Home » Jazz Articles » Live Review » In the Moment: May-June 2004

289

In the Moment: May-June 2004

By

Sign in to view read count
By acknowledging that James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Sly were a legitimate part of black culture, Miles Davis had, in one stroke, renewed jazz, attracted a new generation of listeners and produced some of the most interesting and challenging music of his career.
Submitted on behalf of Butch Nordal

A couple of times a year, when I need a shot of urban energy, I drive to the top of Queen Anne Hill and visit that little park on Highland Drive that looks south out over the city.

At night, you can take in the amazing sight of all the lights of Seattle Center, the downtown skyscrapers and even the ferryboats as they pass by the Alki Point lighthouse. There’s also the diversity and sophistication of the Queen Anne population too. Modest brick apartment buildings coexist alongside elegant, turn of the century mansions.

I’ve always been drawn to and lived in places like this where lots of different cultural elements rub together and create dynamic and unsettled situations. Earthiness and funk can mingle with elegance and urbanity.

I find it impossible to believe that anyone living in this area wouldn’t be interesting. To me, a humble barista from Queen Anne would probably be more fascinating than a CEO from Bellevue merely because the barista chose to live in the city. This then, is my personal, private place to feel the beat of Seattle. But, what kind of beat?

I’m sure that most of us have a personal, music soundtrack that accompanies us through our lives. As years pass, it probably changes as we grow older and our perspective and emotional circumstances evolve. If it didn’t, we might all come to resemble poor Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day.” You might recall its premise, where Murray’s character is doomed to relive a single day, for eternity, after being awakened by the sounds of Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe” on his clock radio each morning.

Sadly enough, that is a metaphor for what is happening in much of the jazz world today. After taking in that urban energy from Queen Anne Hill or, perhaps, visiting my seven year old daughter’s hip hop class, I’m reminded that there is a different kind of young person walking the planet today. As an example, this year’s high school graduating class entered middle school six years ago and, presumably, acquired a worldview, all since 1998! With this in mind, it’s always a little strange to turn on a jazz radio station and hear Mose Allison or Chet Baker doing tired, fifty-year-old music that dates from the early Atomic Age. It’s always a revelation when I occasionally try listening to a smooth jazz station and find that someone like guitarist Chuck Loeb is truly nailing an urban moment while cam-pus stations supposedly playing “real” jazz are playing some ludicrously dated clarinet/banjo duo doing “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

The problem is that early jazz, and three centuries of classical music too, used to be based on popular dance rhythms of the day. Now, jazz is in danger of becoming extinct, because there is a disconnect between it and the way young people like to move to music. Considering that African-American dance movements have been evolving, unabated, in the streets for over a hundred years, it is one of the absurdities of music history that jazz was part of the dance floor for only 25 years before abandoning it in 1945.

Even if you include early rock and roll, America danced to a loose, flowing, swing beat from the 1920s only through the 1950s. This rhythmic approach was consistently popular enough to attract and provide work for great talents like Coleman Hawkins, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines and many others. It was a brief time when art and function melded together in the form of popular dance music. A tiny percentage of all dance music miraculously turned out to be on a level we could consider to be “art.” When “modern” jazz abandoned the dance floor in the 1940s, Charlie Parker still swung as did Miles Davis in the late 50s. Even drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Scott LaFaro’s free-floating time concepts in the 1960s were swing, too. Also, let’s not forget that early country and rock ‘n’ roll groups such as Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, The Beatles and The Supremes were also based on swing.

It’s ironic that the graying generation of bebop players, those former, fiery radicals of the 1940s, resented the success of 1960s pop music because they thought it was simplistic. But much of the music of Frank Zappa, Stevie Wonder and the late Beatles was as challenging and interesting as bebop, and it swung too. At least it had progressed way beyond 1940s kitsch like “In the Mood,” “I Love Coffee,” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” It was also raking in millions of dollars!

NOT OF THE MOMENT

It was in the late 1960s when jazz really got in trouble. Not only was pop music going through an interesting phase, but it had also finally moved on from being swing oriented to basing its rhythms on straight-eighth notes. Jazz had touched on this a few times in Stan Getz’s bossa nova hits and Cannonball Adderley’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” but the baby boomer generation seemed intent on getting some musical psychic space between itself and their parents “adult” world. The new dance fads and electric guitar sounds were all part of the attempt to disown the past. For an entire generation, the connection to fifty years of swing-based music was severed.

Vibraphonist Gary Burton and guitarist Larry Coryell made some valiant attempts to fuse jazz with elements of rock and country music, but they had a sort of rural, granola quality that never quite caught on. In the end, it was Miles Davis’ gritty 1970 jazz-rock recording “Bitches Brew,” that brought jazz back to the dance floor and closed the jazz-generation gap.

Davis blended free-jazz improvising with electric instruments and rock rhythms and hired some of the greatest players in jazz history to accomplish it. It’s amazing to look at the liner notes on those old recordings and see names like Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, George Benson and Airto...all playing on the same album!

By acknowledging that James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Sly were a legitimate part of black culture, Miles Davis had, in one stroke, renewed jazz, attracted a new generation of listeners and produced some of the most interesting and challenging music of his career. Finally, someone was creating new, urban tone paintings whose feelings weren’t stuck in 1950s, Eisenhower America. This was music that could speak to the lives and concerns of a generation that grew up being told “always obey the rules, don’t even think about sex and never wear blue jeans to school.” This all occurring at a time, of course, when they were also informed that their lives could end at any moment, either in a nuclear war or in Viet Nam. A single, screaming guitar note from Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock festival spoke volumes about the slaughter of a generation during those troubled times.

In the five years between 1970-75, keyboardists Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinal and Chick Corea also made many notable fusion recordings which featured electric bands. But in that short time, the electric jazz-rock movement seemed to bloom, peak and then enter a state of limbo. During that same period, President Nixon was forced out of office in disgrace, the military draft was abolished and we slunk out of Viet Nam with our tails between our legs. Thus, the social tensions that seemed to stimulate so much music creativity had evaporated. In 1975, Miles Davis himself quit playing saying that “Jazz was dead.”

After five more years or so of the national psyche wallowing in a state of exhaustion, we elected Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 in an attempt to turn back the clock to happier times. Riding in on this neo-conservative wave was trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and his vaunted pack of “young lions.” In what has turned out to be a colossal failure of the imagination, he fronted the .rst generation of players to not have its own jazz voice. By aping 1950s hard bop, he was pursuing a kind of music that wasn’t very popular or influential, even during its own era!

As an anecdotal example of this, I remember reading an interview with Dizzy Gillespie in a local newspaper during the early 1960s when he was appearing at the Penthouse Tavern in Seattle. He mentioned how he and his band never made much money but that he just needed to keep the group working. In retrospect, that seems like an amazing admission. During what is regarded as one of the golden eras of jazz, a superstar like Dizzy was evidently working just enough to survive!

NO FEET

The fact is that, with the exception of professional musicians, the African-American community had long since abandoned modern jazz by the 1960s. In the 1940s, bebop was a music that listeners had to relate to with something other than their feet. By introducing modern European harmonies, complex melodies and lightening up the pulse, bop attracted white, middle-class intellectuals and rebels more than the brothers and sisters from the ‘hood. If one followed the trail of music that African-Americans continued to move their bodies to, it would lead from big band swing to 1950s rhythm and blues, followed by Motown and rock, then fusion and, still later, hip-hop music. Any African influenced music and dance have always had a strong component of rhythm and movement. This was in stark contrast to what one usually encountered in a jazz club where, to this day, we are still admonished to speak softly, don’t clink our silverware too loudly and don’t even think about trying to dance.

A familiar lament often heard in the jazz community is something to the effect that “If people would just change and get hip, then they would listen to jazz more.” Well, people have changed; they merely decided to follow their feet along the dance thread, just as they have for centuries. Some of the most revolutionary music in history, such as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” or Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” was written for ballet. Concerning “hipness,” raves and comedy clubs are now hip, not jazz clubs. For young people seeking release through an “outside” or maybe just plain outrageous experience, avant-garde music that peaked forty years ago just might not do the trick.

Even though fusion did reconnect jazz with the dance floor, the problem for many hardcore jazz fans was that it seemed more like it was for composers than improvisers. Way too often, a beautiful or interesting tune was followed by a long, open section for improvisers that simply utilized a one chord vamp. The obvious answer would seem to be found in writing fusion music that allowed the soloist to blow on a flowing set of chord changes, but for some reason, few credible or likeable bands seemed to follow through with that idea. An exception might be the seemingly egoless Pat Metheny, who has a twenty-five year track record of blending many styles in a natural way. But, I think for hard core jazz fans, he doesn’t quite fulfill the necessary image of a blue-collar artist suffering for his music. Michael Brecker has also remained primarily an improviser but, as brilliant as his saxophone playing can be, to my ears it conveys a cold beauty similar to the markings found on snakes and lizards. It’s too early to see if the “The Bad Plus” trio will grab a toehold in the collective jazz audience’s imagination.

With all this history in mind, I was glad to receive a copy of Northwest pianist Marc Seales’ intriguing new recording ( A Time, A Place, A Journey ) which makes an attempt to address some of the problems caused by the jazz generation gap. Read the review...

Comments

Tags


For the Love of Jazz
Get the Jazz Near You newsletter All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who create it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

You Can Help
To expand our coverage even further and develop new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for a modest $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination will vastly improve your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.

More

Popular

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.