It's finally here. The statement that had to be made. Of course I can't spell it out because the manifesto is in the music. Punk/Jazz is 16:01 of everything that The Belgian Waffles! have been developing since 1991. That's when Tony, Matt and Bill, met Dan, Heather and Chris. Our coats had the same colors but some were black with white spots and some were white with black spots. Now our attitudes of both Punk and Jazz have become a singular state of mind and action.
What it's not is: idiomatic genre bending, clever, "punky" or "jazzy" or god forbid, pretentious "dilly-dallying" (what passes for today's avant garde). It may be an extension of Charles Mingus' "Organized Chaos" theory. What it is contains the energy and sophistication of the "punk ethic" and the "jazz ethic" (wanna can opener?) getting together to create a rationally Anarchic circumstance in which to create music (see William Godwin).
So, we showed up to fill our slot, spontaneously created a composition and left the stage. No injured. No dead. Life should be so easy.
[Dan]
On the horns of a dilemma... jazz was the music of the streets, now it is the music of the cloister. We are letting the Marsalises and Crouches of the world tell us how to play... I got news for you, pal, no one told Bechet or Armstrong how to play. & plenty of people told Ornette and Coltrane how to play, but they didn't listen.
Jazz was invented by African-Americans. African-Americans were outsiders. Jazz was outsider art. Jazz is no longer outsider art, even if African-Americans are still outsiders.*
No one has to apologize for jazz anymore. Anyone who continues to do so is just a bore. Jazz is unquestionably the greatest American contribution to world culture.
At the point when any art form can be universally acknowledged to be a great contribution to world culture, it is a museum piece... that is, it is dead. That doesn't mean I wouldn't lay down my hard-earned cash to hear some smokin' hard bop, it just means that Armstrong is Mozart, and jazz is a re-creation.
We can certainly learn from the past, & we can project the past into the future, but the moment, once past, is gone forever. You can long for that old feeling; but for it to work, it's gotta be new. No one ever knew what Bird or Monk were going to play next... who can you say that about now? Immediacy was one of the great aesthetic hallmarks of jazz; now jazz becomes obsessed with tradition.
Any discussion of what is or isn't jazz is now the stuff of academic journals & cultured cocktail parties. Any battles over who has the right to say what constitutes jazz are about as relevant as a baseball strike.
And, ultimately, jazz was/is a folk form. Here's where we come in.
We all love jazz. We all spent a lot of time obsessively listening to jazz. We play the instruments of jazz. We take the jazz that we have internalized and pop it out the other end.
If it makes anyone feel better, then let it be: WE DON'T PLAY JAZZ. We take the bright shiny chunks of jazz & smash 'em up. Then we mix 'em together to dredge up a new sound that might be just a little bit like the miasma of sound that some of the masters heard in their heads, just before the notes became clear.
& we don't play by the rules.
punk/jazz: the sound of those who are in love with sound... the sound of the disenfranchised, the sound of middle america picking up horns and making a joyful noise.
punk/jazz: the sound of the scraps of culture, retro-fitted and hot rodded, oblivious of circumstance, defining the streets that we walk.
punk/jazz: not a rebellion against jazz, a rebellion with jazz... just like none of the punk rockers were rebelling against rock, they were using the fragments of rock to rebel...
...and, beyond rebellion, this is the sound of our soul, for what that's worth.
We will take the music at face value, we will fit it into our lives, and we will not apologize. White or black, swing or lockstep, we will find the sound that makes us live, and we will project it, no apologies.
punk/jazz: it's the anti-manifesto. It's what we are, not what we pretend to be.
* At this point, I gotta express a little sympathy for Stanley Crouch, establishment apologist though he may be... when he rails against the industry making jazz safe for white folk, I can feel his pain. Though, I gotta say, be careful what you wish for, because you will get it in the end... jazz has assumed its rightful place in the mainstream of American culture, and, BAM! Here come the dollar signs. News flash, Stanley: the powers-that-be are busy watering down EVERYTHING, from fiction & movies to pop music & painting, to make it safe for mainstream consumption. If you think you have it bad, talk to someone who is a true country music lover. And, as far as that goes, your critique of the industry is just the kind of territorial pissing that I have no interest in.
[Bill]
Mainly what Punk/Jazz is, besides fine listening, is a pretty fucking good document of the Waffles! as a unit. Punk/Jazz is the Waffles! with all cylinders firing and a full tank of gas on a deserted road. This is not the "motherfucking vortex" Waffles!. This is the straight ahead Waffles!. You know those kind of arguments where you spend most of your time defining words and it's all semantics and you just keep getting further away from the point and you're kind of pissed, but you don't care because it's fun and you're learning a lot about the other peron's method of attacking a problem? Well, that's not what this is.
Punk/Jazz is one of those conversations you have with someone you've already been through all that shit with. It's intimate, but not particularily sentimental. It's relaxed, but energetic. It's a straight road, but with good scenery. However, if you prefer the vortex, I'm sure you needn't worry. The Waffles! are opinionated and somewhat capricious motherfuckers and will soon be rassling some new ideas into submission to the machine.
[Angie]
