[Dixielandjazz] What Jazz Is - and Isn't by Wynton Marsalis (1988)

[Stephen G Barbone]

Fun to look back 20 years and see what Marsalis was saying about Jazz.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone

NY Times - July 31, 1988 - By Wynton Marsalis
MUSIC; What Jazz Is - and Isn't

My generation finds itself wedged between two opposing traditions. One  
is the tradition we know in such wonderful detail from the enormous  
recorded legacy that tells anyone who will listen that jazz broke the  
rules of European conventions and created rules of its own that were  
so specific, so thorough and so demanding that a great art resulted.  
This art has had such universal appeal and application to the  
expression of modern life that it has changed the conventions of  
American music as well as those of the world at large.

The other tradition, which was born early and stubbornly refuses to  
die, despite all the evidence to the contrary, regards jazz merely as  
a product of noble savages - music produced by untutored, unbuttoned  
semiliterates for whom jazz history does not exist. This myth was  
invented by early jazz writers who, in attempting to escape their  
American prejudices, turned out a whole world of new cliches based on  
the myth of the innate ability of early jazz musicians. Because of  
these writers' lack of understanding of the mechanics of music, they  
thought there weren't any mechanics. It was the ''they all can sing,  
they all have rhythm'' syndrome. If that was the case, why was there  
only one Louis Armstrong?

That myth is being perpetuated to this day by those who profess an  
openness to everything - an openness that in effect just shows  
contempt for the basic values of the music and of our society. If  
everything is good, why should anyone subject himself to the pain of  
study? Their disdain for the specific knowledge that goes into jazz  
creation is their justification for saying that everything has its  
place. But their job should be to define that place - is it the toilet  
or the table?

To many people, any kind of popular music now can be lumped with jazz.  
As a result, audiences too often come to jazz with generalized  
misconceptions about what it is and what it is supposed to be. Too  
often, what is represented as jazz isn't jazz at all. Despite attempts  
by writers and record companies and promoters and educators and even  
musicians to blur the lines for commercial purposes, rock isn't jazz  
and new age isn't jazz, and neither are pop or third stream. There may  
be much that is good in all of them, but they aren't jazz.

I recently completed a tour of jazz festivals in Europe in which only  
two out of 10 bands were jazz bands. The promoters of these festivals  
readily admit most of the music isn't jazz, but refuse to rename these  
events ''music festivals,'' seeking the esthectic elevation that jazz  
offers. This is esthetic name-dropping, attempting to piggyback on the  
achievements of others, and duping the public. It's like a great  
French chef lending his name, not his skills, to a a fast-food  
restaurant because he knows it's a popular place to eat. His concern  
is for quantity, not quality. Those who are duped say ''This greasy  
hamburger sure is good; I know it's good, because Pierre says it's  
good, and people named Pierre know what the deal is.'' Pierre then  
becomes known as a man of the people, when he actually is exploiting  
the people.

All the forces at work to blur the lines deplore the purist ethic in  
jazz, but try to capitalize commercially on the esthetic reputation of  
jazz. In other fields, purism is considered a form of heroism - the  
good guy who won't sell out - but in jazz that purism is incorrectly  
perceived as stagnation and the inability to change. Therefore, those  
who are most lauded by the record companies and writers and promoters  
are those who most exploit the public. The major obstacle facing this  
generation of musicians is finding out what makes something jazz.

Andre Malraux, in ''The Voices of Silence,'' observes that art itself  
puts the biggest challenge before an artist, not the superficial  
statistics of sociology: ''Artists do not stem from their childhoods,  
but from their conflict with the achievements of their predecessors;  
not from their own formless world, but from the struggle with the form  
which others have imposed on life.''

Feeling as I do that the greatness of jazz lies not only in its  
emotion but also in its deliberate artifice, I have tried, in helping  
to shape Lincoln Center's Classical Jazz series, to convey some of the  
conscious struggle that has gone into the great jazz of the past and  
to show how it impinges on the present.

The irony of my generation is that now not just commentators but even  
many musicians still believe in misconceptions that long ago were  
rejected by men like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who knew that  
their work was much more than the result of talent forged by adverse  
social conditions. For too long, people have attributed Armstrong's  
spiritual depth and technical fluidity to the supposed fact that he  
didn't know anything about music, couldn't read music and played in  
the hallowed halls of prostitution, knife fights and murder. But  
Armstrong grew up in a New Orleans that demanded many levels of  
musical sophistication. In a highly competitive musical milieu, one  
had to know melodies, how to phrase them beautifully, the harmonies of  
those melodies, many kinds of rhythms, and so on. Access to such  
knowledge allowed younger generations of musicians to develop what had  
only been implied in earlier music.

Armstrong did that with ragtime, with the popular songs of his day,  
and with the styles of trumpet players like King Oliver. He knew he  
was refining what he heard around him, and he didn't like to be  
thought of as a ''rough'' player, which is why he spoke highly of  
those who had ''sweet'' tones.

But the noble-savage cliche has prevailed over the objective fact of  
the art - and this is manifest in my generation's inability to produce  
more than a few musicians dedicated to learning and mastering the  
elements like blues and swing that gave Louis Armstrong, Duke  
Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker such unarguable artistic  
power. Young musicians who want to follow that path these days cannot  
find anywhere to practice their art. In schools that I teach in around  
the country, I find the teaching of the arts and of American culture  
almost nonexistent; perhaps that's because jazz is central to American  
culture. While faced with this problem, musicians are also faced with  
the constant clamor for something ''new.'' How can something new and  
substantial, not eccentric and fraudulent, be developed when the  
meaning of what's old is not known? Could we have gotten to the moon  
without even understanding Newtonian physics?

I am not saying that there should not be artistic variety. How could I  
say that, when so much of jazz results from the work of great  
individuals? But those great individuals all had in common the pursuit  
of quality and the painful experience of discipline. To accomplish  
what they did, each of the great individuals in jazz took the time and  
effort to master particular things. They were not satisfied to stand  
above the engagement that is necessary to perfect craft.

With these thoughts in mind, we designed a Classical Jazz series this  
year that deals with the music of Duke Ellington, Tadd Dameron and Max  
Roach, as well as with evenings given over to singers and  
instrumentalists interpreting standard songs. The series focuses on  
two things as ''classical'' in jazz: the compositions of major writers  
and the quality of improvisation.

In the first case, musicians have struggled with the problem of  
creating the sound of jazz in preconceived notes, rather than in on- 
the-spot improvisation, in tones that have been pondered and edited  
until the writer is satisfied. This doesn't mean that the individual  
piece won't be reworked every now and then while still remaining in  
progress. (Ellington and Charles Mingus were noted for this.) In the  
second case, when jazz singers or instrumentalists take over a song,  
they use all of the sophistication Louis Armstrong first brought to a  
very high level of craft, virtuosity and feeling. This is the  
classical form of jazz performance: when improvisation works so well  
that it can stand on its own as composition. This kind of  
improvisation is what jazz musicians raised to an art through deep  
study and contemplation.

While enjoyment and entertainment are paramount matters in the  
Classical Jazz series,it should be clear that we also feel a need to  
help promote understanding of what happens in jazz. An important part  
of the series, therefore, are the program notes by Stanley Crouch,  
which seek to explain the intent of the musicians as well as the  
meaning of the art. Although jazz can be enjoyed on many levels, from  
the superficial to the profound, we feel that the proper presentation  
of notes, song titles and even small discographies will help audiences  
better understand the essential elements of the music and thereby  
enjoy the music even more.

Duke Ellington exemplifies a mastery of the relationship of knowledge  
to development. He was present almost at the beginning of jazz; his  
career spanned five decades of continuous and unprecendented musical  
development: he continuously proved that no one was more capable of  
translating the varied and complex arenas of American experience into  
tone. His recorded legacy gives us the most accurate tonal history of  
the 20th century. Duke Ellington developed the implications he heard  
in the lines and phrasing of Armstrong's improvisations, and he  
expanded upon the compositions and arrangements of everyone around  
him, including Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Fletcher Henderson.

Max Roach is part of this serious hierarchy of musical giants. All  
great instrumentalists have a superior quality of sound, and his is  
one of the marvels of contemporary music. The drum set is actually  
many intruments in one - the bass drum, the snare drum, tom-tom, sock  
cymbal, crash cymbal, and ride cymbal - and they all have unique  
characteristics. To play them all at once requires an individual touch  
and attack for each one. The roundness and nobility of sound on the  
drums and the clarity and precision of the cymbals distinguishes Max  
Roach as a peerless master of this uniquely American instrument.

His stature as a musician, composer and bandleader is the result of  
his having created a larger and more varied body of work than any  
other drummer-leader. He has done solo pieces, pieces for drums and  
voice, for jazz ensembles, percussion ensembles, for choirs, and has  
performed with video. While working with Charlie Parker, Dizzy  
Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Clifford Brown, he  
developed a unique vocabulary that gave the drums another level of  
identity. He played the drums in a way that not only kept time and  
accentuated the beat, but he also developed the call-and-response idea  
central to the foundations of American music. He has refined his style  
over the course of the years, and his playing now has the grandeur  
found only in those who had exceptional talent to begin with, and  
matched that talent with an ongoing dedication to sustained development.

Classical Jazz at Lincoln Center - whether celebrating the work of an  
individual artist or using the improvisational talents of masters like  
J.J. Johnson, Jon Hendricks, Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Sweets Edison  
and the other artists on the programs - is intent on helping to give  
to jazz, its artists and its products their deserved place in American  
culture. I also feel that the Classical Jazz series gives Lincoln  
Center additional reason to regard itself as a center of world culture.

Jazz commentary is too often shaped by a rebellion against what is  
considered the limitations of the middle class. The commentators  
mistakenly believe that by willfully sliding down the intellectual,  
spiritual, economic or social ladder, they will find freedom down  
where the jazz musicians (i.e. ''real'' people) lie. Jazz musicians,  
however, are searching for the freedom of ascendance. This is why they  
practice. Musicians like Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Elvin Jones, Max  
Roach, Sweets Edison and Betty Carter are rebelling against the idea  
that they should be excluded from choosing what they want to do or  
think, against being forced into someone else's mold, whether it be  
the social agendas of the conservative establishment or the new fake  
liberal establishment of which many well-meaning jazz observers are  
part. They feel knowledge gives them choice; that ignorance is bondage.

The late Ellington pieces that will be featured - ''Such Sweet  
Thunder'' (1957), ''Suite Thursday'' (1960) and ''Anatomy of a  
Murder'' (1959) - show how well Ellington mastered the integration of  
rhythm section and band; these extended pieces prove that he is one of  
the great musical thinkers as well as one of the great masters of  
musical form. Integrating the rhythm section and the rest of the band  
is not a simple job, and I believe the jazz pieces of concert  
composers are almost always failures because they have not mastered  
that idea. Concert composers must accept the fact that a rhythm  
section is part of the sound in a very different way than anything in  
European music; but they settle for corny syncopations, which only  
partly suggest the range of force and impetus provided by the rhythm  
section.

Genius always manifests itself through attention to fine detail. Works  
of great genius sound so natural they appear simple, but this is the  
simplicity of elimination, not the simplicity of ignorance. This kind  
of intricacy is abundantly evident in these late works. Not only are  
difficult form schemes arrived at and executed harmonically,  
melodically, rhythmically and texturally, but Ellington also  
successfully manipulates interrelated dance moods and tempos that  
imply a totally innovative vision of form as it applies to movement.  
Even more amazing than the complexity of these pieces is the fact that  
we can still hear quite clearly the sound of the early New Orleans  
polyphonic style that attracted Ellington to jazz as a young man.

Though Tadd Dameron is not as well known as many other giants, he was  
one of the finest composers jazz has produced. He created a body of  
material of great originality and personality that still addresses the  
fundamentals of jazz - blues and swing. What distinguishes Dameron is  
how successfully he transformed the sound and the substance of the  
jazz ensemble through skillful adaptation of the innovations of  
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. His work is difficult and  
beautiful, which is what I consider the greatest challenge in modern  
music. As Duke Ellington once said, some people think that something  
has to be ugly in order to be modern. Like Ellington, Dameron didn't  
believe that.

His music has a melodic and harmonic complexity that is angular, but  
it always has a singing quality, which he probably got from Ellington,  
who was one of his artistic mentors. An avowed fan of Louis Armstrong  
from his youth, Dameron understood the majestic powers of the trumpet  
when it sings melodies that rise above the ensemble with relaxed,  
lyrical boldness.

A recent experience showed me just how much Dameron's compositions  
contributed to the language of the music. I was listening to a  
recording of John Kirby's Sextet from the late thirties, a well- 
rehearsed and exceptional band with intricate arrangements. Yet, when  
I put on some of Dameron's music, recorded with the trumpeter Fats  
Navarro 10 years later, it sounded almost like an entirely different  
idiom. Dameron learned to apply keen melodic and harmonic sense to the  
rhythmic innovations instigated by Charlie Parker. In other words, his  
music swang and sang and had intellectual stang.

JAZZ AT TULLY HALL

While jazz festivals over the years have largely been eclectic  
affairs, more recent developments have seen some jazz festivals  
becoming more focused. The Classical Jazz series at Lincoln Center's  
Alice Tully Hall has been following the newer pattern, with this  
year's festival focusing on composition and on jazz as an art form.

The festival, presented in conjunction with radio station WBGO/FM and  
with major funding from Yves St. Laurent, opens Friday with the music  
of Tadd Dameron and featuring Tommy Flanagan, George Mraz and Kenny  
Washington and the ensemble Dameronia, which includes Clifford Jordan,  
Walter Davis Jr. and Benny Powell.

On Saturday, the program is titled ''Saturday Night Songbook'' and  
features artists like Anita O'Day, Jon Hendricks, Earl Coleman, Joe  
Lee Wilson and Frank Morgan. There is no Sunday program. On Monday,  
Aug. 8, the program is called ''Standards on Horn,'' with the  
participants including Wynton Marsalis, Harry (Sweets) Edison, Doc  
Cheatham and J.J. Johnson among others.

The offering on Tuesday, Aug. 9, is titled ''Many Eras of One Man's  
Music'' and focuses on Max Roach. Mr. Roach will, course, be on the  
program as performer as well as composer, along with the Max Roach  
Quartet, the Max Roach Chorus and Abbey Lincoln Moseka.

The final program, on Wednesday, Aug. 10, is ''A Duke Ellington  
Tribute,'' in which the performers will include, in addition to Mr.  
Marsalis, Jimmy Hamilton, Milt Hinton, Norris Turney, Jaki Byard and  
Jimmy Knepper.