[Dixielandjazz] Taking Sides

[Stephen G Barbone]

> "Ken Mathieson" <ken at kenmath.free-online.co.uk> wrote
>
> 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.

No reason anyone should flame your well reasoned post Ken. I think  
your Ornette Coleman example makes good sense.

Having seen that group when they burst upon the jazz scene at the Five  
Spot in NYC circa 1960 give or take a year, I was mystified on first  
listen, but then as the night wore on, and during subsequent visits to  
hear them, I realized that what they were doing was an advanced form  
of collective improvisation. Roswell Rudd, told me shortly afterwards  
that he found such "free jazz" easy to play because he'd been doing  
collective improvisation in his formative Dixieland years. Roswell is  
still crossing over into various styles of jazz, with his New Orleans  
slides and smears on trombone. And Kenny Davern had a brief fling with  
free jazz but then came back to Swing, Dixieland and American Songbook  
Jazz.

What was really impressive at the Five Spot back then, is that almost  
every jazz bass player in NYC went there to hear Charlie Haydn in that  
group. To see how he handled the changes. And the  faculty of  
Juilliard came to listen to the band as did the incomparable Leonard  
Bernstein. They seemed to be impressed, similarly perhaps to Ansermet  
and Stravinsky' experiences on first hearing Sidney Bechet. I believe  
Stravinsky wrote some clarinet pieces, based upon Bechet's Blues  
performances.

The togetherness of Ornette's band was incredible. Each player took a  
turn taking the music where he wanted, playing the chordal structure  
or melody he wanted, and the rest of the band was charged with  
following the new leader. Those musicians knew how to listen to each  
other and blend in with whatever the lead instrument was doing. Very  
much like Dixieland except the melody was improvised on the spot.

Cheers,
Steve