Is Jazz Dead? Duke Ellington died on 24 May 1974. Within days Miles Davis had recorded a tribute, ‘He Loved Him Madly’ (alluding, of course, to Ellington’s ‘Love You Madly’). Across the Atlantic, Philip Larkin was also moved by Ellington’s death: ‘Let us bury the great Duke’, he wrote (alluding to Tennyson’s poem on the death of Wellington). ‘I’ve been playing some of his records: now he and Armstrong have gone jazz is finally finished.’ Miles Davis died on 28 September 1991. On 12 October Keith Jarrett and his trio recorded ‘For Miles’ and ‘Blackbird, Bye Bye’ as their tribute to him. In the fall of 1996 Jarrett became ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. If that is a more accurate name for what is popularly known as ME, for Jarrett, it was a ‘stupid’ understatement. ‘It should’, he said, ‘be called Forever Dead Syndrome.’ He couldn’t do anything, couldn’t play the piano. For someone who claimed that ‘playing the piano’ had been his ‘entire life’, it was like not existing. Recorded at his home studio in rural New Jersey, The Melody At Night, With You (1999) was the album of Jarrett’s convalescence. In a way it was a very modest offering: an hour of old love songs and standards played solo, on the piano, with little sign of the surging improvisational gusto that marked Jarrett’s epochal Köln Concert of 1975. When he took a break from playing improvised music to begin recording Bach in 1987 Jarrett remarked, ‘This music doesn’t need my help.’ This time around it was the pianist who needed the help 258 Working the Room of loyal old tunes like ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ and ‘I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good’. Finding themselves needed and profoundly appreciated, the songs flickered back to life. If this seems a sentimental reading consider Jarrett in the wider context of jazz at the tail-end of the century through which it streaked. Was it not appropriate – inevitable, almost – that one of the greatest living jazz musicians should have succumbed to exhaustion when the medium in which he was working had utterly exhausted itself? From the early ’40s to the late ’60s, jazz strode confidently into the future, constantly revolutionising itself. Such was the speed of development during this period that, in its aftermath, musicians could build careers stocktaking the immense hoard of cultural riches laid in by the likes of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis (with whom Jarrett played in the early ’70s). As a consequence, the forward momentum of the music diminished to the point where it became choked by the enormous weight of the past. Like the Mississippi, the jazz delta began to silt up. Two directions were possible: backwards, into the past, or sideways – east more often than not – to the edges of the form, into world music. Recorded in May 1961, ‘Olé’ is one of the first tracks on which John Coltrane can be heard moving east. On this occasion he looked only as far as Spain, but later stages of the journey can be traced by the simple geography of titles like ‘Africa/Brass’ and ‘India’. Not everyone viewed this odyssey sympathetically. Larkin held Coltrane largely responsible for the ‘racket of Middle East bazaars’ that came in his wake. Larkin was a musical bigot but anyone listening to the screeching ‘chaos’ and ‘absurdity’ – Larkin again – of Om (1965) would concede that he had a point. On the title track of Olé, however, Trane’s soprano solo begins with extraordinary discretion and delicacy. It comes after a blazing flamenco bass duet between Reggie Workman and Art Davis. At first you do not even realise that the soprano sax has taken over: it sounds, instead, like a stringed instrument, as if one of the bassists is straining into the higher register of the violin. Or, to alter the angle of approach slightly, as if the interplay between the basses is so tight that the Is Jazz Dead? 259 soprano can insinuate itself into the mix only by passing itself off as a kindred instrument. On Yara (1999) by the Lebanese oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil one experiences exactly the opposite sensation. For this, his tenth album, Abou-Khalil was joined by two Frenchmen, Dominique Pifarély (violin) and Vincent Courtois (cello). At one point on the opening track, ‘Requiem’, the violin sounds like a soprano sax before gradu- ally assuming its usual musical identity. What happened in the thirty-eight-year interim, between Olé and Yara? To put it as concisely as possible, jazz as jazz died. Perhaps, iron- ically, that is why we had to wait until 2000 for a comprehensive documentary series like Jazz by Ken Burns: jazz is history. That may also be why, having ridden the crest of a stylish jazz revival when first released, movies like ’Round Midnight and Bird have rapidly acquired the patina of period pieces or costume dramas. The same point can be made the opposite way: some of the best new jazz releases are actually old releases re-mastered and re-packaged. Specialist publications aside, the only place where jazz commands extensive media attention is on the obituary pages, when living legends die. Not surprisingly, concerts by jazz giants often have the reveren- tial stuffiness of improvised mausoleums. I hear a clamour of objections. Isn’t this simply another of the ‘premature autopsies’ denounced by Stanley Crouch? Aren’t these concerts almost always sold out? Isn’t the audience invariably ecstatic with gratitude? Since old rock bands keep coming back from the dead, re-forming, touring, why shouldn’t old jazzers keep playing for as long as their fingers are nimble? Why shouldn’t talented young musicians have the chance to explore the legacy of Charlie Parker? They can, they should. But jazz is like Woody Allen’s shark: it has to keep moving, going forward, otherwise it dies. That’s inherent in the idea of its animating characteristic: improvisation. The Who can play ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ again and again, forever and a day, without undermining the song’s credibility. Every rock song aspires to the status of an anthem. But as soon as a jazz tune becomes anthemic it is no longer jazz – it’s elevator music. (Yes, ‘A Love 260 Working the Room Supreme’ is played in elevators.) Change is immanent to jazz. Wynton Marsalis has done much to raise awareness of the jazz tradition but his conservative approach drew an inevitable rebuke from the late Lester Bowie, who energetically espoused an alternative tradition of change, innovation and revolution. The problem – as anyone who has heard Archie (‘gonna be a Re-re-revolution’) Shepp perform in recent years will testify – is that the modes of change have them- selves become dated, fixed (gonna be a Re-re-repetition). The allure of the avant-garde turns out to be primarily nostalgic. (There is some- thing pleasingly apposite about the section labelled ‘Secondhand Avant-Garde’ in Ray’s Jazz store in London.) Borges said that the problem with Apollinaire’s experimental poetry is that ‘not a single line allows us to forget the date on which it was written’. One’s enjoy- ment of contemporary jazz quartets and quintets playing bop of a very high standard may not be diminished but it must be informed by the fact that music like this was first heard more than half a century ago. It’s not as thoroughly quiff-bound and retro as rock ’n’ roll but jazz, now, is not just part of the American academy, it’s part of the American heritage industry. Another objection: could something similar not be said of classical – or, to use the jazzer’s term – straight music? If Mozart is timeless why isn’t Coltrane? Well, he is, clearly. The status of the masters is assured. The issue, again, has to do with the peculiar dynamic of jazz, the thing that makes it jazz. Dizzy Gillespie once said that the only way this music – jazz – was going was forward. If it’s not going forward then it’s not jazz – it is instead a species of classical music, an archive. Compared with the Giant Steps made by Coltrane, or the Change of the Century announced by Ornette Coleman, or the ‘Directions in Music’ taken by Miles, jazz in the last twenty years has been relatively staid. Meanwhile, other forms of music – world and dance music most obviously – developed so fast that jazz, relatively speaking, seemed either to be standing still or moving backwards. Standards are constantly being re-interpreted. More recent compo- sitions – Wayne Shorter’s ‘Footprints’, say, or Ornette Coleman’s ‘Lonely Woman’ – become part of the inherited repertoire of material that is Is Jazz Dead? 261 improvised on and around. Plenty of jazz musicians experiment with new instrumental permutations . These are some of the ways in which jazz keeps faith with Ezra Pound’s rallying cry, ‘Make it new.’ Which is a good thing, isn’t it? Yes, yes it is. But then you realise the devastating truth of Joseph Brodsky’s suggestion ‘that the true reason for making it new [is] that “it” [is] fairly old’. The standard formats of jazz – quartets or quintets comprising various permutations of saxophone or trumpet together with rhythm section of bass, drums and piano – are musically active only in the most passive sense (they still exist); judged by their potential to generate the molten eruptions of Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders, however, they are practically extinct. Technically, there are phenom- enally advanced players around but even the most fertile soil – found on the slopes of Mount Coltrane – has become exhausted by over- use.