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In late March a young Toronto trio called BadBadNotGood stirred up some jazz-world Internet controversy thanks to a Now Toronto feature filled with the sort of button-pushing comments that are wholly to be expected from kids in their late teens. Peter Hum of the Ottawa Citizen was the first to dig into the story and reply in detail, and in no time it blew up. Among other things, BadBadNotGood dismissed pianist Robert Glasper for drawing inspiration from hip-hop that was too old, ripped on jazz educators for requiring students to transcribe Charlie Parker solos, and excoriated the jazz community in general for its lack of familiarity with Pitchfork. The story’s author, Anupa Mistry, offers the fact that influential British DJ Gilles Peterson and Odd Future‘s Tyler, the Creator both love BBNG as proof of the group’s genius—in other words, she buys into the trio’s somewhat inflated picture of itself hook, line, and sinker. Her claim that jazz has “ossified over time” would still sound like nonsense to me, even if she seemed to know the first thing about contemporary jazz—she’s clearly more comfortable talking about hip-hop. And in her story she seems happy to grant the kids in BadBadNotGood the rhetorical backup they need to write off critics of their music as clueless codgers.
