My latest piece is in a post-jazz style, in the vein of Polar Bear and some other groups/artists who I love. The "post-"ness in my case I guess derives from the use of non-jazz-styled singing, the fact that it's mostly notated out, a slightly more involved formal map, a coloristic approach more indebted to concert styles. And such.
But I must admit I'm a bit fed up with "post-". I don't know if I can be post-classical, post-rock, post-folk, and post-jazz, as my tastes and propensities in those areas tend to run. Pretty soon I'm going to be post-music entirely, which would certainly be a boon to my shuffleboard prowess, but would also invalidate my sleek new website.
What is all this "post-" business about? I think I know. It just means "new." Anything someone calls post-jazz is just new jazz. The same with the rest of those styles up there. I'm even starting to think that postmodernism might just be modernism happening again. No one else seems to have a better explanation.
Yep, friends -- the Cold War ended, and 9/11 is a decade behind us, and we find that no matter what the supposed defining historical event was for us, stuff just keeps on happening. As soon as we think we have things figured out, they wiggle a bit more, and suddenly we need to start appending meaningless prefixes to make our old labels still fit. Or we can allow those labels to flow along with events. Jazz music, classical music, rock music--these things aren't over yet. So how can we be "post-" them?
Maybe it's like that bumper sticker I saw in Austin: "I'm already against the next war."