Christian Scott and a New Jazz Orthodoxy

It has been a long time since Wynton Marsalis made the cover of Time Magazine. Twenty years ago, actually. Though he had risen to the top of the jazz world by that time, the October 20, 1990 issue of Time served as Wynton's unofficial coronation as the most well-known jazz musician in mainstream America. With that, of course, came his role as the major tastemaker in the jazz world (and the accompanying backlash which still lingers). But in the intervening two decades, we have yet to see another jazz musician rise to the top of the heap, as it were, and become the new face of jazz for the mainstream.

Enter Christian Scott. His latest album, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, was released last month, and Scott has made a media blitz which is rare for a jazz musician. Scott has appeared on late-night talk shows and NPR, sat in with Thom Yorke of Radiohead, and been featured in Vibe, New York Magazine, and the Village Voice, just to name a few. None of this matches Wynton's Time cover, but Scott could very well add a few more high profile notches to his belt before the year is up (it should be noted that Maralis had been leading his own groups for almost a decade before the Time cover). On top of that, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow could very well make everyone's year-end lists of the best albums of 2010. I will not predict that Scott will become the Marsalis; such predictions rarely end up being true. But whether or not he gets noticed by the rest of America, he could very well play an important role in the ongoing evolution of jazz.

The question "What is jazz?" is beyond cliche, but Christian Scott is fast becoming the embodiment of an answer to this question (though not necessarily the answer), whether he likes it or not. Though I suspect he may like it. Having read and watched a number of different interviews of his lately, it is plainly evident to me that Scott is not afraid to share his feelings on jazz. Case in point, in his recent All About Jazz interview, Scott recounts his own disagreements with Marsalis, and criticizes his narrow conception of jazz, "He got to this place where he's at the top of the pile, and then he decided he was going to tell everyone else in the country what to listen to and how to play jazz." Scott goes on to dismiss the idea of recording a standards album, as well. None of this is, of course, anything new for a jazz musician to say. However, Scott and a number of his contemporaries, to me, embody a conception of jazz that moves beyond the Jazz Wars of the 1990s (Marsalis complaints notwithstanding).

Musicians like Christian Scott, Vijay Iyer, Robert Glasper, and Jason Moran (just to name a few) seem to experience jazz as an oral tradition, one that is adaptable to various external forces and one which can incorporate new strands without losing its identity as jazz.¹ You can find ample evidence of this relationship with jazz in the music of these artists. For one, they seem to fill out their repertoire with both nonjazz tunes (from genres as diverse as classical, rap, alternative rock, and gospel) and standards written by some of jazz's universally-recognized masters, like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, or Andrew Hill. They are reverent of the past, but they value individual expression over belonging to a certain school (as Davis, Monk, and Hill did).

As for the nonjazz tunes, they run the gamut from M.I.A. to Radiohead to Ligeti and beyond. What's important is not the specific music but the fact is that far from jazz, yet these musicians love it enough to bring into the fold. This is obviously not the first generation to listen to other kinds of music besides jazz, nor is it the first to incorporate it into its own music. Rather, Christian Scott and company draw heavily from one strain of jazz tradition that is ecumenical in its source material. Some forebears in this strain would include Lennie Tristano, Anthony Braxton, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock.

So Scott has made a powerful argument for bridging the gap between Marsalis' neoclassicists and his detractors, who maybe were a bit too preoccupied with denying boundaries (or maybe not, and their resistance to Marsalis was less about boundaries in general than Marsalis' specific boundaries). Regardless, though Christian Scott may become just another jazz musician who occasionally pops into the popular consciousness, he has made his position on what is jazz quite clear, and he is not alone in his artistic choices.

Note: Moran and Glasper appeared on my Jazz Now list last year, and two of the three other groups on my list, The Bad Plus and Happy Apple, I would say share this relationship to jazz I am describing.

FURTHER READING
Jason Parker on jazz and cultural relevance (I'd say Jason and I are on a similar wavelengths)
Time's 1990 cover story on Marsalis
Christian Scott's AAJ interview
A Blog Supreme's Jazz Now project



¹ Of course, calling jazz an oral tradition is somewhat anachronistic, as the music can be preserved in a number of physical forms (recordings and sheet music most prominently) which are vastly more efficient means of propagation than oral transmission. But even so, because of the existence of recordings, we can experience music in its historical moment well after it was created, allowing up-and-coming musicians to become familiar with a vast musical history in a relatively short amount of time. We can arrange our introduction to the past in such a way as to learn the tradition chronologically, as if witnessing a century of history in order. In other words, we can comprehend jazz as an oral tradition through artificial recreations of the past (i.e. recordings).

Dave Holland: A Latter Day Art Blakey

Of the generation of musicians who came of age during the development of bebop, Art Blakey is remembered as the great teacher of subsequent generations of jazz musicians. His band, The Jazz Messengers, are frequently referred to as a university of jazz in the historical literature. And his place in this slightly mythologized narrative is secure. His former sidemen, which includes Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Donald Harrison, and Terence Blanchard, all credit Blakey to their developments as musicians. Blakey is the classic evangelist, as the tall tale goes:

Art was driving to an out-of-town job and passed through a village where traffic was completely tied up because of a funeral procession. Since he couldn't get past the cemetery until the service was over, he got out and listened to the eulogy. The minister spoke at length about the virtues of the deceased, and then asked if anyone had anything else to add. After a silence during which nobody spoke up, Art said, "If nobody has anything to say about the deceased, I'd like to say a few words about jazz!"¹

Such was Blakey, always educating. And he is not the only musician who should be championed for his role as a bandstand professor. Dave Holland has served as a kind of Dean of Postbop for the past 30 years. His working bands, while they lack the brand name of Blakey's Messengers, have nonetheless served as a revolving door of talent which Holland nurtures. Like Blakey, Holland has an impressive record of graduates: Chris Potter, Steve Coleman, Eric Harland, and Kenny Wheeler, to name but a few.

But the analogy runs deeper than that. It is one thing to hire a bunch of up-and-coming sidemen, but quite another to let them develop as individuals while keeping your own stamp on the band at the same time. Holland and Blakey were both members of their respective rhythm sections; they could not be as overtly dominant as a front line player. Indeed, both men also recorded many original compositions written by their sidemen, and are remembered by their sidemen for their encouragement in contributing tunes to the book. But at the same time, the recorded outputs of Blakey and Holland each bear a distinctive sound. You know whose band is on the stand anytime either plays. It takes a special kind of musical leader to develop such a recognizable style with a continually changing cast of musicians passing through their bands.

Holland's recordings always seem to be well-received, but he has not quite reached the historical status of Blakey. Of course Blakey had the benefit of one of his sidemen acquiring an incredibly powerful position for mythmaking (ahem), but that's not territory I wish to cover here. Blakey also played during a time when stylistic categories within jazz were less complicated (it's much easier to approach a definition of hard bop than it is for postbop). However, if we can call the Jazz Messengers Hard Bop Academy, I think it's about time we start calling Holland's quintet the School for Postbop Studies.

Bonus material after the jump.

Don't Be Afraid, The Clown's Afraid Too

Anthony Dean-Harris wrote a provocative post for Nextbop this week in which he poses a question: Is the jazz audience in America shrinking because potential new listeners are "turned off" by the arduous task of digesting the "imposing" history of the music? You should go read the full post, I'll wait.

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I enjoyed seeing that someone else thinks about these things, and Anthony makes some good points here. More than almost any other kind of music, jazz is defined by its past, so much so that you may not even think of it as a living music if you didn't know any better.

However, I think Anthony veers off track when he writes, "They should hear the music of jazz’s past, not because it’s educational but because it’s entertaining in its own right." I do not disagree with his assertion, but rather I think that if we jazz enthusiasts are to help evangelize jazz, we will have to resist the temptation to recommend a laundry list of historical recordings as a means of introducing new listeners to the music (I'm not accusing Anthony of this, but merely trying to say we all should just back off a little bit). To draw on Anthony's analogy to rock music, I don't feel the need to couple a White Stripes recommendation with a Led Zeppelin album for historical perspective. I think the White Stripes catalog is good enough by itself without imploring someone to listen to the band's antecedents. Besides, anyone who wants to know more about the White Stripes' influences can easily get to Led Zeppelin on their own, and I think the analogy holds true if you were to replace the White Stripes and Led Zeppelin with Jason Moran and Jaki Byard.

The idea that history is an added burden to the task of expanding jazz listenership should not be discounted, not because jazz neophytes might be turned off by learning about the music's history, but because neophytes might already be buying into a specific master narrative of jazz that automatically dismisses the music as a museum piece. To put it another way, people do not ignore jazz because they don't want to learn about Duke Ellington or Miles Davis, they ignore jazz because they associate the music with dead people who are less likely to be relevant to them. This is one reason why A Blog Supreme's Jazz Now project was championed by so many other bloggers. At heart, we all understand that current jazz is thriving artistically, and that new listeners could easily love the music if we would just recommend something recorded by living musicians whose work contemporary world.


BONUS MATERIAL: Anthony's post reminded me of a thread that run's through Art Taylor's wonderful collection of interviews, Notes and Tones. Taylor asks each of his interviewees, including Miles Davis, Max Roach, Don Cherry, and Thelonious Monk, what they think about the word "jazz," eliciting all manners of discursive thoughts on the word and its not insignificant impact on the lives of individual musicians. If you haven't read this, it is worth an afternoon of your time, you can find a copy in the stacks of any college library with a decent music department, and some public libraries (or you could just shell out the ten bucks for your own copy).

Hard Bop

Last week at Rifftides, journalist and blogger Doug Ramsey wrote a short post on the complicated nature of the term "hard bop." Pointing out the difficulties in hammering out a definition of hard bop, he quotes longtime record producer and jazz scholar Orrin Keepnews, who said,

So it is quite possible that there never really was a musical style that could properly be described a "hard bop."

This sparked an interesting debate in the comments section, and even warranted follow-up posts from Doug and others. The subject of hard bop is something I have spent much time considering. My undergraduate thesis at the University of Florida focused on the social politics of hard bop. Ramsey is correct to note that hard bop is a complicated genre. Unlike bebop or free jazz, it does not represent a progression of jazz, in which new elements were incorporated into the music while other elements were jettisoned completely. Rather, in the words of noted critic Martin Williams, hard bop was a regression, in which a number of musicians reduced jazz to its so-called "roots," namely, African American folk forms like the blues, with a bit of gospel and R&B thrown in the mix.

Of course, the major problem with the term hard bop is that it was invented by music critics* and rarely used by musicians themselves (such was the case with bebop for a long time as well; many musicians simply referred to it as modern jazz). However, this fact does not delegitimize the term. Though assigning genre labels to music can in effect create unnecessary boundaries around that music, it is nonetheless helpful in understanding both the the musical and social forces that contributed to the creation of individual musical statements and the evolution of jazz itself.

So I though I would indulge myself with a longish post on the subject of hard bop. For organizational purposes, I have broken up the piece into several subposts, Ethan Iverson-style. The posts that follow are largely derived from my UF thesis. If you would like to read a copy of the thesis itself, drop me a line (davidhill126[at]gmail[dot]com) and I would be happy to send you a copy. Your comments are as always welcome.


*In his liner notes to the 1957 Art Blakey album Hard Bop, Nat Hentoff writes that John Mehegan first used the phrase "hard bop" while writing for the New York Herald Tribune in the mid-1950s.

Table of Contents

The Musical Definition of Hard Bop
East Coast vs. West Coast Jazz: A False Dichotomy?
The Racial Politics of Hard Bop
Recommended Readings and Discography

On Booker Little and Jazz Mythology

Booker Little and Clifford Brown had much in common. Both were trumpet players from middling cities (Little from Memphis, Brown from Wilmington, Delaware) who played important roles in the development of jazz trumpet, but died before their thirtieth birthdays. Brown's and Little's solos are both studied and transcribed intently by young trumpet players. Both made impressive albums, both as a leader and a sideman, which are among the greatest jazz on record. Both were sidemen in Max Roach's quintet, and both built on the bebop trumpet style of Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro.

Yet while Clifford Brown has been mythologized in The Jazz Tradition, Little remains a surprisingly obscure figure in the history of jazz, known mostly by musicians and aficionados. Why is this? It can't be because Little did not record enough masterpieces. Take a look at his discography, he appeared on Africa/Brass, Percussion Bitter Sweet, and Eric Dolphy's live recordings at The Five Spot. They may not be the most legendary recordings, but they are just as memorable and important to the development of jazz as any of the best Clifford Brown recordings. I would argue the same of Little's solo work, especially the well-regarded Out Front.

I wish I could come up with a better reason, but it seems to me that the answer largely has to do with timing and circumstance. Brown's heyday fits within a neat break in The Jazz Tradition. His first recording with Max Roach, Brown and Roach, Inc., was recorded in August 1954, just a few months before the death of Charlie Parker. Brown's ascent comes just as a the historical arc of jazz is in need of a protagonist. The same cannot be said for Little. Among his contemporaries were Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, two figures who seemingly crowd out all other jazz musicians in some writers' retellings of the history of jazz between 1960 and 1963. Little seems to get lost in the background of jazz history.

But Clifford Brown is not just a lead player during one period of The Jazz Tradition, his personal story is also more easily mythologized. Because Charlie Parker's death stemmed from years of drug abuse, the clean cut image of Brown, who shunned drugs, smoking, and drinking, served as important story in jazz. Brown was kind of a corrective to the surprisingly-prevalent notion among jazz musiciansat the time that herion use contributed to creativity and performance (at least, according to some). This factor is also key in transforming Brown's life into myth; he is the opposite kind of fast-burning flame than Parker, and his story serves as a captivating next chapter following Bird's life and death. Ken Burns uses this dichotomy to much effect in his documentary Jazz.

So for having reasons little to do with their own music in some regard, perhaps, Brown can be mythologized into this jazz martyr, while Little is neglected by history. This fact in itself is an interesting critique of the mythologization of jazz inherent in The Jazz Tradition, and should inspire us to think beyond this master narrative when considering the history and development of jazz.

List: 1959: Before and After

Being that 1959 saw the release of so many landmark jazz albums (Kind of Blue, Time Out, Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come, etc.), plenty of writers will be profiling the golden jubilees of all these albums throughout the year. But focusing on 1959 misses the point of that era. While 1959 was certainly a great year for jazz, the years surrounding 1959 all created their fair share of classics canonized in The Jazz Tradition. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s were a veritable golden age for jazz, when young lions like Coltrane and Coleman were reshaping the music while older stars like Ellington and Hawkins were still thriving, lets not limit ourselves to remembering 1959 as a watershed moment. Below are some great albums from 1958 and 1960 which are sometimes overshadowed by the weight of 1959.

A quick note: I am classifying these albums by the date they were recorded. Some were released the year after they were recorded, but the way things were changing in the jazz world at this time, a musician could sound much different over the space of a year (such is the case especially with John Coltrane).

1958:

1. Bill Evans, Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Featuring an interesting album cover, Everybody Digs Bill Evans effectively introduced Evans to the jazz world just as he was to join Miles Davis' quintet at the piano chair.
   
2. Cannonball Adderley, Somethin' Else. One of the classic hard bop records, Cannonball was joined by a veritable all-star band featuring Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Hank Jones, and Sam Jones. Adderley firmly established his reputation as a prominent figure in jazz with this record.
   
3. Ornette Coleman, Something Else!!!!. One of the few albums in which Coleman used a piano player (Paul Bley in this case), Something Else introduced the world to Coleman before his infamous residency at New York's The Five Spot in 1959.
   
4. Miles Davis, Porgy and Bess and Milestones. Porgy and Bess reinforced Miles' image as the biggest star in jazz, selling countless copies, while Milestones set the stage for 1959's Kind of Blue.
   
5. Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Moanin'. The title track was, in my estimation, the quintessential hard bop tune, the definitive example of the style I play when trying to explain what hard bop was.
   
6. John Coltrane, Blue Train. Hard to believe Blue Note Records only got Coltrane in the studio as a leader once in his life.
   
7. Sonny Rollins, Freedom Suite. Some say this is Rollins' best studio album. Hard to argue against that, but the album is also important for the brief liner notes written by Rollins which draw light to the status of African Americans in the land of the free.
   

1960:

1. Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain. Though plenty of people will tell you that this is not really a jazz record, it nonetheless introduced jazz to a lot of people over the past five decades. I remember when I bought this album eight years at a music store in Toronto. When I paid for it, the cashier, a guy in a Slayer t-shirt with multiple piercings, simply said to me, "great album." This was not the kind of person you'd expect to make that comment.
   
2. John Coltrane, My Favorite Things and Olé Coltrane. While My Favorite Things propelled Coltrane into stardom, Olé Coltrane is an underrated album in the Coltrane canon, featuring a young Freddie Hubbard in addition to the dueling basses of Reggie Workman and Art Davis.
3. Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz. In which Ornette ups the ante and firmly opens Pandora's Box, cementing the enfant terrible reputation he began to earn with Something Else.
   
4. Charles Mingus, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. The opening track, "Folk Forms No. 1," perfectly fuses the blues with improvised contrapuntal composition, while "Original Faubus Fables" unleashes Mingus' contempt for a segregationist Arkansas Govern0r Orval Faubus.
   
5. Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, A Night in Tunisia and Roots & Herbs. Featuring one of the best editions of the Messengers (Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Jymie Merritt, and Bobby Timmons), Blakey recorded a lot of albums in 1960. These two are my favorites of the bunch.
   
6. Max Roach, We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. Featuring a photo of black college students at a sit-in, Roach's Freedom Now Suite presented a musical history of African Americans, featuring the vocals of Abbey Lincoln.
   
7. Wes Montgomery, The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery. Montgomery lays down some choice hard bop and shows all who care to listen that he is the guitar boss of the jazz community. His version of Airegin is my favorite recording of the Sonny Rollins standard.

UPDATE 1: The lists have already begun. Here's one from acompleteunknown at The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown. They've made some good choices, though I would replace Mingus' Ah Um with Blues and Roots, and would not have left off Giant Steps...

UPDATE 2: Kevin Kniestedt offers his thoughts on 1959 at Groove Notes.

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.

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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."

Time Out Revisited

[Note: Thanks again to Jazz.com for including the blog in their links page. If you're new to the site, welcome, and stay awhile.]

Next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Dave Brubeck's Time Out, one of the classics of the modern jazz canon. Commercially, Time Out was one of the most successful jazz album of all time, reaching number 2 on the Billboard pop album charts in 1961 (the track "Take Five" from the album reached number 25 on the pop singles chart that same year). Two tracks from the album, "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and "Take Five," are now standards of the jazz repertoire. The album itself has a secure place in The Jazz Tradition as one of the quintessential recordings of cool jazz. One critic has gone so far to describe "Take Five" as a tune that "for a lot of people who aren't really jazz listeners defines what jazz is."

But while the commercial success of the album is undeniable, Time Out still suffers from somewhat of a critical indifference, at least if you compare it to the status of other "great" albums that came out around the same time as Time Out. 1959 was a very fertile year for jazz classics, as Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, and John Coltrane's Giant Steps were also released that year (as were a number of lesser "classics," like Charles Mingus' Blues and Roots). Many of these records are given more prominent places in the pantheon of legendary jazz albums, and all are considered to be important statements in the evolution of jazz. Compared to these other albums, there is little love for Time Out, which is sometimes dismissed as an exercise in time signatures, rather than a work of art in its own right.

Part of this was no fault of Dave Brubeck himself. As Stanley Crouch remembers,

When I was coming up, people either liked Dave Brubeck or they hated him. Now if they hated him, they hated him for a couple of reasons. One, they didn't think he swang [sic]. Two, they thought his conception was garbage. And three, they thought he was getting a lot of attention because he was white.

Crouch makes an important point. During the media fascination with cool jazz in the early 1950s, when Life, Time, and even Good Housekeeping were extolling the virtues of clean-cut, white jazz musicians from the West Coast who were (in their words) saving jazz from the drug-addled excesses of bebop, Brubeck was often cast as the Great White Hope of jazz. This clearly upset many musicians, who felt that the media obsession with Brubeck and other white musicians willfully neglected the artistry of black musicians.¹ Brubeck was often a target of black musicians in Down Beat Blindfold Tests around this time.² Even though many musicians softened on Brubeck later on, a lingering skepticism persisted in the reaction to his music for a long time, which doubtless contributed to the indifference paid to Brubeck by constructors of The Jazz Tradition, who often relegated Brubeck to footnote status.

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I first listened to Time Out when I was in high school, still building my jazz collection. When I bought the album, it quickly made its way into my regular listening rotation. Before that time, I had never listened to Brubeck or saxophonist Paul Desmond, and still had not listened to much music considered to be part of the 1950s cool school (sometimes also called cool jazz and/or West Coast jazz). I was quickly drawn to the sound of Desmond's saxophone and his and Brubeck's compositions, none of which sounded like anything I had heard before. However, as time wore on and my jazz library grew, I found myself coming back to Time Out less and less often, to the point where, according to my iTunes, I had not listened to it at all in the past three years until I started working on this post.

This is not because I all of a sudden began to dislike Brubeck, but rather I feel I may have grown out of his music. When I first heard the album, it sounded so adventurous. The album opens with "Blue Rondo a la Turk," a tune written in 9/8 that is played in a delayed four (with every measured grouped as 2+2+2+3/8). The song shifts into standard 4/4 in certain sections, and remains in 4/4 during most of the solo section. It is a well-conceived and well-executed tune, with a wonderful solo from Paul Desmond. The main melody was captivating to my teenage ears. Sometimes I would listen only to the main melody, and skip the solos, so I could break the melody and rhythm down in my head, and explore the song's construction. When I hear the melody today, I am still captivated by it, somewhat in part due to the nostalgia factor of remembering how I felt when I first heard it.

But regardless of that feeling, the song has lost much of its novelty and immediacy in the years since I have first heard it. This is not surprising in retrospect. When I first heard Time Out, I had not yet heard Ornette Coleman, fusion-era Miles Davis, Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, Charles Lloyd, or a number of other exploratory and/or avant-garde musicians who would push or bend the boundaries of jazz much farther than Brubeck did on Time Out. To put it another way, after hearing The Shape of Jazz to Come, much of the music on Time Out no longer seems so radical. This has to be a large part of the reason why I do not listen to Time Out much at all these days. In high school, the album was like a new girlfriend; I had yet to explore the complexities inherent in the album or learn everything I could from it. Now, the album resembles an ex-girlfriend, in that I focus more on its shortcomings than what I loved about it so much to begin with.

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And there is much to love about Time Out. As he so often was, Desmond was in rare form, giving many captivating solos and exhibiting his unique tone on alto saxophone. Desmond and Brubeck were one of the great partnerships in jazz history, on par with Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Charles Mingus and Dannie Richmond, or Bird and Diz. One could just as easily consider this album a vehicle for Desmond as a vehicle for Brubeck's compositions. To quote Crouch, "the combination of the two of them on the same bandstand was better for both of them career-wise and perhaps for the ear of the audience."

However, unlike the other classics of 1959 mentioned earlier, Time Out made no major stylistic statement other than the embrace of nonstandard time signatures. Otherwise, it was a typical effort from Brubeck masquerading as an adventure in style. There is little difference between Time Out and every other album of his that preceded it, save for the unusual times of the tunes. It did not turn jazz on its head as The Shape of Jazz To Come, nor did it distill the essence of tonality the way Kind of Blue did. The album is simply Brubeck being Brubeck, to borrow an overwrought phrase.

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"Blue Rondo a la Turk" is the most adventurous tune of the album, with alternation between straight 4/4 meter and 9/8. However, it is also a tune that is prone to the common accusation against Brubeck, that he could not swing. After the melody and bridge are played, the tune switches into a standard blues form for the solo section, with a few detours into 9/8. After Desmond gives a subdued but enjoyable solo, Brubeck enters, and tries to match the mood set by Desmond. However, he overshoots the mark, and his first solo sounds stiff and overly muted. Here the swing feels artificial, and a bit sterile. This is rather unfortunate, since the tune got off to such a captivating start with the weaving melody and solo by Desmond. The band returns with the melody after Brubeck's solo, but the tune never fully recovers. In a way, the tune is a microcosm of the entire album, alternating between moments of joy and moments of tedium.

"Strange Meadow Lark" follows, and it is one of the more conventional pieces on the album, played in straight 4/4 after a rubato introduction. Though there is no overt challenge to convention inherent in the tune, it is nonetheless enjoyable, on par with other tunes of Brubeck's like "In Your Own Sweet Way."

The third, and most notable, track of the album was "Take Five," a bluesy tune set in 5/4 time, which effectively introduced the time signature to jazz. It is the only tune on the album written by Desmond (the rest were penned by Brubeck). It is a brilliantly-concieved tune, which swings as well as any other jazz tune while navigating an assymetric meter. Desmond dextrously works through the tune's head, then lets his haunting tone shine through during a brief but satisfying solo. Brubeck sits out the solo section here, and instead drummer Joe Morello solos over the comping of Brubeck and bassist Gene Wright. Morello keeps things simple (after all, the song's meter is already confusing enough to new listeners), but still commands attention. The tune is an effectively ominous drone, which manages to keep a single rhythm interesting throughout the five-minute tune. The tune also has a certain je ne sais quoi which Infiniti executives misinterpreted to mean "Buy our sedan," but that is a different subject for a different post.

"Three To Get Ready" is the most underrated tune of the album. Shifting between 3/4 and 4/4, the tune is upbeat and joyful, perfectly written for Desmond's sound. Desmond's solo out of the head is among the best he ever recorded, and is one I recommend to anyone who asks me about Desmond. "Kathy's Waltz" follows, and Desmond again carries the day, while Brubeck plays with the time signature in his solo, superimposing a two-beat rhythm on the waltz accompaniment. The effect is fun, and swings rather nicely.

"Everybody's Jumpin'" is a satisfying, if unmemorable swinger set against flurries of block chords by Brubeck. Like much of the album, it suggests something new without lighting the world on fire. "Pick Up Sticks" ends the album on a similar note, bringing the album to a somewhat anticlimatic end following the disruptive beginning set by "Blue Rondo a la Turk." Listened alone, the second half the album does not seem like something scholars would be discussing fifty years later.

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The time-signature experiments of Time Out were never extrapolated by anyone else the way Miles Davis' modal experiments on Kind of Blue or Ornette Coleman's breaking of harmonic barriers on The Shape of Jazz To Come were. Perhaps this is why it given secondary position to these other works in The Jazz Tradition. Remove the nonstandard time signatures, and the album is still enjoyable, but is not progressive, in the sense that it did not present a drastically new way of playing jazz for other musicians to draw on and evolve. It is still full of surprises, and presents new layers upon further listening, but in the constructed Jazz Tradition, it does not provide trajectory, save for introducing the music to thousands of suburban college students (which is no small feat indeed). As I wrote earlier, the album suggests something new without lighting the world on fire.

Thus it is not entirely unfortunate that the album is overshadowed by Miles, Ornette, and Trane, but this is not to say it is no less of a work of art. Brubeck may not have reinvented the wheel, but he certainly did not mail it in on this album either. On its fiftieth anniversary, it rightly will be celebrated as an example of the limitless possibility inherent in jazz, and also for the searching curiosity of the music which could build so big a tent as to include it with the harmonic explorations of Coltrane and harmalodic possibilities of Coleman.

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Track Listing: Blue Rondo a La Turk; Strange Meadow Lark; Take Five; Three to Get Ready; Kathy's Waltz; Everybody's Jumpin'; Pick Up Sticks
Personnel: Brubeck, piano; Paul Desmond, saxophone; Gene Wright, bass; Joe Morello, drums

¹Brubeck was well aware of this fact, and, to his credit, was also skeptical of the way the jazz press and mass media sometimes latched onto white jazz musicians in order to present the music in a manner more palatable to white audiences. He was also as aware as anyone of the way in which jazz was sometimes used to gloss over problems relating to race relations, in addition to being an ally of the civil rights movement. See for instance The Real Ambassadors, a musical he wrote with his wife which satired the use of jazz as a foreign policy by the US State Department. In the musical, Louis Armstrong plays a musician visiting a fictional African country who criticizes the contradictory measure of using jazz to promote America as a bastion of liberty and equality while the US government had yet to sufficiently support the efforts of the civil rights movement.
²My favorite example of this is a Charles Mingus Blindfold Test from 1955, in which Mingus says of a Lee Konitz record, "This makes me mad, because it's not jazz, and people are calling this kind of beat jazz. Dave Brubeck gets the same beat." Mingus would retract this comment himself later that year in his Down Beat article "An Open Letter To Miles Davis." In a 1963 interview, Archie Shepp embarassedly remembered telling Lee Morgan that Brubeck was one of his early influences was Dave Brubeck, after which Morgan "really wigged out."

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Below is a YouTube of the Brubeck quartet playing "Take Five" in 1961, with Desmond showing off his inimitable style and Morello giving a nice solo evocative of the styles of both Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones.

Review

Stanton Moore Trio
Emphasis! On Parenthesis

Before we begin, I would like to share one of my more mundane conundrums (or is it conundra? Wait, there's another one...). I have a minor compulsion to categorize and label my music collection on iTunes. This compulsion is especially acute when it comes to my jazz collection. All my music is classified, besides the usual artist and album fields, by genre, subgenre, and year recorded. When I can find the information, I also list recording personnel in the comments field. I spent the better part of a year (in 15-minute sessions whenever I had a free moment at home) recording this information on my pre-iTunes music. I tell you this to introduce this review because, when I first got Stanton Moore's new album, I had no idea how it fit into my categories. Is it Jamband/Jazz or Jazz/Fusion? Perhaps there is some other category that fits better (Funk?), I'm not sure yet. I have yet to assign this album any labels, and it is killing me and my perfect little system.

Since Miles Davis began infusing his music with rock and funk beats, hiring guitarists, and playing the Fillmore in the late 1960s, the debate over jazz fusion has evolved into a somewhat fruitless series of accusations, in which more traditionally-minded musicians and critics label music that strays too far from The Jazz Tradition as nonjazz, while more inclusive observers argue that boundary-stretching artists like Medeski Martin & Wood are just as much jazz musicians as Dave Holland or James Carter. Enter Stanton Moore. As drummer for the popular New Orleans band Galactic, as well as a leader of side projects like Garage a Trois, Moore sits firmly in the New Orleans funk tradition typified by the Meters. However, his mostly-instrumental solo albums frequently veer into jazz territory, evoking the more groove-oriented soul jazz of the early 1960's (think Jimmy Smith and The 3 Sounds) while retaining the hard-driving backbeat of Moore's work with Galactic.

Such is the backdrop of his latest solo offering, Emphasis! On Parenthesis. Moore teams up with frequent collaborators Will Bernard and Robert Walter to lay down some groove-oriented acid jazz (to use a somewhat outdated term). Moore and his band lean heavily on a series of riffs which, stitched together, comprise his tunes. This method of composition is similar to the riff-based blues of the early Count Basie band. It is there that the similarities end. Bernard's style is more dependent on Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and other blues-rock guitarists. Walter, as well, takes his cues from the blues-rock tradition which influenced bands of both the British Invasion and the post-Grateful Dead jamband scene. It probably makes more sense to classify this group as a jamband, rather than a jazz trio. Both labels underscore the significance of improvisation to this group, but to call the trio a jazz band would imply a certain sense of sophistication and adventurousness that Moore and company lack.

Simply put, this album lacks adventure. After listening to it multiple times, I was left with more than a few melodies stuck in my head, but with few, if any, of the moments of surprise and joy that I hope a new jazz album will bring. This is not a swipe at the skills of these three musicians. Moore has an outstanding sense of rhythm, and can lay it on thick while still keeping the sound of the band light. Walter and Bernard follow Moore's cues, and keep the sound of the band from plodding into the ground. Despite their technical skills, though, the music seems a little tired. On my first listen, I felt like I had heard these riffs before. In the hands of artists, though, familiar melodies can lead to new and intriguing possibilities - think of Jason Moran's reworking of James P. Johnson's "Modernistic" on the album of the same title. Here, though, Moore's well-worn funk licks fall short of ecstasy, residing instead in the limbo between transcendent jazz and contrived funk.

Track Listing: (Late Night at The) Maple Leaf; (Proper) Gander; Wissions (Of Vu); (Sifting Through The) African Diaspora; Over (Compensatin'); (Smell My) Special Ingredients; (I Have) Super Strength; (Who Ate The) Layer Cake?; Thanks! (Again); (Put on Your) Big People Shoes; (Here Come) The Brown Police
Personell: Stanton Moore, drums; Will Bernard, guitar; Robert Walter, keyboards

On Medeski Martin & Wood

Medeski Martin & Wood have been the most difficult to classify group in jazz for the better part of two decades. They have won legions of followers coming from diverse corners of the musical world by embracing an ecumenical approach to music, combining avant-garde harmony, hard-driving rhythm, refreshing spontaneity, and soulful sense of funk. Their music often shows up on my iPod, and I often think about the ongoing debate over "What is Jazz?" while listening to them. The trio occupies an interesting space in this debate. Though they may not be too concerned with the question, their music reveals the limitations of a restrictive definition of jazz, and highlights the difficulties encountered when trying to define a music so diverse as jazz.

Wynton Marsalis made a name for himself in the 1980s as the wunderkind who took the jazz world by storm, both with his virtuosity and his knack for publicity. Through interviews in Down Beat and articles written for publications including the New York Times, Marsalis argued for a definition of jazz which some criticized as rigid and somewhat arbitrary. In a 1988 op-ed piece for the New York Times, "What is Jazz - And Isn't," Marsalis complained, "Too often, what is represented as jazz isn't jazz at all." He argued that earlier practitioners of jazz had "created rules... that were so specific, so thorough and so demanding that a great art resulted." Marsalis elaborated to delineate a "purist ethic in jazz," which is built upon the twin pillars of blues and swing. To put it briefly, jazz music, by definition, swings and reflects a blues aesthetic. For Marsalis, swing and the blues are the sine qua non of jazz.

This by necessity caused Marsalis to dismiss large portions of the avant-garde and jazz fusion as non-jazz, a distraction from the true tradition initiated and propelled forward by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. Using his post as artistic director at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis was the chief agent promulgating this strict definition of jazz, promoting the works of artists like Tadd Dameron or Duke Ellington, among many others, who easily fit into this definition. As a result, he and Jazz at Lincoln Center came under criticism from other artists and critics for ignoring artists like Muhal Richard Abrams or John McLaughlin, to name but a few, whose work falls outside Marsalis' traditional definition of jazz.

The music of Medeski Martin & Wood adds an interesting dimension to Marsalis' definition of jazz as an art built upon the twin pillars of blues and swing. Listen to the above recording of Medeski Martin & Wood playing their composition "Big Time;" one can easily hear the qualities deemed essential to jazz by Marsalis. The blues aesthetic is always present in Medeski Martin & Wood's compositions, filtered through layers of funk and dressed up with complex harmonies, giving the blues a more modern hue. This blues feeling is not contrived, either. I saw them play live in Miami Beach in 2006, and the highlight of the show was a cover of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say,” drenched in blues.

That Medeski Martin & Wood are well-versed in the blues is likely not something Marsalis would dispute. Their sense of swing, though, falls outside the boundaries of what one would expect to hear from a jazz group. Despite this, they still swing. Medeski Martin & Wood do not swing in the way that Count Basie or John Coltrane swing. They impart a more funky kind of swing, with precedents in R&B, hip hop, and rock and roll. Wynton Marsalis would not swing this way, but that does not mean Medeski Martin & Wood do not swing.

By incorporating their own take on swing, Medeski Martin & Wood reveal a multifaceted dimension of jazz which does not necessarily overturn Wynton Marsalis’ “purist ethic,” but instead arrives at that ethic from a different direction. Marsalis’ definition of jazz (blues + swing = jazz) posits a linear relationship between jazz and non jazz, with the two at opposite ends of a straight line. However, this definition does not account for a group like Medeski Martin & Wood (though, admittedly, Marsalis would probably not consider their music to be jazz). I am not of the opinion that any improvised music that claims to be jazz is jazz. There are certain qualities and stylistic elements that should be present. However, I find Marsalis’ insistence on a particular type of swing and blues to be too one-dimensional. Instead of jazz being on a line opposite non-jazz, I conceptualize jazz as an area on a plane surrounded by non-jazz. Thus, artists like Medeski Martin & Wood could occupy a different zone than, say, J.J. Johnson, but both could still be jazz.

Review

Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making
Gabriel Solis

Thelonious Monk is a curious figure in jazz history. Revered by his peers and other musicians, he did not receive the recognition he deserved from a mainstream audience until the 1960s, when he appeared on the cover of Time and was able to play regularly in the New York jazz scene again after a forced hiatus related to legal troubles. This was a full twenty years after he made his debut on the New York scene, playing in bands with Cootie Williams and Coleman Hawkins, and taking part in the jam sessions with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Christian, among others, at Minton's Playhouse where bebop was developed. It is not surprising, though, that it took awhile for the public to fully appreciate Monk, being that he was the supreme iconoclast of modern jazz. While he was often referred to as the High Priest of Bop, his own style was too unique to be lumped in with bebop, and most piano players of his day developed a style more closely related to Bud Powell's style than Monk's.

Ask any musician or jazz fan today about Monk, though, and you will likely hear that Monk is a seminal influence on most jazz musicians who came after him, and that his own idiosyncratic style is something that any jazz musician must contend with at some point in his or her musical development. In his provocative new study, Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making, musicologist Gabriel Solis examines the transformation of opinion surrounding Monk's music, and how jazz musicians of all stripes utilize Monk's music in the formation of both their own voice and competing jazz traditions. Though he begins with a cursory review of Monk's life, Solis' book is less about Monk and more about the way his jazz musicians engage with past masters in order to cultivate a personal style which drives the music forward. Solis uses the music of Thelonious Monk to demonstrate how jazz musicians make music which is "conscious of the past while simultaneously seeking to develop its impact on the present."

Solis is masterful in his analysis of recorded performances of Monk's music from artists across a broad range of styles, including Wynton Marsalis, Danilo Perez, and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Solis takes the analysis further by placing Monk's music in the context of the debate between mainstream traditionalists like Marsalis and the avant garde over the definition of jazz and the role of tradition in jazz. Because Monk was an iconoclast in his own time whose ideas were later adopted and examined by a wide variety of musicians, it seems quite logical to Solis that Marsalis can claim Monk as a pillar of The Jazz Tradition, while other artists outside the jazz musician can argue that Monk is the type of artist whose existence negates a unified jazz tradition. Solis leaves the reader with a nuanced understanding of the mainstream-avant garde debate, and uses performances of Monk to illustrate the complexities of the debate.

Solis does not escape this review unscathed, though. One of his strong points is his multidisciplinary approach to jazz studies. Take a look at Solis' bibliography, and you will find Hegel, Foucault, and Erik Erikson scattered in with the usual jazz studies fare. However, while Solis can handily parse and analyze jazz musicians and their work, he has more trouble digesting Foucault. Despite this shortcoming, Solis has made a strong opening statement in his first book. He is an original thinker who can push the still-nascent field of jazz studies into new arenas and dimensions, and Monk's Music is illustrative of his academic potential, in addition to being a solid work of scholarship.

Review

Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post Bop
Jeremy Yudkin

Miles Davis' "Second Quintet" of the 1960s (featuring Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Williams) does not quite get the attention it deserves at times. It is overshadowed in memory by John Coltrane's and Ornette Coleman's groundbreaking quartets, and is sometimes seen as merely a bridge between Miles' straightforward hard bop of the 1950s and early 1960s and his wild fusion experiments later in the decade. Jeremy Yudkin, a musicologist at Boston University, thinks this band, and especially the album Miles Smiles, deserves a place in the pantheon of Miles alongside his other celebrated works like Kind of Blue and Birth of the Cool. Moreover, Yudkin thinks Miles Smiles is best understood as the album in which Miles solidifies the style of postbop, making it an unrecognized pillar of The Jazz Tradition. In this book, Yudkin both attempts to understand Miles Smiles within the development of Miles Davis' artistic development and to employ Miles Smiles as a codification of postbop, a heretofore "slippery title" which other scholars of jazz have used in a temporal, but not necessarily stylistic sense.

Yudkin is at his best when placing Miles Smiles in the context of the Miles Davis canon. He deftly compares Miles' use of space in Miles Smiles to earlier examples in his career like "Boplicity" from the Birth of the Cool sessions in 1950 and "Bag's Groove" in 1954. He also identifies Miles' use of pyramidic structures and modes as points of continuity between Miles Smiles and Miles' earlier canon. Miles Smiles emerges from this study as a logical continuance from Birth of the Cool, Milestones, and Kind of Blue. Miles Smiles emerges as a work with deep roots in Miles' past, which reveal themselves as the foundation of his style evident throughout his evolution as an artist.

Yudkin falls short, however, in demonstrating how Miles Smiles translates into a specimen of postbop, and not just another link in the Miles Davis chain. Defining postbop as "freedom anchored in form," he concludes that Miles developed "a new approach to music, an approach that was abstract and intense in the extreme, with space created for the rhythmic and coloristic independence of the drummer--an approach that incorporated modal and chordal harmonies, flexible form, structured choruses, melodic variation, and free improvisation." Under this definition; flexible, abstract-yet-melodic, modal and chordal; postbop continues to seem like a catch-all definition, the kind which Yudkin dismisses as "slippery" at the outset of his work. The definition offered by Yudkin seems better utilized as a classification of Miles rather than a definition of postbop.

Indeed, the difficulty with defining postbop as a style underscores the impossibility of classifying jazz at this point in the music's history. After the rise of free jazz and the avant-garde, jazz loses its linear narrative form. Countless styles abound, finding strange connections. Roswell Rudd goes from playing traditional dixieland to free jazz; Stanley Crouch transforms from free jazz drummer into the intellectual godfather of jazz neoclacissism. Yudkin illustrates the complicated nature of classifying a mature and diverse art form like jazz: in which it is easier to position an artist within a web of influences than it is to unite a group of artists under a stylistic banner.

Nevertheless, many will find this book useful. Yudkin includes some very helpful transcriptions from Miles Smiles, and, as anyone who has tried to figure out the chord changes to Nefertiti can attest, deciphering the music of this group is no easy matter. More than that, though, Yudkin has shined a spotlight on a body of work which can never get the amount of attention it really deserves. We owe him thanks for reminding us what pure genius Miles Smiles is, and remains.

Self Portrait in Three Colors

I.

As this is the inaugural post on the blog, I'll begin with an introduction of sorts. I first listened to jazz in 1996, when I was in seventh grade and joined the Arvida Middle School Jazz Band under the direction of Roger Faulmann. I had been playing trumpet for a year at that point. This band was my first exposure to jazz, though the band did not play much jazz per se (the repertoire was a mostly American popular songs with some oldies and traditional big band charts thrown in for good measure). Besides the borderline-jazz and non-jazz tunes, we played arrangements of Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Duke Ellington. So the first jazz I was listening to came from that source. Soon enough, I was broadening my horizons to Miles, Bird, Monk, Trane, and all the other jazz greats one would expect an adventurous neophyte to discover. This continued into high school, where I blossomed into a full-fledged music nerd, playing in multiple bands at Coral Reef Sr. High in Miami, Florida, and developing into a mildly competent jazz trumpeter.

By college I had given up all aspirations of becoming a musician, but used jazz in a research focus for my history degree, writing an undergraduate thesis on the racial politics of hard bop for the history department at the University of Florida. This interest continued at the University of Virginia, where I wrote another thesis (this time for an M.A.) on the discourse of race in the jazz community of the 1960s. before dropping out of grad school with an M.A., I had ambitions of becoming a historian who examined jazz and American culture. I now work in the "real world" at stock market research firm, and have decided to continue writing about jazz on this blog.

I've always had a passion for jazz; for the way it challenged me, surprised me, made me laugh; for the way musicians incorporated disparate elements into their music while stamping out a unique musical identity. I plan on building a catalog of critical writings, discussing jazz of many eras, reviewing books and new albums that come out, and trying to find an answer to the eternal question, "What is jazz?" I hope you'll at least find my posts thoughtful and occasionally thought-provoking.

II.

Because every once in awhile I am asked by friends for a brief primer into jazz, I often think of what to recommend to the nascent jazz listener. I've come up with what I think is a good list to give someone a basic discography on which to build a collection. While I try to keep it broad, I think the list still reveals what I like the most and what I find to be the most important building blocks of jazz, so I include it below to give you an idea of my own tastes. I should note that most was recorded before 1970. This is not because I think good music ceased to be recorded after this point, it is because I feel one should first be introduced to "The Jazz Tradition" (I will address the problems of such a canonization of a tradition and attempt an explanation of the Jazz Tradition in later posts). This allows the listener a better understanding of the context out of which a jazz musician from any era comes. I also try not to repeat artists, so I can include more.

So, acknowledging those caveats, here is my list, in chronological order:

1. Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Louis Armstrong
2. Decca Recordings, Count Basie
3. The Blanton-Webster Band, Duke Ellington
4. Yardbird Suite (or any other collection with the mid-'40s sides with Dizzy Gillespie), Charlie Parker
5. Moanin', Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
6. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis
7. The Shape of Jazz to Come, Ornette Coleman
8. Monk's Dream, Thelonious Monk
9. A Love Supreme, John Coltrane
10. Maiden Voyage, Herbie Hancock

Of course, when I actually make this recommendation, I often double the list so I can include Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Lee Morgan, more Miles and Monk, Bill Evans, etc. But the exercise is no fun if you do not impose any boundaries...

III.

Since the above list excluded everything after 1965 (I was unable to include any fusion on the list, which is one of the reasons it took me so long to narrow it down), I will include a second list of everything since then for the beginning listener who is familiar with The Jazz Tradition.

1. Bright Size Life, Pat Metheny
2. Standard Time, Vol. 1, Wynton Marsalis
3. Soul on Soul, Dave Douglas
4. Tonic, Medeski, Martin & Wood
5. Whisper Not, Keith Jarrett
6. Bill Frisell with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones, Bill Frisell, Dave Holland, and Elvin Jones
7. Prime Directive, Dave Holland Quintet
8. Oh!, ScoLoHoFo
9. Modernistic, Jason Moran
10. House on Hill, Brad Mehldau

That's the introduction. Stay tuned...