A little more than a year ago this writer raised some doubts about the present and future course of jazz, in a piece whose title alone (”The Death of Jazz”) stirred a considerable amount of controversy.
No less troublesome, it seems, was the piece`s basic point: That today`s so-called neoclassical trend in jazz (in which a good many young players are trying to work within styles that were prevalant in the mid-1960s) is not the healthy sign that many listeners and critics believe it to be.
Fueled by a desire to return to traditional jazz values, such music has an understandable appeal–not only because it sounds reassuringly familiar but also because it has arisen at a time when much of American society seems to thinking along conservative lines.
But once jazz becomes more concerned with preservation than growth, doesn`t that amount to a break with one of the most fundamental aspects of the music`s tradition: the need of each player to explore and express his or her personal identity?
And if jazz does turn into something of a repertory art, which seems likely if the neoclassical trend continues to grow, where will that leave future generations of would-be creators who will be told, in effect, that others have felt more while they have felt less?
With those thoughts in mind, it seems like a good idea to look at the latest evidence: the music that such neoclassical young lions as trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Jon Faddis have been making in recent months.
But first a word or two should be said about the aggressively propagandistic critical prose that tends to surround this music–if only because a steady dose of it leads one to think that the journalistic fans of jazz neoclassicism are at least as interested in trend-making as they are in the music itself.
Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins is the man who came up with the neoclassical label. But his colleague Stanley Crouch has been the most strenuous and visible backer of the trend, thanks to the many liner notes he has written.
In that role, Crouch is seldom content to celebrate the specific musical virtues of the album at hand.
Instead, the technically impressive but rather straightlaced music of Marsalis and his neoclassical fellows is played off against the supposed
”decadence” and ”fumbling” of the jazz avant garde–as though jazz had careened off the tracks in the 1960s and the neoclassical trend were a kind of rebellion in reverse, an attempt to bring order and sanity back to the music. ”These young men aren`t about foisting the cliches of 20th-Century European music on jazz,” writes Crouch of a group called Out of the Blue, which tries very hard to sound like the clock had been turned back to 1965.
”It is an ensemble luminously in tune with integrity.”
But if ”integrity” and ”foisting” are indeed the issues, it seems fair to ask how the music of Out of the Blue`s first album (called ”Out of the Blue”) stands up alongside a representative and stylistically similar album from the late 1960s: tenor saxophonist Tyrone Washington`s ”Natural Essence,” which includes trumpeter Woody Shaw and alto saxophonist James Spaulding.
The two groups share the same instrumentation and the same musical techniques, as the heated rhythmic angularities of bebop are linked to free-floating modal harmonies. And even if Out of the Blue`s Mike Mossman and Kenny Garrett haven`t directly modeled themselves on Shaw and Spaulding, they certainly sound as though they have.
But the emotional tone of the two albums is quite different. While most of the members of Out of the Blue sound as though they thought of their music as a style (i.e. as a series of rules one must adopt and accept), the music of Washington and his partners is fundamentally explosive, a discontented elegance that keeps zooming off in search of extreme emotional states.
In fact a passionate need to exceed itself lies at the heart of Washington`s music. And while stylistic patterns can be found on ”Natural Essence,” they only emphasize the mood of turbulence and flux–defining the brink over which Washington constantly threatens to jump.
So even though the music of Washington and his mid-`60s peers was less openly radical than that of Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, it was by no means a separate phenomenon. Indeed, the strains of transition that supposedly were confined to the jazz avant garde may have been even more violently felt in the music that lay just to the ”right” of it.
One wonders, then, how a music that was virtually tearing itself apart can serve as a stylistic model for today`s jazz neoclassicists–for at the root of all neoclassical movements there lies a desire to transform the erratic flow of artistic change into a smooth-running, orderly process.
And one wonders as well how this self-conscious return to the recent jazz past is affecting those who are actually playing the music.
An example of what may be involved is Wynton Marsalis` latest album,
”Black Codes From the Underground” (Columbia), which leaves one with the feeling that making a personal statement on his horn no longer is Marsalis`
goal.
Indeed, his otherwise admirable desire to embrace the entire jazz-trumpet tradition seems to have transformed the typical Marsalis solo into a kind of musical seance–as though each phrase he plays has so many sources in the music`s past that this knowledge outweighs whatever meaning those notes might have to Marsalis in the here-and-now.
Even more explicit tribute is paid to the past by another young trumpet virtuoso, Jon Faddis, on ”Legacy” (Concord Jazz).
A protogee of Dizzy Gillespie (who describes ”Legacy” as
”terrifying”), Faddis emulates Gillespie`s style on ”Night in Tunisia”
and ”Things to Come” and then ventures back to Louis Armstrong (”West End Blues”) and Roy Eldridge (”Little Jazz”).
The results are rather terrifying, but not in the way Gillespie meant;
for Faddis` high-note blasts are linked to a rhythmic and melodic rigidity that makes caricatures out of his Armstrong and Eldridge tributes.
The Gillespie salutes work better, because the angularity of that master`s style conceals some of Faddis` stiffness. But after listening to Faddis` handsomely austere reading of Thad Jones` ”A Child is Born,” one wonders whether Faddis ought to have taken Jones, not Gillespie, as his model. One can see the logic in what Faddis has tried to do, for it is tempting to think that the artistic past is still open to colonization, an endlessly fertile plain that will sustain new creative harvests. And at one time jazz did function in that way, as several generations of musicians were able to build directly upon the styles of Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young without compromising their own musical and emotional growth.
But at least as far back as the bebop era, the rate and nature of stylistic change in jazz began to accelerate; and it would be hard to think of any period in the last 40 years during which the music was not urgently transforming itself.
So there would seem to be something illusory in the hope that solid ground can be found in the jazz styles of the mid-1960s, which is where almost every would-be neoclassicist plants his flag; for that music was always unstable, an art of emotional and technical brinksmanship.
The best album in the current neoclassical batch, trumpeter Terence Blanchard and alto saxophonist Donald Harrison`s ”Discernment” (Concord Jazz), suggests what may be going to happen next.
Formerly associated with Art Blakey, Blanchard and Harrison are drawn to that master`s mid-1960s style. And like Marsalis, with whom they share a New Orleans upbringing, they also favor the music of Miles Davis` pre-electric bands.
But because Blanchard and Harrison seem to really feel those styles, their music has some of the same fragmented intensity that emerged there in the first place–a taste for obstacle-course rhythm patterns and extreme emotional states, even a need to delve into non-repeating forms.
So even though the music of Blanchard and Harrison is a bit tame by the highest mid-1960s standards, it does seem eager to explode. And if and when it does, there may be no way to keep it within the boundaries of a particular stylistic tradition.
Yes, integrity is a key issue in jazz–more so, perhaps, than ever before. But advocates of the neoclassical approach would do well to heed these words from critic Virgil Thomson.
Distinguishing between an ”objective” music in which one can
”represent other people`s emotions” and a ”music of personal lyricism”
(which would seem to be the kind of art that jazz is), Thomson goes on to explain that ”you can write or execute music of the most striking evocative power by objective methods, but you cannot project a personal sentiment you do not have.
”If you fake it knowingly, you are dramatizing that which should be transmitted directly; and if you fake it unknowingly, you are, merely by deceiving yourself, attempting to deceive your audience.
”Naturally, experienced persons can teach the young many things about the personalized repertory. But there is no set way it must be rendered, and any attempt to impose one on it takes the life out of it.”
