Is Jazz Dead?

Or Has It Moved to a New Address

Stuart Nicholson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136731006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Is Jazz Dead? examines the state of jazz in America at the turn of the twenty-first century. Musicians themselves are returning to New Orleans, Swing, and Bebop styles, while the work of the '60s avant-garde and even '70s and '80s jazz-rock is roundly ignored. Meanwhile, global jazz musicians are creating new and exciting music that is just starting to be heard in the United States, offering a viable alternative to the rampant conservatism here. Stuart Nicholson's thought-provoking book offers an analysis of the American scene, how it came to be so stagnant, and what it can do to create a new level of creativity. This book is bound to be controversial among jazz purists and musicians; it will undoubtedly generate discussion about how jazz should grow now that it has become a recognized part of American musical history. Is Jazz Dead? dares to ask the question on all jazz fan's minds: Can jazz survive as a living medium? And, if so, how?

1

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? THE JAZZ MAINSTREAM 1990 TO 2005

Jazz is radical music, but it’s now practiced by conservative people.

John Coxon, Spring Heel Jack

When Miles Davis died on September 28,1991, at St. Johns Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, jazz was plunged into a crisis of confi-dence as much as conscience.

Jazz’s only surviving bona fide superstar was suddenly gone. The passing of such a legendary and charismatic figure served to underline the fact that there was no one of comparable stature to step into the jazz canon and continue the teleological “great man” model of jazz history. Subsequently, jazz seemed to be in a state of waiting for Godot, with no single musician providentially appearing, as had happened in the past, to become emblematic of a new direction, like a Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, or, indeed, another Miles Davis around whom history could be constructed. “Jazz was already short of marquee names when the ‘90s began,” wrote critic Francis Davis in July 1996 in his Atlantic Monthly column. “The loss of [Davis] threatened to become a permanent void at the top of the bill.”

Davis had been an omnipresent figure in the music from the time he played Hal to Charlie Parker’s Hotspur in the 1940s to his final recordings with rap artist Easy Mo Bee in 1991. When he returned to the performing stage following almost six years of inactivity in 1981, his “comeback” concert on July 5 at Lincoln Center sold out within two hours. It was the most publicized event in jazz history, with almost every major newspaper in the world devoting column inches to the event. Davis’s subsequent eight-show tour through Japan that October grossed over $700,000. Although he suffered a stroke in February 1982, he and his group toured Sweden, Denmark, Germany, England, Italy, Holland, France, and Belgium in April and May. Big tours such as these would become a feature of Davis’s postfurlough comeback as he became the major draw in jazz during the 1980s.

As guitarist John Scofield, a sideman for Davis between 1982 and 1985, observed to a reporter from Wire magazine in 1991, “Nobody else could do big long tours every summer and fall and sell out stadiums all over Europe. And these people were not jazz snobs, they just dug Miles. He could make a believer out of a non-jazz person with the beauty of his sound and the rhythm of his notes. That’s pretty heavy.” Audiences came in droves; box offices frequently could have sold out three and four times over. The reason was simple: fans wanted to consume the aura of the physical presence of one of the great and enduring legends of twentieth-century music and to acknowledge a musical giant during his lifetime. In many ways the music, paradoxically, was less important than “the event.”

While Davis’s past musical achievements may have overshadowed his current musical aspiration during the final decade of his life — his legacy comprises some of the best-performed and most adventurously crafted albums in all of jazz — what may have been lacking in trailblazing innovation was made up with charisma. Miles’s whole career had been one of constantly reinventing himself by deftly changing the backdrop that framed the fragile lyricism of his playing, his regular feats of musical prestidigitation keeping him ahead of the game for almost forty years. The distinction in his music was how the varied settings he created for himself often influenced events within jazz itself.

Although his prolific creativity ceased during a furlough from jazz that lasted from 1975 to 1981, his career on records continued unabated during this period as his record company delved into their vaults to draw on previously unreleased material. “When he was not playing, his career went on — thanks to me,” Teo Macero, his long-time record producer at Columbia, told writer Gene Santoro in his book Dancing in Your Head, “working in the studio with tapes we’d amassed. Without that he would’ve been in the soup.” When Davis made his 1981 comeback concert at Avery Fisher Hall, in terms of record releases at least, it was as if he had never been away.

After his death in 1991, there was a distinct feeling of déjà vu as Davis albums, often with previously unissued material, continued to appear at regular intervals. In 1997 Columbia produced a brochure of Davis albums currently in print, detailing forty-three album reissues, twelve compilations, and five box sets, the latter including his ground-breaking studio collaborations with Gil Evans in their entirety and his marvelous mid-1960s acoustic quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. On release, these scrupulously packaged sets were given considerable prominence in newspapers around the world; in 1997, for example, a new Davis box set was worthy of a full-page review in the New York Times. Indeed, twelve years after his death, in October 2003, Davis was still figuring prominently on The Billboard Jazz Chart, reaching number 4 with The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions. When Charlie Parker died in 1955, graffiti across New York proclaimed “Bird Lives.” In the musically conservative 1990s, there was no graffiti for Davis; had there been, “Miles Smiles” might have been appropriate.

Davis’s most effusive obituaries grew noticeably ambiguous about the last twenty years of his career and especially about the last ten. The reason was that a standardized, some may say homogenized, version of an American jazz mainstream had emerged — the term “mainstream” for the purposes of this book meaning “main stream,” the favored style of the majority. In jazz, the prevailing orthodoxy was based on the certainties of the acoustic hard-bop-post-bop nexus of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Electric jazz — which Davis had championed in the late 1960s, most notably through the album Bitches Brew (1970) — and experimental free jazz styles — originally pioneered in the late 1950s and 1960s by the likes of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane in his final period, Cecil Taylor, and others — had become marginalized. Acoustic jazz had become the standard; as Christopher Porter, editor of Jazz Times, pointed out in his April 2003 editorial: “The status quo in jazz is music that sounds like it was made between the 1940s and the 1960s.” Somehow a remarkable reversal of values had taken place. Where once it had been possible to characterize jazz as a flight from the status quo, it could now be defined as a flight back to it.

The term “mainstream” was first coined by writer and chronicler Stanley Dance in the 1950s. He was describing a group of ex-Count Basie sidemen, still plying their craft within the conventions of the swing era despite the changing musical climate around them. During the 1950s and 1960s, the mainstream was an alternative attraction to the main events going on elsewhere: John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis at the Blackhawk, a Mingus imbroglio at the Café Bohemia, Albert Ayler with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray at the Village Gate. By the end of the 1990s, however, the mainstream had become, to all intents and purposes, the main event.

Even during the late 1980s, the kind of pluralistic scene that had characterized jazz in the past had seemed set to continue. Steve Coleman and his M-Base experiments into arty rococo funk was, as Downbeat noted, “The p.r. coup of 1988 — the jazz critics flavor of the month for, well, months.” Elsewhere, electric jazz was undergoing something of a renaissance prompted by Miles Davis’s comeback, with John Scofield’s Blue Matter band enjoying worldwide critical acclaim and bands led by Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, and Mike Brecker touring the major circuits. Musicians like Dave Holland, Charles Lloyd, Joe Henderson, and McCoy Tyner saw their careers rejuvenated, while Sonny Rollins and Keith Jarrett could still sell out almost any venue around the world.

In February 1987, Michael Dorf had opened the door of the Knitting Factory in New York and by April that year was booking improvisers every night of the week. “The Knitting Factory, a club on 47 East Houston Street, had almost singlehandedly revived New York’s downtown arts scene in the first six months of operation,” noted the New York Times. “The downtown scene quickly became trendy and marketable,” observed pianist Brad Mehldau. “It used precisely that ‘Other’ status, that appearance of marginalization, to sell itself. Many more ‘straight ahead’ players would say that they have felt marginalized by the modishness of the downtown scene — if you just show up with an acoustic band, playing tunes, you’re not ‘avant-garde’ enough.”

The Knitting Factory plugged into a niche market for experimental music, with its own record label, web events, T-shirts, and even a West Coast branch as the term “downtown jazz” gradually became descriptive of, it seemed, almost any kind of experimental music. “There was a thriving (every way except economically) Downtown scene, [where] a night at the Knitting Factory was usually for the door,” observed trumpeter Randy Sandke, author of Harmony for a New Millennium. Marketing strategies as much as canon formation helped create the concept of a succession of “schools” of jazz, beginning with “New Orleans” and moving through “Chicago,” “swing,” “bop,” “cool” or “West Coast,” “hard bop,” “free,” “jazz-rock,” and so on. But unlike the collective force these communities of similarly oriented and competing artists playing within a single coherent style generated, downtown music embraced a myriad of highly personal styles and came to mean many things to many people. As a brand, downtown jazz was stronger than the recognition an individual player might achieve. Consequently, several artists became keen to shed the downtown sobriquet after its first flush of success because they felt it deflected attention from their music. Some felt it made it more difficult to “sell” to a consuming public, compared with the more traditional hierarchy of competing performers found in the more distinct genres marked out by the young lions or smooth jazz musicians.

Experimentation continued, however, as a niche music within a niche music; indeed, any self-respecting critic can recite a shopping list of experimenters laboring in relative obscurity at the music’s margins. From the mid-1990s, there was a resurgence of loft-style jazz at New York’s Vision Festival, while the Blue Series Continuum directed by pianist Matthew Shipp for the Thirsty Ear label and the more understated warping of mainstream expectation by some Palmetto label artists attracted critical acclaim, as did improvisers in the rugged mien of late period Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and others, such as David S. Ware, David Murray, and Charles Gayle. The Chicago scene also enjoyed recognition as a vibrant center of, at times, exciting musical anarchy, particularly at the hands of musicians such as Ken Vandermark, Rob Mazurek, Jeff Parker, Hamid Drake, Fred Anderson, and Tortoise. “No one interested in the future of jazz can afford to ignore them,” said the New York Times.

Yet, ultimately, experimental jazz remained an interesting sideshow to the main event, the omnipresent jazz mainstream. Even by the early mil-lennium years, no artists seemed to have had the impact of the first wave of downtown experimenters in the 1980s, who seemed, for a time at least, capable of mounting a serious challenge to the current jazz propriety of the day. Some of these players included Bobby Previte, Wayne Horvitz, Tim Berne, and especially John Zorn, whose career, as Ajay Heble observed in his book Landing on the Wrong Note, has “been marked by an extraordinary ability to cut across the high art/popular culture divide by popularizing music that’s edgy, dissonant and inaccessible.”

As interest began to wane in the M-Base experimenters and the myriad of styles contained under the downtown umbrella, the influence of the American jazz mainstream increased. By the end of the 1990s, those not performing within its shadow invited doubt by some as to whether they were playing jazz at all. There were several reasons for this, which individually might not have had a powerful impact on the music, but collectively had the effect of shaping a mainstream that had gradually become resistant to the kind of change, innovation, and invention that had swept through the music in the past. “I don’t feel like there has been much by way of radical change,” the clarinetist and composer Don Byron told me. “Just a few younger players who weren’t around a few years ago, a few people who were around a few years ago are leaders now, but that’s not a radical change to me!” By 2000 — in retrospective documentaries like Ken Burns’s ten-part series on jazz — the jazz mainstream had become so self-contained it even denied the contemporary in the narrative of jazz history. But why did this renascent mood descend on jazz and what was its effect?

In 1981, Wynton Marsalis (b. 1961) became the first person to win simultaneous Grammys for a classical recording, Trumpet Concertos (a collection of trumpet concertos by Haydn, Hummel, and Leopold Mozart), and a jazz recording (his quintet’s recording of Think of One). A trumpet player with a sure sense of identity — in 1991 he told me, “I know what my position is, Art Blakey told me what my position is, I know when I talk to Dizzy Gillespie. I know when I talk to Sweets Edison, I know when I was talking to Miles Davis” — he seemed destined for great things, and by the time he was twenty-five, he was a prominent figure in jazz.

Columbia’s success in marketing Marsalis encouraged record companies to sign similar wunderkinder, who had the effect of partly demystifying the aura jazz had acquired among a potential audience of their peers. “I thought if I went after young artists at least that would pique the interest of kids,” George Butler, the Columbia executive who signed Marsalis, told Newsweek. These young musicians — products of a jazz-education system that was producing graduates fluent in bebop and postbebop styles in such numbers it was regarded by some critics as a “phenomenon” — aspired to the high musical standards set by Marsalis, often copied his visual signature of sartorial elegance, and played in the adopted voices of some of jazz’s older and often posthumous heroes. Critic Gary Giddins, in the introduction to his well-known 1985 collection Rhythm-a-Ning, noted that with this latest development, “Jazz turns neoclassical.” This was indeed an apposite term because as a neoclassicist, Stravinsky became more interested in narrowing and refining the range of sonority than expanding it. So too the emerging young neoclassicists in jazz. Nevertheless, this style represented a major area of recording activity in jazz during the 1980s and well into the 1990s. Thanks largely to Marsalis, jazz was now undergoing a renaissance, but as historian Eric Hobsbawm pointed out in Uncommon People, “There was something strange about this revival … jazz of the early ‘90s looked back.”

The product the neoconservatives offered can be stated simply as a return to the harmonic and melodic values of the hard-bop and postbop improvisers of the 1950s and early 1960s, and, in Marsalis’s case, back to Ellington and Armstrong as well. Like F. R. Leavis codifying the literary tradition along narrow and intolerantly proscriptive lines, Marsalis espoused 4/4 swing and the blues as basic ingredients without which, he believed, there could be no jazz. It was a reassertion of what the neoconservatives considered to be the very value system of jazz itself and an attack on jazz for having lost touch with its audience (in the case of free jazz) and for losing touch with the acoustic “tradition” (in the case of jazz—rock fusion). In essence, neoconservatism presented a return to internalist principles of unity and coherence or a post-Romantic concept of thematic and organic unity. By the late 1980s, musicians playing in the so-called neoclassical style had become known as the “young lions,” a sobriquet taken from the name of the famous collaborative LP by Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Frank Strozier, and Bobby Timmons from April 25, 1960, and given contemporary relevance by a concert of the same name at the Kool Jazz Festival in New York on June 30, 1982. Performed by “seventeen exceptional young musicians” including Marsalis, James Newton, Chico Freeman, John Blake, Anthony Davis, John Purcell, and Paquito D’Rivera, it set the tone in jazz for almost two decades.

In 1990, Marsalis was featured on the cover of Time magazine, which announced the dawn of “The New Jazz Age.” The neoconservatives were now central to the major recording companies’ commitment to jazz, and as they jostled to sign young musicians, it had the welcome effect of focusing media attention on jazz and raising its public profile. “Because of the Young Lions era, the quote-unquote ‘phenomenon’ they had in the early 1990s, any jazz musician under the age of 25 got offered a recording contract,” bassist Christian McBride, one of the leading young musicians of his gen-eration, told me in late 2002. “I turned one down. I got offered a recording contract from Blue Note when I was 20 or 21, but I knew I wasn’t ready. Yes, sure, I would probably play okay, but it wouldn’t be much of an overall statement, so I decided I would hold off for a little while. I always felt like something that frivolous would kind of destroy the reputation or the foundation of what jazz is all about. You don’t give somebody a recording contract because of their age — not in jazz! I mean, that is what pop is about, but you don’t do that in jazz.” In his Atlantic Monthly column, Francis Davis pithily commented, “There have always been young jazz musicians, but only lately has anyone made a fuss over them just for being you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Where Do We Go from Here? The Jazz Mainstream 1990 to 2005
• 2 Between Image and Artistry: The Wynton Marsalis Phenomenon
• 3 Prophets Looking Backward: Jazz at Lincoln Center
• 4 DéJà Vu Time All Over Again: Jazz Singers and Nu-Crooners
• 5 Teachers Teaching Teachers: Jazz Education
• 6 Altered Realities and Fresh Possibilities: Future Jazz
• 7 Out of Sight and Out of Mind: Jazz in the Global Village
• 8 Celebrating the Glocal: The Nordic Tone in Jazz
• 9 A Question of Survival: Marketplace or Subsidy
• Reference Bibliography
• Index