After Years of Seeking Respectability, Jazz Is Finally Winning Recognition As

Has Jazz Gone Classical?

After years of seeking respectability, jazz is finally winning recognition as “America’s classical music.’’ But the transition to the concert hall—and musical adulthood—has not been all to the good, our author writes.

by Clive Davis

ne unmistakable symptom of old knows best, blowing a languid blues solo Oage, we are told, is the habit of on a bandstand. picking up a newspaper at the breakfast The iconography of jazz is arguably table and turning first to the obituaries more fashionable now than at any time page. If that is the case, then jazz long ago since the days of The Great Gatsby. passed the stage when it first began to Donna Karan supplied the outfits for a sense its own mortality; each week, it recent tour by the hip young saxophonist seems, brings more melancholy news. The Joshua Redman; no glossy magazine is death last year of Ella Fitzgerald, who had complete without a bourbon advertise- been in retirement after years of ill health, ment depicting some artfully pho- furnished yet another reminder of how tographed tenor player, eyes shut, perspi- many of the giants have departed. Recent ration glistening on his brow. Yet the years have also seen the loss of the irre- media hubbub is counterbalanced by an placeable Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, undeniable mood of unease. Though the Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen Basie orchestra, for instance, continues McRae, Gerry Mulligan, and Stan Getz, to win magazine polls, the Count him- to name but a few of the pioneers of the self, possessor of the most inimitable of last half-century. Of the swing music mas- piano signatures, has been dead for 13 ters, of course, even fewer remain: the years. The Mingus Big Band’s raucous octogenarian vibraphone pioneer Lionel weekly sessions at The Fez, a New York Hampton has gallantly shuffled onto the watering hole, have become a chic concert stage for choruses of “Airmail attraction. But Charles Mingus himself Special’’; the former Count Basie trum- passed away nearly two decades ago. His peter Harry “Sweets’’ Edison celebrated his most admired albums—Mingus Ah Um, 81st birthday last October in the way he New Tijuana Moods, The Black Saint

56 WQ Spring 1997 Wynton Marsalis has led the movement to make jazz a music of the concert hall.

and the Sinner Lady—are more than 30 excellent protégé Benny Green, a soul- years old. ful pianist some four decades his junior, When, last autumn, New York’s Town I doubt that I was alone in wondering Hall played host to an all-star tribute to whether Green and his peers would be Oscar Peterson—now 71 and still per- able to fill the venue when they, in their forming in spite of the effects of a turn, attain the status of grizzled elder stroke—it was impossible to overlook the statesmen. fact that so many of the musicians paying homage to the pianist belonged to his ut then, as one wag has put it, if age group, a generation edging inex- Bjazz is dead, the body is in remark- orably toward retirement. As Peterson ably good condition. Walk into the aver- embarked on a vibrant duet with his age branch of a large record chain in any

Jazz 57 major city, and you are likely to find the music databases, and a fledgling touring racks crammed with enough reissues to and recording network. satisfy all but the most esoteric collectors. Recordings that were all but impossible to f America’s inheritance seems in safe find when they were first issued on 78 rpm Ihands at last, the contemporary agenda or LP discs can now be scooped up by the looks rather more ambiguous. Identifying a handful on compact discs replete with modern classic, the 1990s equivalent of, say, alternate takes and voluminous historical Miles Davis’s 1959 masterpiece Kind of Blue, notes. The most sought-after purchase of is difficult. Plenty of interesting albums are 1996 was a sumptuously packaged, six-disc still being made, but none that herald any collection of trumpeter Miles Davis’s his- dramatic advance beyond what has gone toric orchestral collaborations with the before. What are we to make of the fact that Canadian arranger Gil Evans—the jazz perhaps the most publicized album of last world’s answer, if you like, to the great year was the soundtrack of Robert Altman’s Frank Sinatra-Nelson Riddle swinging ses- film Kansas City—swing music played by sions of the 1950s. Not content with reis- Joshua Redman, James Carter, and other suing the original albums—including the young saxophonists in fedoras and baggy sublime version of Porgy and Bess— suits, all doing a wonderful job of pretending accompanied by three extensive essays, to be Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins? Columbia Records also threw in fragments The problem, some would contend, is that of overdubbed solos, rehearsal sequences, renovation and restoration are not sufficient and desultory studio conversation. To on their own. According to this view, we are some skeptics it was a case of corporate simply witnessing the repackaging of a overkill, but for Davis’s many admirers, the dynamic art form as little more than a collec- box set was the next best thing to entering tion of museum pieces, a sanitized theme a time machine and sitting in a corner at park bereft of that crucial element of sponta- the recording sessions themselves. More neous inspiration—what New Yorker jazz crit- Davis memorabilia are due to follow. ic Whitney Balliett famously described as Other record companies, taking their “the sound of surprise.’’ Even among those cue from the extraordinary success of who abhor the prolixity of John Coltrane’s Columbia’s 1990 retrospective devoted to “sheets of sound’’ solos—frenzied epics of the blues guitarist Robert Johnson—which improvisation that could last for 30 minutes sold in excess of 300,000 copies—have or more—it is generally agreed that the tenor plunged into the box set business. The saxophonist remains the last major innovator. Atlantic/Rhino Records tribute to John The 30th anniversary of his death, this com- Coltrane, aptly entitled The Heavyweight ing July, will no doubt be marked by another Champion, outweighs even the Davis set, bout of reissues. Yet if nobody has taken his devoting no fewer than seven discs to a place after three decades, so the argument mere 18-month phase in the prolific saxo- runs, then jazz can hardly hope to compete phonist’s career. Another recent arrival, on with an all-pervasive rock culture, the musi- the Blue Note label, is an effervescent, four- cal equivalent of McDonald’s, or the exotic disc compilation of traditional music, Hot temptations of so-called world music. Jazz on Blue Note, performed by the likes of The respected critic Francis Davis sum- Sidney Bechet, George Lewis, and Bunk marized the concerns of many observers in a Johnson. These fascinating recordings from provocative essay in the Atlantic Monthly last the 1940s and ’50s were reissued under the July. Noting the record industry’s propensity aegis of America’s Jazz Heritage, a program to seize upon the latest youthful talent at the organized by the Smithsonian Institution expense of older and more expressive artists, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foun- Davis complained that the musicians who dation. The foundation is also investing sev- have been receiving the most attention over eral million dollars in jazz programs run by the last decade or so—the so-called young Lincoln Center and National Public Radio, lions—lack the individuality of authentic

58 WQ Spring 1997 When jazz was young, bands such as Carroll Dickerson’s Orchestra, shown here in Chicago around 1922, attracted large popular audiences with entertainment and dance music.

leaders: “There are no Thelonious Monks or polyphony of the pianist and bandleader Jelly Ornette Colemans in this bunch—no inno- Roll Morton gave way to soloist-led, small- vators or woolly eccentrics among those group music championed by Louis we’ve heard from so far. In setting craftsman- Armstrong; Basie, Benny Goodman, and the ship as their highest goal these neophytes swing bands then took center stage before remind me of such second-tier stars of the being supplanted after World War II by Dizzy Fifties and Sixties as Blue Mitchell and Wyn- Gillespie and the beboppers. Frustrated with ton Kelly—players whose modesty and good the predictable harmonic framework of bop, taste made them ideal sidemen but whose Ornette Coleman and Coltrane led their fol- own record dates invariably lacked the dark lowers into the inhospitable, atonal realm of corners and disfigurements of character that Free Jazz during the 1960s, while another separate great music from merely good.’’ faction headed by Miles Davis headed for the In a subsequent interview, Davis made a broader—and much more lucrative—pas- particularly striking observation. Whereas tures of jazz-rock, otherwise known as fusion critics have historically been cast in the role music. Bearing in mind that the first jazz of guardians of the canon, sternly measuring record, Livery Stable Blues, by the Original new work against the timeless standards of Dixieland Jazz Band, was made in 1917, and the old, their role has now been reversed, he that the first waves of the avant-garde crashed pointed out. Now it seems to be the musi- into the public’s consciousness by the end of cians who are most interested in clinging to the 1950s, the pace of change has been aston- tradition, while critics chafe at the perceived ishingly rapid. The novelist Kingsley Amis, an dearth of fresh, adventurous voices. aficionado of the raucous speakeasy music of the 1920s and ’30s, spoke for many a bewil- ho is the new Miles, the new Charlie dered member of the old guard when he WParker? After all, the history of jazz reflected on his lost love in his Memoirs: traditionally has been presented as a series of “Good going in a sense, to have got from Great Leaps Forward initiated by towering Monteverdi to John Cage in—what? Forty individualists: the urbane New Orleans years? The Hot Five to Ornette Coleman?

Jazz 59 Nothing makes me feel more thoroughly old urehead of this austere, high-minded band of than to realize that there is nothing but a suit-and-tie revivalists. Beginning with fright- bloody great hole where quite an important eningly precise evocations of the Miles Davis part of my life once was. I mean, poetry, the Quintet, circa 1964, Marsalis has worked his novel and much more besides have gone off way back through the canon, trying his hand all right, but they have not vanished (except as at olde-worlde New Orleans and the sleeker it might be for pastiches of bygone writers).’’ lines of Ellington’s big band scores. As a star The 1970s were, it is fair to say, the bleak- of Columbia’s roster and artistic director of est period of all. (Given the quadruple blight the fast-expanding jazz repertory program at of rock “supergroups,’’ disco, punk, and An- Lincoln Center, Marsalis is now, at 35, the drew Lloyd Webber, it was hardly the bright- most influential figure in world jazz. By last est era for popular music in general.) The fol- summer Time was listing him, with a touch lowing decade saw the rise of what has been of hyperbole, as one of “America’s 25 Most called a “neoclassical” movement, a school of Influential People.’’ Hailed in a Washington twentysomething, conservatory-trained musi- Post profile, with the faintest hint of sarcasm, cians who have sought to counteract what as “the Leonard Bernstein of jazz,’’ Marsalis they saw as the lowering of standards wrought has led a frenetic one-man campaign to both by the self-indulgences of the avant- restore the music to its former prominence garde and the crowd-pleasing posturings of in American culture. Thanks to an extended the jazz-rockers. series of albums, tours, television appearances, and high school clinics—and above ynton Marsalis, a trumpeter born in all through the mixture of revivals and new WLouis Armstrong’s native New works presented at Lincoln Center—he has Orleans, emerged as the unchallenged fig- become inextricably linked with the notion of jazz as an indige- nous classical music. The link between the classical and jazz traditions has been a thread run- ning through Mar- salis’s career. When he signed with Col- umbia in the early 1980s, he made a point of dividing his energies between the classics and recordings by his group (which at that time also featured his elder brother, Bran- ford, on saxophone). In 1984, he became the first musician to win Grammy awards in both the classical and jazz categories. Indeed, the disc that brought him the classical accolade— a performance of the Haydn, Hum- A man of “dark corners”: Thelonius Monk in New York City, 1949 mel, and Joseph

60 WQ Spring 1997 Haydn trumpet concertos—finds him records, and claims to have provided him playing with more abandon and exuber- with a grounding in jazz history and litera- ance than can be found on any of his early ture, have inflamed matters further. jazz albums. Marsalis subsequently retreated from clas- arsalis can usually count on a favor- sical concerts. However, he is due to return Mable (some would say, fawning) press to the stage this spring in a Lincoln Center in New York, but as one newspaper com- touring program that will include Stravin- mentary followed another, matters came to a sky’s L’Histoire du Soldat. Meanwhile, with head in the summer of 1994, when he chal- his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra in tow, he lenged one of his principal antagonists, the has launched a major international tour, pre- writer and historian James Lincoln Collier, senting his composition Blood on the Fields, to a public debate. The immediate cause of an oratorio inspired by the history of slavery what amounted to a bare-knuckles fight was in the United States. Plans for the 1997–98 a letter Marsalis wrote to the New York Times season, unveiled in January, include a cele- Book Review in response to a positive review bration of Cuban jazz and concerts marking (by the British journalist Russell Davies) of the birthdays of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelo- Collier’s latest book, Jazz: The American nious Monk, as well as the centenary of Theme Song (1993), a collection of highly Sidney Bechet. readable essays. Marsalis’s eminence as a classical inter- Collier combines an interest in social preter is unquestioned. But his pro- commentary with a passion for the trombone nouncements on musical tradition and his that he indulges in lunchtime Dixieland ses- activist role in New York have aroused sions at a Cajun restaurant on New York’s resentment among performers and critics Eighth Avenue. In 1978 he published The alike. Even in a domain renowned for its Making Of Jazz, which remains one of the petty internecine warfare—jazz has en- best single-volume surveys of the subject. As dured almost as many sectarian disputes as his friends would agree, he also relishes an the average Trotskyite sect—the controver- old-fashioned set-to. It therefore did not sy surrounding the man who would be come as a complete surprise that, in an trumpet king has been unusually acrimo- intriguing chapter on racial divisions in his nious. book, he took a swipe at Lincoln Center for The issue of race has stirred the most its decision to “turn to blacks as authorities rancor. In short, Marsalis and his advisers on the music simply because they are black.’’ (who include the outspoken critic and Not content to rest there, Collier followed up polemicist Stanley Crouch) have been with a chapter devoted to the inadequacies of accused of indulging in “Crow Jim’’—a critics which included a blunt attack on term minted in the 1940s by critic and Stanley Crouch. composer Leonard Feather to describe reverse racism. By 1993, there were repeat- he Marsalis-Collier bout, held at ed rumblings that the programming at TLincoln Center in front of an audience Lincoln Center consistently neglected the mostly predisposed to favor the trumpeter, legacy of white performers such as Bill proved to be as entertaining as any concert. Evans and Benny Goodman, and that too Fighting on his own turf, with the venue’s many of the new commissions stayed in audio-visual resources set up at his disposal, the hands of Marsalis himself or his inner Marsalis was obviously looking forward to circle of friends. Marsalis consistently administering what he promised in his open- denied any improprieties, but the fact that, ing remarks would be a “whipping.’’ Some during a television interview, he once newspaper accounts agreed that Collier was referred to control of the music industry “trounced,’’ but although Marsalis scored being wielded by “people who read the numerous points by noting technical inaccu- Torah and stuff’’ hardly helped his cause. racies in the author’s controversial and The combative writings and remarks of unflattering 1987 biography of Duke Elling- Stanley Crouch, who routinely supplies ton, the older man appeared the superior manifestolike liner notes for Marsalis’s debater. Some members of the audience,

Jazz 61 hissing at his remarks and occasionally trying other performers, his media appearances, to shout him down, had clearly come with and his dispensing of commissions, he has the intention of taking part in a politically robbed the critical fraternity of a good deal of correct public execution. Collier cheated its power.) them of that dubious pleasure. Marsalis’s basic argument—one with which I sympathize—is that popular t was an ugly but undeniably entertain- music has for some time been subject to Iing occasion from which Marsalis an ever-accelerating process of infantiliza- emerged with less dignity than his oppo- tion, epitomized by the irresistible rise of nent. For all the theatrics, though, it would Michael Jackson and Madonna. Jazz musi- be a mistake to overestimate the signifi- cians, he insists, have a duty to resist the cance of the various Lincoln Center skir- erosion of standards rather than contribute mishes. In some respects this was a classic to the pace of “dumbing down’’ in music. New York insiders’ story of large egos bat- Many column inches have been devoted tling in an enclosed space. Some of the to Marsalis’s weary denunciations of rap resentment directed at Marsalis arises from music; as he pointed out in an interview, a perennial problem: the city plays host to the genre is only one symptom of a too many dedicated, poorly paid musicians malaise: “My feelings are not just about chasing too little work. Besides, Marsalis rap, but about the whole direction of and his repertory formula are just one seg- American popular music. Once it ment of the fractured mosaic of interna- switched from an adult base to an adoles- tional jazz, which ranges from the cent base, that was a major step backwards. ephemeral dance-floor rhythms of the Pop music used to be adult music, with fusion style called “acid jazz’’ to the stark, adult sensibilities. But since pop made that New Age ambience of recordings on the switch to an adolescent base, it has never German ECM label, or the vibrant South been able to return, as music, to what it African township rhythms of the pianist was. And I guess it’s understandable, Abdullah Ibrahim. because in terms of commerciality, it be- Marsalis’s record sales, it should be added, comes more successful every year.” have also been in decline—partly because Marsalis and Crouch affirm that jazz can he has issued too much honorable but undis- flourish only if new generations of musi- tinguished material. The sprawling, double- cians, students, and audiences are intro- album “sacred’’ suite, In This House, On This duced to the treasures of the past and learn Morning, was a case in point, a distinct anti- from them—just as the classical listener climax after the vigor of another two-disc set, learns to appreciate Bach or Mahler. Hence Citi Movement, a hyperkinetic score com- the need for the Lincoln Center program posed for the choreographer Garth Fagan. and similar projects at Carnegie Hall and Like George Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon, Marsalis the Smithsonian, where the saxophonist has long seemed to be burrowing his way and arranger Bob Wilber (who skillfully re- toward a magnum opus. He has not reached created the sound of the Ellington band on it yet—Casaubon never did—and the New Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 film The Orleans prodigy has reached an age at which Cotton Club) founded a repertory group many musicians find their best work is nearly 20 years ago. already behind them. The objection is often raised that the Cynics who believe he never will create unfettered spirit of jazz withers away in the anything as inspired as the music of the mas- formal setting of a concert hall. My own ters he so admires should also ask themselves experience is that sitting in the best seat at where jazz would be without his high-profile Avery Fisher Hall or London’s Royal Festival campaigning. Moreover, from his bully pul- Hall is no substitute for the intimate pit on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he is acoustics of a club. Yet it would also be fool- making important points about the health of ish to ignore the resources made available by popular music. (And he is listened to with institutions such as Lincoln Center. Reper- greater respect than any critic: through his ex tory music, with all its copyists and rehear- cathedra comments, his endorsements of sals, does not come cheap. The ultimate

62 WQ Spring 1997 implication of all this is that the tradition has them the superb Canadian singer-pianist in fact reached a terminus of sorts: as Diana Krall—who are reminding us of the Marsalis has expressed it, an adult evolves simplicities and virtues of unadulterated and grows more slowly than a six-year old. melody. Interestingly, his archenemy Collier arrived at a very similar conclusion in his epilogue to o wish for the return of Louis The Making Of Jazz—published, remem- TArmstrong or Count Basie’s original, ber, two decades ago: “We have to divest our- raw Kansas City orchestra is to long for the selves of the idea that the history of jazz has magical return of a combination of social always been toward better and better. In no conditions that have gone forever. Even at art has this ever been the case. . . . Jazz has the height of the swing era, in the 1930s, always been obsessed with the new, with when big bands embodied the popular experimentation, and the result has been music of the day, the amount of interesting that it has rarely paused to exploit its discov- music being played was relatively small: what eries before leaping out to make fresh most people enjoyed was dance tunes tinged ones. . . . Jazz needs, at the moment, a with the jazz idiom. For better or worse, respite from experiments. It needs time to bebop’s coterie aesthetic severed those fragile consolidate the gains, to go back and re- ties with the mainstream; henceforth, jazz examine what is there. There is enough work tended to be produced and discussed as a left undone to last many lifetimes.” branch of “art music.’’ If the music faces a cri- sis of confidence today, it is not too different f course, the strategy carries risk. Too from the predicament that confronts so Omuch church-like solemnity, too many of the arts in this febrile era of many overblown pseudoclassical suites, too postmodernism. Are the novel or the much reverence for old standards, could well visual arts in a much better state? Can alienate new listeners. Yet, in view of how the cinema be in the best of health when much damage the worst excesses of fusion the film-school antics of Quentin Taran- and the avant-garde have caused over the tino are the height of fashion? past quarter-century, the gamble is worth tak- If jazz has been pushed further toward ing. Who knows, we may also be witnessing the margins, that is a fate it shares with the beginnings of a return to an emphasis on classical music and other art forms. As arranger-led music rather than music struc- MTV culture seeps deeper into the tured around the supposedly superhuman social fabric, embracing the baby faculties of the soloist. boomers as well as their children, cul- Certainly, the neoclassical reaction has tural horizons shrink further. When I produced an over-emphasis on technique for opened my newspaper this morning, I its own sake (a problem compounded by the read another article reporting the narrow, homogenized curricula of many calamitous fall in classical music sales. music schools). But in new arrivals such as The business section, by contrast, an- Joshua Redman and the percussionist Leon nounced that the rock singer David Bow- Parker it is possible to detect musicians who ie had collected $55 million from the put emotion and that indefinable quality we issue of bonds on future royalty pay- call “soul’’ ahead of merely following the ments on his music. You do not have to rules. Just as encouraging is the flourishing of be as pessimistic as Allan Bloom to a clutch of young vocalists—chief among detect a connection there.

Jazz 63