I grew up playing a lot of jazz in the late 2000s and there was always a strict canon - big band was seen as kind of cutesy and not worth putting much effort into while the Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Davis, Hancock, Shorter and a few others were the "real" musicians. But the internet was in its infancy at the time and YouTube/spotify started showing things that I had never heard of like a bunch of Japanese jazz musicians, so I always wonder what musicians coming up today see as "the canon". Is it still mostly the names I mentioned or does it include a lot more?

On a separate note, I always saw Chet baker and Gerry mulligan as "real" musicians but was taught early on that Brubeck was "staid" and boring. After judging it myself I guess you could say his soloing was a little underwhelming but he was incredibly creative in a way that a lot of the "serious" musicians weren't. Jazz people can be such losers sometimes

I've been playing jazz as a bassist for nearly 50 years, including with several big-band groups. Today my main band is a big-band, though I also play with a number of smaller groups.

Finding repertoire is a perennial challenge. Adding new material takes more effort than just a quick agreement on the bandstand and flipping through the fake books. A lot of material is unpublished, out of print, surreptitiously Xeroxed, etc. But there's a lot of exciting material spanning an entire century.

And the west coast is well represented.

Of course big-band is unique in that it involves improv soloing but is much more about the arrangements, especially the newer stuff. It's like playing chamber music in that way, but of course people still love chamber music. It's never hard to fill an empty seat in our band.

>Jazz people can be such losers sometimes

This has never occurred to me before, but I don't think ive ever met a jazz lover I liked.

This surprises me. Ill think about this a bit, perhaps a cognitive psychological rabbit hole is in order.

I think jazz taste has diversified a lot in the last decade and we aren’t seeing a canon outside of cliques. I know myself and other younger folks listen to the artists you listed, I know several who grew up playing in a marching band and enjoy big band, myself I listen to nearly anything.

> I grew up playing a lot of jazz in the late 2000s and there was always a strict canon - big band was seen as kind of cutesy and not worth putting much effort into

Rock used to be this way too. It’s hard to believe now, but there was a real wall between punk and metal in the mid 1980s.

In punk circles grudging respect was given to Motörhead and a few thrash acts but everyone else was seen as hair-obsessed posers or dinosaurs. Neither camp would admit to liking anything “mainstream.”

20 years later Chris Cornell is covering Billie Jean (https://youtu.be/R0uWF-37DAM?si=V3Pqtq-3GDHqxJBd) and all kinds of unusual collaborations were kicking off. It was frankly refreshing.

The core repertoire hasn't really changed but the boundaries get further and further out. It's like "classical" music. Pianists must learn the 2 part inventions, they're an essential part of the tradition.

Big band is hard to learn from. The large ensembles like Basie's and Duke's have persisted in popularity, but classic "big band" are very much of their time.

The bebop guys will always occupy the position in jazz that Bach occupies in "classical". They're foundational musicians in a continuous tradition and one learns a lot about the music by studying them.

By "canon" do you mean respected musicians? Or do you mean that PLUS players whose work is considered essential to learning how to play the music? The answers will be different. Keith Jarrett is great and esteemed but unless you want to sound like Keith Jarrett, he's not essential to study.

For a music built on curiosity and openness, it's surprisingly good at gatekeeping

> his soloing was a little underwhelming

I mean, it is true that a lot of his solos get busier and bangier until he's hammering out polyrhythms at the end. I just take it as part of the ride when listening to Brubeck.

But I really don't want to listen to other jazz artists emulate that, especially knowing how little chance there is that they'll have the same creativity and sense of rhythm that Brubeck had. (Edit: based on the experience of hearing the banging without the creativity/rhythm-- it's not fun.)

The meme of dude standing in corner while everybody else dances as he utters an elitist thought to himself explains many jazz musicians, especially the protagonist in whiplash