Yet, there is something different about the present era - something lacking. If one mentions any decade throughout the brief but rich history of jazz, a particular style almost immediately emerges. If you think 1920's you may think Armstrong's Hot Five's and Seven's. 1930's you might think of swing bands, 1940's you might conjure up images of Bird and Diz on 52nd Street. If one thinks about the 1950's you might think of Miles' great quintet. The 1960's were the era of Coltrane's Quartet, the free jazz pioneers, and the Blue Note sound. The 1970's may make one think of Bitches Brew and all the fusion which followed. If we look at the 1980's - well, the picture begins to get a little less clear, perhaps because we don't have the requisite distance to yet establish a norm. Perhaps Paul Motian's trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano comes to mind. Perhaps the Pat Metheny Group. Perhaps Miles comback or the emergence of Wynton Marsalis. Moving onto the 1990's we obviously don't have the focus to tell. Dave Holland's great groups, perhaps. M-Base and Steve Coleman. The Knitting Factory and all the music centered around New York City's East Village. Kenny G and "smooth jazz"? And what of the present decade? Is there any way to predict what will be the defining characteristic? The inclusion of turntables as jazz instruments? Neo-Soul jazz organ trios?

(Please don't take me to task for leaving out your favorite musician/style. The preceding overview is anything BUT comprehensive).

Part of this situation is of course our historical proximity. It's hard to tell what will be remembered as important, even defining of an era while ensconced in it. (This is certainly the excuse Ken Burns used.) Yet, there is some other factor at work as well. In all the eras up to the 1980's there was at least one clear, major stylistic innovation which caught on with both the public and the musicians. There was a clear sense of what was the current, modern movement. There was a clear idea that "this", whatever "this" was, was the style of the present day. There may have been detractors, or those late to catch on. But there was some sense that there was a movement afoot, and that this is where the music was heading, or was being pushed.

Since the 1980's this doesn't seem to be the case. Musicians have tried to find a new "New Thing", but it has never taken hold of our collective imaginations as movements of the past once did. What might be the cause of this dearth of a clear and dominant style?

Some may say it's simply the quality of the musicians (this certainly isn't the case) or perhaps the way jazz musicians are trained. Many now come out of University jazz programs rather than paying their dues on the road (not that University trained musicians don't wind up paying their dues in time as well - but that's a different point). By forcing the music into an orthodoxy which can be taught and learned there may naturally be some vitality lost. By codifying a right and a wrong way to play over certain chord changes for instance, an undesirable homogeneity may result. And of course it's impossible to teach what is being done TODAY in a University - they rely more on historical models, no matter how recent. This is, however, the same in all fields to some degree. This alone doesn't account for it. Innovators will emerge no matter where or how they receive their training or even if they receive no training at all!

Some others might want to lay blame on the major record labels. These labels, now almost all a part of some larger corporate entity, are clearly more interested in their profits and losses than in the integrity of their artists ("acts" may be a better word in some instances). They don't concern themselves with trivial points like artistic importance. They need to make sure that they have a product which they can sell, hopefully one which can cross-over and they can sell to a generation raised on MTV. They tend to invest in musicians who play in a well-established style, often one which isn't very demanding of a listener. If a musician sounds like someone who was/is popular, a large record label may have an easier time understanding how and where to market them. These labels are investing huge sums to record music which doesn't have the potential monetary return of even a minor hit pop record, they may understandably be somewhat conservative. This, in turn, may encourage musicians on less adventurous paths in the hope of some type of commercial or professional success. But again, this can't account for the totality of the situation. As mentioned earlier, there are probably more recordings released than at any other time in history. While an artist may not have major label money to help promote a new CD, the internet has provided at least one outlet which is something of a level playing field. It's fairly simple to establish a web site, build an email list to inform interested parties about gigs and recordings. You can reach people outside your immediate scope with some ease. And if you believe that cream rises, when someone with something truly new and important to say comes along, she/he will find a way to get the word out. Big record companies aren't blameless, but the jazz audience shouldn't expect them to underwrite all manner of stylistic innovation, either.

Another possibility is the huge historical burden which is the recorded legacy of jazz. Jazz is a live art form - based as it is on improvisation. Jazz recordings aren't jazz. They are at best, a snapshot of jazz. This is true of most classical music as well, the only exception being electronic music. Other styles, in particular studio concocted pop music, came to embrace record making more than jazz. Because of jazz's improvisatory nature, jazz and recording has always been a rocky marriage. Players always talk about feeling confined in recording studios. Yet, with all this, jazz has an impressive track record of catching lightening in a bottle. There are remarkable recorded documents which seem to capture pure creativity in it's most refined and inspired form. Kind of Blue. Blue Train. Speak No Evil. The Shape of Jazz To Come. To us, at our historical remove, these seem like near perfect works of art. These are the models which musicians have to measure themselves by. It may be a natural outcome for musicians to want to make music similar to these models, simply to prove that they can. Gil Evans had a term - "duty playing". He said that this is what musicians played to let other musicians in the audience know that they knew how to play. You have to play your Bird licks if you play alto. You have to play your Wes octaves if you play guitar. You have to play your Jaco artificial harmonics if you play electric bass. You want to make sure that other musicians know you can do this, sometimes in the process doing a disservice to the music at hand. Once you've established your proficiency at this, perhaps, you'll have the license to play something of your own. It is plausible to think that this "duty playing" has overtaken musicians. After all, there's an extensive history to contend with now. Much more than there was 30 years ago. It may not be unreasonable to think that this idea has in some ways crippled the innovative urge. Players have a larger vocabulary to gain command of. It may be hard to write your own poems while trying to memorize the complete sonnets of Shakespeare. Still, you would expect some new features to creep into the "duty playing" canon. You would expect musicians to egg one another on, to advance the vocabulary. And this does take place. There just isn't the one overriding style dominating and directing this movement.

To what, then, are we to account for the current lack of stylistic innovation in jazz? Perhaps it is not blame we should seek to place, but rather a clearer understanding of where the music is and why it is there.

It has been suggested that jazz, in it's nearly hundred year history, has acclimated all the musical innovations of European Classical music throughout it's roughly six hundred year history. This is an analogy which may not hold up to close scrutiny, but it does have some merit. Certain stylistic similarities can be found if one looks at the surface of different periods of jazz and classical music. The Classical era, for example, with it's emphasis on clear lines and attractive proportions has something in common with swing era bands where every round peg found it's way into the appropriate round hole. Be-bop has some of the ornate qualities of the Baroque or Rococo eras. The Coltrane Quartet with Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison has been likened in it's emotional content to Beethovenian Romanticism. Ornette Coleman's innovations can be compared with the breakdown of tonality and the emergence of atonality as a musical language. Albert Ayler and "energy players" of free jazz in the sixties bear some vague similarities to the textural music written by composers like Penderecki, Ligeti, Xenakis and Takemitsu, though in outer features only, not in detail.

In the field of jazz piano playing alone, convincing historical parallels can be drawn. Art Tatum can be seen as a Franz Lizst type virtuoso. Bill Evans certainly drew from Chopin, Debussy and Scriabin. Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor can be seen as having certain traits in common with American Experimental composers for the piano - from Henry Cowell and Charles Ives up through John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow. And Duke Ellington can be compared to Beethoven both in stature as a monumental figure hovering over the entire history, as well as pianists who history remembers more for their compositions (of course, there are no recordings of Beethoven's piano playing to compete with his scores).

In the field of harmonic advances jazz has been quick to make up ground on European classical music. Jazz has moved from simple diatonic harmonies, through be-bops' extensions and alterations, through a very impressionistic approach to modality, on into atonality and composing/improvising with sounds as well as, and in place of, pitches. That's a great distance to have traversed in a reasonably short period of time. So where then does this leave us today? To where does it point? Perhaps we can take a clue from the state classical music finds itself at the moment.

What was the last significant stylistic development in classical music? One could make a good case that it was Minimalism. Whatever one thinks of Minimalist music aesthetically, it appears that this was the last time music was written which didn't in some way, shape or form, sound like or look back towards older music. (There are, of course, other strands, including the "New Complexity". This seems in many ways to be a continuation of the line of High Modernism, and sort of a continuation and extension, not a stylistic break as such). When one first heard a piece by Reich, Glass, Riley or Young odds are you were hearing something very much unlike ANYTHING you had ever heard before. They had found a new and convincing way to make music. This hasn't happened since. Not in any way which opened up a stylistic direction which could define an era. Classical music (perhaps a better phrase would be European Concert music, to distinguish it from music of the Classical era, - hopefully the reader will forgive this bow to convention for simplicities sake) began to look back on itself. Stravinsky may have initiated the idea of Neo-Classicism, but even in his Neo-Classical period his music always sounded very much like Stravinsky. It would be hard to mistake Neo-Classical Stravinsky for the genuine article, a work by Haydn for instance. When the Neo-Romantic movement began to hold sway, it didn't simply want to work with its historical models, it was in many ways a return to its historical models. It wasn't a matter of using old conventions in modern music, but of moving modern music back towards an earlier style. It seemed as if many composers felt that classical music had gone too far, had clearly lost it's audience, and needed to be brought back under control. If one scans the programs of any major symphony orchestra, it is no surprise that the majority of the works performed are still from the 17th to the 19th century. 20th century music is still by and large a rarity. Contemporary music is heard even less so. The prestigious commissions for new compositions, along with major label recordings of contemporary music have been veering towards this Neo-Romantic conservatism steadily for a number of years.

A similar state of affairs can be found in the world of jazz. If symphony orchestras are concerned about their audiences, and in turn tend toward programming more conservative works, then it is perhaps easier to understand why large record companies tend towards more conservative music, if not the outright commercial. If European Classical music had reached something of an impasse, and had turned back on itself, certainly jazz could find itself in the same situation. In some ways, it is even more understandable in jazz than in classical music. There is no real reason why classical music should have become so self-referential. There had been some type of clear, consistent stylistic progress throughout its history. Things moved along - not always in a straight line, but things moved. Sometimes the music moved towards complexity, sometimes towards simplicity. But there was never really a return towards older music. It was always something new in reaction to what immediately preceded it. The situation now, when new music has to compete with the entire history of music available on recordings, is a relatively new situation, and may partly explain why composers feel the need to work in older styles. Sort of "duty composing", if you will.

In jazz, the situation may be somewhat more complicated, but actually healthier.

Since jazz is about the same age as the commercial record industry, it has always had to compete with it's own history. Still, it managed to move forward. Why, in the last 20 or so years has it seemed to meander? Perhaps it is because it has traveled SO far in the preceding decades. A natural state of consolidation is to be expected, and encouraged.

Music history is portrayed often as this series of stylistic leaps. The truth is the situation has always been much subtler than this. There are periods where the music advances in leaps and bounds, and there are periods where the music creeps forward. Jazz may have reached a major impasse and may now be in the process of creeping forward, rather than leaping forward.

Inherent in many of the previous stylistic shifts in jazz was an almost religious devotion to the new or the old. Players either adopted the new style or rejected it. It was very much seen as an either/or situation. Players from one school rarely crossed over to work with players from another. A few examples may help to make this point. When the "West Coast" sound was current, it was played in much of the jazz press in opposition to the "Hard-Bop" which was seen as the East Coast reaction to it. West Coast jazz was seen as soft, cerebral, effeminate, and played most often by white musicians. Harp-Bop was seen as earthy, gutsy, visceral and played primarily by black musicians. Players were often lumped into one camp or the other. This sort of separation probably even damaged some players' careers because they were grouped in with a style that later fell out of favor. Other schisms existed - Louis Armstrong's disdain for be-bop, Miles Davis' and Charles Mingus' criticism of Ornette Coleman are among the more famous examples. To adopt one style meant to give oneself to it fully, oftentimes to the exclusion of other styles.

Today, a much healthier plurality exists. Musicians are much more open to a broad range of styles than would have happened in the past. There may be many reasons for this. One, for example, could be a general embracing of multiculturalism leading to a way of thinking that would be inclusive rather than exclusive. Another, since many players have been University educated, and so are well versed in the history of jazz, they may have a better appreciation for older or different styles. Another reason could be the influence of Post-Modernism, which looks back and uses historical materials. Post-Modernism in jazz is often thought of as nothing more than adoption of a type of eclecticism, though it can include more than that. (In many ways, Post-Modernism seems to be the appropriate style for an American pop culture obsessed with nostalgia. Though in truth Post-Modernism may be less a style and more an accumulation of practices.) Jazz' particular brand of Neo-Classicism may be a symptom of this Post-Modern condition. One final reason for this plurality may be simply practical and economic. Players often have to make gigs in a wide variety of styles to make a living. It's not uncommon to find the same player performing Downtown free jazz one day, swing era big-band music another, and mainstream post-bop on another (not to mention funk, Latin, rock or any other styles a player may encounter).

This plurality may ultimately prove to be healthy. Players are interested in finding ways, not simply to juxtapose these different styles in a Post-Modern pastiche, but incorporate them into a new unity. Many jazz players regularly incorporate elements of hip-hop and rap into their music now, as in the early days of fusion Tony Williams Lifetime took the energy of Jimi Hendrix, the genre of the organ trio, and the liberties of free jazz to create something new. Players no longer feel the need to reject what has come before to find new ground, they are willing to incorporate any and all influences as they see fit.

This, of course, is a difficult task. It may be, more than anything else, the reason there has been no one overriding style to emerge lately. The interest may not be so much in creating a new style by rejecting previous styles, which has always been the most simplistic view of the way music had progressed, but rather assimilating divergent threads to make a new, richer, stronger clothe. There are many fine players today, producing important music. If one style hasn't emerged to define the era, perhaps it is because the era is to be defined by its plurality. In time, we may look back at the era from the 80's through the present as having an embarrassment of riches. Older masters working side by side with a younger generation of players, producing music of high quality in a wide array of styles. This is music that looks backwards and forwards, which knows that a healthy respect for the past doesn't mean slavish imitation of it. There is much good, modern music being created today - some of it going back and exploring uncharted depths of earlier styles, some of it incorporating divergent trends. Everything is fodder for future development, nothing is rejected (very little, at least). This may come be seen as a period of great experimentation, though the advances resulting from that experimentation are sometimes hardly visible to the naked eye. While the advances made may not be the great paradigm shifts experienced in decades past, there is development, there is progress, there is genuine and deeply felt work being produced.

Musicians may not have arrived at a solution as how to make use of all the diverse elements jazz presents them with, but what a glorious place to be in where you don't have to decide either/or! You can use swing era riffing next to Ornette lines and "Ascension" textures, if you can make it work. You can choose to work with all that is offered to you, and proceed diligently, with sincerity, step by step. The music will find its way eventually. History will ultimately judge the work being done now, yet it seems that there is enough work of integrity (if you look for it) to stand the current era with those eras past. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, jazz has come to a fork in the road, and taken it. Let's enjoy the ride!

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