Trends in Jazz

TRENDS IN JAZZ

New Blood

The 1970s had been a sluggish decade for jazz, producing few "name" performers and notable only for experiments in jazz-rock "fusion." Jazz in the early 1980s offered more of the same, with pop-minded artists such as Spyro Gyra, Pat Metheny, The Crusaders, Al Jarreau, George Benson, Herbie Hancock, Chuck Mangione, Angela Bofill, George Winston, David San-born, and Grover Washington Jr. dominating jazz sales and airplay. That trend changed abruptly at middecade as record buyers and jazz enthusiasts began discovering new jazz artists and returning to old favorites. Stanley Jordan and George Howard made a splash in 1985, as did Sade, who attracted a large jazz following with her cool, exotic vocals. Perhaps the most popular jazz performer of the late 1980s was Kenny G, whose albums Duotones (1987) and Silhouette (1989) were exemplars of the "fusion" sound. The most welcome trend was the resurgence on the charts in the late 1980s of jazz masters such as Ella Fitzgerald, Ornette Coleman, and Count Basie. The movie Round Midnight (1986) quickened record sales for Dexter Gordon, while the movie Bird (1988) helped make the late Charlie Parker the biggest-selling jazz artist of 1989.

Marsalis

Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis caught the jazz world by surprise in the early 1980s with a mastery of technique astonishing for such a young performer. At fourteen he played with the New Orleans Philharmonic. At seventeen he was admitted to the Berkshire Music Center to study classical music, and at eighteen he was attending the Julliard School of Music and performing with the Brooklyn Philharmonia. At nineteen he played with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Herbie Hancock. That same year Marsalis signed a major-label recording contract; Hancock produced Marsalis's first album, which sold 125,000 copies. In 1982, at twenty, Marsalis beat Miles Davis as best trumpet player in a Down Beat readers' poll and played at the Kool Jazz Festival in New York. At twenty-two he performed in a concert at Lincoln Center that featured the music of Bach and Duke Ellington. Marsalis was rare in being skilled in both jazz and classical music, and in 1984 he became the first artist ever to win Grammys in jazz and classical in the same year. In 1985 he was the top-selling jazz artist in the United States, with Hot House Flowers. In 1988 Standard Time put him in the top spot again.

Purist

Marsalis felt that jazz was more difficult than classical music because it required great versatility, creativity, personal style, and emotion, which many critics felt he lacked. Marsalis himself admitted, "I have a lot to learn. My playing isn't spontaneous enough." But few disputed his talent, his ambition, and his seriousness about his art. "I do not entertain and I will not entertain," he said. "I'm a musician." Classical trumpet master Maurice Andre said Marsalis had the potential to be the greatest trumpeter in history. A jazz purist, Marsalis scoffed at the style of jazz "fusion" popular throughout the 1970s and 1980s: "I don't like it when pop is sold as jazz. That's the record companies trying to redefine jazz." His older brother Branford, who developed his own reputation as a tenor saxophonist, was less of a purist. Although he recorded several top-selling albums of sophisticated jazz, Branford Marsalis also dabbled in pop. In 1985 he backed Sting on his solo-debut album and went on to tour stadiums with the former Police idol. He also appeared in several feature films.

NEW AGE MUSIC

New Age music slipped into the American consciousness in the 1980s, an era of hype and hysteria for anything new, and managed to keep a low profile for the rest of the decade—in part because of its elusiveness as a category. No one seemed able to define precisely what made a particular piece of music New Age. Some New Agers, such as harpist Andreas Vollenweider, disavowed the term altogether. Yet most did agree about the effect New Age music had on listeners, describing it as creating sensations such as "a pastoral utopia of peace and centeredness," or "a magic carpet ride for the listener's imagination," or "a pilgrimage through the cosmos."

The enthusiasm for New Age music bridged two separate phenomena. The first was a lingering fondness among many Americans, generally aging baby boomers, for the counterculture of the 1960s. The second was excitement, in largely the same demographic group, about the new digital-sound technology made possible by compact discs. The result was a small underground of mostly white, college-educated professionals (some of them hippies-turned-yuppies) "tuning in" and "tuning on" again through the mainstream cultural avenue of New Age music.

The New Age sound originated with acoustic musicians such as pianist George Winston and guitarist William Ackerman, who founded the New Age record label Windham Hill. As jazz and classical musicians picked up the style, it became more complex in texture. New Age music resembles improvisational jazz and jazz "fusion," but it also borrows from the ambient, "pillowy" synthesizer music of artists such as Philip Glass and Brian Eno and the ethnic influences of world music. Ethereal, almost patternless melodies and harmonic washes create a "visual" sound that is best described by New Age song titles such as "The Garden of Ecstasy," "Islands of Paradise," and "Sea of Light."

While some New Age artists went for purely pastoral effects, others had a style close to opera. Their inspiration ranged from mythology and Nordic lore to modern religion, and their mood from serious to playful. Some tried to be innovative; Montreaux included every style from calypso to bluegrass. A lot of first-time listeners griped that New Age music was just high-tech Muzak, elevator music for yuppies—and hospitals and airlines often used it to soothe the fears of patients and passengers. But Vollenweider defended the New Age sound: "With the music, you can build a bridge between the conscious and the subconscious. We have to somehow excite our spirituality."

A few New Age performers, including Enya, Yanni, and Vangelis, broke through to mainstream success with New Age "hits." By 1985 Vollenweider had sold 2.1 million recordings worldwide, The Windham Hill label, started in the mid 1970s, had retail sales of $20 million in 1984, and by the late 1980s New Age stations such as "The Wave" in Los Angeles were springing up across the country. By then New Age music had invaded television, including news programs, soap operas, and the 1988 Winter Olympics. On Independence Day in 1986, the new music received a lot of free exposure when the spectacular Parade of Tall Ships in New York Harbor performed impressively with a New Age "curtain of sound" as a backdrop.

Sources:

"Muzak for a New Age," Newsweek, 105 (13 May 1985): 68;

Helfried C. Zrzavy, "Issues of Incoherence and Cohesion in New Age Music," Journal of Popular Culture, 24 (Fall 1990): 33-54.

Connick

Among Wynton Marsalis's best friends was another boy wonder of jazz, New Orleans-style pianist and vocalist Harry Connick Jr. Only twenty when he achieved stardom in 1988 with his first recording, the debonair Connick struck many listeners and critics as a cocky brat and, worse still, a poseur. "Recycled Sinatra" was a common description. Others sniffed that he was just a jazz version of Michael Feinstein, the cabaret crooner-pianist who specialized in classic show tunes. But Connick had already paid his dues, growing up in New Orleans and sitting in on Bourbon Street gigs. Like Marsalis, Connick excelled in both jazz and classical styles; he even studied piano with Marsalis's father, Ellis. As a teenager he had also played with Eubie Blake, Buddy Rich, and Al Hirt. Most audiences were less interested in Connick's keyboard virtuosity than in his retro style, from his 1940s suits and slicked-back hair to his drawling vocals that suggested an earlier, more glamorous era. Connick was a genuine talent shrewdly marketed to a public that liked their culture packaged, processed, and homogenized.

Sources:

"The Bourbon Street Kid Hits His Stride," Newsweek, 113 (20 February 1989): 67;

"Branford's Two Worlds," Newsweek, 111 (4 January 1988): 54;

"Kid Zipper's High Horn," Time, 122 (7 November 1983): 94;

"Whiz Kid," New Yorker, 59 (20 June 1983): 78-80.