[Dixielandjazz] A Lost Era of Jazz Comes To Life

[Charles Suhor]

A fascinating piece. Thanks for sending it, Steve.

A comment leading up to the subject of the article--When I was 
researching the post-60s times for a history of jazz course a few years 
ago, all of the writers confirmed my sense that after avant garde and 
fusion jazz there was an explosion of syntheses and no clear single 
direction--no new Bird, Trane, or Ornette but lots of good and not so 
good stuff that couldn't be described as the "next step," as  the 
previous history of jazz had been described (oversimplified, but 
legitimately) in terms of evolving styles and artistic lineages.

The writers gave the post 60s phenomenon names like "the fragmentation 
of jazz styles" and couldn't find a unified movement. Among the 
syntheses, the neo-bop of Wynton Marsalis is most popular, all agreed. 
Some lamented the lack of an innovative giant or a new defining style, 
but others noted that there's no reason to suppose that a real or 
imagined linearity will occur. (It's arguable that there's a similar 
diffusion in classical music, the novel, and other arts in the latter 
half the 20th century.)

Back to the artcile. As I see the huge discographical effort described 
there, it seems to amount to an aggregate that doesn't paint a picture. 
Avakinan's work and that of other discographers of early jazz, swing, 
bop, etc., showed the contours of the movement. The description of the 
recordings in the article sounds like flung confetti. Agreed, it's 
better to have all those particles gathered in heaps than to not have a 
place for them--access is really important--but I don't see where, in 
terms of what Max Roach called recordings as "a textbook of jazz," a 
text is being constituted. It's more the discographical equivalent of a 
table of random numbers.

Charlie

On Dec 6, 2006, at 8:47 AM, Steve Barbone wrote:

> As the article states below: It seems as if the purpose of this 
> evolving
> jazz Blogosphere movement is: “to give this essential music its due and
> share it with folks so they can hear for themselves”
>
> 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
>
> “Jazz just kind of died,” said the saxophonist Branford Marsalis. “It 
> just
> kind of went away for a while.” 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 “Jazz,” 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
> year’s 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 music’s most conflicted period.
>
> The movement, so to speak, has its origins in a posting by the 
> trumpeter and
> composer Dave Douglas on his label’s blog, greenleafmusic.com. “I’m 
> reading
> a new book by Philip Jenkins called ‘Decade of Nightmares: The End of 
> the
> Sixties and the Making of Eighties America,’ ” Mr. Douglas wrote at the
> beginning of the summer, “and 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 couldn’t handle, and this may help explain why.”
>
> That book’s principal argument is that the 1970s saw the failures and
> excesses of ’60s 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. “There’s a demonization of musicians who 
> pushed the
> boundaries, successfully and importantly, in that period,” he wrote, 
> “and it
> has crept into the way history is told and music is taught.”
>
> Noting that “jazz” became an impossibly broad designation around this 
> time,
> Mr. Douglas posed a rhetorical question: “Is there a writer who can 
> take on
> the project of an unbiased overview of music since the end of the 
> Vietnam
> War?” And borrowing Mr. Jenkins’s benchmark of Richard M. Nixon’s
> resignation as the official end of the 1960s, he proposed a new jazz 
> history
> that would acknowledge “a generation of multiplicity,” beginning in 
> 1974 and
> stretching to the end of the cold war.
>
> The call hung in the air for a while. Then, near summer’s 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. Douglas’s 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 (“Every note is perfect,” he 
> wrote
> of Charlie Haden’s out-of-print LP “The Golden Number”) and often 
> pithy (“If
> you don’t like ‘The Calling,’ I can’t help you,” he said about a track 
> from
> Pat Metheny’s album “Rejoicing,” also featuring Mr. Haden).
>
> “I could have made this list much longer,” he wrote in conclusion, 
> “but how
> many Paul Bley and Mal Waldron records can you put on a list without 
> looking
> silly?” 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 “textbooks” of 
> jazz,
> it shouldn’t be surprising that Mr. Douglas’s 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 club’s 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. (“This whole process is exactly what I lived through,” 
> 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 MP3’s featured at destination-out.com, usually 
> grafted
> from out-of-print LPs and posted with chirpy yet incisive analysis, do 
> serve
> a similar purpose: “to give this essential music its due and share it 
> with
> folks so they can hear for themselves,” 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 it’s 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. What’s 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 music’s 
> future.
> Many overlapping versions of the future, to be precise.
>
>
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