Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21St Century
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Make It New RESHAPING JAZZ IN THE 21ST CENTURY Bill Beuttler Copyright © 2019 by Bill Beuttler Lever Press (leverpress.org) is a publisher of pathbreaking scholarship. Supported by a consortium of liberal arts institutions focused on, and renowned for, excellence in both research and teaching, our press is grounded on three essential commitments: to be a digitally native press, to be a peer- reviewed, open access press that charges no fees to either authors or their institutions, and to be a press aligned with the ethos and mission of liberal arts colleges. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, California, 94042, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11469938 Print ISBN: 978-1-64315-005- 5 Open access ISBN: 978-1-64315-006- 2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944840 Published in the United States of America by Lever Press, in partnership with Amherst College Press and Michigan Publishing Contents Member Institution Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Jason Moran 21 2. Vijay Iyer 53 3. Rudresh Mahanthappa 93 4. The Bad Plus 117 5. Miguel Zenón 155 6. Anat Cohen 181 7. Robert Glasper 203 8. Esperanza Spalding 231 Epilogue 259 Interview Sources 271 Notes 277 Acknowledgments 291 Member Institution Acknowledgments Lever Press is a joint venture. This work was made possible by the generous sup- port of Lever Press member libraries from the following institutions: Adrian College Grinnell College Agnes Scott College Hamilton College Allegheny College Harvey Mudd College Amherst College Haverford College Bard College Hollins University Berea College Keck Graduate Institute Bowdoin College Kenyon College Carleton College Knox College Claremont Graduate University Lafayette College Library Claremont McKenna College Lake Forest College Clark Atlanta University Macalester College Coe College Middlebury College College of Saint Benedict / Saint John’s Morehouse College University Oberlin College The College of Wooster Pitzer College Denison University Pomona College DePauw University Rollins College Earlham College Santa Clara University Furman University Scripps College Sewanee: The University of the South Union College Skidmore College University of Puget Sound Smith College Ursinus College Spelman College Vassar College St. Lawrence University Washington and Lee University St. Olaf College Whitman College Susquehanna University Willamette University Swarthmore College Williams College Trinity University vi MeMber InstItutIon AcknowledgMents For my parents, Will Beuttler and Joan Beuttler, and my wife, Kim Abrams Beuttler INTRODUCTION I’m not an isolationist, and I’m not obsessed with trying to do anything new. I feel as attached to history as my teachers might have been. I’m trying to do what they did— keep it free and open. I use their language and reshape it. The ones who have passed, when I meet them at the big gate they’re going to ask me, “Did you take care of our music?” — Jason Moran, as quoted in the New Yorker, March 11, 2013 The most important artist and the most important time is, like, right now. It’s the people who are learning now, and creating new things right now. Idol worship doesn’t help this music in any way. — Esperanza Spalding, as quoted in the New Yorker, March 15, 2010 This book on jazz as it enters its second century is modeled on one published in 1965. Jazz Masters of the 50s, by Joe Goldberg, was the first of the six decade-ori ented volumes of jazz history published by Macmillan Publishing Co. between 1965 and 1972. It’s my favorite in the series (though pianist/composer Ethan Iverson makes a good case for Rex Stewart’s Jazz Masters of the 30s, which like Iverson’s own award- winning blog, Do the Math, has the advantage of being written by an accomplished musician), largely for its format, which devotes a chapter apiece to a dozen heroes from my early jazz- listening days, among them Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Sonny Rollins. The format enabled Goldberg, in what turned out to be his only book, to use his dozen profiles to provide a snapshot of where jazz stood as it entered the 1960s. (He died in 2009, having written “a few hundred liner notes” and still contributing to Billboard and other publications.) My book attempts to give a similar sense of where jazz stands today, through the stories of several top artists (seven individuals and the trio the Bad Plus, which switched pianists as the book was being written) who rose to prominence in the jazz world around the year 2000 and afterward. Organizing this book into chapters that read like magazine profiles makes it more digestible for readers and allows them to read the chapters in whichever order they prefer. Goldberg’s book was structured that way, as was series editor Martin Williams’s similarly readable Jazz Masters of New Orleans (1967). More challenging was deciding which artists to include. I made and remade lists of thirty or so possibilities as I began my research, and found that about half of them kept bubbling to the top as musicians whose work had the qualities I was looking for. I wanted people whose music was taking jazz places it hadn’t been, as opposed to carrying on styles of jazz already being established when Gold- berg’s book was published. I wanted musicians whose work has both intellectual and visceral appeal, who neither pandered to audiences nor were indifferent to pleasing them— that is, musicians whose work had a chance to captivate listeners who weren’t necessarily jazz aficionados. I wanted people who illustrated how significantly jazz had changed over the fifteen years between my leaving an edit- ing job at DownBeat in October 1987 and starting to write weekly on jazz for the Boston Globe in late 2002. The title Make It New, borrowed from Ezra Pound’s modernist call to arms, reflects those changes. When I left DownBeat, jazz was in its neoclassical period— a time when Wynton Marsalis and others dubbed “young lions” were emphasizing a return to the principles of straight- ahead jazz of the 1950s and earlier, particularly the foundational elements of swing and the blues. The newer styles of jazz that had arisen in the 1960s and ’70s didn’t disappear, and other experimentation had con- tinued throughout the peak neoclassical years, but the neoclassicists were better marketed, meaning they dominated what little attention jazz received from main- stream media and got the most work in clubs and concert halls. This had changed, however, by the time I began covering jazz for the Globe. The newer talents on the scene showed more interest in not only mastering the music that had preceded them, but also building on that foundation to create something new.1 A digression in a 2013 “Before and After” session in JazzTimes magazine suc- cinctly summarized this evolution. The pianist Kenny Werner was discussing a track by the young trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire when he said, “You know, the ’70s were about creativity. The ’80s became this neoclassicist thing. The bad thing was that people got hung up on what is and what isn’t jazz. But the good thing is that musicians really trained themselves. When I began to dig it was in the 2 MAke It new mid- ’90s, when I realized that musicians were better trained than we ever were, because we didn’t have that discipline. But they were becoming creative again.” The 2010 DVD Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense focused more formally on jazz as it was evolving in the first years of the new century, and can be viewed as a sort of addendum (and perhaps rebuttal) to the Ken Burns series Jazz from ten years earlier, which surveyed jazz history with a point of view greatly influenced by Wynton Marsalis. Esperanza Spalding, Anat Cohen, and Robert Glasper are among the many musicians featured in the newer film, Glasper most provocatively, whose main point can be summarized with a line from Terence Blanchard: “There’s a group of young musicians who have a new vision.” An intriguing but gloomier point is raised in the film by the Seattle journalist Paul de Barros, who doubts whether it is possible for jazz to recapture the relevance it had a half- century earlier. “You think of more than music,” de Barros explained to the camera. “You think of integration, the civil rights movement. You think of a kind of bohemian outsider- ism. The problem that jazz faces right now is that if you say ‘jazz’ to somebody, they don’t have something in the present culture they can connect it with. What is it actually saying? If you asked Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins what their music was saying, they would say, ‘Well, I’m a black person in a white society, and I have something to say, and I need it to be heard.’ That was part of the message behind that music. That was the urgency of it. We understand that, and we understand the relationship between Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman and black freedom. We do not understand what the relationship is between Bill Frisell and society.” The late saxophonist and producer Bob Belden said something similar to jour- nalist Bill Milkowski for a JazzTimes profile in 2000: “Jazz does not reflect what’s going on in society at all. Because musicians don’t make music that tells a story. And for the most part it’s because they don’t have a story to tell, except the story of long hours practicing at Berklee.”2 That began changing significantly with the killings that launched the Black Lives Matter movement, with jazz reclaiming some of its role as protest music that it had ceded to hip- hop in recent years— and had already begun sharing through the turbulent 1960s and afterward with folk, rock, soul, and R&B.3 Robert Glasper (one of the jazz musicians who performed on Kendrick Lamar’s important 2015 hip- hop album To Pimp a Butterfly) and Ambrose Akinmusire (who played on one track of that album) both released albums that had tracks that included the recita- tion of the names of victims of police violence.