Graphics and Music

Taste is an admirable quality. Taste in art comes from refinement, experience, knowledge, and sensitivity. Class and taste aren't necessarily the same thing. Social class in my book has nothing to do with class as an adjective. It is a noun meaning merely a group of people. I learned early in life many people expect respect only because they possess money. I decided after working on a Doctor of Musical Arts there were few people that could still expect that. "Shine my shoes, boy." Miles Davis must have been the most vocal of all jazz artists to openly detest the image of Uncle Tom. He adamantly refused in his lifetime to adopt the same techniques Dizzy Gillespie used to humor or entertain an audience. Miles focused on the music, and that is what made him one of the best band leaders of all time. Miles influenced jazz music probably more so than anyone else. He invented Jazz/Fusion with recordings leading up to Bitches Brews, he defined the "Cool School" of jazz, and he pioneered the use of modality in jazz harmony. Nowhere in his agenda was there any place for "playing the fool." We need more artists like this today. Miles was a leader and was often characterized as "marching only to the beat of his own drum." Even as he did this, his product never pushed the boundaries of taste and style. Modern day television could learn a lesson from Miles Davis. The cheap, childlike graphics and trite bubble gum music that have infiltrated television need a true test in longevity. The Golden Age of Television provides the history for what television should still be aspiring to. Just because time travels across the bridge to the 21st century doesn't mean the lineage of our art forms just somehow disappear. The only reason this would seem so is because the individuals responsible for their production are not versed in the respective crafts. It is difficult, often painful to watch a flailing adolescent sew their wild oats in a flurry of uncontrolled, unstudied jism. Professionalism requires more than daddy's money, and that is a lesson Hollywood needs refreshed.