The History of Jazz (80 page)

This concept-driven campaign, so obsessively focused on the city scrawled on an artist’s birth certificate, threatened to collapse under its own weight. CBS Records, acquired by Sony in 1987, eventually parted ways with almost every one of the New Orleans artists it had signed, including Wynton Marsalis. For the most part, the musicians swept up in this Crescent City fever were genuine talents, even if the fame and expectations thrust upon them from the start were new phenomena in the jazz world. As the preceding chapters of this book make clear, many of jazz’s greatest figures of previous eras never enjoyed a contract with a major label, and others did so only after mastering their craft the slow way as sidemen in the trenches and on tightly budgeted leader dates for small labels. Some critics feared that the industry’s quest for young blood would create a generation of instrumentalists with unripened talent or lacking the deep commitment to a set of musical values that comes only from hard dues paying. Others lamented how many brilliant artists in midcareer, mainstream players born between 1940 and 1955—pianists Jessica Williams, Kenny Barron, Steve Kuhn, and Adam Makowicz; trumpeters Tom Harrell, Valery Ponomarev, and Bobby Shew; saxophonists Bobby Watson, Eric Kloss, Ricky Ford, and Jane Ira Bloom; trombonist Steve Turre (to cite but a few)—seemed part of a lost generation who were mostly forgotten by the power brokers and magazines, seen as too old to be part of the youth movement, but too young to be respected veterans from the early days of jazz.

Yet, as subsequent events would confirm, this flowering of the traditionalist movement in jazz was much more than a passing fad or a short-lived marketing angle pursued by the record labels. The concurrent spread and institutionalization of jazz education during this same period no doubt played a key role in this process. At almost the same moment that Wynton Marsalis was embracing a more traditional musical vocabulary, the National Association of Jazz, a modest organization of music professionals and teachers started in the 1960s, changed its name to the grander International Association for Jazz Education and would build its annual get-together into the single biggest event in the jazz world—a distinction it maintained until the organization’s collapse from financial stresses in 2008. Who could have imaged, back in the Swing Era or Jazz Age, that the biggest annual jazz party would coalesce around a collection of educators? Equally surprising to old-timers would be the music’s journey from the nightclubs of Fifty-second Street to Lincoln Center. Jazz at Lincoln Center had also started on a small scale, with a budget of less than $1 million when it was established, in 1986, as a department of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. But JALC’s budget had grown to more than $40 million by 2008—making it the biggest power broker in the jazz world of the new millennium. These are profound changes, yet in an era of codification, institutionalization, and historical consciousness-raising, such shifts should not be surprising.

One can measure this transformation in many ways, but perhaps the most obvious sign of the new state of affairs is the proliferation of tribute bands, tribute recordings, reissues, historic boxed sets, reunion tours, and repertory projects. In the old days, an occasional “ghost band” would work the circuit, usually the result of musicians keeping a group afloat after the death of a prominent leader. But after the return to the roots movements of the 1980s and 1990s, ensembles devoted to the dearly departed seemed to sprout up everywhere, professing allegiances to bygone styles and artists even if none of the musicians on hand had any firsthand contact with the original source of inspiration. Perhaps it is some consolation to readers of this book that, even though they will never get a chance to see the deceased exponents of jazz past in the flesh, they can almost certainly find a tribute band, whether their tastes run to Cannonball Adderley or Lennie Tristano, Bix Beiderbecke or Herbie Nichols, or some other figure from the the last century.

How sobering it is to consider that the most momentous jazz milestones of 1959 were the release of classic recordings such as
Kind of Blue
,
Time Out
, and
Mingus Ah Um
; but—strange to say—the most publicized jazz events of 2009 were the fiftieth-anniversary reissues of these same albums. The Columbia (now Sony) label that had originally presented this fresh and unapologetic music to the public had by this stage mostly abandoned the idea of promoting any jazz that wasn’t a reissue or some marketing-driven concept of minimal substance and credibility. Certainly there are many jazz fans and performers who would prefer a more revolutionary art form with grander aspirations. Yet, like latecomers to a party after all the best food and drink has been consumed, artists of the current day must make do with what scraps are available—and usually those are elements drawn from the music’s heritage. To build a revolutionary new style from these bits and pieces may well be too large a task for even the most talented among them, although a few still aspire to such heights—albeit almost invariably without the support of a major label.

Yet should we demand such perennial revolutions? Is it the jazz world that is amiss—or merely our perspective? How valid is our ingrained expectation that the music should always be progressive, always break the mold, always embrace the newest new thing? Is it not enough simply for music to be enjoyable, intelligent, well played? On the other hand, if young jazz musicians are content to work within the framework of earlier styles, why should we listen to their compact discs rather than to the history-making performances by Armstrong, Parker, Ellington, and other past masters that serve as the blueprints for these latter-day works? Why pay attention to the imitator when the original is—through the miracle of recording technology— almost as accessible? These are deep questions, beyond the scope of this work, and ones that this author hopes to pick up on a later occasion. They are questions, moreover, that are relevant to many arts and genres beyond the world of jazz. It suffices to point out that, after five hundred years as a dominant aesthetic vision, the very notion of an art form following a progressive evolution, quasi-scientific in its continual “breakthroughs,” is now tottering at its foundations. Various New Age, minimalist, and other styles of art, for all their limitations—and though their aesthetic underpinnings are largely unformed—suggest the possibility of a “degree-zero” style (to borrow the terminology of critic Roland Barthes), one that has no relation to the time warp of advancing techniques. In a complementary vein, other aestheticians have spoken of the arrival of the “end” of the history of art—a vision that, to some, represents the glorious advent of a nonlinear age of unconstrained creativity, but, to others, implies a frightening abandonment of our previous assumptions and points of reference.

The history of jazz is at a critical point where such questions become increasingly important. The music’s past threatens to dwarf its present and cloud its future. Only in the last few years, visitors to jazz record stores have encountered a novel situation in which most of the music for sale is by artists who are no longer alive. The surviving jazz radio stations are moving in a similar direction, celebrating the legacy of past masters and putting fewer and fewer current releases into rotation. The rise of movements to propagate the jazz repertory; the emergence of generation after generation of neotraditionalists; even the interest in jazz historical studies, which validates the work you hold in your hands: these are all symptoms of the same tectonic shift inexorably altering the structure of the jazz world. As a result, any new artist attempting to make a reputation in today’s environment must compete not just with other young talents but with the entire history of the music. That is a heavy burden indeed.

Responding to this set of circumstances, an alternative approach to the tradition was espoused by a group of progressive, and often irreverent, postmodernists during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Starting a few years before Wynton Marsalis began his ascent to the pinnacle of jazz fame, these less-heralded artists were attempting a more confrontational approach to the various preexisting styles and vocabularies of jazz. Realizing that the music’s weighty tradition could not be avoided completely, these postmodern players nonetheless refused to be mere acolytes celebrating the past. Instead, they applied a deconstructive approach, a willfully manipulative attitude that aimed to transform elements pulled from the jazz (and nonjazz) musical archives into building blocks for new hybrid sounds. These performers grappled with their musical inheritance not to turn jazz into a museum piece—far from it—but rather seeking aural weapons that still might have the capacity to shock and awe.

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” runs a famous aphorism from the ancient poet Archilochus—a saying that inspired Oxford don Isaiah Berlin to categorize visionary individuals as either foxes or hedgehogs, based on whether their careers emphasize single-minded allegiance to one big concept or constant shifts from idea to idea. The distinction is useful in understanding the postmodern turn in jazz, which aimed to change the art form from the home of heroic hedgehogs into a frenetic free-for-all of fleet foxes.

If jazz was built by big personalities with strongly defined individual styles, in the waning years of the twentieth century it would be inherited by eclectic improvisers who were comfortable with a range of idioms and could mix and match them depending on the setting or their inclination. Starting in the 1970s, the leaders of the jazz world were increasingly those who knew “many things” and delighted in the opportunity to show audiences the full range of their musical learnings. The postmodern jazz musician, a figure who exemplified this turn of events—reflecting tendencies also evident in other art forms during this period—inevitably reminds us of those famous linguists who have mastered several languages and can quickly jump from one to the next. Perhaps even this comparison is too tame, since the jazz postmodernists even dared to superimpose incongruous styles one on top of the other—conversations in multiple tongues happening simultaneously—forcing them together into provocative new combinations. Leading jazz performers had rarely done this in earlier decades. They worked to develop personal styles as unique as a fingerprint, and created their individual sound almost as much by their ruthlessness in excluding certain phrases and structures as by what they included. The postmodern turn in jazz, in contrast, stood out for its vast inclusiveness, its reluctance to abandon any avenue of expression, no matter how far from the mainstream. “Rather than a single notion of ‘freedom,’ various freedoms were being asserted across a wide spectrum of musical possibilities,” George Lewis has written, offering what could easily serve as a definition of the postmodern impulse in jazz.
³

Even the institutional structures of jazz changed to reflect this new sensibility. Instead of towering individuals who led the jazz world by courageous example, musicians whose very names—Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Coltrane— defined and symbolized the evolution of the art form, collectives and associations of various sorts now became the leaders of the progressive wing of the jazz world. The looseness of these confederations reflected the increasingly prevalent openmindedness to varied methods of musical expression. The formation of the Jazz Composers Guild toward the end of 1964 was an early sign of how this new approach might work. In time, other groups emerged on the scene in different communities, including the Underground Musicians’ Association in Los Angeles, the Black Artists’ Group in St. Louis, and the Detroit Creative Musicians Association. But the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) would prove to be the most influential of these collectives.

The AACM began in 1965 with the aim of helping progressive musicians find performing opportunities, rehearsal space, and other career support. Pianist Muhal Richard Abrams served as the organization’s first president—his Experimental Band, a large free jazz ensemble established in 1961, had helped lay the groundwork for the AACM, and many of Abrams’s later recordings would stand out as important statements of the movement’s aesthetic vision. Other early participants included Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Anthony Braxton, and Lester Bowie. In its charter as a nonprofit organization, approved on August 5, 1965, the AACM outlined nine purposes, which included the cultivation and training of young musicians, the presentation of concerts and recitals, the creation of employment opportunities for performers, and the fostering of “the tradition of cultured musicians handed down from the past.”
⁴
In time, the group would expand its scope to sponsoring recordings, producing radio shows, helping inner-city students, and many other behind-the-scenes efforts of advocacy and community service.

Important early recordings documenting the AACM’s music included Mitchell’s
Sound
(1966), Jarman’s
Song For
(1967), Bowie’s
Numbers 1 & 2
(1967), Abrams’s
Levels and Degrees of Light
(1968), Braxton’s
Three Compositions of New Jazz
(1968), and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s
People in Sorrow
(1969),
Tutankhamun
(1969), and
A Jackson in Your House
(1969). The title of Mitchell’s
Sound
, a project that helped usher in this new Chicago-based movement, gave testimony to an especially vital aspect of this multifaceted music. Like Albert Ayler, these artists often focused on qualities of sound as opposed to conventional delineations of harmony, melody, and rhythm. Standard notation was insufficient to contain these nonscalar explorations—which to some degree are throwbacks to African and early African American systems of organizing music—given the frequency with which the sonic textures moved beyond the twelve standard tones. Yet this was only one part of the Chicago school’s approach. Unlike Ayler and other early avant-gardists, the Chicagoans often downplayed the intensity of so-called energy jazz in favor of a comparatively open sound. They were less enamored with “hot” solos (that grand tradition invented a half-century earlier in the Windy City) and embraced instead a more layered and episodic approach to composition and performance. Other trademarks of the emerging Chicago school included diverse borrowings from other genres, aspects of performance art, minimalist and aleatory tendencies, and a pan-African/world music sensibility.