Perhaps no music sums up 20th century America — in all its frenetic excitement and glory — more succinctly than jazz.
The hot-swing rhythms of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, after all, heralded the start of the new century with a distinctly American beat. Here, at last, was America’s answer to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, a home-grown music born in African-American culture but embraced by listeners of all hues and eventually exported around the planet.
But as the 20th Century gives way to the 21st, jazz faces formidable challenges. Can a music that flourished in one century continue to seduce listeners in the next? Will young people in the 21st Century draw any meaning or value from the music of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane in a cyberspace age?
In short, what are the prospects for jazz as it begins its second century?
To find out, we posed these questions to two prominent jazz artists — one a young turk, the other a revered and seasoned master.
Both had a great deal to say about the perils and possibilities of jazz as the curtain goes up on its second century.
SHORTER SAYS INTERNET OPENS NEW DOORS FOR JAZZ
For nearly 40 years, Wayne Shorter has been one of the most important composers in jazz, as well as a vastly influential saxophonist-bandleader. From the landmark music he created for Miles Davis’ band in the ’60s (including compositions such as “E.S.P.,” “Sanctuary” and “Footprints”) to his sublime saxophone in Weather Report in the 1970s and early ’80s, Shorter has developed an enormous body of work.
He also has seen jazz trends come and go, though he blithely has ignored them, moving freely from acoustic to electronic jazz and back, from pop-tinged dance music to exquisite dueting with longtime friend and Miles Davis Quintet collaborator Herbie Hancock.
A jazz icon as well as a tireless experimenter, Shorter at 66 still conveys the creative restlessness of a musician half his age. Perhaps his youthful attitude helps explain his us-against-them perspective on the future of jazz.
“As far as I’m concerned, the people who have the courage to stay creative will be like David against the Goliathof the music industry,” says Shorter. “They will storm Goliath, which in music means the gatekeepers of the industry.
“The people in control [of the record industry] are fearful of musicians who don’t follow the money. The executives say to themselves, `Money doesn’t mean anything to these people? That’s dangerous. Very dangerous.’
“But that’s the real power of the creative musicians. So creative music can flourish in the next century. The record industry doesn’t like that, because they know that the musician has decided to think for himself.”
Moreover, says Shorter, the new technology — particularly the Internet — gives experimenters the opportunity to take control of the production and distribution of their art. By burning their own CDs, releasing the music they choose and disseminating it in cyberspace and in concert, musicians liberate themselves from the influence of major labels, indie labels and other corporate control.
“This whole Internet thing is great,” says Shorter, who has been a science fiction buff since he was a teenager and is tantalized by the promise of the World Wide Web.
“It’s getting music directly to the people who want it. You could say that the Internet is infinity itself. Who knows what could happen? I think maybe even music itself may take a back seat to some other form of expression that’s 100 percent involvement. Maybe we won’t call it `music’ anymore. Maybe it will be a combination of sound and image and other sensory experience out in cyberspace.”
Yet so far as the future of jazz is concerned, Shorter is considerably more optimistic about the evolution of the art form than the public’s appreciation of it. Jazz may develop in dramatic ways, in other words, but the wider public will have difficulty absorbing it.
That has been the case since at least the 1940s, when complex bebop music supplanted more accessible and danceable big-band swing. Though jazz flirted with a wider audience in the 1970s by venturing into pop-tinged “fusion,” the music by the mid-1980s began to reclaim its voice as a sophisticated, substantive music.
As such, it has continued to appeal to a small but savvy audience that thrives on harmonic sophistication, instrumental virtuosity and creative daring. Jazz continues its maturation as an American art music, mostly outside the pop trends of a new century.
“A Miles Davis or a Charlie Parker wouldn’t be heard today, except by a few very sensitive people,” says Shorter. “You know why? Because in music, people want more and more instant gratification.
“Even when I was a kid of 15, and I’d go to a party and bring my Dizzy Gillespie records, everyone else would be listening to Ruth Brown and rhythm-and-blues kind of stuff. That’s all right, but when I would put on Dizzy Gillespie’s `Manteca,’ they would rip the needle off the record, because they wanted something easier.
“So as jazz continues to develop, it’s going to be heard, but only by the few. The word `jazz’ will always mean adventure, and not everyone is willing to take a chance on a musical adventure. Maybe even most people aren’t.”
But if the majority of listeners of the 21st Century aren’t tuning in to the latest experiments of jazz, what happens to music of Morton and Armstrong and other earlier masters? Will it simply fade in oblivion, forgotten by all but a few devotees?
“I’m pretty sure people will remember the jazz that used to be, at least the way they remember Beethoven, who had a lot of the spirit of adventure — and the spirit of jazz — in his music. So did Mozart, who was getting into some really experimental things when he died, and check out Bach, who was doing some really dissonant stuff way back.
“You still hear those guys’ music played all over the world, and that’s how jazz is going to last, because the adventurous stuff always sounds new.”
A NEW LIFE FOR JAZZ WITH A DIFFERENCE
To jazz professionals and casual observers alike, 31-year-old tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman stands as a promising advocate for jazz in a new century. Though musically sophisticated and technically accomplished, Redman has been blessed with a charismatic manner that attracts young listeners otherwise uninterested in jazz per se.
In effect, Redman unintentionally has emerged as a kind of pop star among jazz performers, appealing to both the uninitiated and the connoisseur. But Redman’s contact with the youngest listeners has made him keenly aware of the difficulties jazz faces in coming years.
“There are definitely young audiences out there, but there also are plenty of hip-hop kids who don’t even really know who Run-DMC is,” says Redman. “You ask them about Run-DMC, and they say, `That’s the ’80s, that’s old school.’
“So you’re going to talk to those same kids about John Coltrane? It may as well be Mozart.
“In the general culture,” adds Redman, “awareness of jazz and its historical background is very small, and in some ways sometimes I feel like it’s getting smaller and smaller.”
The comparatively minuscule sales of jazz recordings — which the Recording Industry Association of America estimates at about 3 percent of the entire market — underscores Redman’s observation.
So if jazz stands well outside the American mainstream, and if audience awareness of the art form is shrinking, the prospects for jazz during the next 100 years would seem bleak.
“Whether jazz ever will have the kind of public prominence that it enjoyed in the big-band swing era, when it was so intimately connected to the entertainment of the time, is debatable,” says Redman.
“And I don’t know whether we even should hope that it does, because jazz, as it is played now, is very different from back then. Duke Ellington and Count Basie made some of the most amazing music ever played, but it was much more connected to the entertainment world of the day than a lot of jazz is today.
“In many ways, jazz has become a more self-conscious art. But jazz has had this huge impact because of its spirit, which is all about improvisation. That’s what has been so revolutionary about jazz, that’s what has made jazz appeal to so many musicians and listeners, and jazz still provides that. That’s why jazz is going to continue to have cultural weight and prominence as a creative artistic force.”
And yet, there’s something unnerving about those tiny sales figures. If jazz is revered in concept but ignored in the record stores, it seems a hollow victory at best.
“All that a figure like that RIAA number tells you is how many records have been sold, but it doesn’t speak to the artistic caliber or the cultural importance of the music,” says Redman.
“The great thing about jazz is that it has learned not to be dependent on record sales the way pop music is. I think everyone in jazz understands that the music has an economic and artistic life outside of record sales,” says Redman, pointing to the vibrant live jazz scene across the country and in cultural capitals around the world.
Indeed, beyond its prominent role in clubs, concert halls and international festivals, the music is flourishing anew at institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York (under the artistic direction of Wynton Marsalis) and the SFJAZZ Spring Season in San Francisco (led by Redman). Backed by multi-million dollar budgets, these up-and-coming institutions have given jazz new forums and developed previously untapped audiences.
The music keeps on swinging, in other words, quite apart from record sales.
Moreover, jazz, like many great art forms, has flourished aesthetically, not only in times of great popularity but also amid general neglect. The 1960s, for instance, marked a low point in the commercial life of the music, with jazz clubs closing and jazz musicians scrambling for work amid the ascendance of rock ‘n’ roll.
Yet during this period, when jazz musicians often played for friends without pay, the music developed dramatically, thanks to the innovations of experimenters such as Ornette Coleman and various bands linked to the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
It may have taken years for the listening public to catch up with the ’60s jazz avant-garde, but a seemingly desolate period for jazz musicians paved the way for groundbreaking innovations and an international audience.
Moreover, though the deaths of titans such as Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie in the 1990s robbed jazz of its biggest stars, the music has produced a new wave of brilliant performers who someday could command comparably huge followings. Already, artists such as Marsalis, Redman, singer Cassandra Wilson, pianist Marcus Roberts and Chicago avant-garde saxophonist-bandleader Ken Vandermark attract intensely loyal audiences around the world.
The artistic importance of their recordings and the pace of their international touring point to a music that seems to be pushing headlong into its second century.
“I believe that a lot of jazz is as creative and adventurous and forward-moving as it was in the past,” says Redman. “I’m inspired by so much music that’s out there today. But we can’t look for the next Coltrane or the next Miles. There was only one of each of them. And even though musicians like Coltrane or Monk were recognized as revolutionaries in their time, they’re much more lionized today. So we’ve got to give it some time before any of today’s musicians reach that level.”
Yet there’s no doubting the artistic vitality of today’s music, which includes everything from the meticulously composed, epic scores of swing-based composers such as Marsalis and Roberts to the free improvisation of young experimenters such as Vandermark, Dave Douglas and Joe Morris.
Add to that the merger of jazz and classical idioms that inspires pianist Brad Mehldau, the Argentine folk rhythms that drive the music of Guillermo Klein, the cross-cultural experiments of Asian jazz musicians from San Francisco to Chicago and there’s no doubt that the music is being redefined in uncounted ways.
The major jazz labels may be steering clear of the most daring experimenters, but the small independents have rushed in to fill the void.
“The one thing we can count on is that there are always going to be independent labels out there that are willing to document the music at a low cost, which is really important,” says Redman, who surely knows that no less than Blue Note Records started out in 1939 as precisely such an indie.
“And there’s one other thing we can count on: Jazz musicians are incredibly resilient, and they’ll find a way to cope with any situation. When you’re not in it for the money, you’re free to play anything you want, and that’s what always keeps jazz pressing onward.”
