Marc Myers writes about jazz for the Wall Street Journal, which must be a heck of gig, considering that there really isn’t that much to write about, and hasn’t been for a long time. His own book stops dead at 1972, with no mention of Wynton Marsalis or ECM Euro-jazz, or of Weather Report, the Jazz Crusaders, or the rise of ‘electric jazz’ or ‘smooth jazz’, or the disgraceful jazz education industry. But then, he’s a journalist, and hand-feed-don’t-bite. Being rude about Wynton Marsalis is still not good for anyone’s career.
For all the music industry history, including a fascinating chapter on the effect of Los Angeles on West Coast Jazz, and the political history, Myers can’t get a coherent story going. It slips out of his grasp every time a new chapter starts. One reason is that he doesn’t engage with jazz as music, and see it as something with its own internal logic of development. He’s writing a purely externalist history, and those often feel dis-jointed.
There’s a line of ideas to be traced from the simultaneous improvisations of Dixieland to the group improvisations of Ascension
and the avant-garde jazz groups working today. That line goes through small bands - trios to nonets - in which soloing is an intrinsic part of the music.
There’s another line to be traced from dance-orchestras playing composed waltzes to the jazz dance bands, to Basie's and Ellington’s bands, which comes to an end in the mid-1960’s. Though solos were played, and often had to be offered to retain good players, these were add-ons: the tune would work perfectly well without the solo.
A small-band piece starts by stating a theme or tune, maybe twice, proceeds to divert by way of three or four solos of varying length, which may or may not refer fleetingly to the opening theme, and finishes with a re-statement of the theme. Big-band pieces are all about the written tune and arrangement, and the solos are at most twelve bars, and only one, and that close to the one on the record.
The more composed more of it is, the less it’s jazz, but if there’s no theme, chord sequence, or mood, then it’s avant-garde. Flamenco Sketches is a mood created by a pace and a sequence of changes, some from one mode to another with the same notes, and some from one key to another. It’s jazz, and can only be played by instrumentalists who are also musicians and of the highest quality.
That’s why West Coast jazz, and the jazz-y music of film and TV soundtracks, is only marginally jazz. Myers explains that this music had to be made quickly and cheaply, and therefore by technically skilled, sight-reading players who could nail the tune first time round. A lot of those men had been through one music college or another on the GI Bill, and could sight-read fluently, transpose effortlessly, and knew their C#7/5dim9 from their Emaj7dim4add13, without having to think about it. Nerds, the lot of them. They could play solos, but it wasn’t what they spent their time doing, when they weren’t in the studios. When they weren’t in the studios, they were driving to another studio, playing golf with music producers, or playing softball with their kids in the gardens of their ranch houses in the LA suburbs. That where Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell found all those effortlessly competent studio musicians in the 1970’s.
And let’s not go near the jazz-fusion thing of the early 1970’s. (Myers does, for a whole chapter.) I was there in the audience. It was not a pretty sight. Only four bands ever did it well: Miles Davis, Weather Report, The Crusaders, and Steely Dan. (Steely Dan was seen as a hip rock band at the time: looking back it’s clear they were really jazz composers who could cut a rock tune now and again.) The rest were, for all the technical virtuosity of the players, a mess. Some of the worst music ever played by superb instrumentalists came out of the jazz-rock / fusion years of the early 1970’s. If the band didn’t have Joe Zawinul or Larry Carlton in it, it wasn’t going to work.
(Digression: Guitarists and post-1969 jazz have never gone well together. Miles Davis remains the only bandleader who ever got genuine feeling and music out of the young John McLaughlin. Most big-name jazz guitarists since have lacked finesse and musicality. Except Larry Carlton, who understood that the guitar is a slow instrument and its notes should be given time to make themselves felt. Listening to his solo on Chain Reaction
I wonder how much Larry Carlton learned from the legendary Steve Cropper?)
So core-jazz is a chamber music based on recognisable tunes, themes or changes, in which extemporised soloing is an integral part, and which has a tinge of the blues, a hint or more of swing in the rhythm, and uses four-note seventh-chord based harmonies, as opposed to classical music, which uses three-note fifth-chord based harmonies. That last bit of music nerdery is suggestive rather than definitive: the point is that hard-core jazz has a distinctive style of harmony which when played anywhere else sounds ‘jazzy’.
Now add in the Romantic artistic ideal of creativity as novelty and genre-busting, rather than creative ingenuity within a genre (at which the Baroque composers excelled, for instance), and a certain amount of good old-fashioned manly competition - in other words, the twentieth-century artistic temperament - and we have a motive for continuous change. It took Jean-Luc Godard less than eight years to go from Breathless to the fin du cinema of Week-end. It’s not surprising that John Coltrane could go from bebop, through the reductio ad absurdum of bebop that is Giant Steps, and one of the most popular albums in jazz, A Love Supreme, to the free jazz of Ascension, in a mere ten years. And what the hey did anyone do after that? Miles Davis provided one answer, with time-no-changes, and then with the `electric’ period, but that was after he had tried to figure out what the rock bands were doing.
In my version of the story, jazz killed itself by using John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and others to work itself to its logical conclusion (Hegel would be so proud). The economic and social changes didn’t help, but weren’t the main reason.
In the usual version, the changing economics and demographics of American towns reduced the audience for jazz. The blatant racism of many American policemen didn’t help. And then the British invaded America in 1963 and the Beatles killed jazz.
Well, not quite.
Any form of art grows and develops with an audience, often mostly from one birth cohort, and when that cohort dies, the music vanishes, to be re-discovered a hundred years later (as happened to Bach. And Shakespeare, for that matter). Lesser talents may have to wait for the development of an entire industry devoted to re-discovering them (as has happened with the `early / period music’ movement).
Jazz always did have a small audience. White women just don’t like chamber jazz, though your grandmother might have liked Bing Crosby. (Everybody likes Bing Crosby.) From bebop onwards jazz has been adopted by people who don’t feel part of the mainstream of society. The easiest way for a white boy to show he was hipper than the average square, and could put some effortless effort into his entertainment, was to listen to hard-core jazz.
Out there somewhere was a huge audience of mainstream squares, just waiting for something that spoke to them, and that they could adopt without marking themselves as outsiders. Or worse, in America, as intellectuals.
They found it in The Beatles rather than in Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, because Lennon and McCartney simply wrote better music than almost everyone else, including Burt Bacharach. Bacharach and David wrote clever, complicated and sad music.
All the time.
Lennon and McCartney wrote songs that were more memorable-emotional-danceable-repeat-listenable and all-round entertaining. What music is after all supposed to be. And often showing a little flash of high-grade sophistication, like the incomprehensible opening chord of Hard Day’s Night, or the Palestrina-like harmonies in If I Needed Someone. Not enough to be difficult, but enough to re-assure everyone that this was not disposable Teen Pan Alley stuff.
That mainstream audience descended on pop and rock music. Record companies exist to make money, and the returns on capital from pop / rock were way higher than on jazz. When the kids who wanted to be dissenters found Bob Dylan and the `protest’ singers, jazz was robbed of most of its second-generation-dissenter audience.
Then it turned out that the Beatles and The Who and quite a few others really were pop-artists who worked in music rather than painting, and so the intellectual and the cultured could get on the pop / rock bandwagon as well. So the only young white boys digging jazz were those who came into it through the electric music of Miles Davis, or an interest in the avant-garde, or through their father's record collection.
But. But most of it was recorded, and most of those recordings were digitised, and so can be stored at a very low cost. Streaming music services create a huge demand for all sorts of sounds, and a lot of hard-core 1950’s and early 1960’s jazz is used to replace the dreaded ‘muzak’ in public places. To modern ears, it is pleasant, has a good but not obtrusive rhythm, and the solos provide a more textured background. Starbucks is never going to programme Ascension. Or even A Love Supreme. There are limits.
Jazz did what so many art forms do: it ran itself out and was replaced by something else. Now it exists in an archive, to be played when the mood is right.
One thing I do agree with Myers about: jazz played itself out in or around 1972. Take the release of On The Corner as the symbolic date. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that gets filed in the ‘jazz’ section in the record stores, but it ain’t jazz. It’s something else. Though his job may depend on him not saying so, I suspect Myers agrees with me.
No comments:
Post a Comment