[Dixielandjazz] A Lost Era of Jazz Comes To Life

[Steve Barbone]

As the article states below: It seems as if the purpose of this evolving
jazz Blogosphere movement is: ³to give this essential music its due and
share it with folks so they can hear for themselves²

Not a bad idea as I see it.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


In the Blogosphere, an Evolving Movement Brings Life to a Lost Era of Jazz

NY TIMES - By NATE CHINEN - December 6, 2006

³Jazz just kind of died,² said the saxophonist Branford Marsalis. ³It just
kind of went away for a while.² He was looking back to the 1970s, an
uncertain era when some jazz musicians turned to rock or funk, and others
pushed deeper into heady abstraction. His assessment, conveyed in the final
episode of ³Jazz,² the influential Ken Burns film, seemed as definitive as a
coffin nail. 

But over the last six months, a far-flung contingent of musicians and
aficionados has made an effort to upend that prevailing notion, armed with
stacks of vinyl, high-speed Internet and a shared conviction that things
back then were really far from moribund. Along the way, they touched off the
year¹s most animated public discourse on jazz, a democratic exchange that
culminated last weekend in the debut of behearer.com, an interactive
database devoted to the music¹s most conflicted period.

The movement, so to speak, has its origins in a posting by the trumpeter and
composer Dave Douglas on his label¹s blog, greenleafmusic.com. ³I¹m reading
a new book by Philip Jenkins called ŒDecade of Nightmares: The End of the
Sixties and the Making of Eighties America,¹ ² Mr. Douglas wrote at the
beginning of the summer, ³and I think there are some pertinent tie-ins to
the elusive history of the last four decades of American music. Those are
the decades Ken Burns couldn¹t handle, and this may help explain why.²

That book¹s principal argument is that the 1970s saw the failures and
excesses of ¹60s idealism compounded by national horrors like Vietnam and
Watergate, resulting in the rise of a paranoid conservatism. On his blog Mr.
Douglas drew a parallel. ³There¹s a demonization of musicians who pushed the
boundaries, successfully and importantly, in that period,² he wrote, ³and it
has crept into the way history is told and music is taught.²

Noting that ³jazz² became an impossibly broad designation around this time,
Mr. Douglas posed a rhetorical question: ³Is there a writer who can take on
the project of an unbiased overview of music since the end of the Vietnam
War?² And borrowing Mr. Jenkins¹s benchmark of Richard M. Nixon¹s
resignation as the official end of the 1960s, he proposed a new jazz history
that would acknowledge ³a generation of multiplicity,² beginning in 1974 and
stretching to the end of the cold war.

The call hung in the air for a while. Then, near summer¹s end, a reply of
sorts appeared on Do the Math, the blog of the band Bad Plus
(thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath). Ethan Iverson, the pianist in the band
and the chief blogger on the site, answered Mr. Douglas¹s query not with an
unbiased overview, but a catalog of hundreds of cherished albums from his
collection, complete with casual but articulate annotations.

Mr. Iverson was transparently subjective (³Every note is perfect,² he wrote
of Charlie Haden¹s out-of-print LP ³The Golden Number²) and often pithy (³If
you don¹t like ŒThe Calling,¹ I can¹t help you,² he said about a track from
Pat Metheny¹s album ³Rejoicing,² also featuring Mr. Haden).

³I could have made this list much longer,² he wrote in conclusion, ³but how
many Paul Bley and Mal Waldron records can you put on a list without looking
silly?² All told, Mr. Iverson had churned out nearly 5,000 words.

Within a couple of days, Do the Math was so bombarded with feedback that Mr.
Iverson set up a temporary e-mail address and announced a one-week call for
outside submissions. By the end of that week there was not only a blizzard
of e-mail messages from around the world but also a handful of lengthy
responses from every corner of a nascent jazz blogosphere.

Darcy James Argue, the leader of a big band called the Secret Society,
posted his own expansive list at secretsociety.typepad.com. Steve Smith, the
classical editor at Time Out New York and a contributor to The New York
Times, spilled even more words than Mr. Iverson at
nightafternight.blogs.com, beginning with an erudite endorsement of John
Carter, an overlooked composer. Jeff Jackson (blog name: Chilly Jay Chill)
and Jeff Golick (Prof. Drew LeDrew), proprietors of destination-out.com,
piped up in favor of the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and the saxophonist
Marion Brown. 

The resulting list of nearly 500 albums ‹ compiled by a Boston-based
saxophonist named Pat Donaher at visionsong.blogspot.com ‹ is essentially
the product of an open-source, alternative canon-building sweep. Though
idiosyncratic and avant-garde in temperament, it feels admirably
nondogmatic. Fusion flagships (Weather Report, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu
Orchestra) are selectively represented, as are acoustic efforts by veterans
like Tommy Flanagan and Joe Henderson. Because the timeline stretches
through the 1980s, Wynton and Branford Marsalis both make the list.

Given that Max Roach once referred to recordings as the ³textbooks² of jazz,
it shouldn¹t be surprising that Mr. Douglas¹s plea for a history ended up
yielding a discography. In fact, the online flurry loosely evokes a
formative moment in jazz culture, when a handful of enthusiasts gathered
periodically at the New Haven apartment of the historian Marshall Stearns to
listen to, and argue about, rare jazz recordings.

That coterie, under the official-sounding banner of the United Hot Clubs of
America, had no blogs at their disposal ‹ this was 70 years ago ‹ but they
were going after much the same idea. One of the club¹s members, a Yale
undergraduate named George Avakian, parlayed his enthusiasm into a legendary
career as a record producer; in the process he had a hand in the very first
jazz reissues. (³This whole process is exactly what I lived through,² Mr.
Avakian said last week when presented with printouts of the recent blog
exchange.)

Of course the jazz blogosphere is not a modern facsimile of the United Hot
Clubs. Yet the free MP3¹s featured at destination-out.com, usually grafted
from out-of-print LPs and posted with chirpy yet incisive analysis, do serve
a similar purpose: ³to give this essential music its due and share it with
folks so they can hear for themselves,² as Mr. Jackson wrote in a recent
e-mail message. 

Behearer.com, named after a Dewey Redman album and assembled over the last
two months by a handful of volunteers, shares that impulse of openness. The
charge has been led by a programmer, Brett Porter (bgporter.net). At the
moment it¹s not much more than a cross-indexed list of recordings, starting
with the blog-consensus catalog. But because the site has the same sort of
user-editing functionality as Wikipedia, it has the potential to evolve into
a clearinghouse. What¹s needed is the continuing engagement of a community
online. 

Mr. Douglas has faith in that community, which has supported Greenleaf Music
since it was established last year. This week the label will record his
working quintet at the Jazz Standard; each set will be offered as a $7
download within 24 hours at musicstem.com. In some ways this arrangement
recalls the rugged self-reliance of the 1970s avant-garde, but with better
technology and a savvier business plan.

It also underscores a point about the jazz blogosphere: no matter how
retrospective the discussion, virtually all of the participants have a stake
in the contemporary scene. So their interconnectivity has implications
beyond the scope of history; you could even make the Marsalisesque argument
that by preserving the past, their efforts help secure the music¹s future.
Many overlapping versions of the future, to be precise.