[Dixielandjazz] Taking Sides

[Ken Mathieson]

Hi All,

The Mouldy Fig v Modernist arguments still appears to rage. I can't get my head round this at all. To my way of thinking, everything that happened in jazz up to about 1970 developed out of what went before. It was all the one music at different stages of development: Horace Silver and Thelonius Monk (to name just two) couldn't have done what they did without Jelly, James P and others having done their thing first. 

The thing that held it all together was the swinging time feel, which gradually evolved but remained essentially the same driving, flowing approach. The big change came with the introduction of rock and world rhythms, which essentially displaced jazz's most important ingredient. Try making a goulash without paprika or a bolognese sauce without tomatoes: it becomes something different. That's what has happened in a lot of what now passes for jazz. Personally, I thought the Dave Brubeck Quartet was a fine jazz outfit, if given to a bit of heavy-handed bombast from time to time. Certainly the musicianship of Paul Desmond, Gene Wright and Joe Morello was beyond reproach and all of them, including Brubeck, had clearly listened to and learned from the tradition that preceded them.

There is nothing quite like Dixieland sympathetically and well played, and swing, bop and beyond couldn't have emerged as they did, without the preceding traditions being absorbed and mutated, but nothing stands still for ever without stagnating. When I first started investigating jazz in the 1960s, I was listening to Bunk Johnson at the same time as Charlie Parker and heard them both playing the blues. And when Ornette Coleman came on the scene, I felt he had much more in common with the early New Orleans styles than with bop, hard bop, cool school etc from which he was supposed to have developed. The reverse also applies: try voicing some of  Bix's lines for 5 or 6 horns in parallel harmony and you'll hear sounds more in keeping with Gil Evans and the "Cool School" than with early New Orleans or Chicago jazz.

Essentially my view is that jazz is all the one music as long as it retains a swinging time feel. I can enjoy all its constituent styles individually, but see them as part of a larger whole: For me the best definition of jazz is still that it's "just another way of playing music."

That should get the flamers going.

Cheers,

Ken Mathieson
www.classicjazzorchestra.org.uk