Appendix to Part Three

Deepening the Game

The Appendix to each Part will contain a brief précis of the relevant Chapter of Interaction, Opening Up the Jazz Ensemble, the Book and CD package published by Advance Music in 1995. The Appendices will also contain, where appropriate, recommendations for further reading and listening as well as a selection of relevant quotations and contributions.

NB: The new title to Part Three, 'Deepening the Game', absorbs many of the ideas and concepts expressed in Interaction Chapter Three, 'Jazz Changes, Tradition, and the "new" thing'.

Precis of Chapter Three: Tradition and the 'New' Thing

Many in jazz education haven't yet come to terms with the fact that, since Kind of Blue there has been a liberating of almost every aspect of jazz which has had a very radical effect on the music and how it is now perceived. Neither have they come to terms with the music's past. This chapter discusses what happened with the 'new' thing, now thirty years old; shows how it is no longer shocking - if it ever was; and looks at the connections between tradition and the new thing.

The two dominant figures behind the changes of the late 1950s were Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis. Davis's concern for musical space has been of immense importance in developing and reshaping the potential of jazz. Coleman's ultimate premise was that the mood created from the playing of the melody was a sufficient base for improvising. As George Russell said, 'All the soloists share what I consider a very important approach to contemporary jazz - an awareness that you can play on an idea, not necessarily on the dictated chords.'

As the music loosened up in the sixties, musicians realised that the overall formal restraints of a performance could also be relaxed. Collective improvisation, almost totally discarded when the New Orleans style faded, made a comeback and there was no longer the requirement for soloists to wait in turn to speak their piece, as was common in most jazz performances.

Space, individuality of approach to sound and improvising, modal thinking, changes in instrumental roles, changes in underlying time signatures; all are ways where tradition and the new thing can seen to be linked.

Chapter Three concludes with workshops designed to help students free up their concepts. These include working with space; working with modes; new time signatures and collective improvisation.

Further Reading and Listening

'The more cultural contributions and discoveries of every kind that are produced... with material multiplying even faster and everything also being preserved from the past and made instantly available, the problem of selection becomes overwhelming ... What institutions can we rely on to choose what will fall under our eyes without our searching it out?'
Thomas Nagel's words are particularly apt for this section. I certainly cannot pretend to be able to propose who one should listen to and what one should read - particularly to discover even part of what I call 'the hidden background hum' - but here are some pointers. These will be added to as the project progresses and, as always, contributions are welcome.

Other arts
As many of the quotations used show, I have a particular interest in reading about painting and literature, readings which often add depth to my views on jazz and jazz composition. Among the writers I would recommend are William Gass (the quote used below is from The 'Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde' in Finding a Form - Cornell University Press, 1996); Clement Greenberg (Four volumes of Collected Essays and Criticism, published by the University of Chicago Press), Robert Hughes, whose Nothing if Not Critical (Harvill Press, 2001), scathing in Hughes's inimitable way, has been particularly useful; David Sylvester (About Modern Art - Yale University Press, 2001) and T J Clark (Farewell to an Idea - also Yale, 2001)

Jazz writers
John Wickes, whose Innovations in British Jazz, Vol 1, 1960-1980 (Soundworld Publishers) is reviewed below, puts that important period of jazz development in Britain into perspective and sets the scene for the later developments of musicians such as John McLaughlin, Dave Holland and John Surman. Bruce Johnson's The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity (Currency Press, Sydney), from which the quote below comes, is an interesting look at jazz in Australia.

Gary Giddins' Rhythm-a-ning, Jazz tradition and innovation in the 80s (Oxford, 1990) and Howard Mandel's Future Jazz (Oxford, 1999) both cast some light on the newer jazz. Ted Gioia's The Imperfect Art, Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (Oxford, 1988) and Max Harrison's A Jazz Retrospect (Quartet, 1991) are both more wide-ranging in scope than most jazz criticism. Roger T. Dean's New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music since 1960 (Open University Press, 1992) is welcomely academic. Francis Davis, the most interesting commentator on the current scene, has various books published by Oxford and his article on the young jazz lions, quoted from above, can be found at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96jul/young/young.htm

Musicians who are 'Deepening the Game' - a very partial list
Jon Balke and Auden Kleive (with their own projects as well as with their trio Jøkleba) and Arild Andersen (Norway), Christoph Cech and Christian Mühlbacher (Austria), Paul Grabowsky and Roger Dean (Australia), Pierre Dorge (Denmark), John Surman, Evan Parker and Iain Ballamy (England), Simon Nabatov (Germany), Dolmen Orchestra and Gianluigi Trovesi (Italy), Jimmy Giuffre, John Rapson, Sam Rivers, Ken Vandermark, Either Orchestra, Aardvark Jazz Orchestra (United States).

Quotes
Some of these quotes are relevant to 'Tradition and the "new" Thing', the previous title for Part Three, others fit under the new rubric 'Deepening the Game'. Those marked with a * are used or referred to in this project or in Interaction.
Some other relevant quotes, by and against Wynton Marsalis, can be found elsewhere in Part Three in Target: Taking care of business - or a long vacation? Wynton and his critics.

Gary Giddins, Rhythm-a-ning*
'The turning point was the seminal Kind of Blue, that gorgeous introspective collection of first takes so smoothly executed that hardly anyone recognised it for the insurrection it was.'

Django Bates
'That may be where we came from, but it's not where we're going.'

Robert Hughes, Nothing if Not Critical, p175
'Art is invention but also remembering.'

Charles Ives
'Their motto. All things have a right to live and grow, even babies and music schools, but not music.'

William Faulkner, quote from an un-named novel
'The past isn't dead. It isn't even past.'

Bill Evans
'He who sees furthest into the past sees furthest into the future.'

Clement Greenberg
'(this) state of affairs has resolved itself into ... an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters.'

Noam Chomsky
'So when you go to graduate school in the natural sciences, you're immediately brought into critical inquiry - and, in fact, what you're learning is kind of a craft; you don't really teach science, people sort of get the idea how to do it as apprentices, hopefully by working with good people. But the goal is to learn how to do creative work, and to challenge everything ... people have to be trained for creativity and disobedience - because there is no other way you can do science. But in the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on people are trained ... not to question too much'.

Miles Davis
'I don't like to hear what we did 20 years ago, nor people saying that they're trying to keep that tradition - that kind of music - alive and save it. It's already on tape so you don't have to save it. To play it over again, I think, is just being lazy.'

Ted Gioia
'We tend to conceptualise composition in jazz as a process of putting black dots on pages. Many commentators make a further leap and assume that greatness in jazz composition will be achieved when we have lots of black dots on lots of pages ... Jazz composition is primarily about creating an invigorating framework and fresh mental space for creativity. The breakthrough in Kind of Blue was in creating a new state of mind ... I am suggesting that the success of a jazz composition can best be determined by what the players do at that point in the performance when there are no black dots to play. In essence one listens to the quality of the improvisations as a way of judging the merits of a composition. If a soloist is not inspired, all the black dots in the world won't compensate for this deficiency. And if the soloists is inspired, just a few black dots - or none at all - will suffice. Even the jazz composers who wrote thick scores - such as Ellington and Mingus - recognised this.'

Francis Davis*
'I used to believe that what scared most people away from jazz was their suspicion that they would be bored by it. In the case of much latter-day bebop, with its lineup of soloists running down the chords to no apparent purpose after stating a sketchy theme not to be heard again until the end, boredom is a reasonable response. The solution, I always thought, was to expose people to kinds of jazz in which composition and improvisation overlap, and in which something is going on in every measure. It wouldn't have to be Muhal Richard Abrams or Sun Ra or anything too far out; it could be Ellington or Charles Mingus or even Marsalis's score for the 1990 movie Tune In Tomorrow. But if new audiences are flocking to jazz on the heels of a generation of musicians who were themselves receptive to Marsalis's ideology at an impressionable age, I must be wrong. People who have never really listened to jazz want it to go on sounding the way they've been led to believe it should, so that they'll be able to recognize it in case they ever chance to hear any.

'James Carter might erupt in screams even on a ballad or a medium-tempo groove tune, his rhythm section suspending the beat as it pummels its instruments into cacophony. This lends an element of unpredictability to Carter's solos, but the problem is that his solos are always unpredictable in exactly the same way. I suspect that even those listeners who shun what used to be called free jazz for fear of just such episodes willingly go along with Carter because they know his paroxysms will be short-lived. Minus the thematic development that is possible in free improvisation, his farrago-like solos reduce thirty years of sonic exploration to a handy vocabulary of stock effects not much different from the honks and screams of the average rhythm-and-blues saxophonist of the 1950s.'

Clement Greenberg
'... (the artist) cannot resort to the means of the past, for they have been made stale by overuse, and to take them up again would be to rob his art of its originality and real excitement.'

William Gass
'Such a pure avant-garde must not only emphasise the formal elements of its art (recognising that these elements are its art); its outside interests must be in very long term - if not permanent - problems ... The avant-garde's ultimate purpose is to return the art to itself, not as if the art could be cordoned off from the world and kept uncontaminated, but in order to remind it of its nature (a creator of forms in its profoundest sense) - a nature that should not be allowed to dissolve into what are, after all, measly moments of society.'

Bruce Johnson
'Australians were at the end of a long line of Chinese Whispers. The message heard .... bore little relation to the message being shared between New Orleans musicians and their audiences ... Nor was it decoded as the same message received by other countries outside the United States.'

A review of some books addressing this issue
In view of the relevance to this section the following book review, originally published in Jazz Changes, Volume 6, Number 3, is added here.

Blues Up and Down: Jazz In Our Time
Tom Piazza
St Martin's Press, New York

Blue, the Murder of Jazz
Eric Nisenson
St Martin's Press, New York

The All-American Skin Game, or; The Decoy of Race
Stanley Crouch
Vintage Books, New York

Innovations in British Jazz, Vol 1, 1960-1980 (with CD)
John Wickes
Soundworld Publishers

There is a polarisation running through the first three abovementioned books which I find disturbing. It is not that it exists, for writers will always use contrast to make a point. It is that in these books there seems little if any room for anything in between, or for any combining of whatever two sides are being contrasted.
All three books are affected in some way by the views of Wynton Marsalis, whether pro (Crouch, of course, and Piazza) or against (Nisenson). But whatever the stance is, there is a well defined (for the writer) opposite and nothing else exists.
For Piazza, the opposite starts off as being fusion but later this changes to the avant-garde. In passing, he excoriates most other critics by saying that they dismiss tradition in a constant search for newness, for what he calls, dismissively, 'freedom'. In the later sections of the book he extols the 'young, gifted and cool' generation, saying 'never in the last twenty years has there been such a sense of excitement among new players, and major record companies have been signing the best of them...'
For Crouch, the opposite is anything that doesn't conform to the Marsalis canon. For Nisenson jazz is dead because Marsalis killed it and what does exist now is not enough to keep the spirit alive.
None of these three writers seems to be very aware of the massive changes in jazz which took place, forty years ago, because of the approaches of players such as Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. Piazza dismisses those involved in these 'new' things as musicians with no technique playing at 'freedom'. In so doing, he suggests that none of his fellow critics are capable of understanding jazz as he sees it, or of penetrating the charlatanism of the musicians involved.
Where the polarisation really comes into play is America versus anything else. There is a feeling that, despite the evidence of the last 40 years ­ or more ­ American jazz is still all there is. And that America is all that exists. Wake up, folks, there is a jazz world ­ or, more accurately, jazz worlds ­ outside America. Not only the cultures that sent Joe Zawinul, Tiger Okoshi and Dave Holland there, but vibrant musical scenes in other countries which created jazz musicians such as Django Reinhardt, Albert Mangelsdorff and Lars Gullin.
While Nisenson, to his credit, does touch briefly on Jan Garbarek, Piazza dismisses world music influences, in terms reminiscent of Wynton's put-down of Lester Bowie, as 'a bizarre meld of stylised dashikis and blue jeans'. This is a particularly odd view when one considers the constant outside influences on jazz from Cuba, Brazil, Europe (although even Piazza recognises this as a formative influence on the music's birth). But, of course, these influences are long in the past, before the music was formed into a definitive canon of bop, hard bop and the saintly Duke.
Another thread running through these three books is a dislike, hatred, even, of my near namesake, James Lincoln Collier. Although he is a friend and occasional Jazz Changes contributor (but no relation), I don't intend to fight his battles for him. But the reaction to him is part of an extremely unhealthy arrogance about specific views of jazz which is now emerging. This includes extreme protectionism of the reputations of the great names of jazz, such as Ellington. Jim Collier's views on Duke were greeted by one observer with the comment: 'It's great to hear somebody talk about him as a fallible human being instead of a god without any faults.'
(Talking of fallibility: Strayhorn biographer David Hadju has recently suggested in an American magazine that there was a possibility that Ellington and Billy Strayhorn may have had a homosexual relationship. Jazz Journal International columnist Steve Voce expressed outrage that this could even have been suggested. As far as Voce, and I am sure many others, was concerned, God had been insulted. My inclination to suggest a competition to identify the tunes that they might have written together in a pre- or post-coital reverie ­ 'Things Ain't What They Used to Be'? ­ has been shelved. I wouldn't want too many cardiac arrests on my conscience!)
The final insult in the approach of these books is the surmise that jazz is defined by what is marketed as jazz; that jazz doesn't exist outside certain clubs and jazz radio stations and, of course, the pages of certain jazz magazines. It does, Veronica, it surely does.
There are some encouraging signs: London musicians were raving about the recent visit of Mark Isham's Silent Way project to Ronnie Scott's recently, a club not often known for its musical values or its hushed audiences; the fact that a recent Jazz Times allowed Keith Jarrett to slag off Wynton publicly is welcome also. But these are sparse signals in a jazz world where Kenny G ­ and worse ­ are programmed in 'jazz' clubs and on 'jazz' radio and which can argue in the pages of a 'quality' jazz magazine whether Kenny G is a jazz musician or not
Jazz which is incapable of definition in simplistic terms continues to be made and should be celebrated. I can't imagine that any of the American authors are great fans of Kenny Wheeler or Evan Parker, music from whose new ECM CDs I heard at a sparsely-attended launch recently. That music will doubtless get exposure on ECM, but not as much as it deserves. How such music developed is detailed in John Wickes's fascinating and long-awaited Innovations in British Jazz, Volume One 1960-1980. I remember being interviewed for the book by Wickes in the mid-1980s and the book has great interest for me and others who lived through that period.
Although some of the production values are not all that they should be ­ sloppy editing, bad binding ­ nevertheless this book will serve well to put that very rich (musical, not financial!) period in perspective for others. Famous expats like John McLaughlin and Dave Holland are seen in their early days and the careers of such contemporary players as John Surman, John Taylor and Kenny Wheeler are discussed widely. Unlike the three American authors, Wickes regards all music as equal, covering all musical bases from bop to post-bop, jazz-rock to free jazz.
Similar stories could be written about jazz in many other countries and could lead the way to an appreciation of the fact that real jazz of all kinds exists all over the world but has to be assiduously sought out. Such music defies the static views represented in the Piazza, Nisenson and Crouch books, which pretend to be controversial but peddle the American party line. As Wickes shows, there is a lot more going on and he is to be congratulated for chronicling it in such a detailed way.

Graham Collier

Comments and contributions are welcome and should be sent to graham@jazzcontinuum.com

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