Disputing the continuum

[mke]

In a few recent threads, the view of jazz history as a "line" connecting "narrative improvisers" (to paraphrase Ken Vandermark) from the dawn of the music to Evan Parker (that recently-resurected fault-line). This encapsulates the Dixieland/Swing/Bop/Free/Fusion/Free Improv/and-then-what linear historical view. Are people really satisfied with this? Do you think it really reflects the jazz that exists throughout the world today? I'm not really, and I don't.

Today, I hear a wide array of jazz and jazz-inflected music ranging from the straight-jacketed retro to the progressive to the avant-garde, regardless of style (retro/progressive/avant-garde being contextual markers rather than stylistic ones) and music made for the dancefloor (maybe ignored by most here because of the necessity of electronic beats for that, even if it's only the logical follow-up of jazz musicians adopting funk beats. If need be, check "Dogon AD"'s first track for the possibility of creatively skewering contemporary dance rhythms) as well as for the boudoir or listening room.

I don't know, some half-formed thoughts that spring from the impression that in this linear mode of self-description, jazz is actually sold short: the story seems to inevitably lead to a hopelessly muddy impasse. A more layered genealogy would probably better illuminate the current situation and possibly even disarm those who always want to declare it (the music's historical progress) all finished.

[Sergio Zamora]

I've never thought that a linear narrative was sufficient to explain the development of jazz - or of the greater shell of creative improvised music - even from its beginnings.

But certainly it would be impossible to try to neatly encapsulate in a linear fashion its developments since, say, the mid-60s to the present.

As you allude, pretty much everything we have lumped under free improv/free jazz and avant garde/modern creative as well as 'post-bop' is a chaos of styles, variations within variations and nuances - individual and within an individual as well as from places to place, aesthetic conflicts and mergers, and so many other adventuristic divergences that are impossible to explain in any sort of this-begat-that narrative.

I'm not sure if there is any solution or conclusion. Personally, I've gone from being a listener of jazz to a listener of creative improvised music (jazz included) to a listener of creative music. And it's not like I need a new fix or something - it's just so exhilarating to hear something new that unique and fresh and honest. I only wish the chaos would go on indefinitely.

What was the question?

[Kevin L]

Originally Posted by Sergio Zamora

I only wish the chaos would go on indefinitely.

Thanks to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, it does.

[crawjo]

What makes a movement a movement to begin with? Do artists have to consciously identify with the movement to which they allegedly belong? Is there a specific aesthetic criteria that defines something as this rather than that? Or is this just a lazy way of thinking about history?

I ask these questions not merely to challenge the applicability of the "movement paradigm" to contemporary music, but also to rethink the traditional labels we affix to music from the past. What made music "hard" bop rather than "post" bop, and vice versa? When did music become "free", and what made it so, as compared to the other genres of the time?

[bostontricky]

I think the model is more fluid than a strict linear narrative. I'm thinking more along the lines of one tree (with Buddy Bolden at the base) in a forest of other trees. More and more branches as you go up, and they start to intertwine with other branches and also branches from other trees until it's one unholy mess.

Over time, the architectural critic Charles Jencks has attempted to group various architects into movements, with some success. The image below suggests how various groups change over time (from left to right), widening, narrowing, disappearing. He'll often place certain architects (Eisenman, for one) in different areas during different phases of their careers. It's a pretty loose model, and it would be interesting to see someone mock one up for jazz.

[Gary Sisco]

Since it's I who is being paraphrased here, I'd point out that I never used the word linear or implied it. What I said was that an organic, *developmental* line can be heard from jazz's recorded beginnings onward through the second, possibly but more amorphously the third, generation of free jazzers. All I meant by that was to emphasize that in fact there are no clear breaks or divisions, not that there are in a linear fashion. People are still playing all of the forms today that have ever existed. It's not necessary, I don't think, to name every eddy in the Delta to conclude that the Mississippi runs through it.

If the forms do not develop, which word I use in its evolutionary context, out of each other along the way, that position, which isn't mine, is what would imply a break or breaks along the way, and quite possibly the emergence of different musics gathered under the rubric of "jazz" (a position many have taken through the years, actually, Ellington included, but I'm not one of them).

It's no stretch to hear bebop's developmental roots in swing, for example, and in any case swing is the ground out of which it developed. The primary changes, revolutionary in their time, don't necessarily sound so in hind sight. Parker got the idea of extending chords and improvising off the chords using implied scales *during* a solo in a swing band. It took some time for him to work out the idea but it came out of the context of swing, regardless. The other primary change was one of tempo, which required a new way of playing drums, because bebop's tempos became too rapid for the older approaches to the drums, but again, the one developed out of the other. These changes can be heard as they happened on live recordings from the early days of bebop (part of which are obscured because of the recording strike but there are live recordings that have been issued since). On the recent Bird and Diz at Carnegie Hall in '45, for example, one can hear Max Roach playing with at least one foot still in the older swing style, and on two cuts, a swing drummer in Catlett.

Both Coltrane's "sheets of sound" and his later obsessions with scales developed out of bebop's way of improvising off of chords and their implied scales, and his later obsession with rhythm itself flowed out of that earlier obsession (and was also at that point that Coltrane had truly left bebop behind; before that, he had been taking it to its extreme logical conclusions, as initiated by Bird's original inspiration). By the time Coltrane's focus was primarily on rhythm, having left his chordal and scalar explorations behind, that he genuinely entered free territory and left bebop behind.

Ornette took a different course to free improv -- ironically, it might seem, but not so to anyone familiar with the history of revolutions -- by returning to a method of improv largely based on melody only this time with the harmonic aspects emerging from melodic improvisation (together with rhythmic motion, or swing -- harmolodics). But revolutions very often have begun as attempts, conscious or no, to return to something (revolve being the root word). Punk rock being another example of same in a different musical context.

I do not and haven't ever implied any teleology, but the developmental evolutions can be heard in the recorded history, as it happened -- but in hindsight, like any evolutionary development.

There were of course other sidetracks along the way (soul jazz's emergence out of hard bop, for one example of many) but, as I said above, the existence of numerous streams and eddies in the Delta doesn't mean it's not the river, still, headed for the Gulf. It's just taking many approaches along the way.

I've also repeatedly argued through the years that jazz eventually -- as can especially be heard in the present, with its unprecedented number of new releases and increasing independence of musicians from corporate labels -- developed into almost as many approaches as there are musicians, so we're well on into the delta at this point. Indeed, in the present, jazz has become so differentiated that no one's style can realistically be called the or even a "mainstream," today, in any genuine sense of the word.

There does come a time when such differentiation happens to a large and complex enough extent that the many different currents and sidetracks do in fact become something else -- or some of them do, at least -- (hence the existence of words like "delta" as opposed to "river," though they are each aspects of the same thing) and at some point in the second or third generation of free improvising, I think something apart from jazz did develop, but it developed to a lesser or greater extent out of free jazz's way of improvising, depending on who one's referencing,where, and when -- just as there is a point at which the delta becomes so diffuse as to become something else again, as the river at some point is lost in the Gulf.

Julius's borrowings from contemporary dance rhythms is actually as traditional as anything in jazz, since jazz began as a dance music and has, all along its way and still today, used inspirations from any and all forms of music, especially forms of popular music. There wasn't and still isn't a time when jazz didn't do that.

[Bill Barton]

Well said, Gary, well said!

In many cases, past historians tended to put way too much of a linear spin on things in my opinion, not so much in the definition of "movements" (at least in most cases) but on the "great man" theory, concentrating way too much attention on a particular single figure as emblematic of an entire era: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, et al. Not that these musicians weren't groundbreakers and earthshakers, but there was (and is) so much more going on in any era you care to name.

[mke]

Annoyingly, I just lost a fairly long post...

The current situation is often depicted as an open pick'n'choose space. While that is partly liberating, it also partly contributes to the "end of jazz" feeling. My main goal in bringing up this topic was to see if by more clearly and fully drawing out the strands of jazz's history, and seeing how they extend and intertwine in the present, it wouldn't be easier to demonstrate jazz's vitality.

Crawjo: I think there are or were musical differences that justified different labels, but as the musics evolved and lines blurred and solidified elsewhere, what the labels represent and their validity changed. In the case of bebop/hard bop/free jazz, they seem to have been consolidated into various varieties of in/out playing, for a while now.

bostontricky: That's an awesome diagram, is a bigger version available? It could capture the organic side of the music's evolution.

[Gary Sisco]

I look at the present period of jazz this way: the healthiest and most evolutionarily creative ecosystems are those that are the most complex, with the greatest abundance of species and interdependencies (interactions) between them. That's kind of the way I view jazz today. There's no one style, form or movement that's dominant. Rather, there are all of those that have ever existed historically (hacks included) *and* there are just about as many approaches today as there are musicians playing. So many now that no one cat or movement can become dominant in the ways they did in the past.

That's a good thing, to me. The scene is much more complex and the possible interactions limited only by the many cats' imaginations.

[bostontricky]

Absoultely, Gary. I've always been more interested in examining the boundaries, where interchanges between styles/genres/disciplines are occuring.

Mwanji, I'll see what I can dig up, but I might not be able to get to an architectural library until the new year.

[Sergio Zamora]

Originally Posted by mke

The current situation is often depicted as an open pick'n'choose space. While that is partly liberating, it also partly contributes to the "end of jazz" feeling. My main goal in bringing up this topic was to see if by more clearly and fully drawing out the strands of jazz's history, and seeing how they extend and intertwine in the present, it wouldn't be easier to demonstrate jazz's vitality.

It seems that in the context you are presenting it, anarchy and freedom are two sides of the same coin. Personally, I'm more than willing to live with that dreaded "end of jazz" feeling if the alternative means a reduction of creativity and invention (I'm not saying it absolutely is - I'm just making a point). There are so many aspects in my life in which I like to have some semblance of security - shelter, food, livelihood, family. Music does not have to be one of them. But that's me.

[crawjo]

Interesting question. I'd say that part of the problem has been that there was never any such thing as "freedom" in jazz (or any other music for that matter). Performers are always bound, to greater or lesser extents, by the contexts in which they find themselves. I would argue that the "free" jazz movement of the 1960s was intimately tied to the music's history. I hear a lot of Dixieland in Albert Ayler, to take one example.

I bring this up because I think that the word "freedom" can be misleading, and even harmful, to understanding the changes that did occur in the music, and how contemporary jazz relates to what came before it.

[Jon Abbey]

Originally Posted by Face of the Bass

Interesting question. I'd say that part of the problem has been that there was never any such thing as "freedom" in jazz (or any other music for that matter). Performers are always bound, to greater or lesser extents, by the contexts in which they find themselves. I would argue that the "free" jazz movement of the 1960s was intimately tied to the music's history. I hear a lot of Dixieland in Albert Ayler, to take one example.

I bring this up because I think that the word "freedom" can be misleading, and even harmful, to understanding the changes that did occur in the music, and how contemporary jazz relates to what came before it.

yeah, this is something I've said for a long time, I agree with every word. I think the term "free jazz" is a confusing oxymoron that doesn't really apply to anything, since for it to actually be jazz, there has to be some sort of underlying structure, no matter how loose. I think the term "ecstatic jazz" (which was coined a lot later to apply to the Parker/Shipp NY axis) is much more accurate overall.

that's why I personally differentiate the first generation of European free improvisers (Brotzmann, Bailey, Parker, AMM, Schlippenbach, Stevens, etc.) from being part of the jazz tradition, although those artists were obviously largely directly inspired from the US jazz tradition (AMM much less than the others listed above, they came much more out of modern classical as a collective).

[Jon Abbey]

I just noticed that the first Globe Unity disc was recorded on December 6 and 7, 1966; I was born on the morning of the 7th. kind of cool...

[crawjo]

Originally Posted by Jon Abbey

that's why I personally differentiate the first generation of European free improvisers (Brotzmann, Bailey, Parker, AMM, Schlippenbach, Stevens, etc.) from being part of the jazz tradition, although those artists were obviously largely directly inspired from the US jazz tradition (AMM much less than the others listed above, they came much more out of modern classical as a collective).

By "modern classical" do you mean guys like Cage and Stockhausen? A lot of those European improvisers you mention did start out playing in jazz bands, but I agree that there was some influence along the way that caused the music to develop in a different direction. Maybe it's just a matter of them coming from a particular European aesthetic tradition, rather than an African-American one, which is of course where many (most?) of the "free" jazz players in the states were coming from.

[Jon Abbey]

Originally Posted by Face of the Bass

By "modern classical" do you mean guys like Cage and Stockhausen?

yes, I think for AMM specifically, it was primarily the New York School (Cage/Feldman/Wolff/Earle Brown), plus Cardew was in the group at the beginning, who was one of Stockhausen's primary assistants. Brian O. probably knows more specifics on this.

A lot of those European improvisers you mention did start out playing in jazz bands, but I agree that there was some influence along the way that caused the music to develop in a different direction. Maybe it's just a matter of them coming from a particular European aesthetic tradition, rather than an African-American one, which is of course where many (most?) of the "free" jazz players in the states were coming from.

kind of, but I'd state it a bit differently, more that those musicians really admired the jazz tradition but wanted to create an aesthetic area of their own.

[Jazz Purist]

I abhor the use of the term, "mainstream jazz", as it implies and infers that certain forms of music such as "Acid", "Fusion", and "Smooth" are genuine and integral parts of the jazz lineage. Secondly, I too believe that the term "Jazz" is one that has been used much too loosely, which has lead to the "over labeling" of the music by subgenre. In my estimation there are eight basic subgenres that belong under rubric of Jazz and they are:

Dixieland
Traditional
Big Band/Swing
BeBop
West Coast/Cool
Modern - (Modal, Hard Bop, Soul)
Latin - (Brazilian and Afro-Cuban)
Free/Avant Garde



The essence of jazz is rooted in West African culture and musical expression, and has several rudimentary building blocks which create it's unique sound, and these are blue notes, syncopation, swing, polyrhytmic texture, and improvisation. Almost all of the jazz subgenres listed above maintain these traits and characteristics, while other purported forms of music, (such as "Acid", "Smooth", "Fusion" etc.) have very few, if any of these traits, and possess none of the vestiges of ragtime, which is the precursor to and progenitor of true jazz. As I have said, there is far too much labeling of this music by subgenre, and now I suppose we can add the newest form of jazz music to the list, as we now have something called "Nu Jazz".

[mke]

Originally Posted by Sergio Zamora

It seems that in the context you are presenting it, anarchy and freedom are two sides of the same coin. Personally, I'm more than willing to live with that dreaded "end of jazz" feeling if the alternative means a reduction of creativity and invention (I'm not saying it absolutely is - I'm just making a point). There are so many aspects in my life in which I like to have some semblance of security - shelter, food, livelihood, family. Music does not have to be one of them. But that's me.

I don't understand why you see this as an anarchy/freedom/security thing. The metaphors I choose ("illuminate", "threads") are more about trying to see in a detailled way how the contemporary jazz currents (I don't think that there is one (or more) per musician, as Sisco suggested) extend, blend or terminate the currents of the past, with the aim of, hopefully, giving more substantive and general arguments to those who don't feel that jazz is dead (ie. that it is continuing to change).

[Jon Abbey]

I abhor the use of the term "Jazz Purist", since as I said the other day, it brings to mind thoughts of ethnic cleansing.

[mke]

Originally Posted by Face of the Bass

Interesting question. I'd say that part of the problem has been that there was never any such thing as "freedom" in jazz (or any other music for that matter). Performers are always bound, to greater or lesser extents, by the contexts in which they find themselves. I would argue that the "free" jazz movement of the 1960s was intimately tied to the music's history. I hear a lot of Dixieland in Albert Ayler, to take one example.

What do you mean by "freedom"? I don't take it to mean the absence of rules or context, so I can't understand your statement. That Ayler didn't spring from the void doesn't affect the degree to which his music was free or not. On the more sociological side, I find it odd that you would not find freedom in an art form that has done so much to show Afro-Americans (and, by extension, blacks in general) to be thinking, progressive individuals, rather than dumb sub-humans.

I bring this up because I think that the word "freedom" can be misleading, and even harmful, to understanding the changes that did occur in the music, and how contemporary jazz relates to what came before it.

Freedom (in the sense of what/when/how to play your next note, for example) is not the only measure of the evolution of jazz, but one of several. To take it as the only one is misleading, obviously.

[Gary Sisco]

There are of course many more than one meanings to the word "free." In the context of free jazz, it means to me free in the sense of its being created outside of songform and the changes. I agree with Jon in a sense, as I draw a distinction between free jazz and free music. Free jazz being freely improvised jazz (and therefore within a form's lineage) and free music being freely improvised music as such. Improv within forms or improv of forms. And so on. Needless to say anything may crystalize over time into a another form if the musicians begin plying the same territory too often.

That's an aspect of what I was saying above. The historical elements that render a music recognizable as "jazz" are present also in free jazz. There was never a clear break and, likely, few intended one. Ornette's roots in Bird are self-evident in his sound.

[mke]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Julius's borrowings from contemporary dance rhythms is actually as traditional as anything in jazz, since jazz began as a dance music and has, all along its way and still today, used inspirations from any and all forms of music, especially forms of popular music. There wasn't and still isn't a time when jazz didn't do that.

I largely agree with your initial post. As for the excerpt quoted above, that's what I meant. I wanted to highlight the fact that danceable jazz was still being made, and more "adventurous" jazz too, but using contemporary dance rhythms. JC seems to me to completely ignore this popular and fairly commercially succesful bit of jazz (it may also be a Europe/US thing?), despite its extension of one strand of the tradition.

[Gary Sisco]

MKE -- It is in part an American thing because part of the mythology here is that jazz as dance or even danceable music ceased to exist with the rise of bebop,* which is silly, of course, but also entirely rules out, among many other things, the one most popular and longest lastingly popular form of the music: soul jazz, which is still today the most popular form, and has its own club circuit.

But, yeah, there's lots of danceable but adventurous jazz out there. The perennially popular Eskelin-Parkins-Black trio, to name one example of many.


Americans have a tendency to like their history neatly cut and dried but of course it is never so and can't be.

* Amiri Baraka had the best retort to the standard line "You can't dance to bebop." He said, "That's right. *You* can't dance to bebop."

[crawjo]

Originally Posted by mke

What do you mean by "freedom"? I don't take it to mean the absence of rules or context, so I can't understand your statement. That Ayler didn't spring from the void doesn't affect the degree to which his music was free or not. On the more sociological side, I find it odd that you would not find freedom in an art form that has done so much to show Afro-Americans (and, by extension, blacks in general) to be thinking, progressive individuals, rather than dumb sub-humans.

What about Ayler's music is "free"? He played very recognizable melodies, over and over and over, lots of marches, etc. etc. The main thing that would mark his playing as "free," I think, is his style of playing the tenor saxophone, which was obviously very unique. But I'm not clear on how this makes "freedom" a useful concept for understanding the evolution of jazz, because it seems to me that all the great innovators of jazz were trying to do much the same thing. In other words, Louis Armstrong played free jazz, so did Charlie Parker, so did Miles Davis, so did Sun Ra, etc. etc.

I guess my problem with the term is that the proponents of free jazz sometimes made it seem like they were breaking away all previous conventions. But it didn't take long before free jazz, as a genre, took on its own characteristics and expectations, and thus no longer became free. I think the biggest problem here is that the use of the term "free" had a very specific political meaning during the 1960s. Once the political context changed, the term itself became meaningless as a way for distinguishing a certain type of jazz. Basically, the free jazz players of the 1960s were just taking an aesthetic tradition that had long been a staple of jazz, and they were overtly politicizing it.

[Sergio Zamora]

Originally Posted by mke

I don't understand why you see this as an anarchy/freedom/security thing..

I mainly see in what you say about trying to mitigate the "end of jazz" feel. I'm maybe extending more the meaning of that phrase than you originally intended, but it does seem like a logical consequence that freedom - i mean real freedom - within an area of music *might* lead to its 'end' - which can be read as a destruction or a transformation, depending on whose looking at it.

[Gary Sisco]

Who says you can't play free and melodically and with rhythm? To me, free means you play what you want to hear at the time you're playing. That could include just about anything outside songform/changes.

The most basic meaning of the word is to able to do what thou wilt.

One of the problems for many years is the confusion of the word free with formlessness. But music has form, freely improvised or not. Free jazz has a jazz form, freely improvised or not.

[jd-pa]

I don't if 'it's dead or not or it matters if its placed into some timeline. Jazz is conversational. From a drummers perspective no note is played unless it relates to another note within the ensemble. This would be the 'improvisation' aspect.
As opposed to some musics where theres an 'auto pilot' rhythm and layers of more instruments are placed -on top of that- 'building the song.
Jazz is improvisational. An improvised conversation. What happens 'after the melody is played. Or the melody can be left out. But the improvisation must remain(right?
So as long as musicians chose the conversational "jazz" way it will last to infinity. And the improvisation might be the link between 1900(jazz) and 2000 jazz. its a continuum

[Gary Sisco]

Jon -- Not only can I not stand the term "jazz purist"; I don't even know what it means after 36 years as a dedicated jazz fan. It gets bandied about but no one ever explains what they mean by it.

[Erik Lund]

His parents' idea to have little Jon Abbey was conceived the exact moment Rowe had the epiphany to lay that guitar right out over the table.


Slightly cooler...

[mke]

Originally Posted by Erik Lund

His parents' idea to have little Jon Abbey was conceived the exact moment Rowe had the epiphany to lay that guitar right out over the table.


Slightly cooler...

I always assumed they were listening to Bud Powell at the time... (there's one I'm sure he's never heard before!)