A Work in Progress
Jazz improvises its way into another century.
Master Class
A fantastic example of the art of improvisation is the Keith Jarrett Trio’s live, unedited recording of its historic 1994 three-night engagement at the Blue Note. The six-disc set is a fascinating showcase of the dramatic effect of subtle shifts of tempo, tone, and emphasis. Especially enlightening are the tunes performed twice, the overall mood of each remaining unaltered even while pianist Jarrett, bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Jack DeJohnette deftly deconstruct and reassemble their parts.
Jazz at Its Purest
Jazz reinvents itself every night. A tune you heard performed Friday is deconstructed and presented in a new form Saturday. By Sunday it could have mutated into something barely recognizable, or it could have reverted to its original form. That’s the joy and genius of jazz.
No other music form is as demanding on the performer on a nightly basis. But to the credit of jazz, it applies the pressure equally to unknown and established artists, as musicians are judged almost exclusively by their success at conjuring up the unexpected on a moment’s notice, no matter how illustrious their past achievements might be.
Despite the deep respect for its tradition, the status quo simply isn’t jazz. It’s a music whose mandate is to expand and embellish if it can’t originate. Therefore, mere replication of existent sounds, no matter how difficult, doesn’t qualify as genuine jazz.
The Proof Is in the Playing
For artists who take their art seriously (and there are few, if any, accomplished jazz players who don’t), the prove-it-every-set mindset necessary to succeed in a live setting is a constant challenge to maintain. “You have to keep your concentration focused on the music, and just remove everything else from your mind when you’re playing,” guitarist John Scofield explains. “You never really know what is going to happen until the music starts, so you’ve got to be ready for anything.”
The bottom line to what happens on stage, in the truest jazz situations, is artistic responsibility, a duty fulfilled in different ways for differing reasons. “You always want to sound your best when you’re playing a live show,” saxist Joe Lovano states. “After all, you owe it to the people who pay to hear you. But mostly you owe it to the music.”
I vs. We
There’s no debate that live performance is the quintessential expression of jazz, but there’s a long-running difference of opinion on a related matter. It’s a philosophical and musical question, asking whether the greater artistic achievement is solo creativity or that within a group.
It’s an eternal and ultimately unanswerable one that is predicated on perspective and how much you value the individual versus the group. To frame the question in purely jazz terms, consider a couple of masterpiece recordings by piano legends McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans. Is the purity of personal expression on a solo recording, such as Tyner’s “Echoes of a Friend,” greater than the synergistic interaction of an ensemble effort like the Bill Evans Trio’s “Waltz for Debby?” Well, yes, and no. And that’s the debate.
Echoes of a Friend
The John Coltrane Quartet naturally impacted saxists, yet also had an enormous and enduring influence on pianists for the next quarter century, courtesy of McCoy Tyner. Only 21 when he joined the band, Tyner rose to the extraordinary challenge of Coltrane’s music, inventing an approach that’s still being copied. Tyner’s distinctive approach, a powerful, percussive attack originally developed to cut through the controlled chaos of the Coltrane quartet, delivered clusters of notes in stunning style.
John Coltrane: A Sound Supreme
Figure 10-1: John Coltrane’s music began as pure idealism, and even his later experiments never compromised.
To jazz fans, and especially to jazz musicians, John Coltrane is as much a concept as a man. Coltrane’s searingly spiritual sax explorations epitomize an intensity of commitment to jazz unmatched by any modern musician. Known to devote 10 to 12 hours of each day to practice, Coltrane put his entire life at the service of his music in a sort of holy quest for sonic enlightenment.
How It Began
Coltrane’s stylistic spiral toward the otherworldly avant garde expressions of his final recordings involved several distinct periods, beginning with his early efforts as a relatively straight-ahead saxist. He originally played only alto sax but switched to tenor when hired by bluesman Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, an alto player himself.
Turning Point
The Coltrane legend began when Miles Davis made him a part of his quintet in 1955. The high-profile gig made him a star. Davis, however, fired the heroin-addicted Coltrane in 1957, and that dismissal changed both the saxist’s life and the course of jazz. Coltrane kicked his heroin habit and, after a brief stint with Thelonious Monk, rejoined Davis, bringing with him a new style, his signature “sheets of sound,” and a new dedication to his art.
On His Own
Coltrane left Davis’ employment in 1960 to form what jazz scholars call his “classic quartet,” a group whose significance to modern jazz cannot be overestimated. Coltrane led the band into previously uncharted areas and the rest of the jazz world, both musicians and fans, followed.
By 1965 Coltrane, whose solos could now last 45 minutes, had taken his music to a still higher plane, one most musicians could only admire from a distance. Many fans, dazed and confused by the music’s uncompromising nature and unrelenting intensity, couldn’t even muster distant admiration. It didn’t matter. Coltrane, playing some of the most soul-baring sounds the planet has ever heard, had achieved oneness with his music, grasping, at last, the holy grail of jazz.
Sonic Stew
Bitches Brew was the jazz equivalent of folkie Bob Dylan going electric, and it was greeted with similar outrage by Miles Davis’ acoustic admirers. It completely polarized the jazz world, and three decades later the debate continues. The music — extended, multi-textured vamps with rhythms and melodies colliding and/or combining in changing patterns — made by Davis and a superstar band including John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Wayne Shorter, remains mandatory listening.
Electrifying Experiments
As jazz entered the closing decades of the 20th century, it did so with a radically reduced role in popular music. To ears deluged with rock music, jazz seemed out of step with the fast-paced times, more of a sedate remnant of quieter days than a reflection of the action in the streets.
Fusion Sparks
Figure 10-2: Miles Davis didn’t invent fusion, but he served as ground zero for the movement.
So, Miles Davis stepped in and once again changed the sound of modern jazz, assimilating and redirecting the energy and dynamics, as well as the volume, of rock. Davis experimented a bit before he got the formula right, but with the landmark recording Bitches Brew in 1969 he electrified jazz with a shocking sound as contemporary and controversial as any on the music scene.
Davis didn’t single-handedly invent fusion, but his band did serve as the mothership for the movement, providing founding members for the fab five of fusion bands: Weather Report, Return to Forever, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Lifetime, and The Headhunters.
Davis subsequently pushed the envelope still farther with albums like Big Fun, Jack Johnson, and On the Corner, melding the contemporary street sound of Sly & the Family Stone with the progressive jazz tradition. It was spacey cosmic funk that George Clinton would enjoy, and it presaged the arrival of everything from slow jams to hip hop.
Fusion Fizzles
Fusion went through a rapid evolutionary cycle, steadily losing its spontaneity and the attendant excitement with each reactionary revision. It settled into a simplistic, guitar-oriented exercise for a while and then gave itself over to electronics in general — synthesizers in specific. Ultimately, however, it had its edge blunted to such a degree that many of its later practitioners can now be found playing the mellow mood music of smooth jazz.
21st Century Jazz
Where’s jazz going in the new century? If we knew, it probably wouldn’t be much fun, and it certainly wouldn’t be jazz. No one anticipated the swing era, predicted the birth of bebop, or imagined the fury of fusion. Other developments, from scat singing to smooth jazz, also flew in under the most enlightened radar. The only safe assumption is: it’ll be music aware of its heritage, but unafraid to make history of its own.
The Modern Masters
Ken Burns, who devotes only a chapter of Jazz: A History of America’s Music to everything that has happened since 1960, might believe the final four decades of jazz in the 20th century were mere afterthoughts, but history — and millions of modern jazz fans — argue otherwise.
On a Roll
Jazz made exponential leaps in the modern era, upgrading and fine-tuning every aspect of the performance and presentation of the music. But, most importantly, it’s been on a 40-year creative roll powered by some of the greatest talents in jazz history.
Jazz has always advanced on the giant steps of individual genius. Such individuals — Armstrong, Ellington, Gillespie, or Coltrane, to start with the most obvious — have frequently carried the music forward through the sheer power of their inspired creativity. The modern era has been blessed with literally dozens of such jazz giants, and they’ve been democratically distributed.
Some Contemporary Jazz Giants
Drummer Art Blakey, whose Jazz Messengers band served as a training academy for several generations of the music’s best and brightest, educating both Branford and Wynton Marsalis, among countless others, and bassist/bandleader Charles Mingus, a potent and outspoken voice of social protest and a brilliant composer, proved rhythm section members could be major forces in the evolution of jazz.
The influence of pianist Thelonious Monk, one of the great composers and most colorful characters of jazz, and saxist Ornette Coleman, whose inscrutable “harmolodics” approach is better heard than explained, demonstrated that iconoclasts could also play a prominent role. And superlative soloists, such as tenor saxist Sonny Rollins, pianist Keith Jarrett, and soprano saxist Steve Lacy, continue to provide the virtuosic improvisation that is the creative core of jazz.
Photo 10-3. Caption: Thelonious Monk’s percussive starts, stops, and jagged rhythms allowed him to master silence as well as sound.
Younger musicians — including trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Dave Douglas; arranger Maria Schneider; saxists Greg Osby, Jane Ira Bloom, and James Carter; guitarists Bill Frisell and Charlie Hunter; vocalist Cassandra Wilson; and pianists Geri Allen and Matthew Shipp; among many, many others — ensure the leadership for a continuity of the creative roll as jazz, still undefined and undaunted, swings successfully into another century.
Assignment: A Work in Progress
Reading: Read Chapter 10 of Jazz: A History of America’s Music before you go out and catch a live jazz set, or two, if possible.
