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Subject: [soundlounge] Music SCENE | [JAZZ] Too GOOD for this World
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 15:34:01 -0700
From: wesley <wesleyhongkong@earthlink.net>
Reply-To: TK@yahoogroups.com
To: Sound*Lounge <TK@yahoogroups.com>
Music SCENE | [JAZZ] Too good for this world
Too good for this world
Jazz excited devotion like no other kind of music - and that's
its big problem. Jonathan Jones continues our series on
'difficult' art forms
Saturday September 22, 2001
The Guardian
[Image]
Miles Davis
It's such an obstacle, that word jazz. It suggests music that should be
listened to in a certain way, with certain expectations, as cliches
drift across a smoke-filled room full of retro-beats in polo necks.
In fact the real thing can be stranger. The oldest pop subculture has
acquired a lot of mannerisms since its emergence in early 20th-century
America. The compere introducing acts on Monday night at London's Pizza
Express Jazz Club invites "a celebrity on the scene" - the foyer act
booker at the Royal Festival Hall - to come up and select a raffle
winner.
The "scene"? The music I grew up with, the likes of Joy Division and the
Velvet Underground, was ugly, angst-ridden and misanthropic. It seemed
true to life. But now I'm watching Dylan Bates, a young man in a striped
suit leading a motley band on instruments from a penny whistle to a bass
saxophone. This is chaos that always returns to reason, subversion that
always maintains its decorum.
Jazz has always seemed too beautiful for this world. Beginning in poor,
derelict New Orleans, black America created a music that, in the face of
a history of oppression and insult, insisted defiantly on a sublime
happiness, a higher freedom. To this day, there is no such thing as
anti-humanist jazz.
It can never be on the side of death, as Wagner or the Rolling Stones
circa 1969 might. While drugs and self-destruction are part of jazz
subculture, you only have to compare the Velvet Underground's Heroin
with Miles Davis's Kind of Blue to realise they don't defeat the music.
Jazz is a cult of spontaneity, improvisation, the flux of life. Jazz is
always an art.
Pop's appeal is that it doesn't have to be; it might be worthless. Jazz
is about the search for value, the insistence on finding beauty in a
hideous world. In his novel Another Country, James Baldwin describes the
moment when the uninterested, chatting audience at a Manhattan club in
the early 1960s is shut up by a great saxophone solo full of anger and
truth.
"The silence became strict with absolutely focused attention, cigarettes
were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables. And in all of the faces,
even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared."
These are the moments in jazz we all wish we had witnessed. We see them
in the nostalgic monochrome photographs of the heroes - Holiday, Bird,
Coltrane and Davies - recording 1959's Kind of Blue in practically one
take. Who wouldn't have wanted to be there, then, in Manhattan or Paris?
Even the sillier aspects of jazz fandom were once radical and
liberating. Novelist Thomas Pynchon has recalled with fond irony his own
late-1950s youth as a would-be beatnik: "Like others, I spent a lot of
time in jazz clubs, nursing the two-beer minimum. I put on horn-rimmed
sunglasses at night. I went to parties in lofts where girls wore strange
attire. I was hugely tickled by all forms of marijuana humour, though
the talk back then was in inverse proportion to the availability..."
My difficulty has always been with the place of jazz here, now.
Listening to it is fraught with self-consciousness. To visit the jazz
section of the record shop and buy those CDs with their beautiful
reproductions of the 1950s and 60s sleeve designs is such a painfully
knowing act. And how is it possible to feel this music directly, as if
it were for us?
To Ken Burns, who made the epic Jazz documentary recently shown on BBC2,
this is a part of American history whose social significance dissipated
with the rise of pop and should be cherished now as heritage. This also
appears to be the approach of today's most famous jazz musician, Wynton
Marsalis.
I didn't find a corrective to this attitude in the Soho jazz clubs,
although I had a great time. Ronnie Scott's is a national treasure, from
the photos on the walls to the intimate red table cloths. Hearing
British saxophonist Andy Sheppard play there was terrific. But it was a
relaxing experience rather than an electric one: the pleasure came from
imagining what it was like to be in a club like this years ago. But
these are lazy excuses. I need to listen harder.
I ask the Guardian's jazz critic, John Fordham, to suggest some
recordings to show what jazz is now and why it matters. Rather than
confirming its glorious past, the music he suggests doesn't sound
anything like "jazz" in the ritual sense. Pianist Brad Mehldau plays
piano music - inflected as much by Beethoven as by Fats Waller - with a
subtle, brilliantly organic intuition of the history and potential of
that instrument.
And you don't have to think of Keith Jarrett's improvisational piano
recording The Köln Concert as jazz if you don't want to. It's a flow of
melodic, poignant rhapsodies, a universally accessible modern classic
yet the purest jazz improvisation. Equally, Miles Davis's 1970s music
remixed by Bill Laswell sounds like almost anything but jazz.
It's a psychedelic, oceanic reverie you might connect more to funk
revolutionaries Sly and the Family Stone than to the jazz tradition -
until you hear that trumpet, so thoughtful, minimal and perfect, wafting
across the synths and wah-wah guitars, improvising a response to them.
The best jazz does not need to speak its name.
This presents a paradox, though. It's the recordings that seem to me
exciting, immediate, completely lacking in nostalgia, but jazz is
defined by its live and improvisational nature. As Mehldau puts it, in
an astoundingly theoretical sleevenote, "Jazz's canon is its recorded
legacy [but] if all the written music in the world suddenly burned up in
a flash, who could still do a gig the same night, with complete
strangers and no rehearsals?"
It seems that jazz musicians are compelled to be ascetics in a corrupt
world. The story goes that Davis phoned his friends when he realised how
much Jimi Hendrix got paid. "Hey, Jimi Hendrix gets 30 grand a gig," he
said, and immediately decided to get out of the minority-interest jazz
ghetto into experiments in funk, and even hip-hop towards the end of his
life. The jazz ritualists have never forgiven him. It was notable that
the Ken Burns documentary was far less reverent to Davis than to earlier
jazz heroes, and yet no single musician in the history of jazz rivals
his range of achievements.
The history of jazz still seems to be told as a teleological tale of
tradition, in which musicians' influence on, and challenge to, each
other is endlessly analysed. It's part of that cultishness that keeps
people away. But why should jazz only be compared to itself, when so
many clues indicating a much wider sense of its place in culture were
left by its practitioners? Ornette Coleman gave away a pretty big clue
when he put a Jackson Pollock painting on the cover of his
improvisational recording Free Jazz.
And Bill Evans, Davis's piano player and key collaborator, leaves an
equally large clue in his 1959 sleevenote for Kind of Blue. He compares
the recording, with its improvisations in response to simple structures
devised on the day by Davis, and handed to the participating musicians
at the studio, to abstract painting. "There is a Japanese visual art in
which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin
parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that
an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break the
parchment."
To anyone in America or Europe buying the record in 1959, the image that
would have come to mind while reading this would surely have been the
flowing lines and improvisational brilliance of Jackson Pollock, who in
the late 1940s started to place his canvas on the floor and loosely,
rhythmically move around it, flicking, throwing, pouring paint. Like the
great jazz musicians, he was able to loop, stretch and twine his thread
of improvisation so that it was both free and somehow structured.
This wasn't coincidental. Pollock was a passionate jazz enthusiast, and
yet his affinity for jazz is always treated casually, while every
supposed literary allusion in the titles of the paintings, by a man who
may never have read a book in his life, has been teased out. Perhaps art
critics would rather not see America's greatest artist as being
profoundly influenced by black American music. Jazz belongs over there,
in its section (which cultist fans are only too happy to preserve)
instead of at the heart of modern culture. Yet Pollock's interest in
jazz was arguably the essence of his aesthetic.
Which brings us back to that hurdle. Jazz has seemed too good, too
aesthetic for this world. Some critics and art historians feel the same
about Pollock. Today's art owes far more to Warhol than Pollock,
emphasises deathliness, and has a violent insistence on the real and the
grotesque. It's a nasty world, as we've just been reminded. Like
Pollock, jazz believes in beauty, a defiant insistence on life, a fluid
human spirit in the midst of modern violence. Perhaps the sound of John
Coltrane desperately blasting My Favorite Things into an abstract
masterpiece is exactly the music we need to listen to here, now.
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