Rehearsing The Blues

Excerpted (If It's The Last Thing I Do)

From "Nicholas Payton Is Chillin' On Our Nutz: How One Musician Misrepresented the Facts and Bullied the Jazz Narrative Off Course," my last feature-length piece of jazz writing before I leave the jazz community more or less completely for several years:

Payton and his most vocal adherents are making much the same argument for jazz. "Some aim to nix jazz for perceived racist connotations; [Gary] Bartz is most strident on this point, comparing jazz to a plantation system with 'house' and 'field' musicians," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper. [16] "Whites created the title [‘jazz’] anyway," writes saxophonist Marcus Strickland in arguing for Black American Music. [17] Because, Payton argues, “jazz” is "a label that was forced upon the musicians," [18] much like slave names, then it should be cast off and replaced. Malcolm X. Jazz X. "It’s the colonialist mentality that glorifies being treated like a slave," Payton writes on his blog, The Cherub Speaks. [19] "Go on, 
continue to box yourself in a label that was designed to marginalize [b]lack musicians and cut them off from their brilliance." [20]

Payton and his most vocal adherents are making much the same argument for jazz. "Some aim to nix jazz for perceived racist connotations; [Gary] Bartz is most strident on this point, comparing jazz to a plantation system with 'house' and 'field' musicians," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper. [16] "Whites created the title [‘jazz’] anyway," writes saxophonist Marcus Strickland in arguing for Black American Music. [17] Because, Payton argues, “jazz” is "a label that was forced upon the musicians," [18] much like slave names, then it should be cast off and replaced. Malcolm X. Jazz X. "It’s the colonialist mentality that glorifies being treated like a slave," Payton writes on his blog, The Cherub Speaks. [19] "Go on, 
continue to box yourself in a label that was designed to marginalize [b]lack musicians and cut them off from their brilliance." [20]

 

As we have seen, however, the origins of the word “jazz” as "a label that was designed to marginalize" African-American musicians and their work are far from certain, and may be completely false, a jazz urban myth. And the above-quoted passages from some of the most creative and heritage-minded musicians in jazz show that not all, or even most, musicians would agree they're being "boxed in" by the word; or, if they are, it may not be because it's a racist, colonialist or oppressive word, but merely an outdated or too narrowly defined one.

 

So, the question is: Do we need to Malcolm X jazz? Does changing the name of the genre have the same symbolic power that it had, for instance, when Duke Ellington told Fletcher Henderson he wanted jazz to be called "Negro music"?

Check out the entire piece here, and feel free to leave any comments you have, or email me at jon.wertheim@gmail.com.

 

 

What Defines The Jazz Tradition?

The musicians and the tradition both define it.

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To be "jazz," music must carry on the core values of jazz music. It can't just talk the talk, it has to walk the walk as well. I'm all for expanding musical boundaries, but at a certain point a genre is a genre, if only for convenience, and while I found Robert Glasper's Black Radio enjoyable (Esperanza Spalding's Radio Music Society seemed like a lot of bulls**t), I just had to label it "hip hop" in my iTunes. If something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, you can't call it jazz. You have to call it a duck.

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I don't know if i agree with those who say that the only reason Glasper and Esperanza are making this music is to make more money. I think that they sincerely believe in their music as music. But I also think there's some confusion in the jazz world right now about what can and can't be done with a genre. In fact, this confusion was well described by Glasper in my interview with him for Nextbop:

Too many genres fit under Black American Music. There are too many genres that don't have a problem fit under that name. R&B... Shit! Pop, rock, blues... (Laughs) You know, hip-hop... They all fit under Black American Music, but now if you just call it that, it doesn't even have a name under that umbrella, so it makes it more ambiguous, like "Where is it? What is it? Huh?" We're having a hard enough time with a name. And trying to change the name now, I personally don't think is going to make anybody like the music any better. I think we should just change the music. Maybe change the music and then change the name of your music. If you're coming up with something kind of new, maybe call it something - you know, call that something else.

Genres, contrary to popular opinion, aren't racist or even all that constricting. If you feel constricted by jazz, don't make it any more! It worked for Herbie Hancock and Miles, who certainly didn't pretend they were making jazz when they were releasing their funk/pop records!

Everybody Loves Raymond (But They Shouldn't) (Op-Ed)

Note: This piece, more of an op-ed than anything else, was originally written for Nextbop.com, but the folks there decided not to publish it. I'm proud to say I write for Nextbop, and am grateful to Sebastien Helary and Anthony Dean-Harris for giving me the opportunity. But certain aspects of Nextbop's editorial policy, such as not criticizing but also not seemingly saying no to the average or mediocre can get on my nerves. I'm a believer in assessing things based on their worth, not their aspirations (or my own), and that's how I wrote this piece.

Anthony asked me to review this album, and it seemed to me to exemplify that point, and a larger point about this newest generation of jazz musicians. John Raymond, if you're reading this, keep on truckin'. Don't give up, man. The rest of you, read on.

2011, Part 3: A Few Things I Wrote About (Or Didn't), And Why

^ We're all hoping this doesn't happen this year.

I think this is my best writing of 2011: James Lincoln Collier on Ellington, MP3s, Jazz Is Dead, Christian McBride's duets, Jazz fame, and Wynton, Wynton, Wynton.

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I started one series recently that, for several reasons, never got off the ground. The first, and so far only, installment can be found here. This will be continued in 2012, as will the West Coast series I floated but never realized in print. Two Jazz Internet interviews have been published, and more are on the way, one a month starting in January. Up next: Anthony Dean-Harris.

I had a good year for CD reviews, and abandoned (for the most part) full-length review pieces for my Roundup series. I did do some longer pieces this year, though, and they can be found, along with all the Roundups, here.

Is Jazz Dead? No, But Something Is

Will Layman at PopMatters has written a clever and witty article entitled "A 'Dear John' Letter To Jazz: To Hell With Loving You." His introductory points ("My friends all say they like you, but it turns out they’re just using you") are on-point, except for one thing: Layman fails to draw a distinction between the pop-culture image of "jazz" and the real sound of jazz that is, contrary to Layman's conclusion, still flourishing around the world. A quote:

Jazz, I know there was a time when you were the cutest cat in school, the bee’s knees, the zippiddy-doo-dah coolest sound around. Folks danced to you. They mobbed ballrooms to Lindy their very asses off while you throbbed and swung, saxophones roaring.

And even after that was the case, you still had a devoted popular following. College kids in Allen Ginsberg glasses might pop their fingers to Brubeck or Miles Davis.  Jukeboxes in cities got worn out from playing funky stuff like Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” or Cannonball Adderley’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”.

And as recently as the ‘70s there were pop radio hits like Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good”—and as recently as the ‘80s Bobby McFerrin took some overdubbed scat singing up the charts with “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. When Wynton Marsalis was 21 years old, wearing a killer suit and holding two Grammys in his hands—one for jazz and one for classical music—there was still some kind of hope.

But then two decades of “smooth jazz” dreck rolled over the landscape and real jazz seemed both more obscure and more rare. You became a taste from the past. Once only the hip kids were likely to know about you. But in recent years the hip kids are too busy digging really obscure or noisy/unpopular rock to bother with obscure/noisy/unpopular jazz.

The problem with this is that Layman isn't really talking about what he thinks he's talking about. The Vanguard shows he mentions later in his piece don't really have much to do with the Lindy Hop, "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" or Chuck Mangione. They also don't have much to do with Wynton Marsalis or anyone else who doesn't dare mess with history. "The rock aesthetic of simplicity, directness and sincerity doesn’t much cotton to your complexities and abstractions," Layman writes. "A society that prizes spectacle and memoir doesn’t know what to make of a trumpet solo that resembles architecture more than it does a sit-com or a confession." 

Ah. So that's how it is.

House Party Starting

Nate Chinen's blog The Gig now features a new author photo and an actual post.

Chinen is one of the best, but recently I've been wishing he would do more original writing at The Gig, instead of just filling it up with links to his New York Times pieces. Those articles, good as they are, never quite have the spark of The Gig, so I'm excited to see that Nate has apparently divined my dreams (or at least that one particular dream). Check it out here.

Note: There are some very, very large pictures of Nate Chinen online. Just search his name, you'll be surprised how big these photos are. 

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I don't keep up with David Hajdu's New Republic blog, The Famous Door, like I should. A recent visit revealed a beautiful short article on Sonny Rollins and Bret Primack (aka Bret The Jazz Video Guy Primack). Here's a quote:

Stepping Back, Moving On

We all have musical prejudices. Martin Williams disliked John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong hated bebop, Barry Ulanov looked down on everything not either Duke or Tristano. My most recent article, Value Judgment, seeks to emphasize a percieved lack of subjectivity in the world of jazz criticism. But in writing that piece, my aim was to make a point, not necessarily explain it. And, in making my point, I named names and brandished my lists of critics like some kind of jazz McCarthy, sitting behind a microphone and prophesizing downfall by objectivity.

I stand by my point, but with time comes reflection (and emails with Patrick Jarenwattananon), and a flaw in Value Judgment is, as I say, my lack of explanation. The comments on that post (now lost in cyberspace, I'm sorry to say) tended to ask for, or try to give, some clarification on what kind of subjectivity I meant, and how that subjectivity manifested itself. I touched on this slightly - too slightly, it seems to me now.

Value Judgment

Here are some opinions for you: Dizzy Gillespie has no chops. Chick Corea doesn't play jazz. Scott LaFaro can't play a walking line. Sonny Rollins is a better saxophonist than John Coltrane. Lee Konitz should buy a tuner. Jonathan Kreisberg is too self-conscious. The Revivalist is too narrow, A Blog Supreme is too broad, Jon Caramanica writes about the wrong people, David Itzkoff is too snarky, Dave Prentice is too long-winded and Jon Wertheim is too cranky.

Wait, what? Before you all pick up the phone to leave me angry voicemail messages, let me explain. Yeah, I believe these things. Yes, they're all negative. Does that make me a bad critic? Peter Hum and Tom Hewson have recently been talking about negative reviews, and it got me thinking. Does a negative review - or, to use a phrase from the article I just linked to, a "value judgment" - mean that someone is a bad critic?

I don't think so, and I've been noting with dismay a trend in critical discourses about all art forms to shy away from actually criticizing, and if they do, they apologize for it afterwards, or at least feel like they have make some kind of concession to their readers.

Art Nouveau

 

I don't have a TV, so I watched the Grammys through the eyes of Jon Caramanica and Dave Itzkoff at the New York Times ArtsBeat blog, and through the words of countless tweets. But even though I couldn't see it with my own eyes, I'm incredibly pleased about Esperanza Spalding's Grammy for Best New Artist.

Already, the Internet is buzzing with the kind of controversy the Internet is perfect for manufacturing. Most of it revolves around Justin Bieber, the sixteen-year-old Canadian megastar who was expected (with rolled eyes by some, ecstasy by others) to pick up the award. And, yes, a lot of vitriol has been flowing from Bieber fans everywhere (I saw one particularly nauseating screenshot of Esperanza Spalding's Wikipedia page that's best forgotten), and various blogs and websites are publishing headlines heavy on words like "surprising," "shocking upset" (from Billboard!), "startling," etc. (I even saw the word "debacle"... yikes!).

As a critic known to get his hackles up about that kind of thing (I spilled a lot of virtual ink, none of which I regret, on Quincy Jones and Kanye West a few months ago), I might be expected to get into it with the Bieber/Spalding question. But, in my opinion, to focus too much on the defeat of one artist takes away from the victory of another. To reduce Spalding's award to another discussion about jazz's place in culture and the way pop is taking over and so on is to start beating a horse best left alive for another day.

Protest Music

Jazz is viewed by some as wholly protest music, so deeply rooted in the culture of black pride in the face of white oppression that no jazz musician can escape its legacy. Fine. That's a case that can be made easily and well. But a result of that view is that the more specific instances of protest music in jazz emphasized by history have tended to be in the Civil Rights narrative: "Strange Fruit," The Freedom Suite, Freedom Now! Suite. Since 1969, however, one of the best jazz bassists ever has been making a different kind of protest music, a protest music with a focus on Latin America and Asia but one that might be better suited to the turmoil going on right now in the Middle East and northern Africa.