By Kenny Mathieson

Even though we are all listening and responding to the same music, I suspect jazz carries a whole different set of cultural baggage when viewed from this side of the Atlantic. Equally, it is possible to lay too much stress on the differences -- jazz may be looked upon more as an art form than a commodity here, but it still struggles to find an audience, and its due level of recognition within the music establishment, especially when it comes to handing out music subsidies and sponsorships.

Although writers like Gene Lees and James Lincoln Collier have questioned the recieved wisdom regarding the greater racial tolerance and aesthetic enthusiasm granted to jazz in Europe, the weight of evidence from expatriate jazz musicians has tended to confirm significant differences existed.

Even now I speak to many American jazz musicians who claim that there is more work for them in Europe than at home (and often more lucrative work -- the European festival circuit has been seen as something of a gravy train over the years), and that European audiences are more respectful and appreciative not only of their own work, but of jazz in general.

My own feeling is that it is not that simple. Whatever the differences in reception, jazz is still a minority taste, albeit (as in the USA) a significant and committed minority. The fees paid by the big festivals or government subsidied organisations are welcome to the artists involved, but can also price other promoters out of the market.

Nonetheless, jazz survives all of the gloomy prognostications and internal divisions. The music is now a global language, played and interpreted all over the world. That is true all along the spectrum of jazz styles, from Dixieland to free improvisation. However, many listeners and observers now see that spread of styles as having reached a position of stasis.

They point to jazz’s history of innovation and discovery, and asked where are the great innovators now? It is a fair question, but a complex one. Jazz grew out of a multi-faceted blend of diverse influences, and underwent an accelerated development, passing from pre-history to space age in a single century.

Given the pace of the transitions from the polyphonic ensemble music of the New Orleans pioneers in the 1920s via the sophisticated arrangements of the Swing big bands in the 1930s, the advanced harmonies and new rhythms of bop in the 1940/50s, to the radically different polyphonic ensemble music of free jazz in the 1960s, it is no real surprise that jazz then seemed to hit a wall.

Each step of that history can be predicated in its predecessor (at least in retrospect), and it forms a logical circle of sorts, or perhaps a cycle. The vexed question of where jazz goes from there has been asked since the 1970s, but the answer has not yet been in a radically new direction which would take that cycle to a new stage.

Nor does such a development seem likely. Instead, jazz became absorbed in an even greater sense of its own history, and musicians began to go back and re-explore the past. Some simply repeated the licks of greater players, standing too literally on the shoulders of giants. Others found, and continue to find, new things to say in the context of received idioms, spanning the whole of the jazz continuum, from ragtime to free improvisation.

Jazz is now a multi-layered entity, and that sense of continuous striking out toward a new horizon seems less pointed as a consequence. Rather than evolve onto another major jazz style, post-60s developments have focused on fusion, moving from the initial jazz-funk and jazz-rock experiments to an increasingly broadly-based experimentation with other genres, including classical, all manner of folk and ethnic musics, and dance forms like hip hop and drum ‘n’ bass.

Jazz has expanded from its roots in Black American culture to encompass a global reach, a process which began very early in its history. As the century begins, what we seem to have is a core of solidly represented jazz styles, surrounded by a rainbow coalition of fusions. Intriguing, exciting, inventive and even surprising work emerges with more regularity than we have any right to expect, and does so from all points on the jazz spectrum.

If there is no single figure to stand alongside an Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Coltrane or Coleman as the heroic leader of epoch-making innovation, jazz musicians of all persuasions remain remarkably dedicated to a music which demands a great deal of them, and generally offers little in the way of material rewards in return.

Jazz enters its second century as a very different beast than the one which existed for much of it. It may be that the contours of the core music have now been mapped, but if further exploration must be carried out in refinement of existing forms, or in cross-fertilisation with other musics, both options offer sufficient possibilities for taking jazz boldly forward. And who knows what surprises might be waiting?

Copyright © 2000 Kenny Mathieson.