Revivalists - the Good, The Bad and The Ugly

[Dan Gould]

Larry has some interesting comments about "revivalism" and it leads me to wonder just who in the universe of musicians who are fundamentally "revivalist" of a by-gone era, gets it "right"? Who do you think plays creatively and well within their chosen style?

Leaving aside Scott and Eric Alexander, I'll throw out a few names:

Tad Shull - I know Larry will agree with me on this one. Check out his Criss Cross leader date (the Tenor Triangle dates are good, too) Deep Passion.

Two trumpeters:

Brian Lynch & Jim Rotondi.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Bobby Broom

Bobby Forrester (unfortunately, the late)

Chris Foreman

Jim Alfredson

Joe Gloss

(Can't say Randy, 'cos he's been around since the style was alive; I assume that doesn't count)

Winard Harper

Karl Denson (a bit uneven but on form a real bad mofo)

Rodney Jones (another uneven one)

Further thoughts after I've had a ciggie.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Kankawa

Andrew Beals

Randy Johnston

MG

[jlhoots]

Grant Stewart

[medjuck]

Are there any revivalists of the '60s avant-garde, free, outside or whatever else we call it jazz?

[king ubu]

VDMK?

David Ware, Matt Shipp?

To define there has to be kind of a dateline - who has played already by 19XX is not a revivalist but the real thing, or something like that.

But then David Murray (vs. Albert Ayler) was mentioned in the other thread, so I guess the above three all qualify (vs. Ayler and Taylor, but who cares anyway).

[Chuck Nessa]

Ubu beat me to the punch.

[king ubu]

and to make a positive contribution (to the bad - and ugly in VDMK's case - but that of course is in the eye of be behearer), I'd add Roy Campbell as a "good" one - lots of blues, lots of emotion and sincerity in his playing, and to me at least it felt like he had truly absorbed the tradition and paid his dues, not like some of those fake guys (Shipp to me is somewhere in between, sometimes I like him, sometimes I don't).

Now William Parker would be another one... I'm no fan, so... but maybe he's just about old enough not to be considered a re-goer? And of course he played with a huge number of important avantgarde musicians, no denying that.

Hamid Drake, too (again I'm no fan).

And also somehow but different, Brötzmann. Different because I give the benefit of doubt to the european improv scene of the mid/late 60s, meaning I don't just consider that a derival of black american free jazz - guys like Bennink, Mengelberg, Schlippenbach, Parker etc. are also older than most of those others like Shipp, Ware, or Campbell.

[Dan Gould]

MG,

Does Bobby Forrester really qualify? Born in 1947, that made him in his early 20s at a time when the organ was probably at its all-time greatest popularity, when you think of how many labels were recording organ players as leaders.

[Dan Gould]

I wonder if Jim A. would object to being on a list of "revivalists". I think he and the band want (and have) to go beyond Jimmy or Lonnie Smith circa 1967.

[Larry Kart]

I don't think of any of the people mentioned on this thread (that I know of) as being revivalists. Below are some videos, audio clips, and one set of MP3 files of some of the real (and so seldom successful) thing:

First, the incredible French band Charquet and Co., which led to today's Le Petit Jazz Band:

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/everybod...1978/2410587002

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/vo-do-do...1978/3619881404

http://www.mp3.com/artist/le-petit-jazzban...-morel/summary/

Then samples from two albums by Australian composer-pianist Dave Dallwitz. These are more ragtime-oriented than Dallwitz's great stuff from the 1960s and before, most notably his "Ern Malley Suite," but it's all I could find. Note that many of these pieces are Dallwitz originals:

http://www.amazon.com/Hooked-Ragtime-Vol-D...e/dp/B000000ZQ2

http://www.amazon.com/Hooked-Ragtime-Dave-...pd_bxgy_m_img_b

Videos of of the great Australian eccentric reedman Ade Monsbourgh (and there are more where these came from). Ideally, one would want to hear some Ade from the '50s, and Neville Stribling is not in Ade's league, but these will give you some idea. Ade's sources are in the past, but he sounds like no one else. Again, most of the pieces that Ade's own band, Lazy Ade and His Late-Hour Boys, plays here are his own. The lyric on "Don't Monkey With It" is worth trying to make it out:

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/the-aust...-hour/828602684

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/lazy-ade...risks/528228284

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/lazy-ade...th-it/620110738

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/lazy-ade...ed-up/617746100

As Terry Martin has written of the almost miraculous Australian Trad movement of the 1940s: "Seemingly simultaneously and independently, musicians in the southern arc of the continent (Melbourne, Hobart, and Adelaide) took spirit from the great Chicago recordings of the '20s to generate a style that, while sharing some aspects with the slightly earlier revivalists in the United States, had in its prime a joy of liberation and swing all of its own... Aspirants to earlier jazz styles are advised to seek out out the Australian traditional jazz recordings of the '50s, as well as some lalter incarnations ... as an idiosyncratic example of a historic style made new." (My emphases.) And the same goes for Charquet and Co. and Le Petit Jazz Band. It's their own identities that these men are discovering and expressing through this music, and that makes all the difference. No one is asking for extra credit because they like what they like.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

MG,

Does Bobby Forrester really qualify? Born in 1947, that made him in his early 20s at a time when the organ was probably at its all-time greatest popularity, when you think of how many labels were recording organ players as leaders.

I put him in because he didn't make his first album as a leader until the late seventies, by which time the organ room thing was dying, if not dead.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I wonder if Jim A. would object to being on a list of "revivalists". I think he and the band want (and have) to go beyond Jimmy or Lonnie Smith circa 1967.

But that's the idea you were looking for, isn't it? People who think there's more to be said through an old style that, though it's no longer popular or cutting edge, hasn't been fully mined out.

That's also why I didn't put JDF in there. He's also a revivalist but, apart from huge technique, doesn't seem to me to be bringing anything personal to the work.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I don't think of any of the people mentioned on this thread (that I know of) as being revivalists.

Then we really are thinking about this differently. And I don't understand the distinction you're trying t omake.

MG

[BillF]

We live in an age of postmodernism where all the arts, including jazz, are characterised by the replacement of the modernist avant-garde ethic of always trying for something new by a "pick and mix" selecting, often with tongue in cheek, of elements of old styles. Jazz musicians like Bird, Trane and Ornette were modernists who did something no one had heard before, but from the seventies, with the phenomenon of the backward-looking Scott Hamilton and Warren Vache, we entered the postmodernist stage which is still with us. Today's jazz players tend to put their styles together from pre-existing elements, whether from swing, bop, the avant-garde or world music. The result is a jazz which has ceased to be "progressive" and which can be labeled "neoclassical" when it enters the academy, a tendency particularly associated with the activities of Wynton Marsalis. Critics Alyn Shipton and Ted Gioia are two I can think of who promote this interpretation of the way things are today.

[paul secor]

I suppose that Nat Su might be considered a revivalist by some. Not by me though - I just hear him as a fine musician.

[Dan Gould]

I don't think of any of the people mentioned on this thread (that I know of) as being revivalists.

Well, Larry, I took this statement of yours:

But even though the style of music that led to the coining of “mainstream” has now edged over into revivalism, if only because almost all the original Swing stylists are no longer with us, when the term is used today it retains some of its original ideological wishfulness. The belief or the hope is that within shifting stylistic boundaries a majority of musicians still agree on how the music can and should be played, that it is within this area of language agreement that the music’s most genuinely creative figures are at work, and that the course of the music will and should flow along in this manner. In fact, things are a bit more complicated than that."

and added the fact that today (as I think most people will agree), the "mainstream" encompasses pre-bop to hard bop. So Wynton acolytes, Hamilton, Eric Alexander, Tardo Hammer are therefore "revivalists".

[king ubu]

I suppose that Nat Su might be considered a revivalist by some. Not by me though - I just hear him as a fine musician.

In the end, who really cares? Su is great (one of the very few who searched his path in the footsetps of Konitz and not took the Charlier Parker freeway), and as with guys like Mark Turner or Kurt Rosenwinkel, whom I feel a bit ambivalent about, I'd not consider their music revivalist.

[Larry Kart]

I don't think of any of the people mentioned on this thread (that I know of) as being revivalists.

Then we really are thinking about this differently. And I don't understand the distinction you're trying t omake.

MG

The pieces from my book that I posted on page 7 of this thread (especially the piece titled "Raiders of the Lost Art") are my best attempt:

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...music&st=90

I'll try to add a bit more. Off the top of my head, genuine jazz revivalism in my view must involve a literal or figurative distance from contemporary phenomena and/or a desire to distance oneself from contemporary phenomena. For example, the very first jazz revivalists, the Lu Watters Yerba Buena crowd in San Francisco, was driven in part by a professed loathing for the supposedly corrupting commericialism of the slick Swing bands (yes, they meant Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, et al., and they felt this music corrupted both musicians and the public) as well as by their belief that jazz had a relatively neglected/forgotten, artistically pure Edenic past, which they could return to and revive. Also, I hate to mention this, but for some of these folks there was a good deal of CPUSA parlor Marxism mixed in. e.g. pioneering primal black geniuses being ripped-off by the machinery of mass-market capitalism. The CPUSA's whole "folk music" binge coincides with this. Of course, Watters et al. also genuinely dug King Oliver, Johnny Dodds, etc., but for my tastes, they seldom were up to the challenge musically (though people whose opinions I respect disagree). Also, and this brings up another key point, though the SF revivalists didn't see it that way, they were perhaps too close -- in time and physical/social distance -- to their models. Here there was the interesting fact that Condonites, whose music was as close by as could be, had never ceased to play their version of the music they themselves had played in the '20s. Don't have chapter and verse on this, but my guess was that the SF revivalists regarded the Condonites as no less corrupt than the Goodman and Shaw bands, et al. I should add that the one great key virtue of the SF revivalists is that they regarded the pieces of the '20s that they were drawn to as worthwhile in themselves, as vehicles for ensemble performance, not merely as frameworks for solos. They themselves IMO were not able to bring this off as well as was desireable, but this was a genius insight in terms of what would come to pass elsewhere. (Footnote: Given the template I'm building here, I think that Wynton definitely is a revivalist, though of a newish, corrupt sort -- because the goals of his movement were so deeply oriented toward acquiring cultural power, under the guise of moral-aesthetic righteousness.)

Elsewhere was Australia in the early 1940s. There the literal and figurative distance factor was profound. Exposure to American recordings and to American culture in general was limited, and the players who did respond were in all other respects embryonic, quirky home-grown modernists who were trying in a host of ways to define themselves in a culturally raw enivornment, not to cock a snook at the supposedly slickly oppressive Swing bands who loomed so large in the SF revivalist ethos. Two further things: The young Australian players who caught this Trad fever were in one sense amatuers but also were at best, in terms of sheer musical talent, the best players around there regardless of style; this could not be said of Watters and his people IMO. In any case, virtually everyone Down Under who was any good began to sound like himself; in particular, the SF emphasis on the compositional weight of early jazz pieces led to, from Dave Dallwitz especially, the creation of pieces that were in the style of early jazz but were distinctly his own and, I and others believe, as good as anything from, say, Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers. Sounds crazy, but take a listen. The "Ern Malley Suite," if you can find it, is one of the major large-scale jazz compositions.

On to Jean-Pierre Morel and his Charquet and Co. of the 1970s and the Le Petit Jazz Band of today. It's perhaps revealing that, as Morel has said, his music was in part based on a negative reaction to what was in France when Morel was a young man a big portion of the contemporary jazz scene -- the broadly popular and fairly crude (both in terms of music per se and in terms of its response to its supposed sources in the jazz past), show-bizzy strain of jazz revivalism that prevailed in France in the 1950s and '60s (Claude Luter would be an example of this.) Based on his own burgeoning involvement with the orchestral jazz of the '20s (Morel was collecting obscure recordings and hunting down and poring over scores), this young provincial somehow assembled a band of like-minded guys, and ... well I hope you saw and heard the videos I posted earlier in this thread; they say it all. And Le Petit's many recordings are proof that there's probably no end to this vein of precious metal. It should be added that, akin to Dallwitz in this regard, Morel's arrangements of these pieces are his own work, not off-the-record copies or literal recreations of surviving charts. The amazing ensemble zeal of these performances, and the frequently thrilling and quite individual solo work (Alain Marquet, by any standard that comes to mind, is one terrific jazz clarinetist), make it clear that these men have plunged into the jazz past in order to make something new that expresses who they themselves are -- just as much as, say, Woody Shaw or Ornette or anyone else did or is doing that. No f------- nostalgia, and no f------- post-modernism either; just a personal form of love.

[AllenLowe]

I tend to to think that someone is NOT a revivialist unless they are being one in a conscious way - it's one thing to say, "I'm going to bring back that old music" and than excavate it technically; quite another to just play in the way you feel naturally and have it coincide with older styles(s) - the difference in perspective also effects WHAT you play and how you play it -

Edited February 26, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Rooster_Ties]

I tend to think that someone is NOT a revivalist unless they are being one in a conscious way - it's one thing to say, "I'm going to bring back that old music" and than excavate it technically; quite another to just play in the way you feel naturally and have it coincide with older styles(s) - the difference in perspective also effects WHAT you play and how you play it -

I was about to say: "Yeah, I was thinking that too!!!" Probably more the case that this perspective resonates strongly with me too.

It seems clear to me that Wynton is also a revivalist -- but beyond that of course, he's also a fetishist -- (fetishist: definition #3: blind devotion: a fetishism of sacrifice to one's children.) -- and an ideologue (a person who zealously advocates an ideology). So as much as Wynton (himself) annoys me -- but yes, his music annoys me too -- it's that lethal cocktail of revivalism, fetishism, and ideology that REALLY gets my ire up.

So where does Wynton stand purely on revivalist grounds?? I don't think very well, but it's hard to be objective about such things. All I know is his shit (the music itself) usually gives me the willies - I do know that.

Edited February 26, 2008 by Rooster_Ties

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Off the top of my head, genuine jazz revivalism in my view must involve a literal or figurative distance from contemporary phenomena and/or a desire to distance oneself from contemporary phenomena.

OK, so if I now read you right, Deep Blue Organ Trio aren't revivalists because they aren't doing it to try to distance themselves in time (since they're in Chicago, they can't distance themselves geographically) from the present; they're merely continuing to play in a style that, though it's no longer got a cutting edge, still has numerous musicians, who were its exemplars in the fifties and sixties, playing. This would include Reuben Wilson, Mel Sparks, Houston Person and Lonnie Smith.

I can see your point there. I'd say that the original audience for these musicians and their music has gone away and they now are playing to a different audience; one that showed practically no interest when these guys were in their prime but, once the main venues at which the music thrived had closed down, realised that it had missed something. And that Deep Blue Organ Trio are playing to this same (new) audience and not the original one. 'Course, I'm not familiar with Chicago, but I do think the Green Mill is not an organ bar. (Actually, looking at a few sleeve notes, I don't see any Chicago organ bar in the sixties - The Organizers and The Three Souls used to play at the Hungry Eye and I do recall a Kingston Trio LP having been mde there.)

This is obviously not the same kind of revivalism that you're talking about. But I think it's revivalism just the same. And DBOT actually are pretty good in that they do have a different approach to the tradidtional material from what would have gone down in Newark.

On to Jean-Pierre Morel and his Charquet and Co. of the 1970s and the Le Petit Jazz Band of today. It's perhaps revealing that, as Morel has said, his music was in part based on a negative reaction to what was in France when Morel was a young man a big portion of the contemporary jazz scene -- the broadly popular and fairly crude (both in terms of music per se and in terms of its response to its supposed sources in the jazz past), show-bizzy strain of jazz revivalism that prevailed in France in the 1950s and '60s (Claude Luter would be an example of this.) Based on his own burgeoning involvement with the orchestral jazz of the '20s (Morel was collecting obscure recordings and hunting down and poring over scores), this young provincial somehow assembled a band of like-minded guys, and ... well I hope you saw and heard the videos I posted earlier in this thread; they say it all. And Le Petit's many recordings are proof that there's probably no end to this vein of precious metal. It should be added that, akin to Dallwitz in this regard, Morel's arrangements of these pieces are his own work, not off-the-record copies or literal recreations of surviving charts. The amazing ensemble zeal of these performances, and the frequently thrilling and quite individual solo work (Alain Marquet, by any standard that comes to mind, is one terrific jazz clarinetist), make it clear that these men have plunged into the jazz past in order to make something new that expresses who they themselves are -- just as much as, say, Woody Shaw or Ornette or anyone else did or is doing that. No f------- nostalgia, and no f------- post-modernism either; just a personal form of love.

That was a kind of interesting bit of stuff OK, you may not have come across Kankawa. He's a Japanese organist. Made quite a few standard type of Soul Jazz albums and a duo job with Brother Jack. But he's been expanding in recent years and incorporating Rock into it - now that wasn't what Fusion was doing in my view. The Fusion guys were relating to Hard Bop, not Soul Jazz. But he's also incorporating some Japanese aesthetics into it - not Japanese music itself; just Japanese stylishness. So it sounds very different, even if he has people like Ronnie Cuber or Gary Bartz with him. (He also dresses like a cartoon version of Elton John at his most eccentric and now calls himself Kankawa 122.)

Try the album BIII for a sample. If Morel interests you, Kankawa 122 will, I think. Anyway, I think he definitely qualifies.

MG

PS and Kankawa sure is FUN!

[Larry Kart]

Off the top of my head, genuine jazz revivalism in my view must involve a literal or figurative distance from contemporary phenomena and/or a desire to distance oneself from contemporary phenomena.

OK, so if I now read you right, Deep Blue Organ Trio aren't revivalists because they aren't doing it to try to distance themselves in time (since they're in Chicago, they can't distance themselves geographically) from the present; they're merely continuing to play in a style that, though it's no longer got a cutting edge, still has numerous musicians, who were its exemplars in the fifties and sixties, playing.

MG

Exactly. And I like DBOT, have bought their records. Also, while the Green Mill is not exclusively an organ bar, out-of-town organ groups do play there -- Will Blades' is one that I went to hear. (Will is the son of an old friend of mine, former Chicago Tribune Book editor John Blades.)

About Wynton (and his gurus) as revivalists/fetishests/ideologues (I think they're all three, and probably some other stuff there aren't names for yet), accumulation of cultural power in the name of righteousness soon became the gist of it IMO. This was a new thing in jazz revivalism as far as I know; nobody before had ever thought that one could actually storm the palace (and/or build a palace) under such a banner. I tell ya, those of us who saw it happen witnessed one of the most remarkable feats of social engineering in the history of modern man. Some day it will be studied the way people study the Spanish Inquisition (or, now that I think it, the Counter-Reformation).

[Hot Ptah]

Larry Kart, So that I can understand the distinctions you are making, would Don Byron's "Bug Music" album qualify as revivalist as you are using the term?

[Soul Stream]

go BEYOND Jimmy or Lonnie Smith circa 1967.

....you can take it to a different place maybe...but you can never go beyond.