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From Meltingpot to Potluck

Peter Wessel ............................................................... Jazz has always loved myths, and the hottest names at European jazz festivals are still American and still predominantly black. Yet the truth is, that although we go on worshipping the few remaining titans that have emerged from the melting pot, and sometimes accord their musical offspring excessive reverence, the evolution of jazz has long since ceased to be an exclusively American affair. From its birth in New Orleans a hundred years ago, this sensual, improvised music with its syncopated beat became a perfect mirror of the nation in which it originated. A bastard child, whose obscure lineage included the Church on the maternal side and popular and military musical traditions of Africa and Europe as paternal spirits, it soon developed a wholly original but at the same time very versatile personality that lent itself easily to any social occasion. Jazz was utilitarian music - in the beginning often just an ingredient to give more "punch" to a performance - and therefore highly sensitive to social change: the optimism of the roaring twenties is reflected in the large orchestras and hot arrangements of Fletcher Henderson, Jean Goldkette, Jimmie Lunceford and Paul Whiteman; the anger provoked by a growing consciousness among blacks and intellectual liberal whites in the wake of the Second World War of racial prejudice found its correlative in the angular rhythms and complex harmonies of the be-boppers, and it will be hard to find a more eloquent expression of the feeling of anguish and loss that pervaded the fifties than the forlorn call of Miles' muted horn. What is remarkable is the way the evolution of jazz in America came to a standstill, and how this unique American art form began to feed on itself around the time of John Coltrane's death in 1967. I'm not saying that the great saxophone player's death caused the demise of jazz - or at least of American jazz: on the evidence of his discography, this third most influential improviser in jazz history (after Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker) had probably outplayed his role as a beacon for new generations of musicians already three years earlier with the recording of A Love Supreme. Nevertheless the date does seem ominous, for it was the year that Miles Davis' second great quintet (the one with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and Ron Carter), on the verge of disbanding, recorded Nefertiti, their last entirely acoustic album; Thelonious Monk went underground never really to surface again; jazz-rock fusion was just around the corner (generally more rock than jazz, this attempt at renewing the idiom eventually proved a dead-end street), and terms like neo and revival flourished. As the French jazz historian Andr Hodeir pointed out in his seminal work, Jazz - Its Evolution and Essence (1954), jazz had in only five decades retraced the road that European music took ten centuries to travel. Although Hodeir's pessimism about the future of jazz proved premature, it seems obvious that by the time American jazz had reached the level of complexity and refinement of European art music it had lost its freshness and spontaneity, and stagnation, degeneration and decadence set in. It began to look backwards, and if that's the death of any art form it is an especially cruel and humiliating death for jazz - the incarnation of a culture whose mission it is to "make it

new" as Ezra Pound said. Why jazz lost its inspiration - its drive - in the States is hard to say, but a comparison between American and European trends may give us some clues. Jazz was, as we have said, from the beginning an art form with popular roots. But like any other creation that has come out of the great American melting pot (including the Americans themselves!) it had to give up its claim on the past - renounce its inheritance - to be recognized as a new, self-made, and genuinely American art form. Nevertheless, if in the process of becoming just that (a new American idiom), jazz was bound to retain only as tendencies - distant echoes - the formal features of its origins in African and Old World folklore, the ecstatic nature and ritual function of its forebears weren't sacrificed. Indeed its background as a poor upstart - with the natural opportunism (or the flexibility, if you prefer) of the upstart - made it the ideal music to accompany the American Dream. Jazz as dance music for huge audiences reached its apex during the Second World War with scores of swing bands mobilizing hope and solidarity across the U.S. as well as in theatres of war. People needed to be together, and the war machinery created a favorable economical climate for large ensembles such as the orchestras of "the royalty": Count Basie, Duke Ellington and "the King of Swing", Benny Goodman; the trombone-playing bandleaders, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller; clarinetists Woody Herman and Artie Shaw, saxophonist Charlie Barnett, and drummers of the caliber of Chick Webb and Gene Krupa. And then again an important social change meant a crisis to jazz. That demobilization put and end to the big band era is a fact that few will dispute, but from the vantage point of the present day we can also see how jazz during the cold war changed from being a unifying force to becoming a forbidding and arcane language for cliques of the politically and culturally hip. Yet far from threatening the vitality of jazz, this new elitism, complete with its phraseology, props such as goatees, sunglasses and extravagant headwear, eccentric behavior, and high priests (Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus come to mind) brought about some of the most original contributions to what the poet Leroy Jones - in keeping with the radicalism of bebop some years later would call "black music". Like tradition jazz needs to fulfill a social purpose to be alive. If it doesn't have a function - and by function I mean anything that helps liberate physical or mental energies (in its short history jazz has been present - has been used - in brothels, dance halls and clubs, at funerals, on Broadway, as a badge to signal freedom and rebellion, for meditation and contemplation, in films, ballets, and poetry readings etc.) - it becomes a mere tourist attraction or topic for erudite dissertations. And this is the heart of the matter. Jazz is a physical art form that feeds on the moment. Like oil paintings and religious services it can only be fully appreciated live, and only through the interplay with a live audience does the jazzman acquire his full dimension as a modern shaman. This important fact has unfortunately been obscured by the importance of the gramophone record as the only means to preserve a music whose most characteristic aspect is its very transience: without Columbia, Victor, Okeh, Savoy, Prestige, Verve, Atlantic, Blue Note, Impulse (just to name a few of the most important historical record labels) no one who hadn't heard Louis Armstrong in person or broadcast by radio would have known what his improvisations sounded like, some of the finest

music of the 20th century would have been irreparably lost, but most importantly: many a young man with a horn would never have awoken, and the hall of fame of jazz might have been a mere clubhouse. In the last three decades audiovisual means of communication have taken the place of personal presence in most spheres of American life and only schools, universities, health clubs, and the occasional eatery seem to offer an occasion for social intercourse. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that jazz has been losing its social function to become a career instead. Of course there's always the blues. As all the greatest revolutionaries in jazz have demonstrated, whenever jazz came to a crossroads or had turned so many corners that it ran into itself there was always the deep river of the blues to walk into, and one would return to the shore cleansed and with new inspiration. Now, the trouble is that that river doesn't run through the University campus, and it doesn't feed the fountain at the Music Academy either. The blues is the river of life and it's got rocks on the bottom. Until you've paid your dues you can't play the blues, no matter how close you stick to the twelve bars or how many blue notes you throw in there. The blues is laughing just to keep from crying. That's cosmic humour as Hermann Hesse observed, and that's what we hear in the sardonic notes and wry quotes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and Eric Dolphy, but what we listen for in vain in the technically brilliant solos of many of the young virtuosi coming out of Berklee or The New School on Manhattan. For many years there existed a healthy dialectical relationship between the black and white elements in jazz. Because the Afro-Americans had a powerful oral tradition to build on, almost all the great improvisers - the men and women whose strong personalities had made their voices sound like instruments and their instruments like extensions of their voices - were black. White musicians, on the other hand, had traditionally had better access to formal musical education and tended to sway jazz in the direction of more structured forms along the lines of European classical music or impressionists like Debussy or Ravel. When the so-called Cool School - dominated by white musicians and bandleaders like Stan Kenton, Claude Thornhill, Lennie Tristano and Dave Brubeck - in the late forties espoused a rather cerebral type of jazz, hard bop and its cousin soul jazz emerged as its natural counterparts. Led almost exclusively by young and forceful black musicians, like drummers Max Roach and Art Blakey, bassists Charles Mingus and Paul Chambers, trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan, pianists Wynton Kelly and Horace Silver, and saxophone players Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley and Gene Ammons, this school of jazz insisted on a return to the roots: polyrhythmic vitality (but still basic and swinging enough to be danceable), blues inflection, and a down-home, physical, churchy sound. The prevalence of organ combos (like the one led by Jimmy Smith, "the Charlie Parker of the hammon organ") and head arrangements in hard bop as opposed to the written woodwind-and-strings charts characteristic of cool, and especially of its brainchild third stream - is by no means a coincidence. Ironically the only completely successful synthesis of the black and white strains in jazz produced on American soil before the cultural revolution of the '60s - the only attempt to merge European art music and jazz to have any immediate impact on the evolution of jazz in America before rock and the electronic revolution robbed jazz of its public and threw it into a state of momentary bewilderment and indefinition - did

not result from the third stream experiments of classically trained writers such as Gunther Schuller, Milton Babbitt or John Lewis, but from the collaboration of two intuitive and self-taught musicians: Miles Davis, hardly an advocate of white values, and Gil Evans, a white arranger. Their three albums Miles Ahead, Sketches of Spain, and Porgy and Bess are among the finest examples of jazz "concertos" in a neoclassical vein. As I mentioned earlier, American jazz had begun to feed on itself by the end of the '60s. Rock had usurped its place as dance music. The line-up of instruments in the typical bebop quintet never varied: trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass and drums, and the by now traditional way of playing a tune by sandwiching strings of solos built on the chord sequences of standards between unison opening and closing statements of the theme offered little challenge and variation. With the development of audiovisual entertainment many clubs had closed down and there was no organized concert circuit. The chances of experiencing live jazz were therefore few, as were few the possibilities for musicians to make a living. Most of the veteran jazzmen who weren't in and out of jail on drug charges - or had not dropped out altogether - had gone electric, and the younger and healthier generation of black musicians bent on pursuing a musical career within the jazz idiom had become just as academic as the Whites: now even they had lost touch with the blues. The old magic - the tension between black folk forms and their ritual function on the one hand, and white individualism, formal training and promise of fame on the other - no longer worked. The melting pot had been simmering for too long, so although the dish looked good and the consistency was smooth, it had lost its bouquet and taste. Meanwhile Europe had been developing as a breeding ground for a lot of new talent. The first American jazz musicians had visited Europe shortly after the First World War and in the early '30s two key figures from the classical period in jazz, Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter took up residence in London. Nevertheless the continental attraction of Paris, its multicultural dynamism, bohemian charm and intellectual enthusiasm soon proved more decisive than the linguistic advantages of England, and in the '40s and '50s a steadily increasing number of mainstream jazz stars settled in the French capital. Some of these, like Roy Eldridge, belonged to the "aristocracy" of mainstream jazz and had decided that it was better to leave the States rather than being humiliated by the boppers whose "Chinese music" they could not understand. It would of course be wrong to conclude that Paris was a haven of peace and concord where everybody could play what they wanted without opposition. No, postmodernism was still a long way off, and a cruel and bitter feud was fought between traditionalists, agitated by the critic Hughes Panassi, and modernists. By and large, though, there was room for everybody: what mattered was that jazz had regained its audience - a devoted audience -and was recognized as an art form, a sign of nonconformity, and a means of interracial solidarity and social cohesion. Faced with the impact and novelty of jazz it is no wonder that it took some time for European musicians to learn the idiom and realize that they had something of their own to contribute to improvised music. Nevertheless as early as 1937 Django Reinhardt, the great Belgian-born gipsy guitarist, was jamming with Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter and a host of talented French musicians including Alix Combelle, Michael Warlop and Stephane Grappelly in Paris, and when Don Byas, in 1946, and Charlie Parker, in 1949, came to Europe, they realized that there were already people there who "spoke"

bebop and they didn't have any trouble finding worthy sidemen among their European colleagues. By 1960 the European bop contingent included such players as Ronnie Scott in England, Arne Domnrus, Rolf Ericsson and Lars Gullin in Sweden, Hans Koller and Friedrich Gulda in Austria, Bobby Jaspar in Belgium, Tete Montoliu in Spain, Roger Gurin and Pierre Michelot in France, Gil Cuppini in Italy, George Grunz in Switzerland, and Dusko Goykovich in Yugoslavia. The high quality of the local jazzmen notwithstanding, European jazz - with the one exception of Django Reinhardt - was strictly American: Dixieland and bebop. But with the event of modal jazz and free jazz (also called the new thing) in the early and middle '60s structures were broken down and bridges were built which would make it easier for jazz to assimilate other folk forms. Modal jazz, involving improvisation on a series of scales within a highly simplified harmonical structure (in contrast to the complex and rapid chord progressions of bebop), had been developed by Miles Davis and the musicians moving in his orbit in the late '50s and early '60s, and been given a theoretical framework by the composer and theorist George Russell in his groundbreaking work The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Modality refers strictly speaking to the classical modes (dorian, phrygian, etc.) of early Greek and European music, but when applied to jazz it also implies other nondiatonic scales such as can be found in traditional Spanish and Indian music. The basic idea in free jazz is the absence of a predetermined underlying harmonic structure and predetermined structural length. Tribal and spontaneous it emphasizes collective improvisation and relies heavily on moods and the empathy between the performers. Although often very abstract and seemingly cacophonic it has been able to fuse Afro-Caribbean elements with the angularity and dissonance of twentieth-century avantgarde classical music, and today almost any improvisation will contain free passages. One of the main exponents of the new thing was the alto sax player Ornette Coleman, whose revolutionary 1959 quartet included the trumpeter Don Cherry, a musician who - together with George Russell - would become instrumental to the evolution of multiethnical jazz in Europe. A number of important American avantgarde jazz musicians settled in Europe or spent extended periods there in the '60s: Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Ibdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) etc, but it was the presence in Sweden of George Russell and Don Cherry as teachers and initiators that more than anything made European musicians - and musicians from other continents living in Europe - aware that jazz has a global scope and that each people can add something to it. Third stream had failed because at the root of it there was an inferiority complex. In his attempt to raise his music from what he mistakenly considered to be low brow and attain respectability the American jazz musician emulated the European classical idiom. A devitalized idiom which had long ago become preciously elitist and lost its earlier popular appeal. In the historical memory of the European jazz musician jazz did not call up remembrances of hardship, illiteracy and low life, and classical music was for him just another thing of his European past that it made no sense to vindicate. To him jazz was associated with the resistance against the nazis during the Second World War, with the intellectual and artistic elite, and the defense of cultural integrity and dignity. With the increasing permeability of national borders in Europe and a multicultural reality in most of its large cities, personal identity has become ever more related to cultural specificity. As far as jazz is concerned this has meant a resurgence of

its ethnic element (whether rhythmic, melodic or harmonic); a mushrooming of specialized record labels and publications,and the folk-hero status of players like the Norwegian Jan Garbarek, the Italian Richard Galliani, the French Michel Portal, the Spanish Chano Dominguez, the Indian Trilok Gurtu, the Brazilian Nana Vasconcelos, the Danish Palle Mikkelborg, the Swedish Palle Danielsson, the British John Surman, the Dutch Jasper Van't Hof, the German Albert Mangelsdorff, the Polish Tomasz Stanko, the South African Dollar Brand, the Argentinian Gato Barbieri, and even of Americans (!) such as Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, Carla Bley, Dave Douglas, and Henry Threadgill - in short, it has meant the rennaissance of Jazz. World Music succeded in reinvigorating jazz precisely because it did not try to melt all jazz into one pot. Instead it took pot luck and accepted the dynamic plurality that is characteristic of the European checkerboard of peoples.

Copyright 1998 by Peter Wessel. About the Author e-mail: pwessel@ya.com

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