Make a Jazz Noise Here

[escher]

Don't forget Shorter's major contributions to the Jazz Messengers, too: he wrote a bunch of their tunes and was the sax player for much of their heyday. Thankfully, that work is very well documented with a bunch of live and studio albums of the band.

You're right, there are great tunes written for Blakey (but also for Morgan and others), i was talking only of his own albums. If i had to choose his best stuff considering also the groups in which he's "only" a sideman it's another story because i tend to prefer his contributions on albums of other musicians

[Grazioso]

I was thinking of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers this morning, but of the group in the '80s with Wynton Marsalis.  Art Blakey almost single handedly kept alive the hard bop tradition when the entire jazz world was being lured into fusion or r&b/funk.  Miles started the migration, but it was already headed that way with the soul bop of songs like Sidewinder, organ/guitar trios of Jimmy Smith, Brother Jack McDuff and Stanley Turretine's soul jazz.  Part of it, and this was on Miles' mind, was trying to gain credibility and popularity again with the black community which had abandoned jazz for soul, r&b and funk.  Sly Stone was a huge influence on Miles and Herbie Hancock.

Anyway, Art Blakey never wavered, and it was because of his steady leadership of the JMs that when the time was ripe, Wynton Marsalis, and his brother Branford, emerged from that group and became "the new Miles Quintet" for lack of a better phrase, and jazz was sent back to its hard bop roots, but now called "Neo Bop".  As I posted earlier, the fusion, jazz-funk phase ran out of steam and most of those guys came back to acoustic jazz, and I credit Art Blakey with being a big reason why the music remained grounded in the tradition coming out off the 50s and 60s golden age - so that they had some place to come back to.

Well said. Like Miles, Art Blakey was renowned as one of jazz's great talent scouts over the course of decades: Brownie, Silver, Dorham, Mobley, Golson, Shorter, Morgan, et al. passed through the Messenger ranks and were given chances to demonstrate their writing and playing chops before a world-wide audience. The band was hot stuff in the late 50's/early 60's, with a host of live recordings documenting their stays in Berlin, Copenhagen, Lausanne, Zurich, Stockholm, Tokyo, etc., and above all, Paris.

[Grazioso]

You're so wrong about that. Popular music like jazz is always in a state of flux and has to expand & grow to stay fresh .. it's always of it's time and absorbs what's current, it has always been like that throughout history. Some folks want it to stay within certain style & era forever, thankfully the musicians are a lot more experimental and adventurous - and what has done in the late 60s & 70s is still with us today widening the musical palette in more ways than one.

I would say it has to be done well to stay fresh. Changing direction or incorporating new influences is not inherently desirable, particularly if it weakens the very elements that make jazz strong and distinctive in the first place. You can bend something so far it breaks. "Scusi, Signor Michelangelo, don't you think the chapel ceiling you're painting is getting a bit too complex for the common man? Maybe some stick figures would make it more relevant and up to date..."

[karlhenning]

. . . always in a state of flux and has to expand & grow to stay fresh . . . .

Well, that explains the obsession with Stockhausen, and allegations of genius . . . .

[Grazioso]

Tom Harrell is another fine composer/player of straight-ahead jazz:

http://www.youtube.com/v/IaaKbQ5JPuY

[Grazioso]

Wynton is a fine player .. but he and his ilk are more obsessed with glorifying & emulating the music that his 'heroes' created from bygone eras, but nowhere near as fresh or original as they were (obviously). He even dresses that way.  .. it was happening way back then but - it's kind-of sad that, and it's easier to do. All those musicians who mold themselves into that .. it's meaningless and forgettable.

Nothing is easy about the music he's playing And one could easily argue that it takes more courage to play music in a traditional style than working tirelessly to be trendy and novel. It's like deciding to play Baroque music for a living: you'll never get rich playing Bach, but you'll make rich music.

So, do we now really need jazz with rappers and turntables to expand the music's boundaries and be culturally relevant, to be "bold, new and fresh"? And you talk about fusion as if it were somehow cutting edge. Maybe once, but it's 40-year-old ancient musical history, as "dead" (or "alive" depending on your take on musical "evolution") as the big-band dance music of the 30's.

[Grazioso]

More great straight-ahead jazz, from Dave Douglas:

http://www.youtube.com/v/7OM5G9E-wDc

[escher]

the problem with jazz-rock and fusion is that oppositely to the previous important movements (bop and post-bop, modal jazz, cool, third stream, free jazz) that were really experimenting,  the electric movement was  basically fashion.
I have obviously nothing against electricity, and i think that there's also good stuff. The first electric albums of Miles Davis were really something new (though electricity in jazz existed yet, sun ra used electric instruments in the mid-fifties and there were also experiments in the forties), there is interesting music made by Don Ellis, Frank Zappa, Hancock and other musicians. But after Bitches brew a lot of musicians in few years have seen the commercial potential of the genre. And in too much fusion and jazz rock under the virtuosism often there was very simple (and often tasteless) music.

[Grazioso]

I have obviously nothing against electricity, and i think that there's also good stuff. The first electric albums of Miles Davis were really something new (though electricity in jazz existed yet, sun ra used electric instruments in the mid-fifties and there were also experiments in the forties),

And electric guitar, vibes, and Hammond B3 organ all have long histories in jazz. But it's not so much the instrumentation as what's done with it. Then again, instrumental timbres also help define styles and eras.

[jowcol]

Wow.  Get called away on business and several pages appear on this thread. 

The last few pages that have seemed to me like the classic parable of 6 blind men and the elephant, where each man describes the elephant differently depending on which part they touch.   

I may seem a bit out of character here, but I'm going to defend James here, and will run the risk of ticking the rest of you off.  Here goes. 
There is a point James made back on the 31st, right before I got summoned to the wilds of Nebraska, that echoed a point he made several pages back, and may offer the key to our greater understanding of the elephant.  In fact, somewhere around page 15 or so,  James and myself were batting around the some notions of composing vs improv, live vs studio, etc that were reprised over the last few days.

Anyway, in both of these section,  James  made it clear that songwriting was one of the criteria by which he was making his judgments.  He also said he'd be much happier listening to Shorter than Trane.   (and 70s Weather Report over Miles Davis) And I if concise songwriting and studio precision where the things I was looking for, I'd agree completely- a lot of his selections are completely in line with this, and I see a logical pattern.
(Now I would question the logic of confusing one's personal aesthetic criteria with a sweeping judgment of all jazz—but  I think we all have our hands dirty when it comes to that. )

One question—as we've been debating composing vs improv, live vs studio, etc, we've been using our own criteria—have we really stopped to think how the different musicians felt?  I'd bet the farm that Zawinul and Shorter considered the composition an essential part of what they were doing. 

Miles, on the other hand, emphasized his 70s work in terms of bringing together personalities and establishing a groove or situation for the music to happen.  And Coltrane?  I would never consider him much of composer—even his major works like Ascension are pretty sketchy structurally. 
However, he was quoted as saying that he viewed a song a nothing more than a platform to take off from.   Once he started his own group, his goal was spinning out some relatively complex improvisations on some very simple structures.  For me, he achieved what we set out to do, much like Shorter with the 2nd Davis Quintet and solo work, and Zawinul with Weather Report, and Miles during his whole 68-75 electrical period.   

Frankly, although I've not resisted a chance to point out to James (usually though a variety of wise-assed techniques), when I have felt that he's confused his personal preferences with objective fact,  there have been several instances in the last few pages where others have made sweeping statements about what jazz is, or the relative worth of a given period that do exactly the same thing.   It would be just as fair to call out Leon, Escher, MI, and myself for just the same thing. (And yes, I can dig out the quotes...)  It's not fair to give James a hard time for something the rest of us are doing.  And, I'm not sure if I made it clear, in my varied bizarre and wised-assed comments,  James and I  do share a lot of common favorites , and I don't think that anybody who has been contributing to this discussion is clueless—just that we forget which part of the elephant we are touching.  I personally think the dialog would be more constructive if we were more mindful of what WE are looking for, and label our opinions as opinions.   I don't hold any of us as an ultimate authority on Jazz (which is why we have day jobs, right?), but are people who love music and want to share what moves them.

Some other thoughts and opinions—I'm big on improvisation, and the chemistry and telepathy of a good rhythm section that goes beyond what can be captured in musical notation.   Yes, I'll confess that my Jazz universe is centered around the classic John Coltrane Quartet, and their basic "sound"  gives me the same "this is the voice of God  speaking" feel that I encountered when I first dug into Bach.   Very different in some ways, but in others, I sense a style taken to the logical limit, and in my own warped musical pantheon, I put that quartet on the same level as Bach and Stravinsksy.  I'm not asking any of you to—but that is simply the way my head is wired. 

I love modal music because, I'm not a passive listener, I like to make up my own lines and accompaniment in my head , and modal music gives the most freedom to do just that.  It's similar to minimalism or a pot luck—if you don't bring something to the event, it sounds pretty empty. But, to me, highly composed music has its benefits (I wouldn't be on this forum if I didn't love a lot of it), but an open-ended Jazz jam never bores me because I never take the same path in and out.  It delivers a music experience to me that I can't get out of a Stravinsky, Bartok,  etc.  Not saying it's better—just different.  I would not want to eat the same meal for the rest of my life- same goes with music. Your mileage may vary.

As far as the comments going back about Trane and his live stuff—there is a lot out there.  If you pick up all of the Pablo stuff, and  Live Trane boxed set, you haven't gone all the way.   If you do a google search on "Live Trane Underground" you will find downloads and torrents for the majority of the remaining work there is a record for the 1961-63 period.  This may bore some of you to tears, and I won't dis you for not liking it, be for me, it's amazing how much  variety each version of a "My Favorite Things" had each night.  (Elvin said you had to be willing to die on stage with JC.)  Compare the two MFTs from the both the 1961 Stockholm and Paris shows, and the length and construction of solos is radically different- even though they were recorded the same day. 

James and I differed many pages back on the degree that mid to late Weather Report shook up their live material, as both of us have boots from those tours.  My take was not nearly enough—I didn't get the feeling that anything could happen as I would from, say, Miles live stuff from 73-5 or Tranes 1961 or 63 tours.  James thought they shook it up too much and wandered too much  (although, I'd still need to point out that the run times are still for my money,  to close to the studio times for my  money).   No value judgment implied—it depends on what each of us is looking for.
Confession time—these are a result of my personal preferences and questionable tastes. 

I liked earlier WR, but based on our conversations a few months back, I went through my collection again, and if anything, and less excited.  To me, that material is too pop friendly and contrived, and I keep waiting for each track to really take off—and it never does.  Of course, James has said the same about Mile's sprawling mid 70s stuff—how much longer until we get a chord change?  It's also interesting that we have the opposite approach to evaluating an album by track times.  I look for long cuts and avoid albums with a lot of short ones—he's diametrically opposed.  Oh well, but are both big fans of the Mahavishnu Orchestra—although, I'd have to say that, based on my boot collection starting in April 72 there were as fearsome a unit live as they were in the studio, and showed an incredibly amount of diversity in what they covered and did not.

I also need to confess that I admire the 2nd Miles Davis quintet a lot more than I like it.  It has killer musicians (Tony Williams is particularly amazing), and some incredibly innovative song writing.  But for me, it has an anti-Gestalt-  the whole is less than the sum  of the parts.  It's hard for me to get emotionally engaged, and I find myself returning to it less and less.   

I'm the same about Bop—although I've wondered by James didn't like it more, as it was much more complex harmonically than a Kind of Blue.  Of course, the real tragedy was that some much of the really formative bop  by Parker and Gillespie happened during the record ban, and the majority of recordings are from after his breakdown.

As far as Swing—I love some of it—Ellington for sure,  and Lester Young.  But I don't think that all jazz needs to swing.  It's funny, but Coltrane was accused of being a anti-jazz and killing swing in 1961, but I think Jazz needs to kill what comes before and create new stuff ( which is a sentiment James raised, and I agree with strongly).  Swing killed Dixieland.  Bop killed Swing.  Cool Jazz killed Bop.  Fusion killed Cool Jazz.  Eh.. whatever.   I like some Medeski, Martin and Wood in light doses, even though they toy with hip-hop. 

Okay—rambled long enough.   Time for me to go back to my part of the elephant—even if it's the ass-end.

[jowcol]

And I don't think songwriting is as important to jazz as the soloing.  There are other traditions where the writing is THE thing and the writing is much richer than anything in jazz, but jazz is the primary Western tradition where the improvisation is the definitive aspect.  So, yeh, I'll take on someone who wants to judge jazz by a standard that I think is inappropriate.

Of course YMMV.

I share your opinion-- but I still consider it one.  A lot of the big bands were better known  for their arrangements than soloists--

[Dancing Divertimentian]

You remind me of a 4th-rate version of Stanley Crouch for some reason. I could invest a lot of time going through each word & statement you have made in this thread and tear you a new asshole but i dont have the time nor energy; and it ultimately would be a huge waste.

Why in the world would you WANT to "tear someone a new asshole"??

What's the point? What do you hope to gain?

Converts?

By systematically trashing someone you hope to convert them? Or us?

Can you articulate WHY you have this rather, err...unusual attitude?

[escher]

And Coltrane?  I would never consider him much of composer—even his major works like Ascension are pretty sketchy structurally. 

true, tough i would not understimate some "detail" of his music, the quartal harmony used by McCoy Tyner was big part of the originality of the sound of the group. 

However, he was quoted as saying that he viewed a song a nothing more than a platform to take off from.   Once he started his own group, his goal was spinning out some relatively complex improvisations on some very simple structures.  For me, he achieved what we set out to do, much like Shorter with the 2nd Davis Quintet and solo work, and Zawinul with Weather Report, and Miles during his whole 68-75 electrical period.   

Frankly, although I've not resisted a chance to point out to James (usually though a variety of wise-assed techniques), when I have felt that he's confused his personal preferences with objective fact,  there have been several instances in the last few pages where others have made sweeping statements about what jazz is, or the relative worth of a given period that do exactly the same thing.   It would be just as fair to call out Leon, Escher, MI, and myself for just the same thing. (And yes, I can dig out the quotes...)  It's not fair to give James a hard time for something the rest of us are doing.  And, I'm not sure if I made it clear, in my varied bizarre and wised-assed comments,  James and I  do share a lot of common favorites , and I don't think that anybody who has been contributing to this discussion is clueless—just that we forget which part of the elephant we are touching.  I personally think the dialog would be more constructive if we were more mindful of what WE are looking for, and label our opinions as opinions.   I don't hold any of us as an ultimate authority on Jazz (which is why we have day jobs, right?), but are people who love music and want to share what moves them.

Some other thoughts and opinions—I'm big on improvisation, and the chemistry and telepathy of a good rhythm section that goes beyond what can be captured in musical notation.   Yes, I'll confess that my Jazz universe is centered around the classic John Coltrane Quartet, and their basic "sound"  gives me the same "this is the voice of God  speaking" feel that I encountered when I first dug into Bach.   Very different in some ways, but in others, I sense a style taken to the logical limit, and in my own warped musical pantheon, I put that quartet on the same level as Bach and Stravinsksy.  I'm not asking any of you to—but that is simply the way my head is wired. 

I love modal music because, I'm not a passive listener, I like to make up my own lines and accompaniment in my head , and modal music gives the most freedom to do just that.  It's similar to minimalism or a pot luck—if you don't bring something to the event, it sounds pretty empty. But, to me, highly composed music has its benefits (I wouldn't be on this forum if I didn't love a lot of it), but an open-ended Jazz jam never bores me because I never take the same path in and out.  It delivers a music experience to me that I can't get out of a Stravinsky, Bartok,  etc.  Not saying it's better—just different.  I would not want to eat the same meal for the rest of my life- same goes with music. Your mileage may vary.

As far as the comments going back about Trane and his live stuff—there is a lot out there.  If you pick up all of the Pablo stuff, and  Live Trane boxed set, you haven't gone all the way.   If you do a google search on "Live Trane Underground" you will find downloads and torrents for the majority of the remaining work there is a record for the 1961-63 period.  This may bore some of you to tears, and I won't dis you for not liking it, be for me, it's amazing how much  variety each version of a "My Favorite Things" had each night.  (Elvin said you had to be willing to die on stage with JC.)  Compare the two MFTs from the both the 1961 Stockholm and Paris shows, and the length and construction of solos is radically different- even though they were recorded the same day. 

James and I differed many pages back on the degree that mid to late Weather Report shook up their live material, as both of us have boots from those tours.  My take was not nearly enough—I didn't get the feeling that anything could happen as I would from, say, Miles live stuff from 73-5 or Tranes 1961 or 63 tours.  James thought they shook it up too much and wandered too much  (although, I'd still need to point out that the run times are still for my money,  to close to the studio times for my  money).   No value judgment implied—it depends on what each of us is looking for.
Confession time—these are a result of my personal preferences and questionable tastes. 

I liked earlier WR, but based on our conversations a few months back, I went through my collection again, and if anything, and less excited.  To me, that material is too pop friendly and contrived, and I keep waiting for each track to really take off—and it never does.  Of course, James has said the same about Mile's sprawling mid 70s stuff—how much longer until we get a chord change?  It's also interesting that we have the opposite approach to evaluating an album by track times.  I look for long cuts and avoid albums with a lot of short ones—he's diametrically opposed.  Oh well, but are both big fans of the Mahavishnu Orchestra—although, I'd have to say that, based on my boot collection starting in April 72 there were as fearsome a unit live as they were in the studio, and showed an incredibly amount of diversity in what they covered and did not.

I also need to confess that I admire the 2nd Miles Davis quintet a lot more than I like it.  It has killer musicians (Tony Williams is particularly amazing), and some incredibly innovative song writing.  But for me, it has an anti-Gestalt-  the whole is less than the sum  of the parts. It's hard for me to get emotionally engaged, and I find myself returning to it less and less.

i think that though there were some similarities between Coltrane's quartet and Davis's second quintet, their approach and "poetics" was radically different. I perceive Coltrane as a romantic, and his sheets of sounds were about energy (is not difficult to understand why he was fascinated by Ayler and the free jazz movement). The second quintet (influenced by Shorter's approach) was more about ambient,  detachment (i hope i't the correct word) and balance. There's very little romanticism in their music, Pinocchio and for example, Wise one are worlds apart

I'm the same about Bop—although I've wondered by James didn't like it more, as it was much more complex harmonically than a Kind of Blue. 

true, and i'd say that when we're talking of bop music we are talking  of Monk, Herbie Nichols, Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Benny Golson.
But also Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Booker little, Joe Henderson, Grachan Moncur, Jackie Mclean, Sun ra, the second quintet, Shorter, Cedar Walton, Cal Massey, Sam Rivers, and stuff like Coltrane's giant steps too, Some of the most adventurous jazz of the sixties, bop music is not just simple hard bop and blues stuff, it's a big genre

As far as Swing—I love some of it—Ellington for sure,  and Lester Young.  But I don't think that all jazz needs to swing.  It's funny, but Coltrane was accused of being a anti-jazz and killing swing in 1961

even Monk was accused of not swinging, but it doesn't mean that it's true.

[escher]

However, one of my very favorite jazz-rock albums:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUIGLMJNoHA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtRqUEtMsDg

not very well known and very different by the classic idea of the genre, something like gothic jazz-rock/prog rock/canterbury  music played by jazz musicians plus vocals. But a great and very successful album imo

[Grazioso]

again, erase the labels, tags, false traditional notions  .. and look at the creative musical results, you can do this and it's not inappropriate; that was all I was really saying originally. Any form of popular music (this includes "Jazz") whether it emphasizes a more compositionally grounded-based approach or if it's completely free and everything in-between that spectrum can never compare with best art music.

Self-contradiction.

And calling jazz pop music is to misconstrue jazz history and the nature of the music. It was once pop music (much of it made for dance, featuring relatively simple catchy tunes), but with the end of the war and the rise of "modern" jazz, that largely ceased to be the case. Certainly with the advent of competition from rock & roll and other actual popular forms.

I think it's going too far to to label jazz a "musician's music," but there is truth in that it often got far too complex to appeal to many beyond a small coterie of diehard fans, critics, and the musicians themselves (and more than a few of them resisted the changes wrought on the music by bop). That holds true today. Jazz is not remotely popular, for better or worse.

Wynton is a fine player .. but he and his ilk are more obsessed with glorifying & emulating the music that his 'heroes' created from bygone eras, but nowhere near as fresh or original as they were (obviously). He even dresses that way.  .. it was happening way back then but - it's kind-of sad that, and it's easier to do.

He wears suits, like a gentleman. Would you have him appear at Lincoln Center in a baggy T-shirt and pants hanging down below his ass to be hip and trendy? Remember how Miles made himself look the fool by deciding, as a middle-aged man, it would be hip to dress like a teenager?

People may prefer a certain era than others but the best of it from all the eras is speaking with the vocabulary "of today" at the time when it was created, for that generation.

So Louis Armstrong was irrelevant for most of his career? If we're to get rid of labels and tags, why not just judge the music, instead of how it supposedly reflects its time? We do that as a matter of course in classical music. And don't forget that one of the chief traditional criteria for artistic greatness is universality--how little it's mired in its day.

[Grazioso]

just a much much broader scope .. that's all. and jazz was & still is a form of popular music .. & it's time & place.

How is jazz still popular music? Not in terms of musical sophistication and the demands placed on its performers and listeners, which typically go way beyond actual pop music. Not in terms of consumer spending:

Recording sales are not broken out by genre in this chart, but the RIAA's 2008 "Music Consumers Profile" contains data reviewing almost a decade of business. According to the published figures, jazz sales equaled 3.0 per cent of total sales in 1999, hit 3.4 per cent in 2002, dropped to 1.8 in 2005, and in 2008 registered a mere 1.1 per cent of sales. In almost every year classical sales trump jazz sales; religious music sales are in the 3.9 to 6.7 range; pop, country, urban/R&B and hip-hop each claim numbers in the low double digits, and rock accounts for between 24.8 and 34 per cent of year end shipments.

Source: http://news.jazzjournalists.org/2011/02/graph-shows-music-sales-decline/

More interesting--and sobering--stats:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204619004574320303103850572-lMyQjAxMDA5MDAwODEwNDgyWj.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

and two interesting quotes from the same article:

I suspect it means, among other things, that the average American now sees jazz as a form of high art. Nor should this come as a surprise to anyone, since most of the jazz musicians that I know feel pretty much the same way. They regard themselves as artists, not entertainers, masters of a musical language that is comparable in seriousness to classical music—and just as off-putting to pop-loving listeners who have no more use for Wynton Marsalis than they do for Felix Mendelssohn.

(Emphasis mine)

Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music. But there's no sense in pretending that it didn't happen, or that contemporary jazz is capable of appealing to the same kind of mass audience that thrilled to the big bands of the swing era. And it is precisely because jazz is now widely viewed as a high-culture art form that its makers must start to grapple with the same problems of presentation, marketing and audience development as do symphony orchestras, drama companies and art museums

(Emphasis mine.)

And Louis Armstrong is a historical musical figure in a page from a golden age of American popular music ..

Which is tantamount to saying Joe Zawinul or Miles Davis is a historical musical figure in a page from a golden age of American popular music. Are they merely historical figures, or does their music have current relevance or value? You value a lot of the fusion music of the 70's, yet from one perspective it's "dead" historical music from decades ago. Do you label music according to time period or do you judge it by the notes?

[jowcol]

Labeling and pigeonholing it is retarded. People may prefer a certain era than others but the best of it from all the eras is speaking with the vocabulary "of today" at the time when it was created, for that generation.

Understand in saying that you are setting yourself up for a parade of quotes from times when you've found it necessary to label.  The fact is, it is impossible to generalize or draw patterns at all without some approach to labeling or categorization.  The difficulty, however, is when we forget our arbitrary our labels are, and confuse them for some objective fact.

There was a great sutra where someone visited the Buddha on a chariot, and the Buddha asked him how he traveled.  The many replied he came by chariot.  The Buddha asked him what was a chariot, and when through all of its parts, asking which one made it a chariot.  The man was so flustered, he finally admitted that the concept of "chariot" had no meaning, and there was no such thing as a chariot.  Then the Buddha asked him , "if that is the case, how did you get here?"   The point was to realize the limitations of our mental constructs we use to describe things, but also acknowledged that we needed to use them.

[jowcol]

LOL

Dude- I'm envious.   You've gotten a "Way Off" and a "Nonsense".  I think you are ahead in the game of "James Bingo"

[karlhenning]

I'm in pfffft heaven here.

[Grazioso]

There was a great sutra where someone visited the Buddha on a chariot, and the Buddha asked him how he traveled.  The many replied he came by chariot.  The Buddha asked him what was a chariot, and when through all of its parts, asking which one made it a chariot.  The man was so flustered, he finally admitted that the concept of "chariot" had no meaning, and there was no such thing as a chariot.  Then the Buddha asked him , "if that is the case, how did you get here?"   The point was to realize the limitations of our mental constructs we use to describe things, but also acknowledged that we needed to use them.

Venerable Nagasena, Pfft! 

While binaristic, categorical thinking has its practical pitfalls (and spiritual ones--read some Zen texts for memorable warnings), the beauty of it is that it ideally acts as not as a tool with which to beat one's neighbor over the head, but rather a spur to further investigation and reexamination: "X is Y" "Well, are we sure about what Y is in the first place? Did we pay careful enough attention to X the first time around. Let's investigate and maybe come to appreciate both X and Y more fully."