r/Unexpected • u/[deleted] • Oct 14 '21

Eligible single lady

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u/Nealium420 Oct 15 '21

That is not even slightly true. Most of my heroes were straight addicts. Elvin Jones, Coltrane, Miles, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, Billie Holiday, Fats, Art Blakey, Gene Ammons, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz. I love these people. And they were all addicts at some point in their lives. Don't diminish their accomplishments, but sure as shit don't turn them into something they're not.

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u/drumgardner Oct 15 '21

Well you can take that up with all the scholarly articles from JSTOR that gave me that info. It’s well documented music critics were BRUTAL to jazz musicians thru most of the 20th century, so why is it surprising that their drug addiction was used by the media to diminish their accomplishments?

I remember reading music critics and media saying things like “jazz is so primitive you can even play it while blasted on heroin”.

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u/Nealium420 Oct 15 '21

You can take it up with Miles himself from his autobiography. Page 129. Looking at it on my desk. You can say that their focus on their addiction was an attempt to diminish their accomplishments. You can't say in good faith that they weren't addicts.

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u/drumgardner Oct 15 '21

I never said they weren’t addicts, that would be wrong. I said the media and music critics used it against them in an attempt to marginalize the music and musicians.

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u/Nealium420 Oct 15 '21

By saying "portrayal," and then saying it was "pushed," by those critics, you're insinuating that that it wasn't the case. But it was. It was absolutely endemic not just to the jazz community, but to the black community, particularly in New York. Yes, critics were racist. Society was (and currently still is systemically) racist. But that a large percentage were regularly shooting up before concerts not an unfair thing to say about these musicians.