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"[By 1981] fewer and fewer black musicians were playing jazz
and I could see why, because jazz was becoming the music of the
museum.... No one wants to be dead before their time... and that's
what was going to happen to someone who went into jazz."
- Miles Davis, Miles, The Autobiography (1989)
"I can't help but wonder what the future holds for America's
number one art form. I have traveled across this vast country and
I am sorry to say that the jazz scene looks pretty sad.... I think
it's a shame to let these many talents with so much to say to starve
literally and musically."
- Jackie McLean, in the liner notes to Destination Out (1963)
For Miles Davis, the death knell sounded in the early eighties,
directly before his own return to recording and live performance
after a five-year hiatus. His equally restless contemporary, Jackie
McLean, had lamented the demise of jazz almost two decades earlier,
as many former bebop and hard bop stylists embraced free jazz as
the only means by which to confront the music's "starvation"
in the early 1960s. Throughout the sixties, Philip Larkin-following
the lead of one of the first notable voices in jazz journalism,
Hugues Panassié-suggested that jazz had actually been dead
before the end of World War II.1 The "happy, cake-walking syncopation"
of Larkin's beloved ragtime had been replaced by the abstruse and
explosive rhythms of Charlie Parker's bebop. For a jazz journalist
and historian such as Martin Williams, however, Parker and his even
more aggressive successors in the late 1950's-Ornette Coleman and
John Coltrane-were the natural extension of the improvisatory mantle
established by Larkin's hero Louis Armstrong. But for Williams,
and many others, the death of discord initiated by the soul-jazz
and jazz-rock fusions of the late 1960's again threatened to kill
off jazz for good.2 But as anyone knows who has recently consumed
the nearly nineteen hours of Ken Burns's documentary Jazz on PBS,
many of these stories feature the promise of jazz rebirth, most
recently the neo-traditionalist revival of Wynton Marsalis trumpeted
by Burns, Stanley Crouch and others.
My essay will explore several jazz historical narratives from a
wide range of perspectives: from Larkin's frustrated desire to recover
the initial thrill of hearing Fats Waller 78's in his digs at Oxford,
to poet Amiri Baraka's immersion in the "New Thing" of
free jazz, to Miles Davis biographer Eric Nisenson's recent polemic
Blue: The Murder of Jazz (1997). Despite their many individual differences,
one characteristic of jazz historiography as a whole is the continuous
cycle of death and resurrection. After all, as Nisenson writes in
his introduction to Blue, "the cry that 'jazz is dead' has
been so ubiquitous throughout jazz history that it has almost become
a tradition in itself" (1). Yet for each such song of mourning,
jazz springs to life once more. After tracing this phenomenon-both
the many deaths and rebirths of jazz-in Part One, in Part Two, I
will offer an explanation for the power of this resurrection motif.
I will contextualize these narratives within other mythologies of
rebirth in which the rebirth signals not only a new life but also
a state of exalted enlightenment. The jazz narrative of resurrection
is part and parcel of jazz's academic apotheosis, providing a universality
and cultural currency often denied to the art form. In speaking
of the mythological archetype who progresses from a state of death
to life, Joseph Campbell writes that the hero "has died as
a modern man; but as an eternal man-perfected, unspecific, universal
man-he has been reborn" (20). Such is the function of "Eternal
Jazz": transcending death and asserting its unassailable position
within the humanist tradition. Much like the resurrected hero, jazz
leaves one condition but finds the source of life to emerge into
a richer and more mature condition.
I
Long ago, jazz consumed its nine lives. Perhaps the first ended
on October 10, 1917 in the very city that gave birth to jazz: New
Orleans. In one of the earliest surveys of the music's history,
Frederic Ramsey's and Charles Smith's Jazzmen (1939), we learn that
the evolution of jazz depends upon a local ordinance which closed
Storyville. This eighteen square block red-light district had served
as the home base for many jazz pioneers, most notably Jelly Roll
Morton, a pianist who first gained fame playing for Storyville's
rowdy patrons. In a narrative which is repeated in many subsequent
histories, the closing of Storyville ensured the Diaspora of New
Orleans musicians who traveled up the Mississippi to cities such
as Chicago, Kansas City, and later New York and Los Angeles, where
traditional New Orleans music mixed with other African-American
musical forms and brought new life to jazz.3 In such an account,
jazz becomes an exile, but not before jazz "moves on"
in a different sense. On that October night in 1917, Smith writes,
A light breeze gently stirred the fronds of [notorious madam] Josie
Arlington's palm tree. Somewhere close by there was the sound of
a girl having a crying jag.... As the evening wore on the musicians
came out of the houses, one band after another, and formed into
line-"the best damned brass band parade that New Orleans ever
had." Slowly it marched down the streets... [and] played Nearer
My God to Thee-plaintively, like the brass band on the way to the
graveyard. On Franklin Street, prostitutes moved out of the long-shuttered
cribs, mattresses on their shoulders.... And over on Basin Street
where the pretty quadroons gave America one of its popular blues,
a red light flickered faintly and went out. (58)
Of course, current historical revisionism has re-examined the actual
role of Storyville and found it far more limited: very few working
musicians were ever employed in the brothels at any given time.
As jazz historian Ted Gioia reports, many of the houses used player
pianos and very few employed large ensembles at all (31). But the
important thing is that, for many years, the jazz mythology embraced
a narrative of loss and one coupled with the hope that the lamps
would light again soon. This was particularly true in Chicago, where
Louis Armstrong would escape the shadow of his onetime employer
Joseph "King" Oliver and breathe new life into jazz with
his solo improvisation in performances such as his famed recording
of "West End Blues." Before long, jazz had "seeped
into the white districts of Chicago, spreading eastward and westward
over the country like a slowly opening fan" (Ramsey 95). As
we can see, the theme of the death and resurrection of jazz had
been established before America had even entered World War II. And
it was during this war that the rising popularity of something called
"swing" may have elevated jazz into a truly popular phenomenon.
Then again, depending on one's perspective, swing could also be
viewed as a threat to destroy jazz once again.
World War II ushers in the next distinct period in which jazz receives
the last rites. In The Swing Era (1989), composer and jazz historian
Gunther Schuller suggests that,
To read most of the histories and reference books on jazz is to
gain the impression that jazz died around 1942.... Still others,
of course, are quite unequivocal about proclaiming the final "demise
of jazz" to have occurred in the postwar era, and that modern
jazz or bop and what followed in the further innovations of the
sixties and seventies are all rather a "corruption of jazz,"
not upholding its original "true values and spirit." (844)
My own research confirms what Schuller suggests, but I would argue
that this process has occurred yet again during the past decade,
in the midst of what some have deemed a true jazz renaissance. For
many writers in the 1990s, the very backward-looking nature of the
"neo-bop revival"-which followed the ascendancy of Wynton
Marsalis as the nation's leading jazz musician (and popular educator)-is
really evidence of the latest death of jazz. Such is the third discrete
historical moment involving the death and rebirth of jazz. And each
cycle has surfaced in much the same manner, with an often-similar
discursive field and many of the same arguments marshaled for both
its demise and resurrection.
The Jazz Wars
Shortly after America entered World War II, an American Federation
of Musicians recording ban literally threatened to stop the music-at
least in its recorded form-for nearly two years. Beginning in the
autumn of 1942, the union hoped to stem the tide of new releases
in order to ensure that working musicians would continue to find
work in clubs and prevent people from simply enjoying music on club
jukeboxes or their Victrolas at home. At the same time, there was
a more general shortage of consumer goods, including phonograph
records, as materials used in their production were diverted toward
the war effort.4 But the threatened death of jazz was not simply
a matter of a musician's union addressing the needs of its membership
or an issue of wartime conservation. In addition to fighting in
the Pacific and in Europe, there was a war on the home front: the
first of many "jazz wars."
Actually, there were two jazz wars in the forties. In the early
part of the decade, a battle raged between the proponents of traditional
New Orleans jazz and swing, the latter an evolving jazz form which,
for perhaps the first time, made jazz synonymous with America's
popular music (that is, if you believed that swing was jazz). In
this first great schism, the terrain for all future jazz wars was
clearly established. In the Dixieland camp, there was tradition
and stability, in which a defined set of musical structures and
practices fixed the definition of jazz in a nearly timeless fashion.
According to the swing camp, however, New Orleans jazz had merely
evolved into the next logical stage of its development, even enlisting
Louis Armstrong as an expert witness: "Jazz and swing is the
same thing.... In the good old days of Buddy Bolden.... it was called
Rag Time Music.... Later on in the years it was called Jazz Music-Hot
Music-Gut Bucket-and now they've poured a little gravy over it,
called it Swing Music.... No matter how you slice it-it's still
the same music" (Armstrong qtd. in Gendron 35). In reality,
the two styles of music were very different: swing was carefully
arranged, marked by the recurrent use of "riffs," and
popularized by many all-White orchestras. And for the New Orleans
revivalists (or the "moldy figs," as they were known to
the opposition), all of this was working to destroy jazz:
The riff was, for the revivalists, the most offensive and blatant
symptom of the glorification of the 'groove beat as an end in itself'
and the triumph of arranged music at the expense of 'spontaneous
improvisation.' The 'riffing style' is the 'definite opposite of
pure creative music,' since in 'riff music,' one knows exactly what
is coming next for a whole chorus.' (Gendron 43)
Although "swing" and "jazz" were one and the
same to many other listeners, the revivalists believed that true
jazz was imperiled during the war years.5 Not only had solo improvisation
been abandoned for unison riffs, but swing had often eschewed African-American
musical forms for many of the (White) popular favorites of Tin Pan
Alley. Writing during the closing days of the war in Shining Trumpets:
A History of Jazz (1946), Rudi Blesh provided the most vigorous
appeal warning of the destructive power of swing: "It is easy
to prove that any swing is completely anti-jazz, completely anti-New
Orleans, opposed to the real musical values jazz represents....
Establishing no new art form, developing no older one, it is nihilistic,
cynically destructive, reactionary" (290).
Today, it may seem hard to imagine Count Basie and Duke Ellington
as "nihilistic" and "destructive," but neither
figure could avoid the condemnation of Blesh and his fellow moldy
figs. The prescription for the revivalists: a return trip south
on the Mississippi to the New Orleans styles of the twenties.
In Blesh's writing we see another example of the death and resurrection
motif that surfaced in Jazzmen a decade earlier, only this time
the death is more violent: "Commercialization was a cheapening
deteriorative force, a species of murder perpetrated on a wonderful
music by whites and by those misguided Negroes who, for one or another
reason, chose to be accomplices to the deed" (11). For Blesh,
bandleaders such as Basie and Ellington were heretics, succumbing
to the pressure of commercial success and trading the musical complexity
of ragtime for an inferior, albeit more popular, musical form. However,
the war was not lost for Blesh and his fellow revivalists, and shortly
after advancing the case for murder, Blesh summons a Biblical rhetorical
fury to suggest a rebirth: "At this moment everything points
to a great and imminent revival, all opposing forces to the contrary.
When that happens-tomorrow-we shall hear the shining trumpets again"
(16). In the conclusion to his study of the "real jazz,"
Blesh claims that the trumpets have begun to sound, stirring the
dead to life. During the heyday of swing,
the fortunes of jazz, itself, had never been lower nor had its future
ever seemed blacker. But, symbolically, [King Joe] Oliver and Louis
[Armstrong], too, in the main never ceased to play the simple, hot
trumpet of New Orleans jazz.... The year that Oliver died [1938],
jazz was stirring in its sleep, [and] its followers were rallying."
(283)
Despite the promise of rebirth, however, jazz had not faced its
only enemy in this tumultuous decade.
Perhaps an even greater threat emerged during the second great jazz
war of the forties: bebop versus both swing and New Orleans jazz.
It is with the rise of bebop when, in a phrase of Philip Larkin's,
jazz first became "ugly on purpose." As I mentioned before,
the discursive battleground looks very familiar in this second jazz
war of the forties. In fact, as Bernard Gendron suggests, many of
the most vocal champions of bebop were former proponents of swing
and veterans of the battles with the moldy figs. The advocates of
bebop saw the new form as "just one of a whole temporal string
of 'new's' to affect jazz music, just one moment in the search for
the 'new,' as this was implicitly defined by the prevailing discourses"
(49). Here, we discern the very heart of the debate: whether or
not jazz possesses some sort of fixed set of clearly-identifiable
qualities or whether it is an inherently modernist form which must
constantly reinvent itself and, in Ezra Pound's words, "make
it new."6 In understanding the terms of the debate, one can
see why many of the revivalists who viewed swing as a threat to
"the real musical values of jazz" were perhaps even more
incensed by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and the pioneers of
bop. Even though bebop was far less commercially viable than swing,
for the revivalists it presented many of the same corruptions: a
preoccupation with showmanship, an excessive sartorial flair, not
to mention an obsessive interest in instrumental technique. Once
again, this latest form which called itself jazz could be interpreted
as evidence of its demise.
In his belief that jazz had exhausted itself before the end of the
war, Philip Larkin concludes that, by 1944, jazz became a modernist
art form. And for Larkin, modernism was "an irresponsible exploitation
of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it.... [and]
helps us neither to enjoy nor endure" (27). For Larkin, there
was really no distinction to be made among such "life-denying"
figures such as Parker, Pound, and Picasso, let alone Parker and
the jazz avant-garde who succeeded him in the fifties and sixties.
After Parker, Larkin was "quite certain that jazz had ceased
to be produced" and "the society that had engendered it
had gone, and would not return" (25). Surprisingly, however,
the death of jazz was actually a relief for Larkin: "if jazz
records are to be one long screech, if painting is to be a blank
canvas, if a play is to be two hours of sexual intercourse performed
coram populo, then let's get it over, the sooner the better, in
the hope that human values will then be free to reassert themselves"
(27-28). Much like the authors of Jazzmen, who characterized the
closing of Storyville as a somber funeral procession which served
as a necessary prelude to a glorious rebirth, in Larkin's jazz writing,
the poet/critic raises his glass to toast the death of all modernist
art forms, which merely anticipate the eventual reawakening of the
human spirit.
A Casualty of The Cold War?
If you were a musician or listener who spoke the language of bebop,
then jazz was very much alive, perhaps until the 1955 death of its
patron saint, Charlie "Bird" Parker. But even in the early
1950s, during the years of Bird's rapid physical decline, there
were many new threats to the future of jazz, including its own Eisenhower-era
commercial success (much like the popularity of swing had doomed
jazz for critics such as Rudi Blesh the decade before). In 1952,
Barry Ulanov, a onetime contributor to Metronome magazine during
the height of the revivalist/swing wars, wrote in A History of Jazz
in America that jazz was "in the grip of a bewildering upheaval,"
which was the direct result of the forces of commercialism. As a
champion of "the new" in jazz-whether expressed as swing
or bop-Ulanov expressed dismay at a time when Parker had eschewed
the intensity of his earlier recordings for the Dial and Savoy labels
and released Charlie Parker with Strings on Mercury Records in 1950.
The distance from 1945's "KoKo" (a high-speed, small-group
deconstruction of the swing-era standard "Cherokee") to
1950's straightforward and string-laden "I'm in the Mood for
Love" was perceived to be great-both artistically and commercially.
And writers such as Ulanov feared that jazz was losing its underdog
status as some beboppers were reaching a sizable audience for the
first time, but by looking backward rather than forward: "For
most of its history, jazz, rejected in its homeland, has had consciously
to seek survival, conscientiously to explain and defend its existence....
Variously banned and bullied and sometimes cheered beyond its merits,
jazz has led a lonely life but a full one" (4). For Ulanov,
what threatened the future of jazz was its growing inability to
polarize its audience. Swing had been wildly popular in the previous
decade, but it had also provoked strong opposition. Now, in the
early fifties, there was a new feeling of stasis, as if jazz musicians
were waiting for the great leap forward, while no one was willing
or able to risk alienating listeners. Commercial success, by itself,
was not enough to condemn a jazzman, but commercial success without
musical evolution was unforgivable to Ulanov. Even though they had
occupied opposite sides in the trenches of the revivalist/swing
wars, Ulanov followed the moldy fig Rudi Blesh in adopting a quasi-Biblical
rhetorical appeal. In the closing chapter of A History of Jazz in
America, Ulanov warns of the jazzman's "temptations" which
threaten his "purity" and "moral wholeness,"
while at the same time Ulanov suggests the possibility that "the
garden will thrive" as long as the "genuine" replaces
"the synthetic" (337).
No one seems to be declaring jazz dead in the mid-fifties, at least
explicitly, but Parker's passing seemed to suggest that jazz was
at least comatose. In Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956), André
Hodeir outwardly denies a pessimism about the future of jazz, all
the while using a vocabulary laced with words such as "crisis,"
"confusion," and "desperate." But Hodeir steadfastly
refuses to mourn, believing that,
New blood will begin to circulate as soon as someone discovers a
new method of improvisation that will preserve both the soloist's
freedom [which bebop heightened] and the orchestral work's basic
unity [a legacy of swing] while establishing between the two a necessary
and harmonious relationship. (280)
If swing was the thesis, and bebop its antithesis, then the proper
synthesis was simply waiting to take place. Nevertheless, despite
his surface optimism, Hodeir also believes that the most likely
candidates for the job (Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and John Lewis
of the Modern Jazz Quartet) were not really up to the task.
By the early 1960s, the "free jazz" movement led by Ornette
Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane seems to have tossed both
terms of Hodeir's dialectic out of the window. But those who failed
to embrace the rising avant-garde would no longer conceal their
despair as Hodeir and Ulanov had done in the decade before. Many
believed that, rather than a Hodeirian synthesis, the so-called
"New Thing" should inspire the latest expression of mourning.
For musicians such as Bud Shank, the Kennedy era was no Camelot
for those caught between the Scylla of the avant-garde and the Charybdis
of pop music: "You have to survive. When I became a full-time
studio musician [primarily recording film soundtracks], I had been
unemployed for a long time since jazz left us in 1962-63" (Shank
qtd. in Ward 431). For many critics and journalists, the arrival
of free jazz may have been even more painful. In Jazz: Myth and
Religion (1987), Neil Leonard cites a Downbeat reviewer who again
invokes the destruction of jazz at the hands of two pioneers of
the avant-garde: "I listened to a horrifying demonstration
of what happens to be a growing 'anti-jazz' trend.... I heard a
good rhythm section... go to waste behind the nihilistic exercises
of the two horns.... Coltrane and Dolphy seemed intent on deliberately
destroying swing" (Don De Michael qtd. in Leonard 142).
Perhaps not surprisingly, the commercial prospects of Coleman, Coltrane
and other advocates of The New Thing seemed even more dire than
those which faced bebop musicians in 1945: such is often the price
for forging a new musical trail. But while many listeners were sympathetic
to the view that free jazz was killing swing-an essential component
of much jazz-an occasional voice suggested that the violent imperative
of the avant-garde was a prerequisite to the rebirth of jazz. In
the early sixties, one alternative to free jazz was the more accessible
sound of hard bop, epitomized by the recordings of Art Blakey, Horace
Silver, and many others on the Blue Note label. But as Baraka wrote
in Blues People (1963), "hard bop, sagging under its own weight,
had just about destroyed itself" (223). Instead of expressing
a passive nostalgia, Baraka looked to the avant-garde to lead a
coup d'état: "In a sense, men like Coltrane and Rollins
[both of whom had converted from the church of hard bop]... are
serving as this generation's private assassins-demonstrating, perhaps,
the final beauties to be extracted from purely chordal jazz"
(228). The violence of free jazz, for Baraka, was necessary to prevent
jazz from drifting away from the necessary "hegemony of the
blues" and toward other forms of Western popular forms. In
addition, free jazz could restore improvisation "to its traditional
role of invaluable significance, again removing jazz from the hands
of the less than gifted arranger and the fashionable diluter"
(225). Bassist Charlie Haden, who first gained attention as a member
of Ornette Coleman's group, is another for whom free jazz represented
a new life. Rather than play the chord changes as Coleman had originally
composed them, Coleman offered Haden the freedom to improvise his
own changes, which inspired Haden's commitment to The New Thing.
In an interview included in Burns's Jazz, Haden recalls his thinking
at the time: "Somebody's finally giving me permission to do
what I've been hearing all this time. And we started to play, and
a whole new world opened up for me-it was like being born again"
(Haden qtd. in Jazz-emphasis mine).
Most in the sixties were not as sanguine as Baraka and Haden, however.
In the view of Duke Ellington biographer James Lincoln Collier jazz,
as a whole, "was exhausted, worn out by overuse" (452)
and increasingly found its audience diminishing. As late as 1960,
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm "found the nights too short
to listen to everything that could be heard in New York from The
Half Note and The Five Spot in the Village to Small's Paradise and
the Apollo in Harlem and further west in Chicago and San Francisco."
But only two years later, the jazz scene looked radically different:
"'Bird Lives' could still be seen painted on lonely walls,
but the celebrated New York jazz venue named after him, Birdland,
had ceased to exist [and] jazz had been virtually knocked out of
the ring" (xxvi). For Hobsbawm, it wasn't that Coleman or Coltrane
had destroyed jazz from within (although many, including Philip
Larkin, believed their work to be an extension of bebop's life-denying
principles) but rather that the knockout had been delivered by none
other than Elvis and The Beatles. In a 1986 review of a Count Basie
biography, Hobsbawm recalls that "Sometime in the 1950s American
popular music committed parricide. Rock murdered jazz" (Jazz
Scene 291). As anyone familiar with jazz historiography knows, the
notion that jazz was either dormant or dead in the 1970s is one
of the most persistent jazz myths. In one of the countless sources
which makes this claim, David Rosenthal's Hard Bop: Jazz and Black
Music 1955-1965 (1992), the author simply refers to the late sixties
eclipse of jazz as a period of "devastation." As Rosenthal
writes, "It was almost as if jazz had had a stroke in late
1967" (169). While many had believed that the avant-garde had
already destroyed jazz in the early sixties, even the proponents
of The New Thing lamented the utter demise of the music at the turn
of the next decade. As drummer Milford Graves claims, in the sixties
"everyone was up and the music was hot and burning. But the
1970s is like everyone went to sleep" (Graves qtd. in Peretti
158). Or, as guitarist Gabor Szabo proclaimed more succinctly in
a 1967 cover story in Downbeat, "Jazz as we've known it is
dead" (DeMichael).
Such is also the argument of Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns (and its
companion book co-written by Burns and Geoffrey Ward), the ten-part
documentary originally broadcast in America on PBS in December 2000.
Before Part Ten of the film chronicles the "glorious rebirth"
of jazz in the 1980s, the music, or perhaps interest in the music,
needed to die. At the beginning of Part Ten, "A Masterpiece
By Midnight," Burns's narrator poses a familiar rhetorical
question: "for a long time [in the 1970s], the real question
would become whether this most American of art forms could survive
in America at all." What follows is a list of events that had
occurred by 1970 suggesting to Burns that the end was near:
* The city of New Orleans dispatched a wrecking ball to the birthplace
of Louis Armstrong
* Lincoln Gardens (where Armstrong had played with Joe Oliver on
Chicago's South Side) closed its doors
* The clubs in Kansas City played by Lester Young, Count Basie,
and Charlie Parker had vanished
* New York's Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom stood vacant, while
Birdland had abandoned jazz for rhythm and blues
As Branford Marsalis suggests, by the 1970s, "Jazz just kind
of died-it just kind of went away for a while. There were still
people playing ... but to be honest, with the exception of a few....
a lot of the more talented younger generation who were supposed
to come up just did something else. And that had never happened
before" (Marsalis qtd. in Jazz). In other jazz histories, writers
such as Ted Gioia have offered a somewhat different portrait of
the decade, pointing to the success of traditional jazz labels such
as Norman Granz's Pablo Records and the fact that jazz festival
line-ups leaned heavily on swing and bop idioms throughout the seventies
(382-83).7 But this seems to be a minority view, particularly among
musicians. In the mind of singer Abbey Lincoln, the music was never
permanently rubbed out, but it did endure the oft-cited and violent
attack by rock and roll: "A lot in the music has been lost,
but I don't think we're dead. I think somebody came to kill it.
I know who it was, too. They brought over the English musicians...
and covered us over just like you cover a blanket and put everything
in another perspective" (Lincoln qtd. in Jazz).
The conclusion to Burn's Jazz is merely the culmination of a series
of cycles of death and rebirth that is repeated throughout the film.
Some of the mini-resurrections that provide a narrative structure
include Duke Ellington's 1956 Newport Festival appearance, an event
that revived his career, landed him on the cover of Time magazine,
and subsequently led him to tell interviewers that "I was born
in 1956 at the Newport festival."8 Burns also chronicles Louis
Armstrong's 1964 return to the pop charts with "Hello Dolly!,"
a recording which ousted The Beatles from the number one position
and (for one brief moment) restored jazz to its pre-war level of
popularity. Finally, as a prelude to the final two hours, Burns
presents the story of the triumphant 1976 Village Vanguard engagement
of saxophonist Dexter Gordon, an event that ostensibly served as
the spark which initiated a full-fledged resurrection of jazz in
the eighties: "Gordon's success was fresh evidence that a revival
of interest in mainstream jazz might be in the offing" (Ward
458). Regardless of whether one believes that jazz survived the
assault of rock and roll or not, what cannot be denied is that the
continuous cycle of death and resurrection persists: not only does
one see frequent claims for the rebirth of jazz, but also an intensification
involving the violence of the death rhetoric of jazz. In an era
when some have heralded a genuine jazz rebirth, other voices are
warning us of a violent conspiracy to once again kill off jazz for
good.
"Murder Most Foul..."
To be a murder victim, one must first be alive, and by the early
1990s, jazz seemed very much alive. Regardless of whether one actually
believed that jazz had died in the seventies, the popular perception
surfaced that its vital signs were improving. After all, beginning
in 1982, a twenty year-old trumpet player named Wynton Marsalis
began releasing records reminiscent of the "modal jazz"
pioneered by Miles Davis twenty years earlier. More than a decade
after most had declared traditional jazz to be dead, Marsalis had
been signed by Davis's long-time label, the industry giant Columbia
Records. Even more startling was that the records sold remarkably
well for jazz.9 Marsalis quickly became the poster child for an
entire generation of jazz musicians who embraced more traditional
jazz styles (in other words, acoustic jazz) and eventually became
the latest of the handful of jazz musicians to have graced the cover
of Time magazine.10 In a cover story entitled "The New Jazz
Age," Thomas Sancton's feature on Marsalis is accompanied by
numerous photos of his fellow "young lions" in the neo-bop
movement. The article surveys some of the foundational myths of
jazz history-first, that, aside from Marsalis and select others,
no one earns much money playing this music; and second, that in
the preceding era "jazz fans began to bemoan the death of a
great American tradition" (66). Much like it had done many
times before, however, an organic metaphor signals jazz rebirth.
Thanks to the direct influence of Marsalis, Sancton claims that
"a jazz renaissance is flowering on what was once barren soil"
(66). But this nineties renaissance is one with a difference. While
previously the impact of commercial success had been viewed by some
as a threat to the purity of jazz (swing proponents excepted), Marsalis's
healthy record sales seemed to entice other major labels to recruit
young jazz musicians, thus helping to further this new growth of
jazz.
Ironically, another seed of this new flowering of jazz had actually
been sown in the 1960s at the height of the free jazz movement.
At that time, a handful of Louis Armstrong's aging contemporaries
launched a revival centered around New Orleans's legendary Preservation
Hall and championed the same musical styles favored by the moldy
figs in the mid-forties.11 One of the younger musicians who had
been influenced by this group was none other than Ellis Marsalis,
a young pianist and future patriarch of the Marsalis musical dynasty.
In the Time piece, Marsalis's musical vocation is directly attributed
to his careful tutelage at the hands of his father, as well as other
mentors who include Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, two of the
most influential sources in Ken Burns's research. Burns's Jazz clearly
bears the imprint of the thinking of these men, in particular the
film's very definition of jazz, as well as the notion that Marsalis
represents the (latest) second coming of this music.12
When Dexter Gordon initiated the latest resurrection of jazz in
1976 at New York's Village Vanguard, Burns and Ward remind us that
the saxophonist played "without the synthesizers and electric
bass and drum machines of [jazz-rock] fusion, and within the boundaries
of swing, lyricism, and blues feeling that had been at the heart
of the music since boyhood" (Ward 458). While few could deny
that "swing" and "the blues" have been central
to jazz since its inception, what is also implied is that these
things depend upon acoustic instrumentation, which suggests a highly
static definition of jazz. (After all, if the jazz instrumentation
of the era of Louis Armstrong's "Hot Five" recordings
had been maintained, then the rhythmic foundation of the small jazz
combo might still be dependent upon the banjo.) But an analogous
conservatism distinguishes the thinking of Marsalis, Crouch, and
Murray. And because of his tender age, Marsalis quickly became viewed
as the prophet charged with spreading the word. No one who reaches
the conclusion of Burns's Jazz can fail to recognize the quasi-New
Testament flavor of the language used to describe Marsalis:
No musician in jazz history has ever risen so far so fast.... Because
his climb seemed so meteoric, because he was born in New Orleans
and the son of one jazz musician and the brother of three more,
and because for many people he would become the symbol of the rebirth
of mainstream jazz, his success seems to have been almost preordained.
(459)
In a linguistic chain that includes "risen," "the
son," and "preordained," the resurrection motif of
jazz historiography appears once again, but expressed with an intensity
rarely witnessed before. This type of rhetoric underlies other recent
jazz histories as well, including Stuart Nicholson's Jazz: The 1980s
Resurgence (1995). Although the author ultimately expresses reservations
about whether the Young Lions possess the musical maturity to sustain
the continued interest of a larger jazz audience, Nicholson does
provide another forum for Marsalis's take on his own role in the
jazz revival: "Everyone was saying jazz was dead but when they
heard me, they knew I was taking care of business" (vi).
Ironically, at the very moment in which Marsalis was "taking
care of business," the backlash began, insisting that "the
business" was actually the death of jazz. One need only consider
the Sartrean pun of the title of Francis Davis's Bebop and Nothingness
(1996), a book that chronicles the author's "growing disenchantment
with contemporary jazz." And by "contemporary jazz,"
Davis refers not to the "smooth jazz" of Kenny G., but
laments the dearth of musicians with "more on their minds than
a Columbia Records contract and a week at the Village Vanguard"
(x). If that sounds like a veiled reference to the Marsalis-led
renaissance, it's not; there is no attempt to conceal Davis's fury.
Davis would rather celebrate the under-reported avant-gardists "busy
collaborating with poets, choreographers, and painters in a game
attempt to erase the line that had traditionally separated jazz
from the other performing arts" (x). But he recognizes that
this is not the story reported in the popular media. For Davis,
articles such as the 1990 Time piece "perpetuate the [neo-conservative]
myth that jazz evolved from bebop to aberrant fusion to bop again,
with thirty-plus years of free and its offshoots not even counting
as jazz" (xi). While the neo-bop revival is featured on magazine
covers and reaps the benefits of distribution from major record
labels, jazz veers dangerously close to the Sartrean abyss: "But
if Time and the New York Times say that jazz is experiencing a renaissance,
it is. That's how it works" (xi). For writers such as Davis,
the jazz revival symbolized by Marsalis's Jazz At Lincoln Center
repertory represents nothing less than a slavish devotion to either
already-venerated composers (Monk, Ellington, Mingus, et al.) or
contemporary composers steeped in the bop idiom (Marsalis and his
own colleagues) rather than an attempt to encourage canonical reassessment
and force the audience to challenge its very definition of jazz.13
Eric Nisenson is a true kindred spirit to Francis Davis, but Nisenson
summons up even more rhetorical fury. Despite the title of his 1997
book, Blue: The Murder of Jazz, Nisenson suggests that he is not
writing an obituary for jazz, "because jazz is quite clearly
not dead" (1). Nevertheless, the discursive framework-which
looks very similar to the "jazz is not dead, but it looks pretty
sickly" protestations of early historians such as Ulanov and
Hodeir-begins with a chapter entitled "The Case For Murder."
Although not dead, jazz has become "a suffocatingly arid and
reactionary desert" (2), as if Ulanov's potentially "thriving
garden" has been blighted. The case for "murder"
depends upon the following evidence: 1) jazz radio (which is "virtually
dead"); 2) anemic record sales, and most damning; 3) the "increasing
diminuation of genuine creative vitality" (13). Much like Davis,
Nisenson objects to the increasingly narrow limits on the definition
of jazz imposed by figures such as Marsalis and Crouch. Burns, too,
succumbs to the myth of jazz's demise in the 1970s (much like the
opposition), claiming that electronic instruments were ill-suited
to "the musicians' original conception" (200).14 But Nisenson
believes that the attempt to revive bop idioms is even more dangerous:
"jazz without innovation is a dead art form" (220). In
Nisenson's own words, the jazz of the seventies "sucked,"
but at least it took chances by attempting to fuse jazz with the
electronic instrumentation of rock.
At the end of Blue, Nisenson ultimately closes with the rhetorical
question he has posed throughout the book ("Maybe jazz is dead"-247),
but then offers a testimonial that the recordings of Miles, Coltrane,
the Duke, and contemporary saxophonist Jan Garbarek help him to
believe in the continued vitality of jazz. But this hasty reversion
to a tone of hopefulness belies the implicit despair. A similar,
but more overt, pessimism appears in Gene Lees's Cats of Any Color
(1994). In Lees's final chapter, he establishes a binary even more
extreme than the ones outlined in Nisenson's and Davis's critiques.
For Lees, the Crouch/Marsalis definition of jazz is not only musically
reactionary, but racist as well since, in the mind of Lees, organizations
such as Jazz at Lincoln Center de-emphasize the contributions of
white performers and composers.15 So once again, the death of jazz
is the consequence:
Either jazz has evolved into a major art form, and an international
one, capable of exploring and inspiring the full range of human
experience and emotion. Or it is a small, shriveled, crippled art
useful only for the expression of the angers and resentments of
an American minority. If the former is true, it is the greatest
artistic gift of blacks to America, and America's greatest aesthetic
gift to the world. If the latter is true, it isn't dying. It's already
dead. (246)
For Lees, Davis, and Nisenson, the death of jazz is posed as a
rhetorical question. However, despite the reluctance to declare
it dead in a definitive manner, there is an implicit belief that
an art form that was born at the beginning of the twentieth century
has come to pass at the end of that same century. But is this the
end of the story? Obviously not, as the cycle of death and rebirth
continues as we enter a new century. A work such as Howard Mandel's
Future Jazz (1999) begins the process of reconciling the ways in
which jazz can simultaneously exist as both the neo-bop of the Young
Lions and the evolving jazz forms of true "fusion" musicians
(in the most general sense of that term) such as John Zorn's Masada,
The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Cassandra Wilson. Mandel's argument
is that-to no one's surprise that has read this far-that jazz is
very much alive. But rather than explore what will be, by now, a
very familiar argument, I would instead prefer to explore the reasons
why the jazz resurrection myth exerts such a powerful hold on those
who both play and write about the music.
II
"The image of death is the beginning of mythology."
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)
"Joseph Campbell is the guy I really want you to meet. He
knows myth and ritual like nobody else around, and he can also use
it to get a hell of a boot from, say, a guy like [jazz musician]
Slim Gaillard."
- Albert Murray, writing to Ralph Ellison in 1952
Scholars of comparative mythology frequently remind us of the similarity
of certain symbol-forming practices among otherwise diverse groups
of people. One such example is the tendency to comprehend the experience
of death through archetypal patterns involving death and resurrection.
As Alan Watts suggests, "the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth
is about the most basic theme of myth and religion" (Watts
qtd. in Henderson xi). For example, the Egyptian King Osiris was
entombed alive by usurpers in a coffin sealed with molten lead and
then cast into the Nile. Later, his body was cut into numerous pieces
before being resurrected in order to symbolize hope for a life beyond
the grave (and fostering the growth of mummification in Egypt).
A similar myth surrounding the Greek God Adonis (or the parallel
story involving the Babylonian Tammuz) relates a tale involving
a beautiful young hero who is ultimately destroyed by a wild boar
before being reborn as a flower. In more recent times, among the
Blackfoot Native Americans, rituals gave thanks for the sacrifice
of a buffalo (which had sustained the life of the tribe) and then
restored the slain buffalo to life. In the Roman Catholic Church,
the communion ritual transforms the bread and wine to the body and
blood of Jesus and thus makes sense of the brutality of the Crucifixion.
In each of these mythic archetypes a death that initially might
appear cruel and unnecessary is imbued with meaning. And all of
the rituals mentioned above-as well as countless others from cultures
both ancient and modern-involve a death by violent means, in which
the death then benefits the community. Such a death allows each
person to face his or her own death by accepting the condition as
a catalyst for a new life in which the martyr and the believer both
emerge into a richer and more mature condition. Given the prevalence
of myths such as these, one can begin to speculate about the possible
connections among these accounts of the violent death and resurrection
of the mythic hero and the similar fate of our personified hero:
jazz. In understanding the common links between various myths involving
what James Frazer first identified as a hero/scapegoat, we can begin
to understand the psychological attraction of an essential component
of jazz historiography: the cycle of death and resurrection.16
In each of these resurrection archetypes, the hero moves from the
condition of the non-living to the living, but looks different upon
his or her return. As Alan Watts writes of the resurrection of Jesus,
the hero has become perfected, and the resurrected state transcends
whatever limitations confined the hero in the previous state of
life:
[The resurrection] makes it clear that this is not merely the return
of a ghost from the dead, nor even a simple resuscitation of the
corpse. The Body which was nailed to the Cross and pierced with
the Spear rises again into life, but so transformed that it can
pass through closed doors and appear and disappear out of all conformity
to the ordinary physical laws. (170-71)
By moving beyond the physical, the resurrected Jesus becomes, in
Watts's formulation, "spiritualized," a part of the world
beyond the conventions of space and time and thus a reminder of
eternal life. The condition illustrates what Joseph Campbell refers
to as "Eternal Man" in The Hero With a Thousand Faces
(1968): "His solemn task and deed...is to return then to us,
transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed"
(20). Such is the condition in rebirth for Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz,
or any of the other scapegoat heroes. And such is the condition
of what I will refer to as Eternal Jazz.
Object-Relation and the Death of Jazz
To explain this widespread need to enact the death and resurrection
of jazz-at a diverse collection of historical and cultural moments-one
may productively turn to psychoanalysis, more specifically the field
of object relations theory, which lends itself to the study of human
relationships, as well as the interpretation of a wide range of
literary texts.17 An interest in the "object" began with
Freud and constitutes anything to which a person directs his or
her drives, including a work of art. While Freud and many of his
early followers believed the work of art to be part and parcel of
the masturbation fantasy and thus not related to a distinct aesthetic
impulse, more contemporary practitioners of psychoanalysis have
rejected Freud's assumption. In the wake of Freud's work, Melanie
Klein, Ernest Kris, and others became increasingly interested in
analyzing the impulse of artistic creation, followed by the pioneering
work of D.W. Winnicott. Winnicott believed that the aesthetic act-while
still originating in infantile activities-existed as an autonomous
human endeavor. For Winnicott, art derived not from masturbation
but from "play," in which the masturbatory element seemed
lacking: "if when a child is playing the physical excitement
of instinctual involvement becomes evident, then the playing stops,
or is at any rate spoiled" (Playing 39). Art becomes a lifelong
expression of the desire for play in which we negotiate our constant
movement between fantasy and reality. As Winnicott writes, "playing
facilitates growth and health...and psychoanalysis has been developed
as a highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication
with oneself and others" (Playing 41). Viewed in this way art,
too, becomes a form of therapy, a creative enterprise in which we
extend the process of play by continuing to mediate between the
inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the external
world.
As sensitive as Winnicott is to the distinct category of the aesthetic,
the most powerful reason for viewing the resurrection mythology
of jazz through a Winnicottian lens is that Winnicott sheds even
more light than Melanie Klein on the paradoxical, yet productive
nature of destructive impulses in human development. Such impulses
are paradoxical because fantasies of destruction actually work to
ensure healthy development.18 Winnicott's understanding of both
infant and adult relationships derives from a pattern of behavior
that initially involves aggressive, destructive fantasies prior
to the recognition of the "otherness" and the reality
of the object/person whose destruction was desired.19 As a result
of the developmental process, the object is transformed into a genuine
source of love and affection. This process of fantasized destruction
and resurrection originates earlier than even Freud's Oedipus complex.
For Winnicott, the mother's breast is both the source of life and
the initial object that must endure the "full-blooded id-drives"
of the infant. Winnicott conceives of the child's feeding as a violent
action: "It is not only that the baby imagines that he eats
the object, but also that the baby wants to take possession of the
contents of the object" (Maturational Processes 76). But also
crucial to the child's development is the eventual recognition that
the object will not only survive the attacks but also continue to
offer itself willingly to the nursing child. In the process, the
survival of the object also alerts the subject of his or her status
as a potential object.
What Winnicott is describing here is a form of graduation from the
stage of "object- relation" to the stage of "object-use."
In the former, the object is seen merely as an extension of oneself,
but in the transition to the latter, there is the recognition of
the object as an external phenomenon. The infant progresses from
a state in which he or she considers the mother's breast to be an
extension of the self to an awareness that it is an entity in its
own right. But as Winnicott describes the two conditions, "in
between, however, is the most difficult thing, perhaps, in human
development" (Playing 89). And, in an elaboration which seems
directly related to the psychological impetus behind the mythology
involving the death and resurrection of jazz, Winnicott explains
the nature of this difficult passage:
This change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys
the object. From here it could be argued by an armchair philosopher
that there is therefore no such thing in practice as the use of
an object: if the object is external, then the object is destroyed
by the subject. Should the philosopher come out of his chair and
sit on the floor with his patient, however, he will find that there
is an intermediate position. In other words, he will find that after
'subject relates to object' comes 'subject destroys object' (as
it becomes external); and then may come 'object survives destruction
by the subject.... A new feature thus arrives in the theory of object-relating.
The subject says to the object: "I destroyed you,' and the
object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject
says: 'Hullo object!' 'I destroyed you.' 'I love you.' 'You have
value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.'
(Playing 89-90)
In nearly every mythology involving the violent destruction of
the hero (who then, in effect, returns to "receive communications"),
a similar psychological process operates, as the hero's value is
enhanced because he or she survives the destructive impulse. When
the object (for our purposes, jazz) is destroyed in the fantasy
of the subject, the object becomes distinct and separate and takes
on a life of its own. The transformation of "jazz" to
"Eternal Jazz" intensifies the subject's relationship
to the music and derives from the fact that Eternal Jazz has indeed
survived. In the process, Eternal Jazz returns, much like Jesus
returns to the faithful, as a nurturing and educating force.
In rebirth, the stakes for jazz have been raised; upon its return
the burden carried by the music is far greater than in its earlier
state. While "jazz" serves as a form of expression for
the musician and language that addresses the complexity of the human
condition for the individual listener, Eternal Jazz carries an additional
social imperative that is easily identified when musicians and historians
speak of its revival. In his fears that jazz is being murdered,
Eric Nisenson believes that we have to learn from the mistakes of
the seventies when jazz really became endangered, "not just
for the sake of the music, but also for the sake of the country
that gave it birth" (233). In a world dominated by "cool"
media (to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan) such as the computer
and television, jazz restores "heat" to our lives and
allows us to connect to each other once again. Nisenson believes
that an improvisation-based art such as jazz-which depends so much
upon the immediate interplay between audience and artist-might actually
save us, if we are not already too disconnected from each other
that such a dialogue seems hopeless.
As a self-proclaimed contributor to the resurrection of jazz in
the eighties, Wynton Marsalis makes a similar claim of salvation
near the conclusion of Burns's Jazz. In an America beset by continuing
racial discord, jazz now serves as far more than a mere musical
language regulated by the physical laws of space and time: the group
improvisation of jazz teaches us to speak and to listen and, subsequently,
to imagine a better nation:
The music forces you, at all times, to address what other people
are thinking and for you to interact with them with empathy and
to deal with the process of working things out. That's how our music
really could teach what the meaning of American democracy is....
[Jazz] gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when
it becomes itself. And this music tells you that it will become
itself. (Marsalis qtd. in Jazz)
Without its death and rebirth, the music-as-hero cannot be expected
to carry this additional educational imperative. For readers of
Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the process
will be familiar: rebirth carries the responsibility of helping
to educate other members of the community. Such is a feature of
almost any story of the hero's resurrection, since resurrection
implies a state of transcendence: "The psyche, whether in individuals
or groups of people, is enabled to make a transition from one stage
of development to another and therefore brings the theme of death
and rebirth into close relation to problems of education whether
in a religious or secular sense" (Henderson 4). Eternal Jazz
adopts just this type of educational mission for Nisenson and Marsalis
in our current cultural climate as it did for musician Archie Shepp
during the sixties, when jazz was reborn with the experimentation
of Coltrane and Coleman. For Shepp, the free jazz musician should
seek "to liberate America aesthetically and socially from its
inhumanity," and Shepp believes that the jazz musician could
work to "exorcise" the nation (Shepp qtd. in Baraka, Black
Music 154-55). The process represents nothing less than the apotheosis
of jazz: moving far beyond the brothels of Storyville, the dancehalls
of the swing era, or the Manhattan clubs where bebop was born. Eternal
Jazz resides in a far more lofty place.
Given this theoretical framework, the consistently violent signifiers
that distinguish jazz historiography begin to make sense. In my
essay's epigraph, jazz was "starving" in the early sixties
for avant-gardist Jackie McLean, while opponents of the New Thing
could simultaneously speak of the "destruction of swing"
in the pages of Downbeat. The idea that a "murder" against
jazz had been plotted extends from Rudi Blesh's postwar calls for
an anti-swing, New Orleans-based revival to Eric Nisenson's anxieties
over the Marsalis-led murder at the end of that same century. But
not only is jazz always being destroyed, it also survives that threatened
destruction. In the process, Eternal Jazz achieves something Winnicott
refers to as "object constancy"-it becomes real to the
subject and reinforces the notion that both the object and subject
are distinct and real. The idea that an external object is alive
and nurturing is essential to the subject's continued growth. The
act of intended destruction is developmentally crucial, but even
more so is the act of survival. The continued survival of jazz thus
becomes a psychological imperative for those who chart its history,
as jazz transcends the acts of human violence. Every writer or musician
surveyed in this essay (who has imagined the death of jazz) is one
who loves the music and someone for whom the music is even greater
for refusing to die and continuing to nourish its listeners. The
process is quite similar to what Brooke Hopkins describes in a study
of the psychological impact of the Crucifixion: "The violence
of the act, the assault on Jesus' body, his hands, his feet, his
side, is fundamental here. The crucifixion (as it is represented)
is an essentially corporeal act.... [If] Jesus, as an analogue of
the mother or of the loved object, is 'always being destroyed,'
he is also always surviving" (256).
Such mythic representations of destructive impulses can thus be
viewed as a means of continuing developmental processes that began
at birth. As jazz has "matured," its historiography repeatedly
bears out Winnicott's belief that "growing up is inherently
an aggressive act" (Playing 144). In childhood games such as
"King of the Castle," Winnicott sees a recapitulation
of the destructive fantasies first manifested in an infant's nursing.
In an unconscious impulse that culminates in dominance through the
imagined death of all rivals, the adolescent's growth depends upon
fantasized destruction: "there is to be found death and personal
triumph as something in the process of maturation and in the acquisition
of adult status" (Playing 145). When discussing the drives
that motivate the child who is breast feeding or the similarly-structured
adult processes in which we learn to "use" objects and
recognize their externality, an analogous sense of object-use characterizes
many of the mythic narratives which encompass our culture. The pattern
of destruction and survival central to Winnicott's model of development
becomes a central feature to myths ranging from Osiris to the Crucifixion
to the death and resurrection of jazz. In the process, it is not
so much that jazz is reborn but rather the subject, himself, who
sees in Eternal Jazz a figure that offers nourishment on many levels:
a stronger community, dialogues (both musical and political) marked
by true empathy, and a more general liberation from inhumanity.
A final illustration of the power of Eternal Jazz appears in the
criticism of Ralph Ellison, a writer who frequently expressed a
nostalgia for the days of the local dance bands (the "territory
bands") of his Oklahoma City youth. In an essay celebrating
the art of vocalist Jimmy Rushing, Ellison laments "the thinness"
of modern jazz in 1958:
The blues, the singer, the band and the dancers formed the vital
whole of jazz as an institutional form [in the 1930s], and even
today neither part is quite complete without the rest. The thinness
of much of so-called "modern jazz" is especially reflective
of this loss of wholeness, and it is quite possible that Rushing
retains his vitality simply because he has kept close to the small
Negro public dance. (47)
For Ellison, the jazz dances of Rushing's heyday were a vital "public
rite" that has disappeared, and the loss of jazz as a dance
music is not simply a loss of a popular form of entertainment:
[Rushing] expressed a value, an attitude about the world for which
our lives afforded no other definition. We had a Negro church and
a segregated school, a few lodges and fraternal organizations, and
beyond these there was all the great white world. We were pushed
off to what seemed to be the least desirable side of the city...
and our system of justice was based upon Texas law; yet there was
an optimism within the Negro community and a sense of possibility
which, despite our awareness of limitation..., transcended all of
this, and it was this rock-bottom sense of reality, coupled with
our sense of the possibility of rising above it, which sounded in
Rushing's voice. (44-45)
In retrospect, Ellison is aware of the profound significance of
an art which some would dismiss as mere entertainment (and which
Ellison himself perhaps under-valued in his youth). At a time in
the late 1950s when Rushing's art is dormant, Ellison proclaims
that "we need Rushing" to once again remind Americans
of "who and where we are" (49). The return of Jimmy Rushing
from his European exile might help to restore the necessary wholeness
to the disintegrating fabric of American life, a process that shows
how jazz has moved out of the dancehall in order to occupy a vital
position as a local and national institution. Although Ellison was
a frequent critic of postwar jazz, and it was not only jazz that
endured a painful cycle of death and rebirth. For Ellison and, I
would argue, most every writer surveyed in the present essay, the
jazz listener becomes an integral part of the process of rebirth.
One sees this point very clearly in "Flamenco," an early
essay in which Ellison concludes by describing the blues aesthetic
at the heart of both flamenco and jazz: "the flamenco voice
resembles the blues voice, which mocks the despair stated explicitly
in the lyric, and it expresses the great human joke which is the
secret of all folklore and myth: that though we be dismembered daily
we shall always rise up again" (100).
And so jazz, too, always rises again. In the recently-published
Future Jazz, Howard Mandel describes the sixties as the "Janus
Age of Jazz," a time when many jazz pioneers looked backward
(as yet another New Orleans revival flourished) and when The New
Thing looked far into the future. In reality, every period in jazz
has sported two faces: one that claims that jazz is dead or dying
and one that proclaims its rebirth. But each of these faces requires
its counterpart; in the mythic cycles of death and rebirth that
I surveyed in Part One, the violent death is the necessary prelude
to a more glorious rebirth. Throughout its history, as Barry Ulanov
recognized back in the early 1950s, jazz has been neglected in its
homeland, constantly needing to defend its existence. Given its
continuing underdog status-consider that today jazz record sales
only account for roughly three percent of the market-jazz must still
fight for its cultural life. In the 1980s, jazz stormed the university,
an act which marked the latest incarnation of Eternal Jazz. Jazz
died, and was reborn, and in the process brought the theme of death
and resurrection into close relation with the field of education.
Whenever the passing of jazz has been declared, one constant consequence
is that it returns as an art form which not only entertains, but
which elevates the spirit:
Jazz music deals with the soul of our nation...[and] through this
music we can see a lot about what it means to be American. In our
generation, there was a belief that jazz music was dead, so there
was all the celebration that went with that: "Ahh, finally,
no more jazz." Now here we are-we're still swingin,' and we
ain't going nowhere. There's plenty of us out here swingin,' and
we're going to keep swingin.' (Wynton Marsalis qtd. in Jazz)
As we have seen, the irony here is that the pleasure derived from
the death of jazz comes not only from the people who dislike jazz:
those for whom jazz is elitist, or difficult, or even those who
consider it a "low" cultural form. True pleasure also
springs from those who imagine its death, all the while drawing
nourishment from the music as it survives the violent fantasy. The
desire to destroy jazz can also be seen as a natural extension of
processes of human development, in which the music is not an escape
from reality but a way of confronting fundamental truths about our
relationships from birth to adulthood. The resurrection of jazz
not only reminds us of our own distinct identities, but also offers
the opportunity for the music to address the social ills of the
communities in which we live. Such was the argument of Burns's Jazz,
the most recent jazz history examined in the present essay. And
further proof that the cycle of jazz's death and resurrection continues
can be obtained again from one of the newspaper headlines that recently
attended the British release of the film. One review, in particular,
appearing in the 25 May 2001 issue of The Guardian carries a headline
which initiates the cycle once more: "Jazz: The Obituary."
Notes
1 In addition to writing two early histories of jazz-Le Jazz Hot
(1934) and The Real Jazz (1942), Panassié published the magazine
Jazz-Hot, which was one of the most influential jazz periodicals
of the World War II-era.
2 Williams's objection to the fusion of jazz and rock is related
to a certain rhythmic incompatibility: "the beat in jazz moves
forward; it is played to contribute to the all but irresistible
momentum of the music: jazz goes somewhere. The beat in most rock
bobs and bounces away in one place.... Rock stays somewhere"
(Williams qtd. in Burns 449). In addition, Williams's view of the
post-Coltrane era can be surmised from his seminal work, The Jazz
Tradition, in which the contents progress directly from Coltrane
contemporary Eric Dolphy directly to the World Saxophone Quartet,
who released their first album in 1979.
3 James Lincoln Collier is one among many who have written of the
"jazz Diaspora" which followed the closing of Storyville.
By 1978, when Collier was writing The Making of Jazz, he would write
that "the effect on employment for musicians was less drastic
than some writers have claimed" (79), but still argues that
the event had a "symbolic effect" in pulling many of the
leading New Orleans musicians out of the city, namely Joseph "King"
Oliver and Sidney Bechet. A much less critical account of the myth
of Storyville's demise appears in Nathan Pearson's Goin' to Kansas
City (1987). See Chapter Two, "Sources of the Early Kansas
City Jazz Style: Ragtime and New Orleans Jazz."
4 There has been much discussion about the primary motivation for
the 1942 recording ban. It is true that the shellac used in phonograph
records was also a primary ingredient in bullet coating and electric
wiring. However, as Scott DeVeaux reports in The Birth of Bebop,
an active recycling campaign ensured that the shellac drawn from
old, worn-out recordings would prevent a complete interruption in
the supply of new recordings. See pages 239-40 and 295-99.
5 The pages of Metronome magazine provided a home base for the
proponents of swing. The magazine had begun in 1892 as a source
for parlor music, but by 1935-the year of Benny Goodman's famed
Palomar Ballroom concert-the focus of Metronome had shifted to dance
music and musicians. Noted contributors such as Barry Ulanov, as
well as the magazine's editorial staff, maintained that swing and
jazz were synonymous in pieces such as "Jazz vs. Swing, Which
is Which? Are They Both the Same," Metronome Apr. 1944: 22-23.
6 One of the most vigorous statements on the subject of the unchanging
nature of jazz appears in Theodor Adorno's essay "Perennial
Fashion-Jazz." In arguing for the rhythmic "limitations"
of the music, Adorno suggests that "jazz has in its essence
remained static" and that "millions of people seem never
to tire of its monotonous attractions" (121).
7 Jazz writer and discographer Douglas Payne, who has offered valuable
commentary on an early draft of this essay, has reminded me of the
many record labels in addition to Pablo Records that were releasing
traditional jazz in the 1970s. The list includes companies such
as Timeless, East Wind, and Steeplechase Records, all of which are
based outside of the United States.
8 This statement appears, among other places, in John Edward Hasse's
Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1993, 322. In addition, Burns reinforces the
Ellington "resurrection" in the companion book to Jazz
by placing a caption over two-page photo spread on Newport '56 that
simply reads "Rebirth."
9 According to the official website for the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA), two of Marsalis's mid-eighties recordings,
Hot House Flowers and Standard Time, have been certified gold records
with more than 500,000 copies sold. Only a handful of other jazz
records can claim this distinction. See <http://www.riaa.com>.
10 Marsalis is once again in select company, as only Louis Armstrong,
Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk preceded him on
the cover of Time, and his predecessors appeared there in the period
from 1949 to 1964.
11 The title of the one book-length study of the New Orleans revival
of the 1960s continues the religiously-charged language that often
envelops jazz history. See William Bissonnette's The Jazz Crusade,
Bridgeport, CN: Special Request Books, 1992.
12 One observes a display of the liturgical hyperbole that Marsalis
inspires in Crouch's liner notes for the compact disc In This House,
On This Morning (1993). In describing the debut live performance
of this piece at New York's Lincoln Center, Crouch suggests,
Marsalis and his men executed a victory far beyond the technical.
They arrived at that place where the wick of the soul caught fire,
casting a large and variously shaped light through the wonderfully
designed lamp that was In This House, On This Morning. That fiery
wick spoke its brightness through the bush of silence and darkness
with such aesthetic authority that Pearl Fountain, Marsalis's housekeeper
and a veteran of many, many long mornings and evenings in church,
said of the performance, "God visited you all last evening.
(194)
This essay is also reprinted in Crouch's collection of essays The
All-American Skin Game, or The Decoy of Race (1997). An alternative
view of the debut of In This House appeared in the pages of the
Village Voice, in which a reviewer described the piece as under-rehearsed
and the Lincoln Center patrons as speeding toward the exits before
the conclusion of the concert.
13 The concluding chapter of Gene Lees's Cats of Any Color (1995)
elaborates on the subject of the rather narrow breadth of the Jazz
at Lincoln Center programming practices in the early 1990s. See
pages 187-246.
14 For me, there is a contradiction inherent in Nisenson's anti-electric
stance here. For Nisenson, the "fusion" era of the seventies
is a period of jazz dormancy that prefigures its current critical
state. However, Nisenson also claims that "jazz" and "fusion"
are really synonymous, pointing to the fact that jazz has fused
successfully with many different musical forms. While Nisenson lauds
the jazzy baroque fugues of the Modern Jazz Quartet and the influence
of Swedish folk music on the work of trumpeter Art Farmer, he seems
convinced that the amalgamation of jazz and funk or rock rhythms
is far less successful. Perhaps it is simply a matter of taste,
but in my case for the vitality of jazz in the seventies, I would
submit to the court Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, Herbie Hancock's
Head Hunters, and a host of early-seventies recordings on Creed
Taylor's CTI Records. As early as the sixties, the jazz "boogaloo"
provides another example of the productive combination of jazz and
rock beats. The boogaloo essentially "straightened out"
the eighth notes of the traditional swing rhythm while retaining
the soloist's improvisation and plenty of syncopation within the
instrumental ensemble. For an example, sample Lee Morgan's "The
Sidewinder," one of the most commercially successful Blue Note
recordings in the label's history.
15 Lees draws the title of his book from a quote by Louis Armstrong.
Following the controversy that surrounded the integration of Armstrong's
band (which included white trombonist Jack Teagarden), Armstrong
had pined for a time when "cats of any color could play together."
16 There is a useful summary of some of Frazer's findings in David
Leeming's Mythology: The Voyage of the Hero (1998). See especially
pages 157-82.
17 The use of object-relations theory has been applied in the interpretations
of texts ranging from Macbeth to the poetry of Frost and Wordsworth
to D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. For such examples, see
Peter Rudnytsky, ed., Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces:
Literary Uses of D.W. Winnicott (1993).
18 For more on the differences between Winnicott's and Klein's
conceptions of the ultimate source of the creative impulse, see
Winnicott's "Creativity and its Origins," reprinted in
Playing and Reality (1971).
19 An essential component of object-relations theory is that the
"object" may be just that-a blanket or stuffed animal
in childhood-or it may be person, particularly a mother, father,
or someone in a close relationship to the subject. However, even
in adulthood, people retain close connections to objects, including
food or alcohol, which is why the field is not known as "human
relations" theory.
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