Stuart Nicholson’s provocative new book asks whether jazz is still a vibrant and evolving art form or a music that has run out of creative puff. John Clare finds reasons for optimism.
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Anyone who musters concern for an art seen to be withering, or sympathy for unrecognized artists who might otherwise renew its continued vitality, will be met by a number of questions from the heart of the current ethos. Are artists who pursue an unpopular path symptoms of a monstrous individualism? Or are they an enriching element of a free society who deserve support? Or should unpopular pursuits be allowed to wither naturally in the flux of free trade? To what degree is invisibility due to ‘the people’ simply not liking ‘that stuff’? How much is it due to lack of exposure; to choices made by editors and programmers who are completely aligned with the idea that market forces determine artistic worth?
It is very hard to generalise here. I have seen artists from the regions of near-invisibility perform to substantial and enthusiastic audiences following some surprise publicity. And I have seen a good crowd turn up following such publicity, only to grow impatient with the art.
Many other questions branch out from these. Until his final chapter – ‘A Question Of Survival: Marketplace Or Subsidy’ – Stuart Nicholson chooses to cut this Gordian knot by drawing popular and classical music into an information-packed and often insightful survey of how education, technology, globalization, corporatisation, etc are effecting jazz and all parallel forms. Many of the insights are his own. Many can be found in the rich array of opinions drawn from international musicians – and he includes DJs among them – teachers and writers.
The Marsalis phenomenon is viewed from many angles. While elements of it are treated sympathetically, some potent negative opinions are aired. The disgusting aspects of Marsalis/Stanley Crouchism are epitomised for me by an interlude described by Nicholson in which Cecil Taylor spent $15,000 of his own money – or at least raised that amount – to produce his 65th Birthday Concert at Alice Tully Hall. Downbeat noted that the added satisfaction of playing in a hall where he would not otherwise have been invited by the in-house jazz department was too evident to conceal: “’What jazz department?,” he shouted when asked about [the Marsalis/Crouch controlled] Jazz at Lincoln Centre.’”
Crouch had stated that Taylor did not fit Jazz at Lincoln Centre’s definition of jazz, because, ‘even though he improvises, he does not swing.’
You know, there was a time when many people thought Thelonious Monk did not swing. Whether you think he ‘swings’ or not, Cecil Taylor can develop tremendous momentum. So, it’s in a unique ‘free time’, whereas Monk was at least in four-four swing (most of the time). What then of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong playing shuffle rhythms derived from R&B? What of Dizzy Gillespie alternating then-modern swing with Afro Cuban rhythms? Is he swinging some of the time, and some of the time not? Charlie Parker once told his musicians that he had heard a polka band and that, ‘They were swinging more than us!’ Swinging is a quaint archaic hipsterism. It is also subjective. Rhythm is king! Including the torrent of rhythms in Cecil Taylor.
Enough of that. If only Crouch were at hand so that I could coax him to have a swing at me! (Nicholson also notes that Crouch was sacked from The Village Voice after assaulting someone during a disagreement).
In his long section on education, Nicholson argues that in the past jazz evolved in clubs and dancehalls rather than the practice rooms of Berklee. I would add that it also evolved in the hot house of crowded apartments where people like Gil Evans, Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan met to discuss aesthetics and music theory. Nicholson says that jazz evolved in response to changing social conditions. I would only broaden that to say that it reacted to the changing ethos of the times, sometimes celebrating it, sometimes wryly commenting and sometimes exploding in anger. Of course all these elements were often subsumed in the music. The growl mutes of the Duke Ellington orchestra can sometimes sound angry, even within a celebratory surging continuum. Is Cecil Taylor’s music angry or celebratory, or is it many things at once? Is it pure energy and sensation? In any case it is the loss of this kind of rich and sometimes ambivalent connection to our times, to the world in which we live and work right now, that is lost when jazz is taught solely on the basis of music from a period that the pupils have not experienced. Yet old forms expressed with passion can sometimes have a surprise relevance. On dismissing the trad jazz revival of the 1930s and 40’s, for instance, Nicholson becomes simplistic.
Nicholson’s attitude to bebop as the sole paradigm of jazz proficiency and knowledge is expressed in his lucid article on this website: Bebop As The New Dixieland. I agree, with certain caveats. The assertion that emotion and vivid sensation cannot be imparted by music in which nothing new can happen is in itself questionable – tell that to ethnic groups I see dancing and laughing wildly to warhorses they’ve heard countless times -and in its implications ignores older musicians who are still playing vitally within this idiom, along with certain younger players.
I think immediately of David Theak, whose band incorporates rock and, sometimes, ambient influences, but whose own improvising modus is basically post bop. There is a huge exuberance in Theak’s tenor and alto playing, and beyond that there is real passion and invention. His perfect frontline foil is the often breathtaking guitarist James Muller, whose rock influences are strong, but played against lightning fast bop-derived configurations. The band is off the ground when it is on, so to speak, and it appeals to a broad audience. The Theak-tet will sometimes use fast so-called straight ahead swing, but as one element in the rhythmic spectrum. As such it can have a devastating effect, and here of course I have come back into broad agreement with Nicholson.
Something has always worried me as well about the practically exclusive focus on bebop (with an addendum of modal jazz). It drastically limits the possibility of polyphony and the use of harmony as colour rather than a functional underpinning of often internalised chord sequences. These missing elements can be heard in earlier forms of jazz, in the old avant garde (so often more compositional than it is credited to be), and in much contemporary jazz.
Bebop reduced its options in certain areas in the way Mondrian reduced his pictorial choices. This created a bracing focus, an intense discipline. Mondrian is still one of my favourite artists, but I am glad there was only one of him (his few disciples are barely remembered).
In describing some of the possibilities of expression emerging in new jazz, Nicholson gives a comprehensive parallel history of other forms – hip hop, electronica in the broader sense, world music etc – which should be read by all remaining fogeys out there desirous of getting some kind of fix on what has happened while they weren’t looking. The obvious point being that jazz has often drawn from other music, and has at times been in the forefront in using new technology. I don’t know whether jazz, rock or blues players first took up the electric guitar, but there are certainly some very early exponents in jazz. Some, like Eddie Durham, Charlie Christian, Les Paul, Grant Green and Sonny Sharrock (leave aside the colouristic guitar stylings of contemporary jazz) have drawn strikingly original sounds from the instrument. The vibraphone was first heard (on record at least) in jazz-tinged dance bands, but its first really brilliant exploitation was in jazz, just pre-dating Messaien’s incorporation of this electric instrument.
Local (Australian) use of electronic sounds that might well have been cited in Nicholson’s book, include two of the several bands led by trumpeter Phil Slater. Lloyd Swanton’s catholics and the distinctively Melburnian band Way Out West. Also, Melbourne’s Steve Magnussen has long deployed colouristic guitar techniques (as well as remarkable time) in such a distinctive way that the bands in which he plays regularly become a beautiful blending of acoustic and electric music. Let us not forget Triosk. Nicholson is not being taken to task here. While he shows himself to be aware of some developments in Australia, a lengthy exposition of Australian jazz is not part of the ground plan.
Nicholson is instructive, wide ranging and persuasively enthusiastic in his exposition of current European jazz, pointing significantly to its use of national folk and classical traditions. The ancient sneer that they, or some of them, don’t really get it when they play American jazz (don’t swing, man!) is answered by the self evident (or should be self evident) truth that jazz no longer belongs solely to America, just as Beethoven does not belong to Germany, nor opera to Italy. There are many ways to play jazz. It is now the vehicle for communal and individualistic experience beyond that of America, and indeed regional experiences inform American jazz, beyond those available wherever the jazz capital is currently deemed to be.
In the long final chapter, Nicholson largely avoids ideological argument, but shows how subsidy has helped create a market through much of Europe. The same has happened to a lesser extent here. Bands that have enjoyed international success have been, and still are (because international success does not always translate into local success in Australia) helped by The Sydney Improvised Music Association and the Melbourne Jazz Cooperative. This has become more problematic as mainstream Australian publications pursue a fierce, triumphalist pop culture/celebrity policy. I am all for intelligent and even lengthy writing about pop culture in the most serious forums, but the openly stated aim is to squeeze everything else out into the margins.
For all that, jazz is not dead here. It is certainly not dead in Europe, or Nicholson’s long European section would have been much shorter.
Finally, I must say that no jazz writer has failed to irritate me, and Nicholson certainly did that when he summed up Miles Davis’s achievement as the creation of different backdrops for his ‘fragile lyricism’. This is a parallel to those writers who kept insisting that Davis had a limited range, well into the period when he was playing big, shining A’s above high C. At the Isle Of Wight he played powerful double high C’s. Where was the fragile lyricism there or on Miles At Filmore or the first side of Jack Johnson, or Live Evil, or many of the up tempo tracks from much earlier than this? Anyone who still thinks that Davis played the same throughout his career should listen to some of his solos from the Walkin‘ and Bag’s Groove period and then switch to Saeta from Sketches Of Spain then move on. His use of space and dynamics is often very different, and while certain building blocks remain and even become naggingly persistent at times – there is much that is different in his lines. Many trumpeters have used Davis’s later work as a platform on which to launch their own contemporary styles.
This inflammation subsided quickly, because there is no other book that treats all the elements that Nicholson has drawn together so thoroughly and well. It is quite essential.
Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved To A New Address?)
By Stuart Nicholson
Routledge, $35
