The Second Line :Thoughts & Opinions on Jazz

Repertory Jazz, Fusion, Marsalis, and Crouch
by Marshall Bowden

Jazz, like any other musical form, does not exist in a vacuum. Or, at least it shouldn't if it is to continue to survive and be an active part of our musical language. The musical landscape is constantly changing with the arrival of new technology, changes in the delivery of music both live and recorded, and the considerations of the marketplace. Against this background each musical genre must compete, morph, and reinvent itself while still maintaining the identity that attracts its core audience.

There are those who would have you believe that jazz should not be part of the marketplace, that it should actually be subsidized and shielded from market considerations in much the way that classical music of the European tradition is. This is in itself interesting, since these very same self-appointed keepers of the flame simultaneously decry jazz artists such as Dave Brubeck, John Lewis, and Gunther Schuller, who they see as coming under the sway of European traditions.

Wynton Marsalis, considered by many to be the best jazz musician of his generation, has decided, after receiving his post-graduate degree in Jazz History from critic and cultural observer Stanley Crouch, to ensure that no further music created henceforth be considered jazz unless it slavishly imitates a style already long ago admitted to the jazz canon. One can only assume that this is because Marsalis has realized that though he is an excellent trumpet player with a beautiful tone and gobs of technique as well as a fairly good composer, he has nothing genuinely new to say and cannot hope to bring to jazz any true individuality along the lines of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, or Thelonious Monk

I am reminded of the words of Francis Davis, discussing the current crop of jazz's young lions in the Atlantic Monthly: "There are no innovators or woolly eccentrics among those we've heard from so far. In setting craftsmanship as their highest goal these neophytes remind me of such second-tier stars of the Fifties and Sixties as Blue Mitchell and Wynton Kelly -- players whose modesty and good taste made them ideal sidemen but whose own record dates invariably lacked the dark corners and disfigurements of character that separate great music from merely good". That's Wynton -- no dark corners here, man. But he is the first recording artist to win Grammy awards in both classical and jazz categories, recording both genres for Columbia, the same record label that Miles Davis recorded for during most of his career. Marsalis has been quick to accuse Miles of having "gone electric" in the late '60s because his record label wanted him to sell more records, yet he obviously sees no problem with recording both classical and jazz music prolifically with Columbia's encouragement, doubling his recorded output and, one assumes, the associated revenue.

Marsalis believes that popular music has become increasingly infantile over the years, and that this was not always the case. Perhaps not, but many songs of the jazz age, considered standards today, were aimed at young flappers and their escorts whose music scandalized their elders. I'm not taking issue with whether jazz should be looking for a way to become teenybopper music (it shouldn't) but with whether it should or even can remain "pure" and untainted by what is going on around it. Jazz musicians have always tried to pull into their work sounds from every conceivable place -- from popular music, from cutting-edge music in the European classical tradition, from other parts of the world. Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and countless others have tried to incorporate music that was not necessarily a part of jazz at the time. Sometimes these experiments are self-indulgent and come off poorly, but in the hands of the truly talented they often succeed beyond anyone's expectations. There is a huge difference between the electric wah-wah pedaled trumpet histrionics of Don Ellis and the dark, bubbling work of Miles Davis, and Marsalis should realize and embrace this. Perhaps he does to some extent. In his source interviews with Ken Burns, parts of which were later used in Burns' Jazz documentary, Marsalis seems to make a distinction between the earliest "fusion" bands and what happened as the '70s progressed: "As fusion progresses, we see that the musicians' desire is not to come up with a jazz sensibility and use things from rock and roll, but it's to just become a glorified pop musician who can play instrumental music also. And this comes, we get to see it in full, in full bloom when Miles Davis returns in the early '80s with a straight instrumental pop album that has no overtones of fusion at all. And we also see it with the demise of the great fusion bands as we progress into the '70s".

Stanley Crouch also exhibits some shades of gray in his interview with Burns that are lacking in many of his published critiques. In his essay "On the Corner: The Sellout of Miles Davis" collected in his 1995 book The All-American Skin Game he addresses Davis' electronic music thusly: "And then the fall. . . . Beginning with the 1969 In A Silent Way, Davis' sound was mostly lost among electronic instruments inside a long maudlin piece of droning wallpaper music. A year later with Bitches Brew, Davis was firmly on the path of

a sellout. It sold more than any other Davis album and fully launched jazz/rock with its multiple keyboards, electronic guitars, static beats, and clutter". By this time in the essay, Crouch has spent quite a bit of time giving us a real musical breakdown of some of Davis' earlier work, yet this is nearly all he can muster about Davis' actual electronic music. He provides plenty of reasons why Davis chose this path, but for a man possessed of a fine critical mind and the ability to express himself quite clearly, he completely fails to offer any realistic musical description of such Davis works as In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, works that even Marsalis is willing to acknowledge as adventurous and innovative recordings within a jazz framework. But in his discussion with Burns (in 1997), Crouch backpedals a little: ". . . I used to think that he sold out from the start. Now I don't necessarily think that's initially what happened . . . at first, I think, he went into it he was actually looking around, looking for something to see if there was a place for him. And in Filles de Kilimanjaro, for instance, in that recording, he has a piece called "Mademoiselle Mabery" which is an adaptation of Jimi Hendrix' tune, "And The Wind Cries Mary" which is a masterpiece, this particular thing. Had he stayed over in there, he would have actually invented something that we didn't know".

But, as we all know, Miles didn't "stay over in there". He wasn't just trying to connect with a white rock audience, though. He was deeply troubled that black people didn't listen to jazz, a music that had been a focal point of Afro-American expression from the time of slavery straight through the civil rights movement. As black people began to demand social and economic freedom they found expression in R&B and funk. On the Corner, a record more controversial than Bitches Brew in the Davis canon was his attempt to address funk music and incorporate the grooves of James Brown and Sly Stone. Later, Davis became more interested in layered, slowly evolving soundscapes that today we might call ambient. It is true that when Davis returned to recording in the early 1980s he was pursuing a more pop sounding path and might have lost his way for a time, but his brilliant Tutu, released in 1986, pointed the way he would go in the future.

Trying to deny jazz any history or future after the early 1960s is a mistake, and so is trying to return to that period or an earlier one. The innovations of the past should be honored and the music should certainly still be played. Repertory requires money for musicians, copyists, publicists and a host of other individuals, and programs such as Marsalis' Jazz at Lincoln Center provide a necessary element to jazz performance and the jazz community. But given Marsalis' bias against the jazz experiments of the '60s and '70s, can anyone seriously expect to see a retrospective of the music of Weather Report there anytime soon? Maybe jazz can't compete in today's MTV-Big-Mac world, maybe it will mutate into something else (and that is not to say something inherently "better" or "more advanced" than what has gone before) in order to survive. I believe that's called evolution. There's little question it will never achieve the commercial success of its stepchildren, R&B and Rock. Does it matter? Some say without being carefully maintained under glass, as Afro-American classical music, jazz won't survive. I wouldn't bet against it.