Occasional Jazz Conjectures

“Tradition is the passing on of fire and not the adoration of ashes.”—Gustav Mahler

“There are as many unisons as there are stars in the sky.” —Ornette Coleman

There are some folks who think that the nature of the universe is permanence; there are some who will argue that surely the nature of the universe is innovation and change. The former like their permanence of the blues-based, swinging variety–easy to snap their fingers to; the latter crave the outer limits and adventure of the shape of jazz to come. It’s always been that way—from Parmenides and Heraclitus to Charlie Parker and Peanuts Hucko.

The English poet/jazz critic Philip Larkin once apoplectically groused that, “Jazz had gone from [the cave paintings of] Lascaux to Jackson Pollock in fifty years.” For Larkin, a tippler of earlier vintages of jazz, modal exploration and droning loves supreme were simply not jazz. Fifteen years earlier, Louis Armstrong and/or Cab Calloway (depends on who you ask) decried the “Chinese music” of the beboppers. A mere 20 years before that, the whole jazz enterprise was written off as a left-handed form of human endeavor, a St. Vitus-dance-inducing “syphilis of the ears and hips.” If people like Coleman Hawkins, Earl Hines, Pee Wee Russell, Mary Lou Williams, JImmy Giuffre, and Sonny Rollins and so forth hadn’t been of a mind to ramble, passing back and forth the fire with the next wave of youngsters, we might all be sitting around a cracker barrel wearing straw boaters feeling “hep” with our Lu Watters records and calling it all good. But that’s not the tradition of this music, “the essence of the music, is change itself,” reminds pianist Muhal Richard Abrams.

No matter our taste. . .Chicago, New Orleans, West Coast dixieland, small-group swing, big band, bebop, hard bop, cool, Third Stream, New Thing, soul jazz, boogaloo, jazz-rock, fusion, free-jazz, non-idiomatic improvisation, avant-garde jazz, new Dutch Swing, freebop, nu jazz, neocon, acid jazz, smooth jazz, chill jazz, vocal jazz, vintage popular song, grindhouse, etc., we should stop worrying so much about what jazz “is,” and applaud and embrace what jazz “does.” Jazz unites our voices and energies, expresses joy, sadness, beauty and syncopated rage, tells a story and sparks revolution. . . it is, to borrow from the gospel according to Marsalis, a delicious gumbo.

Jazz is about confluence and it has been since it’s birth way back when. This most wonderful four-letter word, this mash-up circumstance of pan-Caribbean/African rhythm and European pomp, has always been about multiple perspectives and rich, multilayered storytelling. To build on Ornette’s phrase, this is our music. . . all of it: from ragtime to no time. Nothing illustrates this idea of jazz as an expansive continuum, a lively exchange between past and future, multiple traditions and unfettered creativity, more than the upcoming 2008 Portland Jazz Festival’s array of pianistic artistry—a veritable “Varieties of Religious Experience” for piano fans.

“The piano is many, many things and one of the things is a drum with 88 notes,” noted Cecil Taylor in an issue of Playbill earlier this year. “In order to strike the note, one must beat it. Now how you beat it, that is what you learn by playing it for a long time. You could play or beat it as Oscar Peterson or Hilton Ruiz or you could beat it the way Thelonious Monk struck it. Or it could be the fine way of Teddy Wilson. Art Tatum was huge. There are many different ways.”

From Bill Charlap’s poised Teddy Wilsonisms and Kenny Barron’s bop to Ethan Iverson’s irreverent trompe l’oeil, the nooks, crannies, and undulant pulses of Myra Melford and Craig Taborn to the quixotic Cecil Taylor’s Henry Cowellish clusters of tone, balled-up fistfuls of notes, which can make some feel like “being dragged through a hedge backwards” . . .this, Mr. and Mrs. America is a fine how-do-you-do intro to all the shapes of jazz. Consider this your two-weekend crash course in jazz history, a truly super-crafty crocheting together of form, melody, surprise. Expect all manner of tightrope-walking defiance of expectation.

Get schooled in the savoir-faire of swing-to-bop pianist Bill Charlap (Sunday, February 17 along with Jillian Lebeck), a 41-year-old marvel steeped in the pantheon of Teddy Wilson-Bud Powell-Barry Harris-Tommy Flanagan verve and taste. A whip-smart bop harmonist, Charlap served solid bandstand apprenticeship with Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Benny Carter, Clark Terry and the Phil Woods Quintet. Dig into further definitions with Herbie Hancockesque pianist Renee Rosnes (Friday, February 15 with SF Jazz Collective), soak up the lessons of a bop master, Kenny Barron (Saturday, February 16 with Classical Jazz Quartet), a Hank Jones-Tommy Flanagan inspired veteran known for his work with Sphere as well as the sublime “People Time” with Stan Getz. Turning beauty inside out a la Paul Bley, Fred Hersch (appearing with our own Nancy King, February 22) has soaked up the deep lyrical poetry of vocalists like Carmen McRae and Billie Holiday like no other pianist working today. Like Bill Evans and Bley, he doesn’t back down from nuance or silence as a rhythmic and compositional deployment. For those raised in the era of “shuffle” mode where boundaries blur and Nirvana, Ornette, Ween, Steve Reich, Patsy Cline, Keith Jarrett, and Radiohead occupy equal footing, the work of Tord Gustavsen (Saturday, February 16), minimaLiszt Nik Bärtsch (February 23) and Bad Plus (Saturday, February 16) will be hungrily devoured. And Myra Melford (Friday, February 15) and Craig Taborn (Saturday, February 16 with Tim Berne) will excite as vivid reminders of the powerful impulses that occur when tradition and freedom are alternately flexed.

For those disinclined toward risk and the unknown or intimidated by the more fringe-dwelling elements of the festival, this is a wonderful opportunity to gain a new understanding of this beautiful, at times uncompromising music as it was meant to be heard: right here, right now. Like the paintings of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline—this is music rich in gesture and voice, utopian in its primal energies, work that thrives on a coexistence of ideas and vibrations. Like Richard Serra’s monumental sculpture, with many of these promethean talents, you can’t help but know you’re in a room with something imposing and powerful—and the investment pays off in spades.

In the case of the energy and boldness of Cecil Taylor (Sunday, February 17), even the most skeptical nay-sayer can’t help but be moved by what Kurt Gottschalk called the sheer “enormity of his art.” Incomprehensible to many, but deeply embedded in the tradition of jazz (and it is, free jazz is now eligible for AARP membership), Taylor at his most fevered and intense will slyly evoke the tickle-and-pounce of Erroll Garner, the rhythmic displacement of Thelonious Monk, complex Ellingtonian harmonies. There’s simply no denying the jazz-ness of it even if it doesn’t “swing” in the so-called traditional sense. Winston Churchill liked to quip, “Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” Taylor continues to both pass on and fan the flame, illustrating that it’s not what jazz is, but what jazz does that matters. Et tu, Cecil?

“Profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”
—Paul Valery

Published originally in Jazz Matters, the publication of the Portland Jazz Festival.