The History of Jazz (85 page)

Take, for example, trumpeter Tom Harrell, a fluid player and creative improviser, who has served as sideman with artists as diverse as Stan Kenton, Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Lovano, Lionel Hampton, and Bill Evans. Harrell has struggled with schizophrenia, and his productivity and artistry in the face of it serve as eloquent testimony to how little he has let this disability restrict his onstage career. Despite his travails, Harrell made his reputation as a musician’s musician, praised by jazz insiders before he became well known among fans; but a talent this large was impossible to keep secret for long. In time Harrell moved beyond serving as a superior sideman and made his mark on numerous leader dates, racking up awards and honors, and sometimes even beating out the famous Mr. Marsalis in the jazz polls. Less clear is what position Harrell occupies in the jazz wars. His music seems to be focused on soloing at a high level no matter what the setting, and one struggles to find an ideological platform undergirding his efforts. And after so many years of ideological skirmishes in the jazz ranks, this emphasis on the music and neglect of slogans must be seen as a refreshing change of pace.

Much the same could be said about Roy Hargrove, another leading trumpeter, who is equally at home leading a big band, fronting an Afro-Cuban ensemble, accompanying singers, working with his hip-hop collective, the RH Factor, or playing the old standards in a small-combo setting. Hargrove was born in Waco, Texas, in 1969, and while still in high school benefited from the mentoring of Wynton Marsalis—who has emerged as a guiding light for many younger players and may eventually prove to be the leading talent scout of his era in addition to everything he has done as a performer-composer. In the early days of Hargrove’s career, critics might have been tempted to pigeonhole him as another young traditionalist. Yet the trumpeter has pursued a wide range of projects over the years with little regard for categories and competing camps. His versatility may remind some of the mix-and-match postmodernists, but whereas the latter enjoy the mash-ups that take place when different idioms collide, Hargrove respects each project on its own terms, without need for irony or deconstruction to “frame” it. The most salient quality of his music is his mastery of the horn and his ability to make his presence felt no matter what the setting.

Among the saxophonists, no one has done more to cut across ideological lines than Joe Lovano. On his exceptional double-disc live recording at the Village Vanguard, Lovano offered a stirring tribute to Ornette Coleman on his composition “Fort Worth,” yet on his previous release
Rush Hour
, named album of the year by
Downbeat
, the saxophonist collaborated with Third Stream progenitor Gunther Schuller. Then again, on his
52nd Street Themes
album, Lovano showed how comfortable he could be playing bop-oriented songs composed before he was born. In other settings, Lovano is not afraid to take an unabashedly lyrical approach to a ballad, stirring up comparisons to Stan Getz, or to battle other tenor icons in his Saxophone Summit sparring with Michael Brecker, Dave Liebman, and Ravi Coltrane. He has delighted audiences with in-the-tradition duets with veteran pianist Hank Jones, mixed it up with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell in an iconoclastic trio, and put his stamp on theme albums dedicated to Frank Sinatra and Enrico Caruso. Is he a traditionalist or a progressive? Old school or new school? Such questions become meaningless in the face of his expansive body of work. Lovano is a stellar soloist, plain and simple, with big ears and a big heart. His fan base has grown because of how his music sounds, not because of what it signifies.

Tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, born in Berkeley in 1969, has followed a far different route to get to a similar end point, growing up on the West Coast, thriving in academics—he was valedictorian of his high school class and attended Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude—and toying with the idea of becoming a doctor or lawyer before settling on the sax. But like Lovano, Redman stands out as a unifying figure, drawing on many camps without giving full allegiance to any one of them. His father, Dewey Redman—who had come of age with Ornette Coleman and later played in Keith Jarrett’s so-called American quartet— was demonstrating a similar flexibility back when the jazz world was far more polarized; but Redman the younger has been, if anything, even more peripatetic in his music making. He dazzled listeners at the 1991 Thelonious Monk competition, captured a recording contract with Warner Brothers, and on his 1993 recording
Wish
seemed to be following in his father’s footpsteps, covering Ornette on the opening track with a band that featured Coleman alums Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, as well as guitarist Pat Metheny. Other early releases, such as the exemplary double compact disc release
Spur of the Moment
, recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1995, and the
MoodSwing
project from the same period, were more overtly traditional but hardly conventional. Redman has also grooved in odd time meters with Brad Mehldau, served as sideman with the Japanese blues band the Seatbelts, crafted low-key chamber jazz on his 2009
Compass
release, and taken on a funk-oriented attitude with his Elastic Band. Yet, whatever the setting, Redman impresses as one of the most consistently inventive soloists of his generation.

James Carter, born in Detroit in 1969 and just four weeks older than Redman, espouses a similar disregard for party lines yet shows his versatility in a still different way. He plays tenor sax, soprano sax, alto sax, baritone sax, flute, and bass clarinet, and one would be hard pressed to say which of these is his main outlet. His repeated victories in the
Downbeat
poll baritone sax category might suggest that this could be a promising area of specialization for Carter, yet he seems happier switching from horn to horn rather than pursuing a monogamous relationship with any one of them. His knowledge of the jazz tradition runs deep, and his recordings are peppered with cover versions of tunes from decades past that only the cognoscenti would recognize. Yet Carter doesn’t fit easily into the traditionalist mold, and his music also borrows from contemporary stylings or moves into avant-garde territory as the situation warrants. With his all-star
Heaven on Earth
project, Carter even adopts a rockish jam band aesthetic, although he finds a place here for a dose of Ayleresque energy jazz. Jazz history is often unkind to musicians who try to cover too much ground, as demonstrated by the careers of Benny Carter, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Oliver Nelson, Jimmy Giuffre, and others who might have been better known if they had remained faithful to a single instrument and concept throughout their careers. Time will tell whether Carter can overcome this tendency of the jazz world to celebrate that which they can pigeonhole. Certainly his talent is large and could carry him to the highest rung of the art form.

Although few artists match the versatility of James Carter or Joshua Redman, jazz saxophony in the new millennium is represented by a number of performers who impress by their adaptability, their professionalism, and their dedication to their craft. Chris Potter is just as comfortable filling in as sideman with Herbie Hancock or Steely Dan or Dave Holland as on his own leader dates, but he doesn’t try to show off how quickly he can change gears; rather his playing is marked by a serious immersion in the gig at hand, and hearing him in any one of these ensembles, the listener might surmise that this particular setting was his entire focus. Kenny Garrett boasts, if anything, an even more wide-ranging résumé, having started with the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1978 (when the band was led by Mercer Ellington) and gone on to work alongside Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner, and other prominent jazz artists; one suspects that these bandleaders sought him out because he does more than play at different styles but can insert his own strong musical personality into the mix without any sense of gamesmanship or contrivance. As one looks at these artists and other leading reed players of the new millennium—such as Miguel Zenón, Donny McCaslin, Mark Turner, Antonio Hart, and Anat Cohen, among others—one is struck by how these artists can be so effective with so little grandstanding or ostentation. After several generations of heroic jazz horn players who inspired others with their cult of personality—obsessed acolytes even founded a church to honor John Coltrane—as much as their musical methods, this down-to-business earnestness may strike casual fans as a letdown, but the insiders are likely to applaud a new phase in which musicianship and professionalism, pure and simple, have their day.

These emblematic qualities of the current generation of jazz performers— professionalism, versatility, musicianship, earnestness—are accentuated by the expanding influence of jazz education programs and the increasing codification and institutionalization of the art form. Joshua Redman came out of a Berkeley school system that, over a period of several decades, established a substantial jazz program, starting with efforts by Dr. Herb Wong back in 1966 and blossoming when Phil Hardymon became the band director at Berkeley High in 1975. Other alums of this system include David Murray, Benny Green, Peter Apfelbaum, Dave Ellis, Rodney Franklin, Craig Handy, and Michael Wolff. School programs of this sort serve as sources of talent for an expanding roster of colleges and universities where jazz, once excluded from most academic settings, is nurtured and supported. The most prominent of these environments, the Berklee College of Music, has risen from humble roots to become something of a Juilliard of jazz. It boasts four thousand students from more than seventy countries and employs more than five hundred faculty members. Berklee’s influence can be seen everywhere in the jazz world—80 percent of its graduates go on to pursue careers in music and its alums have earned hundreds of Grammy awards. Other prominent jazz programs—at the University of North Texas, the Manhattan School of Music, William Paterson University, NYU, USC, CalArts, the New School, and many other places, both in the United States and overseas—have transformed jazz from the domain of the self-taught and those who learned on the job to a schematized body of knowledge disseminated in classrooms and assimilated by students as though it were calculus or accounting. This has influenced everything from the historical consciousness of today’s performers to the way they phrase—increasingly with clean, crisp notes hit dead center with no bent edges or murky aftertaste. One is even tempted to divide jazz history into pre-Berklee and post-Berklee eras, a way of conceptualizing the music that is no doubt simplistic yet represents a meaningful divide in the evolution of the art form. Jazz, a music long associated with outsiders and bohemians, has somehow become a respectable insider’s game, complete with endowments and scholarships.

What a change from an earlier day! Yet if many listeners wax nostalgic for an era in which the music was less codified and more intuitive and malleable, few would dare deny that the current batch of jazz players tends to be better trained and more technically proficient than its predecessors. In addition to the players cited above and elsewhere in this volume, I would call attention to guitarists Kurt Rosenwinkel, Marc Ribot, Ben Monder, Nels Cline, and Julian Lage; bassists Ben Allison, Esperanza Spalding, Avishai Cohen, and Drew Gress; vibraphonists Stefon Harris, Joe Locke, and Steve Nelson; drummers Brian Blade, Dafnis Prieto, and Nasheet Waits; trombonists Steve Turre, Wycliffe Gordon, and Robin Eubanks; violinist Regina Carter, banjoist Béla Fleck, and accordionist Gary Versace. Not all of them learned their jazz at school, but their skill and professionalism are very much emblematic of the ways and means of the modern-day jazz musician. What this list does not convey, however, is the depth of available talent—for every name mentioned, hundreds are waiting in the wings or already in the process of making their own mark on an art form that, though it has changed much in recent decades, has never had such a large reservoir of talent at its disposal. And this trend is even more evident when we turn our attention outside of the United States.

Fans and critics often proclaim, with a self-satisfied complaceny, that jazz is “America’s classical music.” The phrase has a pleasant ring about it, yet close observation of the jazz world shows that many of the most exciting developments in recent years have taken place outside of the music’s homeland. And if one were to set betting odds on predictions about the future of the art form, the further globalization of jazz may be the safest wager of them all. In short, America’s classical music is now the common property of the whole world.

Perhaps the term “glocalization”—favored by critic Stuart Nicholson
²
—is an even better way of describing this shift. In recent years, the development of jazz outside the United States has been increasingly marked by the assimilation and celebration of national, regional, and local elements. Jazz from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, and other centers of stateside musical activity is still heard and admired all over the world, but it is now mixed with—or competes against—other influences from afar. As a result, the repertoire of jazz music is broadening, the range of styles expanding, and even the instruments on the bandstand are changing in response to new sounds coming from multiple directions. This state of affairs, which can be traced at least as far back as Django Reinhardt, has existed to some degree for many decades, but has become a pervasive force in the music only in recent years.

This shift is evident whether one focuses on recordings, live performances, or, looking outside the music itself, the insitutions and cultural prestige that surround and support the art form. European jazz labels—such as ECM, ACT, HatHut, and CAM (which acquired the Italian Black Saint/Soul Note labels in 2008)—rank among the most creative and daring forces in the music today, and they increasingly find outstanding talent within the European community itself. The jazz festival circuit is much healthier in Europe than in the United States, with thousands of annual events—more than three hundred in Italy alone—keeping the art form vibrant and in front of the public’s eye. These festivals—which typically receive subsidies from national, regional, and municipal funds as well as private sponsors—have long been a major source of income for U.S. jazz players who often find their skills more highly remunerated outside their home country; but the promoters are also now cultivating homegrown artists, and it is not unusual these days to encounter lineups with few, or sometimes no, American bands on the schedule. Yet the most striking measure of the new state of affairs is a harder one to quantify, but no less tangible in its impact: the quality of jazz music outside of the United States has taken a quantum leap over the last quarter century. No longer content to play a passive role as mere consumers or imitators of American jazz, a new generation in Europe and elsewhere on the globe is making fresh and potent music of its own that demands our attention.