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Transcript Three:
In All
Languages
5-6:30 p.m.
Moderator:
Larry Blumenfeld, 2001-02 NAJP mid-career fellow
Panelists:
Steven Dollar, freelance music writer
Krin Gabbard, professor of comparative studies, SUNY/Stony Brook
Gary Giddins, author and jazz critic, Village Voice
Robin D.G. Kelley, professor of history and Africana studies, New
York University
Chris Washburne, professor of ethnomusicology, Columbia University,
and jazz musician
K. Leander Williams, jazz critic, Time Out New York
Blumenfeld: I have to admit, there’s
a certain perverse pleasure to being here in the middle of the day,
and to be able to talk and talk and talk about music without Lorraine
Gordon going, “Shhhhhh!” So let’s enjoy it while
we can. And of course, thank you to Lorraine for opening the door
to us.
We have on the panel an NAJP fellowship alumnus who wrote about
both film and music for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 12
years, Steve Dollar. He now lives in New York and writes about jazz
and other cultural matters. To his right is K. Leander Williams,
the jazz critic for Time Out New York, known as Kelvin. To his right
is Gary Giddins, who has written the Weatherbird column for the
Village Voice for 29 years, and is author of quite a few books of
note. To his right is Krin Gabbard, a professor of comparative literature
at SUNY at Stony Brook, who is also author of a few books on jazz
and American cinema. To his right is Chris Washburne, assistant
professor of music and director of jazz performance at Columbia
University—you also may recognize him as a jazz trombonist,
where he’s played with a wide range of notable bands (Tito
Puente’s band, Eddie Palmieri’s band, the Ellington
Band), and as the leader of his own Latin jazz band, SYOTOS. To
his right is Robin D.G. Kelley, who this year is the Louis Armstrong
Visiting Professor in Jazz Studies and, in addition to his existing
books, is working on a book that deals interestingly with Thelonious
Monk, which maybe we’ll cajole him into talking about.
We’ve got three working jazz critics, three scholars whose
teaching has a lot to do with jazz and, interestingly, has a lot
to do with teaching about jazz to non-musicians and non-music students—that
is, out of literature or humanities departments. And I titled this
panel “In All Languages,” which was ripping off an Ornette
Coleman title, and I’m not the first or the last to do that
at the Vanguard. It was inspired a little bit by an experience at
the Newport Jazz Festival a couple of years ago, where there were
a couple of days of symposium: one or two days of scholars presenting
papers, which were really fascinating, and another day of journalists
and critics talking about what they do, which was equally interesting.
And I found scholars taking notes in the journalists’ and
critics’ talks, and critics taking notes when the scholars
talked. One scholar and I afterwards commented to each other,
“Hey, you know this doesn’t always happen: this conversation
between the two.” So that’s what I’m hoping to
breed here, and I’m hoping to narrow down that space.
And I want to start by looking to a critic—say, Gary—to
ask, what do critics really do? What do you see your role as, in
terms of the music and the audience, and maybe somehow as related
to what the scholar does.
Giddins: Well, critics are people who spend their adulthoods exploiting
the passions of their adolescence. We try to evaluate the music
we love—we try to remain fans, primarily.
But we are different from the ordinary fan, because the ordinary
fan has a day job. And listening to music is a luxury. Every once
in a while, you go out to a club. It’s expensive, and you
may have a couple of hours in the evening when the kids are asleep
to put on some records and really sit down and listen. And that’s
what we do all day.
So this immediately creates some distance between critics and the
jazz public—historically, you could trace it—because
since the critics are listening to so much music, we often become
fascinated by twists and turns in the music, and we understand how
they got there, but to the general public, it can be really annoying.
It just might seem too adventurous in some ways. On the other hand,
most critics try to be jacks-of-all-trades. We try to listen to
everything. So we’re not necessarily great authorities on
anything. I get letters from readers all the time who know a lot
more than I do about some specific area that I might be reviewing
and will correct things. In a sense, we’re generalists, and
at the same time, we’re devoted to the music in a way that’s
impossible for a layman to be, and that affects our perception of
the music and the way we try to evaluate it.
Blumenfeld: I imagine when I start posing this question to the professors
here that in some respect you’re shaping fine, young minds
and building some kind of cultural history or awareness. But Kelvin
[of Time Out New York], are you trying to build something or shape
something in the work you do as a critic? How do you look at it
over the long haul?
Williams: I think Gary has expressed it very well. I’m trying
to evaluate music for the people out there who are perhaps interested
and want to find some way to bridge the gap between their knowledge
and the musicians. The one thing that separates myself and Gary
from the scholars is that on the one hand, the scholars are dealing
with something like a captive audience: the student has selected
the course, gone through the course book and selected the course.
We’re working in an area that’s a little more gray.
Yes, we are generalists, but that has something to do with the fact
that we are reaching out to people, reaching out to the person who
picks up the paper and wants to find out something about jazz.
Dollar: Particularly in my experience, working for a daily newspaper
where often you’re writing on very short deadlines and compressing
a lot of experience and activity into a few paragraphs for an audience
in which the percentage of people who would have shared that experience
might be very small, the challenge often is to come across as enthusiastic
and knowledgeable and contextual as possible, while at the same
time not alienating people with hipness or “You’re such
an insider”—while at the same time conveying some sense
of enthusiasm or disappointment, depending on how the performance
was, or how you feel about an album or somebody’s career.
And that’s often a lot of fun, because you are in an interesting
spot. You have your own knowledge, which may or may not be at an
expert level, and you’re dealing with a wide range of people.
Hopefully you’re writing for people who curious about art,
or are curious about “Well, what did that club sound like?”
or maybe they never get out at all and you’re the medium through
which they experience that part of the world—in the same way
that a lot of us probably pick up The New Yorker and read the film
capsules but never go to the movies as often as you would if you
were a film critic. So there’s a lot of different responsibilities.
I’m always having these debates with myself about a certain
performer, or I go to a concert and I have my ideas, and I ask myself,
how does it stack up against what I expect? My job is finding a
balance between a lot of those different things, and you don’t
always strike the same balance every time, but I think that’s
what’s part of what makes it a fun challenge.
Blumenfeld: I do want to get a little more at what each person’s
work is staked to, in terms of the music or the larger culture,
etc. But I think it’s helpful to get at how we define our
roles. So [speaking to the academics] I’m going to throw it
to any of the three of you to start with: It’s nothing new
that jazz would be connected to culture and literature, writ large.
But it is relatively new, or gaining momentum, that jazz is taught
in literature departments, history departments, American Studies
departments. What is your role, in that sense?
Kelley: If I could complicate the division between scholars and
critics for a moment… In some ways, 90 percent of our job
as scholars is writing for a public—for a general audience
in some cases, but also a lot for our colleagues, which is really
limited and I try not to do that—what’s interesting
is that much of the work that we use in our courses (and I call
it scholarship) comes from writing by critics. I use Nat Hentoff
in my course. I use Gary Giddins in my course. And there are some
critics who really defy the definition. Think of someone like Stanley
Crouch, who comes from an interdisciplinary background, draws a
lot on literature, writes long pieces, has very provocative things
to say—and yet he is also doing criticism. Amiri Baraka is
another one, and also Ralph Ellison. These are foundational texts
for the field that we call Jazz Studies, and they’re people
who get identified as critics.
The third category that always gets left out is that of musicians’
writings. Musicians are intellectuals, and have produced some of
the most important work, whether you’re talking about Duke
Ellington’s writings, or Anthony Braxton’s. There’s
a whole range of people whose writing has become foundational texts
for what we call Jazz Studies. And in the course I’m teaching
now on jazz and the political imagination, much of what we’re
talking about is jazz from intellectuals, and there’s some
interesting books that came out: Eric Porter wrote a book called
“What is This Thing Called Jazz?” which is precisely
about black musicians and their thoughts and ideas and writings.
You think about a scholar like George Lewis, great trombonist, an
AACM figure, but also one of the leading scholars in this field
of jazz studies.
So I always get nervous when we make these sharp divisions. And
I was nervous in the earlier panels where there was kind of an anti-academic
tone, which almost made me want to leave. I was like, “I don’t
want to be lynched up here just for being an academic.” But
there was a certain anti-academic tone which really militates against
what people are doing. I think of a lot of critical work as scholarship
as well.
One last thing before I hand it over: there is bad scholarship—very
bad scholarship—and there’s good scholarship. There’s
problematic criticism, and there’s good criticism. And one
of the things we have to pay attention to is, what is it that a
scholar tries to do? A lot of scholars are not necessarily trying
to evaluate a particular critical work in and of itself, but to
study the context of that work. So when we talk about jazz and politics,
in terms of my own courses and writings, I’m interested in
the question, “How do people think about jazz?” We could
debate all day long about its African origins, but one of the critical
questions in my course is, “Why is it that in the 1920s, jazz
is seen as necessarily connected to Africa?” It’s not
just about its actual rhythms, it’s not just about the music.
It’s about an imagination—partly a white imagination—about
Africanism and sexuality, about primitivism and things like that.
So this has to do with a whole intellectual discussion of the way
people think about jazz—which is also connected to the music
itself but, to me, is part of what students and the general populace
might be interested in.
Gabbard: Can I pick up on that?
I want to echo a lot of what Robin has said. I think he and I share
a lot of the same convictions about the music. To begin where he
began: It would be impossible for us in the academy to do our work
without the work of the jazz critics. I’ve been reading the
work of Gary throughout my entire history as an academic as if they
were sacred texts. I can also mention the fact that I’ve been
reading Kelvin weekly now for several years in Time Out New York—I
can’t imagine getting through a week without reading his columns
in that journal.
When we talk among ourselves as academics about the music, it’s
music that we know because we’ve been told about it by the
critics. They have helped us distinguish among the CDs that function
as an ocean of music out there. They’re the ones who identify
who to go hear in the clubs. So our work really begins when we have
a handle on it from the dominant jazz discourse.
I’m uncomfortable with those divisions too: Robin has written
wonderful criticism in the popular press, and I’ve had my
crack at it a few times, too. I think a lot of the jazz scholars
also bridge both those worlds. And certainly, I would say that the
critics also have a life in the university as well. I know certainly
Gary has taught in academic institutions. But the main the thing
for me is—I think Gary actually wrote this, or maybe it was
Francis—one of you said something about how the critic seeks
to write words that dance off the page, to write in language that
is so alive and so vital it’s a complement to the music. And
most academics can’t do that. That’s why they’re
not journalists; that’s why, chances are, they’re in
the academy. The academic cannot afford to be a generalist the way
it’s been described here, and has the luxury—when the
scholar is preparing to teach a class or sitting in on a committee
meeting—of taking time to really immerse himself or herself
in the subject. I think for Scott DeVeaux’s wonderful book,
“The Birth of Bebop,” he spent over 10 years writing
that book. That’s a luxury that most journalists obviously
don’t have.
But beyond that, I think that the scholar today, in the university
in particular, has to say something that’s surprising. Even
if the scholar can’t make his or her language dance off the
page, the scholar can say something like that makes the people reading
it say, “Wow! I didn’t know that.” So if you go
back even 50, 60 years ago and look at Ph.D. dissertations in literature
departments, people are saying “Well, William Dean Howells
belongs in the canon. His novels are as good of those of Henry James.”
And there are all those boring-to-read-through reasons why William
Dean Howells is as good as James, or why Christina Rossetti is as
good as Keats. Even though its boring to read those reasons, the
point is, “Wow! I never thought of that! Tell me something
new.”
So I think what the jazz scholars now are doing, especially in the
past 20 or 30 years when the critical discourse has changed so radically
and we no longer have that canon, our job is no longer to hoist
someone into a canon. Rather, I think what most jazz scholars are
doing is writing about jazz discourse, writing about how jazz functions
within structures of power, the way it functions within gender and
racial relationships. And if you go through the most important books
written on jazz by university professors—I actually made a
list here of the books I admire, the people I admire. Scott DeVeaux’s
book, “The Birth of Bebop.” Bernie Gendron, he’s
got a book coming out from Chicago about the creation of arts discourses,
about how the battles between the ancients and the moderns, in the
days of bebop versus Dixieland, created an art discourse. Ron Radano
has written compellingly on Anthony Braxton. Eric Porter has written
that book, “What is this Thing Called Jazz?” John Gennari
has got a book coming out soon. George Louis, certainly. I would
put Robin at the top of that list, as someone who is writing about
jazz, particularly about Monk—I haven’t seen the book
but I know what he’s working on from having heard his papers—he’s
talking about the ways people have talked about Monk, as much as
about Monk himself.
I want to say one thing real quick about what’s happened in
jazz studies in the last couple of years. Since so many of us are
doing jazz-discourse analysis, an exciting moment for all of us
about a year and a half ago was the appearance of the Ken Burns
documentary, where we were present at the creation of a discourse,
where we were really seeing a lot of stuff that had been out there.
Robin mentioned Ralph Ellison. Ellison created a Louis Armstrong
that is now, I think, the Louis Armstrong that we have—as
much because of Ken Burns now as because of Ralph Ellison. And a
lot of ideas that were out there in half-baked form or that were
coming into being are now in place thanks to the Ken Burns documentary.
Of course, that provoked a counter-discourse, which is also exciting
to witness the birth of.
Gary Giddins: I take issue with one statement: the idea that Ralph
Ellison invented the Louis Armstrong that we listen to. I think
it’s just preposterous. Ralph Ellison wrote beautifully about
jazz. He wrote definitively about people like Charlie Christian
and Jimmy Rushing. And he wrote wonderfully about Armstrong, especially
in the novel. But he was writing about a work that was already in
the canon.
The man who really recreated the Louis Armstrong that all of us
have been riffing off of—and who doesn’t get the credit—is
Dan Morgenstern. He was the only guy out there in the 1960s who
was talking about Armstrong’s work in the ’30s through
the ’60s. Even Stanley Crouch wrote a piece in the Village
Voice in the mid-’70s called “Laughing Louis,”
which was also an important statement, in part because it came from
a black writer. White writers had been saying it for a while, and
a lot of the black writers had been accusing him in his later work
as a kind of ad hoc minstrelsy. But this idea of the way Armstrong
has come to stand now is a very recent phenomena, and certainly
the Burns thing put it into the public view: I don’t question
that at all. I think the great thing about the Burns film probably
is that it changes the status of Armstrong as a central figure in
American culture forever. I really would be very surprised if anyone
wanted to challenge that position at this point.
Washburne: I’d like to just throw my two cents in here and
pick up on a couple things that were said.
First, Gary gave the definition of what a jazz critic does—that
is, to pursue the love of adolescence through adulthood, and I’ve
been doing that too. I think we share that as scholars; it’s
the same thing that we do.
I’d also like to make it a little more complex, because I’m
a musician. I’m a musician first, and then I became a scholar.
And I use that. There are critics who are musicians as well and
who act in both these worlds, and this separation is not so straightforward.
Several of those who are sitting up here have written some very
nice things about me, and I appreciate that—and if they hadn’t,
I don’t know if I would appreciate that either, but I’d
still be here and there’d still be this discourse amongst
this panel.
I’d like to address what I view as the scholar’s purpose:
it’s two-fold. Ten percent of our activities are teaching,
maybe more than that for some. And I’m in a classroom with
135 students in jazz history. Most of them are non-musicians right
now—it’s an undergraduate class—and I have a captive
audience, but I also have a huge responsibility. In many ways, I’m
the first link to this new audience. The future of jazz, in some
ways, rests a bit on these people. And it’s my responsibility
to present it in such a way so that they can relate their lives
to jazz, and hopefully, jazz can become a part of their lives, and
they’ll pass it on to their friends and their kids. I’m
trying to establish a future audience, if nothing else.
The second part of it is that as a scholar, I’m very concerned
about what I read in the press. I read all of these gentlemen’s
columns, and I read these scholars as well. And I see my job as
to fill in some of the places that might be missed, because indeed,
the first jazz histories were written by critics—and they
still are, in large part. As a matter of fact, when I do historical
research, there aren’t very many scholars that I can turn
to. Usually, it’s the critics I turn to to get my information.
That said, when I look at what histories are being written now,
and what histories of jazz are being reinvented and reinscribed
now, it’s my job as a jazz critic to say, “What about
this?” or “What about this other group of musicians
that isn’t getting written about, isn’t getting programmed?”
So in some ways, I feel like I’m playing backup, trying to
ensure that the histories that are being written, like Ken Burns’,
that there’s another voice being heard at the same time saying,
“OK, Ken Burns, that’s cool, but, you know, what
about everything past 1960?”
Blumenfeld: Yes, you’re right: you’ve successfully problematized
any clear-cut distinction. And I think the real interesting discourse
happens in the overlap. I don’t want to turn this into a Ken
Burns forum—we’d have to cancel the sets tonight if
it did—but Ken Burns may have copped out when he said over
and over again to interviewers, “Jazz history is the province
of historians. I can’t really deal with what’s happening
today or in the very recent past, ’cause that’s the
province of you—the critics and the journalists.” Does
anyone want to seize on that?
Giddins: The problem with the film, as I see it, has nothing to
do with that. I debated Ken about the film at a colloquium at Harvard
last year, so he knows exactly how I feel about this.
The moment for me when the film really goes left—I don’t
mean that politically, I should have said “right”—is
when he has the image of Miles Davis fading out, saying that jazz
dies, and six years later, it’s resurrected by Wynton Marsalis.
That particular year, 1975, is one of the greatest years in the
history of this music, in terms of the number of musicians who came
on board, in terms of the number of veteran musicians who’d
been off the scene for five, 10, 15 years, hiding in the studios,
playing in bit bands, who came back. I’m talking about Hank
Jones, Dexter Gordon, Red Rodney, Tommy Flanagan. In terms of recordings,
it was an incredible moment. From ’75 into the mid-’80s,
I think, that’s one of the great periods—and not least,
in fact maybe most, it was that period when the loft scene started,
which a lot of us now are really lamenting because we didn’t
take it as seriously as perhaps we should have when it was going
on. It was an incredible moment also in jazz history and in the
history of New York City. So this is not a question of his not being
a historian. This is a question of him looking for a story, a way
to end the film.
Blumenfeld: Is that all there is to it?
Giddins: I think that’s primarily what’s going on.
Blumenfeld: A kind of narrative coherence?
Giddins: I was a consultant on the film, which didn’t mean
a hell of a lot. There were a dozen of us. About a dozen or 15 of
us went up to Burns’ place in New Hampshire, and we spent
a week there, and we watched the rough cut every day. And it was
our job to tear it apart. A lot of critics have been talking about
Wynton Marsalis: Dan Morgenstern was the only person who vetted
the script for facts and errors, and I think a lot of people didn’t
want to go up against Dan, and Wynton was an easier target.
Kelley: I read the script too. Every page. 800 pages. As you know
and Dan knows, they’ll accept small criticisms of fact, but
they didn’t accept larger conceptual…
Giddins: Well, this is what happened during that week: All of us
had arguments we wanted to wage, and I—actually, all of us,
I think it’s safe to say—won some arguments, and we
all lost a lot of arguments. Dan lost Errol Garner. You could name
every single person in that film, and I could name the arguments
that we won and lost. I lost the one about that appalling moment
when Branford Marsalis comes out to dis Cecil Taylor. I completely
flipped out, and I explained as best I could why this was a big
mistake. He had a big problem trying to bring the thing to a whole.
Having said that, I don’t think it’s problematic that
the film ended in 1960—actually, it ends up in the early ’80s
because of the Marsalis thing. As far as I’m concerned, if
the film had ended in 1960, it would have been fine with me. If
he had just called it “Jazz: 1900-1960,” that’s
a perfectly valid thing to do. Because of the success of the film,
a lot of other documentarians would have an easier time raising
money. Nobody’s ever made a film about the loft era. That’s
a terrible oversight. There are so many areas… this is not
what Burns was trying to do.
One other thing I want to say about this—because I got the
same criticism for a book I did called “Visions of Jazz.”
I didn’t write the encyclopedia of jazz, and Burns’
wasn’t filming the encyclopedia of jazz. Burns’ genius—and
I think this is not too strong a word—his real gift as a filmmaker,
is that he knows how to tell a story. And Burns knew immediately—because
he doesn’t know anything about jazz, Jeff Ward does, he really
is a lifelong jazz enthusiast—that if you dropped every single
name… one of the things at Harvard, somebody said, “Could
you talk about some of the people who are not in the film that pissed
you off?” and I just… “Albert Ayler, Dinah Washington,
Pee Wee Russell, George Russell…” I just went on and
on, and everybody started laughing. But my feeling was that if he
had mentioned all those names, the average person’s eyes would
glaze over, because it’s like looking at your tax form. Most
people don’t know any of these names.
So Burns’ gift was to say, “I’m going to take
a half dozen people, Armstrong, Ellington, Miles, and so forth,
and I’m not only going to tell their stories, but I’m
going to trace their entire lives.” No one has ever done that.
What they do in every jazz film you’ve ever seen is that they
talk Armstrong’s impact in the ’20s, and then suddenly
its Charlie Parker in the ’40s, and it’s like…
what happened to Armstrong? But what Burns dealt with is, “What
is the life of a musician like? What is it mean to grow older in
this music? How do you make a living? What happens to your artistry?
How do you keep fresh? How do you continue to relate to your audience?”
That’s a subject that he handles superbly in the film that,
to my knowledge, no other documentary filmmaker has even come close
to.
Kelley: I think that might be true—and this is not a critique
as much as an opportunity to talk about what we do as scholars.
When my class deals with that film and that series, our question
is: “Yes, he tells a story. But why a story of jazz as a metaphor
for liberal democracy?” And that’s the main story. Freedom
is defined one way. So what we do is, we look at it, we try to figure
out ideologically what is it that this film tries to accomplish
as a narrative, as a story. And then we say, “What are other
stories about jazz and freedom?” So we talk about jazz as
a metaphor for freedom in lots of ways—why the Surrealists
were interested in jazz, for example. What freedom meant for the
Black Liberation movement, which Burns deals with for a moment,
and I give him credit for that. What does freedom mean across the
globe? Jazz in South Africa, for example, where freedom and jazz
have a particular kind of meaning. You don’t necessarily have
to attack Ken Burns to use it as an opportunity to talk about the
many, many, many ways that jazz gets talked about as a narrative
about freedom.
But then there are other narratives as well. I mean, there are many
ways you could tell a story. But why this story and, especially,
World War II, which is a very significant moment, historically?
We have a story of jazz musicians as patriots, as pro-war, going
to fight in this war. But another way to tell this story is jazz
musicians as converting to Islam, being basically anti-war. Black
musicians had among the highest percentage of draft resisters, or
refusals to fill out registration cards. What does that mean? Does
that mean they’re unpatriotic? No, but there’s something
else going on there that deserves attention, which is so interesting
to me: the fact that jazz musicians get attacked by the police because
they’re seen as able-bodied young men who are not fighting
in the war, and many of them don’t want to fight in the war
because of the memory of what happened after World War I—a
memory of participating in the war for democracy and coming back
to lynchings. This is historical material that, to me, students
need to know about. Because it’s not just about jazz: it’s
about America and the world. And that is what scholars do.
Blumenfeld: I want to read a tiny bit of pianist Brad Mehldau’s
liner notes to “Trio 4: Back at the Vanguard,” when
he’s talking about “that narrative of jazz, of its death
and its resurrection”:
“An end-game attitude towards jazz gives us a premature, peanut-size
parody of the entire Western tradition in art.” (I’m
skipping around here.) “Jazz never lost itself, so redemption
isn’t necessary. The Fall myth is less about art than a stapled-on
projection, a misplaced anxiety about the mortality of the culture
in which that art is created, which is in itself another evasion,
a fear of one’s own mortality.”
I’m not sure why I read that. [laughter] But telling jazz
relies on history, yet it defies history. Obviously, a lot of we’re
all doing contributes to and shapes the story of jazz, which, I
think we all agree, is more complex than could even be told, or
was told, in that film. How do you shape what you’re doing,
in terms of the telling of jazz’s story, or in the interpretation
of jazz’s story?
Gabbard: Let me give an example of something I’m working on
right now. Have any of you seen the movie called “Pleasantville”?
Absolutely fascinating film. It’s dumb, I don’t recommend
you go see it, but it’s a fascinating film in terms of the
way it deals with jazz and race. I think it’s emblematic of
the hybrid status, the strange system of representation that jazz
participates in in this country.
If you know the plot of this film, these two teenagers from the
present—Tobey McGuire and Reese Witherspoon are the actors—are
magically transported into a 1950s sitcom, a sort of “Father
Knows Best.” Everything is in black-and-white, and no one
in the world that they suddenly inhabit knows anything that’s
not already in the text of that TV show, so they don’t know
what a double bed is because no one had sex in the ’50s on
TV. And little by little, the teenagers from the present transform
this black-and-white world into a colorful world. They bring color.
And the discourse of that transformation is explicitly racial. There’s
even a moment when a man puts a sign in his window that says “No
Coloreds.”
But for me, the crucial moment is when the most radical change takes
place, where most of these black-and-white sitcom kids become colored,
when on the soundtrack you have Miles Davis playing “So What?”
from “Kind of Blue.” And you hear quite a lot of it,
much more than you usually hear in a movie of this kind. And before
that, you’d heard Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.”
But you get a lot of Miles Davis in that film, which does not have
a single black face. There’s not one African-American actor
in that film. And yet here was a film very much about the magic
of jazz, the transformative powers of jazz, and very much about
equal rights for people of different colors.
So for me, what’s happening there is something that on one
level we might even celebrate: that the civil rights struggles of
the ’50s have become so much a part of the American experience
that it almost belongs to all of us, white and black alike, and
that Miles Davis has ceased to be a black jazz musician and rather
someone who speaks for a wonder and transformation. On the other
hand, this is a pretty horrifying idea, a sort of usurping that
music, wrenching it out of its context, and making it function in
this way it does for the lives of white teenagers in middle America.
Giddins: Krin, in your book about jazz and film, you know as well
as anybody that the saxophone, the jazz saxophone, always accompanies
the prostitute when you go downtown. Back in the days when I was
reviewing film, I remember a film from Brazil that was called “The
Green Wall,” and it constantly went back and forth between
two settings: one was this idyllic countryside. And then it goes
to the city, the worst part of the city—it’s congested,
it’s dark, it’s crime-ridden—and every time they’re
out in the country, the music is Bach, and every time they go into
the city, the music is the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Are any of you old enough to remember Peter Gunn? Peter Gunn was
a detective show in the late 1950s that had some importance because
it was the first score that Henry Mancini wrote, and it was a real
jazz score. And I remember it vaguely as a kid, but they just put
out a whole bunch on DVD. So I watched about a dozen of them and
I was really astounded because, first of all, Peter Gunn doesn’t
have an office. His office is this jazz club called Mother’s,
run by someone exactly like Lorraine Gordon. [laughter] Except gangsters
were always beating the hell out of her.
But there’s one show that’s worth renting, because you
won’t believe me when I tell you about it. It’s called…
I forget what the name of the show’s called, but it opens
up, and you’re in the club, and the jazz musicians have just
finished a number and there’s a curtain that closes around
the stage. And the pianist is played by a black character actor
who’s been playing terrible roles in Hollywood movies for
30 years, the kind of guy who would have played the tribesman in
“Road to Zanzibar”: here, he plays the leader of the
band. Everybody else in the band is white, and in fact, almost everybody
in the show is white. So he’s the pianist and he’s the
leader, so he walks up in front of the curtain and he gives this
introduction to this guest pianist who’s about to solo. And
it’s very, very ’50s— it’s like, “Here’s
a cat, man, who figured out a cool way to get to a major seventh
through a minor sixth.” So he introduces the guy’s name,
and the curtain opens, and the pianist is sitting there with a knife
in his chest. So Peter Gunn has to find out who killed him.
In this town where “Peter Gunn” takes place, it turns
out there are jazz clubs on every corner. But in all of the jazz
clubs, the night before this guy was killed, every band was playing
a dirge. He says to Peter, “Did you notice what we were playing
right before?” He says, “It was like a slow piece, it
was like a dirge. And they were playing them all over town. Somehow,
these musicians knew one of their own was going to be killed. And
the next time you come here, if you hear a dirge, the next day you’re
going to read an obit in The New York Times.” Peter Gunn has
to find out before you hear another dirge going through the city,
because it means somebody else will be getting killed.
So the guy tells Peter Gunn that everybody hated this guy. Why did
they hate him? “Because jazz musicians play their soul, man,
and this guy did something that’s just verboten: he stole
from other musicians. He played their licks. He didn’t really
feel it from the heart—he just took their stuff.” I’m
thinking “Jesus Christ! They killed this guy because he plays
like Andre Previn.” Basically, that’s the plot.
So my point here is: Jazz was being sold as something that was so
inside, so mystical—mythical and mystic at the same time,
that the audience automatically feels frozen out of it. It’s
like something you have to pay dues in. You have to figure out the
secret handshake. Life magazine did a famous story about bebop that
never mentioned Charlie Parker, but had a half dozen pictures of
Dizzy Gillespie’s secret handshake. And this thing has been
going on for years and years.
This kind of appropriation basically tells the public that jazz
is some inner-city thing that a few hepcats are capable of, and
every once in a while, somebody will bring it out to the hinterlands.
And it will usually be a white guy, and it’ll usually be a
kind of buffoonish white guy—it’ll be an Al Hirt, somebody
who can play on the Lawrence Welk show and get by. We are all living
in a world made by these myths. That’s why you can’t
get this music out there.
After the Burns thing aired, I was on a book tour in Chicago, and
somebody came over to me and he said, “I just want to say
one thing to you. My 14-year-old daughter came home from Tower last
night with 2 CDs: Britney Spears and Louis Armstrong.” As
far as I was concerned, that made the whole thing worthwhile.
But the real thing that everybody has to think about in terms of
a film like that—because nothing like it had been done before—is
what will be the payoff 15 years from now? If 4 million people watched
it, and only 100,000 of them really got into the music, that would
seriously expand the jazz audience from what it is now. And without
those kinds of things, there is no expansion. Because there is no
commercial radio, there is no jazz on television, there isn’t
jazz in most publications, and there’s simply no way to get
out of this circle that we’re all wedged into.
Washburne: In some ways, there’s no jazz on television, but
go watch any commercial for a BMW or Mercedes Benz ad: you’re
going to hear jazz. So the function of jazz in our society has changed
on some levels, and this is something that is of interest to myself
and my students, to look and say, “Well, what role does jazz
play in American society today?” and they go, “Oh, we’ve
never really seen any jazz, never heard any jazz.” And I said,
“Bull. You watch television?” The average human being,
by the time they’re 72 years old, has watched nine years of
television. That’s a lot of jazz.
Giddins: But they don’t know it. They don’t know Ben
Webster is behind that car.
Washburne: And that’s all of our jobs: to enlighten them to
what they’re listening to, and make them hip to it.
Blumenfeld: You’re touching on something that I wanted to
talk and think about: We all see these banners that “Jazz
is America’s classical music,” “Jazz is America’s
only indigenous art form,” “Jazz is America’s
folk music.” And it’s all those things at the same time
somehow, yet not all that many Americans are actually listening
to jazz or seeking it out. So how does that strange reality resonate
with what you guys are facing, or are up against, or [are] trying
to do?
Kelley: Well, this is a small thing, but I’ve always wondered
about that in terms of the development of hip-hop music. If you
actually pay attention to what’s being sampled—and I’m
not talking about the last two years, I’m talking about the
last 20 years—there’s so much jazz. And I’m not
just talking about Bob James or Earl Klugh, but if you listen to
the Pharcyde, for example, and their first album, you hear the introduction
to “Autumn Leaves,” by John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.
And that becomes the hook throughout the whole song. We could name
a million examples.
And the thing I always wonder is that these are DJs who have to
go out and seek out this music—a lot of this stuff they got
from their father’s or mother’s record collection and
thought it was hip and it ends up circulating. Of course, as Gary
pointed out, they may not know where this comes from. Some of them
do, and I know this for a fact, because I’ve talked to them.
But the fact is that this music has, in its cut-and-pasted form,
somehow persisted throughout the last 20 years. We don’t hear
it, because all we talk about is lyrics—we don’t talk
about the music of hip-hop. And I want to throw this out there.
I wonder if anyone else has any ideas.
Williams: You’re right. Quite a bit of jazz infuses hip-hop.
Blue Note Records has probably even jumped on the bandwagon. Of
course, 10 years ago, it was acid jazz, which was basically just
funk instrumentals. But the people at Blue Note instantly saw the
market for that, and all of a sudden we had a series of Blue Note
Breakbeats things, with Lou Donaldson’s “Pop-Belly”
on Q-Tip’s (A Tribe Called Quest) “If the Papes Come.”
Digable Planets sampling James Williams for “Cool Like Dat,”
their single that was all over the radio for a year and a half.
Marvin “Smitty” Smith and I, we were at Bradley’s,
right around the time that “Cool Like Dat” was around.
The chorus was “bum-pa-da, bum-pa-da, bum-pa-da, bum-pa-da,”
and Smitty was walking up to James Williams singing, “Make
that cash, make that cash, make that cash.” [laughter] James
looked at me and said, “I want to renegotiate the contract.”
[laughter] There’s quite a bit of jazz in hip-hop, and all
over the place. We just don’t know it’s there, as Chris
said. We just don’t know it’s there.
Blumenfeld: You brought up hip-hop and re-reading some of Albert
Murray’s stuff. Not only does he talk about the blues trope
that’s been picked up by many, many people, but he makes a
big deal of talking about “the break.” The Break is
crucial to what he’s talking about, and that’s a word
and a concept that’s central to hip-hop and DJ culture, but
I’m not so sure it’s central to jazz culture right now.
How should we rephrase tellings of the history or the present of
jazz? That’s a question for anyone. What’s largely missing
in the story? Where do people need to direct their attention, either
in terms of styles of music, aesthetics, truths about the music,
or political associations?
Giddins: The first thing everybody has to remember—and it’s
so obvious that it shouldn’t even need stating—is that
even when you’re dealing with jazz, everything we do as writers
or educators is somewhat autobiographical. That is to say, we’re
working with who we are, where we come from, the kinds of backgrounds
we have. Consequently, we hear things differently, we see things
differently, we interpret things differently. So there is no definitive
story—God knows Burns’ wasn’t.
I would like to see more serious books and symposium, in which people
from different backgrounds can challenge different assertions, different
ideas. I just came back from a symposium in Seattle that was put
together by the Experience Music Project, it’s paid for by
one of Bill Gates’ zillionaires, and it was an unbelievable
thing. It was half critics and half academics, just like this, and
it was all pop, except for the one token jazz panel.
But the point is, every time I’ve ever been to a jazz conference,
it always turns into a kind of boosterism—“What can
we do for jazz? How can we help jazz?” Whereas the rock critics
didn’t evince any of that kind of paranoia, and so everybody
wrote papers that had to do with ideas and theories and concepts
and historicism and criticism. It was absolutely fascinating. The
critics were doing serious scholarly work, and the academics were
doing their scholarly work in plain English, and everybody understood
everybody else. And I think if we can’t get to that—if
we can’t get past this idea of boosterism and really start
talking about the meat of the matter—then the meat becomes
rancid and there’s nothing left to talk about at all.
Kelley: Gender—that’s my contribution. People are studying
gender now, but it’s one of the areas that I think really
needs to be developed. For example, earlier, there was a discussion
about gays in jazz. There was a remark made by a gentleman that
made perfect sense to some people, and that was that women just
entered into the jazz scene about 20 years ago as part of the women’s
movement. And yet we have this brilliant book by Sherrie Tucker
called “Swing Shift” that argues that women have been
in the jazz scene since the very beginning—in the ’20s,
the ’30s, the ’40s—and the question she raises
is how they’re rendered invisible.
And when you ask the question, “How are they rendered invisible?”
or “What are the struggles they had to go through to perform
in both all-women’s bands as well as in mixed-gender bands
or male bands?”—what does that tell us about the way
the story of jazz gets told? Why is it a heroic, masculine story?
It’s much bigger than the presence of women: it’s about
masculinity and femininity. And the fact that we could even have
a discussion earlier on that suggested that gender has nothing to
do with music, and you have someone like Schoenberg writing a book
in 1911, “Theory of Harmony,” where he talks about—like
a lot of classical composers—feminine endings, and that consonance
is masculine and dissonance is feminine, that there are feminine
cadences. It’s not like anyone made up this stuff. It’s
there. We just have to work hard to find it. And I think that if
we don’t have a history of jazz that deals with men and women,
masculinity and femininity, especially the invisibility of women
in jazz, we’re going to have a really bankrupt history of
the music.
Washburne: It’s not only gender, I think what he’s getting
at is a topical history of jazz. There’s many different histories
of jazz, and there are certainly ones that have been spoken louder
than others, and it’s up to us as critics and scholars to
write from those different perspectives—not only gender. What
about the internationalization of jazz? What about the contributors
to the jazz history that didn’t originally come from the United
States? From the Caribbean, from Europe, from Africa, from South
America, from Asia? All of these different cultures are in the mix.
A lot of times, the discussion gets bound by this black/white dichotomy
of racial politics here in the United States, and when you start
to throw in a third nationality, a third culture, it gets too complex,
and people say “No, no, no, it’s just black,”
or, “It’s just white.” And we’re missing
a huge portion of the story, and that’s something to add in
to that gender.
Gabbard: I can’t magnify that enough. The last time I talked
to Sherrie Tucker about her work and her notion of the new jazz
history, she was basically in favor of throwing away the whole jazz
history, and starting from scratch and rewriting it. When you read
her book, you can see why she would argue that.
What I do with my students after we’ve watched a little bit
of Ken Burns is say, especially towards the end, “All right,
here is one narrative. Here’s a story that Ken Burns likes
to tell.” And I think Robin is absolutely right—it’s
an American exceptionalist, patriotic version of jazz as part of
the project that saved the world, and then when it gets complicated,
it loses its interest. So what is another narrative? Well, one narrative
that you get in some of the textbooks is that it continues with
fusion—you can attach that as a completely conventional, almost
Hegelian step in the history of jazz. Or how about, as Gary mentioned,
the loft scene—why not rewrite your history of jazz and see
that as what’s happening, in spite of the fact that it’s
drastically losing its audience? Why not a narrative of jazz just
tracing the audience? Who was listening to this music? Why were
they listening to it? Under what circumstances were they listening
to it? These are the kinds of things that were so exciting about
Ken Burns, because we really could engage with a discourse. However
much we might despise it, we could engage with it and create our
own.
Washburne: I think there are a lot of histories going on right now.
If you extrapolate out of the loft scene of the ’70s, you
have a whole circle of musicians around William Parker, who got
his start there. Now they’ve got a whole festival built around
that. You’ve got interesting situations in which you have
musicians who are of the generation after that loft generation who
pick up from that, but who also contribute their own language. It’s
an interesting little galaxy of players.
Gabbard: If you read Cadence magazine, you can believe that the
whole history of jazz continues out of that loft scene, this highly
marginal music is really “the mainstream” now.
Washburne: In a lot of ways—except that there’s no commercial
apparatus to push it forward. In a sense, it’s creating its
own apparatus, to whatever degree that it can, and whether that
plugs into an audience that may come more out of the margins of
art rock or the rock scene… I may go to Tonic on a Friday
night, and there’s an intersection of improvisation, electronic
music, DJ music, Asian, African-American, extremely nerdy Caucasian
people playing with their laptops, you get this big intersection
going on that definitely goes beyond jazz into all kinds of interesting
music going on now. But it’s interesting to see all the cross-pollination
going on and see the audiences there that are very young and very
focused. Maybe they’ll all turn into critics, but they’re
definitely engaging their enthusiasm full-tilt.
Blumenfeld: I want to touch on one other basic, broad theme. In
old medical textbooks, “nostalgia” is defined as something
like “disease of memory.” And now I know nostalgia has
many meanings, both positive and negative, and that’s my way
of getting into the fact that when someone tells me “Hey,
I’ve got some great jazz for you to hear,” it’s
almost always a dead person who recorded the album. When I look
at Billboard’s Top Ten, it’s more and more exceedingly
reissues. How does that impact what and why you do what you do?
Giddins: Last year there was an album by Jason Moran, called “Black
Stars” on Blue Note. Brilliant album. It had an almost unanimous
response, a very heavy critical response. And 30 years ago, that
kind of response would have moved some records. This record, I doubt
it sold 5,000 copies—I doubt it came close to 5,000 copies.
I think one of the big, crucial problems jazz has in New York, which
is still the center of jazz in the world, is that there’s
no commercial jazz radio. I am amazed at myself for saying this,
because when I was growing up, I just abominated commercial radio,
with its playlists and its commercials and all that crap. But the
one thing about commercial jazz radio, which you don’t have
with National Public Radio or WBGO or any of the listener-sponsored
stations, is that the labels could buy ads. They could actually
push their records. They could force the radio station to pay attention
to a certain record because they paid money for it. And when you
can’t do that, you’re really in trouble.
I was talking to an executive from a label not too long ago. I had
done a piece on a record that he put out, and he called to thank
me. And I said, “What are you thanking me for? I’ve
been doing this for a quarter of a century.” And he said,
“Yeah, but you guys, the press, are all we have left.”
They don’t have the kind of touring they had before: there’s
no way to sell the stuff. So Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue”
sells 5,000 copies a month, something incredible like that, and
some new musician comes along and it’s automatically within
a cult context.
And distributors don’t want to deal with the jazz records.
The labels used to bribe them, basically, by giving them so much
product, in terms of reissues, so that when they got a jazz record,
they would put it out. But now, the distributors will sit on it.
I know a distributor in Des Moines, Iowa who just isn’t going
to be bothered sending 10 copies of some new Blue Note so that it
gets into Libra’s record store in Grinnell. He’s not
going to bother because it’s not going to sell. I went to
college near Libra’s Records, and I remember the jazz section:
it was one Miles, one Stan Getz, and a whole shitload of Al Hirt.
That was it. And that’s the way it is in large sections of
the country.
Washburne: I just want to add to this problem of commercial radio
not having any jazz on it. Broadcast Architecture is a firm that
creates playlists for different commercial radio formats, and they
do listener surveys. They get groups of people to come in from mainstream
America, and they make them listen to soundbites and snippets of
pieces of music, and have them answer questions. Someone like Kenny
G gets a very positive response and sells 30 million records and
is played on a lot of the urban-adult radio. But with people like
Joshua Redman (some of his cuts that have crossed over to that radio
format), as soon as his solos would start coming on, or if they
get a little longer than 15 seconds, it’d be “too jazzy”
or “too aggressive,” and as soon as someone mentioned
the word “jazz,” they would pull that cut and it wouldn’t
make it onto that list. So jazz is actually viewed as a handicap
in the commercial radio realm.
Kelley: This is a historical problem. We think of jazz as in crisis
now, but the best example I can think of is the case of Thelonious
Monk. I have students and jazz afficionados who always thought that
Monk was always great, always sold records, always was big-time.
But when he was signed with Blue Note Records, Lorraine Gordon carried
78s uptown, downtown, to try to sell Monk’s records. He got
negative reviews in Downbeat. When he opened at the Vanguard, which
is years before the Five-Spot, not a lot of people showed up for
the gig, except for musicians, who really appreciated what he did.
And anyone recognizes him now—or even in 1957—as always
sort of great.
In other words, part of what we’re talking about is how a
jazz canon is formed. And the sad thing is that when we pay attention
to the experiences of musicians, many of the musicians who are dead
now, died penniless. In their times, they had to struggle to sell
records, to get gigs. And they’re canonized. One of the stories
you have to tell is the way in which this process happens, and how
much work it involves just to sell an artist, even someone as great
as Thelonius Monk.
Giddins: Robin, that’s supposed to happen to artists who are
really original. We expect that to happen. You’re not supposed
to go instantly from Theodore Dreiser to James Joyce and be able
to get that.
But the problem we’re talking about now is mainstream players
who are playing right within the center context of the music, and
they are having the same troubles that a Coltrane or a Monk had.
Incidentally, at the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival in ’66
or ’67, Monk was booed.
Kelley: Yeah, that’s true. He was booed more than once after
’66, ’67, and that had a lot to do with other things.
But I understand that. That’s not my point. My point is, for
an audience who talks about music in the year 2002, the question
is, what are the commercial problems they have to confront? And
this is always the question that’s raised.
One of the things I’m trying to point out is that historically,
virtually every single one of these people who are now in the canon
had these struggles to contend with, and we don’t know how
long they lasted. In the case of Monk, it was a very long time.
He was playing professionally in the mid-1930s, and it wasn’t
really until the mid- to late-’50s, that he began to make
it. And for some of the young musicians who are around today who
are just wonderful and struggling—Taylor Ho Bynum, Vijay Ayer—there’s
a whole range of people who struggle to sell records. Some of has
to do with the nature of their art, and part of it has to do with
the industry they have to face.
Dollar: One thing that I’ve noticed a lot lately is a lot
of musicians becoming very impatient with that and moving towards
more beat-oriented music or, like Medeski, Martin and Wood, they
have a label. I guess they’re pushing the crossover to the
jam-rock audiences, a neo-Grateful Dead kind of thing. I don’t
know if it works or not, but it’s an interesting trend. It
could forge some innovation, or not, but it’s something that’s
going on.
Blumenfeld: Gary’s allusion to Jason Moran and his album—if
you listen to Jason Moran and what he references, he lets you know
that the great-man, canonical history isn’t all there is,
and it also misses some of the good bits, Because he’ll throw
you back to pianist Jackie Bayard, or Herbie Nichols, or saxophonist
Sam Rivers, who’s on that album. And other than collector’s
labels, these are people who don’t get box sets, and whose
reissues don’t sell that much.
But this is the part of the song that’s the “shout-chorus,”
which means, raise your hand and you’ll be called upon to
shout. In the words of Alex Trebek of Jeopardy, please phrase your
answer in the form of a question.
[Audience member]: I wanted to bring up a couple of things that
were voiced in the last panel, two things that seem really germane
to this discussion. The first was the notion of exposure: that was
one of the things that the jazz artists in the study said was crucial.
Gary cautioned against the kind of knee-jerk bolsterism, but at
the same time, on this panel, we’ve talked about movies, we’ve
talked about TV shows and Ken Burns and the way that that’s
a gateway to a larger community, or a larger people.
And the second thing was: A lot of jazz musicians in the study evinced
a distrust in institutions. I was interested in the way the university
is an institution and the critical thing is an institution.
It seems like whether or not there’s a divide between the
critic and the scholar, both roles are defined by this mediatory
relationship between the music and the audience. I’m wondering
to what extent that relationship defines what we do. Is it different
if you’re dealing with students on a very formative level,
or writing in a paper which can be picked up by anybody on the street?
Giddins: I was in Arizona for a couple of weeks two years ago, and
I met somebody there who said to me that she was a big jazz fan,
she loved jazz. I said to her, “Who do you listen to?”
She said, “Boney James.” And I said, “I don’t
know him.” And she said, “I thought you said you were
a jazz critic.” And I said, “Well, I’m just beginning.”
[laughter]
So she asked to see something I’d written, and I had the current
Voice, which I’d taken with me on the plane. Before I gave
her the column, I remember reading it to myself and thinking, “There’s
no way she’s going to understand 60 percent of this piece.”
It was a sobering moment for me, because when you write for a publication
for a long time, you begin to sense who your readership is. You
begin to know your readers from the kind of feedback you get, the
letters, and what you can get away with. If I refer to Bird, I assume
that everybody knows who I’m talking about. Colleagues of
mine tell me all the time how jealous they are of that, because
in a daily newspaper you can’t possibly use the kind of shorthand
that I do routinely.
And I was reading this piece, it was a very simple mainstream piece,
but it had enough argot in there that I thought, “Jesus, I
would have to annotate this thing.” So it’s an interesting
question that you’re raising. When I did that book “Visions
of Jazz,” the copy editor who went through it at Oxford said,
“You know, you refer here to a ‘jazz repertory ensemble.’
What is a jazz repertory ensemble?” This was extremely helpful
to me, because every time she raised a flag like that, I would put
in an explanation the first time it appears in the book. You don’t
do it every time you write it, but in a context of a book, you really
need to do it. You want to be as open as possible.
But there’s no question that the music is so inside, in a
way. If I talk about the Lester Young/Coleman Hawkins thing of the
tenor saxophone, the pre-war era, every jazz fan knows what I’m
talking about and nobody else would have a clue. Because these people
have not crossed over. Every once in a while in The New York Times
Book Review, I’ll see some review of a novel that has nothing
whatsoever to do with jazz, and the guy will make some kind of Lester
Young metaphor. And I’ll be impressed that it got through
the editor, because the assumption is that the literate readership
of the Book Review is going to know who Lester Young is, or know
what bebop is, or Charlie Parker. But you can never take very much
of it for granted, because you are up against a general audience.
I’ve had people come over to me on a book tour who have said,
“I grew up with jazz, I’ve loved jazz all my life, but
I sort of lost contact with it.” And I said, “Who are
your favorites?” “The Andrews Sisters.” You get
that all the time, because jazz was used to cover so much. And it’s
even worse now. This Boney James thing really got to me, because
“jazz lite” is a slander. It’s worse than New
Wave or some other name. The fact that they’ve expropriated
the word “jazz” to describe this music, which has no
connection whatsoever to it, is a slander. The proof of that is,
when I was a kid, there were certain jazz records that crossed over,
like “Take Five”… Archie Shepp said he started
out listening to Stan Getz because Stan Getz got radio play. But
from Brubeck, it was easy to go to Monk. From Stan Getz, it was
easy to go to Dexter Gordon. In other words, if you were digging
Brubeck and Getz, you were already in jazz. It was easy to go further.
If you’re into Boney James, I don’t know that you can
cross from him to David Ware.
Kelley: The other aspect of your question has to do with institutions,
and it’s a very, very important question. I can speak very
briefly to the university, because we haven’t talked much
about race or power or any of that stuff. Universities are these
spaces of power. A very small part of the struggle that a lot of
us are dealing with is, one, how to legitimize the study of any
popular culture, particularly jazz, and two, how do we hire people
who are experts in the field?
One of the struggles is that some programs only want people with
Ph.D.s, when the most appropriate figures are musicians in the field
who actually write and teach. There are many stories of people—at
Columbia, NYU and other places—where they’ve tried to
hire big-time musicians, and they’ve gotten opposition for
it. And yet someone with a Ph.D. who may not be as ensconced can
get a job over that. So, how do you redefine authority in an institution
that has a particular criteria for who’s an “authority”?
It’s always going to be a struggle.
One of the great things that came out of the Black Freedom struggle
in the ’60s, the Black Arts movement and other movements aligned
with it—the Asian movement, the Chicano movement—was
the creation of ethnic studies programs that actually hired musicians.
Think about U. Mass/Amherst: those hires had to do with political
struggles that made it possible. And what we all have to think about
is, where are the spaces where these musicians could work and teach
and have the authority that they deserve?
Blumenfeld: Since Gary mentioned both smooth jazz and “Take
Five” in the same answer, I want to point out that about five
years ago “Take Five” became a hit at smooth-jazz radio
stations across the country. But the other side of that story is
that they edited out the drum solo.
[Audience member]: I hear things said, brilliant and fascinating,
that seem really crucial. One was about the industry we have to
face, and I think that’s one of the biggest issues of all.
And the other was the idea that for avant-garde contemporary jazz
musicians, it’s understood that they’ll starve, or not
get theirs in their lifetime.
We need far-sighted critics with an overview. Historically, the
people that have now become icons, in their time, they were seen
as problematic. And the critics were some of the first to write
them off. Then they came back and said, “These guys are great.”
So I’m wondering how you see yourselves today as critics,
and whether it’s a different breed than what used to be, in
that you feel you can even confront things as regards the industry.
I assume that as critics, you think in terms of the importance of
the very modern voices, and creativity is what keeps the music alive,
although it’s not supported by the system.
Giddins: The question was, has the whole field of criticism changed
over time, because at one point, a lot of the major figures that
Rob was talking about were dissed primarily by critics. This, for
me, is the big difference. I’ve been working on a project
recently that obliged me to go back and look at a lot of pieces
that I’d written in the ’70s. And I was amazed at how
mean I was. I really wrote some nasty pieces back then.
And it occurs to me that that’s a luxury that jazz no longer
has. I don’t feel I have it. I have a page of the Village
Voice every two weeks. It’s my page. Am I going to waste that
page telling people not to listen to somebody they never heard of
in the first place? It’s absurd—there’s just no
way you can justify that.
So in a sense, we all become kinds of boosters. When the music is
healthy and you can really have a debate with your readers and you’re
really a liaison, then you can be acerbic. You can start controversy.
I think jazz criticism was enormously healthy in the late 1950s
and early ’60s when critics were actually debating among themselves
over certain artists. One of my critics I really admire and like
personally a great deal is Ira Gitler. And people still give him
a hard time because he dissed “Chasin’ the Train.”
Well, so what? It’s precisely because it’s an important
work… If everybody could understand “Chasin’ the
Train” the first time, it would have been, what? Another “Take
Five.” These responses are healthy. I mourn the absence of
those responses. I can’t possibly justify that.
I’d like to hear how Kelvin, how anybody deals with it. I’m
too damned impressionistic anyway as a listener, and I hear bad
record after bad record, and I go into this blue funk, and I think,
“It’s dead. It’s over.” And then I’ll
hear one great record and “Renaissance! Jazz is alive!”
and then it will be that record or that concert that will be the
subject of the next column. But I don’t think it’s healthy
for the music, and I don’t think it’s healthy for me
as a critic that I have to, in a sense, pull back the talons because,
again, you can’t attack somebody nobody’s ever heard
of.
Williams: He’s right. I don’t find myself doing a lot
of unfavorable reviews. But I like that. I like hipping people to
unknown people who are doing beautiful stuff. When I do slam something,
it usually has something to do with the apparent newsworthiness
of it. If Wynton Marsalis makes another bad album, I’ll trash
that. But as Gary said, it’s because people know who he is,
and they’re wondering about what’s on that record.
[Audience member]: Is there a disconnect now between jazz and African-American
culture? I ask this because I was at a concert about a month ago
that was organized by William Parker, and a woman came in named
Oleta Hayes, who’s a dancer and she’s African-American,
and she asked, “Why is everyone at the concert a young white
male?” Or “the majority of people there.”
And I see the music that William Parker makes—people like
Joe McPhee, Jamil Moondock—as extensions of the ’60s
movements, and yet there’s very few African-American fans.
What do you think about that? Is there a disconnect?
Williams: That’s actually not true. I think I read somewhere—I
don’t have the exact statistics—that a larger portion
of the total African-American population patronizes jazz than the
total white American population. But the thing is, there’s
more white people. There are. Way more. If you do the math, you’re
going to be able to figure out why there are so few black faces.
Kelley: I think that’s a very good point. And some of it has
to do with the prohibitive costs of clubs. I know there are certain
artists that bring out a lot of… every time I hear Randy Weston,
when Randy Weston was at Lincoln Center, everyone came out for that.
And I think we have to pay attention to why that is.
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