Music: Jazz

Music: Jazz

The Death of Jazz?

Jazz is rumored to have died in the 1990s, but in fact, jazz earned wider recognition, attained greater respectability, and attracted larger audiences than ever before. The iconography of jazz was more fashionable and more prevalent than when jazz was new, vigorous, and innovative. Glossy magazine advertisements for liquor, cigars, luxury automobiles, and other amenities of the "good life" often depicted a soulful saxophonist, trumpeter, or vocalist. With eyes shut tight and perspiration glistening on their foreheads, these jazz performers offered representations of the intensity, pleasure, and sophistication with which companies wished to associate their products. Yet, palpable feelings of unease counterbalanced the popularity of jazz. Throughout the 1990s, jazz aficionados found ample reason to sit on the ground and tell sad stories about the death of kings (and queens). The passing of Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Carmen McRae, Gerry Mulligan, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, and Sarah Vaughan marked the end of an era on the American jazz scene. Of those giants who remained, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison, formerly a member of the Basie Orchestra, were in their eighties. Pianist Oscar Peterson was in his seventies and still performing despite the effects of a stroke. Critics began to wonder aloud whether the rising generation of jazz artists, However talented, could fill the void, though Sonny Rollins remained a towering presence, and Jackie McLean served as an apostle of modern jazz for a new generation of listeners.

Out with the Old, In with the Old

Who was the new Miles or Monk, the new Bird or Trane of the 1990s? What recording of the decade was the equivalent of Miles Davis's 1959 masterpiece "Kind of Blue?" Reissues of classic recordings, such as Davis's collaborations with Canadian arranger Gil Evans, and a tribute to John Coltrane, were popular. According to one line of criticism, however, these collections were little more than splendid museum pieces that revealed the arid banality of much contemporary jazz. Even those who abhored Coltrane's "sheets-of-sound" solos (frenzied, improvisational epics that could last for thirty minutes or longer) agreed that, more than thirty years after his death, Coltrane's stylistic innovations were unmatched. Jazz critic Francis Davis summarized these concerns in a provocative essay published in 1996. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, Davis complained that among the new generation of jazz musicians "there are no Thelonious Monks or Omette Cole-mans…, no innovators or woolly eccentrics among those we've heard from so far. In setting craftsmanship as their highest goal these neophytes remind me of such second-tier stars of the Fifties and Sixties as Blue Mitchell and Wynton Kelly—players whose modesty and good taste made them ideal sidemen but whose own record dates invariably lacked the dark corners and disfigurements of character that separate great music from merely good." Davis then made the arresting observation that whereas critics were formerly the guardians of the musical canon, measuring the value of each new contribution against the standards of the past, now musicians themselves embraced tradition while critics fretted and fumed at the apparent scarcity of the fresh, the adventurous, and the spontaneous—characteristics that Whitney Balliett, jazz critic for The New Yorker, once identified as "the sound of surprise."

The Rise of Neoclassicism

Following World War II, the bebop sound of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, and others began to supplant the big-band music of the Swing Era. Wearied by the predictable harmonic structure of bebop, Omette Coleman and John Coltrane pioneered the avant-garde atonal free jazz of the 1960s; another faction, most effectively represented by the group Spyro Gyra and Chick Corea, was influential in the mid 1970s, embracing the fusion of jazz and rock. During the 1980s, the advocates of the so-called neoclassical movement sought to reverse the lowering of musical standards that had resulted from the self-indulgence of the avant-garde and the commercial success of the jazz-rock fusion. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis emerged as the leader of this austere, patrician band of musical traditionalists. More than two decades earlier, James Lincoln Collier, who ironically became one of Marsalis's principal antagonists during the 1990s, reached similar conclusions. In the epilogue to The Making of Jazz (1978) Collier wrote: "We have to divest ourselves of the idea that the history of jazz has always been toward better and better. In no art has this ever been the case.… Jazz has always been obsessed with the new, with experimentation, and the result has been that it has rarely paused to exploit its discoveries before leaping out to make fresh ones.… Jazz needs, at the moment, a respite from experiments. It needs time to consolidate gains, to go back and re-examine what is there. There is enough work left undone to last many lifetimes,"

An Ambiguous Future

Efforts to revitalize the tradition, of course, carried inherent risks. Too much solemnity' and too much reverence for old standards might alienate new audiences and inhibit artistic creativity. Yet, neotraditionalists argued, in view of the damage that the worst excesses of avant-garde and fusion wrought during the 1970s and 1980s, the gamble was worth taking, even if the neoclassical reaction produced an over-emphasis on technique as an end in itself. Besides, many emerging jazz artists of the 1990s, including Terrence Blanchard, James Carter, Kenny Garrett, Roy Hargrove, Donald Harrison, Nicholas Payton, Joshua Redman, and Marcus Roberts, although superb technicians, restored vitality and emotion to their music. Equally encouraging was the appearance of a coterie of young vocalists, chief among them singer-pianist Diana Krall, who revived the beauties of melody and brought new life to classic jazz tunes. Despite these promising developments, jazz at the end of the 1990s remained in something of a crisis. Exiled to the periphery, jazz simply could not compete with the pervasive music-video culture of MTV. In that circumstance, jazz faced a predicament similar to those of classical music, poetry, fiction, and the visual arts in the age of postmodernism.

Sources:

James Lincoln Collier, Jazz: The American Theme Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Collier, The Making of Jazz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).

Clive Davis, "Has Jazz Gone Classical?" Wilson Quarterly, 21 (Spring 1997): 56-63.

Francis Davis, "Like Young," Atlantic Monthly, 278 (July 1996): 92-97.