By Simon Weil

[I]

In a 1995 Interview for American Heritage, Wynton Marsalis was asked what he thought were the essential elements of Jazz. He said that some were non-musical (for more on this see next chapter), but of the musical elements, he declared that: "Number one is playing blues". He was the asked what he meant by "blues". He said: "I mean the philosophy of it. Blues gives the jazz musician an unsentimental view of the world. Blues is adult secular music, the first adult secular music America produced. You accept tragedy and you move forward. It has an endless quality - "Yes, this is messed up, but we have to do that..."

As Marsalis notes, this is indeed a philosophical view of blues. It is one rooted in the thought of Albert Murray ("Albert Murray has written one of the greatest books on jazz, Stomping the Blues, which is on blues, but is one of the greatest books written about the poetics of jazz music, what the musician should be trying to do.") Before we look at that, I just want to point out that there are any number of philosophies - of ways of looking at the world. That Marsalis should say that blues as defined by Murray is an essential element of jazz is equivalent to saying that to be a jazz musican one must adopt Murray's philosophy to some extent. One is thus prevented from adopting one's own preferred world-view in Marsalis' formulation. This is of course contrary to the idea of jazz as something that forwards democracy.

So to start, here's Albert Murray describing the onset of an unpleasant condition known as "the blues":

...you realize you don't feel good anymore, not because all at once you have been stricken but because a dull and unspecified ache is beginning to throb. Then sometimes you feel yourself becoming rueful, or glum, or sometimes either sullen, mean, and downright evil on the one hand or weak in the stomach and knees on the other. Stomping The Blues p4

"The blues", Murray suggests, is just like being attacked by tiny omnipresent devils:

...my central image of the blues...is that there are invisible blue devils that beset you on all sides, and that they are the embodiment of entropy. You can't destroy them, but you can push them back, you can hold them at bay. And as soon as you relax, they're right back. Murray:The Function of the Heroic Image/in O'Meally p575".

This is because Murray's view of the world is that it is chaos. "The blues", he contends is that world of chaos impinging on the individual. It has to be fought - and it has to be fought the whole time - otherwise chaos will take over. This intensely bleak philosophy is a version of existentialism. It underpins everything in Murray's thought - as it underpins Crouch and Marsalis's thought also. Thus Marsalis says:

"Chaos is always out there..." American Heritage 1995

Murray's view is "you can push [the blue devils] back, you can hold them at bay." But: "In the end, of course, it is always raw nature, the unconscious and the irresponsible, inexorable earth in all its natural chaos which abides... The Hero and the Blues/Murray p30

What this means is that no matter how much one fights chaos, one can never defeat it. One can never win. Chaos will always return. Which brings us to one of Murray's favorite quotations:

...Hemingway's Winner Take Nothing...the frontpiece. "Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat, the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing, neither his ease nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor if he win far enough shall there be any reward within himself."

Now that there is the human condition! La Conditione Humaine, as Malraux called it... Conversations with Albert Murray p55-6

[II]

To fight this chaos is, Murray believes, the role of art. As Tony Scherman put it:[Murray] grounds his thought in the notion of literature as "equipment for living", not a disinterested contemplation of the world but an active engagement with it. The basic literary motive, says Murray - storytelling - inheres in every human being; indeed without inventing stories and metaphors to order our raw experience, we would be unable to function. The artist, playing, improvising, shaping, becomes the model for the rest of us, who struggle to wrest meaning from the flux and chaos that underpin our lives, our brief term on earth. The artists with the clearest vision of the nothingness at the heart of human existence, Hemingway, Mann and Malraux, make up Murray's pantheon, into which he inducts a fourth member, Ellington. Conversations with Albert Murray [Scherman 1996] p124

Murray goes much further, into absolute blackness, asserting that without art man is himself chaos:

...the basic or ultimate objective of art is to provide mankind with what Kenneth Burke calls basic "equipment for living", and that comes in the form of metaphors. The adequate metaphor is the most basic equipment for living. Without an adequate metaphor, you're insane. You don't have a story, you're a ball of chaos - and chaos is the enemy. The Function of the Heroic Image/ Murray in O'Meally p570

Now, at this point we are at the bottom of the vision of jazz saving America. Essentially the view of Murray, Marsalis and Crouch is that without art there is chaos - That Man is chaos, that America is chaos. They believe there is one art that can save America from that chaos - and that art is jazz. We will see how in due course, but just to let you know, we have touched bottom. It is this black vision that underpins these men's ideology. All their ideas refer to this null point - to understand their thinking, the reader must keep it in his mind's eye. Marsalis believes that true jazz musicians do this. He says:

"Do not misconstrue the sadness in their eyes as a sign of defeat. It is the mark of a profound loneliness, the heroic loneliness of those who sustain an intense relationship with a reality so harsh as to burn the eyes of the unprepared who chance to look upon it." Sweet Swing Blues on the Road p152

This is the "unsentimental view of the world" that Marsalis asserted the jazz musician has in our first quote. It is rooted in Murray's blues philosophy - a philosophy that says the world is fundamentally chaos.

[III]

It is important that the jazzman should see that the world is chaos, for the three men’s idea of Art - and thus Jazz - is of something that fights chaos. And, as Murray dramatically asserts, without art Society may just explode:

Art...is a movement against entropy. Its ends are sanity, purpose, and delight. When you lose that - when you get a nihilistic view of a life - then you’re in trouble. Without the discipline that ultimately comes from the arts, civilization could blow up any day. Conversations with Albert Murray p114 [1996]

If Jazz as a whole is supposed to oppose chaos, there is a certain sort of jazz, that is in itself chaos - Free Jazz - in the minds of the Lincoln Center moguls. As Murray says in an interview made for the Burns series and included in the book:

“Art has to do with security against chaos. What we want are durable forms, things that endure...

Ornette Coleman came along and said, “This is free jazz,” But what is freer than jazz, you are talking about freedom of improvisation. The whole thing is about freedom, about American freedom. So why would anybody want to free it from its forms? The whole idea of art is to create a form that is a bulwark against entropy or chaos. Jazz is not meant to be formless and absolutely self-indulgent. That’s like embracing the waves in the sea. You cannot embrace entropy. You cannot embrace chaos.” Murray Interview in Jazz, a History of America’s Music/Ward and Burns p343

And Marsalis concurs:

I’ve talked to Ornette about his conception of free jazz. I don’t understand it. I think it’s chaos. Maybe it’s not, but that’s what I think it is. Chaos is always out there; it’s something you can get from any fifty kids in a band room. I’m in favor of using that conception when kids first start playing. It helps them explore their instruments without restraint. Marsalis/American Heritage 1995

But the logical corrollary of this pair of ideas - that free jazz is chaos and that jazz with form somehow helps defeat chaos in the world - is that free jazz, and by extension avant-garde jazz incorporating free techniques, induces (or at the very least goes with) anarchy in the world. And that’s just what Stanley Crouch implies in the following quote:

...there were no problems [at the Umbria jazz festival in Italy], unless one considered some well deserved booing and cat-calling problems. But it had not always been that way. When [Carlo] Pagnotta began producing concerts [in Italy] with the cooperation and financing of local government in 1973, many of the young people who came treated the performances like rock and roll happenings polluted with radical stances. Music with melody, harmony, and instrumental control was considered the art of repression and the symbol of the enslavement of black people, while the opportunists of the “avant-garde” were celebrated as the voices of freedom. The concerts moved from town to town with unruly young people following them, and things became so bad that the owners of local shops began to board up their windows and doors when the festival arrived. But, in 1978 [things changed and the organisation of the festival now] allows the music to exist free of avant-garde fashion. Umbria Jazz [1983] in Notes of a Hanging Judge/Crouch p247-8

This is why, I believe, Marsalis and his confederates are so set against Free Jazz (and indeed against much of the avant-garde). They see it as a force for anarchy in the world (the unruly young people causing windows and doors to be boarded up is an expression of that here). Just as they think “good” jazz, based around traditional form, can be a force for democracy in America (or the rest of the world).

[IV]

There has been no better platform than the White House for the Lincoln Center to put across its views about jazz and American democracy. And in 1998 one of the The White House Millenium Evening Lectures was given over to them. President Clinton and the first lady were in attendance, as was Vaclav Havel. A transcription of the event is available at:

http://docs.whitehouse.gov/Initiatives/Millennium/19980921-8778.html

Surely this was one of Marsalis’s greatest triumphs. The evening amounted to a vindication by The President of the United States himself, the leader of American democracy, of the Lincoln Center’s ideas about democracy. Clinton himself gave a speech that sounds like it had been written by the Lincoln Center ideologues. Amongst other things, he asserted that:

“... like our democracy, jazz provides a framework for flowing dialogue, a basis for brilliant improvisation, a point of reference and a point of departure.”

Soon afterwards, Marsalis himself took the mike. He said:

“Now, in our democratic way of living, our central concern is how to balance what we want to do with what needs to be done, and that's a big concern. In other words, "I" versus "we." Jazz musicians on bandstands around the world struggle with this nightly, and believe me, it's a great struggle. Because you want to play loud and you want to play long solos. So does everybody else on the bandstand.

..."We" is what we call "polyphonic improvisation."...It's very easy for this to sound like noise, so you have to try to say, "Let me get together with everybody else," because you don't know exactly what they're playing. This is the challenge of jazz and it is the challenge of democracy.”

One can see in this the distinction in Marsalis’s mind between “polyphonic improvisation”, which is democracy on stage, Marsalis’s ideal, and noise - which is anarchy on stage - that is “Free Jazz”. In polyphonic jazz, the individuals are listening to each other - their "I" is balanced against the communal "we". So their improvisations are contained within - and themselves contribute to - form. In “noise”, everyone is playing at once, without listening, just like the kids who just picked up their instruments (above) - or, like Marsalis believes, in Ornette-style Free Jazz.

So, when asked by Burns “What does jazz tell us about our country right now?”, Marsalis replied:

“Right now it’s telling us that we need to learn how to listen. We don’t listen you know. It’s like when I hear these young musicians play, the first thing they have in common is that they don’t listen to each other. First they play too loud. when you’re playing that loud, you just can’t play with anybody else. And then it’s telling us to listen and make an honest attempt to understand what somebody else is playing...” Jazz, A History of America’s Music/ Ward and Burns p121

In Marsalis’s mind, the avant-garde represents the opposite of this ideal:

“I don’t like Coltrane’s later stuff, to be honest...That avant-garde conception of music that’s loud and self-absorbed. American Heritage 1995

This ties up with Crouch’s take on the Umbria Jazz festival above - where avant-garde jazz is asserted to go hand in hand with unruly youth and boarded up windows and doors. When “things got so bad”, in Crouch’s phrase.

[V]

But this is not all there is to jazz. Apart from having form, jazz must have a very specific form. It must swing. Here are some quotes from Marsalis’ book:

[Q] “What is the meaning of jazz?”

Marsalis: A swinging dialogue between parties whose philosophy is “Lets try to work this out”. SSBOTR [Sweet Swing Blues on the Road] p138

In jazz it is always necessary to be able to swing...You cannot develop jazz by not playing it, not swinging or playing the blues. SSBOTR p141

Swing is a matter of ongoing coordination and participation.

The ultimate achievement in jazz soloing is the expression of a distinctive personality.

The ultimate achievement in jazz music is the interplay of distinctive personalities through some type of musical form...The group establishes its identity within the interplay while swinging.

Jazz is musical inteplay on blues-based melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and textures in the motion of an improvised groove. A groove is the successful coordination of different parts - like a clock. SSBOTR p129

Swing is a collective decision. SSBOTR p146

In fact, it is from Crouch that Marsalis has his idea of swing as part of Jazz as Democracy. Crouch has been purveying it since (at least) 1983, long before Marsalis. In 1983, Marsalis was only 22. Crouch himself probably constructed it from the ideas of Ellison and Kouwenhoven (both men he has praised highly), but is nowhere explict about it - so it’s not possible to be more explicit without speculating. Here’s Marsalis:

[Q] What is jazz?

Marsalis: Jazz music is freedom of expression with a groove... A History of America’s Music/Ward + Burns p116

And here, in 1983, Crouch talks about the “molten democracy of the groove”:

Jazzmen supplied a new perspective on time, a sense of how freedom and discipline could coexist within the demands of ensemble improvisation...their art was collective...

[Jazz’s] thoughts about American life arrived not in the philosophical text but in the well-picked note on a moment’s notice and the physical response to dance...the molten democracy of the groove, when a band catches its stride and every decision by every individual not only carries his stamp, but makes for a collective statement that transcends the particular. Notes of a Hanging Judge, Body and Soul X: The Religion of Play 27 Dec 1983 Crouch

In an extraordinary article written for Forbes in 1996, Crouch declares that the swinging jazz ensemble is a model for the New Age in America, in its organisations, world of work and careers:

In the case of America...jazz...now emerges as the most profound metaphor of our present age...the improvising jazz ensemble is recognised by more and more contemporary thinkers as a significant model -- and aesthetic that foreshadows fundamental ways of living and doing.

Jazz is the art that has resolved the so-called "mind-brain problem"...In essence, each performer must simultaneously conceive ideas, respond to the total musical environment, and execute everything at once, which means hearing on four different levels at the same time. So the ability of the brain and the motor areas of the body to achieve aesthetic order, expressive passion, and logic against the cold limitations of chaos is brought to a particular level of brilliance. The musicians (and audience) then experience a control of the present, an execution of spontaneous artistry in real time that separates jazz from all other Western performing arts.

In the digital age, as we move into quicker and quicker changes of information, more and more intricate technology, and reinventions of the world of work, our organizations and our careers in action will become more and more aligned with the jazz ensemble. We will see that empathetic individuality, the essence of the jazz spirit, is the way to go. We will find ourselves improvising with greater and greater confidence and fearing less and less the imaginative powers of the individual committed to enrich the whole.

Coordination of the individual talent with the needs of the group for coherence provides us with great challenges, but as we look into our cultural past and present, there are many inspiring precedents as well. What jazz musicians seek is the groove, the moment when all inventions unfold as though preordained, when e pluribus unum becomes the phenomenon of swing. That is what our new age demands and what jazz has shown us is repeatedly possible. Swingin' in to the Digital Times/Stanley Crouch Forbes 1996

And indeed, jazz moves the whole world:

...the will to empathetic order that is the fulcrum with which jazz moves the world. CITI Movement notes /Stanley Crouch 1992

It is these kind of inspiration ideas that lie behind Marsalis’s views about swing. And they have inspired others also. Robert O’Meally says this:

Jazz is freedom music, the play of sounds that prizes individual assertion and group coordination, voices soloing and then (at their best) swinging together, the one-and-many *e pluribus unum* with a laid back beat...

According to this jazz/democracy perspective, in the growing blueprint society that is the United States we are all improvisors, making it up as we go along and depending on flexibility and resilience - both hallmarks of the music - to make our way together. Introduction to One Nation Under a Groove or the The United States of Jazzocracy/ Part II of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture ed. Robert O'Meally (intro written by O'Meally) p119 and 120

That is he conceives of the entire United States swinging along as one. One nation as a democracy under a groove. Heady stuff. One can get high just thinking about it. As Marsalis told Burns:

“[Jazz] gives us a glimpse into what America is going to become when it becomes itself, and this music tells you that it will become itself. And when you get a taste of that, there’s nothing else you’re going to taste that’s this sweet. That’s a sweet taste, man.” Jazz, A History of America’s Music/ Ward and Burns p460

But, before we get too high, let’s taste the intoxicating effect of swing in a club. Here’s Crouch again:

Jazz people know swing is what they’re after. Why? Because swing, as one musician observed is the sound of support and recognition. So those listeners want to be in on that number, that improvised occasion when the entire room - everything on the bandstand and off the bandstand - becomes one force unified by swing. I’m talking about when swing becomes invisible and solid. Then all that falls within hearing distance starts swinging, and becomes that swing. That, for those of you who don’t know, is the highest aspect of the performance relationship betwen the jazz musician and the jazz listener and the jazz place. Village Vanguard Notes p3 Crouch 1999

Wonderful what the molten democracy of the groove can achieve. But perhaps its not so wonderful. Indeed perhaps it’s not democracy at all. Here’s Crouch’s analysis of a Spike Lee film:

In more than a few ways, Do the Right Thing fits the description Susan Sontag gave fascism in her discussion of Leni Riefenstahl, “Fascinating Fascism.” Sontag says fascist aesthetics “endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication of replication of things; and the grouping of these things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force.”

In Do the Right Thing, the egomania and the servitude, the massing of people into things, and the irresistible force are all part of blackness. That blackness has the same purpose Sontag recognized in the work of Riefenstahl: it exists to overcome “the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community.” Notes of a Hanging Judge/Crouch p240

As we know, in the Lincoln Center aesthetic, jazz is supposed to combat chaos in the world. That is it is supposed to combat, amongst other things, the existential experience of alienation - of aloneness. In the club situation outlined above, Crouch has this occur by fusing the entire audience with the band and the place around and into one supra-human entity - “swing” - that is it becomes a thing. This is indeed a massing of people. Further this swing is “solid” - that is everything and everyone is organised around this super-powerful, hypnotic force. And, as is evident, this does occur with “ecstatic feelings of community”.

In other words, the result of swinging jazz, something Crouch affirms to be “democracy” looks very much like what, in other circumstances, he asserts to be fascism. So what is it? Evidently he doesn’t really know. He wishes it to be democracy, but under other circumstances he thinks it’s the opposite - fascism. Yet he has inculcated Marsalis with his idea that it is democracy, just as Marsalis has fed the idea to Burns. And now Burns, one of the leading documentarians in the world is feeding it to us. Perhaps people should exercise some caution before they believe him.