I was just venturing a guess about Dejan's assertation that light jazz and chamber music is the prevailing demo music of choice , and why that might be. No, I am not saying that jazz recordings emphasize those frequencies, but rather that it usually comes out that way. Like you said, they use minimal recording technique so it works well as a demo. I really have no answers, but to me they probably pick that stuff because it sounds "nice" and maybe you can still have a conversation over it in the demo room, I dunno!
I have very little interest in jazz as a whole. The closest I have is Don Shirley "waterboy" which is more folk than jazz I suppose. Piano, upright bass and violin I think. Great record. I have a friend who has been in numerous bands in the Milwaukee area and have attended many of his gigs. It is very nice music, but not what I wanna listen to at home. This is a gross generalization, but there seems to be a lot of noodling. Noodly music is cool for awhile, but it wears on you. It seems to be the natural progression of musicians who get SO good and their fingers just fly across the instrument playing amazing stuff, but in the end you can't remember any of it. It just doesn't register. The jazz gigs I've been to tended to blur into a mass of round-robin tradeoff solos. Wanking. Sometimes it can be cool, but sometimes it looks like the musicians are having more fun than the crowd is. Just my impression.
I like technical music, but it can get out of hand quickly. This goes for metal too. And metal does have a jazz influence, or rather some bands take bits and pieces of it. I think the complexity and technical style of playing comes from that genre, even though it may not come out sounding like jazz.
But, you could probably lecture me about my lack of understanding of the subtleties of your brand of music as well.
Yes I certainly could go on for days about that! But what for? Obviously our tastes could not be any more disparate, so I'll just leave it at that. I like the natural room sound of jazz, but that's about it. If it is fast and bombastic type stuff I might be into it. But that whole slow, smoky club crooning thing doesn't interest me.
BTW, what do you call that genre of music, anyway?
You could call it Heavy Metal, but there's sub classes of course. Tourniquet would be a trash band, Kyuss is kind of...hmm they're sorta in the stoner rock category, but not quite. Cathedral is a Doom Metal band characterized by slow tempos, gloomy lyrics, and overall bludgeoning heaviness. Their 1st album would've been a better genre-defining thing to play. (and not as distorted as far as the mix goes! heh!)
So the recordings sound great because the intent of the musicians and the technicians is to recreate the reality of the event, not some artificially re-assembled abortion.
Jazz musicians play acoustic instruments, and are often recorded live before an audience, or they are playing together in a room at the same time with mic'ing that captures not only the instruments and vocalists, but the space they are playing in; not as individuals sitting in a sound booth wearing headphones while listening to a recording of another musician who also was recorded in a booth, and then assembled by some know-it-all adolescent "recording engineer" using his mixers, and equlalizers, and re-mixers, and wave file editors to create what he thinks the recording should sound like.
I don't think there's any right or wrong way to record something. Jazz is suited to the means you described the recording process. I am not certain it would work for amplified bands. It would be intersting to try though.
The tools themselves are not evil, it's what people choose to do with them. A lot of art is an "artificially re-assemled abortion" as you put it, but I don't think that necessarily means it has no value. Do all of your jazz records say "No overdubs, No EQ, no noise gates, no digital editing"? I doubt it. I'm sure the sax player took a few takes before he got it "right". Multi-track recording allows people to make things that maybe otherwise might not exist. If this process is so objectionable to you I'd suggest never watching a movie or televsion again and only going to the theater because there again you have elements of something recorded in isolation and then assembled to form something new. No, it's not the same as a theater performance, but so what? It's an art form unto itself. You're free to only listen to purist records if you want, but that doesn't mean the alternative is fundamentally flawed and wrong.
I don't much like the idea of 'Pro-Tooling' a record to death either and I agree that you can get carried away with digital editing, but someone created those tools and people are going to want to use them, just as they may want to 'get back to basics' sometime and leave the computer at home.
