thoughts on jazz

1. without a new intellectual leader a la bird, coltrane, ornette, ayler, jazz will die. Rand was right. There are no immediately observable consequences of having a solid intellectual foundation, but without it the music will die. Wynton Marsalis may be a great trumpet player but he's a hack and has done nothing to underpin the intellectual foundations of this music. That is why we don't rally behind him anymore.

2. it was said of Rene Chateaubriand that he was 'incapable of writing any character other than himself', and that he was a 'poet rather than a novelist', even though he wrote novels. This distinction is useful in thinking about jazz. Jazz is poetry rather than prose: this is not to suggest that other music is prosaic. Rather, a jazz musician is incapable of writing a song other than himself - in some sense, jazz songs are not independent works at all but templates applied to personality. In this sense, all jazz songs are the same because they express exactly the same thing, which is the totality of the performer. B.B. King's autobiography includes a quote from Bird to the effect that jazz music was essentially the blues. This is what I think he probably meant - that the musical relationship of performer to sound remains rooted in that tradition of personal expression that originates in the blues.

This is not to suggest that programmatic jazz is impossible. It has definitely been done - Night in Tunisia comes to mind, as well as Syeeda's Song Flute, just to cite two of the most overt examples. Jazz that aims to represent rather than express inevitably fails, however - which is my pet peeve with a lot of modern jazz. When Charlie Parker played Night in Tunisia, the exotica was of secondary concern to his soloing, which was exactly what it had always been - a torrent of (i hesitate to say emotion) intensity of experience.

This situates jazz firmly in the modernist tradition. There have been many comparisons between baroque improvisation and jazz; certainly the forms and techniques are very similar, but my argument is that the purposes differ. The sense of self that jazz requires is very much a modern construct that did not exist in the form it does today pre-20th century.

This idea also helps us unite the disparity of post-1960s jazz, which is a major concern today. There are few ideas today which can reconcile the 'historical' movement (wynton et al) and the free movement (ornette). My argument is that the essence of jazz is not a system of blues and altered harmony and syncopation like Wynton says - nor is it the endless pursuit of the new like some of the freedom players espouse. The essence of jazz really is this particular relationship of performer to improvised music which comes from the blues, and I believe that anything that claims to be jazz but strays from this principle immediately calls into question the necessity and quality of the performance.

There have been a few musicians recently (or not so - Duke Ellington said the same thing) who are for discarding the term 'jazz' entirely. I can see why this is an attractive concept. Calling it simply 'music' invokes a kind of universal quality of the performance and gives it the importance of a primary idea. I think there is probably some merit in this - but like it or not a certain idiom of expression is going to continue to exist, and the only reason why this is important is because this idiom contains the elements that are necessary for jazz to be compelling. Genre labelling is largely superfluous, but to call something jazz is perhaps to give an idea to the listener of what is happening. That has merit.

3. Jason Moran is the fucking bomb. He totally deserved that Macarthur.