I never had a good relationship to fusion when fusion was most popular--a period that coincided with my own teenage years. Now i can appreciate certain aspects of it more because I no longer feel resentful that it watered down jazz just at the moment when i was coming of age as a jazz fan. I remember going to a Hubert Laws concert in college and being very disappointed by the absence of improvisation and the willingness of the audience to applaud the merely familiar, the exact riffs off the records.

To understand fusion, I think we have to think of it as one of the four main movements in jazz between bop and the neo-classicism of Wynton Marsalis in the 1980s. Remember that Wynton began his career reacting against fusion (and free jazz to a lesser extent) and reviving hard bop.

Let's look at these four movements, more or less in chronological order:

Cool jazz:

Key figures: Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Lennie Tristano and his school, Bill Evans, Gerry Mulligan, saxophonists influenced by Lester Young.
Relation to popular music, culture / hybridity: This movement had its moments of greatest popularity in the success of Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, and Stan Getz. It represents the fusion of "white" and "black" forms of jazz in an experimental context. It can be seen as both cerebral or as quasi-popular.

Hard bop:

Key figures: Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Max Roach and Clifford Brown group, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley. Other Blue Note artists.
Relation to popular music and culture / hybridity: Fusion of jazz with gospel and R&B.

Free jazz:

Key figures: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, etc...
Relation to popular music and culture / hybridity: intersection with Afro-centrism and the black arts movement; popularity of Coltrane. Ornette's use of electronic, fusion oriented bands. Beginnings of "world music."

Fusion:

Key Figures: Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea--many other alumni of Miles's bands... Chuck Mangione
Relation to popular music and culture / hybridity: the entire style was based on a fusion with certain elements of rock, especially in terms of rhythm and use of electronic instruments. Collaboration between black, Latino, and white musicians is the norm.

These brief description suggest several conclusions:

*** the interaction of jazz with popular music is a constant, present in all four movements. The bluesiness of hard bop should not be seen as alien to the funkiness of fusion. Think of Joe Zawinul's hit "Mercy, Mercy," which he wrote for Cannonball, and his later hit "Birdland," which he wrote for Weather Report.

*** Jazz is always a hybrid music, always responsive to other styles of music.

*** Miles Davis was heavily involved in just about everything during this period (1950s-70s), except for free jazz. Of course, there are freer influences in Miles's music too, especially in collaborations with Wayne Shorter. Many musicians of the period crossed boundaries among these four styles, though none as much as Miles. We've got to see them as overlapping both in time and in terms of the musicians involved.

*** The neoclassical revival of the 80s chose ONE out of four interesting developments of the preceding period to champion. Jazz-rock fusion and cool jazz were too "white," or too hybridized, for Wynton's taste. You get people like Crouch saying that Bill Evans couldn't swing or play the blues.

It's curious that in the 11-day Roy Haynes festival there has been little mention of any specific stylistic characteristics of his playing. Granted, I heard very little, in terms of percentage, of the program, since I had to teach and sleep and otherwise be away from the computer, but what little talk there was shied away from anything technical. Like: How do you know it's him, how would you identify him in a blind-fold test? Phil Schaap talks a lot, it's true, but he tends to concentrate on discographical issues.

In terms of timbre, I think its the crackly snare, the crispness of the hi hats, the contrast between the generally clean ride sound and the occasional crashes. (Roy often uses a flat ride, with no bell.) Toms are a little "twangy." In rhythmic terms, there's a kind of exuberant jaggedness and the ability to create longer, coherent comping phrases. He can be quiet busy, marking accents with emphasis, but he isn't too loud.

If any lesser drummers played patterns as seemingly irregular as he does, it would totally throw off the rest of the band. He is very confident and sure handed when he goes into some metric modulation thing, like right now I am hearing him do. I'd say he is more precise than Elvin in his poly-rhythms.

In contrast to Max Roach, I'd say he's less "square" and more rounded. He's really quite close to Tony Williams or Jack DeJohnette, who belong to one generation younger. He's more advanced stylistically that Blakey, Roach, Klack, or Philly Joe. He's outlived almost everyone else that is comparable on the instrument, except DeJohnette. He rivals or maybe even surpasses DeJohnette in stylistic flexibility, the ability to play in any musical context.

They are doing something great over at WKCR in NYC, which you can get streaming over the net: a Roy Haynes festival of about 5 gadzillion hours. Unfortunately I only noticed this morning, so I'll only hear that last few days of it--during waking hours. From the 1940s to the current decade, that's parts of SEVEN decades of music making. And I say parts of because there's nothing from earliest part of the 40s, and the current decade is not yet completed. Even rounding down to sixty years, it's an impressive span of time to be at the top of your game, where Roy still is. Even if Roy is not your number one guy on the drum throne, there's plenty of good music even without focusing on the drummer per se: such as, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker...

I'm a big fan of excess like this. A couple hundred hours in a row playing the entire discography of Roy Haynes? Fine by me. It makes me feel almost normal (as the guy reading 9,000 books of poetry). It's easy to be in a good mood after getting rid of Presidente Arbusto after 8 years of shameful abjection. Obama... and Roy Haynes too!

Even if RH is not your main guy, you can't really see him as markedly inferior to any other player in any context. If he sat in for Elvin in Coltrane's quartet, as he did, the results are still going to be great--or if he sat in for Max Roach with a Parker quintet--the same thing holds. He's just about the best drummer for Chick Corea or Pat Matheny too.

Probably one of the best educations in jazz could be had by beginning with the Ella Fitzgerald songbooks. The ones I know the most intimately are the Cole Porter and the Rodgers and Hart, but there are also the Gershwin, the Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, and Ellington collections. And one I'm forgetting; i think there were seven?

Anyway, the idea would be to get a grounding in the classic songs, sung in a calmly swinging but still fairly *straight* way. (After that I would move on to the high modernist canon of Mingus, Monk, and Miles.) She doesn't alter the melodies too much or get too cute or mannered. Ella, like Sinatra, is a great jazz musician, and Nelson Riddle's arrangements serve them both well. The idea of doing songbooks itself is a stroke of genius, because it gives the singer like Ella a repertoire that is at her musical level, rather than making her depend on whatever songs some record producer happens to think will be hits. Imagine if Billie Holiday could have made a Gershwin songbook.

Vocal jazz of a certain always intersects with plain old "pop" music. Bing Crosby, Nat Cole, Sinatra, Ella, Dinah Washington, etc... There were the commercial pressures, and also the fact that jazz simply *was* the pop music of a certain period. Not all pop was jazz per se, and not all jazz was pop, but the dominant idiom was swing-based jazz.

The rejazzification of certain figures, at a somewhat later date, is interesting to consider in this context. Take Tony Bennett, for example. Once pop music was not as jazz based, Bennett could do more pure jazz work than before. Norman Granz recorded Ella and Sarah in a later period in contexts that highlighted their jazz roots. Ella with Joe Pass, for example.

Rather than seeing this pop elements as an impurity in jazz, I see it as a healthy complement. Vocals will always be more popular than purely instrumental music, so the most popular jazz musician today is probably Diana Krall. Maybe it's a generational thing, but I prefer to go back to Ella.

How about that hero worship mode of jazz people? I'm sure it's tiresome if you're not one of us. If it were just a superficial hipster pose to dig Bird, Pres, and Trane I think I would have outgrown it by now. Instead, I get deeper in.

What can I say about Wynton? My view is hardly original or unusual, but Wynton is a not a first-rate player at all, despite his considerable virtuosity, earnestness, and jazz erudition. The missing element is that "it." That tastiness and conviction. There's often a pedanticism about playing older styles, one that is stylistically correct but misses the essential element of those styles: that indefinable tastiness we get in Nat Cole or Coleman Hawkins. Even more minor figures than Wynton have this quality in greater abundance. I think Wynton strives for that but misses it by a country mile. His classical playing is virtuosic but rather pompous; I'll take Alison Balson over him.

Of course tastiness is a function of taste. Wynton's supporters will have a different opinion than mine. Of course, they will be wrong, but what I can do about that?

I'm listening to the WKCR Lester Young birthday broadcast. Although I've heard most of the tracks before I'm sure there will be surprises.

It's interesting to here three distinctive flavors in the piano backups. Teddy Wilson, Nat King Cole, and Oscar Peterson. Cole is one of my favorite piano players of mid-century, and seems to complement Lester perfectly. With Buddy Rich on the drums to boot. Teddy plays with the perfect flavor of the 30s. OP comes out of Cole's style, to some extent.

The interesting thing is to hear a phrase you've heard before--but on a track that you've never heard. There's that eerie familiarity / strangeness.

Bloggin' the Bean

Now the Coleman Hawkins event has started for sure. I just heard a track with Roy Eldridge, Curly Russell, Art Blakey, Horace Silver. Blakey has a killer bass drum thump. It's not a little 18" polite jazz bass drum sound.

I'll be blogging this event as it occurs. I have to sleep, eat, shop, and work too so I won't be able to listen to all 24 hours of it.

My first thought is that Hawk is not an over-subtle artist: he makes a supremely self-confident statement in every solo. (Maybe my idea will change as I listen.)

Secondly: he fits in well with the bebop rhythm section. He is one of the great artists of the 40s, though his roots are in earlier jazz.

Now he's playing Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Room." It ends with a big Blakey buzz roll. (It's a live Birdland date.)

***

Now "Stuffy," a song I know from another recording. Hawk plays four choruses. He basically just plows forward, straight ahead, increasing intensity gradually through the beginning of the fourth chorus, then easing up a bit.

Roy Eldridge's solo uses very similar phrasing to Hawkins. Now they are trading fours with Blakey. Those must be calfskin heads tuned low.

***

The WKCR announcer said it was Connie Kay on drums? But the club announcer said Blakey I'm pretty sure. And it sounded a whole lot more like Blakey to me.

***

Now we'll hear Bean with Ben Webster, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Herb Ellis.

Hawkins solos first, on a slow-to-medium blues. He signals intensity with timbre and pitch, not by playing faster.

Now the sweeter Webster. The ideas are not too creative here!

Now Mr. P. He just fills the space in without doing much. Not an impressive track.

***

"It Never Entered my Mind." Another Rodgers and Hart ballad. A nice paraphrase/statement of the melody, by breathy Ben Webster, then Hawkins steps in. The rhythm section is a bit clunky. Something doesn't feel quite right.

Stay tuned...

It's not unusual for me to come home and find my daughter playing "Joy Spring" along with Clifford Brown. She's learned the heads to about a dozen or more jazz standards, mostly just from playing along to the records and learning by ear. "All of Me," "Doxy," "St. Thomas," "Now's the Time," "So What," "Oleo," "Cherokee," "Tenor Madness," Moritat." Mostly Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk. I hear her right now with "Birth of the Cool." I think it's "Boplicity." Now where could she have gotten this interest in jazz from?

Max Roach has passed away at age 83. I really feel that this is a loss of one of the last connections to the bebop pioneers. Of major figures, only Roy Haynes survives.

One of the myths of jazz is that the raw material on which improvisation was based was dreck, and that jazz musicians took a largely hostile attitude toward this raw material (the popular songs of the day.)

Well, actually, no. These are great songs for the most part. And my hypothesis is that musicicans chose songs that they liked over those that they didn't like. Hence the huge preference among jazz musicians for the big four of Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, and Rodgers.

Take the example of John Coltrane playing "My Favorite Things." We know this melody is by Richard Rodgers, from the "Sound of Music." What is the more parsimonious interpretation? That Coltrane played this song in order to mount an attack on Richard Rodgers, or that he played it because he loved the song? Or take Monk's preferennce for Gershwin's "Nice Work." Monk only played a few standards, and he liked to play them over and over.

I think these Russian Jews who created Tin Pan Alley Americana were on to something great and that the black jazz musicians resonated with their creations. And what about Russian Jewish musicans like Stan Getz? Or Hungarian Jews like Benny Goodman? I don't think you can understand American popular culture without getting this fusion of Eastern European and African-American influences in the 1920s.

Not necessarily in this order, but

Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Billy Stayhorn, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Johnny Green, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin. Jerome Kern, Fats Waller, Dorothy Fields, Rodgers and Hammerstein...

What can I say, I'm a sucker for a good song. It's just one of those thiings, just one of those marvelous things, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. A foggy day in London town.. A piano tinkling in the next apartment, those stumbling things that told you what my heart meant. Someone to watch over me.

I never thought much of moonlight skies, I never winked back at fireflies. The way you wear your hat. The way you sip your tea. The way we danced till three. A fine romance. You say tomato and I say tomahto. Suddenly I saw polkdots and moonbeams. I'm going to sit right down and write a letter and make believe it came from you. I'm a sentimental sap that's all, what's the use of trying not to fall. Holding hands at midnight, neaht the moonlit sky, It's nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try. It's the tender trap. Tangerine, with her lips of flame. In the wee small hours of the morning. East of the sun and west of the moon, and then I saw the midnight sun. It's moonlight in Vermont and Autumn in New York, April in Paris. I'll remember April and be glad.

I bought you violets for your furs. I get no kick from cocaine. I can't get started with you.

All of me, why not take all of me. Can't you see, I'm no good without you. You got the part that once was my heart so why not take all of me.

A player almost anonymous... I won't make you guess about this list. These are (some of) my favorite players who aren't household names or super "canonical" figures:

Illinois Jacquet. He was a straight-ahead tenor who did a lot of work in the JATP.

Harold Land. Another straight-forward tenor mostly known for his role in the Clifford Brown/Max Roach groups. He could hold his own with Clifford Brown so that's saying quite a bit.

Paul Chambers. Maybe he's a bit too famous for this group, because of his work with Miles Davis and Coltrane. Still I am obsessed with Paul Chambers. I can't figure out what makes his playing so perfect.

Sonny Clark. He had some excellent recordings with a trio with Philly Joe and Chambers. He wouldn't necessarily be in anyone's group of top 10 piano players of all time, but his groove is so deep.

Billy Higgins. He is countless records but never achieved the degree of recognition of a Tony Williams.

I guess what I like about these players is that they all follow established modes of playing with a great personal style, but without necessarily being innovators or virtuosi of genius. I wouldn't make exaggerated claims for any of them (except Paul Chambers), but simply say they are the ones who make the music feel good, give it substance and richness at a level just *below* that of the canonical forgers of a new style. They are all very "tasty" players in the mode of Teddy Wilson or Jo Jones. They aren't the Art Tatums or Elvin Joneses of the world.

Linguist Mark Liberman makes an eloquent point here: that the idea of a perfect, elegant, and correct language is always displaced unto a past, but that this past is always imaginary. That is to say, people never have spoken in this *perfect* language, and nobody seriously thinks that we should return to 18th century, or 17th century, norms--or to the norms of whatever period is considered the golden age of language usage. It's a fundamentally dishonest argument, because the norms of usage, whatever they are, must always necessarily be those of the present, never those of the past. [I hope my paraphrase does some justice to Liberman's post]

And so it is too with the norms of the "poetry language" (Kenneth Koch). We can't seriously propose to bring back Victorian ideals, or Elizabethan ideas, because we wouldn't be happy with the result even if we could actually bring back those ideals. We are stuck in the present, and that present is more lively and interesting because it is *our* time. "As if you would never leave me and were / the inexorable product of my own time."

Part of time is the way in which time is *felt*. I'm thinking of the "feel" of a musician or poet for time itself. Think of how Charlie Parker changed the way we perceive the passage of time from one second to the next! (Cortázar wrote about this in his story "El perseguidor.") Creeley felt and understood Parker's innovation.

Time to teach grammar!

Miles Davis
Billie Holiday
Lester Young
Charlie Parker
Bill Evans
John Coltrane
Frank Sinatra
Ella Fitzgerald
Clifford Brown
Johnny Hodges
Dinah Washington
Milt Jackson
Sarah Vaughn


What is this a list of? (What is it's guiding principle?) Who else belongs on this list? Is the order I've put the names here the correct one?

Some bebop contrafacts, with original song in parenthesis:

In Walked Bud (Blue Skies)

Ornithology (How High the Moon)

Oleo; Moose the Mooche (I got rhythm; there are many other songs based on "I got rhythm," too numerous to mention,)

Donna Lee (Indiana)

Quasimodo (Embraceable You)

Hot House (What is this thing called love?)

Koko (Cherokee)

Evidence (Just You, Just Me)

Hackensack (Oh Lady be Good)

On a Joshua Redman recording I will tend to listen to Brian Blade more attentively than to Joshua himself. I find the drummer's ideas more interesting than the saxophonists. That's what got me interested in drumming in the first place. In the absence of soloists of genius, the rhythm section is more compelling than the front line.

I am more interested in Dewey Redman than Joshua anyway. It's kind of funny that the father was eclipsed by the talented but more conventional son.

Here are a few of my favorite small jazz groups, in no particular order. My choices aren't particularly original, I'm afraid. I'm thinking of groups that were real groups, not just people who got together just to record. These are not just collections of musicians, but organic units.

Miles Davis Quintet of the 1950s with Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe.

Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s with Shorter, Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams.

Other permutations of Miles Davis groups with Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb.

John Coltrane Quartet with Tyner and Elvin Jones. Various bass players but mostly Jimmy Garrison. Add Eric Dolphy to the group too.

Ornette Coleman Quartets with Cherry, Billy HIggins, Haden. (and other permuations with LaFaro and Blackwell).

Clifford Brown/Max Roach groups with Harold Land on tenor, Richie Cole on piano.

Early Art Blakey groups with Clifford Brown.

Parker, Dizzy, with Max Roach and various piano and bass.

Mingus groups with Danny Richmond on drums, Jackie Byard, and Dolphy. Various other players like Booker Little on trumpet.

Monk with Sonny Rollins, Max Roach.

Early Monk with Art Blakey.

This blog is devoted to contemporary poetics and to jazz, in approximately equivalent portions. Stay tuned.

Pierre Bourdieu refers to jazz, in passing, a middle-brow art. Theodor Adorno, notoriously, lumps it in with the “culture industry,” making no distinction between Thelonious Monk and [insert name of pop star here]. What I find fascinating is that there are high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow approaches to jazz. An interest in canonical or avant-garde figures (Lester Young, Mingus, Monk and Miles, Ornette) is the mark of high-brow taste. The middle-of-the-road approach is self-explanatory. A desire to make jazz more respectable or “classical”hovers indeterminately between the high and the middle category. Low-brow jazz is simply Kitsch, the recycling of popular styles evident in many recent Nat King Cole tribute albums.

These categories overlap and are somewhat arbitrary. The high-brow attitude that consigns Oscar Peterson to oblivion is perfectly understandable. But do we really want Peterson to be different from what he is? His sense of ornamental excess and exuberant swing can be highly pleasurable. This is not the same thing as confusing him with Bud Powell.