I have had a notion, hearing from many musicians that academia has become its main home, that jazz itself has come to reflect the currents of modern academia.
In my humble view, this is a bad thing for jazz, because academia has become the home of the elite but disconnected. Jazz has always had about it the character of relaxed abstraction - one of the things that makes it attractive - but it has also had about it a drift toward intellectual disconnectedness that I find unattractive, and jazz's association with academia can only exaggerate that drift.
I agree there are some interesting moments in here. But everything is
de rigueur: the shave-head saxaphonist, the African hairnet, the
f-holes which make no design sense in the drums, sparse instrumentation, and the dextrous but passionless performance; the sort of thing academics love because it reinforces their sense of separation and entitlement (If you can't tell, I have bitter criticisms of modern academia).
"Two guys displaying how different they could be" is one way of looking at it. Another way is two guys showing how well they can conform to an academic audience's expectations. Which are two ways of saying the same thing.
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