The Vijay Iyer trio: "we're number 49!"
Just when you thought the 2009 year-end listmaking hullaballoo had run its course, the Village Voice Pazz And Jop Poll — and its accompanying commentary — went out in print today (and online last night). I take this as good, being one of those head cases who likes reading about and listening to music. The essay from ___-rap duo Das Racist about their online celebrity (ahem), for example, is the most amusing slice of Internet I've come across this year so far.
Himanshu Suri is half of Das Racist, and he's been palling around with Vijay Iyer of late. Which brings me to the jazz point of all this: the Vijay Iyer Trio's Historicity cracked the top 50 in the albums poll, at #49. And not even all the folks who voted for him are primarily jazz writers. See? Also, improvised records from Darcy James Argue, Robert Glasper, Nels Cline and Henry Threadgill also made the top 250, where I stopped counting. Full poll here.
Is this significant? Let us do a reckless part-for-whole substitution here, and make Vijay Iyer (and Argue, Glasper, Threadgill, etc.) = jazz for a minute. The jazz optimist says, "Sweet, jazz is in the top 50. I guess there's hope for this music to be more widely embraced yet." The jazz pessimist says, "Jazz is in the top 50, which makes Historicity the exception that proves the rule: it's only up there at all because the jazz writers' fraternity elevated it to the top of their buzz machine, and even so, it only barely cracked the top 50. We're never going to make it."
Ok, end head-scratching. Critics do not comprise entire crowds (though it gets perilously close sometimes in jazz), and as long as Vijay and co. have sufficient audiences to support their work (preferably in their native North America as well as abroad) I'll live with whatever cultural positioning this jazz stuff has. But it remains a strange portent: you, what do you make of it?
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