The History of Jazz (82 page)

The major heroes of postmodern jazz have tended, like Braxton, to be prodigious in their output and omnivorous in their tastes. Few musicians have exemplified these traits to a greater extent than saxophonist David Murray. Before his fortieth birthday, Murray had some one hundred and fifty recordings, more or less, to his credit. These covered a dizzying range of formats and styles, from solo saxophone to big band, and most stages in between. It is a symptom of postmodern jazz in general, and Murray’s career in particular, that attempts to describe this music tend to collapse into a listing of various influences. Certainly, jazz genealogists could spend a long time tracing the predecessors who have left their mark on one Murray recording or another. The title track of his celebrated early recording
Flowers for Albert
was dedicated to Albert Ayler, whose influence on Murray was evident, as was the impact of other avant-garde saxophonists such as Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman. But Murray would, in time, also be compared to a host of mainstream saxophone stylists—Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Paul Gonsalves, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Ben Webster, even Sidney Bechet—with greater or lesser degrees of plausibility.

Certainly Murray’s career, as it evolved, came to reflect the growing distance between progressive jazz and freedom music, a chasm that opened in the 1970s and widened noticeably in the 1980s and 1990s. “The music has to start swinging again,” Murray remarked in a 1983 interview. “I think it reflects the sociological aspects of the times—people don’t want music they have to suffer through.”
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Both as a composer and an instrumentalist, Murray pursued this ideal. In the process he incorporated the influence of other great jazz composer-players, especially Mingus and Ellington, as is most evident in his larger ensemble work. Murray’s octet recordings for the Black Saint label were especially persuasive, recalling Mingus’s knack for mixing formalism with a devil-may-care heedlessness. Sideman stints with James Blood Ulmer and Jack DeJohnette amplified on the breadth shown in the saxophonist’s leader dates, while his work with the World Saxophone Quartet further testified to Murray’s diversity. In later years, Murray increasingly would look outside the jazz world for inspiration, and his midcareer projects include a series of collaborative efforts with traditional Guadeloupian gwo-ka percussionists, a music-meets-poetry partnership with Amiri Baraka, and even the release of a tribute album devoted to the Grateful Dead.

The World Saxophone Quartet (WSQ)—where Murray worked alongside Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Hamiet Bluiett—was founded in 1976 during the course of a visit to New Orleans to give seminars and concerts when the foursome discovered that audiences responded most favorably to their work without a rhythm section. The concept of four horns interacting without further support invites comparisons with the classical string quartet, yet the WSQ defied any expectations of chamber music snobbishness. They made music that cut across boundaries, that might doff its hat at Ellington one moment, veer into atonality the next, or set a groove drawing on African music, soul, or R&B. A series of releases on the Elektra label—
Plays Duke Ellington
,
Rhythm and Blues
,
Metamorphosis
(with African percussion)—demonstrated the WSQ’s expertise in these different genres, while earlier recordings for the Black Saint label, such as
Steppin’ with the World Saxophone Quartet
,
Revue
, and
Live in Zurich
, served as effective showcases for the compositional skills of the individual members.

Hemphill had grown up in Fort Worth, Texas, where he had gained familiarity with the city’s rhythm-and-blues tradition, as well as with its progressive jazz currents, which Hemphill assimilated firsthand in the course of his studies with John Carter. Lake also boasted deep roots in the free jazz scene, having led the St. Louis–based Black Artists’ Group. In the early 1970s, Lake worked in Paris with other BAG musicians before moving to New York. Bluiett had also been associated with the Black Artists’ Group before moving to New York in 1969, where he worked with Sam Rivers and Charles Mingus. Each of the four original members of the World Saxophone Quartet was a skilled composer. But much of the magnetism of their playing came from the artful balance between structure and spontaneity, between following the written scores and leaving them behind. Hemphill’s health problems, including diabetes and heart surgery, ended this fruitful partnership at the end of the 1980s, but the remaining members maintained the WSQ, with Arthur Blythe, John Purcell, and other saxophonists filling Hemphill’s chair in later years.

Postmodern currents in all the arts have typically come to embrace the use of parody and pastiche as the ultimate tools in deconstructing inherited traditions. The deadly seriousness of the first generation of avant-garde pioneers is eventually succeeded by a glib, irreverent hipness, a path that quickly takes us from the steely abstractions of cubism to Campbell’s soup cans on canvas. In the jazz world, no artist has been more representative of the Warholian spirit than saxophonist and composer John Zorn. While a student at Webster College in the early 1970s, Zorn had been inspired by the music of the AACM and the Black Artists’ Group. But like many of the other new faces of the 1980s and 1990s New York downtown scene— including fellow postmodernists and collaborators such as Tim Berne, Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell, and Bobby Previte—Zorn pushed the eclecticism of his models a step beyond, even surpassing a Murray or Threadgill in his unexpected choices for source materials. His tastes wander far beyond the jazz world, and on any given project may include punk rock, aleatory music, klezmer, or spaghetti western film scores, among other genres. Often these styles are juxtaposed in surprising ways—an aural equivalent of channel surfing—inspiring, for instance, Ornette Coleman compositions played with the frantic energy of a heavy-metal band or the theme from a James Bond movie sprinkled with a seasoning of electronic noise.

Zorn’s work falls into a number of broad categories. His game pieces provide an alternative to the chord-and meter-based structures of mainstream jazz in favor of more or less complex instructions—in essence, the “rules” of the game—that establish a framework for the composition without specifying any preferred outcome. His release
Cobra
provides a glimpse at the different possible outcomes resulting from a specific game piece for twelve musicians (although the hand signals that direct the flow of the piece are not adequately conveyed by the recording). For all their limitations, such works attempt to rediscover the essential jazz celebration of process over the certainties of a finished product—in the same manner as a Japanese tea ceremony differs from the merely functional cup of diner coffee. A second body of work, including Zorn projects such as
Naked City
and
The Big Gundown
(featuring the music of Ennio Morricone), is driven by Zorn’s fascination with cinema, especially genres such as westerns, gangster movies, and film noir. He has written a number of cinematic scores himself, usually for independent filmmakers and often for documentaries, and his music is rich in implied visual corollaries. Other Zorn projects might focus on facets of world music, a specific jazz figure, whether famous (Ornette Coleman) or semiobscure (Sonny Clark), or dip into contemporary classical music (“Forbidden Fruit,” written for the Kronos String Quartet).

Trumpeter Dave Douglas first came to the attention of many jazz fans while working with Zorn’s Masada group in the early 1990s. This band’s blending of klezmer and avant-garde jazz could almost serve as an emblem of the self-conscious postmodern posture. Yet Douglas was also recording works by Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, and Duke Ellington on his debut Soul Note leader date
Parallel Worlds
from this same period, and only a few years earlier had been playing hard-bop tunes in Horace Silver’s band. His later career highlights have included a spirited tribute to Mary Lou Williams,
Soul on Soul
from 2000, but with almost all of the Kansas City jazz elements strangely purged from the music, and Douglas’s work with his Tiny Bells trio, which started out focused on Eastern Europe folk material but eventually encompassed a vertiginous array of genres. Douglas’s ability to master many vocabularies is striking, yet the range of his work is so wide that he risks comparisons not with Miles or Dizzy, but rather with those crack Hollywood studio players who can play a country music session in the morning, record a commercial jingle in the afternoon, and show up on a reggae date in the evening. In a jazz scene that sometimes seems like a land grab, few artists have staked out more territory than Zorn and Douglas, and where the early postmodernists found eclecticism a means of refreshing their styles, this second wave of adherents has increasingly relied on it as the central value of their careers.

Guitarist Bill Frisell too has exhibited, at times, a taste for genre-hopping and pastiche, but his work more often reflects a singular focus and a rare concern, given his cultural surroundings, with preserving an individual and identifiable style. Even on his most decidedly eclectic project,
Have a Little Faith
—an impressive tour of musical Americana from Sousa, Copland, and Ives to Dylan, Rollins, and Madonna—Frisell’s viewpoint avoids reduction into mere satirical distance, and on his
Disfarmer
album from 2009 he achieves a stark and moving unity of purpose that has more in common with roots music than postmodern deconstruction. Although he is quick to praise the many guitarists who have influenced him, from Jim Hall to Jimi Hendrix, his playing retains an unmistakable originality that defies any tracing of guitar licks back to original sources. His undulating lines convey a minimalist aesthetic married to a painter’s concern with color, texture, and tone. And though Frisell is enamored with the use of various electronic tools to distort his guitar sound, he typically uses them as means toward deeper artistic expression, not as ends in themselves. For all the superficial diversity of his efforts, Frisell’s musical landscapes are mostly painted in washed-out pastels, depicting sparsely populated settings under blanched horizons. The moody ruminative side of this artist is well documented on a number of jazz-oriented leader dates for the ECM and Nonesuch labels; but it also plays a role in his genre-crossing pop culture projects, which range from collaborations with rock icons such as Ginger Baker and Elvis Costello to soundtrack music for everything from television cartoons to Buster Keaton silent movies.

This ragtag postmodernism seemed to lose some steam in the new millennium, as the jazz world took on a more institutional and reverential tone, but a number of provocative examples showed that radical juxtapositions of different genres and traditions could still delight and even—a rarity given the “I’ve seen it all” attitude of seasoned club hoppers by this time—surprise the audience. The Bad Plus, a collective trio established by pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King in 2000, tweaked its combined noses at jazz snobs and found a sizable audience of jazz newbies with cover versions of songs by Nirvana, Black Sabbath, the Bee Gees, and similarly outré material. A 2009 video released by the band finds the Bad Plus performing a dauntingly avant-garde work by classical composer Milton Babbitt while sexy dancing girls cavort in the foreground.

Jason Moran has similarly constructed a career that straddles genres and categories. This Houston-born pianist first made his name in the late 1990s as sideman with saxophonist Greg Osby, a relationship that led to Moran signing with the Blue Note label, where his releases have shown a restless urgency in which almost any type of sound—acoustic, electronic, spoken, looped—can serve as an ingredient. On Moran’s compact disc
The Bandwagon
, a cover version of Brahms coexists with high-octane free jazz and a musical composition built around a woman speaking on her cell phone in Turkish. His 2009
In My Mind
project incorporated multimedia effects into a musical tribute to a Thelonious Monk Town Hall concert that took place fifty years earlier. Yet Moran is equally comfortable working sans cell phone and slide projector within the mainstream jazz tradition, and from time to time has shown up in the bands of an impressive if diverse range of bandleaders, including Joe Lovano, Charles Lloyd, Cassandra Wilson, Lee Konitz, and Dave Holland. At his most characteristic moments he builds thick and sometimes overpowering sound textures at the keyboard where the listener seems to be following an aural tropical storm, surging and abating from moment to moment, rather than a conventional solo over chord changes.

Pianist Uri Caine, another champion of postmodern attitudes, has specialized in similarly radical reconfigurations, often of works drawn from the classical repertoire, as demonstrated on
Urlicht/Primal Light
(1997),
The Goldberg Variations
(2000),
Uri Caine Ensemble Plays Mozart
(2006), and
The Othello Syndrome
(2008). Whereas in the past, jazz artists had looked to highbrow role models as ways of uplifting the art form—the Third Stream movement of the 1950s was perhaps the most ambitious program of this nature—the later postmodernists treat the work of “serious” composers as just one more example of cultural bric-a-brac available for manipulation and expropriation. After hearing Caine’s version of Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
, where if you wait long enough almost every style of music—samba, gospel, klezmer, electronica, etc.—shows up, the listener will find it hard to remember why people got so hot under the collar when Glenn Gould played this work on the piano instead of the harpsichord.

Clarinetist Don Byron has frequently collaborated with Caine, Moran, Frisell, and other jazz postmodernists, and his personal aesthetic vision shows a similar delight in genre bending and juxtaposition. In various projects, he has celebrated klezmer music, updated nineteenth-century classical compositions, championed fringe composers such as Raymond Scott, Junior Walker, and Mickey Katz, and played the standard jazz repertoire from a variety of angles, with perspectives from both inside and outside the changes. One seeks in vain for the defining elements of Byron’s style, and would do better to see his work—as well as that of many of his contemporaries—as embracing a jittery anti-style that seeks constantly to redefine its own parameters and limits.