Jazz Under Fire
Recent conversations about the relevance of jazz have
inspired me to write a different perspective that I hope will cause people to
see the discussion from a fresh vantage point.
One thing I would like to say first is that the New Yorker
reposting the Onion article was disrespectful to an amazing musician, Sonny
Rollins, who has been an inspiration to many.
His mastery of the saxophone has been an inspiration to musicians the
world over and the example of self-introspection he set by re-inventing his
sound at the height of his career, should be a lesson to anyone who feels that
they have mastered something.
I understand the purpose and role of satire but it is
possible to cross the line of respectability especially if the article is
published in a magazine that is considered “respectable.” Yes we live in a free society and you can say
anything you want but there is a reason fringe commentary is called “fringe.”
Jazz is part of a people’s culture and identity. It’s as if someone published a satire about famed
Indian Classical musician Ravi Shankar saying that he disliked playing his own
cultural music. Yes you can write a
satirical piece on that topic but it is distasteful to say the least, just like
the New Yorker article was.
There is an amount of reverence for jazz just as there is
for any other indigenous cultural art form.
Yes Jazz is part of American music history but more to the point, it was
created in and is a part of African American history. It was a way for African Americans to define
themselves within a society that historically devalued them.
Similar to the New Yorker article the Washington Post
article was just as irreverent but more importantly this article was not satire
but a bona fide opinion. It calls jazz “boring,
washed up and overrated.”
When some people refer to jazz they think they are just talking
about a style of music that is disassociated with a cultural group. Jazz like the Blues, Funk and Hip Hop, is a
gift to the world from African Americans.
If you don’t understand it, think it’s boring, or “overrated” that’s
more of a statement on your inability to dig deeper to see why you think that
way when so many have been enriched by it.
The author states:
“I studied
jazz while an undergraduate at Wesleyan University and had the privilege of
learning from, at varying distances, some of the genre’s great performers and
teachers, including Anthony Braxton, Pheeroan akLaff and Jay Hoggard. I
appreciated that these generous African American men deigned to share their art
at a quite white New England liberal-arts school. But I just didn’t get their
aesthetic. Like cirrus clouds or cotton candy, I found jazz generically
pleasing, but insubstantial and hard to grasp.”
His inability to grasp jazz may be because he learned it in
school and not in the environment from which it was born. Jazz came out of the clubs and the hunger for
musicians to express more of themselves than what the repetitive arrangements
that they were playing allowed them to. After
playing stock arrangements in Cab Calloway’s band all night Dizzy Gillespie
wanted to dig deeper into the chord changes and fellowshipped with other
like-minded musicians like Charlie Parker to do so. Jazz was their mode of survival, of
communicating and sharing their emotions.
It was hardly insubstantial to them and if you want to grasp it, then I
suggest learning about the context that it was created in.
Let me address his concerns point by point. The author’s reasons for not liking jazz are:
- Jazz took away the lyrics
- Improvisation is not what it’s cracked up to be
- Jazz stopped evolving
- Jazz is “mushy”
- Jazz let itself be co-opted
Jazz took away the
lyrics
The reason the musicians took away the lyrics was to be able
to explore the harmonies and intricacies within the song. Yes lyrics are an important part of a song
but removing them doesn’t make the performance any less, just different.
Improvisation is not
what it’s cracked up to be
Depending on who you’re listening to, improvisation can be
inspiring. To spontaneously create
something profound in real time is exhilarating not just in jazz but in any art
form. That’s what makes watching a
skilled dancer create moves on the dance floor so fun. That’s what makes watching sports so
engaging. We know the plays but it’s the
audibles that create the drama. Jazz is
just as inspiring. Hearing Dexter Gordon
come up with funny quotes of nursery rhymes or listening to Coltrane blaze
through a complex passage lets us know the possibilities of human creativity
and musical mastery.
Jazz stopped evolving
Jazz is always evolving.
It incorporates any music that it comes in contact with. Just like the Yoruba religious practice of
recognizing saints and deities from other religions as forces of energy and
incorporating them on their altar, jazz recognizes other music forms as viable
expressions of music ideas and incorporates them to create new forms of
jazz. Hence we have Latin Jazz, Jazz
Rock, Jazz Funk, Hip Hop and Jazz, Pop Jazz, Jazz Klezmer, you name it. The only time jazz will stop evolving is when
music stops evolving. There will always
be an improvisational form of any existing genre of music.
Jazz is “mushy”
I’m not sure but I think his implication here was that Jazz
incorporates too many other styles and is thus undefinable. That’s why there are suffixes and
prefixes. We all know that Latin Jazz
will sound different from Pop Jazz. The
terms New Orleans Jazz and Hard Bop refer to different historical styles and
that’s why these terms are around, to define the various styles of Jazz that
people create. There is unity in the
diversity however and the key elements are swing, improvisation and Blues,
these exist in all styles of Jazz.
Jazz let itself be
co-opted
This is an interesting statement. I don’t think anyone “lets” themselves get
co-opted. I think what happens is that people realize they need to make a
living and start making compromises that they wouldn’t make if they had the
income they needed to survive. That said
some artists genuinely want to create more popular music and that’s not a
co-optation, that’s a choice.
He also says that Jazz has “left the nightclub for the
academy.” Even though there are less jam
sessions as there used to be, they are still happening and musicians are still
coming together to share the experience of musical improvisation.
One statement that I felt stood out was the one that said:
“[Jazz] is shielded from commercial failure by the American
cultural-institutional complex, which hands out grants and degrees to people
like me.”
If commercial success is his only marker of success then
what does he think about art in general? Personally I feel art plays an
important role in society by pushing the boundaries of creativity and showing
what is possible within various art forms.
Jazz has done that consistently in music and yes for the most part
without commercial success. Being
musically creative is the focus in Jazz not commerciality.
Jazz could find popularity and commercial success if there
was a broader understanding of music in our society. Our society’s low
tolerance and understanding for more complex music is most likely due in part
to a lack of support for music education in our schools.
The true spirit of Jazz is not about dollars but sense. The music is about making sense and meaning out
of life’s events and performing it on your instrument whether you get paid or
not. Unfortunately, that’s what creates
problems sometimes because club owners and labels know musicians love to play
and play for the love, so they have historically taken advantage of that. But I digress.
Jazz is like a hard-earned and well-deserved relationship
that took time to build but has a solid history and its own code of inside
jokes and unspoken understanding. There
is depth to the music that has to be sought after to be appreciated. As an
elder told me, “it won’t come to you, you have to come to it.” And when you do
the reward is not an “elevator shaft” experience as the author described but a
mountaintop moment of hearing new vistas of sound and rhythm.
Let me be clear, I by no means want to force him to like a
certain genre of music. I respect anyone’s
right to like or dislike any music because we all have tastes. However, not liking something and
disrespecting it are two different things. The writers of these articles should
know and respect that Jazz is part of an historical lineage and that there are
those who do like it, scratch that, love it.
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