Nice embouchure, Barry!

So do you think Obama is more of a JJ Johnson guy or a Kai Winding guy?

via f yeah dementia!!1!

Blues and Politics

Point:

"It was not done with malice, and if I had known that that made-up word [macaca] would be connoted as a racial insult I would not have said it."

Counterpoint:

Issued Without Comment

An Open Letter To Senator John McCain

Dear Mr. McCain,

Since this is a blog post that you will probably never read, and since I still don't believe you know how to use a computer, I will skip the usual pleasantries. Instead, I will cut straight to the point. As Peter Hum and Jason Parker, among others, have pointed out, in your zeal to identify every misspent cent in the federal budget, you recently noted that Jazz at Lincoln Center received an $800,000 grant. You find this prospect to be wholly repulsive, it seems. "Next time you're in New York, go to the Lincoln Center," you said, adding sarcastically, "Jazz lovers rejoice."

I understand the principles of limited government which you hold dear (that is, when you are not calling for the escalation of foolish and unwinnable wars halfway around the globe which cost thousands of times more than these grants for jazz programs). Frankly, I agree with the assertion that the current economic crisis is the result of overextension in both the private and public spheres. However, as the old saying goes, you are being a pound foolish and a penny wise. With the 2010 federal budget deficit coming in at over a trillion dollars, it is simply asinine to be haggling over such a trifle as NEA grants.

I suggest you drop your vendetta against jazz, and try to balance the budget by focusing on programs that actually make a dent in the ledger (like outmoded weapons programs, for instance). Jazz is one of the most important cultural legacies of our republic, but you would not know it from the support (or lack thereof) it receives from our government. Moreso than just about every industrialized nation, the United States depends almost solely on the private sphere to fund and promote the fine arts. Judging by the status quo, you have effectively already won your battle to defund the arts. So leave us the hell alone and allow institutions like J@LC, the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the NEA to at least keep the pittance they receive from the federal government.


Most Sincerely,
David Hill

A Very Special Friday Album Cover

Today the British newspaper The Independent reviews Freedom, Rhythm and Sound by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker, a compendium of rare jazz cover art from the 1970s. Many of the covers in the book reflect the Black Power aesthetic of pride in blackness, signifying on African and African American cultural forms and tropes.

You can view a slideshow of some of these album covers here. The book makes a great holiday gift for any album coverphile you know.


h/t: jazz.com

Wynton Marsalis is the Ronald Reagan of Jazz - Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

On Monday morning I awoke to find a wonderful surprise on my RSS reader: a panoply of new posts on Do The Math examining the Young Lions of the 1980s and the jazz wars of that decade, as well as an extensive interview (and blindfold test!) with Wynton Marsalis. What a great early holiday gift from Ethan Iverson. Do yourself a favor and skim through some of the goods. Some of the material delves into historical and musical minutiae that only a specialist can really understand, but there are plenty of tidbits that will entertain even casual jazz fans.

The material as a whole brought to my mind a thought I had explored somewhat deeply during my time in graduate school. During that time, when I was mentally plotting out possible dissertation topics, I explored the idea of writing a cultural history of jazz that effectively contextualized the music in American thought and culture. Basically, I thought I would rewrite Jazz in American Culture my way. One chapter idea for the dissertation which received much contemplation was a study of Wynton Marsalis' rise to prominence during the 1980s. The idea in my mind was to connect the forces surrounding the rise of Marsalis to those surrounding the rise of Ronald Reagan.

Calling Wynton Marsalis the Ronald Reagan of jazz is not a new idea. Indeed, invoking Reagan in the pejorative sense had become somewhat of a favored mode of attack in the jazz wars. Shortly after the Ken Burns Jazz documentary aired in 2001, this screed made the rounds on the internet, in which saxophonist Mike Zilber issued a number of pronouncements against Marsalis (who was a major consultant to and presence in the documentary), Burns, and the documentary itself. The charges themselves are mostly not worth repeating, since you can read the entire piece on this page and anyone familiar with the controversy around the document is well aware of the points made in Zilber's critique.

But my idea was to examine the connection between Reagan and Marsalis in a non-pejorative, inquisitive manner. Indeed, Reagan's name carries with it an almost inconceivable amount of baggage, as this year's election cycle showed us time and again. However, if you look past the mythology built around Reagan and examine the personal feelings behind his ideology and how he resonated with a large coalition of voters in 1980, I think you will find more than a few interesting similarities between he and Marsalis that help explain Marsalis' own rise to prominence as well as the "renaissance" of jazz he helped lead in the 1980s.

The lazy critique of Marsalis posits that he does not like a lot of jazz made during the 1960s and 1970s. His detractors point out that Marsalis has never paid tribute to Marion Brown or Keith Jarrett at Jazz at Lincoln Center the way he has to Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker. This, they argue, shows his hand. As Mike Zilber put it,

Marsalis is now the Ronald Reagan of jazz and, like Reagan, has no memory of those nasty 60s and 70s, preferring to bask in the halcyon days of Roseland, Satchmo and wax recordings.

Though Zilber and others have overstated this fact, it is still important to note that Marsalis feels and is not afraid to argue that much of the music produced and marketed as "jazz" during the 1960s and 1970s is not jazz. More specifically, Marsalis has argued many times that two strains of American jazz - the experimental avant-garde and jazz-rock fusion - should not be considered jazz (he would call both styles "improvised music" instead). This, not surprisingly, rubs many musicians, critics, and fans the wrong way.*

Marsalis has made two arguments for these exclusions. The first, which Wynton expresses in his DTM interview, and which his intellectual godfather Stanley Crouch has repeated elsewhere, is that by succumbing to inclusion ad infinitum, the word jazz loses its meaning. Instead, Marsalis argues, one must draw the line somewhere. For Marsalis, swing is one of the essential traits of jazz (the blues aesthetic is another), so any evaluation of what is or is not jazz begins by determining whether the music in question swings (though it should be noted that Marsalis' tastes seem to have broadened over the past 15 years).** As Iverson argues in his DTM posts, Marsalis and his contemporaries fetishize swing to an astonishing degree. Avant-garde jazz and fusion do many things, but they do not swing the way Marsalis and his peers swing. So it is not surprising why Marsalis would argue for the exclusion of those styles from The Jazz Tradition.

The second reason speaks both to cultural politics and musical analysis. In Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (Roth Family Foundation Music in America Imprint), Gabriel Solis explains Marsalis' has description of the 1960s and 1970s as a time when some jazz musicians lost their way. The historical trajectory of jazz was altered when a number of musicians followed the trails of either the avant-garde or fusion. Both styles were not jazz. Fusion was no better than rock music. As Wynton put it "If you were there it was a great way to meet women and have a good time... but it's a death toll for jazz musicians." And the avant garde was also decidedly non-jazz. It was merely "a reaction to the European avant-garde," which sacrificed The Jazz Tradition for the sake of innovation. Because so many musicians fell under the spell of fusion or the avant-garde, jazz ceased to exist as an artistic musical expression that also captured the ears of a substantial audience, according to Marsalis.

Marsalis sought to return jazz to this cultural moment at which jazz could be both accessible and elevated to high art status. He and the Young Lions brought a renewal to jazz following these musical upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The excesses of the avant-garde and the crass comercialism of fusion were to be cast aside for jazz that built upon a tradition that was artistic but did not innovate for the sake of innovation. It can easily be described Morning in Jazz if you wanted to make reference to Reagan.

Marsalis was successful. He became enough of a cultural zeitgeist to appear on the cover of Time and secure his appointment as Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he institutionalized his program of jazz renewal. But not only that, he created great jazz that itself should be included in The Jazz Tradition. On DTM, Iverson restates the case for Marsalis Standard Time ~ Vol.1, J Mood, The Wynton Marsalis Quartet Live At Blues Alley, and Black Codes (From the Underground), and I heartily second. He may have touched off the Jazz Wars in the process, but he would argue that he also helped blaze the path for creating The Jazz Tradition.

This story of renewal following two decades in the wilderness is oddly reminiscent of the narrative employed by Ronald Reagan in 1980, just around the same time Marsalis began his apprenticeship with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Reagan saw the politics of the 1960s and 1970s much in the same way Marsalis saw the jazz of those eras. The major thenes of Reagan's 1980 Presidential campaign included critiques of the boated welfare state of the 1960s, the loss of momentum in the Cold War at the hand of detente during the 1970s, and the permissive youth culture of both decades. As Marsalis perceived his music as a renewal of jazz, Reagan presented his platform as a vehicle of American renewal (whether he achieved it or not is a whole other story).

Like Reagan, Marsalis consolidated his ideas into a movement, creating a template for his own school to follow and for his detractors to criticize. Both men placed themselves in important historic moments, at which point they were to lead the public on a historical trajectory. Both are at the center of debate in their respective fields almost thirty years afterward, in the 2008 Republican Presidential primaries in Reagan's case, and in the postmortem of the Jazz Wars in the case of Marsalis. So aside from being a superficially biting critique of Marsalis, the comparison to Reagan also reveals much about the way Marsalis may perceive of himself in jazz history.

--

Big h/t and a heartfelt thanks for being who they are to: The Bad Plus (DTM)

For more on Marsalis, see Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists, pp. 287-334 and Gabriel Solis, Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making, pp. 150-151.

*There is an undeniable amount of resentment inherent in these critiques of Marsalis. As Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, he is in a particularly powerful position as the preeminent tastemaker of American jazz. Certainly, most of his critics would enjoy that kind of critical power.
**Marsalis postulates this theory, which he calls the "purist ethic in jazz," in a 1988 op-ed piece for the New York Times, "What is Jazz - And Isn't." Iverson summed up a major critique of this position brilliantly in his DTM post, writing that to his detractors, Marsalis appeared to have "a unified disdain for jazz music that wasn’t swinging, virtuosic, and informed only by the great black jazz musicians comfortable with chord changes."

Under the Radar: Percussion Bitter Sweet

Max Roach
Percussion Bitter Sweet

In the standard history-of-jazz retelling, Max Roach disappears in 1957. He shows up in the 1940s, when he was present at the creation of bebop, and, along with Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey, reinvented jazz drumming for a new generation. He shows up again in the mid-1950s, when he is leading a hard-bop quintet with Sonny Rollins and Clifford Brown that helps define the genre. Beyond that, he fades against the luminaries of Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and others. Max Roach seemingly ceases to be a titan of jazz, slipping into historical obscurity.

In reality, while operating under the massive shadows cast by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and others during the 1960s, Max Roach produced some wonderful jazz in the early part of the decade worth revisiting. Though he would later recede from the jazz community,* his work early in the decade displayed an artist whose social activism reinvigorated his art following the tragic death of Clifford Brown in 1956. Roach thrust himself into the burgeoning civil rights movement during the late 1950s, raising money for various civil rights organizations, taking part in protests and sit-ins, and using his position as a professional musician to promote the cause in the media. His activism first seeped into his music with 1958's Deeds, Not Words, though one could argue that his founding of Debut Records with Charles Mingus in the early-1950s was also part of his activist streak, considering the socioeconomic environment in which musicians operated.

Roach's activism flourished as the 1960s began. In 1960, Roach helped organize a rebel counter-festival at the Newport Jazz Festival, hoping to promote younger up-and-coming musicians while protesting the low pay of the (usually black) artists who could not garner top billing. Later that year, Roach recorded We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, a multi-part work which chronicled the history of African Americans from slavery to 1960. The next year, Roach would record Percussion Bitter Sweet, with a veritable all-star lineup including trumpeter Booker Little, saxophonist Eric Dolphy, vocalist (and wife) Abbey Lincoln, and pianist Mal Waldron, among others. The album features fresh rhythms, incorporating Afro-Cuban 6/8 beats at times, and captivating performances, but it was also a statement of Roach's cultural politics. Roach acknowledges jazz as rooted in African rhythms and folkways, and presents music that is informed by and informing of African cultures and societies.

The album opens with "Garvey's Ghost," early-20th century black nationalist Marcus Garvey. After a haunting opening melody, Little gives a searing, melodic solo. Little plays around the harmony, weaving in and out of pitch in a solo evocative of a strong orator, rising in energy as his speech builds momentum. Clifford Jordan follows with a wide-ranging solo, and Roach then gives a playful and exploratory drum solo over a conga and cowbell accompaniment. The song closes with the restatement of the melody. Written by Roach, "Garvey's Ghost" uses Lincoln's voice in a chorale with the winds, lending added power to the melody. It is a wonderful example of inter-genre fusion, sounding at home in Africa and America, but possible only in the context of jazz.

Garvey's Ghost

"Tender Warrior" reminds us how special Booker Little and Eric Dolphy, and gives the listener pass to wonder how jazz would have been different had both of them not died too young. Little carries the tunes main melody on his flute, showing captivating control over the instrument and letting his voice sound through it. Mal Waldron gives an imaginative solo, followed by Little, who toes the line between harmony and dissonance better than any of his peers could at the time, providing a bridge between hard bop and the avant-garde. Besides that, his sound is wonderful, combining the urgency of Clifford Brown with the vocal quality and warmth of Miles Davis. Dolphy goes on flights of fury on a bass clarinet, followed by an even more furious drum solo by Roach. However, being Max, even when playing furiously he exhibits amazing control over the kit, not making any extraneous sound to dull his lines.

Tender Warriors

Perhaps the irony of Max Roach is that he made some of the best socially-conscious jazz ever, but did so at a time when highly artistic jazz was en vogue. This is not to say that the two are mutually inclusive, or that they are in direct opposition. Rather, Roach reached one of his peaks during the early 1960's when he recorded Percussion Bittersweet and Freedom Now Suite. However great those albums were, the public and jazz press at large were more interested in (or repulsed by, and then mobilized against) the zeitgeist created by Coleman and pushed further by Coltrane, Albert Ayler, et al. Thus, Roach is under-appreciated in memory, and a fertile period of work for him is not as well-remembered as his earlier peaks or the simultaneous peaks of his peers. Such is jazz, a diverse music that has become nearly impossible to completely keep up with.

Track Listing: Garvey's Ghost; Mama; Tender Warriors; Praise for a Martyr; Mendacity; Man From South Africa
Personnel: Max Roach, drums; Booker Little, trumpet; Julian Priester, trombone; Eric Dolphy, reeds; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Mal Waldron, piano; Art Davis, bass; Carlos "Patato" Valdes, conga; Carlos "Totico" Eugenio, cowbell; Abbey Lincoln, vocals

*A few resources I read while composing this post (including Roach's biography at All About Jazz), reference a brief period during the mid to late-1960s when Roach was "blacklisted by the American recording industry." The language in these references is vague, and offers few added details. I had not previously seen this in any other readings I have done, which leads me to be somewhat suspicious of the claim. Previously, I had understood that Roach scaled back during this time, recording less often because he was focused on his activism at the time. I'll have to get back to you on that one...

Sonny and Barack

With his election to the Presidency of the United States, Barack Obama is in some ways our first jazz president. Apart from the obvious metaphorical links between Obama and jazz (his cultural hybridity being foremost among them), Obama's intellectual and rhetorical style in some ways are reminiscent of the improvisational style of one of the few remaining old lions of jazz, Sonny Rollins. He may not be able to play a blues like Bill Clinton, but Obama's prose and oratory both bring to my mind the searching, spontaneous style often associated with Rollins.

In Sunday's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote of Obama,

Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in complexity. He doesn’t condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites.

Similarly, when discussing a series of sample answers to law exams Obama gave as a law professor at the University of Chicago Slate's Emily Bazelon observed,

Obama's exam answers offer complex ruminations on some of the most contentious social and legal questions out there.

Both on the stump and in his writings, Obama offers a thoughtfully intellectual style which attempts to synthesize competing and contradictory thoughts into a coherent whole. Instead of glossing over evidence that works against him, Obama would often tackle these subjects head-on. His speech on race from earlier this spring is a prime example. While addressing his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama tackles the complexities of race in a country where he can be considered "too black" by some and "not black enough" by others. In the speech, he notably drew similarities between his own white grandmother and Wright by commenting on acts of each that could easily be construed as racist:

I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

This statement is no garden-variety observation on race. Obama acknowledges the complexity of America's tangled racial past and reveals a thought process which allowed him to view the actions of others through multiple points of view before giving his opinion on those actions.

Obama's ease with which he weaves common themes between seemingly disparate subjects resembles the manner in which Sonny Rollins could fuse varied improvisational themes within a common thematic framework. Additionally, Obama's interrogatory thought process is mirrored in Rollins' improvisational method of parsing a phrase until he has exhausted its musical potential. The opening cadenza in the video below is a great example of Rollins' improvisational style. Listen to Sonny play with his phrases, modulating into different modes and segueing seamlessly between phrases.

Similarly, the improvisational style of Sonny Rollins combines the quintessence of spontaneity with an encyclopedic background knowledge. Rollins is noted for inserting surprising quotes into his solos in a way which suits the mood of the music at that specific moment without feeling forced. Here, too he shares this ability with Obama, who could stop on a dime to deliver an extemporaneous remark or sly observation. When discussing Dick Cheney's endorsement of John McCain last week, Obama paused as it began to rain at an outdoor rally in Ohio, "You notice what happened when I started talking about Dick Cheney. But a new day is dawning. Sunshine is on the way." This, to me is the rhetorical equivalent of one of my favorite moments of the Ken Burns jazz documentary, when a musician (I forget who) recounts a Sonny Rollins performance on the night before Easter. Well into a set, Sonny sees out of the corner of his eye that the clock has struck midnight, so he works in a quote from "Your Easter Bonnet." Obama shares with Rollins the improvisational wit which makes jazz the "sound of surprise."

I should be careful not to overstate these similarities. Indeed, I could simply be more likely to make this comparison between an intellectual politician and an intellectual musician simply because President-elect Obama's predecessor is singularly infamous for his anti-intellectualism. However, I like to think that these sensibilities that Obama shares with Rollins are indicative of a thoughtful approach to statesmanship and governance that hopefully will pay dividends in the years to come.

Jazz Appreciation Month

Today marks the end of Jazz Appreciation Month. I did not know that Jazz Appreciation Month even existed until my brother mentioned it to me the other day (he himself did not know until it was mentioned on one of the jazz stations on XM Satellite Radio). The fact that Jazz Appreciation Month, brought to you by the Smithsonian, exists brings a few questions to mind:

1. Why is it necessary to promote jazz as "a national and world treasure," in the words of the Smithsonian's FAQ page? Are Americans so culturally illiterate that they need to be told that jazz is a national treasure, or are they aware of this and simply apathetic towards jazz? I believe the answer lies in a combination of both factors; it is easy to find someone who has never heard a Charlie Parker recording, but that person would not necessarily be moved by listening to a recording. For many people, jazz does not resonate, especially if the jazz in question was recorded more than half a century ago. Therein lies the challenge of promoting art to the masses: If no one wants to listen to jazz in the first place, telling them that they are missing out on this "treasure" may not make them any more likely to embrace jazz. This does not bode well for Jazz Appreciation Month.
   
2. Plenty of musicians and critics have called out other musicians and critics for fostering a definition of jazz that makes it seem like a dead art, whose greatest practitioners are long-gone and whose momentum has stagnated into a maintenance of tradition, rather than the creation of new art relevant to the current day. By promoting Jazz Appreciation Month under the auspices of the national museum, are the American people reinforcing the idea that jazz is a museum-piece, to be studied as a relic of the past?
3. Could the Smithsonian have picked a worse logo for Jazz Appreciation Month than the clip-art-inspired dreck at the top of this entry? Clearly, the Smithsonian needs to hire a new graphic designer.

While I would not go so far as to suggest that the Smithsonian's Jazz Appreciation Month is a fruitless endeavor, I do think that there is a better way to promote jazz, which could be undertaken in tandem with Jazz Appreciation Month. For one example, see HR-57 Center for the Preservation of Jazz & Blues, a privately-funded cultural center and jazz club in Washington, D.C. that hosts educational programs, brings in established performers for performances, and provides an environment which fosters young musicians wanting to hone their craft, in the form of thrice-weekly open jam sessions. Perhaps it is misguided to suggest that a federal institution should support such grassroots-level programs as these. However, considering the fact that jazz is an oral tradition which, from its infancy, was primarily disseminated through live music in local clubs across the country, it is difficult to ignore the potential of a localized promotional and educational organization.