of "Is she really going out with him?". He was pleasure to rehearse with.
Regarding your points about the jazz community at the end, I’m reminded of your comment at Martinskirche in Basel last year that the jazz-concert experience is practical anarchy (or something like that).
Well, here I am. Couldn’t find the HJ source. Entirely agree with Tony Graham, your music over the years continually creates a sense of wonderment when I listen. Only - thanks to a certain streaming device (one guess and you are spot on!) - found your music a few years ago. Guess I have to travel to Europe to hear and experience your music live - unless we can convince you to do a tour of Australia (and ok, yes New Zealand as well). Keep up your work of wonderment!
Man I would love to come back to your beautiful country. I haven’t been in Australia since Pre-Covid. There is something in the works, for maybe next year. Thank you!
Was this from an HJ intro to The Turn of the Screw: ‘that blest faculty of wonder’? Whatever. I think he was referring to our sheer love of story. Thanks so much for sharing your ideas here! Always stimulating, sharp and insightful. Like, dare I say, your music.
thanks Brad for your thoughtful words, enjoying this thoroughly.
curious about the idea that there could / would be discovery for artists in their "mid-career" years in addition to the discovery you are pointing to here for artists under 25. If we're always attending to the idea of young lions aren't we feeding the fire? Music industry has always been focused on the young and old, never the mid-career, I'm curious how you feel about challenging that narrative?
Thanks Caroline for comment. I’m with you 100%; that’s a narrative that excludes a big chunk of great musicians. And that’s a perennial exclusion in jazz. This was already happening in the late 80s when I first arrived in NY. The focus was on the “Young Lions” or the older “legacy”musicians, at the expense of mid career musicians.
The way to challenge the narrative? Dunno. I feel that as an older musician at this point in time (55), in some sense I was grandfathered into opportunities that are not available for younger musicians: a record contract, a revenue stream from selling those records, for starters.
I guess in this post I was addressing the group of people I happened to interact with recently, who were largely 25 and under. And I felt some urgent need to say: hey, you are all on the right path. Maybe because I’m a father of young adults that age, it hits home directly. But it doesn’t obviate the point you bring up.
do you think 55 is old? personally 55 feels young, mid career but maybe I'm misguided here, lol!
I'm rlly glad to hear about a hang w a variety of ages, it just doesn't seem to happen much these days, so that makes me smile.
I'm looking for ways to think about how my mind can challenge and grow out of that narrative that the media keeps embracing, without entering into a state of jade or resentment, which I see so many musicians go deeply into. We have so much more to learn and grow, and gotta believe in powers greater than mainstream.
I’ve noticed a lot of young musicians coming through the studio these days that have a refreshingly punk rock approach to jazz… embracing mistakes, celebrating a sort of organic looseness, and having an overall vibe that reminds me more of the early 2000’s indie rock scene than the sometimes self-conscious ‘gotta fix everything and make sure it meets “the standard” of a good jazz recording’ ethos that I feel my generation has (or had) a tendency to get caught up in. Maybe the devaluation of recorded music (important distinction from live music which I expect to increase in social value in the future) has given them a freedom to ‘care less’ in a good way… so they actually make records that have more life, spontaneity, and vulnerability!
John good to get your report from Bunker! Every time I’m there with you guys there’s something going on and it’s often a recording of Gen Z musicians. Thanks for your perspective
What's interesting about that is that if you listen to the classic Blue Notes of the '50s and '60s, most of them were recorded in one session, and it was all go-for-broke - at least some of it was rough around the edges, and Rudy Van Gelder, as I understand it, tolerated no bullshit - it was all get it down as best as possible with what sometimes wasn't enough rehearsal time. So if anything, these younger musicians are tapping into that same setting. It might be 65-70-odd years after, but the same spirit is there: No futzing around, get it out as authentically as possible.
^^^THIS^^^
I totally agree, Brad. Recently played a gig upstate and a young fiddle player sat in with us. He had chops, paid attention to the groove and was fantastic!
Dusty! Good to see you hear man. Miss the old W. 83d St days!
Those were the salad days, my friend. And the parents shows at PS 9. I’ve got a cool music venue in Spencertown that I help book. We have all kinds of great music. Knocking around dates with Peter Bernstein. Would love to have you come up and play. We have a small grant and a Steinway piano. Ping me at: puffdusty @ Gmail dot com.
I’m not fully convinced that what you describe is indifference.
It may simply be saturation.
The modern condition is not necessarily that people care less deeply, but that they are exposed to vastly more books, recordings, archives, clips, essays, traditions, and possible rabbit holes than any previous generation in history. The result may appear superficial because one is forced into constant triage. You end up knowing a little about a great many things, which can itself become dangerous.
I also wasn’t sure the argument entirely resolves itself: the same digital environment producing fragmented attention also seems, according to your own observations, to be producing astonishingly sophisticated curatorship and archival literacy among younger musicians.
So perhaps young musicians can simultaneously skim more broadly and obsess more deeply. Or perhaps the issue is ultimately less generational than individual.
Good food for thought.
I know how you feel about AI and I'm with you on that. But AI can be helpful when searching for that Henry James quote. I hope my quoting an LLM doesn't make you sick.
This is what ChatGPT says:
One of the closest authentic Jamesian formulations comes from The Art of Fiction (1884), where he talks about the novelist’s and reader’s capacity for experience, curiosity, and perception. He frequently praised what he called the “faculty of appreciation” or “faculty of wonder” as essential to imaginative life.
And this Claude:
That's right — James's The Art of Fiction is one of the foundational essays of Anglo-American literary criticism, and the passages you're pointing to are some of its most quoted.
The famous formulation is his advice to the aspiring novelist: "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" That whole section is essentially an argument that the novelist's first qualification is a heightened receptivity to experience — an alertness, a permeability, a refusal to let impressions slide past unregistered. The "faculty of appreciation" language fits squarely in this register; for James, perception is almost a moral activity, not just an aesthetic one.
He pairs this with his attack on the idea that a novelist needs to have lived a conventionally "wide" life to write well. His example is the young woman who glimpses a Protestant household through a doorway and, from that single impression, can imagine an entire milieu. The point being that imaginative life isn't a function of accumulated incident — it's a function of how finely you register what you do encounter. Experience, he says, is "an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness."
This is also where he stakes out his case against prescriptive rules for fiction — against Walter Besant's lecture (which prompted the essay) and against the notion that novels must be "moral" in some narrow didactic sense. For James, the morality of fiction lies precisely in the quality of the mind producing it: a fine intelligence registering experience finely is itself the ethical accomplishment.
It's worth noting that the "faculty of wonder" phrasing, while consonant with James's thinking, isn't a phrase I can confidently attribute to The Art of Fiction specifically — James used a lot of variations on this idea across his prefaces and notebooks, and the New York Edition prefaces (collected as The Art of the Novel by R.P. Blackmur in 1934) develop the same themes at much greater length. If you're tracking the exact phrase, it may turn up there or in his criticism of other novelists rather than in the 1884 essay itself.
Anyway, I'm happy you're on Substack. It brightens up my life.
So many things to say to this. Yes, absolutely the youth are DEEP into the music. Jazz is not dead and it doesn’t smell funny.
Social media is both evil and amazing. It has led me to things that I never would have seen or read otherwise and it has given me the most crippling ennui. But I am grateful for it.
As we discussed after your wonderful show last night in Connecticut, I think the power of Substack in particular is the greater focus on stopping and reading and engaging with an idea. And as you said, Facebook and IG and TikTok feed on dopamine and are very successful in ensnaring both young and old people for hours on end with quick fixes. They now have these interstitial videos on Facebook especially and also YouTube Shorts targeted to me like your shark videosthat feature young men bothering young attractive woman in simulated pick-up scenarios or man-on-the-street interview videos. It is hard not to click on some of these short form videos but when I get on Substack I get lost in a world of ideas; not my base instincts as a mammal.
Anyways bravo as always for giving your honest and fresh perspective on the scene from your eyes. It’s so good to finally have a place after all these years to engage with the real you and not just the idealized version of you presented on your official social channels. It is refreshing and highly enlightening!
Word Matt. Thanks for coming to gig!
Agree here, “When you focus on the easy hit, your sense of curiosity and wonder gets compromised.” I certainly feel hypomania with FB and Instagram. Less so here on Substack, although the platform is starting to clog my email inbox. Trying to manage. And YES, encouraged by the younger players, they have a lot of available on demand information to negotiate.
Grateful for this, Brad.
Love this! Great artists will always evolve with time, technology (excluding ai) and cultural changes. I think Jon Batiste is a great example of a young(er) artist pulling inspiration from a vast range of influences and creating some remarkable work (his next two albums will be explorations of Mozart and Thelonious Monk, respectively).
Shout out to other younger artists I've been loving lately - Julius Rodriguez, Samara Joy and Jacob Collier.
Samara is the Real Deal! Thanks Brian.
Nice. Just woke up to a sunny day on the Oregon coast, waves breaking on the rocks, a black coffee in hand and this article to begin the day. A great start. Thanks.
I agree that so many younger musicians are going deep, although the idea that ready availability of everything makes it harder to go deep isn't necessarily ageism. There's some social science literature suggesting that feeling abundance makes us less able to savor experiences. See, for example, Quoidbach, et al,"The Price of Abundance: How a Wealth of Experiences Impoverishes Savoring," 41 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 393–404 (2015).
But then I should admit that when I was in college from '89-'93, I would buy a new jazz CD every two weeks, and those albums are still etched in my mind like no others. :)
Prof Kerr! I remember you from your days at GW. You were (and presumably remain) a great lecturer. If you're still lecturing on computer crime, I imagine that's been a wild ride since my days as an aimless law student back in the early 2010s.
aside - I was in one of the law revue cover bands, and your former colleague Peter Smith led us in a rendition of "Is she really going out with him?". He was pleasure to rehearse with.
Thanks, Mike! Yes, the wild ride continues. Hope you're well.
Thanks for this piece, Brad.
Regarding your points about the jazz community at the end, I’m reminded of your comment at Martinskirche in Basel last year that the jazz-concert experience is practical anarchy (or something like that).
Thanks Andrew. I’ve always thought it makes more sense as a political analogue for jazz than democracy. Especially now.😭
Well, here I am. Couldn’t find the HJ source. Entirely agree with Tony Graham, your music over the years continually creates a sense of wonderment when I listen. Only - thanks to a certain streaming device (one guess and you are spot on!) - found your music a few years ago. Guess I have to travel to Europe to hear and experience your music live - unless we can convince you to do a tour of Australia (and ok, yes New Zealand as well). Keep up your work of wonderment!
Man I would love to come back to your beautiful country. I haven’t been in Australia since Pre-Covid. There is something in the works, for maybe next year. Thank you!
Yeah, please come back to Australia. Great article too
Was this from an HJ intro to The Turn of the Screw: ‘that blest faculty of wonder’? Whatever. I think he was referring to our sheer love of story. Thanks so much for sharing your ideas here! Always stimulating, sharp and insightful. Like, dare I say, your music.
Wow Tony thanks for this prod to read Turn of the Screw!! Ah I love this place. I knew some learned soul was going to hook me up.
I read The Bostonians for the first time last year and was mesmerized. Okay next up - The Turn of the Screw, with said introduction! Thanks again.
If you like “Turn of the Screw”, there’s a brilliant mid-seventies analysis of it by Shoshona Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.”
Nice okay.
Amen Brad. I share your optimism. One thing, the bass player quoted above is actually the other great Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous!
Larry, yes! And YOU told me the anecdote lol!
thanks Brad for your thoughtful words, enjoying this thoroughly.
curious about the idea that there could / would be discovery for artists in their "mid-career" years in addition to the discovery you are pointing to here for artists under 25. If we're always attending to the idea of young lions aren't we feeding the fire? Music industry has always been focused on the young and old, never the mid-career, I'm curious how you feel about challenging that narrative?
Thanks Caroline for comment. I’m with you 100%; that’s a narrative that excludes a big chunk of great musicians. And that’s a perennial exclusion in jazz. This was already happening in the late 80s when I first arrived in NY. The focus was on the “Young Lions” or the older “legacy”musicians, at the expense of mid career musicians.
The way to challenge the narrative? Dunno. I feel that as an older musician at this point in time (55), in some sense I was grandfathered into opportunities that are not available for younger musicians: a record contract, a revenue stream from selling those records, for starters.
I guess in this post I was addressing the group of people I happened to interact with recently, who were largely 25 and under. And I felt some urgent need to say: hey, you are all on the right path. Maybe because I’m a father of young adults that age, it hits home directly. But it doesn’t obviate the point you bring up.
do you think 55 is old? personally 55 feels young, mid career but maybe I'm misguided here, lol!
I'm rlly glad to hear about a hang w a variety of ages, it just doesn't seem to happen much these days, so that makes me smile.
I'm looking for ways to think about how my mind can challenge and grow out of that narrative that the media keeps embracing, without entering into a state of jade or resentment, which I see so many musicians go deeply into. We have so much more to learn and grow, and gotta believe in powers greater than mainstream.