4 What is actually going on out in the jazz world is very different from what one usually reads about in jazz magazines or what one would conclude from taking critics’polls seriously. There are musicians out here who not only can play but who have continued to develop their skills outside of the praises of the critical establishment, whose words of admiration are usually reserved for those musicians who claim to be moving the music “forward” but who are never heard of outside of their small circles (primarily because they don’t impress other musicians who can actually play). One ignored example of a consummate jazz musician is Eric Reed, who—with the exceptions of Bill Charlap and Brad Mehldau at their very best—can easily outplay all other piano players under 40. Neither Mehldau nor Charlap can walk past him either; it’s just that all three, for now, are in a circle reserved for the most formidable. One needn’t be hostile toward any of the younger so-called avant-garde pianists to notice why Reed is superior to all of them. After all, these supposed avant gardists are never caught swinging, but they will annex hip-hop rhythms, use electronic gimmicks and be celebrated for “keeping jazz alive.” Reed has far greater command of the keyboard, the pedals and the touches and the nuances that make one a first-class jazz pianist. Listen to how soulful and free of clichés he can be on some blues (hear his “Blues Five Spot”on Manhattan Melodies), or how well he can hear his way through very complex harmonies, or the size of the sound he can get out of his fingers—not by banging the instrument with his arms. In the “Jazz Composer Portraits” series that he has produced for Columbia University, Reed has proven himself not only quite an individual but also a charming bandleader and arranger. At Columbia,I heard Reed give two concerts. One featured the music of Billy Strayhorn; the other the music of Eric Dolphy. Each was well rehearsed, and the musicians did not come on the bandstand looking as though they were rehearsing in somebody’s garage or basement (which is surely the influence of rock, that screw-you conception of looking like an unmade bed.) At the Strayhorn concert, after his arrangements sufficiently featured fine players such as Frank Wess and Lew Soloff on other numbers,Reed took a very long solo on “Blues in Orbit.” He was absolutely splendid. The improvisation was built on a few motives that were tried in every register, using the whole keyboard, building from trills to a couple of notes to entire phrases to complete choruses phased in one sweep that told the whole story and were rung out in marvelously controlled varieties of timbre resulting from the combination of touch and the use of the pedals. When playing the Dolphy music,which is extremely hard, Reed managed to still swing, swing, swing. He outplayed everyone, too, which was no simple task since he used Marcus Printup,Greg Osby,James Carter and the marvelous Steve Nelson, the lone vibraphonist between Bobby Hutcherson and Stefon Harris. Gifted with perfect pitch and soaked in the soul source of Negro church music (his late father was a minister), Reed came to the public’s attention on Wynton Marsalis’ In This House, on This Morning. In that band’s broad context, Reed came to master the sweep of jazz piano, from New Orleans to the present. For an example of Reed’s imagination, listen to his feature on “Brake’s Sake” on Standard Time,Vol. 4: Marsalis Plays Monk. Or check him out on Marsalis’ Live at the Village Vanguard. Reed’s humorously “out”invention on “Uptown Ruler”contains a startling 24-bar run of sustained and thematic rhythmic complexity that addresses the time, starting at 6:39 into the piece and not ending until 7:04. Then there’s “Pedro’s Getaway,”where—like Wynton Kelly on “Blue ’n’Boogie” from Wes Montgomery’s Full House—Reed starts smoking on the first beat! Reed has also learned,from Monk and Ellington, how to creatively accompany in the rhythm section, as if he is playing an arrangement, which means, among other things, laying out chords with a melodic direction, inventing riffs, contrasting piano registers with those of the featured player and moving around in the time so that harmony arrives with the ultimate amount of drama as well as subtlety. I once saw grand master Tommy Flanagan at a Javon Jackson gig at the now defunct Sweet Basil, and Reed was the pianist. Flanagan stayed all night and raved ecstatically about the younger pianist. Peter Washington, who worked with Flanagan for 15 years and was playing bass that night with Jackson, commented on how well Reed could handle the time and the exciting clarity of his ideas and execution. If you get a chance to hear Eric Reed, don’t miss your moment. Some changes will be made, some serious rhythmic invention will take place, some deep soul will be displayed and some real jazz will be heard. true 59 2008-08-06T14:44:09-04:00 false 19820 69 200305 true 128 2003-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

What is actually going on out in the jazz world is very different from what one usually reads about in jazz magazines or what one would conclude from taking critics’polls seriously. There are musicians out here who not only can play but who have continued to develop their skills outside of the praises of the critical establishment, whose words of admiration are usually reserved for those musicians who claim to be moving the music “forward” but who are never heard of outside of their small circles (primarily because they don’t impress other musicians who can actually play). One ignored example of a consummate jazz musician is Eric Reed, who—with the exceptions of Bill Charlap and Brad Mehldau at their very best—can easily outplay all other piano players under 40. Neither Mehldau nor Charlap can walk past him either; it’s just that all three, for now, are in a circle reserved for the most formidable. One needn’t be hostile toward any of the younger so-called avant-garde pianists to notice why Reed is superior to all of them. After all, these supposed avant gardists are never caught swinging, but they will annex hip-hop rhythms, use electronic gimmicks and be celebrated for “keeping jazz alive.” Reed has far greater command of the keyboard, the pedals and the touches and the nuances that make one a first-class jazz pianist. Listen to how soulful and free of clichés he can be on some blues (hear his “Blues Five Spot”on Manhattan Melodies), or how well he can hear his way through very...

2009-03-02T00:27:21-05:00

4 Because Negroes invented jazz, and because the very best players have so often been Negroes, the art has always been a junction for color trouble in the world of evaluation and promotion. By the end of the ’20s, Duke Ellington was trying to get his buddies to call their art “Negro music,”possibly because Paul Whiteman had been dubbed “King of Jazz.” Variations on this phenomenon have risen and fallen throughout the history of the art. Since the ’60s, however, certain Negroes who cannot play will claim to be of aesthetic significance on the basis of sociology and some irrelevant ancestral connection to Africa—which provided only part of the mix that became jazz. That had an ironic impact because we are now back to the Paul Whiteman phenomenon, as if all of those white people who had to put up with black nonsense now have their chance to express their rage. This time white musicians who can play are too frequently elevated far beyond their abilities in order to allow white writers to make themselves feel more comfortable about being in the role of evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated. Now, having long been devoted to creating an establishment based on “rebellion,” or what Rimbaud called the “love of sacrilege,”they have achieved a moment long desired:Now certain kinds of white men can focus their rebellion on the Negro. Oh, happy day. In his essential Blues Up and Down (St.Martin’s), Tom Piazza pulled the covers off of these men when he wrote,“Many jazz reviewers—especially among the generation that grew up in the 1960s and ’70s—suffer from intense inferiority feelings in front of the musicians they write about. This results in a vacillation between an exaggerated heroworship of musicians and an exaggerated sense of betrayal when the musicians don’t meet their needs.” Piazza surely knew what he was talking about,especially since he was a white man who had been among these jazz writers when nobody dark was around, which allowed him to understand them and their various insecurities and their various resentments close up. In Francis Davis’ Like Young: Jazz, Pop, Youth and Middle Age (DaCapo),one can get a good deal of insight into Piazza’s thesis. It is a classic of its kind. Davis unintentionally makes it clear that he is intimidated by Negroes and also quite jealous of them. The intimidation arrives because of the troubles and the fun he imagines Negroes having when he is not around. The resentment flares if these Negroes have any power to define themselves and what they are doing or if they have reputations independent of Davis’ permission or if they cannot be conventionally condescended to from the abolitionist’s perspective that so many jazz writers have in common. Their job, they believe, is to speak up for the exotic Negro or use that Negro as a weapon against their own middle-class backgrounds or make that Negro into a symbol of their desire to do something bold,wild and outside of convention. Even being in the presence of such stuff will do, since Davis points out that rap now allows the young white person to come in contact with the Negro most removed from the white world,which used to be the role of jazz. Is that so? Since the rap Negro is nothing,at his most “street,”than a theatrical version of Zip Coon, a character from the minstrel shows, how is he removed from the white world? Every Negro inferior to a middlebrow white man like Davis fits comfortably in the white world, where black refinement is never expected or is dismissed as pompous. Disturbed by the way things have gone over the last couple of decades,Davis’answer to his Negro problem is to create an alternative order of significance. He sees, as do so many of these men,jazz that is based on swing and blues as the enemy and, therefore, lifts up someone like, say, Dave Douglas as an antidote to too much authority from the dark side of the tracks. Douglas, a graduate of Exeter and a dropout from the New Jersey upper middle class, is the perfect white man to lead the music “forward.” Unlike these misled uptown Negroes who spend too much time messing around with stuff like the blues and swinging, Downtown Dave brings truly new stuff into jazz, like Balkan folk material that surely predates the 20th century in which blues and jazz were born. There is nothing wrong with Douglas, who can play what he can play and who should continue to do whatever he wants to do, but there is something pernicious about Davis and all of those other white guys who want so badly to put white men in charge—American and European—and put Negroes in the background. Douglas, whom I have heard since he worked as a sideman years ago with Vincent Herring, is far from being a bad musician,but he also knows that he should keep as much distance as possible between himself and trumpet players like Wallace Roney, Terence Blanchard and Nicholas Payton, to name but three,any one of whom on any kind of material—chordal, nonchordal, modal, free, whatever—would turn him into a puddle on the bandstand. Unlike the great white players of the past,such as Jack Teagarden, Bobby Hackett, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz,Lee Konitz—or,now,Joe Lovano—Douglas will never be seen standing up next to black masters of the idiom. The white critical establishment couldn’t help him then. But the deepest part of this is that it, finally, is not so much about color as it is about the destruction of the Negro aesthetic, which is why Negroes like Don Byron and Mark Turner are embraced. They accept an imposed aesthetic of “pushing the envelope“ in ways that have nothing to do with blues and swing. Above all,they help these writers to bring things disguised as bulls into the middle-class china shops in which these critics themselves were born. true 59 2008-08-05T20:00:21-04:00 false 19802 68 200304 true 128 2003-04-01T00:00:00-05:00

Because Negroes invented jazz, and because the very best players have so often been Negroes, the art has always been a junction for color trouble in the world of evaluation and promotion. By the end of the ’20s, Duke Ellington was trying to get his buddies to call their art “Negro music,”possibly because Paul Whiteman had been dubbed “King of Jazz.” Variations on this phenomenon have risen and fallen throughout the history of the art. Since the ’60s, however, certain Negroes who cannot play will claim to be of aesthetic significance on the basis of sociology and some irrelevant ancestral connection to Africa—which provided only part of the mix that became jazz. That had an ironic impact because we are now back to the Paul Whiteman phenomenon, as if all of those white people who had to put up with black nonsense now have their chance to express their rage. This time white musicians who can play are too frequently elevated far beyond their abilities in order to allow white writers to make themselves feel more comfortable about being in the role of evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated. Now, having long been devoted to creating an establishment based on “rebellion,” or what Rimbaud called the “love of sacrilege,”they have achieved a moment long desired:Now certain kinds of white men can focus their rebellion on the Negro. Oh, happy day. In his essential Blues Up and Down (St.Martin’s), Tom Piazza pulled the covers off of these men when he wrote,“Many jazz reviewers—especially among...

2009-03-02T00:27:21-05:00

4 In 1959, when Ornette Coleman arrived in New York and opened on the Bowery with the quartet that included Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, there was no talk of a harmolodic system. He spoke of playing with natural raw feeling instead of technical obsession, yet Coleman proved to have the most comprehensive grasp of improvised order outside of preconceived form that we have heard in the jazz avant-garde. Coleman brought a conception to the music that Wallace Roney explains perfectly: “Ornette wanted to get the same kind of freedom he heard in Charlie Parker but discovered that the only way he could do that was to move away from chords and count on his melodic imagination to get him where he wanted to go.” Most of Coleman’s greatest recordings are either on Atlantic or Blue Note and were made by 1965. With Cherry, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Haden, Jimmy Garrison, Scott LaFaro, David Izenzon, Higgins, Ed Blackwell and Charles Moffett, he laid down what remains the heaviest body of purely avant-garde jazz. Just a few years ago, when the saxophonist performed with Haden and Higgins at Lincoln Center, it was obvious that Coleman is still the boss and that when he has actual jazz musicians up to the task of playing his concept with absolute authority, his vision of group improvising is far, far beyond that of those who claim to have extended upon what he brought to the Five Spot in 1959. Coleman’s signal achievement is that one does not have to have a panel discussion to argue about whether or not he is a jazz musician. The sound of blues is central to his alto-saxophone tone and to the passion of his music because, at heart, Coleman is a sophisticated country-blues player, the most highly developed to arrive in jazz after Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The grandest example of thematic improvisation unbound by harmony, Coleman creates variations both subtle and explosive. His phrases are often conversational, traveling the length of inspiration rather than two-, four- or eight-bar phases. Emotion can determine tempo and create another kind of syncopation, one in which velocity arrives as unexpectedly as accents outside of the expected. A master at getting everything in, Coleman can turn from very complex chromatic passages that feel devoid of any metric direction, then fall right into a succession of stark but protean riffs delivered with a level of fiery swing that none of those who purported to follow him have ever equaled. Like all professional improvisers, Coleman proves himself an intellectual because artistic improvisation is contemplation in motion that seeks to achieve high-quality aesthetic success, not just the kind of venting one can hear after asking a roomful of children to improvise. The professional has to recognize the elements in the musical environment—the notes, the rhythms, the registers, the colors—respond to them, create a design and achieve form. In Coleman’s case, that form has great plasticity, protean possibilities, but it arrives in music quite like the Picassos that mix the figurative with abstraction. Technically speaking, the most important thing about Coleman is that he proved how much jazz could do with its own tradition in order to “advance.” It did not have to use academic methods borrowed from the European avant-garde as the basic foundation with which to marginalize the jazz idiom and the distinctive emotion of the music. It also did not need the exotica of Indian or African music or the pretensions that too often attend the rhetoric of those devoted to something “non-Western.” Jazz could build on its Negro-American origins while maintaining its universality. Negro-American, of course, means the national mix with a certain interpretation informed by parade music, blues, spirituals, gospel, dance tunes, street chants and so on. As Coleman said in the early ’60s, “Many people don’t realize it, but there is a real American folklore music in jazz. It’s neither black nor white. It’s the mixture of the races, and the folklore has come from it.” That realization is what anchors his achievement. He believes that anything he hears is his if it can fit what he’s doing and come through his personality in an aesthetically natural manner. The astonishing sweep of liberated form and emotion in his music is made obvious in his remarkably symphonic improvisation on “The Ark,” from his 1962 Town Hall concert with bassist Izenzon and drummer Moffett, both of whom brilliantly respond to and inspire Coleman’s creation of long movements based on the theme rather than choruses. In the process, they make his trio perhaps the most spontaneously flexible we have ever heard. Inspired, Coleman moves with absolute ease in and out of straight time, moods, keys, meters, tempos and dynamics. For all of Coleman’s abstractions, he’s much like a blues singer, stretching from tender whispers to exultant shouts, from mystical whines to angry growls swirled around by gloom or closely wrapped in midnight-hour erotic memories. At times, Coleman also relates to Izenzon’s arco playing in ways that makes us rethink the idea of “third stream”—the fusing of jazz and European music—as if he decided that what Gunther Schuller and John Lewis proposed should provide another color that could spontaneously give wider sonic and emotional range to his music. Ornette Coleman is that magical combination of the primitive, the great thinker, the virtuoso and the brave singer of songs. We are lucky to have him among us. true 59 2008-08-01T16:35:57-04:00 false 19710 65 200212 true 128 2002-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

In 1959, when Ornette Coleman arrived in New York and opened on the Bowery with the quartet that included Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, there was no talk of a harmolodic system. He spoke of playing with natural raw feeling instead of technical obsession, yet Coleman proved to have the most comprehensive grasp of improvised order outside of preconceived form that we have heard in the jazz avant-garde. Coleman brought a conception to the music that Wallace Roney explains perfectly: “Ornette wanted to get the same kind of freedom he heard in Charlie Parker but discovered that the only way he could do that was to move away from chords and count on his melodic imagination to get him where he wanted to go.” Most of Coleman’s greatest recordings are either on Atlantic or Blue Note and were made by 1965. With Cherry, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Haden, Jimmy Garrison, Scott LaFaro, David Izenzon, Higgins, Ed Blackwell and Charles Moffett, he laid down what remains the heaviest body of purely avant-garde jazz. Just a few years ago, when the saxophonist performed with Haden and Higgins at Lincoln Center, it was obvious that Coleman is still the boss and that when he has actual jazz musicians up to the task of playing his concept with absolute authority, his vision of group improvising is far, far beyond that of those who claim to have extended upon what he brought to the Five Spot in 1959. Coleman’s signal achievement is that one does not have to have...

2009-03-02T00:27:16-05:00

4 Jazz drumming has no precedent in music history. It is an original way of putting together and playing drums and cymbals, which introduced a new kind of virtuosity demanding independent coordination of all four limbs. The swinging time jazz drummers keep—whether 4/4 or not—is profound because that pulsation arrives as part of the only Western fine-art music given to melody, harmony and counterpoint in which the statement of the very meter itself, however syncopated, is a lively and thoughtful aesthetic aspect of the music. Today there is a stereotyped idea of swing as a very narrow thing, but the fluidity of jazz time is exactly the reverse. This has misled some to believe that jazz time is metronomic. Jazz time is almost never metronomic. Unlike the metronome, which rigidly ticks and tocks its way, jazz drumming keeps the tempo and functions as part of the highly nuanced antiphony among the players that helps define and determine the quality of the improvising. Time is played and played with. It speaks and is spoken to. Further, as any close listener knows, when a musician suddenly rises with what Ron Carter calls “the strongest beat,” that person will take over the feeling of the rhythm,and the others will go in that direction. That is part of the freedom and the power of jazz. Anthony Braxton once said to me that Connie Kay “had 50 ways to play 4/4.” While I am not sure that 50 is an accurate number, the last time I heard Kay with the Modern Jazz Quartet, at the Carlyle Hotel, he approached 4/4 time from so many different angles, mixing shuffle grooves, gospel beats and something from the Caribbean. He did all of this while playing with so much control that the unmiked piano, vibraphone and bass were perfectly audible throughout. I have rarely heard such virtuosity. Some young drummers are so unaware of what their predecessors have achieved that they will contemptuously dismiss playing time as “holding the listener’s hand,” when the question of how many swinging ways one can play time, or how many swinging grooves one can bring off, or how many swinging tempos one can play never comes up. Such young drummers think that there is a great achievement to ignoring all of that and playing percussive coloration, “like a symphony drummer,” as one bassist described a controversial “free” drummer to me almost 40 years ago. (Yes, people have been playing like that for 40 years. Ask Sunny Murray.) Percussive coloration—timbre, reverberation and register—is a basic element of altering jazz time. Strokes on drums tend to have little ring; they are there and gone. With a cymbal, the stroke is the beginning of the sound, which means that the key to the ride cymbal is making that ring swing. A beat played on a closed sock cymbal is a different beat when played on an open sock—or, as Tony Williams so cleverly realized, a triplet figure played by Elvin Jones on his snare drum had a very different effect when executed on a cymbal heavy with reverberation. As for something like “white noise”—of the hissing, pitchless sort heard in electronic music—the brushes handle that, creating purely modern timbres while swinging or, as masters of ballad drumming show, singing. The super-swinging quality of invention Al Foster brings to his understanding of these issues is audible in the varied pings as well as burrs or metallic slurs and smears he imposes on his cymbal sound through highly sophisticated touches. This approach pulls more than one tonal quality from each of his drums by attacking them from their centers to other points all the way to the rims. On Latin tunes, Foster might use a different version of that groove every chorus. Compared to such achievements and the kinds of drama and overall effects they bring to jazz drumming, merely playing percussive coloration might be interesting—even 40 years later—but it is more than a bit "neoconservative" when one realizes that such approaches to percussion have been in concert music since Edgard Varèse wrote “Ionisation” nearly 80 years ago. If one were to do, as one superb example, what Herlin Riley does during “Gagaku”on Wynton Marsalis’ Jump Start and Jazz (Columbia, 1996) and bring such highly unusual rhythms into the world of swinging,we would hear something fresh that—finally—builds upon the conceptions Tony Williams brought to the Blue Note avant-garde of the ’60s. That, however, would demand actual aesthetic thought, something we witness little of in an era when “advanced” almost always means either imitating European concert music or going ethnic and “inclusive.” true 59 2008-08-04T21:09:44-04:00 false 19780 64 200211 true 128 2002-11-01T00:00:00-05:00

Jazz drumming has no precedent in music history. It is an original way of putting together and playing drums and cymbals, which introduced a new kind of virtuosity demanding independent coordination of all four limbs. The swinging time jazz drummers keep—whether 4/4 or not—is profound because that pulsation arrives as part of the only Western fine-art music given to melody, harmony and counterpoint in which the statement of the very meter itself, however syncopated, is a lively and thoughtful aesthetic aspect of the music. Today there is a stereotyped idea of swing as a very narrow thing, but the fluidity of jazz time is exactly the reverse. This has misled some to believe that jazz time is metronomic. Jazz time is almost never metronomic. Unlike the metronome, which rigidly ticks and tocks its way, jazz drumming keeps the tempo and functions as part of the highly nuanced antiphony among the players that helps define and determine the quality of the improvising. Time is played and played with. It speaks and is spoken to. Further, as any close listener knows, when a musician suddenly rises with what Ron Carter calls “the strongest beat,” that person will take over the feeling of the rhythm,and the others will go in that direction. That is part of the freedom and the power of jazz. Anthony Braxton once said to me that Connie Kay “had 50 ways to play 4/4.” While I am not sure that 50 is an accurate number, the last time I heard Kay with the Modern Jazz...

2009-03-02T00:27:20-05:00

4 Jazz has always been a hybrid. A mix of African, European, Caribbean and Afro-Hispanic elements. But the distinct results of that mix, which distinguished jazz as one of the new arts of the 20th century, are now under assault by those who would love to make jazz no more than an “improvised music” free of definition. They would like to remove those elements that are essential to jazz and that came from the Negro. Troublesome person, that Negro. Through the creation of blues and swing, the Negro discovered two invaluable things. In the blues it was framing a melodic line within a form of three chords that added a new feeling to Western music and inspired endless variations. In swing it was a unique way of phrasing that provided an equally singular pulsation. These two innovations were neither African nor European nor Asian nor Australian nor Latin or South American; they were Negro American. Through the grand seer, Louis Armstrong, swinging and playing the blues moved to the high ground. After Armstrong straightened everyone out and indisputably pointed the way, there was a hierarchy in jazz, and that hierarchy was inarguably Negroid, so much so that many assumed Negro genius came from the skin and blood, not from the mind. That is why one white musician brought a recording of the white New Orleans Rhythm Kings to Bix Beiderbecke and excitedly told him that they sounded “like real niggers.” Ah, so. The issue was one of aesthetic skill, not color, not blood. That white musician understood exactly what every black concert musician realized upon truly meeting the criteria of instrumental or vocal performance. At some point, perhaps even at the start, Leontyne Price learned that being black and from Laurel, Miss., did not shut her off from the art of Schubert, Wagner or Puccini, no matter how far their European social worlds were from her’s, in terms of history and geography. Nor did Price’s becoming a master change those works she sang into German-Negro or Italian-Negro vocal art. They remained German and Italian and European, but were obviously available to anyone who could meet the measure of the music. Hierarchy has always given Americans trouble. We believe that records are made to be broken, or to be broken free of, which is why, along with that pesky skin color, the Negroid elements central to jazz were rebelled against as soon as possible. Martin Williams, the late, great jazz critic and himself a white Southerner, told me once that there used to be a group of white jazz musicians who would say, when there were only white guys around, “Louis Armstrong and those people had a nice little primitive thing going, but we really didn’t have what we now call jazz until Jack Teagarden, Bix, Trumbauer and their gang gave it some sophistication. Bix is the one who introduced introspection to jazz. Without him you would have no Lester Young and no Miles Davis.” In such instances, Beiderbecke ceases to be a great musician and becomes a pawn in the ongoing attempt to deny the blues its primary identity as Negro-developed introspective music, which is about coming to understand oneself and the world through contemplation. To recognize that would be to recognize the possibility of the Negro having a mind and one that could conceive an aesthetic overview that distinguished the music as a whole. Troublesome person, that Negro—especially one with an aesthetic. The most recent version of the movement to neutralize the Negro aesthetic was made clear to me by a European 25 years ago. He told me that someday we would all embrace the idea of a great jazz drummer like Ed Blackwell improvising with Asian Indians, North Africans, South Americans, Europeans and so on, each playing in the language of his culture on instruments from his homeland. “This, to me, is the jazz of the future,” he said. It sounded like the United Nations in an instrumental session to me, not the jazz that is more than improvisation alone, not the jazz that always engages 4/4 swing, blues, the romantic to meditative ballad and Afro-Hispanic rhythm as core aesthetic elements. If these people from all over the world want to truly play with jazz masters such as Blackwell and be considered jazz musicians, they have to learn how to play the blues, how to swing, how to play through chord progressions—just as Leontyne Price had to meet the essential refinements of the music to set free the talents that made her famous. Jazz is an art, not a subjective phenomenon. Negroes in America, through extraordinary imagination and new instrumental techniques, provided a worldwide forum for the expression of the woes and the wonders of human life. Look like what you look like, come from wherever you come from, be either sex and any religion, but understand that blues and that swing are there for you too—if you want to play jazz. true 59 2008-08-04T20:52:46-04:00 false 19772 62 200210 true 128 2002-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Jazz has always been a hybrid. A mix of African, European, Caribbean and Afro-Hispanic elements. But the distinct results of that mix, which distinguished jazz as one of the new arts of the 20th century, are now under assault by those who would love to make jazz no more than an “improvised music” free of definition. They would like to remove those elements that are essential to jazz and that came from the Negro. Troublesome person, that Negro. Through the creation of blues and swing, the Negro discovered two invaluable things. In the blues it was framing a melodic line within a form of three chords that added a new feeling to Western music and inspired endless variations. In swing it was a unique way of phrasing that provided an equally singular pulsation. These two innovations were neither African nor European nor Asian nor Australian nor Latin or South American; they were Negro American. Through the grand seer, Louis Armstrong, swinging and playing the blues moved to the high ground. After Armstrong straightened everyone out and indisputably pointed the way, there was a hierarchy in jazz, and that hierarchy was inarguably Negroid, so much so that many assumed Negro genius came from the skin and blood, not from the mind. That is why one white musician brought a recording of the white New Orleans Rhythm Kings to Bix Beiderbecke and excitedly told him that they sounded “like real niggers.” Ah, so. The issue was one of aesthetic skill, not color, not blood. That white musician understood...

2009-03-02T00:27:20-05:00

4 With McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, John Coltrane found new ways to swing, play blues and ballads and use Afro-Latin grooves—the essential elements of jazz. But there are persistent questions buried deep in the John Coltrane mythos, ones that are hidden in the background of the discussion of his music because few professionals want to say publicly what they really think of him and the albums he made in the summer and fall of 1965 with augmented personnel—Kulu Se Mama, Ascension, Sun Ship, Om and Meditations—and the post-Classic Quartet LPs he made up until the end. Before McCoy Tyner left the band in late 1965—unable to deal with the many squeakers, howlers, shriekers and honkers his boss invited onto the bandstand—he asked Coltrane what he was doing. But the pianist could get no answer in musical terms, something that had not happened before. When Red Garland asked Coltrane if he truly believed in what he was doing—leading “the new thing”—the saxophonist said only that if he stopped he would abandon all of those who had followed him. Many then and now believe Coltrane’s apprentices followed him into an artistic abyss. Though he filled the It Club in Los Angeles in 1965, when Coltrane returned the following year with Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Jimmy Garrison and Rashied Ali, there were three people in the room the night I heard him. Sanders says that they never talked about music and never rehearsed, but he feels that Coltrane was interested in experimenting with the saxophone because, being such a relatively new instrument, it had not been fully explored. Perhaps. But there are also rumors about hallucinogenic drugs, which intensify narcissism and spiritual fantasies. Whatever the case, by 1966 Coltrane was not only having troubles in clubs, sometimes being fired on opening night, he could also empty an entire park, which, as Rashied Ali recalls, he did in Chicago. During that performance and others witnessed in New York, Coltrane put down the saxophone and started shouting, yodeling and screaming through the microphone while beating on his chest. The saxophonist told Ali that he couldn’t think of anything else to play on his horn so he tried that. What could have led one of the intellectual giants of jazz—one of the great bluesmen, one of the most original swingers and a master of the ballad—into an arena so emotionally narrow and so far removed from his roots and his accomplishments? While Interstellar Space, the 1967 duets session with Ali, are models of their kind, and Coltrane’s melody statements are often majestic, the other post-mid-1965 recordings, whether studio or live, are largely one-dimensional and do not vaguely compare to what Coltrane accomplished with his Classic Quartet. What Coltrane’s late music does prove, however, is that he might well have been caught up in the “hysteria of the times,” as Cecil Taylor once wrote of him. During that period of the ’60s, everything traditional was under fire, from politics to ethnic identity, for both rational and irrational reasons. It is not impossible to believe that Coltrane was attracted to the romantic fantasies about Africa that black nationalists attempted to impose on both Negroes at large and Negro artists. This was when Negroes sought what should now be recognized as a laughable version of “authenticity” that never assessed jazz itself with any actual depth. In fact, much black nationalism was really about enormous self-hatred and contempt for Negro-American culture. Its vision misled certain black people into denying the depth of the indelibly rich domestic influences black and white people had had on each other, regardless of all that had been wrought by slavery and segregation. The greatest of John Coltrane’s music reflects that confluence of races and influences. A country Negro from North Carolina, Coltrane was as much an heir to all that Bach and his descendants gave the world as he was to the blues. He was an heir to all that Negroes had done with the saxophone and what he admired in Stan Getz. None of Coltrane’s music, early or late, ever sounded like African music because his bands didn’t play on one and three, which Africans do, and because—until the end—they swung, which Africans do not—nor does anybody else unaffected by that distinctly Negro-American contribution to phrasing. (For those who persist in calling jazz African music I ask but one question: Where in Africa is there anything that resembles Art Tatum or Coleman Hawkins?) Coltrane may have been on the way back from the abyss, however, before he died in 1967 at age 40. Rashied Ali remembers playing with Coltrane and Jimmy Garrison in a “straightahead” trio session recorded in Japan, interpreting standard songs. Near the end, Coltrane was calling McCoy Tyner and talking of how much he missed the old band. He even said to one saxophonist close to him that he was about to try and put the Classic Quartet back together. Perhaps Coltrane wanted to feel again all that he had turned his back on. true 59 2008-08-05T20:28:30-04:00 false 19805 61 200209 true 128 2002-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

With McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, John Coltrane found new ways to swing, play blues and ballads and use Afro-Latin grooves—the essential elements of jazz. But there are persistent questions buried deep in the John Coltrane mythos, ones that are hidden in the background of the discussion of his music because few professionals want to say publicly what they really think of him and the albums he made in the summer and fall of 1965 with augmented personnel—Kulu Se Mama, Ascension, Sun Ship, Om and Meditations—and the post-Classic Quartet LPs he made up until the end. Before McCoy Tyner left the band in late 1965—unable to deal with the many squeakers, howlers, shriekers and honkers his boss invited onto the bandstand—he asked Coltrane what he was doing. But the pianist could get no answer in musical terms, something that had not happened before. When Red Garland asked Coltrane if he truly believed in what he was doing—leading “the new thing”—the saxophonist said only that if he stopped he would abandon all of those who had followed him. Many then and now believe Coltrane’s apprentices followed him into an artistic abyss. Though he filled the It Club in Los Angeles in 1965, when Coltrane returned the following year with Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Jimmy Garrison and Rashied Ali, there were three people in the room the night I heard him. Sanders says that they never talked about music and never rehearsed, but he feels that Coltrane was interested in experimenting with the saxophone because, being...

2009-03-02T00:27:21-05:00

4 With the exception of Ralph Ellison, John Kouwenhoven and Albert Murray, few major American intellectuals have routinely taken on the subject of jazz. One would think that a music as important to the definition and the achievement of this society would have sparked more than a bit of interest over the years. The writer David Yaffe reported to me that Ellison himself, on a mid-’60s PBS television program with the jazz critic Martin Williams,observed that one would have thought major critics such as Malcolm Cowley or T.S.Eliot or Alfred Kazin would have had something substantial to say about the music,but they had not. That Cowley, Eliot and Kazin as well as other intellectuals such as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Lionel Trilling and Susan Sontag have never weighed in on jazz may be our loss, but it may also be an example of how even those we count among our most brilliant scholars are far removed from certain American essences. Intellectuals of all races, creeds and geographic locations didn’t get it back in the day and they don’t get it now. Much of this has to do, it seems to me,with the subject of the Negro and of the complex ways in which our society has integrated itself above and below ground. Such prominent intellectuals seem to have been at a loss for the understanding of the Americana that is so broadly interpreted by Negroes from so many different kinds of backgrounds, from the sub-lower class of Louis Armstrong to the middle class of Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington to the upper class of Miles Davis. New York intellectuals, most of whom have been Jews,have never come to understand the intersection of Negro life and Negro music,and what it meant for personal expression—a truth that was well perceived by Jewish musicians, Jewish entrepreneurs, Jewish record producers and Jewish club owners. Southern intellectuals ignored jazz and its reflection of American culture, too—even as they danced the night away and drank sour mash to music filled with Negro notes!—perhaps being too uncomfortable or befuddled by standard racial sentiments beneath the Mason-Dixon line. There was not a Jack Teagarden among them. Ellison’s insistence on American culture being a Creole culture—a mixture of black, white, red and whatever else—was probably one reason why certain intellectuals have rejected him. But Ellison never shrank from the challenge of understanding how black and white overcame everything in order to make integrated new music from its segregated society. All those intent upon a better understanding of the rich American context out of which jazz arrives would do well to read Ralph Ellison. His vision of cultural fullness comes through clearly in Modern Library’s Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, edited by Robert G. O’Meally. Though I would argue with the inclusion of certain fiction pieces in the anthology that seem too far removed from the subject of jazz, the collection is indispensable and captures the worlds out of which the makers of the music came. O’Meally’s introduction discusses how well the exceptional Ellison traverses the worlds of literature, jazz and aesthetics. Living With Music’s companion CD, released separately on Columbia/Legacy, features 16 classic ’30s, ’40s and ’50s jazz songs that, as O’Meally writes in the liner notes,“[echo] the work of Ellison the trumpeter player and composer-in-training who became a writer, and offers Ellisonian equipment for those deciding not only to shun the noise but to live with the momentum implied in jazz music: To live a life that swings.” The CD is worth the price just to hear “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” the anthology’s concluding track,a Jan.6, 1964 recording of a lecture by Ellison at the Library of Congress. It’s an artful example of Ellison’s epic vision of Negro American life. I would also suggest that the reader take up Horace A. Porter’s Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America, which has a few minor mistakes but examines Ellison’s aesthetic and brings together his work with that of Albert Murray. Ellison, who was born in 1914, grew up in Oklahoma City. He played trumpet in bands with Charlie Parker’s mentor, Buster Smith, and Ellison saw the young, revolutionary Lester Young and those barnstorming Blue Devils as well as the dance halls where Kansas City swing partially formed. Ralph Ellison died in 1994. That we have ever had him among us is a great cultural blessing. He lived an American life that swung. true 59 2008-08-06T20:48:10-04:00 false 19842 60 200208 true 128 2002-07-01T00:00:00-04:00

With the exception of Ralph Ellison, John Kouwenhoven and Albert Murray, few major American intellectuals have routinely taken on the subject of jazz. One would think that a music as important to the definition and the achievement of this society would have sparked more than a bit of interest over the years. The writer David Yaffe reported to me that Ellison himself, on a mid-’60s PBS television program with the jazz critic Martin Williams,observed that one would have thought major critics such as Malcolm Cowley or T.S.Eliot or Alfred Kazin would have had something substantial to say about the music,but they had not. That Cowley, Eliot and Kazin as well as other intellectuals such as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Lionel Trilling and Susan Sontag have never weighed in on jazz may be our loss, but it may also be an example of how even those we count among our most brilliant scholars are far removed from certain American essences. Intellectuals of all races, creeds and geographic locations didn’t get it back in the day and they don’t get it now. Much of this has to do, it seems to me,with the subject of the Negro and of the complex ways in which our society has integrated itself above and below ground. Such prominent intellectuals seem to have been at a loss for the understanding of the Americana that is so broadly interpreted by Negroes from so many different kinds of backgrounds, from the sub-lower class of Louis Armstrong to the middle class of Coleman...

2009-03-02T00:27:23-05:00

4 Max Roach is the most highly regarded drummer in the history of jazz, which he should be. At 78—and variously claiming now that he might not be playing again, or that he might be playing again, or that he is tired of playing, or that he has some new stuff he’s thinking about playing—Roach should be saluted for all that he has brought to his instrument and to jazz. Few words can accurately describe him, but genius, even as abused a word as it now is, fits him like a perfectly tailored suit. In New York in 1944, Roach performed in the very first bebop band under the leadership of Dizzy Gillespie. The style he was playing had been invented by Kenny Clarke, who was then in the army. But Roach went far, far beyond bringing his own personality to the innovations of another man, which is what most artists do in any art form. Roach, due to his jazz experience and his knowledge of European concert music, which included playing percussion and Bach two-part inventions, made another synthesis, bringing to jazz a far more advanced version of the kinds of compositional extensions of thematic material that Stravinsky used to blow a hole in the wall of academic convention. Roach became the one who brought about a new kind of hearing by taking the trap set out of a military conception in which drummers swung rudimental patterns of the sort heard in marching bands. It was as a result of Roach that drummers began to hear the trap set as an entire percussion ensemble with registers, from the cymbals to the snare to the ride tom to the floor tom to the bass drum. Before Roach’s unprecedented and unexcelled phrasing across the entire instrument, using rhythmic motifs from the melody as the basis for his improvising, drummers heard the snare drum as a huge steak and the rest of the instruments as garnish. Roach taught everyone that the drums could improvise within the forms just as clearly as tonal instruments did. His percussive inventions have been called “melodic,” which is incorrect. What we hear from him is not melody in the way we get from an instrument with 12 notes at its disposal, but an abstraction of melody delivered in percussive timbres and varied registers. In fact, one could say that a certain kind of “avant-garde” saxophone playing that ignores notes and harmonies but toys with the rhythms of melodic motifs is more in line with what Roach brought into the music than anything else. Jazz drumming is the most modern conception of percussion in the world, and it’s played upon the most original percussion assemblage to emerge over the last 100 years. The best drummers from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South America and Australia surely play with majesty and style. But that assemblage of drums and cymbals that make up the jazz percussion kit is not only an American invention, it is an instrument of special demands, all of which Max Roach has mastered on a scale inferior to none and superior to almost all because he understands the instrument so well. Roach once observed to me that when one is playing the ride cymbal, the snare drum, the sock cymbal and the bass drum, one is not only playing four different instruments with hands and feet, one is playing four different instruments that call for different touches and attacks. We can hear Roach’s mastery of four coordinated limbs with Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk on classic recordings as he comes to maturity in the late ’40s and early ’50s. In 1954, with Clifford Brown on Brown and Roach, Inc., Roach extends drum accompaniment into the arena of comping on a new level of ensemble interaction, as we can hear on “Sweet Clifford.” His “Mildama” is a timelessly adventurous percussion feature. On “I Get a Kick Out of You,” some of his cymbal crashes while accompanying Brown and Harold Land foreshadow Sunny Murray. Whether playing in the rhythm section or featured, all of Roach’s work is superbly executed, beyond brilliant and emotionally full. By 1956, Sonny Rollins and Roach were recording some of the greatest interplay between saxophone and drums in jazz history, anticipating what we would later hear from Ornette Coleman and Ed Blackwell and John Coltrane and Elvin Jones. From that point forward, Roach continued to develop his playing, experimenting with “odd” meters, unusual ensembles and protest projects that brought the politics of race to the bandstand. His appetite for challenge and for new contexts is peerless. For all of the percussion pieces written in the 20th century, none of them approach what Roach brought to the drum solo. He expanded its emotional and tonal palette. He brought ceremonial dignity to it, and a streetwise grit and verve backed up by a sumptuous wit that were delivered with the finest drum tuning of them all. Taken as a whole, he is the grandest of the grand masters, whether he ever plays again or not, and we should never, ever forget that. true 59 2008-08-07T19:27:52-04:00 false 19861 59 200206 true 128 2002-06-01T00:00:00-04:00

Max Roach is the most highly regarded drummer in the history of jazz, which he should be. At 78—and variously claiming now that he might not be playing again, or that he might be playing again, or that he is tired of playing, or that he has some new stuff he’s thinking about playing—Roach should be saluted for all that he has brought to his instrument and to jazz. Few words can accurately describe him, but genius, even as abused a word as it now is, fits him like a perfectly tailored suit. In New York in 1944, Roach performed in the very first bebop band under the leadership of Dizzy Gillespie. The style he was playing had been invented by Kenny Clarke, who was then in the army. But Roach went far, far beyond bringing his own personality to the innovations of another man, which is what most artists do in any art form. Roach, due to his jazz experience and his knowledge of European concert music, which included playing percussion and Bach two-part inventions, made another synthesis, bringing to jazz a far more advanced version of the kinds of compositional extensions of thematic material that Stravinsky used to blow a hole in the wall of academic convention. Roach became the one who brought about a new kind of hearing by taking the trap set out of a military conception in which drummers swung rudimental patterns of the sort heard in marching bands. It was as a result of Roach that drummers began to hear...

2009-03-02T00:27:24-05:00

4 It was so much easier to put on a noteworthy jazz festival in the past. In 1958, when George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival had taken off, one of the world’s great impresarios had the option to present nearly the entire history of this still-young music. The bright and vital lineage of the trumpet, from Louis Armstrong through Roy Eldridge through Dizzy Gillespie through Miles Davis, could be put on display. The greatest jazz composer and big bandleader, Duke Ellington was fully in charge again, having roared back into the eyes and the ears of the world at Newport in 1956, reinvigorating a popularity that had flagged greatly and threatened to end that phase of his life in show business. One of Ellington’s mentors, Willie “The Lion” Smith, a sequoia of the Harlem stride school, was also available to thump and tickle the keys, replete with derby hat, prominent glasses, natty suit and thick cigar. Count Basie and his crew could put their special Kansas City burn on the beat, and Joe Williams, big and black and barely coordinated, could sing some blues about what it felt like to be alone at some early morning hour with one’s mind on a love too complicated to explain in any other way than through trying to make notes reach the expressive level of sighs. When the talent pool was deep, any tenor saxophonist from Coleman Hawkins and Bud Freeman to Ben Webster and Budd Johnson all the way up to Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane was available, afternoon or night. They were there as flesh and blood beings in the world, ready to come up on the bandstand and let everyone know how many ways that tenor could tell an audience what it meant to be an aristocrat, a sore-headed bear, a romantic shot through the chest with a blues arrow, an eccentric, a wit, a poonsman, a prankster full of charismatic melody, harmony, and rhythm, an extender of the instrument’s technical vocabulary or just somebody swinging so hard that an audience was transformed into one enormous foot patting the ground with affection and excitement. Billie Holiday, that virtuoso of rhythm, texture, and nuance, was available to shock an audience into silence with her revelations about love and loneliness and heartbreak and all that it took to get out of bed every morning and meet the blues that had been assigned to birddog your soul by the day. Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, each vastly different examples of virtuosity, blended either operatic gifts or purely jazz command for that special majesty the greatest singers have, that particular gift for blowing up the heart of an audience as if it is a balloon slowly filling with a golden mist of aesthetic helium. The great sweep of rhythmic conceptions heard from drummers such as Papa Jo Jones, Buddy Rich, Max Roach, Roy Haynes, Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, and Elvin Jones, each of whom added something very special to the playing of that instrument, were ready for action at Newport in the bodies of the men who had invented them. Bassists from Pops Foster to Milt Hinton to Ray Brown to Percy Heath to Charles Mingus to Paul Chambers were available to make clear how the bottom register had been redefined—slapped, plucked, and strummed—for homemade American art music. Sure, Wein sponsored his share of noisy drum battles and sometimes put together formless public jam sessions worthy of Norman Granz and Jazz at the Philharmonic. He even had jazz musicians back up Chuck Berry one summer night in 1958, causing the duck-walking rocker to look as nervous as a novice fighter stepping in the ring with Roy Jones Jr. But when the musician riches were deep, Wein mostly presented bands or specially commissioned works or grand reunions that usually fired the imagination. This also happened out on the West Coast at the Monterey Jazz Festival and various other spots around the world. But things are quite different today. The musicians are dying off, as we all will. The fusion period deprived us of all of the young jazz musicians who would, by now, be either stars or close to it if they had been able to develop under the prefusion Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, Tony Williams and Wayne Shorter. Such a dire effect was not intended, but that is how it happened, which is why there is such an age gap between the generation represented by Hubbard and the one in which Wynton Marsalis is presently the biggest star. And today, like the Chuck Berry episode gone wild, one does not necessarily expect to hear jazz at a jazz festival. One might hear anything today. Brazilian music. African music. Indian music. Middle Eastern music. Improvised 20th century concert avant-garde music masquerading as jazz. Rock. Rhythm and blues. Who knows? Some will say that breaking down those barriers is good for jazz, that it opens it up to new audiences. I only wonder one thing about that: Have things ever gotten so open at festivals of Brazilian music or African music or Indian music or contemporary avant-garde concert music or Middle Eastern music that they’ve decided to present Nicholas Payton or Kenny Barron or Elvin Jones or Cedar Walton or anybody else who is, without a doubt, a jazz musician? Though it has only been 44 years, 1958 seems like a long, long time ago. true 59 2008-08-12T18:38:41-04:00 false 19886 58 200205 true 128 2002-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

It was so much easier to put on a noteworthy jazz festival in the past. In 1958, when George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival had taken off, one of the world’s great impresarios had the option to present nearly the entire history of this still-young music. The bright and vital lineage of the trumpet, from Louis Armstrong through Roy Eldridge through Dizzy Gillespie through Miles Davis, could be put on display. The greatest jazz composer and big bandleader, Duke Ellington was fully in charge again, having roared back into the eyes and the ears of the world at Newport in 1956, reinvigorating a popularity that had flagged greatly and threatened to end that phase of his life in show business. One of Ellington’s mentors, Willie “The Lion” Smith, a sequoia of the Harlem stride school, was also available to thump and tickle the keys, replete with derby hat, prominent glasses, natty suit and thick cigar. Count Basie and his crew could put their special Kansas City burn on the beat, and Joe Williams, big and black and barely coordinated, could sing some blues about what it felt like to be alone at some early morning hour with one’s mind on a love too complicated to explain in any other way than through trying to make notes reach the expressive level of sighs. When the talent pool was deep, any tenor saxophonist from Coleman Hawkins and Bud Freeman to Ben Webster and Budd Johnson all the way up to Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane was available,...

2009-03-02T00:27:24-05:00

4 In 1947,George Pal made a classic puppetoon called “Tubby the Tuba,”which was the story of a tuba that wanted to go beyond oom-pahing all night and get the front-line attention given to those horns that played the melody. Dismissed as foolish by a class conscious French horn,Tubby became despondent until a bullfrog gave him the confidence to believe in his register; the tale ended with him getting the lead after showing the conductor he could croon his stuff. It was another American fable about democratic values. In the world of jazz, the Tubby issue has two sides: one good, one bad. If Tubby was in New York and left after his orchestra gig to go hear Buster Williams at the Village Vanguard some months back when he opened a set with an unaccompanied feature on “Summertime,” the puppetoon hero would have wanted to trade in his brass for lacquered wood, a bridge and four heroic strings. Williams marvelously summed up everything that has happened on his instrument since Charles Mingus,beginning in the middle ’50s,almost single-handedly waged a war in which the bass eventually absorbed everything from blues guitar to Jimmy Blanton to Andrés Segovia to Charlie Parker to Art Tatum to double- and triplestops, as well as flamenco strumming and slurs and just about anything else that worked,whether on simple or complex harmony or some combination of both. After his virtuoso feature,Williams,true master that he is,went on to swing a hole in the wall for the rest of the night,walking with that sublime fluidity in which the time is kept and the harmony is interpreted for a bass line that carries a melodic direction full of contrapuntal interplay delivered in quarter notes. Even Bach,who was the greatest musician in the history of Western music, would have been profoundly startled had he heard what jazz bass players have done with the bottom,not to mention how overwhelmed he would have been by what the rhythm section—itself a unique phenomenon in Western music—has achieved. Like everything else in jazz, the development of the bass took place at a very high speed. The central reason that things moved so quickly that was any jazz musician, trained in theory or not,who could read or not, but was capable of meeting the groove and performing with musical logic was welcome. So contributions came from across the spectrum. A sophisticated genius like Coleman Hawkins could be on the bandstand with a genius like Billie Holiday, who had a small sound and a small range but, following Louis Armstrong, was as much a revolutionary as Hawkins himself. Consequently,the music’s development was truly democratic. The intellect was not more important than the ear. Someone who was sophisticated but couldn’t meet the groove was booted out, just as someone who was untrained but couldn’t make it through the forms had to go as well. In a whirlwind of plucking, the bass replaced its predecessor, the tuba, by the middle ’30s, when Walter “Big Four”Page discovered the two-bar eight-beat cycle of rhythm (1 2-3-4-5-6-7-8, not 1-2-3-4, 2-2-3-4). That two-bar phrasing cycle centered “Kansas City 4/4”in the Count Basie rhythm section and remains the feeling,for all of its many reinterpretations,that those who truly swing use to this very day. That walking is something formidable. Nothing in European music ever made the kinds of physical demands on bass players that jazz does and there is no European music in which the bass player keeps the time,functions within the context of a song,interprets the harmony chorus to chorus and does all of this in relation to his fellow players and to the form of the piece. In modern times,however,the bass can suffer from the worst version of the Tubby the Tuba complex,which results in overlong and boring bass solos on every tune and too much amplification. Bassists can rightly argue that everyone else plays too long as well and that they turn up so high because drummers can’t control their instruments and play far too loud (which is why we had a period about 25 years ago when bass players gleefully let everybody else know how it felt to be drowned out—or oppressed by volume). Then there is the question of the Scott LaFaro influence, which is fine for features but conceives of rhythm-section counterpoint in the obvious way it would function had jazz been invented in Europe. That is not as profound, for this music, as what we hear from Paul Chambers on Miles Davis’ In Person: Friday and Saturday Night at the Blackhawk or Ray Brown with Oscar Peterson on West Side Story or Mingus at Antibes to cite just a few examples recorded in the same time period that LaFaro began getting attention. The LaFaro approach also avoids swing, of which Buster Williams says, “That’s the hardest thing of all to do. It all adds up to that. Swinging. If you can make it happen with that, then you’re really playing something.” So if Tubby the Tuba showed up right about now and had a revelation listening to Buster Williams at the Village Vanguard,he might understand that he could beef up the beat while walking with a melodic direction in recognition of the fact that it wouldn’t mean a thing if it didn’t have that swing. true 59 2008-08-22T21:47:38-04:00 false 20053 57 200204 true 128 2002-04-01T00:00:00-05:00

In 1947,George Pal made a classic puppetoon called “Tubby the Tuba,”which was the story of a tuba that wanted to go beyond oom-pahing all night and get the front-line attention given to those horns that played the melody. Dismissed as foolish by a class conscious French horn,Tubby became despondent until a bullfrog gave him the confidence to believe in his register; the tale ended with him getting the lead after showing the conductor he could croon his stuff. It was another American fable about democratic values. In the world of jazz, the Tubby issue has two sides: one good, one bad. If Tubby was in New York and left after his orchestra gig to go hear Buster Williams at the Village Vanguard some months back when he opened a set with an unaccompanied feature on “Summertime,” the puppetoon hero would have wanted to trade in his brass for lacquered wood, a bridge and four heroic strings. Williams marvelously summed up everything that has happened on his instrument since Charles Mingus,beginning in the middle ’50s,almost single-handedly waged a war in which the bass eventually absorbed everything from blues guitar to Jimmy Blanton to Andrés Segovia to Charlie Parker to Art Tatum to double- and triplestops, as well as flamenco strumming and slurs and just about anything else that worked,whether on simple or complex harmony or some combination of both. After his virtuoso feature,Williams,true master that he is,went on to swing a hole in the wall for the rest of the night,walking with that sublime fluidity in which...

2009-03-02T00:27:30-05:00

4 We should not care if some rapper claims to be influenced by jazz. We should laugh at those who make artistic claims for fusion. Rap is finally being recognized as the minstrel update that it is. Threatening Sambo. Cursing Sambo. Whorish tramps who get cases of the wiggles any time money is mentioned. Its popularity among white suburban kids has nothing to do with “hip-hop culture”; it has to do with what I have called “audio safaris.” One can get to the urban jungle and be among the savages merely by going to Tower Records. One can always be sure, deep down, that one is far superior to those jungle bunnies hip-hopping along. For at least a hundred years, there have always been whites willing to pay Negroes top dollar if they dedicated their careers to proving the inferiority of black to white. What rap most importantly proves is that Negro American youth culture—just like every other youth culture suffering from the pop entertainment pressure to shock, to outrage, to scandalize—is as vulnerable to decadence and hollow materialism as anything else. The hollowness of fusion is another story. The musical things that jazz-fusioners tried to conquer, or even to incorporate, were too insubstantial and never provided even the faintest aesthetic outlines for deep creation. What jazz musicians had always done was bring other materials into the world of swing, no matter the source. As Billy Hart said of the late Billy Higgins, what made him a great master was his ability to play rhythms from other cultures with so much swinging charisma that the drummers in those other cultures started playing their own rhythms the way he did. What could jazz musicians do with the music of the rock world? Were they going to take rock melodies and remake them or build upon them as so many jazz musicians had with Tin Pan Alley songs? Hardly. Were jazz musicians going to learn new rhythms or new harmonies or new melodic styles? Be serious. Beyond Miles Davis’ Filles de Kilimanjaro and a few other recordings here and there, the elements of rock always brought jazz musicians down to where rock was, but in an inferior version: the jazz was diluted, yes, but so was the rock, which became shallower due to the crossover’s ineffectiveness. Yet there was seemingly no other choice if those who chose to play fusion were to become successful. Success also meant imitating the immature emotions of rock, not projecting the adult feeling that had been given to jazz through the blues. Jazz musicians had to emotionally dumb down the passion of an art that had always gone beyond adolescent thoughts and desires, no matter the color or the class of its players. Even the least vital and most stiltedly urbane version of the music was focused on something other than the sweat, discomfort, insecurity and resentment of adolescence. Jazz spoke of the world in which grown men and women lived, struggled, loved, lost, dreamed and remembered. That very quality, that maturity, had always separated jazz from the boyish and girlish inclinations of American popular culture. One went to jazz wishing to learn how to become an adult, not seeking justification for one’s teenage limitations. One’s models were men and women, and one was awed by the way those people made adult life seem like much, much more than a loss of connection to the fires of living. The feeling of much rock, then and now, at its most aggressive is the feeling of a pyromaniac, while so much jazz feels like the work of very, very soulful fire-eaters. Living could be hot as fire on a stick, the music says, but you can learn how to handle it, how to feel the heat but avoid being burned. Or, if you were burned, you might learn something about the nature of the human soul and what it takes to rise up from the burn unit of the blues. You might sing a true song of collective importance, a universal sense of the great sadness that awaits us all and arrives when it will. The stiff rhythms of rock, the yowling guitars, the impersonal keyboards, the unswingng bass guitars and the adolescent tendencies to self-pity were not, and still are not, compatible with jazz. But who knows? I have in my possession a letter from J.J. Johnson in which he recounts going to see “the electric” Miles Davis for some career advice. Davis told him to get two or three white boys with long hair and electric guitars and have them play loud as a mother. Then he could do whatever he wanted to do and make a pile of money. Davis had learned. Had he lived, he might have become a rapper: Blue Chip Q-Tip. true 59 2008-08-14T15:04:41-04:00 false 20011 56 200203 true 128 2002-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

We should not care if some rapper claims to be influenced by jazz. We should laugh at those who make artistic claims for fusion. Rap is finally being recognized as the minstrel update that it is. Threatening Sambo. Cursing Sambo. Whorish tramps who get cases of the wiggles any time money is mentioned. Its popularity among white suburban kids has nothing to do with “hip-hop culture”; it has to do with what I have called “audio safaris.” One can get to the urban jungle and be among the savages merely by going to Tower Records. One can always be sure, deep down, that one is far superior to those jungle bunnies hip-hopping along. For at least a hundred years, there have always been whites willing to pay Negroes top dollar if they dedicated their careers to proving the inferiority of black to white. What rap most importantly proves is that Negro American youth culture—just like every other youth culture suffering from the pop entertainment pressure to shock, to outrage, to scandalize—is as vulnerable to decadence and hollow materialism as anything else. The hollowness of fusion is another story. The musical things that jazz-fusioners tried to conquer, or even to incorporate, were too insubstantial and never provided even the faintest aesthetic outlines for deep creation. What jazz musicians had always done was bring other materials into the world of swing, no matter the source. As Billy Hart said of the late Billy Higgins, what made him a great master was his ability to play rhythms from other...

2009-03-02T00:27:28-05:00