The Apple at it's Core
GOLDMAN, ALBERT
ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman The Apple at its Core The death of jazz has been predicted countless times since its birth. Every change of style, technique or attitude has convinced some anxious...
...For one thing, the number of clubs featuring modern jazz, though still small, is definitely on the increase...
...the musicians complain about the mechanical regularity of the schedule...
...After starting off in this direction, however, he suddenly pulled himself up and went into a retreat, which may last for a long time...
...Now, when for the first time the prophecy is likely to be fulfilled, no one will believe it—no one, that is, except those who are close to the jazz scene and conscious of the very great problems that are plaguing the art and its practitioners...
...It was my impression after hearing Sonny last winter at the Museum of Modern Art that his playing had become an elaborate pastiche of every tenor sax style heard for the last 20 years...
...The usual arrangements frustrate everyone: The owners are unhappy with the lack of turnover in the room...
...Free to sit or stand or stroll about, drinking and smoking and chatting with friends and relatives, this audience was totally responsive...
...But it is inescapable, and it explains practically all the faults of modern jazz—the eclecticism, the attitudinizing, the forced-draft experimentation, the overall atmosphere of confusion...
...Nor can one ignore the fact that when jazz enjoyed its greatest popularity, during the Swing Era of the late '30s, it was still a Negro folk art with a broad social base...
...After a few months on the New York scene—months of good notices, heavy publicity, even the rare prize of an RCA recording contract— Sonny decided to break up his group and think again...
...Reading these reports, I was troubled by several things: the almost exclusive emphasis on the problems of supply and demand, the implication (in Newton's piece, the actual statement) that things were especially dead this year, and finally, the tendency of both critics to envision the current problems of jazz against the background of previous eras when both jazz and the world were much different...
...and the patrons often feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied with the "show...
...The Negro jazz musician has at last become totally self-conscious...
...As far as the present "crisis" is concerned, I do not find the situation in 1962-63 substantially different from what it has been for the past decade...
...Francis Newton concludes his article by remarking that the generation of Parker and Gillespie had its forum on the Street, whereas the present generation of Omette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and others has no place to play...
...No new style comparable to the Bop of the '40s or the Cool style of the '50s has yet emerged in this decade because of the confusion of identity felt by most modern jazzmen...
...Since that time he has been barred from the clubs...
...More important, the radio coverage of jazz, particularly by FM stations, is now greater than it has been at any time since the late '30s...
...If they do not find a coherent and viable modern style, independent of both tradition and the alien ethos of art music, jazz, despite its new popularity, will be dead at the core...
...he is in one of those latency periods that are becoming characteristic of every serious jazzman's career...
...But the ban has done nothing to impair his playing...
...Even more disturbing than the critics' descriptions of today's hard times are their diagnoses of its causes...
...The one thing this concert did not do, however, was give the sense of a new or emergent jazz style...
...Years of experience in the clubs have convinced me that they are not the proper milieu for modern jazz...
...it requires a flexible arrangement permitting the audience to turn away when the musicians are merely doodling, but not so far away that the moments of inspiration are lost in the hubbub...
...His problem is to synthesize this tradition, created largely by men of different character and status, with various elements of Western art music developed within a completely different cultural context...
...There, free from the demands of scheduled performance and the annoyances of an uncomprehending public, supported by their friends and disciples, they will study, think and play...
...And the recordings themselves continue to pour forth in astonishing volume from a host of small companies, many of which are obviously in search of novelty and unafraid of the risk involved in presenting musicians with little or no reputation...
...But when Coleman was sure of himself, when he knew exactly what he wanted to do, he had the Five Spot all to himself for 15 weeks, with a full house every night...
...Today, Coleman is not in a condition to play...
...These facts lead me to conclude that jazz is in fact experiencing a "boom," though not of the sort that is immediately helpful to the jazz musician in search of work...
...52nd Street was just a lucky break that could not last...
...The closest approximation to ideal jazz conditions I have ever encountered was, oddly enough, an event of this past winter, just at the time of Francis Newton's visit...
...Jazz ebbs and flows according to the spirit of the moment...
...today there are enough new clubs below 14th Street to make the Village and its environs a major jazz locale...
...To take the exceptional conditions of that period as a norm is unsound...
...he sees himself as an individual artist working in a highly developed form with a long and compelling tradition...
...The problem is a great deal larger than the men who are trying to solve it...
...During the past few weeks, two of the outstanding jazz critics in the United States and Britain, Nat Hentoff (in the New York HeraldTribune) and Francis Newton (in the New Statesman), have described the depressed condition of the New York scene and endeavored to explain its causes...
...Jackie demonstrated the great vitality still latent in the Bop style...
...Jazz is reaching a wider audience than ever before, but it is an invisible audience, tucked away in homes and automobiles, the real centers of American life...
...Hentoff finds great irony in the present jazz "boom," which he views as largely the work of publicists and imagemakers, and as merely a hollow thud for the dozens of musicians who have had to take demeaning "day jobs" just to survive...
...Newton thinks jazz has lost its audience to folk singers and to suburbia...
...He summed up his impressions of New York—"the Apple" in jazz lingo—by describing the city as an "ex-Apple . . . wilted and shaking on its bough...
...Instinctively, they are doing the only thing that will help—they are going underground...
...It is even questionable whether it can be solved at all...
...at times he seemed deliberately to challenge comparison with Bird— playing "Be-Bop" or "Star Eyes" —but it was not a new direction for jazz...
...indeed, he never sounded better...
...It was an informal concert sponsored by the Jackie McLean Fan Club at the Fraternal Clubhouse on West 48th Street...
...Ten years ago the whole jazz life of the city was centered on two midtown rooms, Birdland and Basin Street...
...The musicians feel terribly self-conscious and the audience finds itself compelled to listen headon for long periods to a kind of music that is not designed for such intense scrutiny...
...The current situation is, if anything, somewhat better than it has been in past years...
...These examples are decisive...
...With or without opportunities to work, these men are bound to suffer from a conflict between the aspirations aroused by training they have acquired in schools of music and the radically different values and techniques of jazz...
...Jackie, one of the greatest jazzmen of our day, lost his cabaret card years ago because of a narcotics violation...
...Had he wanted commercial success, he could have been booked all over the country...
...Jazz has not prospered in the New York clubs since the War years when the spill-over from the Big Band Craze and the on-thetown servicemen made it profitable to book combos on 52nd Street...
...Jazz, like art music, must now adjust itself to the new mores of middle-class America, which favor home entertainment by means of hi-fi and radio over public entertainment, particularly the kind provided by night clubs...
...The Bopper of the '40s gleefully alienated this mass audience, put it down hard, and made jazz the exclusive art form of the hipsters: a small interracial in-group with very little money and a constitutional aversion to institutionalized entertainment...
...Returning to the city after a two-year absence, Newton was shocked to find the clubs dark or half-empty, the musicians without work or gigging behind counters, and the much-publicized avant-garde the victim of a club owner's lockout...
...The same pattern is evident in the recent history of Sonny Rollins, who returned to public performance last fall following a year-and-a-half spent in study and practice...
...Perhaps he thought so too...
...Although this change is no help to the working musician, it will probably be a good thing for jazz in the long run...
...Every change of style, technique or attitude has convinced some anxious souls that the end was near...
...Hentoff sees the longestablished favorites pre-empting the field, blocking the rise of fresh talent...
...Here he was surrounded by people who loved and admired him, who understood everything he was trying to accomplish, and who were themselves so cheerful and relaxed that merely being among them was a source of inspiration...
...And this conflict is directly related to the drive for status and dignity that propels the whole Negro community today...
...The other alternative, the formal concert, is just as bad, perhaps worse...
...The really dedicated jazz musicians who must provide jazz with a new soul are now engaged in a difficult struggle to find themselves amid the confusing cultural eddies of the moment...
...On a recent Saturday night, 1 found almost half the city's FM stations broadcasting jazz recordings until the early hours of the morning...
...I doubt, though, whether he would have performed so brilliantly in a less congenial atmosphere...
...It has taken years to woo the public back after the inspired insolence of Be-bop...
Vol. 46 • May 1963 • No. 10
