Do the Math: Iverson Interviews Wynton...

[Mark Stryker]

Also, see this post from EI's blog about the AACM Versus "The Marsalis Juggernaut":

http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/20...n-old-feud.html

Crucial to EI's point of view here is his negative assessement of Steve McCall's drumming on Air's "King Porter Stomp" from the album "Air Lore." He includes an excerpt from the passage he has in mind and then adds this:

"Clunky, sloppy drumming when played with great time is one of the great pleasures, but I’m not sure if McCall’s time is quite good enough to pull it off.  I don’t think it’s amateurish, exactly...but I do think that I should not have to wonder about it."

I couldn't disagree more. The point of this passage, as it was conceived and executed (and this is true of much if not all AACM music), is that one should have to wonder about it along just those lines. EI yearns for the security of what might be called "the norms of craft professionalism" and feels insecure, uncertain when its clothing presence is in doubt but he himself does not then feel secure in tagging the musicians involved as "amateurish, exactly." I could write a book about this (George Lewis beat me to it), but the doubt that EI feels here is a dramatically expressive, intentionally created, playful doubt or ambiguity about one's relationship to/attitude toward (in this case) certain musical habits from "the past" -- not the same thing exactly as, say, Mahlerian irony, but come on, this kind of thing hasn't been unheard of in music for at least a century now.

I have greater sympathy for Ethan's point here. It's about control of the material and context. There is a difference between having the ability to play time at the highest level but choosing to play clunky for a musical/expressive reason and simply playing clunky/super loose because that's how you play -- or leaving the impression of doubt because it's just not solid enough or clear enough that you're actually making the choice to play "amateurish." And context matters. Like McCall's approach to swing might (or might not) sound more convincing to some on the "In The Tradition" records he made with Arthur Blythe than on "Air Lore" because the specifics/demands of the style and material allow greater leeway or flexibility for certain kinds of interpretation. But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention.

It's like the issue of Braxton playing changes. I love Braxton's best music -- the Mosaic box was my top reissue of the year and the implications of his ability to navigate between notated and improvised systems, building in such an ideologically open way on free jazz, post-Webern European classical influence and everything else, from Sousa and Ives to Bird/Tristano, Cage and minimalism, is truly profound -- but I think he sounds terrible playing standards, because somehwere between his stiff approach to time and his idiosyncratic approach to harmony it all just sounds random and, for me, doesn't swing. I don't trust it.

I get Larry's point that the ambiguity toward the past is built into the AACM approach, but the line that Ethan is talking about here is real and it's entirely possible to slip over it in some contexts (Air Lore) and not in others (Open Air Strut).

Edited December 19, 2008 by Mark Stryker

[AllenLowe]

for me it depends on whether the transformation of the idea of time is so convincing that it creates its own frame of reference and wipes away OTHER frames of reference - and with McCall, I agree with Larry.

on the other hand people got real pissed off on my when I remarked once on another thread that I had trouble listening to a well-known new-music drummer because I once heard him at a local gig in New Haven trying to play straight ahead and constantly (and unintentionally) turning the beat around - I'm not sure what the larger philosophical implications of this incident are, but it bugged me because 1) if he can't do it he shouldn't try to do it and b) he had no idea it was happening, which is quite disturbing -

all of this plays into the Mingus shibboleth that little kids could play this music - we all know they can't, but it's good to avoid the pitfalls of free playing if one can. Because as Ornette once (sort of) remarked, you CAN make mistakes while playing it -

Edited December 19, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Mark Stryker]

for me it depends on whether the transformation of the idea of time is so convincing that it creates its own frame of reference and wipes away OTHER frames of reference - and with McCall, I agree with Larry.

on the other hand people got real pissed off on my when I remarked once on another thread that I had trouble listening to a well-known new-music drummer because I once heard him at a local gig in New Haven trying to play straight ahead and constantly (and unintentionally) turning the beat around - I'm not sure what the larger philosophical implications of this incident are, but it bugged me because 1) if he can't do it he shouldn't try to do it and b) he had no idea it was happening, which is quite disturbing -

all of this plays into the Mingus shibboleth that little kids could play this music - we all know they can't, but it's good to avoid the pitfalls of free playing if one can. Because as Ornette once (sort of) remarked, you CAN make mistakes while playing it -

I agree with the notion of the transformation being so convincing that it wipes away other frames of reference. However, the rub (or at least one rub) is the context. "King Porter Stomp" establishes one frame of reference and "Naima" establishes another, so the standard by which we judge how convincing the transformation is can be variable depending on the material and setting. It's slippery. I have mixed emotions about Blythe's "In the Tradition" Columbia LP with Cowell, Hopkins, McCall; I like some things but still have reservations about how McCall-Hopkins are dealing with the time, groove and form. But when I heard that band live at the Vanguard in the spring of 1982 and I didn't have any reservations at all, because in a club, with the air moving in the room, it was simply overwhelmingly great and the fact that time some spots was so loose it slipped into sloppy was simply irrelevant to the imagination on display and the emotional impact of the music. 'Course I was also stoned at the time, so a few dropped eighth notes become less crucial under those circumstances too ...

Edited December 19, 2008 by Mark Stryker

[Larry Kart]

Also, see this post from EI's blog about the AACM Versus "The Marsalis Juggernaut":

http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/20...n-old-feud.html

Crucial to EI's point of view here is his negative assessement of Steve McCall's drumming on Air's "King Porter Stomp" from the album "Air Lore." He includes an excerpt from the passage he has in mind and then adds this:

"Clunky, sloppy drumming when played with great time is one of the great pleasures, but I’m not sure if McCall’s time is quite good enough to pull it off.  I don’t think it’s amateurish, exactly...but I do think that I should not have to wonder about it."

I couldn't disagree more. The point of this passage, as it was conceived and executed (and this is true of much if not all AACM music), is that one should have to wonder about it along just those lines. EI yearns for the security of what might be called "the norms of craft professionalism" and feels insecure, uncertain when its clothing presence is in doubt but he himself does not then feel secure in tagging the musicians involved as "amateurish, exactly." I could write a book about this (George Lewis beat me to it), but the doubt that EI feels here is a dramatically expressive, intentionally created, playful doubt or ambiguity about one's relationship to/attitude toward (in this case) certain musical habits from "the past" -- not the same thing exactly as, say, Mahlerian irony, but come on, this kind of thing hasn't been unheard of in music for at least a century now.

I have greater sympathy for Ethan's point here. It's about control of the material and context. There is a difference between having the ability to play time at the highest level but choosing to play clunky for a musical/expressive reason and simply playing clunky/super loose because that's how you play -- or leaving the impression of doubt because it's just not solid enough or clear enough that you're actually making the choice to play "amateurish." And context matters. Like McCall's approach to swing might (or might not) sound more convincing to some on the "In The Tradition" records he made with Arthur Blythe than on "Air Lore" because the specifics/demands of the style and material allow greater leeway or flexibility for certain kinds of interpretation. But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention.

It's like the issue of Braxton playing changes. I love Braxton's best music -- the Mosaic box was my top reissue of the year and the implications of his ability to navigate between notated and improvised systems, building in such an ideologically open way on free jazz, post-Webern European classical influence and everything else, from Sousa and Ives to Bird/Tristano, Cage and minimalism, is truly profound -- but I think he sounds terrible playing standards, because somehwere between his stiff approach to time and his idiosyncratic approach to harmony it all just sounds random. I don't trust it.

I get Larry's point that the ambiguity toward the past is built into the AACM approach, but the line that Ethan is talking about here is real and it's entirely possible to slip over it in some contexts (Air Lore) and not in others (Open Air Strut).

A couple of things: In part I was reacting to what seemed to me to be the context of EI's own doubt/uneasiness about his own, in his view, culturally cloistered and terribly "white" upbringing (FWIW, and to the degree that this involves EI's view of WM artistic stature and role, I'd say that EI stands somewhere in a very long line of guys who are WM's age or younger who are more interesting jazz musicians than WM is -- not that there has only been one WM; I'm thinking more of the music of WM since he became a professional role-model who touches little kids from "West Chicago" (he means from the West Side of Chicago) on the head and tells them The Truth.

Next, I was reacting to the clip from "Air Lore" that EI attached. It's from a performance I've know since it came out, and I've never had a "problem" with it for a minute. I'm not saying I'm right or EI is wrong about that, just that when I encountered in its original context, it worked for me and still does. By contrast -- yes, I'm among the ones that can't take Braxton on standards by and large. But I think it may be a mistake to put so much emphasis on "trust" and "doubt" in what I sense may be a "Are these guys, or is Braxton in particular, conning me/us?" framework. In particular, I'd say that there's a fairly simple, useful answer to this: "But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention."

First, that the "how do you ... convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you" stance sounds rather judicial, as in black robes and white wigs and gavels. Second, my experience has always been that when I'm convinced by a work or act of art, I'm convinced pretty much right away by some form of the pleasure principle. If I'm not convinced like that, if I'm not interested in and of myself, no exercise of/appeal to "authority over materials" is going to mean much. The question of whether I as an individual have enough good sense and experience/context for my particular responses to mean much to anyone else always remains open of course, and I'm certainly willing to learning more about what I think I already know and what I don't know. But in this art in particular, after spending 55 out of 66 years with it, I think I'm a reasonable version of the proverbial canary in the coal mine -- in part because I believe that (like that canary) I'm not predisposed to chirp or keel over for reasons other than the actual quality of the atmosphere. BTW, I'm not saying that you are that way, Mark, but I do feel that EI shows signs that under certain kinds of stress, he may be.

[AllenLowe]

well, be careful, than, what you listen to, Larry - we need you to keep breathing so we Lemmings (I love to mix animal metaphors) can follow right behind -

[Mark Stryker]

Also, see this post from EI's blog about the AACM Versus "The Marsalis Juggernaut":

http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/20...n-old-feud.html

Crucial to EI's point of view here is his negative assessement of Steve McCall's drumming on Air's "King Porter Stomp" from the album "Air Lore." He includes an excerpt from the passage he has in mind and then adds this:

"Clunky, sloppy drumming when played with great time is one of the great pleasures, but I’m not sure if McCall’s time is quite good enough to pull it off.  I don’t think it’s amateurish, exactly...but I do think that I should not have to wonder about it."

I couldn't disagree more. The point of this passage, as it was conceived and executed (and this is true of much if not all AACM music), is that one should have to wonder about it along just those lines. EI yearns for the security of what might be called "the norms of craft professionalism" and feels insecure, uncertain when its clothing presence is in doubt but he himself does not then feel secure in tagging the musicians involved as "amateurish, exactly." I could write a book about this (George Lewis beat me to it), but the doubt that EI feels here is a dramatically expressive, intentionally created, playful doubt or ambiguity about one's relationship to/attitude toward (in this case) certain musical habits from "the past" -- not the same thing exactly as, say, Mahlerian irony, but come on, this kind of thing hasn't been unheard of in music for at least a century now.

I have greater sympathy for Ethan's point here. It's about control of the material and context. There is a difference between having the ability to play time at the highest level but choosing to play clunky for a musical/expressive reason and simply playing clunky/super loose because that's how you play -- or leaving the impression of doubt because it's just not solid enough or clear enough that you're actually making the choice to play "amateurish." And context matters. Like McCall's approach to swing might (or might not) sound more convincing to some on the "In The Tradition" records he made with Arthur Blythe than on "Air Lore" because the specifics/demands of the style and material allow greater leeway or flexibility for certain kinds of interpretation. But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention.

It's like the issue of Braxton playing changes. I love Braxton's best music -- the Mosaic box was my top reissue of the year and the implications of his ability to navigate between notated and improvised systems, building in such an ideologically open way on free jazz, post-Webern European classical influence and everything else, from Sousa and Ives to Bird/Tristano, Cage and minimalism, is truly profound -- but I think he sounds terrible playing standards, because somehwere between his stiff approach to time and his idiosyncratic approach to harmony it all just sounds random. I don't trust it.

I get Larry's point that the ambiguity toward the past is built into the AACM approach, but the line that Ethan is talking about here is real and it's entirely possible to slip over it in some contexts (Air Lore) and not in others (Open Air Strut).

A couple of things: In part I was reacting to what seemed to me to be the context of EI's own doubt/uneasiness about his own, in his view, culturally cloistered and terribly "white" upbringing (FWIW, and to the degree that this involves EI's view of WM artistic stature and role, I'd say that EI stands somewhere in a very long line of guys who are WM's age or younger who are more interesting jazz musicians than WM is -- not that there has only been one WM; I'm thinking more of the music of WM since he became a professional role-model who touches little kids from "West Chicago" (he means from the West Side of Chicago) on the head and tells them The Truth.

Next, I was reacting to the clip from "Air Lore" that EI attached. It's from a performance I've know since it came out, and I've never had a "problem" with it for a minute. I'm not saying I'm right or EI is wrong about that, just that when I encountered in its original context, it worked for me and still does. By contrast -- yes, I'm among the ones that can't take Braxton on standards by and large. But I think it may be a mistake to put so much emphasis on "trust" and "doubt" in what I sense may be a "Are these guys, or is Braxton in particular, conning me/us?" framework. In particular, I'd say that there's a fairly simple, useful answer to this: "But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention."

First, that the "how do you ... convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you" stance sounds rather judicial, as in black robes and white wigs and gavels. Second, my experience has always been that when I'm convinced by a work or act of art, I'm convinced pretty much right away by some form of the pleasure principle. If I'm not convinced like that, if I'm not interested in and of myself, no exercise of/appeal to "authority over materials" is going to mean much. The question of whether I as an individual have enough good sense and experience/context for my particular responses to mean much to anyone else always remains open of course, and I'm certainly willing to learning more about what I think I already know and what I don't know. But in this art in particular, after spending 55 out of 66 years with it, I think I'm a reasonable version of the proverbial canary in the coal mine -- in part because I believe that (like that canary) I'm not predisposed to chirp or keel over for reasons other than the actual quality of the atmosphere. BTW, I'm not saying that you are that way, Mark, but I do feel that EI shows signs that under certain kinds of stress, he may be.

Good points, Larry. Didn't mean to evoke wigs and gavels and all that -- though I would suggest that, by and large, this board is a rather judgmental group, yes? More seriously, I think when I listen I go with the pleasure principle first too. If I'm pleased, that's a byproduct of the artist's command and conviction and my readiness to receive the message. If I'm not pleased, then something has gone wrong either with the artist's intent or command or my ability or willingness to perceive. That's when the analysis kicks in. Why is this music working for me or why not?

I don't think I frame the issue completely as a question of whether I'm being conned or do so in a fashion more than is healthy, but it probably factors in my mix at some level. I understand the danger. Also, there's no question that's always been an issue for a lot of musicians -- "I think they're jiving, baby" was Roy Eldridge's comment on Ornette -- who have an attitude and relationship toward craftsmanship and the technical and musical knowledge demands of their preferred style that can make it hard for them not to hear music outside that style through the trust/doubt/con prisim. Too much of that way of thinking can cut you off from a lot of great art.

.

Edited December 19, 2008 by Mark Stryker

[Lazaro Vega]

In that sidebar from Do the Math about the Long Feud between Wynton and the AACM are the parts in italics Wynton's words or are those Iverson's from another piece he wrote?

In any case, you guys are touching on the crux of the musical matter. If Wynton says this is about how "we" are going to play "together" but then leaves off "free" rhythm because it isn't "jazz" then there's a problem there. He talks about it right at the onset. It isn't that he as an artist has chosen to play time. Who could have a problem with that? And it isn't that he's ignorant of Kidd Jordan's music, for instance, as he says. It is that he has chosen to devalue the evolution of musical systems that have made choices away from playing strict, agreed upon, fixed, "conventional" meter. Playing a fixed time sense with Cecil Taylor does not work -- the drummer had to evolve a role for that music to "swing." And on and on through a couple of generations now -- musicians who've basically said, Roach, Blakey, Joe Jones, Jimmy Cobb, Elvin, Tony Williams: who's going to play in that musical language better than those players who invented it? As to playing together there are musicians the world over, black and white, who can interact with "free" rhythms the way changes players could hit "Cherokee." And the subtext of the conversation which says free time isn't jazz is that it isn't "black" is used to dismisses too many creative musicians in what Lewis calls the black experimentalist tradition. Braxton had it right in the above quoted passage. Though in Lewis's book Braxton also acknowledges Wynton and the New Orleans musicians ability to stick together and promote each other. It was also good to read in Lewis's book how he dealt humorously with the '80's (pg. 526 note 15):

"Newer histories of the period often uncritically recapitulate the corporate-supported tale told by the heavily funded Ken Burns Jazz series, a story which goes something like this: John Coltrane went mad in 1965, and a mysterious virus that he and others were carrying killed hundreds of musicians until Wynton Marsalis arrived in 1983, carrying a powerful mojo from the birthplace of jazz that put the deadly germ and its carriers to flight."

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

"Newer histories of the period often uncritically recapitulate the corporate-supported tale told by the heavily funded Ken Burns Jazz series, a story which goes something like this: John Coltrane went mad in 1965, and a mysterious virus that he and others were carrying killed hundreds of musicians until Wynton Marsalis arrived in 1983, carrying a powerful mojo from the birthplace of jazz that put the deadly germ and its carriers to flight."

I know this is humorous parody with heavily sarcastic intent, but is it really hitting a nail? I ask because surely people don't buy such a message.

MG

[AllenLowe]

MANY people believe it in essence -

[BruceH]

"Newer histories of the period often uncritically recapitulate the corporate-supported tale told by the heavily funded Ken Burns Jazz series, a story which goes something like this: John Coltrane went mad in 1965, and a mysterious virus that he and others were carrying killed hundreds of musicians until Wynton Marsalis arrived in 1983, carrying a powerful mojo from the birthplace of jazz that put the deadly germ and its carriers to flight."

I know this is humorous parody with heavily sarcastic intent, but is it really hitting a nail? I ask because surely people don't buy such a message.

MG

You'd be surprised.

[Lazaro Vega]

It's an avenue for taking the easy way out, not a phenomenon restricted to jazz.

[JSngry]

What basically happened is that this "notion" was used to facilitate a power grab by those who had influence (and those who had access to influence), who then put their people front & center in "the industry". Then, whatever luck/success was had in terms of introducing/selling "jazz" to the public was had with these guys representing, which means that a lot of people got introduced to jazz as a basically fixed set of "styles" of music instead of an ongoing evolutionary life form. Anything/everything else pretty much had the oxygen sucked out of its room.

Now, there are those who would argue, and not without a fair amount of merit, that the whole 4/4 Swing With A Touch Of Latin & Gospel style(s) of jazz was destined to become the popular norm, just because that's what most people can relate to, if they can relate to anything about jazz at all. Fair enough. But now it's being presented and received as an artifact, a fixed quantity, rather than as something living and growing. I mean, that's ok if you like that kind of thing, but a lot of us don't.

Fortunately, the last few years have seen an upsurge in various "counter-jazzes", but the whole scene is so fucked up now, so dysfunctional & fragmented, that I'm afraid it's pretty much Game Over as far as ever again having a jazz scene with a lot of different vital things happening all at once in an even semi-viable economic arena. People now know what jazz "is", they either like it or they don't, and outside of a small network of freaks and geeks, they really don't have any interest in anything that contrasts and compares.

Time to move on, I say, see what else can be put to use to get a/the message across, but I'm not necessarily in anything even remotely resembling a majority on that one. But imp, the whole Marsalis/Crpouch/Murray/L@LC thing really has killed jazz in order to save it, and to my nose, the stench of death (which is most assuredly not the same as the aura of ghosts, holy or otherwise) gets just a little stronger with each passing day.

[Lazaro Vega]

Well, not just economically: when was the last time we heard a "jazz standard"? Tony Williams "Sister Cheryl"? Band's can't seem to agree on, "Hey that's the shit" anymore and play a tune, in whatever style, that they feel is cool.

[JSngry]

I can semi-guarantee you that if there were gigs (and a buzz about them) that the issue of repertoire would become a lot more pressing. As it is now, it's either all original "projects"/bands where you expect/hope/pray that people will show up because you're offering them this glimpse of CREATIVITY AND ORIGINALITY that will grab their souls and get the Right With God (been there, done that, for several decades, and boy wasn't THAT ongoing set of non-profit ventures fun! actually, it was...) or else essentially jam gigs where you show up to give the people what they come to hear (see above), in which case, hey, why bother getting too hip and representing? Best to just put on your minstrel shoes and do the Jazz do.

There are of course exceptions, and Chicago seems to be a city with a scene built on them, but "the norm" is not particularly vigorous right now, and damned if I can see what will make it so again, not this far into things.

[Neal Pomea]

I see it as a problem of the politics of naming. All these threads on what is jazz, what is black, what is minstrelsy, what is marriage, etc. should be in the Politics forum because they are all basically political. They all have to do with who has the authority to name things a certain way, or who can effectively bully their way into dominating the language.

When I do the math, what I see is people bullying traditionalists with name-calling. The traditionalist can say simply, "That music is not jazz." The "progressive" often responds with personal attacks and calling the traditionalist terms like neo-con, close-minded, reactionary, regressive. You don't see that as bullying?

The music evolves and changes. So what. That's natural. We know that. But does it improve? So much of the rhetoric employed by people who say they are just evolving the music connotes that the old music is deficient and needs to be improved. It goes roughly like this:

"Your music is old and deficient. Irrelevant. We have come along and improved it. Not only that, we are going to steal the name you have given your music and use it as our own. We will call it jazz. Your old music will be discussed mostly as a historical precursor to current jazz, which is the only jazz that is alive. And not only that. If you object, then we will label you neo-con, regressive, close-minded, etc."

First, the stance insults the tradition, or the traditionalist, then it goes even further and appropriates the cool terms that the tradition used to describe itself, piggybacking on the cachet associated with terms like jazz. Then it's a tremendous surprise when such appropriation is not embraced. Amazing!!! Really amazing to me.

Don't you see this kind of thing happen in other genres as well? I mean, how can a musician like Ricky Skaggs talk so dismissively of Bill Monroe, as though Monroe's music was somehow primitive and basically a forerunner of modern bluegrass music?

How can Beausoleil, for instance, frame itself as an improvement on the proud tradition of Cajun music by mixing in all sorts of elements that don't sound so good together, sort of like marrying a horse and a donkey to get a mule? And then be surprised that a lot of folks say "That's just not Cajun music anymore. Give me something I am used to"?

Well, that's just a few words. Not much of a counterweight to the views predominating here. Thanks for reading. This is an interesting thread.

[John L]

Time to move on, I say, see what else can be put to use to get a/the message across, but I'm not necessarily in anything even remotely resembling a majority on that one. But imp, the whole Marsalis/Crpouch/Murray/L@LC thing really has killed jazz in order to save it, and to my nose, the stench of death (which is most assuredly not the same as the aura of ghosts, holy or otherwise) gets just a little stronger with each passing day.

I don't know, Jim. I find it very hard to accept the idea that Marsalis, Crouch, and Murray somehow killed jazz.

Throughout the history of jazz, there have always been strong traditionalist movements intent on preserving the purity of existing structures, and those movements often obtained positions of strong influence in the jazz establishment. But that did not prevent a critical mass of talented and ambitious musicians from pulling together and moving ahead. So what is the difference now? The important economic problems that you identify that have increasingly discouraged the best and brightest from becoming or remaining jazz musicians hit the music hard already in the 60s and 70s. Arguably, Wynton et al created more opportunities from the 80s on by bringing increased attention to jazz, and that increased attention was not just limited to Wynton-type music. The reaction of Wynton also set the stage for a counter-reaction. If that counter-reaction has been insufficient in some respects, I think that we need to look elsewhere for explanations.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Hm...

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

The important economic problems that you identify that have increasingly discouraged the best and brightest from becoming or remaining jazz musicians hit the music hard already in the 60s and 70s. Arguably, Wynton et al created more opportunities from the 80s on by bringing increased attention to jazz, and that increased attention was not just limited to Wynton-type music. The reaction of Wynton also set the stage for a counter-reaction. If that counter-reaction has been insufficient in some respects, I think that we need to look elsewhere for explanations.

Thought-provoking.

I looked at the pop and R&B album charts for the eighties to see what the trends were. Two things were immediately obvious.

1 The overall trend was that, as the eighties progressed, significantly fewer jazz albums got on the pop & R&B album charts:

1980 67

1981 61

1982 44

1983 40

1984 33

1985 27

1986 26

1987 21

1988 31

1989 30

(The late seventies was the period in which the numbers of jazz albums making these charts was at its highest.)

2 Within this trend, Smooth Jazz made big gains.

One would expect increasing opportunities for jazz musicians/singers to be reflected in better chart performance. It seems a little hard even on Wynton Marsalis to argue that the effect of his pronunciamentos was to boost the popularity of Kenny G and others of that ilk

MG

[AllenLowe]

there's another and more destructive side to this, and I've heard it from more than a few people who book concerts and tours - the Lincoln Center Orchestra with Marsalis has become so dominant in jazz tours and events, especially for organizations that do only a little jazz, that it has sucked away financial resources that otherwise would have been used to book a wider series of events. Why? Because their fees are so high that when a typical local organization in a small to medium-size city books them (because that's all they've heard of in the jazz field and it seems easy and ready-made) the fee will than force them to do little if anything else in the season in terms of booking jazz as they rarely make any money on the event or may just tend to break even or even lose. There has consequesntly been a ripple effect in the industry, greatly reducing bookings and opportunities for other groups. This may be the worst result of all of this -

Edited December 20, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Larry Kart]

I went on about this at length in my book, but it's important to remember that the WM and Friends thing was at least two things at once -- a breakfast spread and a contraceptive jelly. The power grab aspect Jim has amply described above, though I think it's important to mention a perhaps unintended role that Jazz@LC has played over at least the last decade, as the highly priced touring offshoots of Jazz @LC have killed off the ability of many worthwhile "name" jazz artists of artistic stature to put together regional tours of colleges and performancing arts centers, as they used to be able to do. If you live in a city the size of, say, Baton Rouge or Boulder or Asheville or Spokane, you used to be able to take in whatever the local scene had to offer, plus on a nearby college or performing arts center "cultural" series, two or three gigs per years by the likes of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra or James Moody or Vijay Iyer or ... you get the picture. Well, a good many of those gigs now go to Jazz@LC related ensembles, and because Jazz@LC's prices are so far above what used to be norm (this for the "imprimatur"), the jazz budgets for such series are pretty much gone in one fell swoop; little or no room for anyone else. (A key factor here is that the people who are booking such places typically don't know much about jazz; they only want some jazz acts in their list that they can feel secure about, and the Jazz@LC brand name takes care of that. I've heard about this from musicians who were affected, and IIRC veteran jazz presenter Marty Khan went into this in great detail on his blog, which may no longer exist. To perhaps needlessly emphasize the obvious, the virtue of such gigs was not only that they provided employment for worthy musicians but also that that they brought good jazz of various stripes to audiences who quite often were series-subscriber-type people who might get turned on to the music now that they've had a chance to experience different living strains in-person. Now all they get, by and large, is the same-y (and arguably not very good or even that life-like) music of Jazz@LC and its offshoots.

I see now that this in large part repeats Allen's post below, but amplification up to a point may be worthwhile.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the WM thing was and is not a traditionalist movement but a revivalist one. To begin to explain why and what that means IMO, I will have to quote from the damn book.

(BTW, the pieces excerpted below were written in 1985 and '86 -- the passages quoted from Stravinsky and Virgil Thomson [i marked them ***] should not be missed, I think):

Always able until now to renew itself from within, jazz seems be circling back on itself, forgoing its history of near-ceaseless invention in the name of various kinds of re-creation and revivalism.... In any case, quite a few observers believe jazz has entered its neoclassic phase, an era in which the music will devote itself, in the words of critic Sam Freedman, to producing “personally stamped recombinations of existing knowledge.”

There is nothing new about the neoclassic impulse, which first surfaced in jazz in the early 1940s, when Lu Watters and Turk Murphy tried to re-create the music of such twenties figures as King Oliver and Kid Ory. And one can see the logic in these and other attempts to revive the past, for the evolution of jazz has been so swift that all sorts of fruitful positions were abandoned long before they were played out. What is new, though, are the nature and extent of the neoclassicism that runs through so much of jazz today.

The first generation of jazz revivalists were few in number and confined themselves to early styles. Now, however, almost the entire jazz past has been colonized by re-creators of one sort or another, including many who try to emulate and, in some cases, tame the music of such radical players of the1960s as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. And while these developments have produced some attractive music, one wonders about the well-being of an art that has so totally devoted itself to re-examining its past, especially when this trend coincides with a series of events that may have had much do with inspiring it--the passing from the scene of more and more of the first-, second- and third-generation creators who were, in effect, the music's living tradition....

But why can't jazz continue as it always has, generating vital new artists to take the place of those who are gone? And why should there be any doubts about this neoclassic phase? Isn't paying homage to its past one of the healthiest things any art can do?....

[T]oday's neoclassicism ... ostensibly seeks to revive the values of warmth, soul, and forthright swing that once were the hallmarks of jazz and, in the process, reach out to a wide audience in the same uncompromising way that Armstrong, Basie, and Ellington were able to do. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis is among the key figures in this trend, and listening to him one finds much to admire. Marsalis, in particular, is an artist of great technical and intellectual gifts, seemingly capable of realizing any idea that comes to mind. And one also has no doubt that his heart is in the right place. Lurking behind the neoclassical enterprise, though, there is a lingering sense that it is more a willed event than a natural one, despite its eagerness to restore to jazz those qualities that were, indeed, natural to the music before free jazz came along.

Warmth, soul, and swing certainly are among the hallmarks of a Ben Webster or a Dexter Gordon, but for them these things seem not be sought after in themselves. Instead they are an inevitable byproduct of the act of playing jazz, virtues that arise as a matter of course when one makes musical and emotional contact with the material at hand. And it is this sense of contact with the material that seems to be lacking in so many of today's neoclassicists, perhaps because the medium of line-against-harmony that their predecessors found so usefully resistant no longer provides them with the same kind of challenge. In David Murray's case, it is logical that this should be so, for he once was a fervent disciple of the most radical free-jazz saxophonist, Albert Ayler. As critic J.B. Figi said of another young neoclassicist, Murray “fills roles rather than playing from self,” and one can hear the difference on the version of “Body and Soul” that appears on Murray's recent album Morning Song. Sticking to the harmonic pattern of the tune until he ends his warm-toned solo with an Ayler-like squeal, Murray leaves one with the feeling that his relative orthodoxy is very much a matter of conscious choice and that his decision to play “Body and Soul” in this way ought to be a cause for congratulation. In fact, to the degree that the solo has any emotional content, it seems to lie in that dramatized sense of choice, in Murray's eagerness to gratify his and his audience's desires to experience in the present a way of playing jazz that a short while ago seemed to belong only to the past. But aside from his need to please us in this manner, who David Murray is remains a mystery--which is odd, because the style Murray seeks to emulate was one that called upon the soloist to declare and explore his identity in every note and phrase.

[Me in the present: I know, it may seem peculiar to have thrown David Murray in there, but I'll let it stand.]

There are other neoclassicists who are very aware of these problems and have come up with intriguing solutions. In particular, there are the slyly ironic Henry Threadgill and Chicagoan Edward Wilkerson Jr., a genuine romantic whose involvement with the materials at hand is never in doubt. But Threadgill and Wilkerson may only be neoclassicists in disguise, artists whose jousts with the music's past really have more to do with the specific musical issues that were raised by free jazz and that still need to be dealt with if the music is going to become something more than a museum that mounts a series of jazz-tinged puppet shows. I am afraid, though, that this is what jazz may have in store for it, as the creators for whom the making of the music is not a self-conscious act continue to pass away and the younger generation keeps trying to evoke the spirit of the past by trying on its outward forms.

[***] In the words of Igor Stravinsky, who certainly knew what neoclassicism was all about: “The borrowing of a method has nothing to do with observing a tradition. A method is replaced; a tradition is carried forward in order to produce something new. It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit.”....

[***] ....Perhaps today's jazz neoclassicists ought to ponder these words from composer-critic Virgil Thomson. Distinguishing between an “objective” music in which one can “represent other people's emotions” and a “music of personal lyricism”(which would seem to be the kind of art that jazz is), Thomson goes on to explain that “you can write or execute music of the most striking evocative power by objective methods, but you cannot project a personal sentiment you do not have. If you fake it knowingly, you are dramatizing that which should be transmitted directly; and if you fake it unknowingly, you are, merely by deceiving yourself, attempting to deceive your audience. Naturally, experienced persons can teach the young many things about the personalized repertory. But there is no set way it must be rendered, and any attempt to impose one on it takes the life out of it.”

[The following epilogue was written in 2002]:

Almost twenty years have passed, and it now seems clear that despite the prominence that the engines of cultural politics and publicity have given to Wynton Marsalis, his music (especially his latter-day orchestral work) is a non-issue aesthetically and has been for some time. Such Marsalis pastiches as the oratorio Blood on the Fields (1997), the suite In This House, On This Morning (1993) and the ballets Citi Movement (1991), Jazz (1993) and Jump Start (1995) seem to come from a strange alternate universe --one in which some of the surface gestures of Duke Ellington (Marsalis's chief model) have been filtered through the toylike sensibility of Raymond Scott.

Marsalis remains a skilled instrumentalist, but he has never been a strikingly individual soloist. As for his orchestral works, their relative poverty of invention becomes clear when they are placed alongside the likes of George Russell's Chromatic Universe and Living Time, Oliver Nelson's Afro-American Sketches, Bill Holman's Further Adventures, Muhal Richard Abrams's The Hearinga Suite, Bob Brookmeyer's Celebration, John Carter's Roots and Folklore, and, of course, the more successful orchestral works of Ellington himself. A brief comparison between one of the major vocal episodes in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” (sung by Cassandra Wilson), and the opening vocal movement of Ellington's otherwise instrumental Liberian Suite (1947), “I Like the Sunrise” (sung by Al Hibbler), might be revealing. The works are comparable in theme--the subject of Blood on the Fields is slavery in America, while Liberian Suite was commissioned by the West African republic of Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in 1847--and both “Will the Sun Come Out?” (which lasts nine minutes) and “I Like the Sunrise” (half as long) are meditative semi-laments in which hope, pain, frustration, and doubt are meant to joust with each other. The melody of “I Like the Sunrise” has an equivocal, sinuous grace (climbing in pitch toward a point of harmonic release it cannot reach, it expressively stalls out on the words “raised up high, far out of sight”), while the key turn in the lyric--“I like the sunrise…it brings new hope, they say” (my emphasis) is commented upon and deepened by a tapestry of orchestral and solo voices (particularly those of baritone saxophonist Harry Carney and clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton). By contrast, the three verses of “Will the Sun Come Out?” go almost nowhere in twice the span of time. The melody itself, despite Wilson's attempts to shape it, is hardly a melody at all but a lumpy recitative that sounds as though it had been assembled bar by bar, while the ensemble's instrumental interventions and the solos of pianist Eric Reed merely distend things further. It could be argued that within the overall dramatic scheme of Blood on the Fields, “Will the Sun Come Out?” is meant to be an episode of near-paralysis, and that the music ought to mirror this. But listen to “Will the Sun Come Out?” and ask yourself how often you have heard nine minutes of music pass this uneventfully.

Why, then, the Marsalis phenomenon, such as it has been and perhaps still is? One struggles to think of another figure in the history of jazz who was a significant cultural presence but not a significant musical one. Dave Brubeck? Perhaps, but there is no counterpart in Marsalis's music to the lyrical grace of Paul Desmond or to those moments when Brubeck himself was genuinely inspired. Paul Whiteman? Yes, in terms of the ability to marshal media attention, but if we credit Whiteman with all the music that was produced under his aegis, the comparison probably would be in his favor.

Think again of Whiteman and Marsalis, though, not in terms of the kinds of music they made but of the cultural roles they filled. In both the 1920s and the 1980s (when Marsalis arose) the popularity and respectability of jazz were felt to be key issues--the difference being that in the twenties some part of the culture found it necessary and/or titillating to link a popular but not yet “respectable” music to the conventions of the concert hall, while in the eighties jazz had come to be regarded as a music of fading popular appeal that needed the imprimatur of respectability in order to survive--and to be subsidized, like the opera, the symphony orchestra, and the ballet. Thus the tuxedoed Whiteman, wielding his baton like Toscanini; thus Marsalis the articulate whiz kid, equally at home with Miles Davis and Haydn and foe of rap and hip-hop. But while the byplay between notions of what is lively and what is respectable may be an unavoidable part of the cultural landscape, a music that springs from such premises, as Marsalis's so often seems to do, eventually stands revealed as a form of packaged status whose relationship to the actual making of music always was incidental.

[AllenLowe]

Marty Khan's an old friend, and he was telling me these things back in the early '90s - thanks for posting all that Larry. This problem, I will say, is not just with Lincoln Center, but with non-profits who should know better - back in the '80s I was on some of the early panels of the Leila Wallace Foundation which was, at least we were told, trying to re-shape the world of jazz booking as we knew it. The idea, at least as initially described, was that Wallace would give money to the good local non-profit jazz bookers all over the USA so they could change the way business was done, by helping regional musicians to excape their own local imprisonment and help them get work elsewhere with subsidy and promo help. So guess what happened? Aside from the fact that I was kicked off the panel early on (yeah, there goes Lowe again - I got kicked off because I objected to what I could see what was happening) - the money got distributed and the same old same old musicians (even if they were on the more adventurous end) got the bookings - David Murray, Don Byron, et all. Things remained exactly the same except the non-profits now had a little bit more money to do what they were already doing.

I got some people pissed off at me at the time, as I was virtually alone in my objections - and lo and behold, a year or so later Leila Wallace commissions someone to do a study of the whole project and what do they say? It was a failure because it failed to create work for less established musicians and only re-enforced what the non-profits were already doing. Gee, what a surprise -

my point, I guess, is that though Lincoln Center has been particularyl destructive in this respect, even the progressives tend to retreat to the tried and true. It's one reason why there are so many disenfranchised jazz players, as even their "friends" treat them as aliens and undesirables - lotsa lip service to the independent musician, and little real service -

Edited December 20, 2008 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

Throughout the history of jazz, there have always been strong traditionalist movements intent on preserving the purity of existing structures, and those movements often obtained positions of strong influence in the jazz establishment. But that did not prevent a critical mass of talented and ambitious musicians from pulling together and moving ahead. So what is the difference now?

The difference now is that the "traditionalist movements" aren't just part of the stream now, they are pretty much the entire river.

And the public is ok with that, since there's other things going on in other musics and other lives that cover those bases for those who want them, and that those who both produce and consume the music of the "traditionalist movements" don't have any real need for. When the public wants adventure, or exploration, or counter-mainstream, or even just to dance all night long, they've got other places to go for that. When they want to celebrate The Grand Tradition, they've got the niche market of jazz. And truthfully, that suits most everybody, including a lot of musicians who don't really have either an interest in or a clue about reaching out to an audience, especially a changing one, just fine.

All you gotta do is look at today's marketplace. Look at all the independent releases that fall outside the formula. A handfull of people buy them, a handful of articles get written, and a handful of gigs get booked and played. The cycle repeats itself every so often, enough that alternative circuits exixts. But there's no chance in 98.7% of hell that this will ever be anything other than what it is, because of the lack of a holistic scene where these musics and those musics can be viewed as part of the same family instead of Real Thing vs Some Other Thing.

Times have changed one way, the music in another, other musics in other ways, and the marketplace in yet another. There's not a helluva lot going on in jazz that's in sync with that.

Edited December 20, 2008 by JSngry

[Lazaro Vega]

I see it as a problem of the politics of naming. All these threads on what is jazz, what is black, what is minstrelsy, what is marriage, etc. should be in the Politics forum because they are all basically political. They all have to do with who has the authority to name things a certain way, or who can effectively bully their way into dominating the language.

When I do the math, what I see is people bullying traditionalists with name-calling. The traditionalist can say simply, "That music is not jazz." The "progressive" often responds with personal attacks and calling the traditionalist terms like neo-con, close-minded, reactionary, regressive. You don't see that as bullying?

The music evolves and changes. So what. That's natural. We know that. But does it improve? So much of the rhetoric employed by people who say they are just evolving the music connotes that the old music is deficient and needs to be improved. It goes roughly like this:

"Your music is old and deficient. Irrelevant. We have come along and improved it. Not only that, we are going to steal the name you have given your music and use it as our own. We will call it jazz. Your old music will be discussed mostly as a historical precursor to current jazz, which is the only jazz that is alive. And not only that. If you object, then we will label you neo-con, regressive, close-minded, etc."

First, the stance insults the tradition, or the traditionalist, then it goes even further and appropriates the cool terms that the tradition used to describe itself, piggybacking on the cachet associated with terms like jazz. Then it's a tremendous surprise when such appropriation is not embraced. Amazing!!! Really amazing to me.

Don't you see this kind of thing happen in other genres as well? I mean, how can a musician like Ricky Skaggs talk so dismissively of Bill Monroe, as though Monroe's music was somehow primitive and basically a forerunner of modern bluegrass music?

How can Beausoleil, for instance, frame itself as an improvement on the proud tradition of Cajun music by mixing in all sorts of elements that don't sound so good together, sort of like marrying a horse and a donkey to get a mule? And then be surprised that a lot of folks say "That's just not Cajun music anymore. Give me something I am used to"?

Well, that's just a few words. Not much of a counterweight to the views predominating here. Thanks for reading. This is an interesting thread.

The trouble with this point of view are the careers of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams and Steve McCall, even Coleman Hawkins. They all in one form or another and to a greater or lesser degree started out "in the tradition" and found it lacking something for their own musical development. So it isn't an us vs them evolution as much as it was a creative need being filled by opening up forms and rhythms. Which is not much different than the guys playing in Bull Moose Jackson's band or the swing bands wanting to play a more soloistic role in bebop. Fats Navarro played some great lead AND jazz trumpet with Eckstine. It would have been a great loss, however, if that's all he did. Playing with Tadd Dameron gave us all those great recorded Navarro solos. There came a time when some musicians heard more musical choices available in the world around them and applied them to their music. That's how the music evolved as well as by the hipness quotient.

That David Lee book about Ornette at the Five Spot would be good to mention at this point..... http://www.svirchev.com/features/l/lee-5spot.html

Edited December 20, 2008 by Lazaro Vega

[papsrus]

Fascinating reading.

But there's a little gnawing voice in the back of my head as I read all this though that says, "Has jazz -- creative music -- really been suppressed to such an extent by neoclassicism?"

I see how the nuts-and-bolts funding issues can be a big problem, but beyond that (admittedly very important) aspect, we have the music itself as a guide. And it seems to me that the music is flourishing in many quarters, despite -- and maybe even partly because of -- Marsalis and JALC. Some of that flourishing may have to do with changes in technology that allow less well-known (and less well-funded) artists to publish and perform their music on their own terms. A creative music scene has taken root in Brooklyn in part as a reaction not against JALC and neoclassicism, but as an offshoot of the more progressive downtown scene, which itself may be becoming somewhat staid and predictable. (I could be completely off the rails on that, but this is my sense of things).

In any case, I simply wonder if there is sometimes too much being laid at the feet of Marsalis and the whole traditionalist movement. I'm not immersed in the real-world mechanics of it all, but as a listener, my ears (and my wallet) tell me there is plenty of creative music being made today.

[Larry Kart]

... as a listener, my ears (and my wallet) tell me there is plenty of creative music being made today.

Yes, there is, thank the Lord. But how is any of this "maybe even partly because of -- Marsalis and JALC"? None of that creative music IMO is related to anything Marsalis and JALC have done in musical terms.

Or do you mean that in the face of the b.s. "success" of Marsalis and JALC, some people decided that they had to take care of the business of the business part of their relatively small but at best musically genuine scenes much more assiduously than they would have done before? Maybe so, but by that token you can justify almost anything -- like maybe Grendel was the best thing that ever happened to place where Beowulf hung out.