2020 PAveMEnT: Jazz Discussion

[Asterias Wrathbunny]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for making the first mirror of PAveMEnT such a success. I'd like to start a discussion on what players liked and didn't like about the jazz in the set, and how writers can effectively include jazz in future pop music tournaments. As many have noticed, the jazz questions had significantly lower conversion than the rest of the categories, and the buzzpoints of experienced jazz players leads me to believe that my questions were overall too difficult.

When I was given the opportunity to write jazz questions for this set, I was certain I didn't want to write another tossup on Kind of Blue or Dave Brubeck, and I was looking for more creative ways of asking questions. I also attempted to write questions that reflected the "jazz canon," as in how it would be written about in regular quizbowl, where at regs-difficulty Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk are (or should be) fair game as answerlines. Hence, I didn't consult RYM or number of Spotify plays in picking the clues. A good example of this was on the Art Blakey question, I clued Ugetsu and A Night at Birdland, which could be appropriate clues in regular quizbowl, but aren't his most famous albums.

However, I see how this way of thinking can turn off players who know less canonical jazz and want to be rewarded for their knowledge. Two of the most buzzed-on clues in the set's jazz were "Fists of Fury" by Kamasi Washington (on the saxophone question) and "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong, neither of which I would consider 'canonical jazz', so maybe it's time for a change of pace.

So I've come up with three ideas on how we could change how we write about jazz going forward:

• Write about jazz as it is consumed by popular music audiences, such as using chart ranking, Grammy-recognized albums, RYM, Pitchfork, etc to determine appropriate clues

• Include other genres alongside jazz, such as older blues, gospel, pop, roots music, etc, thus giving writers more freedom, especially on common links, and give players more chances to buzz.

• Replace jazz or reduce its representation and include more categories accessible to a pop music audience.

[scorrevole]

I feel like auditory jazz questions are inherently different than normal jazz questions because the only method with which you can get audio questions is by having physically listened to the music (as opposed to reading about it on Wikipedia or jazz books or previous quizbowl questions). I think you'd have to take into account Spotify listens/other metrics of popularity to account for this and ensure you have actually pyramidal questions, and also just to be consistent with how the other questions in this set are written. Choosing answerlines based off of what should be acceptable at Regs level was definitely a great idea (it was nice to hear questions on, e.g., Cannonball Adderley and Chick Corea, people who are widely listened to but don't come up that often in normal quizbowl) - I just think when deciding what canonical clues should go in those questions one should consider how many people will reasonably get them, and those online popularity metrics are probably the purest measure of that.

I also just think that people listen to pre-bebop jazz a lot less than post-bebop, and since there was a lot of the former in this set less people will buzz in for those. I think some of the pre-bebop questions are important enough to leave them unchanged despite low conversion - if you're already cluing the most popular songs of the most important artists of that era (for instance, in the clarinet question no one buzzed on "Begin the Beguine") there's not much one can do about that. But if you wanted to increase conversion, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to switch some of the pre-bebop questions with post-bebop questions that better reflect what people listen to, and there's definitely room for some Chet Baker/Herbie Hancock/free jazz/maybe even Snarky Puppy content that some players would definitely destroy.

So I guess I'd be sort of in favor of your first bullet point: use "canonical" answerlines taken from normal quizbowl but consult RYM, Spotify, etc. to determine placement of clues, and when you run out of interesting "canonical" answerlines that can have properly pyramidal clues, a few Snarky Puppy/Kamasi Washington-esque questions couldn't hurt. And that's specific to auditory, predominantly trash sets like PAveMEnT - in normal quizbowl more people will be able to buzz on written clues about lesser known albums like Ugetsu and one can care more about sticking within the "canon."