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The different genres in modern jazz are mixing in ways that make it difficult to come up with adequate genre tags, but that doesn't mean we should throw our hands up in the air, give up, and come up with vague useless genre tags such as the now widely used 'Modern Creative'.
What is wrong with 'Modern Creative', you may ask? Lets take a look. Most widely used jazz genre tags, such as bop, avante-garde, post bop, fusion, third stream, swing etc define a certain definable style, but 'Modern Creative' does not.
First of all, the word 'Modern' is temporal, what is modern today is not modern at some point in the future. In the 1920s, nothing was more modern than Fletcher Henderson and Louie Armstrong. In what year will today's modern artists quit being modern, 2030, 2040? If you give the modern term a specific time period, such as 1920s modern, or Early 21st Century modern, then you have a term that will last.
Secondly, the term 'Creative' implies that the artists tagged as such are being more creative than those who don't receive the tag. What is creative and not creative is subjective and varies with the individual. Quite rightly, no other existing jazz genre tag makes this sort of subjective decision about an artists' creativity, or lack thereof.
There is a built in expiration date to a tag like 'Modern Creative', and some day the artists or albums who have received this tag will need a new one when they are no longer modern.
This thread is meant to be a challenge to the websites who use this tag, possibly they will come here and try to defend their use of such an inadequate genre tag.
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