By Chris Albertson

In the Forties, when someone posed the old question “what is jazz?” Fats Waller allegedly replied “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” If you think it was a tough question back then, imagine how Waller would have responded today when record companies, radio stations and trade publications indiscriminately attach the jazz label to a far more disparate variety of sounds. “The public is definitely confused, but you can’t really blame them,” says Harry Connick, Jr., a young New Orleans pianist who knows the real stuff, stretches his keyboard from Monk to Jelly Roll Morton, and believes the public must be educated. “Nowadays, it isn’t enough to just play, you must also have to have something to say, to get your point across. The message must be ‘this is what jazz music is, this other stuff is simply not jazz,’ that will wake them up.”

With alarming regularity, out-and-out pop performances crop up on “jazz” radio programs, and in the “jazz” charts of publications that certainly ought to know better. The confusion has probably never been worse than it is today, but it has reigned for some, so a bit of background may be in order.

Everybody agrees that the music of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers is jazz, and--although the purists, so–called “moldy fygs,” of fifty years ago thought otherwise—most fans have no trouble carrying the label over to the Swing idiom. The controversy really started with the post-war emergence of Bebop, which Cab Calloway called “jujitsu music,” and many veteran musicians and fans considered an intrusion. A polemic—fueled by press agents and a critic or two—erupted between two factions of fans: the traditionalists and the modernists. It was played up as Hot versus Cool or Bix versus Bird, but it really just boiled down to promotional ballyhoo, and even its most obstinate detractors eventually came around to accept the new form as jazz. Bebop was cool, but only in the sense that it was “in.” However, the early Fifties saw the emergence of “West Coast” jazz, an aloof California style that was a bit too frosty for some tastes, but generally accepted. There were now numerous styles of jazz, and cities like Chicago and New York even had their own variant forms, but, on the whole, the music was fairly well defined in the minds of the public.

The real confusion began at the end of the Fifties, when saxophonist Ornette Coleman opened the door to a free–form style that venturesome ears embraced, but others simply dismissed as jazz gone sour. Now there really was a major breach of jazz tradition, but Coleman’s unchained style was not the flash–in–the–pan many people thought it would be; it established him and some of his better disciples as important figures, but there were serious side effects, for it also fostered the so-called Avant Garde movement, which gave mediocre musicians a cue to step front and center with a form so free that it was impossible to distinguish an intentional note from one that wasn’t—all too many fell into the latter category, provoking a comparison with the chimpanzee paintings that once embarrassed the art world. Though largely inaccessible to ears accustomed to hummable melodies, the free–wheeling Avant Garde style at least offered the same element of surprise that so sharply characterizes the earliest jazz forms—however, to the general public, these toots and squeaks were not pleasant surprises, and so the style never caught on. People were more interested in the likes of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet and the Art Farmer–Benny Golson Jazztette, groups that stomped onto the scene with a funky, highly rhythmic, gospel-tinged style that label makers were quick to dub “Soul Jazz.” To some fans, this period of churchly romps represents the last of the red hot jazz eras; with it, jazz more or less bid college campuses goodbye, and the Beatles grabbed a generation of would-be jazz fans. Enter the Flower Generation, and—with the Seventies—reenter Miles Davis, a major force behind the “Cool” jazz movement twenty years earlier, he now donned the new generation’s garb and zeroed in on the long-haired, love beads-wrapped Fillmore crowd, blowing their way a cosmic blend of jazz and electronic funk. We called this Bitches Brew “Fusion” jazz and it remains with us even as the Eighties draw to a close.

Now settled-down yuppies, a great number of Flower Generation graduates think of themselves as jazz fans, but it isn’t Morton, Armstrong, Bird or Monk that vibrates their high-priced speakers; more often it’s fusion twice removed, a bland, formula-ridden hybrid that we now call “New Age.” The acceptance of this contemporary genre of mood music may well be the straw that broke the camel’s back—enter the Neoboppers, a group of dedicated young jazz musicians with a keen sense of history and zealous respect for the great forefathers of jazz.

These young keepers of the flame are men like Connick, the Marsalis brothers, Wynton and Branford, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Mulgrew Miller and Lonnie Plaxico--spirited players, many of whom gained prominence as members of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Interestingly enough, a good number of these musicians hail from New Orleans, the original cradle of jazz, and all seem to have a clear mission: to uphold the artistic excellence and soul of this music—to make it pure again. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis--whose own Columbia albums contain only the purest jazz ingredients, but who also enjoys success with the pop group Sting—does not think there is any great upsurge in jazz interest. He blames the current confusion on ignorance and mental laziness: “I think that when a guy gets to be 23 or 24, and he gets his first job, and he makes $40,000 a year, he suddenly says ‘I can’t listen to pop music anymore, I’m too old for that, I have to mature.’ So what does he go and get? A pop record without words, and they call that a jazz record. Americans don’t want to spend any time listening to something that will make them think, and jazz is a thinking person’s music.”

Just as the trite one-fingered rock and roll style of the Fifties stirred up a backlash and made young music fans look to jazz as a respectable alternative, so the drippy keyboard ramblings of George Winston and the spineless buzz of Kenny G’s souped-up saxophone may well be catalysts for today’s renewed interest in the brand of straight-ahead acoustic jazz played by the new breed of purists. But is there really a significant renewed interest? Branford Marsalis is skeptical. “Yes, we’ve got an audience,” he concedes, “but when you go and see Harry [Connick, Jr.] at Knickerbockers, all these people talk while he plays, then clap, and at the end of the songs they tell him how good he is. People read an article on you, or they see you on the CBS Morning News, so they show up when you perform, but they are not necessarily into the music. You do a gig in, say, Blues Alley [a popular Washington, D.C. jazz spot] and the first set is the Young Republicans. They sit around in their very conservative suits and their very conservative ties, and they expect to hear something like Hello Dolly, especially from me, because I tell a lot of jokes. They say ‘Oh God, he’s funny,’ and prepare to laugh throughout the show—I may give them a line or two that’s funny, but there’s nothing funny after that, because the music is what it is. So they sit there and they look at each other, then they just start talking and eating, and doing whatever, and we become background music. The second set is about fifty-fifty, a mixture of the Young Republicans who couldn’t get into the first set and the hip people who don’t want to stay out late. The third set is almost always just the hip people.”

Perhaps we are not seeing a major renaissance of acoustic jazz, but the work and dedication of these young musicians is having an effect on less dedicated colleagues. Recently, even some of the most plugged-in fusioneers have been known to yank their electric cords from the wall and bop along the acoustic trail. If enough of them do that, who knows? Perhaps the public will discover that saxophones don’t all have to sound the same, that instruments have individual tone qualities, and that it can be quite stimulating to hear music that challenges the mind.

“I like to challenge myself,” says Connick, who started playing on Bourbon Street when he was six. “When I think about what Trane [John Coltrane] did, what Bud Powell and Art Tatum did, I realize that they worked too hard on this music for me to waste my chance to do anything by playing something that doesn’t challenge me. I have to respect those men for doing what they did, and to try to understand them—so, I’m dedicating my life to that.”

“All music is a challenge for a little while,” says Branford Marsalis, “but jazz is the only music that always is a challenge. Every time you listen to a Sonny Rollins record you are humbled—it’s such beautiful music. The first record that made me turn on to jazz was Charlie Parker’s April in Paris--what is more beautiful than Charlie Parker playing Summertime? Not a lot, not a lot, man."

No one is saying that there isn’t a place for Fusion and New Age, just that these forms do not belong on the jazz scene, even when its exponents are closely identified with jazz, as in the case of Herbie Hancock. The new school of jazz players would like to see critics, disc jockeys and booking agents treat jazz more objectively and not be afraid to criticize those who stray from its fold. “Sometimes you have to drop bombs in order to wake people up,” says Connick, speaking metaphorically. “I am of course referring to Wynton, but he is totally justified in what he does.” Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, brother of Branford and unofficial leader of the pack, is the most visible member of the neoboppers. A calm, outspoken man, he does not mince his words when it comes to criticizing the jazz establishment or even some of his revered colleagues. This has not exactly endeared him to party-line jazz critics and the accountants who run today’s record industry, but it has made him a hero of sorts among his own generation. There was an uproar when Wynton Marsalis openly criticized Miles Davis for downgrading his music and surrounding himself with sidemen of inferior talent; it did not seem to matter that Marsalis was absolutely right, his expressed views were regarded by many members of the jazz press as arrogance—certain jazz figures are sacrosanct. “Wynton never personally slandered anybody,” says Connick. “He was only cutting down the types of music they play. Somebody has to speak up, and the press is constantly abusing him for doing that. He’s been laying low now, but he told me he’s getting ready to do it again, to give interviews. I said ‘Good, let me be a major in your army, General Marsalis.”

Only time will tell if the Blanchards, Marsalises and Connicks can turn deaf ears around, and they will probably not succeed without help from those who run the business of jazz. “Most record company executives are idiots,” says Branford Marsalis, “but they never profess to be anything else but accountants. That’s what kills me about the record industry, here I am sitting down with a guy who has a law degree, and he’s going to tell me about music. I find that to be the most humorous thing of all, I mean I don’t even find it offensive, I find it hilarious. You always see Columbia presidents with guys like Springsteen, Billy Joel or Michael Jackson, but the very interesting thing is that recently, when Ted Turner and the Moral Majority decided they were going to buy CBS, the company didn’t send Billy Joel and they damned sure didn’t send Michael Jackson to meet them—they sent Wynton. I think it’s very apparent why they sign guys like us to the label--the other guys bring them money, jazz gives them prestige.”<

The frankness of these young players is as refreshing as their music, and one must admire them for their dedication to jazz in the face of adversity. In the long run, art will of course triumph over mediocrity, but, in the meantime, a lot of the latter is being nurtured by people who owe their position of power to jazz. “I spoke to George Wein the other day,” says Harry Connick, Jr., “and I said ‘Man, how come you put people like Grover [Washington, Jr.] and Kenny G on your festivals, why don’t you book some straight-ahead jazz?’ He said ‘What is straight-ahead jazz now, what is jazz music? I don’t know what it is, I just try to make money now.’ Jesus, what happened to the music?”

What indeed.