Jazzletter Jazzletter

Gene Lee: jazzletter PO Box 240, Ojai CA 93024-0240 januagl 2001 . Vol. Z0 No. 1 The Times and Henry Pleasants teimis players, but you will not hear earnest dufi'ers assert, “I’m as good as John McEnroe!” On the contrary, either they Part Six like to attend the championship matches or, in most cases, One difference between the Serious music composer and the watch them on television, their own limited abilities only jazz musician is that instead of exploring the harmonic enhancing their appreciation of what the masters can do. resources on their own, the latter, rather than reinventing the Hemy, by page 182 of Serious Music — and All That Jazz, wheel, looked to those who had already invented it, and is on quicksand, for he embraces, for all practical purposes, borrowed from Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and others, the ethos ofcommercial amateurism, as promulgated by the while a marginal few looked to Cage, Boulez, and the like. record-company flacks subtly denouncing master musician- Not that all of them were consciously imitative, although ship and its admirers with the new term “elitism”. It was a anyone who has known jazz musicians is aware of their clever sleight-of-mind tn'ck comparable to the'way Ronald usually well-cultivated knowledge of the European reper- and his owners made “liberal” a dirty word. Orega y Gasset toire, past and contemporary flvliles Davis in libraries, wrote: . studying concert scores; Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, and Liberalism — it is well to recall this today — is Allen Eager in love with Prokofiev). Some, however, were the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which largely autodidactic. Hale Smith has suggested that the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the Thelonious Monk discovered the half-diminished chord for noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet. It himself; but, Hale pointed out, it dates back to Mozart, at announces the determination to share existence least. Even when the jazz musicians were not borrowing the enemy; more than that, with an enemy that is weak. from classical music, they were trudging along in its tracks. It was incredible that the human species should have Where I parted company with Henry, and what caused our arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so painful (for me, at least) temporary estrangement was what refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to I considered his gullibility in the face of the New Pops, ifI be wondered at that this same humanity should so may coin a phrase. He becomes, as I saw it in 1970 and see soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline it still, a champion of amateurism in the pejorative sense of too difiicult and complex to take finn root on earth. that word. He says ofjazz, “in order to be made efiective, its perfonnance will require an improvisatory sophistication far Henry says: 0 beyond even the exceptionally gifted amateur. In the early days of jazz, in the 1920s and 1930s, every school and . The youngsters wanted a music closer to the facts college youngster with talent enough to achieve rudimentary of life; and they found it, initially, in folk music, an facility on piano, drums, trumpet, clarinet or saxophone, area already explored not only in Nashville and in the could learn to play the new tunes tolerably in a jazz style.” field of country blues, but also by such minstrel-. Oh no they couldn’t. Not even then. And they certainly researchers as John Jacob Niles, Richard Dyer could not aspire to the level of Louis Armstrong or Bix Bennett, Burl Ives and Alan Lomax. This music was Beiderbecke or Earl Hines. These men were admired not not only more mature in its textural substance; it was because they were average but because they were spectacu- also easier to play and easier to sing. It was also easy larly exceptional. Since when is the measure ofmusic in jazz to compose. A guitar, a few rudimentary chords, a or any other art been that any amateur must be able to do it? simple tune and a bit ofliterary invention addressed to Henry’s earlier writings is full of admiration for the techni- a topical theme, and our young man or wonmn was cal prowess of the great jazz musicians Whatever esthetic making his own music. dimension jazz may have had, there was an element of the It may well have been the healthiest thing that athletic about it, as in the counting of how many high C’s in had happened in music in several himdred years. a row Armstrong could play. There are millions of amateur _ _ ‘H those of Sweet Georgia Brown, Indiana, among others. It what? Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel were In the waning days of the great Broadway musicals, jazz “healthier” than Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Chopin, albums of the scores were a staple. One of the oddest was the and all the rest of those who created that incredible library Cannonball Adderley recording ofthe music from Fiddler on of European concert music? Than everyone in jazz from the Roof As good as that score is in its context, it doesn’t Louis Armstrong to Bill Evans and John Coltrane? Than have appropriate harmonic (or for that matter melodic) Frank Sinatra (for whom Hemy justly expressed such content for jazz. How are you going to blow on Sunrise, admiration elsewhere in his writings)? He says: Sunset or Tradition? And as the scores to Broadway musicals —— the watershed work was Hair, after which came Grease Jazz will have to come to terms with rock, ar1d and others — became more simplistic, indeed primitive, to some of the younger jazz musicians, both white and appeal to an audience that had grown up on rock, there was black — Gary Burton, Larry Coryell, Gabor Szabo, less and less material for the jazz musician to draw on. John Handy, Jeremy Steig, and Charles Lloyd, for Meanwhile, as the drive for profits altered the nature of example — are already showing the way. There are no radio broadcasting, the “old” material — Kem, et al — was insuperable problems, for the styles are idiomatically, heard less and less on the air. Whereas earlier audiences knew ifnot yet intellectually, compatible. The rock musician the songs on which the jazz musicians were blowing, which can use the jazz musician’s superior instnunental gave them a certain security in following the improvisations, sophistication, while the jazz musician can find a new generation was growing up a-historical. They were cut salvation from both excessive intellectuality and off from this knowledge by the censorious character of anarchy in the rhythmic, melodic and textural vitality broadcasting. Even today, when you meet someone young of rock. who has an awareness ofjazz and music other than current pop and rock, and ask why, you will usually hear some But there were insuperable problems. And, before we variant on “Well my mother and father had this record leave this point, none of the musicians he cites in this collection, and . .” paragraph have made substantial contributions to jazz. I And rock itselfgrew only negligibly. I hear this complaint hesitate to say they are peripheral figures — Burton is more not from jazz lovers but from members of the Woodstock than that — but they are not central to what has happened in generation now in middle age. One of these is the man who jazz in the thirty years since Hemy wrote the book. They prints the Jazzletter; John Landa, an extremely well-read man showed the way to nothing. And Gerry Mulligan made an trained as Va graphic artist, who said, and it startled me, “In interesting point to me: he said, “I resent fiision, because it rock music, it’s still 1965.” John and some others his age are, is giving the kids a false idea of what jazz is.” ironically, exploring jazz, making excited discoveres.. The chief problem was the harmonic poverty of rock Ortega y Gassett wrote “Not that the vulgar believes itself music. For most of its life, popular music was the lingua super-excellent and not vulgar, but that the vulgar proclaims franca ofjazz. John Lewis has pointed out that jazz evolved and imposes the rights of vulgarity, or vulgarity as a right.” in a kind of symbiosis with the great American popular Take a look at any record store-cum-head shop. songs in their classic period, written by such sophisticated At the same time there came to be less and less point in the (and for the most part well-schooled) musicians as Jerome jazz musician’s playing “the standards.” Why bother? A Kem, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Arthur Schwartz, younger audience didn’t know them anyway. So youngerjazz and more. The best but not all of them wrote mostly for the musicians on the rise began playing more and more “origi- Broadway stage. Ellington wrote for his band, Harry Warren nals,” thinking that they might as well gamer the royalties, if wrote mostly for the movies. There was, in rock music, any. It became quite common to glance at the credits of an /I‘ nothing for the jazz musician to chew on. Henry elsewhere album and fmd that every tune on it was written by the in the book points out that jazz worked in a sort of chat-onne bandleader. Few if any ofthese leaders had the compositional or passacaglia form. The differences between the two are ‘j , talent and skills of a Benny Golson, Horace Silver, Gerry disputed, but essentially you re talking about a set of chord Mulligan, or Dave Brubeck, and such albums had a sort of changes.

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