The End of Jazz? Dmitri Tymoezko Transition, Volume 0, Issue 70 (1996), 72-81 Stable URL: butp//links jstor.org/sici2sici=0041-1191%281996%290%3A 10%3C72%3ATEOI% 3E2.0,.CO%3B2-W_ ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hhup:/www.jstor org/about/terms.html. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission. Transition is published by Duke University Press. Please contact the publisher for further permissions regarding the use of this work, Publisher contact information may be obtained at hup:/Wwww.jstor.org/journalsiduke.huml, Transition (©1996 Duke University Press ISTOR and the ISTOR logo are trademarks of ISTOR, and are Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office For more information on JSTOR contact jstor-info@umich.edu, ©2003 JSTOR hupswww jstor.org/ Tue Jul 15 20:58:50 2003,Discussed nth oy ‘Thanet Oore ® under Review THE END OF JAZZ? Bebop at the millennium Dimitri Tymoczko Bebop began asa private language, a so- phisticated musical creole spoken at a handful of uptown Manhattan bats in the eatly 19408. Formed under the pres- sure of intense musical competition, itis, as languages go, forbidding and elitist: its light-speed tempi, well beyond the reach of the ordinary metronome, its jagged harmonies, borrowed from late roman- tic and early modernist “at-music and its irregular, highly syncopated rhythms all make for a musical grammar that is exceedingly difficult to master. One could say about bop what Niels Bohr said about quantum physics if its never bothered you, then your'e probably mis- sing something. Bebop was meant to be difficult and baffling. Ie was meant to scare the no-talents off of those early Harlem stages, to shock the commer- white jazz establishment, and gen- erally to leave audiences in a state of slightly bewildered awe, “We're going to create something that they can’t steal" said Thelonious Monk, “because they can’t play it 72 TRANSITION ISSUE 70 Like a few other private artistic lan- ‘guages—Picasso and Braque’s cubism, Schoenberg's ewelve-tone system—be- bop has become legitimate, o the point where it is now the comerstone of neatly every jazz musician's vocabulary ‘The wholesale adoption of such a highly complex musical seyle not surprisingly helped to transform jazz into an elite pursuit: where jaze before bop had fe quently offered a kind of easy pleasure, with foursquare danceable rhythm and. singable diatonic melodies, jazz after bop offen required training and hard work, Less ambitious listeners would hence- forth have to go elsewhere, “When be- bop was new” writes Thomas Owens in Bebop: The Music and Its Players, “many jazz musicians and most of the jazz au- dlience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewil- dering music, But ime and familiarity softened and even eliminated objec sions.” This is rue, but not just because the critics and listeners who used to complain about bop came to accept it many of the objections disappeared be-cause the objectors stopped listening, abandoning bop for simpler, sexier forms such as R&B and early rock and rol. Having effected a radical separation between artist and audience, and even beeween artists themselves—Louis Arm strong spoke of bop asa “modern mal- ice” that gives you “no tune to remem= ber and no beat to dance to"—bebop naturally paved the way for farther mu- sical radicalism. Free jazz, in which the strictures of the bebop grammarians were abandoned in favor of spontaneous, n= restricted improvisation, was in a sense the natural conclusion of the bebop rev- olution, Free jaze was radically discor- dant, a seeming break from what had come before. But wasn't bebop equally radical? Musicians like Miles Davis com- plained that fe jaze sounded grating and unpleasant, but hadn't Armstrong and his contemporaries made the same complaint about Davis and the other early boppers? With the advent of be- bop, all the familiar paradoxes of twen- sieth-century art descended upon a be- wildered world of jaze musicians and critics: what isthe status of an elite mu= sic, which demands specialized educa- tion from its listeners? What sort of re- sponsibility does an artist have to his or her audience? And is there any sense in THE END OF JAZZ? 73, Mietorooa, Thelonious Monk quartettrying to distinguish the extreme her- meticism of free jazz from the only slighty les extreme hermeticism of bop itself? Philip Larkin, the English poet and jazz critic, insisted that postbop jazz be an derstood in a broader aesthetic context. He describes an epiphany during which he first realized that bop could be un- derstood 28a form of the same artistic radicalism which motivated Pound and Picaso “Thee sas something abo the [az] books Tavas now reading that seemed ody fail ian This development, this progres, this new language thar was more difficult, more complex, that requived you fo work hard st appreciating it, that you couldn't expect to understand at fie go, that need tech nical and profesional knowledge to el sate it at al level, this revolutionary ex plosion that spoke for our time while at ‘the same time being eaditional in theflles, the deepest... Of cone! This was the ae age of etc of modem painting, moders poetry moders musi OF course! How gly Thad ted of modem jazz, without weals~ ing the foe of the adjective: his was modern jazz, and Pasker was modem jazz player inst as Picasso was a moder painter and ‘Pound a moder pot. Ua relied that {iz had gone fom Lass to Jackson Poe lock in fit ears but nw that Freizeit lefeame flooding in upon me afer ney 0 years despondency. Lent back to my books “Ale Parker, you had tbe something of ‘musician to fellow the bes jas of he day.” Of eouasel Aer Piasso! After Pound! There could hardly have been a concer summary of tuhat I dn’ blo about a. 74 TRANSITION ISSUE 70 Larkin’ critical pieces, collected in book form as All What Jazz (1971),a4e an elo- quent reminder of what was once a sub- stantial antibop critical movement, in- volving such writers as Hugues Panassie and Henry Pleasants, Larkin seems in hindsight the strongest of bop's detrac- ‘on, for his opposition to the music cen- ters not so much on visceral disgust at the new but rather 2 considered protest against what he termed “the melancholy tendency since 1945 to remove jazz from: ‘our pleasures and place it, with all the other ‘modern’ arts, among our duties” Bt was Larkin right co consider be- bop a kind of modernism? Probably not. Bebop is difficult, and it did begin, like cubism and atonality,as a new and pri- vate language. This alone, however, does not make i¢ modernist, Jaze musicians had long dreamed of competing with classical composers on level ground ‘witness Scott Joplin’ opera Treemonisha, the Gershwins’ Porgy and Becs, and James P Johnson's 1930s semiclassical compo- sitions, many tragically lost to posterity Bebop is better understood in terms of these dreams of classical sophistication than in terms of the ewentieth-century quest for the new: Charlie Parker, in- deed, is less comparable to Pound, Pi ‘asso, or Stravinsky than to Are Tatum, (Parker was eatly described as the guy who could "play Tatum on the saxo- phone”); Tatum’ pianistic virtuosity, in ‘urn, is nora bit modernist, owing every= thing to Liszt, Chopin, and Fats Waller and nothing to the obsessions that com- pelled Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Ifbe- bop requires work from its listeners, then so does a Bach fugue. To follow Bach fone may well need to go through a rea sonably extensive process of familiariz~ing oneself with the rigors of eigh- teenth-centary counterpoint, sensitizing one’s ears to myriad subsle tonal rela- tionships, Is Bach therefore modernist? Free jazz, however, is another story. ‘The difficulties of free jazz do not reside in the challenge of earning a new mu sical syntax, for, as the New Grove Diaio- nary of Jazz rather tacflly puts it, “the music is probably best defined by its negative features... : the absence of tonality and predetermined chord se- quences; the abandonment of the jazz chorus stucture and its replacement by loose designs in which collective improv= isation takes place around predefined signals;an avoidance of cool instrumen- tal timbres in favor of more ‘voice-like’ sounds; and the suspension of standard time-keeping patterns for a free rubato." Free jazz, as Larkin recognized, is indis- putably modemist inspired by atonal mu- sic and abstract painting, and “difficue” in ‘ways that recall the most revolutionary works of early twentieth-century art— Kandinsky’s paintings, Schoenberg’ Er- ‘wartung, and Tristan Tear’ random po- ex. If lstening to bop for the firs time is like listening to a poem in a language you don’t understand, then listening to five jaze is like listening to syllables with ‘out sense, One ean accept free jazz oF re- ject, disparage the chaos or learn to en= oy it, but to enjoy it one does not need to learn anything that might sensibly be described as a new musical grammar, In fact, the problems with free jazz should be viewed as those of atonal mu- sic more generally. Music is a physiolog- ically peculiar phenomenon, and in an important way musicians are more con- strained than other artists, A painter can get away with splashing paint randomly onto a canvas: abstract painting at its ‘worst is blandly decorative (“apocalyptic wallpaper”” as Pollock was once de- scribed), rather than upsetting, Random musical notes, however, like random smells, are downright offensive: sound, like smell is closely linked to our emo- tions, and we are correspondingly more selective about what we ate willing to experience in these departments. Musi- cians occasionally Forget ths: they imi- tate the formal devices of abstract painters, translating random splotches of color {nto random splotches of notes, only to find chat the music which results i, in ‘comparison to the abstract painting that motivated it, neglected, Schoenberg, was a great friend of Kandinsky; Ornette Coleman put a Pollock on the cover of Free Jazz, but neither Schoenberg nor Coleman is anywhere near as popular as the painters who are their closest artis tic counterparts, I's therefore hard not to sympathize ‘with the revivals spirit chat currently rules the jaze world, Progress in artis delicate and halting thing, and the ant seructural free-form improvisation of five jaze may well have been, as Wynton, Marsalis has suggested, a wrong urn, THE END OF JAZZ? 75, Dake Etington ows 9 ity td Gly Caliah,ee Certainly che world of “art-musie” has abandoned the sort of doctrinaire avant- ‘gardism that inspired free jaz. Innova tots here have proceeded by doubling back, as cemplified by the minimalism of Philip ss and Steve Reich. The same is true in the visual arts: figuration and repre- the return to consonance ex- sentation, once the bane of progressive, Is there any sense in trying to distinguish the extreme hermeticism of free jazz from the only slightly less extreme hermeticism of bop itself? forward-looking artists, have once again centered the vocabulary of contemporary painting In this context, isnot dificult to think wistfully back on bebop, the apotheosis of “black classical music.” ‘The beboppers may have turned their backs on their audiences, rejecting Paul ‘Whiteman and the butfoonish antics of Louis Armstrong, but they did not turn their backs on jazz as such: if anything, they raised its technical standards to an unprecedented level ‘And yet one cannot help but feel {queasy about those jazz musicians who, 76 TRANSITION ISSUE 70 following Wynton Marsalis, want to re tum to the heyday of bebop. The «ruth is that bebop sill sounds alien to most listeners. Many even prefer the unstruc- tuted chaos of five jazz to the impene- trable musician-to-musician code of be- bop, John Coltrane’ A Love Supreme, ‘which borders both on jazz-rock and on five jazz, is afer all one of the most pop- ular jaze records of alltime, and proba bly not chanks to Coltrane’ many be- Doppish technical excellences. Like much five jazz, A Love Supreme is appreciated as an unrestrained musical bacchanal, a piece of 1960s psychedelia, a sort of jazz Set Papper. (The rock evtic Lester Bangs, ‘who generally hated jazz, made an ex- ception for A Love Supreme and the mu- sic of Coltrane’ free period.) The re- vivalss in dismissing che simpliciey that was the virtue ofthis music (a of earlier jaze, fee jazz, and fasion) seem to be los ing sight of their audience, Contempo- rary listeners are almost as indifferent ro the prodigious musicianship of the neo- boppers, many of whom gave up their teenage years to spend eight hours a day practicing their instruments, as they are to the equally massive talents of Yngwie Malmsteen, the Scandinavian guitar hero. Complex languages demand thorough instruction. For years it has been possible to decry the state of jazz education sim- ply by remarking chat Thomas Owens’ ‘monumental 1974 Ph.D. dissertation— an 850-page, two-volume study of the music of Charlie Parker—is available only asa barely legible mimeograph from University Microfilms. The tome, which includes transcriptions of one-fith ofParker’ approximately 900 recorded so- Jos, is a major achievement of ewentieth- century musicology. Owens’ dissertation gave many musicians their best glimpse of the machinery of Parkers remarkable technique. It is a jazz version of Bee- thoven’s sketchbooks, look into the in- ner workings of what might otherwise seem incomprehensible musical pres tidigitation. That the book has not long since found a more prominent scholatly publisher, and thar Owens himself has not been given a post at one of the na- tion’ more prestigious musicology pro- sgrams,is testimony to the remarkable ne- lect of bebop even among academic Owens’ second book, Bebop: The ‘Music and ls Players asptes to provide an introduction to bebop for musically so- phisticated readers. Its primary strength lies in Owens ability to isolate key rmu- sical phrases integral toa jazz musician’s vocabulary: he gives us ewenty-nine figures constitutive ofthe “Parker style,” ten key Gillespie patterns sixteen char- acteristically Coltrane gestures, and so oon, forall ofthe important bop players from the earliest founders to latecomers like Freddie Hubbard. These are, as (Owens explains, the starting point for any serious study of jazz: Parker lke all important improviser, devel oped a personal repertory of melodic formu las that he used inthe course of improvising He found many ways t0 reshape, combine, and phase these formulas, s0 that no two choruses were just alike, But his “Sponta- neous” performances were actually prevom- posed in part. This prparation ws absolutly necessary, fr no one can create fluent, coer- ‘ent melodies in realtime without having a FREE JAZZ, ‘A COLLECTIVE! IMPROVISATION ay THE swolreheased bag of melodie tricks ready. His wel-practiced melodic paterns are essential idemifirs of his tye In emphasizing these figures, Owens’s volume constitutes a marked advance lover another notable recent contribution. to jazz pedagogy, the New Grove Dicio- nary of Jaz2, once the exclusive prove- nance of reference libraries but now avail- able in a low-priced one-volume edition, marketed (0 a mass audience. Owens’ book isa kind of musical road-map,a dis- tilltion of decades spent listening 0, thinking abou, and cransceibing bebop. Yet Bebop: The Music and Its Players, though brilliant, is burdened by the fil ture oftillstrious predecessor. The dis sertation appears, condensed, in Owens’ chapter three, and this focus on Parker ‘unbalances the book: in particular, Dizzy Gillespie's harmonic contributions to bebop, without which the style would not exist are severely neglected, In other places, the book seems to aspire to an unrealistic completeness. Hovering some- ‘what uncomfortably in the space be- ‘ween primer and encyclopedia, Owens treats not the one or two dozen musi- cians who might be thought to have THE END OF 1AZ27. 7Herbie Mann st the Vago date. Herbie Mann omy of i ‘commanded major positions in postwar Jazz, but more than a hundred players, (Owens seems morally opposed to crop- ping; his preface regretfully lists no less ‘than thirty-four tenor saxophonists who could not be included in this book.) Such fastidiousness isa litde irritating, and it risks alienating many of Owens’ potential readers: newcomers, who need {0 be told about Dizzy Gillespie (but not Howard McGhee or Joe Guy) and Char- lie Parker (but not Sonny Criss or Phil Woods) may find themselves geting bogged down in the erudition, while Jazz aficionados may find themselves knowing much of what the book's hun- dred necessarily cursory summaries have to offer Likewise, those who don’t read ‘music will find themselves missing much ‘of what is most valuable in the book, (Owens has a genuine gift for capturing jazz sounds on paper, and his book is filled with brief transcriptions of striking jazz moments. (My favorites are the Max: Roach passage on page 206, which re- duces a magically polyrhythmic pattern to a seemingly benign series of eighth- notes; and the Clifford Brown-Harold Land duet on page 217, which isolates a 78 TRANSITION IssuE 70 brilliant moment of spontaneous masi- cal interaction.) But serious musicians will doubtless wane complete solos such, as the dissertation offered, Moreover, on the most important critical question pertaining to bebop, that ofthe relative merits ofthe original Doppers and the Marslis-led revivalists who are attempting to breathe life into bop, Owens’ book maddeningly reftses judgment. In his closing esay on ‘younger masters” he notes that ‘most ofthe younger players mentioned inthis chapter seem less concemed with breaking new musical ground and more concerned with learning and perpetuating the tation they Ihave adepted. Often their ole model are ob- ious « «im other cases element of multiple role models appear in their musi. Because ‘heir musical eos shou, some cites have di panaged their supposed lack of erginaity. Gillespie's comment at the beginning ofthis chapter ["you don’t see no Charlie Parkers coming along”) expresses this sentiment. (Contrast this with his account of the first few generations of beboppers: “Each generation of players has added to this musical vocabulary without chang- ing its syntax”) His response rings dis- ‘urbingly hollow: But perhaps, afer nearly a century of evolu tion, jaz has reached a level that sais the creative needs of young players learning it ‘They sek feshnes in new compositions and new combinations of old melodic and ryth- mic ideas, but do not strive for & new vocab lary ora new jazz idiom. Does that mean ‘that their music isinferirto tha oftheir mu sical role models? The answer may tein s0- ety’: valuation ofS. Bach. Bach inventedPtnecantbrope ‘no musical forms or compositional procedures Yer taday we treasure his works and barely remember the names of his principal Chartos mingus role models Ce Having offered this somewhat weak argument, which seems to confuse the notion of belonging to a tradition with that of simply being derivative, Owens immediately backs away from it, “Is, there now aJ.S. Bach of bebop who will fone day obscure society's memory of ‘those we regard as jazz giants? Probably not." But the question he raises isa trou- of five jazz, they seem also to have re= bling one, and it deserves a substantial jected the notion of innovation as such: answer. there have been, since the end of the six- ‘A genuine artistic tradition involves ties, precious few additions to the musi- both continuity and growth:a common, cal language, no new borrowings from slowly changing foundation to which the classical tradition, ew new voicings inventive individuals can contribute, Be- or melodic trademarks. Instead, listeners bop, like classical music, was such a era- have been treated to a series of ever dition, From 1945 to 1965, there was a_more virtuosic recombinations of the general consensus about the essentials of same basic elements, the syntax; yet a number of individuals devlopdscninty indi 6 Having rejected the radical imovations Within it. One can tell almost instanta- neously that one is hearing Miles Davis, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, or McCoy of free jazz, the bebop revivalists 1m also to have rejected the notion Tynet—or some imitator thereof —and not some other player. Each of these in- novators had one or more trademark of innovation as such sounds: Miles Davis's spare lyricism, or What could ie possibly mean to say his use of the unstemmed Harmon that jazz has reached a level that satisfies ‘mute; Bill Evans’ gentle touch and im- the creative needs of young players earn- pressionist, rootless voicings; Coltrane's ing it;’so that they no longer need to do energetic chromaticism; Tyner’s use of _ the hard work of developing new sounes, 4quartal harmony. These little signatures new ways of thinking about music? have been picked up by other plyers,in- What could it mean, that is, other than that jazz has ceased to exist as a living sntof tradition, that it has become a closed book? Classical music has reached such ccoxporated into the common patlan bebop. And its precisely this elen innovation that is absent from the pla ing of even the best bebop revivalists. a level: we go 0 classical music concerts Having rejected the radical innovations not to hear the latest offerings, but to be THE END OF 1Az27. 79reminded ofthe great music that people used 10 write, Pethaps jaz, coo, was bound to become a repertory music And perhaps it was inevitable that some: fone like Wynton Matsalis, as skilled at clasial erummpet as he is at jazz, should be the musician to do it, Marsalis’ grea est innovation, ultimately, is nor simply the return to bebop. What he has given What could it possibly mean to say that “jazz has reached a level that satisfies the creative needs of young players leaming, it,” so that they no longer need to do the hard work of developing new sounds, new ‘ways of thinking about music? What could it mean, that is, other than that jazz has ceased to exist as a living tradition? us isan entirely new paradigms the jaze phyer noc asa member ofa tradition, but as its caretaker, He i a kind of jazz Tos- canini a superstar who rose to fame on the realization that the music he loved ‘was no longer a living tradition, ‘Owens’ book i re of these anxd other aesthetic ruminations, which means in a 80. TRANSITION IssuE 70 sense itis free to focus on "the musi it self Like the neoboppers, Owens is something of a technocrat,a man who is mote comfortable in the world of notes than in the world of words, But where in his Ph.D. dissertation this austerity vwasa virtue, here itis a weakness. For in Bebop: The Music and lis Players, Owens, not unlike jazz itself seems little wn= certain of his audience, Is this a text: book? Asa purely musical ineroduetion to bebop, it cannot compete with Jon Mehegan’s classic four-volume intro: duction to jaze piano styles, or with Scott Reeves’ recent study, Creativ Improvisation, 1s it a scholarly mono- graph, along the lines of Gunther Scful- lees classic Early Juss and The Swing Ena? Clearly not: its musician-by-musician format invites comparison to a reference work more than an extended scholarly study, Bue is it a ref the standpoint of completeness, no. Clearly, Owens wants to be somewhere in beeween: lke jazz musicians them hhe would like to bridge the gap beoween the world of the ordinary lis. tener and the world of the bebop musi- cian, Ic is no surprise, chen, thac his book runs into the same difficulties ficed by bebop performers for the truth is that bebop, like quantum physics, rests easy translation into ondinary vocabulary “have a weakness” Larkin wrote, “for the entertainers of jazz... 28 opposed to more sombre characters who suggest by their demeanour that Lam lucky to hear then” Itis easy to understand this sen- ‘imen, when we see itjustaposed ag the rather puritan shetorie of the eradi- sional jaze revivals:There is, you must recall, kindof serious study that will give you the confidence to strike your match to the mighty wick that will illuminate yet another portion ofthe darknes Out there somewhere are the kind of people th do not aczept the premature autopsy of noble artform. These ae the ones who follow in the footsteps of the gifted and the disc lined who have been deeply hurt but not die couraged, who have been frightened but have tnt forgotten how to be brave, who reve in the company oftheir fiends and sweethearts but are willing to face the loneliness that i de- ‘manded of master: In order to carry the can dle you have to acept the fact that when the wax om that cane Begins to melt wil side down: and burn your hand. You must be will. ing to acope the fat that pain i apart of the process of revelation, (This from a sermon by Stanley Crouch, Marsalis’ fiend and mentor, which ap- pears on Marsalis’ album The Majesty of the Blues.) Is it only the philistines who find something distasteful in allthis talk of pain, discipline, and mastery? Sensi- ble thinkers from Rousseat: (who op- posed Rameau harmonic complexity) to Stendhal (who preferred Rossini to Beethoven), from Nietasche (upholding Bizet over Wagner) to Larkin, have made the case against untoward musical com= plexity: Music, as musicians have an un= fortunate tendency to forget, is a small part of the world, not the world itself. It Js perhaps no great tragedy if we allow it just to be enjoyable, Jazz is undoubtedly an American trea- sure, and bebop is undoubtedly central to jazz. The music of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane will be remembered, along with the music of GENE AMMONS BOSSA NOVA Louis Armstrong, as among America’s greatest contributions to the art. But Armstrong's music was entertaining, ap- proachable in a way that the music of Parker, Davis, and Coleane was not. One must be careful not to underestimate this. What we now call “classical music” arose in the seventeenth century as a populist reaction to the high-art com- plexities of Renaissance counterpoint — only to develop, within the space of a few hundred years, into a complex high- artform itself Jazz, t00, has had its own, evolution, from the rollicking syncopa- tion of New Orleans jazz to the formi- able intricacy of a Coltrane solo. Ifjazz is now “dead,” now a repertory music like classical music before it, and indeed like Renaissance counterpoint before thar, then we can mourn it. Bue t would bbe wrong to getso caught up in mourn- ing that we fail to notice the music which is taking its place, THE END OF Jazz? 81 Boasa Nova. one Ammons.