“There’s a cycle that all popular genres in any art-forms seem to go through – they start off as super-simplistic, discarding all the frippery of whatever previous genre was currently disappearing up itself, and prizing simplicity, self-expression, and the idea that anyone can create art. [First wave.] They then get a second generation who want to do more sophisticated, interesting, things. [Second wave.] And then you get a couple of things happening at once — you get a group of people who move even further on from the “sophisticated” work, and who create art that’s even more intellectually complex and which only appeals to people who have a lot of time to study the work intensely (this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing) and another group whose reaction is to say “let’s go back to the simple original style”. [Third wave.] We’ll see this playing out in rock music over the course of the seventies, in particular, but in the fifties it was happening in jazz.”

 

• 4chan message boards (/x/)

• Non-dedicated social media platforms (r/nosleep, r/backrooms)

• EditThis (SCP)

• Series 1 (SCP)

“…you get a group of people who move even further on from the “sophisticated” work, and who create art that’s even more intellectually complex and which only appeals to people who have a lot of time to study the work intensely (this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing).”

“As artists like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Thelonius Monk and Charles Mingus were busy pushing the form to its harmonic limits, going for ever-more-complex music, there was a countermovement to create simpler, more blues-based music. In the US, this mostly took the form of rhythm and blues, but there was also a whole movement of youngish men who went looking for the obscure heroes of previous generations of jazz and blues music, and brought them out of obscurity.

 

 

In the UK, there were a lot of musicians… who idolised the music made in New Orleans in the 1920s. These people — people like Humphrey Lyttleton, Chris Barber, George Melly, Ken Colyer, and Acker Bilk — thought not only that bebop and modern jazz were too intellectual, but many of them thought that even the Kansas City jazz of the 1930s which had led to swing — the music of people like Count Basie or Jesse Stone — was too far from the true great music, which was the 1920s hot Dixieland jazz of people like King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong. Any jazz since then was suspect, and they set out to recreate that 1920s music as accurately as they could. They were playing traditional jazz – or trad, as it was known.

 

 

These rather earnest young men were very much the same kind of people as those who would, ten years later, form bands like the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Animals, and they saw themselves as scholars as much as those later musicians did. They were looking at the history, and trying to figure out how to recapture the work of other people. They were working for cultural preservation, not to create new music themselves as such — although many of them became important musicians in their own right.”