On Music

...ON MUSIC By John Goodman Exaggerated Reports of a Death In the June 9 issue of Life, Richard Saltonstall Jr reviewed the state of jazz and the rise of Charles Lloyd ("New Surge tor a Tired Old Idiom") What emerged was another rendering of the life-and-death struggle of a cultural trend 'The jazz culture is in agony The music's mass appeal has died It has long ceased to be danced to And 'new wave' musicians like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus have broken all the rules ot harmony and rhythm to develop far-out, expressionistic improvisations that have narrowed down the purist audience still further Finally, rock 'n' roll, jazz's bastard child, in various, hourly-changing forms?hard,' 'folk,' 'blues' and lately 'psychedelic'—has captured a whole new generation of listeners Without the young audience, jazz is doomed Esthetically, historically, it cannot be extended " Charles Lloyd, he concludes, may very likely resurrect "the true jazz idiom" (whatever that is) Such prophecies of the imminent death of jazz have become almost commonplace But to propose an omnipotent savior shows little understanding of how this art flourishes and communicates Charles Lloyd is surely no messiah, though he is a fine musician And while he is selling himself as a prophet of love, he is really a prophet of change Historically, jazz has been an underground music, as Ralph Ellison has demonstrated brilliantly in Invisible Man and elsewhere It spoke a special language to a coterie audience in rather particular circumstances and surroundings Today, when everything underground is exploited and exalted per se, jazz is somewhat reluctantly being dragged forward Paradoxically, many hippies tend to view it as establishment music Something of this attitude caines over to those who are ringing its death knell In their anxiety to be "with it" and to understand the musical forces animating the crowds at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium and New York's Tompkins Square, such critics forget or ignore the fact that jazz has traditionally been underground, unpopular, and largely uncommercial They also do not see that jazz in its usual random, eclectic way finds and absorbs many of the musical elements which superficially seem most alien to it This has insured jazz's cultural survival in a pop music world that cultivates change for novelty's sake In sum, jazz is highly adaptable Even now lohn Handy and Charles Lloyd, to name the most successful...

...are winning the hippies over in vast numbers If their trend catches on widely, as seems probable, jazz will inevitably re-assimilate some ot the rock styles and modes it helped to spawn In the '30s, when the blandishment of the dollai was at least as strong, swing music more than maintained its identity as jazz in the tace of incursions trom Tin Pan Alley Benny Goodman, who borrowed a style from the bands ot Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman, took most of his material from the pop world and produced a clearly recognizable product This process of constant reformation is more than self-defense, it reflects the old underground ambivalence of the artist for his audience and his material Miles Davis both needs and scorns his listeners, Thelonious Monk uses a vehicle like "Sweet and Lovely" for satiric and anti-sentimental effect The typical jazzman searches for roots and the new thing, for form and freedom The listener should perceive the two tendencies working to create complex levels of irony and passion In our nostalgia, however, we usually find that m the "old days" the ironies were easiei to spot, the musicians' attitudes more overtly sympathetic, and their ties with us closer Yet jazz has managed to project its appeal through radical shirts in style, intention and audience In the early '50s when I was an adolescent a group ot us regularly made pilgrimages trom the Chicago suburbs to seek out jazz in the city Once we were lucky enough to find Baby Dodds, Natty Dominique, and some other New Orleans and Chicago musicians, legendary in our eyes, playing m a nckety second-floor dance hall on the West Side The sense of privilege and wonder I felt in seeing these men perform for a largely Negro audience of their contemporaries in a "classic" setting is more memorable, I think, than the music that they made On another occasion Red Allen was leading a fine gioup in an out-of-the-way saloon on Howard Street when we arrived in the early hours of the morning Though there were not many listeners, the band was cooking and Allen, who can make almost anything work for him, decided to play "The Saints " Musicians and audience, mostly drunk, followed him as he paraded around the place and out into the street for a glorious finale In both these experiences the sense ot our full involvement with the music and the musicians was cential It was, I admit, a clubby feeling, and ol course none of us lecogmzed the irony ot our "commuting" to the seamy city tor our jazz kicks In a similar way we tended to exalt Bix Beiderbecke as a musical and even cultural ideal Partly through books like Eddie Condon's We Called It Music but mostly through first-hand contacts, the folkways of the Chicago Jazz movement fascinated us In retrospect, I suppose we were trying to create another Austin High School Gang We snickered when Jimmy McPartland threw in an obvious figure trom a pop song, knowing the musicians were on our side When bop and modern jazz became unquestionable tacts of life, our group re-formed its musical dependencies, though some members of the club gloried m their status as 'moldy figs " The same thing, of couise happened to musicians and listeners eveiywheie Some found tremendous invigoration in bop and the modern styles, with their tar shaipei portiayal of the ambivalence and irony at the heait of all jazz, not to mention the lelease trom unconsciously felt restrictions on musical foim and value We became musically more aware The jazz coterie still existed, but it was forming splinter groups, writers occasionally spoke of "the jazz fraternity," but without much meaning From the mid-'50s economic and cultural forces like the LP record and media promotion began to broaden and diversity the jazz audience The process continues, and with profound esthetic consequences foi the music Jazz has now moved out of its symbolic refuge in the brightly lit basement hole where Ellison's protagonist lived It is more public, consequently more vulneiable THE INDICATORS Ot Such a shift are ambiguous, unreliable, and sometimes comical A large segment ot the public thinks the jazz intoxicant has changed from whiskey to pot and debates the issue with heat A new initiate to the jazz scene whom I know maintains that whiskey drinkers cannot seriously hope to understand Coltrane's music With underground hang-ups like this, it is no wonder, as Saltonstall says, that "the jazz culture is in agony " Also, the evolution ot jazz slang is distinctly odd The Red Allen band I refened to included Sonny Greei, Big Chief Moore, and Bustei Bailey, but among the younger musicians such nicknames seem to be studiously avoided One more step up fiom the basement9 Jazz slang has provided fairly recent words like bag...

...bugqed and cop out (originally, "go to sleep"), which aie common in current slang vocabulary Strangely enough, those who try to ape the jazz manner invariably fasten on words of almost antique usage like hip, dig and groovy This has been going on for years, but now it sells rock records by the thousands, and so the jazzman has a turther excuse to remain smug, poor and paranoiac By tar the most significant iccent change has occurred in the places where jazz is being played Foi economic reasons many ot the clubs have closed, and when live jazz is heard, it is increasingly in concert halls, festivals and college dates The club owner is caught in the perpetual squeeze The manager of an important New York club explained that even with the best talent he draws mediocre crowds because the jazz audience today can't or won't pay the tariff, while the good musicians can make more money on the concert or college circuit than he can afford to pay them He is thinking of bringing in rock bands to make ends meet This is not a new problem in the commercial world of jazz, but it is becoming severe I do not think that jazz has Iosl its audiences to rock or driven them away through its own excesses The same need for, and resistance to, commercial and esthetic accommodation has existed from its earliest days Further, the music has rarely sought to advertise itself and it has always indulged in excesses The musical resources ot experimental rock will hopefully expand the jazz audience once again and revitalize the art The compulsion ot jazzmen to experiment has never allowed them to be reticent about musical borrowing Even if the music does not expand its audience and appeal, it will hardly be "doomed" in any historical 01 esthetic sense Rather, jazz may eventually become sublimated in a new context, combining other forms with its own traditions to create new musical possibilities...