Please read Ch 9 and Ch 10  READ HERE: Freedom and Fusion Free Jazz Freedom stoo

Please read Ch 9 and Ch 10 
READ HERE: Freedom and Fusion Free Jazz Freedom stood out as a politically charged word in American public discourse during the late 1950s and early 1960s- it would be hard, in fact, to find a term more explosive , more laden with depths of meaning , or proclaimed with more emotion during these tumultuous years. This truism of civics classes and refrain from the nation’s founding documents now took on new force , in the process outlining a sharp divide in the country’s social and economic structures. The civil rights movement of the day raised it aloft as a battle cry, held it forth as a goal, and asserted it as a first principle on which all else depended . It could no longer be put out of mind as an empty phrase or accepted as a fait accompli inThe Brown . Board of Education decisions of the mid-1950s, milestone court rulings reversing a long history of racial segregation in American schools, were not, as some may have suspected at the time, closing chapters of a struggle to break down barriers that had raged since before the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, these moves to integrate public institutions set off a chain of reverberations throughout American society, reenergizing the civil rights movement and setting the stage for a series of confrontations in which the quest for freedom would figure as a repeated motif. “Freedom riders” defied segregation in buses and terminals in the Deep South, often at great personal risk. The “Freedom Vote” of 1963 attracted tens of thousands of participants to mock elections that demonstrated the failings of representative democracy in the South. The ” Freedom Summer” of the following year found activists organizing to register African American voters in large numbers in anticipation of the fall presidential election . The ” Freedom Singers” chorus toured the country , giving concerts and raising money for civil rights advocacy . Black leaders sought to form “Freedom Schools” and establish a ” Freedom Democratic Party” The word was imprinted on the public’s consciousness, dramatized in speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, sung in hymns, brandished at Little Rock, Birmingham, Selma, and other battlegrounds in the fight for equality It is impossible to comprehend the free jazz movement of these same years without understanding how it fed upon this powerful cultural shift in American society. Its practitioners advocated much more than freedom from harmonic structures or compositional forms-although that too was an essential part of their vision of jazz Many of them saw their music as inherently political. They believed that they could, indeed must, choose between participating in the existing structures -in society, in the entertainment industry , in the jazz world-or rebelling against them. The aesthetic could no longer be isolated from these cultural currents. In the overheated Marxist rhetoric that increasingly found its way into mainstream political debate during those days, even a ” pure” art such as music was ultimately part of a superstructure of social institutions and events that was delineated and determined by economic realities and, ultimately , class values . ” Pure” music? One was advised that such abstractions were, at best, an idle delusion, at worst a conscious deception. An undercurrent of political advocacy had always existed in the jazz world , but now it exploded on the surface as never before. Amiri Baraka, then writing under the name LeRoi Jones, declared in his 1963 book Blues People that the new music signified “more radicalchanges and reevaluations of social and emotional attitudes toward the general environment .” Critic Frank Kofsky took this view further, asserting that the free jazz movement represented nothing less than a vote of no confidence in Western civilization and the American Dream.” In the 1964 US election, Kofsky even wrote in John Coltrane’s name on his ballot as his choice for vice president, alongside Malcolm X as his pick for president , a strange ticket only for those unaware of the larger symbolic resonance of progressive jazz currents during this period. This overt linking of free jazz and sociopolitical criticism went so far that Ekkehard Jost, a historian of the movement , lamented that the ” autonomous musical aspects of the evolution of free jazz- i.e., those aspects which escape a purely sociological analysis –often were ignored .” The music risked being relegated a secondary, utilitarian role, valued for what it advocated rather than for how it actually sounded . In truth, the sociopolitical ramifications of this music remained, in many ways, decisive in distinguishing the new free jazz players from the older generation of experimental jazz performers . From a purely musical point of view, freedom or atonality in jazz music had appeared many years before Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor brought it to the forefront of jazz. Lennie Tristano had experimented with free techniques in a series of pieces- Intuition, ” Digression ,” ” Descent into the Maelstrom -some of them dating back to the late 1940s. Bob Graettinger’s writings for the Stan Kenton band, most notably his 1948 magnum opus City of Glass, were uncompromising works that defied the conventions of existing jazz harmonic and melodic techniques , as was Jimmy Giuffre’s 1953 recording of ” Fugue .” Contemporary classical composers were also attempting to use jazz instrumentation to explore avant- garde techniques , as in Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto (1946 ) or Milton Babbitt’s All Set (1957 ). Sensing the potential of these various trends , Gunther Schuller – who had composed Atonal Studies for Jazz in 1948 and , at the start of the of the changes afoot in the jazz worldfirst by choosing to retire from the scene to study and practice, and later, after returning, by hiring several of Coleman’s former associates. Even Miles Davis, who had derided Coleman in the late 1950s (“Hell, just listen to what he writes and how he plays the man is all screwed up inside), came to be influenced by the new sound in the mid-1960s, forging a two-horn sound with Wayne Shorter that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Don Cherry- Ornette Coleman collaborations Coltrane, Dolphy, Rollins, Miles: to see these masters of mainstream jazz not only acknowledge the new music but strive to emulate itthis marked an extraordinary change in the jazz world. This shift was all the more stunning when one considers how little respect Coleman had received just a short while before his rise to fame. When Ornette had attempted to sit in with name bands-Dexter Gordon’s, the Brown-Roach Quintet, and othershe had almost always been subjected to derision and ridicule, sometimes ordered to leave the stage; in other instances, the musicians simply began packing up their instruments while he was still playing. But this response was mild compared to the night in Baton Rouge, some years before, when a Coleman tenor solo had stopped the dancers in their tracks and roused an unruly gangA half-dozen thugs cornered the saxophonist outside, beat him until he passed out, and threw his saxophone into the street. For almost a decade afterward, Coleman hesitated to play the tenor again- he sensed some potential for bad karma in the horn and decided to focus his energies on the alto instead. Years before, Charlie Parker had suffered a painful initiation into musical maturity, when he was laughed off the bandstand during a Kansas City session, but Coleman’s formative years were even more tainted by humiliation and rejection. Indeed, no major figure in the history of jazz has had a less promising early career Coleman was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, during the heart of the Great Depression. These were difficult years -Coleman’s father scuffled, finding what work he could as a cook, mechanic , and construction worker, among other pursuits; Ornette’s mother worked as a clerk in a funeral home and sold Avon- type products on the side. But these were also fecund years for African American music in the Lone Star State: dozens of top- notch bands worked the territory, firing the ambitions and nurturing the talents of least expected moments in Coleman’s mature oeuvre During his early teens, Coleman acquired an alto saxophone but struggled in his attempts to learn the rudiments of the horn. Confusing the alphabet and musical scale, he determined incorrectly that the concert scale began with A, rather than (as it does) with C. Coleman slowly, painstakingly gained a basic education in music, but with many setbacks along the wayJoining a church band, Coleman was ridiculed for his lack of training. A much- anticipated lesson with Walter Foots” Thomas , a seasoned jazz player, provided little guidance or encouragement: the veteran simply had Coleman play for an hour while looking in the mirrorso that Ornette would quit making “faces” while he blew the horn. A short while later, Coleman was thrown out of his high school marching band, ostensibly for mixing swing and Sousa, an unacceptable combination in the minds of the powers that be. His early professional career was equally marked by ups and downsOne bandleader, Coleman claimed, even got to the point of paying him not to play the face of these obstacles, Coleman persevered and continued to develop and grow as a musician. The miraclewas that he did this without abandoning his own personal respect of local Southern California players for his bop approach to improvisation, despite the constant negative prowess. Along with Billy Higgins, the drummer on the feedback. “He could play the blues,an early employer Hillcrest gig, Cherry had played in the Jazz Messiahs, an recalls, “but he didn’t want toIn time, Coleman developed up-and-coming local modern jazz band, and had graced an equally complex relationship to the bebop idiom. He the stage at high-profile clubs such as the Haig and the listened to bebop, studied it, learned the tunes, performed Lighthouse. Like many others, Cherry was originally put them: yet the end result retained a certain foreignness, off by the eccentric Coleman of his first meeting, he just as his blues work had done during his Texas years recalled: “He had long hair and a beard. It was about 90 Amateur recordings made of Coleman at the Hillcrest Club degrees, and he had on an overcoat. I was scared of him in Los Angeles shortly before his rise to fame fortuitously -but soon grew fascinated with Coleman’s unconventional captured this odd hybrid on tape . Playing Charlie Parker’s compositions and improvisations . Cherry would later share Klactoveedsedstene,Coleman echoes the composer’s Coleman’s rise to fame, developing his own range of odd astringent sound and phrasing, yet his choice of notes and behavior patterns in the process. For a time, he favored cadences veers far from the expected path. It almost seems performing on a pocket cornet (called a pocket trumpet as if Coleman has taken the modern jazz vocabulary and by Cherry) to complement Coleman’s plastic alto quasi- translated it into a new tongue, some private Esperanto of toy instruments used to fight a musical revolution . Bassist his own creationCertainly the animating force in this music Charlie Haden was an anchor both musically and personally comes not from Parker, but from Coleman’s singular take on to the horns. Bespectacled, owlish, Haden looked the part of it. an apprentice clerk in a bank. But his bass lines subverted The Hillcrest engagement also represented a rare occasion the image: they captured a piquant meeting ground between for Coleman to work with a group of like-minded musicians. consonance and dissonance , powered the band with a rock- Trumpeter Don Cherry, unlike Coleman, had earned the solid beat, and softened the hard edge of this freedom music with a sweet, warm tonePaul Bley, the pianist and nominal leading up to the recordingA number of times we rehearsed leader of the Hillcrest band, would stay with Coleman for at my house. I would take a paper and pen and make notes only a short while but would make his own mark on about the compositions and about what we were supposed free jazz in later yearsIn a series of seminal recordings- to be doingBut the funny thing was that at every rehearsal Footloose; Mr. JoyThe Floater Syndrome; Open, to Love-Bley Ornette would change what we had done the last time. He demonstrated a masterful conception of solo and combo would change the structure of the song or where the rubato playing, distinguished by a rare sensitivity to space and wasAnd then when we finally showed up for the record , tone and texture. date, he changed everything again Coleman’s persistence, aided by a referral from bassist Even before it was released, the grapevine picked Red Mitchell, led to an audition with Les Koenig of up on the coming event , with Downbeat promising that Contemporary RecordsKoenig had been alerted that it would be very, very Avant Garde In retrospect, we Coleman’s compositions, for all their oddities, might be can see that Something Else! represents a less radical suitable material for other players to recordAt first the departure from the jazz tradition than both its critics and audition falteredColeman was unable to perform his supporters claimed at the time. Conventional thirty-two- bar pieces on the pianoand, in desperation, he resorted to and twelve-bar structures are evident, and familiar chord playing them on alto, backed by Cherry’s pocket cornet. changes, borrowed from standards such as Got Rhythm Koenig was fascinated by the music and set up a trial session and Out of Nowhere,underpin the solosMoreover with a full band, which in turn led to Coleman’s first record Coleman’s improvisations capture a modal flavor and only date, Something ElseThe Music of Ornette ColemanPianist hint at the atonality of his later work. Yet the freshness Walter Norris described to me, in a 1990 interview, the of Coleman’s and Cherry’s melodic lines stood out despite peculiar preparations for the unconventional session”We these remembrances of jazz past. It was as though the music rehearsed two or three times a week for about six months had undergone an exemplary unburdening as if all of theclichés and hoary riffs accumulated over a half-century of jazz music were thrown overboard , lightening the load and opening up the horizon Coleman’s star was clearly in the ascendancyInfluential patrons, including Gunther Schuller and John Lewis, befriended him and helped open doorsColeman and Cherry were invited to attend the Lenox School of Jazz, ostensibly as students but in fact serving as unacknowledged faculty membersColeman got a regal welcome at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival where, in a program billed as “The Three Saxes,” he shared the stage with Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. Earlier that same year, two follow- up recordings had been taped by different labels within a few weeks of each other : Tomorrow Is the Question (on Contemporary) and The Shape of Jazz to Come (on Atlantic) The Atlantic release stood out as an especially important statement of the new music. For the first time, Coleman was able to record using his working quartet of Cherry, Haden, and Higgins. The breadth of their music was striking, ranging from the almost unbearably poignant “Lonely Woman” to the forceful “Congeniality” and the moody But the notoriety of these achievements paled beside the fierce debates ignited by the New York debut of the Ornette Coleman Quartet on the heels of the release of these two records. The band opened at the Five Spot on November 17, 1959, with interest running so high that the club took the rare step of offering a preview for the press and select members of the local jazz establishment Some listeners walked out, others sat transfixed, and though there was no consensus among the audience, almost every opinion was adamant. Controversy proved good for business and for Coleman’s career. His two-week gig was extended by two months. Visiting players clamored to sit in, with everybody from Leonard Bernstein to Lionel Hampton taking the plunge. Mainstream periodicals, from Newsweek from Harper’s Bazaar, covered Coleman’s arrival on the scene as a major cultural event, and jazz magazines seethed with heated exchanges. Anxious to capitalize on the Coleman phenomenon, Atlantic released Change of the Century the following June, drawing on tracks recorded shortly before the quartet left California. This was another intriguing project by the altoist, showing his skill in slyly referencing other idioms: the blues in “Ramblinbebop in “Bird Food,” “Peace” for improvisers. And even the loose links with music theory were ultimately subverted by Coleman himself: he eventually came to insist that harmolodics could help in almost any area of creative expression, including fiction and poetryFrom the vagueness of Coleman’s comments, one suspects that it could equally apply to bricklaying or the culinary arts. But the ultimate test of Coleman’s artistry during this period was not as a theorist, but as a musician. On the heels of his harmolodic proselytizing, Coleman began experimenting with new approaches to combo playingFor years, he had avoided hiring harmony instrument players, such as pianists or guitarists , for his band. But in the early 1970s, Coleman began an association with guitarist James Blood Ulmer. Ulmer brought a radically different texture to Coleman’s ensemble, mixing free jazz with elements of funk, rock, and experimental electronic music. Bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson also became prominent Coleman associates, furthering the altoist’s new direction with their hard- grooving, dance-oriented styles. The A&M release Dancing in Your Head revealed how far Coleman had come since Free Jazz. At the height of the fascination with jazz-rock fusion, Coleman showed that it was possible to use electric music as a springboard for improvisation without resorting to the overtly commercial, slickly streamlined sounds that were now drowning the jazz world in wave after wave of synthesized slush. Follow-up releases such as Body Meta and Of Human Feelings built on this same approach, presented under the banner of ” Prime Time,” a name chosen by Coleman to represent this facet of his music. This greater comfort playing with harmony instruments could also be seen in later Coleman endeavors, such as his Song X collaboration with Pat Metheny from 1985, his invitation to Jerry Garcia to join in Coleman’s Virgin Beauty project from 1988, and his work with pianists Geri Allen and Joachim Kühn in the mid-1990s . Coleman recorded little after this point, but his 2006 release Sound Grammar was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music , only the second time a jazz artist had received that honor. His late career may have produced little new music , but was filled with illustrious honors , from a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” to a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. At the time of his death in 2015, this once scorned and derided horn player was eulogized as one of the great innovators in modern American musica Taylor’s music, despite frequently being mentioned in the striking turnaround, unsurpassed in the history of jazz same breath as Coleman’s, was cut from different cloth. Cecil Taylor, whose influence on the free jazz movement It was denser, atomistic, more explosive, more insistently would come to rival Coleman’s, presents a stark contrast to percussive, more thoroughly purged of romantic sentiment the altoist. Where Coleman was self-taught and struggled In place of Coleman’s human cry on the saxophone, one finds to learn the rudiments of music theory, Taylor boasted a Taylor’s fusillade of notes, unforgiving and unapologetic blue-ribbon musical educationWhere Coleman drew much Born in Long Island City, New York, in 1929, Taylor was of his early inspiration from bebop, blues, R &B, and other raised in the predominantly white neighborhood of Corona African American forms of music , Taylor called upon a His father was a cook and servant who worked for a state wider range of influences, including contemporary classical senator, his mother a housewife with diverse interests: she composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók-the latter’s use spoke French and German, played the piano, enjoyed the of Hungarian folk music in his compositions was seen by theater, and counted Ellington drummer Sonny Greer as Taylor as a counterpart to his own relationship to the jazz one of her childhood friends. Music to me was a way traditionand his tastes in jazz were notably expansive of holding on to Negro culture, because there wasn’t very ranging far beyond the reigning bop figures of his formative much of it around,Taylor has recalledAt age five he years, and spanning Fats Waller, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick began studying the pianoLessons were supplemented by Webb, Cab Calloway, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, Jaki Byard, instruction from his piano teacher’s husband, a timpanist Dick Twardzik, Horace Silver, and, above all, Duke Ellington. who had played under Toscaninian especially fitting early Where Coleman’s later works drew on popular dance styles association given the extremely percussive nature of Taylor’s with pronounced funk and rock elements, Taylor gravitated mature style. In 1952, Taylor entered the New England to formal dance, writing and performing original pieces Conservatory of Music, where he expanded his knowledge of for ballet artists and modern dance companies. Above all, contemporary classical music but grew disenchanted with the academy’s indifference to the black musical experience . This same period found Taylor deepening his knowledge of the jazz idiom. Writer Nat Hentoff, who first met Taylor around this time, has recalled that “no one had clearer, firmer and more unexpected opinions about music than CecilThis confident sense of direction was critical for Taylor, since his music, even at this stage, was increasingly deviating from the then prevailing styles of late bop and cool jazz By 1954 my style of playing was developed,” Taylor has notedA half-decade before free jazz emerged as a controversial new movement, Taylor was already employing arch dissonances, fragmented improvised lines, disjointed rhythms, and the jackhammer piano attack that would characterize his mature work. His 1956 session for the Transition label indicates the scope of these experimental leaningsAt first hearingTaylor’s approach reveals a number of connections to the jazz tradition the repertoire here draws heavily on standards based on conventional song forms, and the instrumentation is a typical jazz combo (Taylor is supported by bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Dennis Charles as well as, on some tracks, by saxophonist Steve Lacy)But on a deeper level, the music is unflinchingly subversive. Taylor sometimes follows the chord changes played by Neidlinger, other times imposing his clashing polytonal structures on top of them, elsewhere trying to undermine any assertion of an underlying harmonic roadmap. His piano attack, with its rumbling thick chords and caustic single-note lines, is somewhat reminiscent of Thelonious Monk’s. But in place of Monk’s sly humor and masterful use of space , we encounter a more treacherous and overgrown aural landscapeRestless, insistent, at times foreboding, this is music that seemingly bypasses the listeners’ faculties of judgment and evaluation and instead heads straight for the central nervous system During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Taylor recorded and performed on only a handful of occasions, but each of these outings further reinforced his image as the most intransigent of the young jazz modernists. He shook up the audience at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, where his performance was recorded and releasedA stint at the Five Spot in New York spurred further controversy and attracted an enthusiastic following among artists and bohemians. Follow-up recordings for Contemporary and United Artists embrace him. Taylor was invited to teach at a major universitythen caused an uproar by failing a large number of students and defying administration pressures to change the grades. Taylor played at the White House but scampered away from the bandstand after his performance-with the president of the United States, who simply wanted to give the planist a compliment, forced to hustle after him. Taylor agreed to perform in tandem with the swing-to-bop modernist Mary Lou Williams-but rather than meeting Williams halfway, Taylor seemed determined to overpower her playing with an explosive accompaniment of avant- garde piano technique. Yet by the close of the decade, Taylor –for all his aloof exterior-had developed an unmatched skill in working within the system. On the back cover of his release 3 Phasis, Taylor’s record company boasts about its many sources of fundingThis disc was made possible through grants from American Broadcast Companies; Armco Inc.; Capital Cities Communication; Dow Jones; Mr. Francis Goelet; Gilman Foundation, Inc.; Occidental Petroleum Corporation; the Rockefeller Foundation; Sony Corporation; Union Pacific Corporation; and the National Endowment for the Arts.” In time , Taylor would possess a curriculum vitae that few mainstream jazz players could dream of, with his Guggenheim fellowship , NEA grants, MacArthur genius grant,the Kyoto Prize (which came with a half-million-dollar cash payout), and even an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory of Music, of which he had been a fierce critic in earlier years. He was voted into the Downbeat Jazz Hall of Fame by the critics in 1975, while McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, and others, perhaps more popular but less iconoclastic , had to wait another quarter of a century to join him. The militant outsider, it seems, had become the consummate inside operator. Yet Taylor’s music stayed at the outer fringe despite his growing eminence. The 1970s were especially fertile years for Taylor’s solo piano work. Silent Tongues, from 1974, was a major statement, with Taylor moving deftly from subtle quasi-classical moods to erupting volcanoes of dissonance. Other solo outings- Air above Mountains ( Buildings Within); Fly! Fly! Fly! FlyFly Indent-rounded out this picture of the keyboardist as human howitzer. At such times, Taylor almost succeeded in making solo jazz piano into an athletic exhibition: no one in jazzor any other musichad ever attacked the keyboard so aggressively , had created such big sounds, had so overpowered the instrument. One expected strings to break, and bits of ivory and ebony to chip off the keys. The experience of seeing Taylor in such a vein could be riveting, convincing even free jazz nonbelievers of the persuasive power of his muse. Although Taylor found that he was in most demand now as a solo performer, he resisted pigeonholing, continuing to broaden the range of his activities . His efforts increasingly went beyond the confines of instrumental performance , expanding to include chalk-screeching-on-the-blackboard vocals, ritualistic chanting, stylized body movements , poetrythe oddest fragments of cultural bric-a-brac. But even when seated at the keyboard , Taylor broke new ground . He was commissioned to write and perform a piece for ballet artists Mikhail Baryshnikov and Heather Watts. He composed and played for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company He wrote for larger ensembles. He also continued to work in smaller combos, sometimes joined by longtime musical partner Jimmy Lyons-an associate from the early 1960s until shortly before Lyons’s death in 1986-whose full- toned alto work served as a firm anchor in the midst of Taylor’s aural tidal wave. Taylor’s massive recording project, Cecil Taylor Berlin ’88, was perhaps his most panoramic venture of the period. This multidisc project-some twelve hours of musicfound the pianist in collaboration with a wide range of players, many of them European, in settings spanning solo piano, duos, combos, and large bands. The pioneering efforts of Taylor and Coleman had blossomed, by the mid-1960s, into a full -fledged movement. Former bandmates of these pioneers now emerged as major performers in their own right. Archie Shepp, who had worked with Taylor in the early 1960s, formed a quartet with Bill Dixon and later participated in the New York Contemporary Five with Don Cherry and John Tchicai Shepp would also stand out as one of the most articulate publicists for freedom music, speaking frequently on its links to progressive political movements. Cherry went on to enjoy a successful career following his departure from Coleman’s band, initiating a relationship with the Blue Note label that resulted in major works Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisers. A series of six concerts at the Cellar Cafe, organized by Bill Dixon, presented under the rubric of the “October Revolution in Jazz,further as summer stints on the road with blues musician Little WalterIn his early twenties , Ayler served three years in the military, playing in army ensembles, occasionally gracing the bandstands of European jazz clubs while stationed overseas, and listening to the free jazz sounds that were beginning to gain wider exposure . Ayler’s first recordings, made during the early 1960s in Scandinavia, find him fighting against the constraints of the mainstream jazz tradition . By 1964, however , Ayler had developed his mature style, distinguished by an untempered WexcitabilityAyler had meanwhile found a group of sympathetic fellow travelers to support his explorations : drummer Sunny Murray, a master of free-time percussion ; bassist Gary Peacock, who could move with ease between conventional structures and atonality, and was especially skillful at exploring the ambiguous middle ground between the two; Don Cherry, who frequently sat in with Ayler and joined his band on a European tour. Witches and Devils, Ayler’s February 1964 quartet date, showed how completely the tenorist had broken away from the customary jazz vocabularyElements of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane are more prominent in his playing, but they too are subservient to Ayler’s rougher, looser conception Murray’s drum kit is the epicenter of unsettling reverberations hinting at underlying rhythms, but never resolving into conventional time. The ensuing trio recording Spiritual Unity, which featured Ayler alongside Murray and Peacock, was a major statement, the most cohesive ensemble project the saxophonist had undertaken to dateAyler showed that his radical remaking of the jazz saxophone vocabulary was largely self-sufficient, needing no other horns to set it off or support its blistering attack. It encompassed fervent explorations of harmonics , haunting stringlike evocations in the higher register, and Vesuvian explosions of sonic lava. Peacock and Murray hold onto these energized lines with the determination of cowpokes latching on to steers at the rodeo. To their credit, they grapple masterfully with Ayler’s unpredictable leaps and turns Ayler’s brother Donald joined as trumpeter in the band in March 1965 and remained a key colleague for the next three years. The younger sibling contributed uninhibited sound collages that complemented the saxophonist’s fractious work. But he suffered from emotional instability and a drinking problem, which precipitated his firing from the band in 1968. In the latter half of the decade, Albert Ayler’s music began to incorporate elements of a variety of vernacular styles. These included rock, R&B, blues, gospel, vocal harmonies, even bagpipe music. His 1968 release New Grass must rank among the strangest jazz albums of the decade, with its attempt to mix freedom music and formulas from the commercial hits of the day. Here Ayler’s radical saxophony is backed by a hard-grooving rhythm section that includes funkmeister drummer Bernard Purdie, and is overwhelmed by a team of sassy if undistinguished Motown-ish singers. This new direction was mostly lamented by fans of Ayler’s earlier work and did little to broaden his appeal among the dominant rock audience of the dayShortly before his death, the saxophonist showed signs of moving away from these crossover efforts. In November 1970, Ayler disappeared, and some three weeks later his body was found in the East River. He was thirty -four years old. Death by drowning was the verdict of the New York Medical Examiner’s office. Some commentators mused about foul play , with rumors circulating about a mysterious bullet wound in the corpse ( although denied by pianist Call Cobbs, who helped to identify the body)Others recalled signs of depression and mental instability that may have led Ayler to take his own life. Under other circumstances, the 1970s jazz revival would have surely given a major boost to Ayler’s career, but his early death ensured that the accolades would be posthumous Yet this saxophonist’s period of peak creativity, for all its brevity, marked an important turning point in the history of jazz. Anthony Braxton has sometimes spoken of a post- Ayler era in the music, setting up this figure as a point of demarcation in the evolution of the avant-garde in jazz- a revealing nomenclature that helps us understand why so much later jazz retreated from a full embrace of the freedom imperative rather than try to move “beyond Ayler” into a further stage of liberation from the strictures of Western tonality . In truth, it was hard to conceive what freedom ” beyond Ayler” might represent, since the saxophonist’s bold leap outside the world of notes into the full flux of sound seemed more a liminal point than a springboard to the next thing. Perhaps , then, it should come as no surprise that, almost at the moment of Ayler’s death, the biggest sensation in the jazz world was a rock-inflected album by
FUSION AND ELECTRONIC 
Fusion and Electronica Jazz has always been a music of fusion”Nothing from New Orleans is ever pure -so goes an old throwaway phrase. But even by Crescent City standards, early jazz was an especially complex mélange. The southern mentality that obsessively measured infinitesimal gradations of skin color -delineating differentiations of racial “purity” with the same zeal that Saint Thomas Aquinas ranked his nine categories of angels quickly came to a cul-de-sac tracing the lineage of this radical new music. Impure at its birth, jazz grew ever more so as it evolvedIts history is marked by a fondness for musical miscegenation , by its desire to couple with other styles and idioms, producing new, radically different progeny. In earliest form, jazz showed an ability to assimilate the blues, the rag , the march, and other idioms as it evolved, it transformed a host of even more disparate sounds and styles . It showed no pretensions , mixing as Yet the concept of jazz as music of fusion took on particular relevance at the close of the 1960s. Jazz was on the brink of an especially pronounced period of absorption and expansion. Over the next decade, the music’s leading exponents would attempt ambitious fusions with a dizzying array of popular, ethnic, and classical styles. At times, the resulting hybrids would be so far afield from the music’s tradition that listeners would ask in puzzlement whether the results could still be called jazz. Such experiments would even call into question the jazz world’s most sacred legacy: the syncopated sense of swing In its place, one now encountered a wide array of alternative rhythms : on-the- beat rock riffs, world-music drones, smoothly flowing quasi- classical styles, and experiments in free time. The types of fusion would vary widely, from the ethereal concert hall overtones of the ECM sound to the grooving dance beats of jazz- rock, but they shared an increasingly outward -looking focus. By the close of the 1970s, Buddy Bolden’s legacy had truly conquered the world, but the New Orleans pioneer would hardly recognize his own progenyIt had become more than a style of music-it was a perspective that seemingly could encompass all sounds. Yet for most listeners during this period, the term fusion had a very narrow and specific meaning. It described highly commercial attempts to combine jazz with rock music. Miles Davis’s recording of Bitches Brew at the close of the 1960s was a signal event in this regard. It legitimized a whole new area of exploration and experimentation for jazz musicians. This emerging rock-tinged sound substantially broadened the jazz audience, and one suspects that it played a decisive role in spurring the improving financial environment for all jazz styles during the 1970s. Fans who were introduced to jazz through fusion soon developed a taste for other kinds of improvised music. As a result, the economic base of jazz broadened and stabilized during this period, after years of stagnation and decline. New clubs opened, jazz labels proliferated, and expatriate musicians returned from their overseas exiles Sales figures for Bitches Brew provide an impressive measure of this change of affairs. A typical Davis mid-1960s album, despite the critical acclaim and lasting significance of this music, would sell fewer than 100,000 units at the time of release. But fans purchased 400,000 copies of Bitches Brew within its first year. Davis built on this new audience with a vengeance: he recorded prolifically over the next eighteen months, amazing Columbia executives, who had previously found it difficult to entice him into the studio he showed up at company publicity functions and played on television shows; he agreed to perform in rock venues, such as Fillmore West and Fillmore East, even when it meant serving as lead-in act for another band. Davis was also now working with a wider range of musicians and sounds -for instance, the Bitches Brew sessions found Davis using twelve different band members , ten of them in the rhythm section . Only Wayne Shorter was a holdover from the mid- 1960s quintet. Some critics accused Davis of selling out. Yet the remarkable thing about Bitches Brew was how little Davis attempted to mimic current trends in commercial music . but one of the tracks lasted for over ten minutes virtually guaranteeing that Davis would receive little radio airplay The songs studiously avoided prevailing formulas for hit music. Listeners seeking tight arrangements , melodic hooks , simple dance beats , or memorable lyrics were inevitably disappointed . This was raw, unfiltered music, rambling discursive, and often unwieldy. The large rhythm section created thick, soupy textures. And the bandleader remained coy, often allowing his associates to work over long static vamps before entering on trumpet. Even then, Davis’s horn lines were far from solos in any conventional sense . Instead , they seemed just one more layer of sound , placed on top of the churning cauldron underneath . This record may be, as many claim, the father of 1970s fusion . Yet if so, one struggles to see its paternal resemblance to the overly arranged , ever-so -slick Grover Washington and Spyro Gyra releases it supposedly spawned . Davis built on this aesthetic vision in a series of follow- up projects . Producer Teo Macero took on an increasingly important role at this time , employing radical tape-splicing techniques to sculpt finished performances from the mass of studio and live material that Davis was recording . On the release of Davis’s soundtrack music for the film Jack Johnson , one of the trumpeter’s strongest projects from the period, Macero created a dramatic shift in Davis’s piece “Yesternow” by incorporating excerpts from “Shh/ Peaceful”-recorded over a year before with a different band. The contrast is unnerving and disjunctive, yet very much in keeping with the helter-skelter sensibility of the new Davis sound. Live-Evil, from this same period , offers a similarly bizarre contrast, with the results of Davis’s intriguing studio project with the quirky Brazilian instrumentalist- composer Hermeto Pascoal strangely juxtaposed with live performances of Davis’s working band. At times it almost seemed as if Davis were defying the rock audiences who were now flocking to see him. Above all, he avoided the onstage recapitulation of hit records- the time- honored formula for popular bands-in favor of a restless linking of sundry fragments, set to a miasma of rhythmic sound Yet the rawness of this music, one suspects, accounted for much of its commercial success. It displayed a rebellious streak that was in tune with the counterculture attitudes of the late 1960s, giving Davis credibility with younger listeners who probably would have been ” turned off” by a slicker format. The proof of this came with Davis’s 1972 the Corner. Here Davis was willing to employ more overtly The mixed reaction to his music was only one of many problems Davis now faced. An October 1972 car accident left him with two broken ankles. His left hip, which had been operated on years before, was increasingly in pain and often left him immobilized. A bleeding ulcer added to his medical complaints, as did nodes on his larynx that constricted his breathing and left him short-winded when playing the trumpet. His drinking and drug problems further contributed to his deteriorating condition. Despite these aggravations, Davis continued an active schedule, undertaking concert performances in Japan in early 1975 that were recorded and eventually released as Agharta and But these were parting shots. Soon Davis had retired from the music scene. By his own admission, he did not pick up the horn for over four years and rarely left his home. Yet the fusion movement, Davis’s legacy, was now entrenched as the most commercially viable jazz style of the period. Former members of Davis’s various bands were taking the lead in this area, with three ensembles proving especially influential in combining jazz with rock: Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Weather Report, co -led by Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul But this represented only part of the impact of former Davis disciples on the new idiom. Hancock’s 1973 Head Hunters release achieved massive sales and brought many younger listeners into the jazz camp with funk- oriented pieces such as “Chameleon ” and an updated version of “Watermelon Man.” This album initiated a bifurcated career for Hancock , with his efforts now divided between mainstream jazz , often of the highest quality, and overtly commercial projects , some of them with little jazz substance . His 1979 release Feets Don’t Fail Me Now found Hancock making an unpromising debut as a singer (albeit with the aid of a voice synthesizer ) and regurgitating a vapid pseudo-disco sound-yet around that same time, he participated in a stunning two-piano concert tour with Chick Corea and an impressive reunion with the VSOP band, essentially a regrouping of the mid-1960s Davis quintet with Freddie Hubbard filling Miles’s role. In later years Hancock would prove to be something of a chameleon himself, with projects that showcased his mainstream jazz skills (Quartet, Directions in Music), his world music interests (The Imagine Project), his taste for funk and electronica (Perfect Machine), and his celebration of diverse songwriters (Gershwin’s World, The New Standard, River: The Joni Letters- the last release earning a Grammy as album of the year in 2008, the first time a jazz record had been so honored since Getz/Gilberto back in 1965 ). George Benson, whose guitar work had graced Davis’s Miles in the Sky release, made a more successful switch to vocal work. His mid-1970s cover version of Leon Russell’s “This Masquerade ,” from the Breezin’ album, initiated a series of pop hits for Bensona success that threatened to obscure his talent as a guitar soloist in a Wes Montgomery vein. Tony Williams’s Lifetime band, which included organist Larry Young and guitarist John McLaughlin , was not as commercially successful as Hancock’s or Benson’s fusion efforts, but provided an even more sophisticated blending of rock energy with jazz instrumental prowess Many lesser- known Davis associates -Airto, Lonnie Liston Smith, Michael Henderson , and others would never achieve the success of Head Hunters, Breezin, or Bitches Brew, but also sought , with varying degrees of success , to seize the momentum of the moment in attracting a crossover audience for their own bands Chick Corea had already established himself as one of the most prominent jazz pianists of his generation when he founded his Return to Forever fusion group toward the close of 1971 Corea’s early professional efforts found him working in both jazz ensembles and Latin bands . His mainstream jazz approach , as it evolved , boasted a clean , sharply articulated piano sound , a mix of modal and impressionist harmonies , and a driving on-top – of-the – beat rhythmic feel . His 1967 work on Stan Getz’s Sweet Rain project already bespoke a mature piano stylist and composer , and his 1968 leader date Now He Sings , Now He Sobs drew much -deserved praise as one of the most creative piano trío projects of the period. Around this same time, Corea joined Davis’s group and participated on Bitches Brew and several follow-up recordings, but, by the start of the 1970s, Corea had left the trumpeter to explore freer structures in his Circle band. In addition, Corea’s exceptional two volumes of piano improvisations for the ECM label from 1971 showed him refining a more song-oriented style, one that became even more prominent in Return to Forever. This ensemble, formed in 1972, found the keyboardist assisted by a strong cast of accompanists, especially bassist Stanley Clarke and later guitarist Al Di Meola, both virtuoso instrumentalists who could match Corea in moving from electric to acoustic settings and creating an appealing blend of jazz, rock-pop, and Brazilian/Latin sounds. Corea was especially adept at incorporating the latter elements into his compositions, as demonstrated by the crossover success of his pieces La Fiesta” and “Spain.” Starting in the 1980s, Corea increasingly played in a trio format, for a time reuniting with veterans Roy Haynes and Miroslav Vitous (who had participated on the Now He Sings, Now He Sobs project), and later forming a dynamic ensemble with bassist John Patitucci and drummer Dave Weckl. Like Hancock, Corea was now alternating between electric and acoustic settings , yet without the sharp disjunction of styles revealed by the former’s efforts-indeed the same Corea-Patitucci -Weckl group would perform alternately as the Elektric Band and the Akoustic Band , with the two approaches revealing a marked convergence. Later Corea groups would play variations on these themes and encompass everything from gritty acoustic combos (such as the New Trio with Avishai Cohen and Jeff Ballard, and the beefed-up Origin sextet ) to electric supergroups , as demonstrated on the 2008 Return to Forever reunion and the 2009 Five Peace Band collaboration with John McLaughlin. Along the way, Corea recorded duet projects with everyone from vocalist Bobby McFerrin to banjoist Béla Fleck, performed classical works, and even composed his own piano concerto and string quartet. As with so many of his peers, Corea’s embrace of jazz- rock fusion would ultimately prove to be merely one facet of a career more eclectic than electric. John McLaughlin worked in Tony Williams’s Lifetime band, as well as on Davis’s early fusion efforts, before branching out on his own with the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1971. Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1942, McLaughlin was active in the London scene, where he played not only with Jazz groups but also alongside rock musicians such as Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, and Jack Bruce, before moving to the United States in 1969. The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s music reflected McLaughlin’s deep rock roots -in many ways Jimi Hendrix was more of a role model for these efforts than an orientation that was heightened by the absence of a horn player in the band. Yet McLaughlin’s interests also ranged over many genres beyond jazz and rock, as witnessed by his facility in flamenco ( demonstrated in his later collaborations with Paco de Lucia), Indian music highlighted in his late 1970s band Shakti), and the classical/ acoustic guitar tradition (increasingly evident in the 1980s and 1990s, for instance , in his guitar concerto, premiered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1985 ). Jazz writer Joachim Berendt seemingly went out on a limb in the early 1970s when he claimed McLaughlin ” symbolizes the complete integration of all the elements that have played a role in today’s musicYet McLaughlin’s later career has tended to substantiate this high-flown praise. Like Corea and McLaughlin , Joe Zawinul and Wayn
Cornett Coleman reading: 
a major reshuffling of the band’s personnel at the end of 1955Herman continued to work steadily throughout the decade. But the jazz world changed dramatically during these years, as did the tastes of the general public. In the context of a transformed music sceneone that included Ornette Coleman, Elvis Presley, Cecil Taylor, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Coltrane, Little Richard, and Muddy WatersWoody Herman could no longer demand respect as a major force at the cutting edge. By the close of the 1950s, Herman was working frequently with a small combo. He would come to regroup, a Herman trademark, and though some of the Herds of later years made outstanding musicfor example, the powerhouse 1962-1965 unit, dubbed the ” Renaissance Herd” by critic Herb Wong-they failed to match the renown Herman enjoyed during his glory decade from 1945 to 1955 Herman would stay on the road almost to the end of his life, playing Carnegie Hall and high school assembly halls with equal enthusiasm. With even greater persistence he was pursued by government tax authorities , who claimed violations dating back over twenty years (due to lapses for which Herman’s manager, not the bandleader himself, was responsible ). In later days, Herman’s financial situation Lewis, in contrast, brought a distinctly academic flavor to his jazz work. He had studied music and anthropology at the University of New Mexico and had continued his education at the Manhattan School of Music, where he eventually earned a master’s degree. He too had worked in major modern jazz bands, including Parker’s and Gillespie’s, and the influence of Bud Powell could be heard, albeit muted in his playingFor all this, Lewis was a reluctant bebopper. He lacked Powell’s fire, instead favoring a more flowing, at times delicate style, one that remained somewhat at odds with the bop idiom. Yet Lewis’s meticulous craftsmanship and formalist tendencies made him an ideal participant in the Davis Birth of the Cool project. Still, none of these early associations prepared listeners for the burst of creativity Lewis revealed as musical director of the Modern Jazz QuartetAlthough his tastes have often been described as conservativefueled no doubt by his interest in traditional formsLewis showed a voracious appetite for new sounds and experimentation that few jazz artists of his day (or any other) could match. Along with Schuller, he played a key role in furthering the so- called Third Stream collaborations between jazz and classical musicians ; in addition to his responsibilities with the MJQLewis formed Orchestra USA in the early 1960s, an unfairly forgotten ensemble that straddled a number of musical styles and idioms. Years later he would renew these ambitions, working with Gary Giddins and Roberta Swann to found the American Jazz Orchestra. Lewis was also an early advocate of the jazz avant-garde and was among the first supporters of Ornette Coleman, whom he encouraged to attend the Lenox School of Jazz in 1959, at a time when most jazz players were ridiculing or ignoring Coleman’s work Lewis could find jazz material in traditions few would have thought hospitable to iteverything from fugues to commedia dell’arte-but he was equally successful at penning more recognizably jazz- oriented pieces, such as his wistful ballad “Django” or his riff-driven “The Golden Striker. For want of a better title, he has been claimed as part of the cool jazz movement Certainly he played a role in the growing popularity of cool jazz during the 1950s, but Lewis’s activities were far too varied to be subsumed under any one heading Although he never participated in the Davis Nonet, Stan Getz figured as one of the most prominent cool players of the period. Boosted by the fan popularity generated by his 1948 work of many leaders of the movement-Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Giuffre, Shelly Manne, Shorty Rogers , Dave Brubeck -reveals the exact opposite: a playful curiosity and a desire to experiment and broaden the scope of jazz music were the calling cards of their efforts. It was perhaps this very openness to new sounds that allowed many later leaders of the jazz avant-gardeEric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Paul Bley-to hone their styles while resident on theGerry Mulligan’s stint in California lasted only a few years, but it marked a turning point in the baritone saxophonist’s career. He came to Los Angeles as a relatively unheralded player, and left as a major jazz star. Building on his work as composer- arranger with the Davis Nonet, Mulligan wrote charts for the Kenton band and later undertook seminal recordings with his own large ensemble. But Mulligan’s most celebrated efforts from this period were in the context of a pared-down quartet. Not only did Mulligan prove that he could write effectively without a full unit of players, but he even discarded the piano in this minimalist combo. In a series of memorable performances-“Bernie’s Tune,”Line for Lyons”Lullaby of the Leaves,”My Funny Valentine,” and others-Mulligan exploited the potential of this limited instrumentation to the fullest through a variety of techniques counterpoint between the two horns; use of the bass and drums as melodic voices; sotto voce bass lines with the sax or trumpet; and stark variations in pulse and phrasing, ranging from Dixieland two-steps to swinging fours to pointillistic bop beats. The media soon picked up on the novelty of the ” pianoless quartet, ” with a write -up in Time magazine exerting particular impact. Before long patrons were lining up around the block to see the band in performance . The marriage of the cerebral and the romantic was one of the odd, endearing qualities of West Coast jazz . In the case of the Mulligan quartet , the latter ingredient was provided mostly by trumpeter Chet Baker . There were many limitations to Baker the musician – his range was narrow, his reading skills poor, his technique so- so, his interest in composition almost nil -but as a soloist he deservedly ranks among the finest of his generation . His instinct for melodic development was uncanny , and his improvised lines captured a touching poignancy . Fashion model looks only added to Baker’s drawing power , and in time heestablish himself as one of the leading jazz soloists of his day and a major protagonist of West Coast jazz, but drug addiction and its resulting complications, both penal and personal, troubled him for the next two decades. By the late 1950s, his playing had taken on a more probing quality, the sugary tone now offering a biting aftertaste . Some of Pepper’s finest recordings date from these years: Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section finds the altoist borrowing Miles Davis’s sidemen for a classic encounter; on Art Pepper Plus Eleven his lithe sax work propels the bop-oriented Marty Paich arrangements ; his sessions with pianist Carl Perkins, little known for many years due to their initial release on tape format , rank among the finest combo sides of the period. But during the 1960s, Pepper almost entirely disappeared from the scene. While in prison he came under the sway of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and engaged in the musical equivalent of psychotherapy dissecting and reassembling his style with these new influences grafted onto the old. For a time the process was awkward and unsure, but there were few listeners to notice even when on the outside, Pepper struggled to find an audience in the Age of Aquarius. For a time, he even contemplated retiring from music to pursue a desk job. But during his lengthy involvement with Synanon , a drug rehabilitation program, Pepper managed to integrate these new influences into an amazing whole , a predatory alto attack with a soft, vulnerable underbelly. The lyricism of his 1950s work was still evident, but his playing had become much freer, his tonal palette more varied, his creativity less fettered by the chord changes. A series of exceptional albums for the Galaxy and Contemporary labels documented this transformation and enabled Pepper to mount a major comeback after more than a decade of semi- obscurity. His 1977 engagement at the Village Vanguard, with drummer Elvin Jones in the band, found him at such a high level of inspiration that his record company eventually released all of the tapes, hours of performance at a fever pitch. Other late recordings of live performances -in Japan or in the States- reinforced his now-ascendant reputation. Yet the passion of this music seemed at odds with the altoist’s advanced years and failing health . Shortly before his death in 1982, Pepper published his autobiography, Straight Life, matching in prose the unflinching candor of his playing .leap, as witnessed by his Out to Lunch album, recorded shortly before his death. But even at this late stage, Dolphy evinced, especially through his elaborate compositions, a reluctance to leave structure and tradition behind (as he had done by necessity on the Free Jazz date under Ornette Coleman’s leadership). Certainly it is tempting to speculate how Dolphy and Little might have evolved had their partnership lasted another five or ten years. As it turned out, both players would be dead before the middle of the decade Little felled by uremia in 1961 at age twenty-three, Dolphy succumbing to heart failure spurred by a diabetic condition in 1964 at age thirty- six. It would be left to others, more revolutionary in their ambitions and even less wedded to the bebop and hard- bop tradition, to bring freedom music to its fullest expression : an Ornette Coleman, an Albert Ayler, a Cecil Taylor In the late 1950s, however, the chief challenge to Coltrane’s preeminence as the leading saxophonist of his day came not from Coleman or Ayler-little known at the time- or even from Dolphy. The most persuasive alternative to his “sheets of sound” approach emanated , rather, from the heart of the jazz tradition, in the person of tenorist Sonny Rollins. More than any of these celebrated peers, Rollins would play the lead role in defining the mainstream sound of the tenor during these transition years. While other saxophonists were exploring the limits of dissonance, free improv and extended forms, Third Stream mergings with classical music, exotic instruments, nonets and octets and other expanded bands, Rollins stayed mostly focused on forging a classic solo style. Much of the history of Adolphe Sax’s invention found its way into Rollins’s playing. One could hear the connections that tied him to the legacy of a Coleman Hawkins or a Chu Berry and other vintage players, seamlessly blended with hypermodern elements drawn from the current scene. like to think there is a direct link between early jazz and jazz of any time, Rollins told interviewer Bob Blumenthal in 1982. like to think that jazz can be played in a way that you can hear the old as well as the new. At least that’s how I try to play A celebration of improvisation lay at the core of his artistry and served as the organizing principle for his finest recordings and performances . At times his zest for the spontaneous flow of musical ideas would lead Rollins to produce extravagant unaccompanied sax musings Here his assessment. A half-century before the nixed Carnegie Hall album, Schuller’s essay had caused Rollins even greater anxiety as he tried to live up to its theoretical implications Similarly, the advent of Ornette Coleman and free jazz helped to spur another period of introspection However, Rollins’s most famous retreat from the jazz scene, which lasted from August 1959 to November 1961, has taken on mythic proportions in the artist’s biography. This period found the famous jazz star strolling up and down the Williamsburg Bridge on many evenings , playing his horn for the astonished passersby At the time of this sabbatical, Rollins was at the peak of his fame. During the previous four years he had put together remarkable body of workA series of tenacious trio and quartet recordings were at the core of his oeuvre. No tenorist has ever played better when accompanied simply by bass and drums, as Rollins’s work from this period makes clear Way Out West, featuring him with Ray Brown and Shelly Manne from March 1957 ; the seminal trio recordings from a November 1957 date at the Village Vanguard ; and Freedom Suite with Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach from the following February Among the quartet projects, Worktime from
PART 1: After reading Ch. 9 section on Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis answer the following questions:
Q: What is significant about Wynton Marsalis’s quick rise to fame?
Q: What are your thoughts on Wynton’s decision to go back to a style like New Orleans jazz?
Q: What are your thoughts on Wynton’s very blunt comments about other jazz musicians?
Q: Wynton can perform classical and jazz idioms, they do not necessarily influence his playing one way or another. He has mastered both. How do you think he would apply this to his viewpoint on jazz considering how jazz came to fruition during the pre-jazz era? 
Branford Marsalis
Q: How does Branford’s viewpoints differ from his brothers? (through his actions) 
Q: If you had to choose a side, who would you side with in terms of jazz direction? why?
Q:  Do we see anything similar in modern day music to the “jazz wars” between modernists and traditionalists?
PART 2: Read Chapter 10 beginning up to the section on Brad Mehldau and answer the following questions:
Q: Prior to 1950 were there any jazz artists who won academic awards or professorships at institutions?
Q: Who applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the 1930s and were they successful in winning that award?
Q: Where did most of the socioeconomic shift happen for Jazz?
Q: These new venues for jazz formation would become a heated talking point; what issues did older jazz musicians have with those getting degrees in jazz?
Q: Why do you think they were against this shift?
Q: What benefits or detriments could happen to jazz from this shift to a more academic approach?
READ CH 10 here: 
During the first half-century of its existence, jazz flourished with little or no support from the ruling institutions of the cultural world. If you were a jazz musician, you operated as a freelancer, seeking the fickle support of bandleaders and the general public. The closest thing to tenure was a spot in a successful traveling band, but even that could end at a moment’s notice-musicians sometimes found themselves stranded far from home, or even thrown off the bus mid-route. If anyone had thought to ask leading jazz players of that earlier day about their institutional affiliations, the puzzled artists probably would have thought the question was about prison or some other form of confinement.THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
Photo by Waring Abbott.
Who could blame them? Colleges would hardly consider inviting them to perform on campus, let alone award professorships, and applying for grants and residencies, now a common practice, was virtually unknown. Stride piano pioneer James P. Johnson sought a Guggenheim fellowship back in the 1930s, and (of course) got rejected- but it’s extraordinary, given the attitudes of the time, that he had even considered applying in the first place. I recently asked a group of jazz researchers to name a jazz artist who received a grant before the year 1950, and no one could think of a single example.
Even when jazz performers drew capacity crowds to concert halls and ballrooms, they often remained outsiders.
The musicians may have viewed themselves as artists, not entertainers, but respect was hard-earned, and given in the smallest of doses. And eventually, after World War II, the crowds started to shrink. As jazz music lost much of its audience during the 1950s, it took on the aura of a counter-culture. Community leaders tolerated it, but also feared it.
If you judged the state of the music based on write-ups in
the newspapers of the day, you might have concluded that modern jazz wasn’t a real art form, merely a recreation activity for drug users, beatniks, agitators, and various other contingents of the underclass.
The situation was so dire that Downbeat magazine launched a contest in 1949 to pick a new name for jazz.
Many believed that the old name was tainted by negative associations, and the music needed a more respectable label.
The winning entry, earning a thougand-dollar prize, was
“Crewcut” and what could be more clean-cut than that?
As it turned out, the contest was soon forgotten. And we are perhaps fortunate: the other entries were no better, and included such head-scratchers as “Mop,” “Schmoosic,” and
“Blip.” As it turned out, the old name would soon get an unexpected boost. Jazz was on the verge of what we today call brand reinvention, and ready to embark on a long path to respectability.
Today, jazz has such a powerful positive vibe that outsiders are quick to seize it for their own purposes. As we have already seen, the word jazz gets used (or mis-used) as the name of an automobile, a cologne, a software platform, or a professional sports team. You hear it played at pricey retailTHE HISTORY OF JAZZ
stores or in the background of TV commercials for luxury products. Once considered the music of the underclass, jazz somehow got turned into a genre associated with the affluent and upwardly mobile. By the same token, jazz. shows up at the White House, gets taught at Harvard, and is considered for the Pulitzer Prize the same award Duke Ellington was denied back in 1965. Nowadays you can work as a jazz professor or jazz administrator, vocations that simply didn’t exist in an earlier day. This transition from jazz as outsider music to insider music gets taken for granted by almost everybody, but is arguably the most significant socioeconomic shift in the art form’s history. Yet even those who lived through the “rebranding” would have a hard time explaining the steps by which it happened.
Much of the change took place at schools and colleges, where youngsters were taught to view jazz in new ways.
In the 1950s, the first jazz textbooks appeared, and around thirty colleges started offering courses on the subject.
That’s a far cry from the current day, when almost every college embraces jazz in some manner, and more than one hundred have formal degree programs, but back then it marked a major turning point, a reversal of the ostracization and marginalization of previous decades. Around this same time, jazz performances on campus-previously relegated to unofficial settings, such as fraternity parties and student-organized dances-started gaining official sanction from administrators. These now were often promoted as real concerts, taking place in the same hallowed halls where Beethoven and Mozart had long reigned unchallenged.
Student jazz bands, previously run informally without the support-and sometimes in outright defiance-of college officials, now started showing up as part of the curriculum, taught by faculty and earning academic credit for participants. In aggregate, these shifts represented a modest change to music education in American life, and most jazz artists of the postwar era still learned on their own, without the benefit of classroom instruction, but this was destined to change.
A full generation transpired before the full impact of this shift would be felt on the jazz scene. But it’s hardly a coincidence that the jazz ethos of the 1980s and 1990s reflected such an expansive historical consciousness and featured so many up-and-coming performers who moved with such ease from style to style. For this generation,THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
academic training and college degrees were the norm, not the exception, and it showed in their professional approach to the music. Whatever they needed to know, they knew.
Whatever you hired them to play, they could play. Of course, this transition did not take place without conflict, and many aligned with the styles and attitudes of earlier eras grumbled, usually in private conversation but sometimes publicly, that the new players suffered from tỏo much schooling. In their opinion, jazz with an academic pedigree was a cold imitation of the real thing, which had been pressure-tested in the wild world of traveling bands and macho jam sessions-and most assuredly not by going to class and reading a textbook. “Hah,” an old-timer responded at some point in the 1980s, when I mentioned a jazz professor
“that,” he insisted, “is what they used to call the piano player in a New Orleans brothel.”
But such complaints had little impact in the larger scheme of things, perhaps because jazz fans had grown all too familiar, perhaps even weary, with these generational battles, which rarely had any positive impact and had been stirring up futile antagonisms at least as far back as the 1920s. In those quaint old days, even a simple change, such as replacing a clarinet in the band with a saxophone, had been viewed by many traditionalists as treason against the spirit of jazz. And the same kinds of squabbles had recurred with each passing decade-youngsters always getting accused of abandoning the authentic jazz of yesteryear— although the complaints never slowed down the inevitable process of change. For all their dissatisfaction, even the harshest critics of the new college-trained jazz performers could hardly deny that these young players came to their vocations with a rare degree of technical skill and deep reserves of formal knowledge. When you heard the best of them, it was hard not to be impressed.
These changes inevitably impacted the sound of the music, and it’s hardly surprising that a new earnestness eventually permeated the stylistic preferences and onstage demeanors of these artists. If you had any doubts that jazz was now a serious art form, and not idle entertainment, you merely needed to spend some time in the concert hall with the rising stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Perhaps no artist reflected this earnest attitude more decidedly than pianist Brad Mehldau. It wasn’t just his tendency to quote German philosophers in his liner notes that contributed THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
to this perception. (At one point, an academic paper was made available for download on the pianist’s website, entitled “Smashing the Framework with a Piano Hammer:
An Interpretation of Nietzschean Existentialism in the Music of Brad Mehldau.”) Nor was it Mehldau’s dour mien on his
CD covers, where he seemed to have a deep-set aversion to showing even a glimmer of a smile. Rather, the singular gravitas of Mehldau’s artistry came most to the forefront on the bandstand, where he combined the cerebral and lyrical in artful reconfigurations of popular songs and his own sharply etched compositions. The vehemence of this music was all the more striking when one considered Mehldau’s marked preference for pop and rock material with only the loosest links to the jazz repertoire. He seemed just as likely to draw on the Beatles and Paul Simon for his set lists as on Monk and Trane, and Mehldau’s example was the key reason why songs by Radiohead and Nick Drake got embraced as jazz standards around this time. That said, you wouldn’t hear Mehldau’s cover versions of these songs on rock radio stations. After the pianist had refracted these compositions through his own house of musical mirrors, these former hit tunes were turned into jazz art songs and bore the full weight of Mehldau’s exploratory tendencies. The song he was playing might be
“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” but when his trio performed it in 7/4 meter with dauntingly dense instrumental textures, you might be forgiven for not recognizing Paul Simon’s number-one hit from 1975.
Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1970, Mehldau spent much of his youth in Connecticut and moved to New York in 1988 to study at the New School under Fred Hersch. The pianist’s early work inspired critics to makg comparisons to Bill Evans, much to Mehldau’s displeasure. On one of his albums he included a lengthy essay asserting his independence from this influential forerunner. “The constant comparison of this trio with the Bill Evans trio by critics has been a thorn in my side. I remember listening to his music only a little, when I was 13 or 14 years old, for several months. … Often what I am doing in my solo is basing its melodic content on the initial melody of the song. You won’t find the model for this approach in Bill Evans.”! In truth, Mehldau’s earliest recordings do show marked similarities with Evans’s work in their choice of material, approach to phrasing, and the interactivity between piano, bass and drums; yet by the time he was in the midst of his Art of the Trio projects from the THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
late 1990s, he was increasingly staking out his own ground, setting out a vibrant body of work that was more likely to influence others than to show its own sources of inspiration.
This artist’s advanced rhythmic conception and orchestral two-handed technique, his expansion of the repertoire noted above, and his musical rapport with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy (or Jeff Ballard on later recordings) made clear that an artist could continue to work within popular song forms and conventional tonality while still pushing the art form ahead in exciting new directions.
Just as Brad Mehldau has needed to assert his independence in the face of those who would like to pigeonhole him as a Bill Evans clone, pianist Matthew Shipp has often had to deal with those who want to typecast him as an acolyte of Cecil Taylor or enter him as a combatant in the Free Jazz controversies that began before he was even born. Yet Shipp is too complicated a musician for such simple genealogies, and though he is capable of titanic atonal attacks on the keyboard, as he demonstrated ever since the days of his apprenticeship in the band of saxophonist David S. Ware, he can also work his magic within conventional chord changes or even while handling simple pentatonic-based figures. Indeed, his recordings include nonconformist versions of the most unlikely songs, such as “Frère Jacques” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” which coexist happily with his gritty interpretations of jazz standards and original compositions. Perhaps the best way of conceptualizing Shipp is to see his music as existing
“on the edge” rather than (like many so-called “free” players)
“over the edge.” In this regard, he is less an extension of Cecil Taylor, and perhaps more aligned with the astringent soundscapes of keyboardists such as Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Horace Tapscott, and Andrew Hill, who preferred to deconstruct tonal systems rather than abandon completely their centrifugal hold on the music.
Shipp was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1960, and though jazz was heard frequently at his home-his mother had known that other great Wilmington musician Clifford Brown—he also played in rock bands during high school and listened to artists such as Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire. This wide mix of influences has been reflected in his Shipp’s own eclectic approach to bandleading, which has found him occasionally drawing on hip-hop elements, synthesized sounds, loops, and other electronic effects, THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
but also achieving equal success in all-acoustic settings.
the jazz studies department. But if academics are supposed
Certainly no one would mistake Shipp for a crossover
to stay in their ivory tower, no one apparently told Allen,
or fusion artist, and he looks to music outside of the who broke down boundaries of all sorts, whether cultural, mainstream jazz tradition not so much for its commercial stylistic, or geographic. She could resurrect the music of aspects, but rather as part of his search after new sound
Kansas City jazz pioneer Mary Lou Williams and play it with
colors he can incorporate into his uncompromising personal
scrupulous authenticity, but also collaborate with avant-
vision of jazz. Here a ruthless domination of the music gardist Ornette Coleman, who rarely worked with pianists somehow coexists with the artist’s analytical and almost because he found their harmonic structures too confining, architectural mindset, and the unresolved tension between yet made an exception for Allen. How many other jazz. the two is perhaps the most alluring aspect of Shipp’s music.
musicians could secure a Guggenheim fellowship and also
Listening to it, one is reminded of those hard-nosed doctors win an award from the TV show Soul Train, or take the stage who can cure the patient, but only by enforcing the most with absolute authority both at the Apollo Theater in Harlem brutal regimen.
and the hallowed halls of Harvard University?
As such examples suggest, the well-trained practitioners
of this period could still make their mark as risk-takers, and
At the time of her untimely death from cancer in 2017,
Allen left behind more than twenty albums under her name,
sometimes proved more daring and less doctrinaire than jazz
which display her skills in a wide range of settings. But her
artists who came of age in the supposedly more wild and
most lasting legacy is likely to reside in an influential series
untamed days of yesteryear. Pianist Geri Allen is a case in of trio and small combo projects that found Allen engaged in point. She had been one of the first students to earn a degree musical dialogues with the leading bassists and drummers in Howard University’s jazz program, and subsequently of the generation that preceded her own. On her 1994 completed a master’s program in ethnomusicology at the project Iwenty One, released on the Blue Note label, Allen University of Pittsburgh, where she later served as director of performed alongside Ron Carter and Tony Williams, who THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
had redefined rhythm and time as members of Miles Davis’s mid-1960s quintet, just as she had previously recorded The Nurturer with Robert Hurst and Jeff “Tain” Watts, who had undertaken a similar reconfiguration as anchors to Wynton Marsalis’s mid-1980s group, and would later engage in expressive interplay with late 1960s Davis bandmates Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette on The Life of a Song. But her longest partnership found her in close collaboration with drummer Paul Motian and bassist Charlie Haden, members of Keith Jarrett’s pathbreaking 1970s quartet, whose musical chemistry with Allen is documented on five seminal albums that rank among the finest piano trio recordings of the final years of the twentieth century. These projects marked a different twist on the growing historical consciousness of the era: instead of trying to resuscitate the sounds of the past, Allen was taking on the larger task of creating vibrant new music with individuals who had made that history in the first place, but in a future-oriented spirit that was never limited by tradition or undue deference for the past.
Among the leading saxophonists that came to the forefront of the music in the closing years of the century, you could hear this same commitment to drawing on the past without dwelling in it a determination to maintain a historical consciousness untainted by nostalgia, and open to new directions. Few horn players achieved this balance with greater skill than Joe Lovano, and in his explorations he refused to recognize the ideological boundaries that had bedeviled the jazz world in previous decades. On his exceptional double-disc live recording at the Village Vanguard in 1995, Lovano could offer a stirring tribute to Ornette Coleman with his composition “Fort Worth,” yet on his previous release Rush Hour, named album of the year by Downbeat, the saxophonist collaborated with Third Stream progenitor Gunther Schuller. Then again, on his 52nd Street Themes album, Lovano showed his mastery of bop-oriented songs composed before he was born. In other settings, Lovano has not been afraid to take an unabashedly lyrical approach to a ballad, stirring up comparisons to Stan Getz, or to battle other tenor icons in his Saxophone Summit ensemble, where he has sparred with Michael Brecker, Dave Liebman, and Ravi Coltrane. He has delighted audiences with in-the-tradition duets with veteran pianist Hank Jones, mixed it up with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell in an iconoclastic trio, and put his stamp on theme albums THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
dedicated to Frank Sinatra and Enrico Caruso. Is he a traditionalist or a progressive? Old school or new school?
Such questions become meaningless in the face of his expansive body of work. Lovano is a stellar soloist, plain and simple, with big ears and a big heart. His reputation has been built on how his music sounds, not what it signifies.
Tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, born in Berkeley in 1969, has followed a far different route to get to à similar endpoint, growing up on the West Coast, thriving in academics—he was valedictorian of his high school class and attended Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude-and toying with the idea of becoming a doctor or lawyer before settling on the sax. But like Lovano, Redman stands out as a unifying figure, drawing on many camps without giving full allegiance to any one of them. His father,
Dewey Redman-
—who came of age with Ornette Coleman
and later played in Keith Jarrett’s so-called American quartet
-was demonstrating a similar flexibility back when the jazz world was far more polarized; but Redman the younger has been, if anything, even more peripatetic in his music making. He dazzled listeners at the 1991 Thelonious Monk competition, secured a recording contract with Warner
Bros., and on his 1993 album Wish seemed to be following in his father’s footsteps, covering Ornette on the opening track with a band that featured Coleman alums Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, as well as guitarist Pat Metheny. Other early releases, such as the exemplary Spur of the Moment, recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1995, and the MoodSwing project from the same period, were more overtly traditional but hardly conventional. In subsequent projects, Redman has also grooved in odd time meterg with Brad Mehldau, played with the Japanese blues band the Seatbelts, crafted low-key chamber jazz on his 2009 Compass release, and taken on a funk-oriented attitude with his Elastic Band. Yet, whatever the setting, Redman impresses as one of the most consistently inventive soloists of his generation.
James Carter, born in Detroit in 1969 and just four weeks older than Redman, espouses a comparable disregard for party lines yet shows his versatility in a still different way.
He plays tenor sax, soprano sax, alto sax, baritone sax, flute, and bass clarinet, and one would be hard pressed to say which of these is his main outlet. His repeated victories in the Downbeat poll baritone sax category might suggest that this could be a promising area of specialization for Carter, THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
yet he seems happier switching from horn to horn rather than pursuing a monogamous relationship with any one of them. His knowledge of the jazz tradition runs deep, and his recordings are peppered with cover versions of tunes from decades past that only the cognoscenti would recognize. Yet Carter doesn’t fit easily into the traditionalist mold, and his music also borrows from contemporary stylings or moves into avant-garde territory as the situation warrants. With his all-star Heaven on Earth project from 2009, Carter even adopted a rockish jam band aesthetic, although he found a place here for a dose of Ayler-esque energy jazz. Jazz history is often unkind to musicians who try to cover too much ground, as demonstrated by the careers of Benny Carter, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Oliver Nelson, Jimmy Giuffre, and others who might have been better known if they had remained faithful to a single instrument and concept throughout their careers. Time will tell whether Carter can overcome this tendency of the jazz world to celebrate that which they can pigeonhole. Certainly his talent is large and could carry him to the highest rung of the art form.
This kind of versatility is prized not only by leading performers but also by student musicians in the new
millennium. If you talk to saxophonists enrolled in the major jazz academic programs, you will soon find that their heroes and role models are often those who in their own development were omnivorous students of the art form. In many ways, Chris Potter exemplifies this new type of jazz hero, and I am hardly surprised when student horn players tell me that they have transcribed his solos and memorized his licks. If you were writing a textbook on the well-trained contemporary saxophonist, you would do well to put his picture on the cover-or, even better, have him write the book himself. A native Chicagoan, Potter moved to New York at age eighteen, where he pursued formal studies at the New School and the Manhattan School of Music, but was soon making his mark in the local nightelubs. In addition to leading his own ensembles, Potter has appeared on around two hundred other recordings. And for a good reason: he can do almost anything on any saxophone (and, as the occasion warrants, on bass clarinet, flute, and other instruments).
His technique is flawless, and he can play with speed and intensity without losing the sensitivity necessary for the skilled professional who might need to perform old-school acoustic jazz one night and high-octane plugged-in funky THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
sounds the next. These hard-earned abilities have allowed him to play onstage with musical acts as diverse as Herbie Hancock, Steely Dan, Marian McPartland, Pat Metheny, and the Mingus Big Band. But Potter’s legendary status draws just as much on activities away from the concert halls his devotees will mention the time he played “Cherokee” in ten different keys for students at a jazz clinic (a recording and transcription showed up a few weeks later on YouTube) or performed some other feat of practice-room bravado.
Perhaps Potter’s closest rival as an influence on up-and-coming saxophonists is California native Mark Turner, who arrived on the New York scene in 1990 after graduating from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. How influential is Turner? Fellow horn player Kevin Sun has shared the story of a jazz ensemble leader at the New England Conservatory, circa 2005, complaining that all the sax players in the band were trying to sound like Turner. “You know, in this music you’ve got to find your own voice,” the irritated teacher told his students. “Now, I’m hearing a lot of Mark Turner in the room, but Mark Turner’s not here today…. I didn’t come here to hear Mark. I came here to hear you.”? Yet Turner is emulated for good reasons. He has mastered all the elements of the tenor sax, whether we’re talking about playing in the highest register of the horn, improvising with ease in any kind of context, playing the old songs with total conviction, or making new ones sound as if they are already timeless classics. He has somehow managed to achieve intensity but while also conveying a sense of ease, almost as if the antagonistic hot and cool schools of yesteryear have called a truce and joined together in a single expressive style. Yet it’s a sign of the times that write-ups on Turner often used the term “studious” —a phrase that would have been out of place in jazz commentary of an earlier day. Pianist Edward Simon, who has collaborated with Turner, offers this snapshot of the saxophonist’s private regimen: “Mark is a highly disciplined individual who lives an exemplary life. It is reflected in every aspect of his vice-free life. He is studious, dedicated (practices saxophone daily), exercises regularly (yoga and running), he maintains a strict vegetarian diet and on top of all this he is a caring family man.”? I’ve even heard admirers of Turner’s craft praise him as egoless, hardly a term one associates with jazz legends of the past. Such descriptors offer a striking reminder of how previous stereotypes of jazz musicians-long stigmatized as drug addicts, rebels, or THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
troublemakers— hardly apply to those who came of age in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
As one looks at these artists and other leading reed players of the new millennium-such as Miguel Zenón, Kenny Garrett, Donny McCaslin, Melissa Aldana, and Anat Cohen, among others-one is struck by how they manage to be so effective with so little grandstanding or ostentation. After several generations of heroic jazz horn players who inspired others with their cult of personality-obsessed acolytes even founded a church to honor John Coltraneas much as their musical methods, this down-to-business earnestness may strike casual fans as a letdown, but the insiders are likely to applaud a new phase in which musicianship and professionalism, pure and simple, have their day.
And the same is true of other instruments, even the guitar
-which in recent decades has emerged as a platform for the most extroverted performers. But not on the current jazz scene. When an NPR journalist profiled jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson, one of the rising stars on the instrument, he noted at the outset that she “doesn’t look like much of a trailblazer. She plays sitting down. She’s small, and mostly hidden behind her hollow-body guitar and glasses.”4 In fact,
it sometimes seems as if Halvorson is deliberately subverting the guitar hero stereotype, maybe even cultivating the public image of a nerd. Her 2018 album Code Girl wasn’t really about writing computer code, but you might think it was judging by Halvorson’s persona and demeanor. But don’t be fooled by these superficial trappings. She can be as gnarly as Jimi Hendrix (a major influence) or as iconoclastic as Anthony Braxton (one of her teachers) on the six strings, serving up some of the rawest, most unfiltered gujtar lines you will hear in a jazz club.
These low-key stars of the jazz idiom get acclaim and awards, but much of the credit belongs to the jazz educators, who have laid the groundwork for today’s resurgence, but almost always while operating behind the scenes. They are often poorly remunerated and invariably little known even among serious fans, but their impact can be heard everywhere on the jazz scene. Robert Morgan, a teacher at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, helped launch the careers of pianists Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, and Helen Sung; drummers Eric Harland and Kendrick Scott; saxophonist Everette Harp; trombonist Corey King; bassist Mark Kelley; and many others. Joshua THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
Redman and Ambrose Akinmusire came out of a Berkeley school
system that, over a period of several decades, established a substantial jazz program, starting with efforts by Dr. Herb Wong back in 1966 and blossoming when Phil Hardymon became the band director at Berkeley High in
1975. Other alums of this system include David Murray, Benny Green, Peter Apfelbaum, Dave Ellis, Rodney Franklin, Craig Handy, and Michael Wolff. In an earlier day, only a few communities in the United States had robust jazz programs of this sort, but Jazz at Lincoln Center can now boast that four thousand schools have received big band scores and teaching materials through their education outreach efforts.
Jazz has not just entered the high school curriculum in the twenty-first century, but in many cases it is the centerpiece of the music program.
These bands serve as sources of talent for an expanding roster of colleges and universities where jazz, once excluded from most academic settings, is nurtured and supported.
The most prominent of these environments, the Berklee College of Music in Boston (no connection with Berkeley in California, despite the similarity in name), has risen from humble roots to become something of a Juilliard of jazz. Berklee teaches more than six thousand students from close to one hundred countries-and in 2011 opened an overseas campus in Valencia, Spain. Its influence can be seen everywhere in the jazz world. Around 80 percent of its graduates go on to pursue careers in music, and its alums have earned hundreds of Grammy Awards. Berklee and the other leading jazz academic institutions-the University of North Texas, the Manhattan School of Music, William Paterson University, NYU, USC, CalArts, the New School, and many others both in the United States and overseas. have transformed jazz from the domain of the self-taught and those who learned on the job into a schematized body of knowledge disseminated in classrooms and assimilated by students as though it were calculus or accounting. One is even tempted to divide jazz history into pre-Berklee and post-Berklee eras, a way of conceptualizing the music that is no doubt simplistic yet represents a meaningful divide in the evolution of the art form.
Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire exemplifies the career path of the new millennium jazz musician. At every step along the way, he navigated through school programs and institutions that simply didn’t exist for an earlier generation THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
f improvisers. Akinmusire first demonstrated his musical rowess while a student at Berkeley High School, and used hat as a springboard for joining the Monterey Festival’s Tew Generation Jazz Orchestra, a touring ensemble that howcases the best high school jazz musicians in the Jnited States. After graduating from high school in 2000, Akinmusire earned a full scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music in New York, which was followed by a naster’s program at the University of Southern California and a stint at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. In 2007, Akinmusire won the coveted Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, and was subsequently signed to a record contract by Blue Note Records.
But if you think all this time in the classroom turned Akinmusire into a cold, textbook-driven performer, think again. He has far more in common with the fiery Blue Note trumpeters of days gone by than with any prevailing academic school, and he stands out as much for his unbridled passion and raw emotion on the bandstand as for his admired practice room-honed techniques qualities that have enabled him to work alongside hip-hop star Kendrick Lamar on the Grammy-winning album To Pimp a Butterfly,
accompany deep-in-the-roots jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, or work in a freeform improvisational setting with the pointillistic drummer Tyshawn Sorey, all with equal authority.
Similar stylistic leanings can be heard in the work of many other standout trumpeters in the twenty-first century.
In a curious way, the extraordinary influence of Wynton Marsalis in re-creating past styles and raising historical consciousness has perhaps promoted a backlash among others who play trumpet in an era when he is the most prominent exponent of the instrument and, for many in the general public, the face of jazz. Younger trumpeters such as Jeremy Pelt or Ingrid Jensen or Christian Scott could all show you their music degrees (from Berklee, in all three instances), but when you hear them take a solo, you get a sense that they are more focused on playing in the moment rather than demonstrating their authenticity working in the tradition.
Among those of a slightly older generation, Tom Harrell has perhaps the deepest academic roots of any horn player.
He literally grew up in the environs of Stanford University, where his father was an eminent professor, and later earned a music degree from the same institution. Yet Harrell too THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
seems positively immune to the methodologies and patterns of jazz pedagogy, playing with an expressive spontaneity that could hardly be codified or taught in a lesson plan.
In fact, as I survey the leading artists who have come out of these structured learning environments and degree programs, I am struck by how little the spirit of jazz has changed in response to this, pronounced academicization. I suspect that this is due to the peculiar qualities that the art form embodied from the moment of its birth. Jazz has always celebrated spontaneity and improvisation, adaptability and living in the moment. It has thrived via an ethos of energy and excitement, not cold-blooded contemplation, and its leading practitioners have never complained if audiences were entertained or even got up and danced-moving people emotionally and getting them to move physically was always part of the plan. None of these qualities is especially well suited to the classroom, nor does a musician’s mastery of them translate easily to an academic résumé or tenure review process. The continued relevance of these core values, after more than a century in which almost everything else in the jazz idiom has changed, suggests that jazz will probably never get tamed by the universities and institutions that have allowed it entry. The ivory tower may adapt to jazz, but it doesn’t seem likely that jazz will adapt in any meaningful way to the ivory tower.
Even if the core values of jazz have hardly changed in recent decades, its leading performers clearly now enjoy entry into many settings and contexts where previously they could merely watch from outside. Jazz violinist Regina Carter (cousin of saxophonist James Carter discussed above) took master classes with Itzhak Perlman and Yehudi Menuhin during her teenage years, and could play with a funk band one night and a symphony orchestra the next. A generation earlier, jazz bassist Ron Carter (no relation) had grown up in the same neighborhood and had even attended the same high school, Cass Tech, but had been forced to give up on a career in classical music because symphony orchestras were reluctant to hire African American musicians. Regina Carter, for her part, focused on jazz from an early age, and has risen to preeminence on her instrument, but that hasn’t prevented her from recording works by Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, or dipping into bluegrass and other traditional sounds. In the music world she inhabits, there are few THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
stylistic barriers- certainly not to the degree they existed only a few decades ago.
This is how the flexibility of the jazz idiom plays out in the current day, a time when many of the old dividing lines have been almost completely erased. The chasm between, say, Monk and Mozart isn’t as wide as it once seemed, and young musicians can now enter degree programs in which jazz and classical techniques are taught side by side, allowing individual artists to move freely from one to the other without any cultural baggage or institutional obstacles hindering their choices. Back in the 1950s, a few visionaries had predicted something of this sort, calling for the rise of a so-called Third Stream that would combine the preexisting tributaries of jazz and classical music into a new hybrid that seamlessly blends the spontaneity of the former with the formal structures and traditions of the latter. In some instances, that kind of merging has taken place on the nightclub bandstand and in the concert hall, but probably not quite in the ways that the Third Stream advocates anticipated. We still don’t hear many jazz fugues or swing sonatas. For the most part, the sounds of jazz and classical retain their separate identities, but the surrounding cultural contexts and institutional structures of the two idioms have come very close to merging. Ambitious organizations such as Jazz at Lincoln Center and SFJAZZ now mount fund-raising campaigns very similar to those found at the leading opera companies and symphonies. The musicians in the two fields increasingly are considered for the same awards, apply for the same grants, teach in the same classrooms. Perhaps this merging will now go the next step, and lead to a greater blurring in actual performance styles. But if past history is any guide, jazz is more likely to take on the full range of expressive tools offered by the classical world, and use them for its own purposes, assimilating without getting assimilated. I suspect most musicians and fans prefer it that way.
The Globalization of Jazz
The hottest jazz story in the media, circa 2015, featured an eleven-year-old boy. Joey Alexander seemed to be everywhere at once. His music went viral on the web, and got high-profile coverage in the New York Times. He even showed up on the CBS news show 60 Minutes, and was booked as a THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
headline act at the Newport Jazz Festival. Alexander recorded his debut album, My Favorite Things, around this time, and when he performed at the Grammy Awards a few months later, this precocious child received a standing ovation from the assembled leaders of the music business. The next day many viewers were still raving about—no, not Taylor Swift, Adele, or Kendrick Lamar, also featured on the broadcast— the amazing youngster who played the piano.
But those familiar with the workings of the music business should have been even more impressed with Joey Alexander’s origins in Bali, Indonesia. My Favorite Things would make history as the first album by an Indonesian artist to appear on the Billboard album chart. That’s especially surprising when you consider that Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, with more than 260 million residents, and boasts one of the richest musical traditions of any nation. It took an eleven-year-old child to break down barriers that previous generations of extraordinary Indonesian musicians couldn’t even budge.
It’s an inspiring story, but also very revealing of the state of jazz in the twenty-first century. For many years, jazz lovers in the United States proclaimed, with a peculiar complacency,
that jazz is “America’s classical music.” The phrase has a pleasant ring about it, yet close observation of the jazz world tells a different story, revealing that many of the most exciting developments in the art form are happening outside of the music’s homeland and increasingly so with each passing decade. In just the last few years we have reached a tipping point when even hard-to-impress New Yorkers, masters of the jazz idiom since at least the 1930s, have put aside their well-known skepticism to the claims of rivals in the musical universe and instead given a hero’s welcome to a piano prodigy from ten thousand miles away.
And if one were to set betting odds on predictions about the future of the art form, the further globalization of jazz may be the safest wager of them all. In short, America’s classical music is now the common property of the whole world. Perhaps the term glocalization-favored by critic Stuart Nicholson-is an even better way of describing this shift. Even as it spreads, jazz gets transformed by local and regional forces, and more than ever before the evolution of the art form is guided by these infusions from outside the genre’s native land. Jazz from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, and other centers of stateside musical THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
activity is still heard and admired all over the world, but it is now mixed with (or perhaps competes against, depending on your perspective) other influences, old and new, from far-flung locales. As a result, the repertoire of jazz music is broadening, the range of styles expanding, and even the instruments on the bandstand are changing in response to innovations coming from multiple directions.
The foundation for this geographic displacement has been in the making for many decades-Django Reinhardt was drawing on non-American ingredients for his music back in the 1930s-but today this panglobal profusion of new perspectives may very well be the most pervasive and irresistible trend in the music.
This shift is evident whether one focuses on recordings, live performances, or, looking outside the music itself, the institutions and cultural prestige that surround and support the art form. European jazz labels-such as ECM, ACT, Brownswood, Intakt, Criss Cross, and CAM (which acquired the Italian Black Saint/Soul Note labels in 2008)-rank among the most creative and daring forces in the music today, and they increasingly find outstanding talent within the European community itself. The jazz festival circuit is much healthier in Europe than in the United States, with thousands of annual events-more than three hundred in Italy alone-keeping the art form vibrant and in front of the public’s eye. These festivals typically receive subsidies from national, regional, and municipal funders as well as private sponsors, and have long been a major source of income for US jazz players who often find their skills more highly remunerated outside their own country. But the promoters are increasingly supporting homegrown artists, and it is not unusual these days to encounter lineups with few or sometimes no-American bands on the schedule. Yet the most striking measure of the new state of affairs is a harder one to quantify, but no less tangible in its impact: the quality of jazz music outside of the United States has taken a quantum leap over the last half-century. No longer content to play a passive role as mere consumers or imitators of American jazz, the current generation in Europe and elsewhere on the globe wants to create trends, not follow them.
Perhaps the most striking example of this is in current-day London. In truth, the jazz scene has flourished there for many decades, but has often been shaped by stylistic THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
developments coming out of the United States. The roles are almost reversed nowadays, with many American musicians and fans not only paying close attention to new sounds from the United Kingdom but increasingly envious of a British jazz ecosystem that can support a wide range of emerging styles and perspectives, attract an enthusiastic young audience, and get adulatory coverage in mainstream media outlets. A century after the so-called Jazz Age, the music is somehow hot again, creating a buzz and impacting popular culture in a way that can serve as a role model for other communities.
Yet if you walked into one of the London clubs where the up-and-coming artists and bands perform, you may think you have arrived at the wrong address, so little is this music beholden to traditional conceptions of jazz. You might hear danceable beats, trance-like vamps and riffs, reggae or rock rhythms, electronic sounds and samples, soulful vocals and urban raps, and other aural bric-a-brac drawn from a full global village of sources. But on closer attention, you will also notice the saxophones and trumpets and other time-honored emblems of the genre, and get drawn in by the spontaneity and in-the-moment vitality that have always defined the jazz experience. The sheer diversity of sounds is striking, but even more the lack of pretense and elitism. If you harbor concerns that a soulless generation of degree-certified jazz museum curators has taken over the bandstands, a night of clubbing in London will ease your worries.
In the next chapter, we will look at the invigorating and open-ended dialogue with popular music that has come to the forefront of jazz in the new millennium, and certainly these developments in the United Kingdom are part of this larger picture. But what’s especially interesting about the new sounds of British jazz is how markedly they draw on specific cultural factors and influences that have no precise equivalent in the United States or elsewhere, for that matter. London’s multicultural environment creates a different jazz soundscape from what you would hear in, say, New York or Los Angeles, for the simple reason that it is the result of historical forces, migration patterns, and priorities that are uniquely its own. This was less obvious in an earlier day, when British jazz musicians were playing, more or less, the same types of songs and styles as their counterparts in the United States. But now when globalization is supposedly forcing a convergence in cultural matters, jazz THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
seems destined to move in the opposite direction, fostering confident regional and local approaches that grow from incommensurable roots. In the case of London, this involves a distinctive postcolonial vibe that brings sounds and styles marginalized in the past to the forefront of the music. Instead of refracting African influences via African American music, current-day English music often draws on a more direct connecting line to these sounds. There are around one million residents of Britain who were born in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, or Ghana-and they have helped shape a musical culture very different from what you will encounter in their lands of origin or elsewhere in Europe. By the same token, contemporary British jazz can boast of an especially intense connection to a host of other traditions (from South Asia, the West Indies, etc.). Just as Jelly Roll Morton, in an earlier day, claimed that jazz in New Orleans drew energy from its assimilation of Spanish and Latin American ingredients, a commentator in London today might just as accurately celebrate the music’s special relationship to India or the Caribbean or Africa.
These connections can be detected everywhere in current-day British jazz, and are matters of personal history as much as bandstand influences. London-born Shabaka Hutchings spent much of his childhood in Barbados before returning to England to pursue music studies. Hutchings’s bandmate in Sons of Kemet, drummer Seb Rochford, is of Anglo-Indian descent, and his colleague Sarathy Korwar in A.R.E. Project was born in India but is now pursuing cross-cultural music fusion projects in London. Keyboardist and producer Kamaal Williams is the son of a Taiwanese mother and British father, and while training for a music career also studied Mandarin and Arabic, as well as Chinese calligraphy. Trumpeter Sheila
Maurice-Grey, leader of the band Kokoroko, was raised in southeast London by a mother from Sierra Leone and stepfather from South Africa and Zimbabwe. Saxophonist Nubya Garcia was born in northwest London to Trinidadian and Guyanese parents. Drummer Moses Boyd’s parents hail from Dominica and Jamaica. Vocalist Zara McFarlane, from East London, is of Jamaican descent. “We have a different history to the US,” remarks Hutchings. “There are some commonalities to do with the legacy of race and colonisation but there are different ways of seeing these histories, and maybe even different ways of approaching the telling of these stories. For me there are issues related to race because THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
Bartsch, who builds on funk music traditions from across the Atlantic, yet elongates the pulse and imposes a kind of deep trance vibe on these sources, almost as if he were searching for a Jungian archetype of rhythmic propulsion. He calls his music “zen funk,” and it highlights again how American ingredients can get co-opted in exciting new ways by artists in other parts of the world, Even when musicians of this generation move to New York—as has been the case with German saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock or Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier-they find ways of collaborating closely with American artists without diluting the strong personal vision and musical values they bring with them from overseas.
In other words, Europe takes what it can from the United States, but still resists full assimilation.
Perhaps the most striking example of all is the pervasive yet transmogrified influence of Chet Baker on European trumpeters. To some extent, this was all the result of happenstance-Baker spent so much time away from his American homeland largely because of more tolerant drug policies overseas-but the end result was that a whole generation of European horn players saw him perform frequently and learned from his example. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that Baker exerted far more influence in Europe than in his native land. You can hear echoes of his sound in Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stanko, Nils Petter Molvaer, Till Brönner, Paolo Fresu, Markus Stockhausen, Mathias Eick, Arve Henriksen, and many other players. Yet these artists have taken this US-made ingredient to places that Chet Baker never dreamed of going, turning his cool West Coast sound into a key building-block of the nuanced chamber music sensibility and cross-cultural styles that have become trademarks of jazz in continental Europe, trends that are just as influential and even more widespread than the danceable jazz grooves of the UK.
By the same token, the European jazz scene reveals a different relationship with classical music, perhaps a closer and more familiar one given the hundreds of years that concert hall performances and their associated rituals have flourished in the major cities of the continent. Hence we should hardly be surprised that a sophisticated chamber music approach to jazz has found talented practitioners and enthusiastic audiences in these same locales today. Yet this lineage is often misunderstood. For example, commentators often point out how European pi–
THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
impressionistic harmonies of Bill Evans or the virtuosity of Oscar Peterson or the classical music stylings associated with Keith Jarrett; and certainly there’s some truth to these observations. But at a deeper level, European musicians hardly required American role models to learn such things all these ingredients were preexisting in their homegrown musical settings. French pianists such as Martial Solal or Michel Petrucciani didn’t need to study Kind of Blue to learn about the harmonic conceptions of Debussy and Ravel. Catalonian pianist Tete Montoliu didn’t learn the Spanish tinge, so essential to jazz, from Jelly Roll Morton.
Perhaps these deep roots help explain why the jazz keyboard tradition has been especially vibrant on the Continent— after all, Europe invented the concept of the heroic concert pianist, those touring luminaries who brought their exciting onstage demonstrations from city to city. This tradition may date back to the time of Mozart, but it has continued to flourish in the new millennium as part of European jazz culture, as demonstrated by the work of artists young and old, such as Stefano Bollani and Enrico Pieranunzi of Italy; Vassilis Tsabropoulos of Greece; Marcin Wasilewski and Leszek Mozzer of Poland; Michael Wollny, Joachim
Kühn, Julia Hülsmann, Florian Ross, and Herbert Nuss of Germany; George Gruntz and Malcolm Braff of Switzerland;
Claude Bolling and Laurent de Wilde of France; Michel Herr, Nathalie Loriers, and Jef Neve of Belgium; Ketil Bjernstad and Bugge Wesseltoft of Norway; and John Taylor, Django Bates, Gordon Beck, and Robert Mitchell of Britain, among others.
True, you can detect the influence of American role models in every instance, yet this blossoming of jazz keyboard music throughout the continent draws almost as deeply on perspectives, traditions, and institutions that existed in Europe long before they found their way to the United States.
The groundwork for today’s self-sufficient European jazz culture has been laid over the course of more than a century. But almost from the start, new perspectives on the music came from this unexpected direction. As we have seen, the first example of an elite classical musician writing an insightful review of a jazz performance took place in Europe, back in 1919, when Swiss conductor Ernst Ansermet contributed an article to Revue Romande about New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet. Hungarian composer Matyas Seiber started teaching academic classes on jazz in Germany in the late 1920s, THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
college considered the subject worthy of study-although the Nazis put an end to his program a few years later. Jazz. festivals were held in Belgium and the Netherlands in the early 1930s, when they didn’t yet exist in the United States.
The first great discographer of jazz was Charles Delaunay of France, while Belgian Robert Goffin’s Aux Frontières du Jazz, from 1932, represents the first serious book-length study of jazz music. A decade later, Goffin and London-born Leonard Feather played a key role in establishing jazz studies in the United States, jointly teaching a class at the New School for Social Research in 1942 that helped legitimize the field in the music’s land of origin. Around that same time, French jazz critic and producer Hugues Panassié made a lasting mark as one of the most important early critics of the music, and demonstrated in a series of influential books that he understood the nuances of the music in a way that few, if any, American commentators at the time could match. Again and again, American jazz fans turned to these and other European role models in grasping the significance of their homegrown art form.
Even so, indigenous European jazz styles were slow in emerging from the shadows of American jazz. During the second half of the twentieth century, jazz players outside the United States typically needed to move there, or at a minimum to play in the style of the leading American artists, in order to build their careers. George Shearing is lauded today as one of the leading jazz pianists of his generation, but this may not have happened if he had not moved to New York in 1947. Around this same time another UK pianist, Marian McPartland, also settled in the United States, initiating a true American success story that not only encompassed dozens of recordings but also entrepreneurship (McPartland’s company Halcyon was one of the first artist-owned record labels in jazz), a sideline writing jazz criticism, and most notably a career in broadcasting destined to reach an even larger audience than what McPartland had already achieved in nightclubs. Her Piano Jazz program on National Public Radio, founded in 1978, would eventually become the longest-running cultural broadcast in the history of NPR-an extraordinary achievement considering that McPartland had turned sixty a few weeks before the debut of the show. A decade after McPartland’s arrival, London-born Victor Feldman made a similar move to the United States, and enjoyed a flourishing career not only as a jazz pianist #010
THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
working with Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and Stan Getz, but also as one of the most in-demand musicians in Southern California recording studios. None of these artists could have enjoyed such opportunities within the narrower confines of Britain’s homegrown jazz scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
We can see the same gravitational pull of the United States in the careers of artists from the continent. In 1952 Belgian harmonica player and guitarist Toots Thielemans moved to the United States, where he worked with Shearing, among others. His 1962 recording of “Bluesette,” featuring Thielemans whistling and playing the guitar in unison, was a surprise hit, but his most important contribution to the idion would be his championing of the humble harmonica, which he established as a legitimate solo voice in jazz and showcased on hundreds of leader dates, film and TV soundtracks, and studio sessions in almost every conceivable music genre. Once again, this would hardly have been possible had Thielemans stayed in his native Brussels. His countryman, saxophonist and flautist Bobby Jaspar, followed a similar path, marrying vocalist Blossom Dearie and settling in the United States in the mid-1950s, although his death in 1963 at age thirty-six cut short a promising career. The same phenomenon would repeat in later decades. European-born artists such as John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, and Joe Zawinul would come to the United States, play with Miles Davis and other American jazz legends, and become stars themselves. They deserved their reputations at the top of the jazz hierarchy, but would they have arrived there with a London or Vienna home address?
Certainly there were great European talents who stayed home during this period, although none reaped the fame of the better-known expats. While Holland and McLaughlin were making their names in the United States, Mike Westbrook, John Surman, Michael Garrick, Kenny Wheeler (Canadian-born, but a UK resident since 1952), Norma Winstone, and others were revitalizing the British jazz scene, but with much less recognition on the global stage. Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen earned a reputation as a world-class jazz bassist without moving from his native Denmark— but primarily through his work with American bandleaders.
In contrast, Lars Gullin of Sweden deserves inclusion on any list of the finest baritone saxophonists of his generation, and as one of the defining talents of the cool jazz style, but
THE HISTORY OF JAZZ
because he never relocated to the United States, his name is still unfamiliar in many jazz circles. By the same token, the biggest selling jazz album in the history of Sweden is pianist Jan Johansson’s Jazz pa Svenska, a sly reworking of folk melodies that would delight even US jazz fans… that is, if they ever had a chance to hear this music, which is hardly known in America. Austrian pianist Friedrich Gulda, a contemporary of Gullin’s and Johannson’s, was a one-of-a-kind innovator who played both jazz and classical music at the highest level, and found intriguing ways of merging them in his concerts, yet he never received more than passing notice in the United States-almost certainly because, unlike Shearing and McPartland, he performed and recorded primarily in Europe. A similar story can be told of Nikolai Kapustin, born in Ukraine in 1937, who developed an unconventional virtuosic piano style that might have brought him renown in the United States; but under the Soviet regime, jazz careers were sharply curtailed.
Instead Kapustin focused his energies on composing some of the most rhythmically exciting (and alas, all-too-seldom-performed) classical music of the century. One can only imagine what he might have achieved in Los Angeles or New York.
Even back in the years before World War II, we find significant music linked to unfamiliar artists who simply had the misfortune of pursuing careers as jazz players outside of the music’s land of origin. Trumpeter Pierre Allier and tenor saxophonist Alix Combelle were playing with a harmonic conception that was quite advanced during these years; British trumpeter Nat Gonella earned the praise of Louis Armstrong; drummer Bill Harty propelled English jazz bands with a swinging beat that would have been the pride of many US orchestras-so much so that when Ray Noble came to New York in 1934 he insisted on bringing Harty along, despite the many experienced American drummers available. Yet today the names of these musicians will draw a blank stare from even knowledgeable jazz critics.
This situation has changed markedly in the new millennium. Wherever one looks in Europe today, one finds not just interesting jazz, but also an elite few who can become global stars without moving to Manhattan. The rise to fame (or at least the jazz equivalent thereof) at the close of the 1990s of pianist Esbjörn Svensson and his trio e.sit.-featuring fellow Swedes Dan Berglund on bass and drummer
PART 3:  Read the section on The Globalization of Jazz and answer the following:
Q: What does Gioia have to say about Joey Alexander, and why is it so important?
Q: Do you agree with the statement that “America’s classical music (jazz) is now the common property of the whole world”?
Q: What possible objections would there be to seeing jazz as a world music genre?
Q: What do you think about other nations holding more jazz festivals than the US to keep the genre alive and well-established?
Q: How has British jazz changed over time, in Gioia’s opinion?  
Gioia mentions Sons of Kemet in the chapter: 
The following song Your Queen is a Reptile is the one linked below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEpziXD-SDk&ab_channel=SonsOfKemetVEVOLinks to an external site.
Q: What are your impressions?
Q: What does this music remind you of?