|
Roundtable
*
"Blues For Clement Greenberg"
A May 4, 2003 Jerry Jazz Musician hosted discussion on jazz criticism,
with
Stanley Crouch, Martha Bayles and Loren Schoenberg
The question of what constitutes art and where lies the cutting-edge
of artistic expression has occupied critics for generations. Here,
the noted art critic Clement Greenberg, famous for his unflagging promotion
of abstract expressionism, studies a Kenneth Noland painting.
___________________________
The fact that writer Stanley Crouch is willing to speak his mind has been
known to readers of cultural criticism for three decades. Depending on one's
outlook, his views on jazz, politics, and race often spark outrage, applause, or provoke debate.
In April, 2003, Jazz Times magazine, host to Crouch's monthly column
"Jazz Alone," published "Putting the White Man in Charge," a provocative
essay covering topics familiar to Crouch readers, most notably his aggressive
defense of the jazz idiom and its African American heritage. In the essay
he wrote that critics like respected Atlantic Monthly writer Francis
Davis see "jazz that is based on swing and blues as the enemy and, therefore,
lifts up someone like, say, Dave Douglas as an antidote to too much authority
from the dark side of the tracks."
As a result of "White Man" and the subsequent May essay on pianist Eric Reed,
"Piano Prodigy," Jazz Times dismissed Crouch via email, telling him
that the column had "run its course." This was viewed as a curious
move to Crouch and others, since only a month earlier this column which had
"run its course" had been billed by the magazine as his most "incendiary"
yet. Soon after his dismissal, Crouch contacted journalists, including
Jerry Jazz Musician, seeking a wider discussion of the event. In Crouch's
view, more is at stake than his sacking, writing, "At the center of the issue
is whether or not there is room for a voice that disagrees with the jazz
critical establishment."
It seems like a legitimate question. Is there?
We decided that a conversation among Crouch and two other prominent critics
within the jazz community would be the most viable approach. We settled
on the highly respected cultural critic Martha Bayles, author of Hole
in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music,
and musician Loren Schoenberg, who, among other duties serves on the faculty
at Julliard, is executive director of the Jazz Museum of Harlem, and author
of The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz. All three of the participants
had previously been interviewed in the pages of Jerry Jazz Musician.
While Crouch's dismissal was the initial focus, the conversation then turned
to the subject of jazz criticism and the divide, in Crouch's view, between
critics who favor the expansion of jazz beyond its African American heritage
-- including the introduction of European classical elements -- and those
like Crouch, who define the idiom more narrowly, preferring the music of
Wynton Marsalis and the musicians associated with Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The edited transcript of the lengthy conversation reveals a discourse rarely
printed in jazz journals, and once again demonstrates how publishing on the
Internet may provide readers of a particular genre with the most extensive
and rewarding experience.
At one point during the conversation, when describing the mindset of critics
who consider themselves to be the leading edge of artistic change, Bayles
brought up the critic Clement Greenberg, who championed abstract expressionists
like Jackson Pollock and Kenneth Noland and who, according to Bayles, "believed
in cutting-edge arts that would push the world toward a socialist future,"
and in artists who were "the leading cutting-edge not only of artistic
change, but by implication of social and political change." His support
of and belief in these expressionists eventually became popular opinion.
It was at Crouch's suggestion, then, that this May 4, 2003 discussion be
titled "Blues for Clement Greenberg."
Roundtable Topics
Roundtable participants
The Jazz Times firing
of Stanley Crouch
Removing
the significance of Afro-American elements of jazz
Does
the disconnect from the African-American tradition make it any less jazz?
The fallout
of Crouch's connection to Wynton Marsalis
The
controversy surrounding Crouch's Jazz Times columns
Rebelling against
the Negro elements of jazz
The debate on the boundaries
of jazz
Equating jazz to cubism
The critic's rebellion
of the middle class
Jazz losing its mass audience
Defining and measuring
the progress of jazz
Critics
overlooking noteworthy recordings and live events
Illuminating
the variety of possibilities within the jazz idiom
Tracing arts criticism
to Clement Greenberg
Critic
as artist sponsor and implied conflict of interest
Martha Bayles
Cultural historian and critic, Honors Program professor at Boston
College, author of Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty
and Meaning in American Popular Music |
Stanley Crouch
Cultural critic, New York Daily News columnist, former Jazz
Times columnist, author of Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folks,
The All American Skin Game, Notes of a Hanging Judge, Don't the Moon Look
Lonesome. |
Loren Schoenberg
Conductor, saxophonist, recording artist, faculty at Juilliard, Jazz
at Lincoln Center's Essentially Ellington Band Director's Academy, Academic
Director Jazz Aspen Snowmass Academy, Executive Director of The Jazz Museum
In Harlem, author of The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz.
|
___________________________
JJM
The impetus for this panel came as a result of Stanley writing me an
email, informing me that his Jazz Times gig as columnist was terminated.
He wrote, "At the center of the issue is whether or not there is room
for a voice that disagrees with the jazz critical establishment." Let's
start there. Is there room for such a voice?
MB I have a question. Where do I
locate the jazz critical establishment? I don't really have a sense of what
amounts to the "establishment" these days.
| LS One of the problems
is that there is no forum for any serious debate about issues in the jazz
community, and that may be one of the reasons you (Martha) have trouble finding
it. All that ever really appears are a couple of regular editorials in a
handful of publications, and the occasional article in a major newspaper
or magazine. But, it is like a one-sided tennis game. Nobody ever "bats the
ball back" because there is a kind of unanimity among whomever the major
writers are considered to be. Perhaps the greatest import of the action Jazz
Times took in firing Stanley is that they basically told their readers
that the jazz community can't take someone with a strong opinion opposed
to those of the major writers, and that they don't have the respect for the
jazz public and for their readers. |
April, 2003 issue of Jazz Times |
MB I feel somewhat at a disadvantage
because I don't read Jazz Times, so I don't have a sense of what they
tend to communicate. Maybe you could enlighten me, Stanley. Give me some
examples of what the drift is.
SC You saw my piece, "Putting the White
Man in Charge"?
MB Yes.
SC It is laid out in the piece. In other words,
the argument that the writer Tom Piazza makes about that particular vision
that these critics have, in which he writes "Many jazz reviewers - especially
among the generation that grew up in the 1960s and '70s - suffer from intense
inferiority feelings in front of the musicians they write about. This results
in a vacillation between an exaggerated hero-worship of musicians and an
exaggerated sense of betrayal when the musicians don't meet their needs."
This is his observation as a man who moved among critics and it is his
interpretation of how they think and what they are like. Then there is the
argument in the piece where I write that a musician like Dave Douglas has
been elevated beyond his abilities in order to substantiate a certain kind
of ideology that seems to be the dominant way of looking at things among
those critics.
MB Well, I am getting two things off of
this. One is that, in all the arts, there is a general bias in the critical
community toward what is considered cutting-edge, innovative, and "out there."
So, there is a tendency to be biased, if you will, toward looking at the
"new thing," to use an old phrase. Consequently, there is a tendency among
musicians to go for whatever is passing as avant-garde this week. But, I
don't quite see how that correlates with race, because there are avant-garde
black musicians and avant-garde white musicians. There are people of all
colors who like and don't like avant-garde music. Because of this, I am having
trouble putting the race frame on top of the styles of music frame. That
is really my difficulty with this whole topic.
SC But, you see, if you look at these
things like the polls that are put together by the jazz journalists, and
look at the people they select, as I say in the piece part of it is racial,
but the ultimate thing is an attempt to remove the significance of Afro-American
elements of jazz from the discussion. There are all these pieces written
by people like Stuart Nicholson and others who write that nothing new is
coming out of America, that whatever is new in jazz is coming out of Europe.
Throughout the history of jazz there has been this tendency to perceive jazz
advancing itself, if you will, by embracing whatever is considered advanced
in European music. Dave Douglas, to me, is symbolic of what these guys
are after.
JJM Does the disconnect from
the African-American tradition make it any less jazz?
SC Yes, it does. In a number of pieces
I wrote for Jazz Times, I would say that there are all kinds of music
in which people improvise, and from all over the world. What has happened
in the arena of jazz writing is that there is no definition of jazz at this
point. Jazz is just something that is "improvised," so the key elements that
connect, for example, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane to Jelly Roll Morton,
Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, are no longer obtained as far as what
you get in these jazz magazines. And their whole idea is of how jazz should
be "inclusive," that it shouldn't "exclude" anything. If that is the case,
who is to say what jazz is?
| LS I would throw in, in terms
of what is driving this discussion, is Stanley's being let go from writing
this column for Jazz Times magazine, and what was really behind it
and what the issue really is. I think that a lot of it had to do with the
fact that, while Stanley was willing to give Dave Douglas benefit for whatever
talents, in his estimation, he has, a lot of the critical community that
is behind pushing someone like Dave Douglas has a very dismissive attitude
towards Wynton Marsalis and a lot of the folks at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
There are so many conflicts and perceived conflicts of interest here that
muddy the water. With all the columns and record reviews of varying literary
and critical quality that appear in Jazz Times and other jazz
publications, it seems to me for Jazz Times to take this action and
take away a column from one strong, opinionated voice in the wilderness,
in my opinion, is related to his connection to Marsalis. Many other critics
have had strong connections to artists that they champion. I feel it is related
still to the fact there are perceptions that when Wynton took over at Jazz
at Lincoln Center, it was the first time that a major cultural institution
had jazz bookings and jazz programs, and it was led by an administration
that was less willing to pay obeisance to the white community that dominated
and decided who played where and who did what. I can tell you that this
reverberated deeply, and I think that some of those reverberations actually
are what are bouncing back and led to Stanley being taken out of that magazine.
I really do believe that. |
Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra
with
Wynton Marsalis
C Jam Blues
 |
MB When you talk about the white
community, you mean the kind of gate keeper, decision makers?
LS Yes, the people who ran the record companies,
the people who ran the bookings, the festivals, the musicians and all the
great "critical heads of jazz." It would be disingenuous to say that that
was not related to this. I see them as related.
MB Can I play the devil's advocate for
the moment, though?
LS Please do.
MB It strikes me that if Stanley's
column was strictly about musical values, it wouldn't have irritated people
quite so much. But when you get into telling white guys that they are
uncomfortable being around black guys, that seems like it was sort of calculated
to stimulate a reaction…
LS Stanley? A provocateur?
MB I hope you will forgive me, Stanley,
but I am coming into the tail end of this and I don't know the degree to
which you have been provoked, although I have some sense of that. I haven't
been on the moon all this time. But, what you wrote seems guaranteed to get
a huge rise out of people that has nothing to do with music.
Paul Whiteman
The "King of Jazz"
Charleston
*
Duke Ellington
Jack The Bear
|
LS But, part of my problem, Martha,
and I have read your book and I know how much you know, so I have a sense
for how you feel about this. It is very much like the elephant in the movie
Jumbo with Jimmy Durante, and with the elephant right before him he
says, "What elephant?" The fact is that you won't see any serious reflection
on any of these issues that Stanley is raising in his columns. Now, whether
or not you or I would express our opinions in the way he did is not the point
I am making. The point I am making is at least he is raising the issues.
This played out almost as if Jazz Times wanted to have Stanley stir
up the community and get a rise of them, and when, in their view, Stanley
went too far, they could tell him, "That's enough." I am not saying that
was an implicit understanding, because it wasn't as far as I know. But, once
Stanley's work veered towards the critical community, and the magazine felt
as if he were savaging "one of their own," they had enough of the controversy
and yanked him.
MB So, Stanley, the substance of your gripe
with the establishment and with jazz critics…let me see if I can articulate
it and you tell me where I am off, OK?
SC It is in the essay. The essay
takes a very simple position that there has always been a race problem in
jazz and there have always been times when white guys have been given visions
of value that exceed what they actually do. It goes all the way back to the
beginnings of jazz with Paul Whiteman marketed as the "King of Jazz," which,
as I say in the column, I believe was one of the reasons that led to Duke
Ellington's attempt to get the people of his period to call their music "Negro
Music," and not "jazz." I think he was aware of the fact that, by that time,
in the mid to late twenties, even the white man wasn't ready to have a white
king of "Negro music." I think that that was very clear to him. White musicians
being given more attention in the jazz magazines has been an ongoing issue
for a long time. Once upon a time during the thirties or forties there was
a big controversy about putting a black musician on the cover of Down
Beat. Then there was another thing, when during the sixties a number
of black musicians who could not really play but who asserted their own
importance based upon some kind of genealogical connection to Africa and
Africans, and that the white man had to put up with that in jazz the same
way white people had to put up with black power, black studies, and hostility
from black kids on campus during the sixties. |
So we are now at a point in which this group of guys who define themselves,
as I said in the essay, in those terms that Rimbaud described as having a
love of sacrilege -- that is to say that their position in life is based
on their rebellion against something. Now they are at the point where they
can rebel against the Negro and the Negro elements in jazz, and are trying
to foist people like Dave Douglas on to the scene as though he is the greatest
trumpet player out there. There is no real argument about whether he is or
is not. The basic thing to me is this. What you see in these magazines is
that they decide who the person at the top is. In Down Beat forty
years ago, everybody didn't just go for Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor or
whomever it was. Now, the situation is that if Dave Douglas is supposed to
be numero uno, everybody submits to that. If Wynton Marsalis is supposed
to be neo-bop or something, everybody says that. There is not a situation
where you have any real debate over the relative merits of different musicians,
or what their aesthetic is or is not. That kind of exchange is not going
on, and when I got this email pink slip from Chris Porter at Jazz Times,
the whole thing took place in an exceedingly unprofessional manner. That
is to say, I write about 100 columns a year for the Daily News for six or
so years. I have written 600 or 700 columns for them now. My experience is
that when you write a column your editor may find to be repetitious or whatever,
you and the editor talk that out.
MB I read the message they sent
you and it seemed extremely cursory, shall we say...
SC What I am saying is this issue
was not handled in a professional manner. He didn't like a column I sent
him. If they were having problems with the column, I am supposed to be the
first one to know, and we are supposed to talk it through, which is what
people in the professional world do. Due to the fact that nothing like that
took place…
MB They raised none of these questions
when editing the piece?
SC No. I sent one in, and if they
didn't like the next one that came in, they could have sent an email suggesting
that we talk more about it. Whatever it is, just normal professional activity.
MB If I were in your shoes I would conclude
that they heard from somebody after the fact who had a lot of clout, and
that was that. Somebody weighed in from some corner or other and that was
that.
SC That may well be. I don't know.
All I know is that, in the 27 years that I have lived in New York, and in
the writing time that I have had, and in the many publications I have been
in, I have never had a situation in which something took place on that
unprofessional of a level.
MB That would piss me off too.
SC But it is not a matter of being
"pissed off," what this is about is a problem within this community, which
is that if they were at odds with something, an editor is supposed to tell
me to try something else, because I wrote about a number of different things
other than that for them, and the editor could have said to try another subject.
That is not what happened.
Jazz Times' version of the Stanley Crouch dismissal
JJM
Addressing the issue of what is important to the reader,
is it possible fans of jazz and readers of Jazz Times like Douglas'
integration of Balkan material into his sound because they find it intellectually
stimulating, and are frankly not as concerned about the definition of "jazz"
as they are about listening to or participating in the performance of music
that is, to them, entertaining or intellectually rewarding?
photo by Ashley
Mitchell
Dave Douglas
Red Emma
from The Tiny Bell Trio, 1993 |
MB By that question, it seems
you shifted the ground back into a disinterested, critical discourse about
the merits of certain kinds of music within certain kinds of musical traditions
and the borders of those traditions, and whether something is inside or outside
the borders or the limits of a certain tradition where you can still use
the word "jazz" to apply to it. And that is a very interesting, intellectual
debate. What strikes me is that at the outset of this conversation Stanley
and Loren were both asserting that this debate is not happening. It sounds
like the question you are asking is not getting asked, and that is part of
the problem. Perhaps it is a matter of people jockeying for the "bennies"
that are out there in the industry, and criticism has become a kind of shilling
for whatever it is that is selling out there now. Is that the drift to where
Stanley and Loren are going with this? I am accepting that there is no debate,
and that is extremely unfortunate, and it sounds like this move on Stanley
only makes the problem worse. What is to be done, to ask the question of
Lenin? Why isn't there a debate?
JJM I get that some musicians are
frustrated that Stanley's "camp" is restricting what can be determined as
jazz. I suppose it is important to Douglas that his music be called "jazz,"
and wishes to be known as a "jazz musician" whether he employs a traditional
quartet or if he were to use Balkan folk material. My question to Stanley
is how do musicians reach the heights of those attained by Louis Armstrong
if their primary purpose is to emulate musicians from a previous era?
SC So now you think you are going
to achieve the heights of Louis Armstrong by playing Balkan music? Is that
it?
JJM I am not suggesting that, but Douglas's
employment of Balkan folk material is pretty radical, and if you turn the
clock back 75 years, you can easily make the case that what Armstrong was
doing was also pretty radical. |
SC But, see, here is the problem
I have. That is all of what's going on now. In the column I wrote about Ornette
Coleman's contribution -- and Coleman has never come "in," he stayed "out
there" where he was when he came to New York -- I felt that there is such
a strong blues quality in his sound and in his ability to swing. He is not
somebody that you have to have a panel discussion about whether or not he
is a jazz musician. I don't care if somebody improvises or doesn't
improvise, whether they use Balkan music or not. That is not really the issue
to me. The issue is that what these people want to do, and what the jazz
critical establishment has concluded over the last twenty years or so, is
that essentially there is no definition for "jazz." I don't believe that.
I am not arguing that you can't do whatever it is you want to do. The
fundamentals of jazz are no more restrictive than the fundamentals of sex.
There are certain things that have to go on in sex. Somebody may think that
certain things may be too limiting, or that two people should be in two different
rooms so they could actually do something different from what people usually
do, whatever those things are. Now we are talking about telepathy or something
different. All that, to me, is fraudulent. That whole idea of
"cutting-edge" and all, that is just a bunch of bull shit to me, in the sense
that the real achievements of the so-called "avant-garde" have never been
built upon, quite frankly. The kind of melodic lines that Ornette Coleman
and Don Cherry could play are not what most people attempt. The kinds of
rhythmic complexities of Elvin Jones, a young Tony Williams or Ed Blackwell,
or what Don Pullen figured out in playing that kind of clustered material
and swing it with a rhythm section as he did with George Adams and Dannie
Richmond, are not what people are trying. They don't care to try. And it
is not always because they can't do it, or don't choose to do it, but it
is because the critical establishment is in this all-embracing posture. I
don't buy that.
LS I would like to add to that. Going
back to the very interesting question concerning Armstrong. He was radical,
yes, and it could be argued that what Douglas is doing with Balkan material
is also radical because it does pretty much what Armstrong did, which is
taking what existed and doing something radical with it. I just believe that
talking about what Dave Douglas is doing and mentioning it in the same sentence
with what Armstrong did is a big mistake, and one that has led to what Stanley
has been referring to, which is a kind of "everything is everything" attitude
-- that jazz was about adding things together so you just keep adding until
you get to where we are now, which is the question of what defines an idiom.
And if you can't define what an idiom is then what are we talking about?
There is something called the jazz idiom, and I believe part of the
problem is that a large part of the critical community may be claiming that
Dave Douglas is the kind of artist who is actually an "idiom adder" or an
"idiom changer," and I feel that is, at best, premature. Talking about what
Wynton Marsalis brings to the jazz idiom versus what Dave Douglas brings
wouldn't seem productive, but that is how the argument is always couched.
As a musician myself, I have played on the same stage as Dave Douglas , just
as I have with Marsalis, and from my own viewpoint, one thing that can be
said is that Wynton is not into "musical necrophilia." It is implicit in
the typing of Wynton like that, as opposed to Dave Douglas.
| MB
With all due respect to Stanley's reference to sex, I would rather
refer to something more artistic, namely something like cubism. Cubism was
a revolution in painting that occurred in a certain time and place. Other
than Picasso, who was Spanish, most of the people were French. It took place
in Paris. It is redolent of a certain time and place. So, there are complications
following upon that, because it is a way of dealing with pictorial space,
which to me is similar to jazz in lots of ways. It reconfigured the universe
for visual artists, the way jazz reconfigured the musical universe for a
lot of musicians and composers. No modern painter can ignore the legacy of
cubism. An artist has to come to reckon with it in some way, and some draw
upon it in a richer way than others. Others just go off and do something
completely different; they don't claim to be cubists, and they don't claim
to be in the cubist tradition, but in some broader sense they might claim
to be modernist artists. I think part of it is that we have ourselves stuck
on these words where any kind of music that isn't an accepted mode of modernism
in so-called "classical" or "serious" music is by default called "jazz."
So, all sorts of strains of musical modernism get fooled around with under
this heading of "jazz," because people want to be hip, they don't want to
be known as a boring concert musician. So if you are hip and you are doing
a music act, you can say you are a "jazz musician." I think there is a really
good debate there. But it is also true that if somebody is painting in a
way where they have obviously educated themselves in the pictorial language
of cubism, it doesn't necessarily mean they are a sort of "moldy fig," trying
to just paint exactly like Braque and Picasso. It means they are using that
language in some contemporary sense. But why can't jazz be talked about in
this way?
SC My argument is this. All of those
things that we get from European modernism and post-modernism are good for
European things. But I believe that what musicians did in America is something
that has to be assessed differently, because it doesn't have any serious
precedent at all in European music, and also, because it is a collective
phenomenon. A painter is standing up in front of a canvas with an easel,
and he is doing what he does or doesn't do, and he is responding one way
or another to a fairly long tradition of European painting. But, the whole
phenomenon of what musicians actually do on a bandstand, and what they are
bringing off when they are playing, is still in need of being assessed on
a far higher level than it is. What I think misleads a number of musicians
is that they get tied up in thinking about and trying to put themselves in
the mental frame that, say, Picasso and Stravinsky and James Joyce did. But
it seems to me that with musicians like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker,
Lester Young or Thelonious Monk, something different happened, and we haven't
gotten deeply enough into discussing what that was, and it does not need
to "advance" along the terms of European stuff. What happened in European
visual art is that eventually you got to the point where you are now. I was
talking to a curator about the fact that so many modern painters or contemporary
painters can't paint or draw, and she said that is not important anymore. |
Still Life with Grapes and Clarinet, 1927
Georges Braque
*
Woman with a Book, 1932
Pablo Picasso
|
MB But you can't pin that on cubism.
SC I am not pinning anything on
cubism, Martha. I am talking about this idea of a certain kind of progression.
MB But jazz went through all those
things too…
SC Wait a minute. Based on an increasing
kind of abstraction that is further and further removed from the initial
point. That is not Picasso's fault. Picasso painted it every way he wanted
to paint until he died. I am not talking about that. I am talking about this
idea that progress is based upon an increasingly abstract removal from an
initial point, and that is why you have certain kinds of things that are
thought about in the jazz critical community -- which is not populated by
great thinkers, by the way. That is all I am saying. When they start talking
about how "Bird did it" is like what Loren was saying. You can't compare
somebody like Dave Douglas to Louis Armstrong or to any of those major figures.
The first thing, he is not, on his instrument, a major figure. Now, if you
like what he thinks or he does, then you like what he thinks and what he
does. But, I haven't met one trumpet player yet who thinks that he is a major
trumpet player. If we use Picasso as an example, we see what he could paint
as a teenager, so he was already in another category. That's all I mean.
LS All of these digressions I find
fascinating, but what spawned this whole thing is that Stanley shone his
light on to Dave Douglas and gave him credit for what he does, and that Francis
Davis wrote this stuff, and, all that we know now is the next step is that
he is out of the magazine, simply put, and that is where I want to keep my
focus. That issue is much more important than even the issues we have been
talking about.
MB Well, except that they are related.
It is a question of how do you talk about jazz on an appropriately high level,
where, as Stanley said, you are talking about what is really going on in
the music. Critics borrow the critical language from modernism. I don't see
another one out there. That is the language in which all the art is talked
about nowadays, post-modernism. Then you get into all that non-art, what
I call "perverse-modernism," which is non-art, anti-art. But to talk about
something that is seriously worth talking about, you have an African American
idiom and an African American musical language, and you have a critical language
which does take its reference points from European modernism. Maybe there
is a mismatch from the beginning, and we are never going to get out of this.
What is the alternative?
LS It is as though Martin Williams
never lived, or that we don't have anyone to go back to for guidance. A handful
of responsible people like Williams and Gunther Schuller and the early Leroi
Jones dealt with the big changes and the controversies in the jazz world
forty years ago. I am just saying that this is not the first time that we
have had to cross this
topic.
Francis Davis |
SC I think you hit upon it, Martha.
What I was raising in that piece is that if the psychology of the people
in the jazz establishment is that of rebellion against the middle class,
then the things they like are the things that strike them as another aspect
of rebellion against what they would consider middle class conventions, which
is projected by middlebrows like Francis Davis. And when I talk about middle
class, I am not even talking about whether somebody is a son of a coal miner
or not, I am just talking about the way they think. Their whole thing goes
back to that Beaudelaireian idea of scandalizing the middle class. Something
I find fascinating is that, since the middle fifties, the idea of teenage
rebellion against a restricting or emotionally, spiritually emaciated parent -- which goes back to the Jim Backus father in Rebel Without a Cause
-- there is this idea that every generation of people had to define itself
in opposition to the people who preceded them. In the process of writing
my book about Charlie Parker, which I hope to have done in a couple years,
one of the things I discovered is that Parker was not at war with people
like Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins over their art. That wasn't what he
was trying to do. What he wanted was to be accepted as one of them. He wasn't
trying to get away from them, and he wasn't trying to reject them. He heard
something else he wanted to play, but he wanted to be one of those guys.
The thing that fascinates me is the idea that you might be able to find your
identity with great individual resonance through the affirmation of the tradition
from which you come. It doesn't mean that you have to dwell in the cliches
of it. Individuality through affirmation is not even on the chart. |
MB Now, I think we are touching
upon it. This is something that has preoccupied me too. Compared to a lot
of the other arts, the Afro-American arts -- particularly the art of music
-- has this deep-seated kind of respect for, connection with, regard for,
reverence for tradition. That sits alongside everybody looking to get a record
contract. So, there is a kind of funny commercial motive for rejecting the
past. But the rejection of the past and the rejection of the elders does
not go as deep or as pervasive as it does in all of the European derived
arts, because that is what modernism was all about. It was tied up in political
revolution. Jazz went for that in the sixties, when it had a little fling
with it, but I don't think it really stuck. Jazz is deeply traditional in
a way that a lot of the other arts are not. Is that a statement that you
can agree with?
SC Yes, but when you say
traditional…
MB Yes, you are ruling out "moldy figism"
and "musical necrophilia," as Loren called it.
 |
LS I just happen to have reread
Gilbert Seldes' "What is Jazz" chapter from The Seven Lively Arts,
and I couldn't remember whether he had written it in 1927 or '28 or '25.
Well, I read it, and came away feeling that he was a man who at least had
heard a Jelly Roll Morton or King Oliver recording, because he was writing
with such insight about things. It turns out he wrote it in 1923, before
Rhapsody in Blue, and he is already talking about Cole Porter and
George Gershwin and all these guys. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that
jazz was always presented as something to slap your parents with in the same
way that Plato wrote about, so I don't think that is something that came
into this later.
MB But, was he writing for a white
audience?
LS Yes. |
MB I think part of what Stanley
is pointing out is the way whites use Afro-American culture. We all know
this. We have all been around this.
SC See, now we have hit the exact
point of reference. What you just introduced, Martha, that is a lot of it.
Because, one thing we know is that musicians like Louis Armstrong, King Oliver,
Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Lester Young were initially affirming something
that their poor, black audience embraced. In other words, although they were
truly avant-garde musicians -- if we look at the conventions of Western music
then they were avant-garde regardless of what kind of harmonies came with
Stravinsky, Ravel or Debussy -- in terms of how they were putting music together,
they were still avant-garde musicians.
MB But they weren't adversarial
toward their audience.
SC And their audience didn't see
them as anything other than an affirmative group of guys who could play.
| LS But this started to vitiate
when the music they played stopped becoming functionally a dance music. People
like Jimmy Heath say, "What is all this stuff about how people didn't dance
to bebop? I saw a thousand people dance to Charlie Parker at the Armory,"
and I think that the way that people perceive what the musicians were doing
was also colored by whether they were providing dance music. That was a
significant part, in the way the musicians were thinking about it.
SC That great performance of Charlie
Parker's you refer to was at St. Nicholas Arena, and there are photographs
in which you see all those people out there dancing, and this was to some
of the "freest," most inventive Charlie Parker we have on record. There he
was, up on the bandstand, and people were dancing while he was playing all
that stuff with Roy Haynes, "Mr. Rhythmic Displacement," on the drums. So,
the cliché doesn't apply. That is not really what was going on. |
Charlie Parker
Ornithology
|
MB
Neither of you would deny, however, that at some point jazz
did take a turn for the more elite, the more complex, the more difficult,
and lost the kind of mass audience that it might have had in earlier times.
We can argue about when that occurred, but, didn't it occur?
SC But, I would argue this Martha,
which is something that has fascinated me for years. When you listen to a
King Oliver record and hear the kind of polyphony that they are dealing with,
and compare it to the single line that Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud
Powell or John Coltrane played in front of a rhythm section, they are not
playing anything that is more complex than the ensemble that Oliver was playing.
The thing that fascinates me about jazz is that as it purportedly advances,
people are able to play less. It was a normal thing in the twenties for three
people in the twenties to actually play polyphony. Loren and damn near everybody
now can tell you that is very difficult to find three guys who can get up
on a bandstand and play really good polyphony, and that used to be a basic
thing. So, you end up on one level ahead, the music moves or has been pushed
or misled by some into an arena like abstract expressionism, where it becomes
more and more about the person playing it than the relationship of what it
is to the tradition from which it comes.
David Ware
Alignment
*
Don Byron
Waltz for Ellen
*
Matthew Shipp
dna |
MB There are two ends to the
animal when it comes to difficulty. There is the difficulty for the artist
and there is the difficulty for the audience. I will admit that King Oliver's
music was difficult for the artist to play well, but it wasn't that hard
to listen to. In fact, it was a real pleasure to listen to. It took very
little effort, and I think that is a principle that goes through all the
arts. People confuse the idea of difficulty to do it well versus difficulty
of access. At a certain point it seems that a lot of jazz music becomes
difficulty of access. It is for me and I love the stuff. But I am more of
an average listener than either Loren or Stanley, and I find some jazz just
kind of, you know, difficult.
LS But that is
because it lost the basic element of what fed it from its functionality,
in terms of being able to dance to it. It kept it within the lines of what
you are calling accessibility. There was a certain kind of melodic line,
a certain kind of root rhythm, and as long as people were satisfying those
needs, Ellington could get away with whatever he wanted to get away with
because people could dance to it. Once it became untethered it kind of floated
out and became free, and bands that kept jazz as a dance music going were
thought to be commercial or sell-out. That wasn't the case.
JJM Do jazz listeners want music that breaks
with tradition?
SC First thing is, I think there
is a big difference between what jazz listeners want and what jazz critics
write about.
MB Of course.
SC For example, Dave Douglas has
never become a popular player, nor has Cecil Taylor, David Ware, Matthew
Shipp, Don Byron or any of these so-called "downtown musicians" the critics
attempt to elevate. Douglas has some traditional things going for him that
critics look for. He is white, blond, short and from the upper middle class.
He knows the modernist language and does "projects." As one guy pointed out
to me, he is a critic's delight because he does all these different projects
and it gives critics something to write about. So, he gives the critics everything that they want, and furthermore, he provides the same thing that
at a certain point so-called "West Coast Jazz" provided, which is a rebellion
against the Negro. I am not backing off of that. These critics are basically saying that they have been
following these Negroes for decades, and they do not have to do that anymore.
They are saying it is time for us to start
admitting white contributions to jazz were important, as if anyone other
than some racist fools in the sixties ever pretended they weren't important.
|
MB
Where I started cheering for you in your essay, Stanley, is when you
said it is about the destruction of the Negro aesthetic. To me, it is about
a body of music and a set of musical practices that does not define progress
in terms of self-destruction and self-immolation. Most of the arts have gone
through this whole modernist/post-modernist wringer of defining progress
as taking your art apart until there is not even any bones left -- just picking
it to death. For various reasons, a lot of people in jazz have essentially
not gone into that, which is not to say they have stayed in the same place.
But that is really hard for a lot of critics to grasp because they apply
only one standard, and the one standard they apply is the radical
modernist/post-modernist position of constantly taking the art apart,
substituting something else for it, radically questioning and thinking about
the art, and putting the conventions of the art and their borders into question.
That is the oldest cliché, but it is constantly repeated, and if you
apply that to today's music scene, I guess this is the type of results you
will have.
LS I would agree. Many of the musicians
who these folks cite as mentors -- whether it be a Coltrane or a Mingus --
are the folks who mastered the idiom and were actually quite modest about
their artistic intent. I realize the words "modest" and "Mingus" don't go
together, nonetheless, these artists were humble in the face of their origins
and the tradition. And, as Stanley pointed out years ago, the avant-garde
opened the door to these folks who were not masters of playing the blues
in B flat but who were masters of the interview with the European jazz magazines,
and they talked a whole bunch of stuff. I liked the point that Martha just
put out, that what we are seeing is the end result of three or four decades
of preparation.
| SC I think there are many
things happening in jazz today that are of great importance, and they are
not being noticed because most of the people who write about jazz are only
hooked up with this particular thing we are talking about. For instance,
I recently heard Eric Reed's septet at the Village Vanguard. They didn't
use any microphones there, not even on the piano. There was one microphone
on the bandstand, and it was on the bass. Whether they played fast
tunes that demanded a lot of fire from the drummer, or if they played ballads,
this kid named Rodney Greene gave them all they needed, all of the drive,
and he never drowned anyone out. To actually be able to go into a club and
hear people who are not overamplified -- who in fact aren't amplified at
all -- and to hear a young drummer have that kind of control over his drums
without sacrificing the fire that people want from a drummer in certain kinds
of tunes, is to me a very important development. You have people like Eric
Harland, Lewis Nash, Kenny Washington and Rodney Greene who are beginning
to reject that whole overplaying, too loud conception that is part of the
negative influence of pop music. |
Eric Reed
Pure Imagination |
MB Yes, that's an entirely different
topic…
SC Yes, but all I am saying
is that the attitude of "too loud" that became "not loud enough" has had
a big effect on jazz over the last thirty years. So, I think that these kinds
of things like where people are actually hearing another kind of control
that certain people are exhibiting is, to me, dramatically radical, especially
in a period when you go into a club the size of the Village Vanguard and
see a trumpet player in a quintet with the bell of his horn in a microphone.
Why is that? You have all these monitors up on stage with these guys listening
to themselves through these speakers. I was on a panel with Marsalis yesterday,
and he said when musicians ask to turn up the monitor, they are not asking
to hear the bass or the piano, they are always asking, "Give me more of me."
He was saying that these kinds of things move the music away from the kind
of nuanced listening that you really need from one jazz musician to another
on a bandstand in order to get a high quality performance. I feel that when
you start seeing these sorts of things taking place, where musicians aren't
overplaying in whatever style they are playing, where they are starting to
not play too loud, then they are starting to rebel against the volume. I
heard Terence Blanchard play recently, and he never played into the microphone
and the saxophone player didn't either. So, I think there is something in
the air now in which musicians are beginning to move away from that kind
of microphone coating that we have become accustomed to in too many club
situations, when you shouldn't really have to use a bunch of microphones
if the drummer has control of himself.
MB Now let me guess, if one of the
critics walked into the club that night, they would say they were turning
back the clock to the older days or something like that.
SC I don't even know if they would
notice that they didn't have microphones. That is what I am saying.
LS They would say they are the Christian
Scientists of jazz.
Marcus Roberts
Jungle Blues
|
SC The other thing is something
that Loren and I have talked about a number of times, where you could have
a recording like Marcus Roberts's big band record, Blues for the New
Millennium, which features all kinds of new music, but missed the jazz
critical radar screen. Why? Because since Roberts was in Marsalis's band
and worked for a while at Lincoln Center, he can't be doing anything new.
But that disc includes pieces with all kinds of rhythms he has these guys
playing, and the overlays that develop where a guy will start playing a solo
seemingly from behind the ensemble because he is not playing loud, and then
he gets louder and louder and comes up into the foreground. He demonstrates
all kinds of things that you never hear people doing today. On some Duke
Ellington recordings you will hear Rex Stewart or somebody seeming to mutter
his way into the foreground, but I just feel there are many different colors
and combinations in the way that Marcus Roberts wrote the stuff for his record.
Ted Nash, a saxophonist associated not only with Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra
but also the "downtown guys," said to me that he and the other guys in the
band who were on that date expected that record to make some noise because
it was so different. But the critical establishment didn't even notice. To
me, that is the kind of problem that we have. Many of the pieces Loren Schoenberg
has commissioned from guys to write for his band don't fit into a category
that critics think Loren is in. |
MB And that category is what?
LS Big band leader.
SC But he commissions contemporary
pieces that are played extremely well by his band, and those pieces don't
get heard, because, if a critic sees his name, they don't investigate the
music because they have already decided if you want something "new," you
don't go to Loren Schoenberg's or Marcus Roberts' band, because you are not
going to get anything new there. A pianist like Bill Charlap is combining
things from Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans, Bud Powell and McCoy Tyner in a fresh,
personal sense, and when he plays, he is not playing in a constrained style.
There is something fresh in the way he plays. I just think there are things
like this going on that are "A+ radical" according to the terms that the
critical establishment themselves claim that they are interested in.
LS I would like to ask a question
of both Martha and Stanley. It is a question that popped into my mind as
we were talking about these issues. I am wondering if this would be a proper
analogy or metaphor. Would it be fair to say that maybe one thing Wynton
Marsalis was doing was asking jazz musicians to come back and have the ability
to do the classic still-life painting of a bowl of fruit on a table? Was
he saying that there is a point in art for centuries in which you get everybody
confronting that table with that bowl of fruit on it, and at some point,
with Jackson Pollock and those kinds of artists, that stuff goes out the
window? And what Wynton is in a sense saying, do whatever you want, but I
would like to know that you can also do this…
MB Well, that is why I brought
up cubism, because cubism was representational art, it was not abstract.
It was an analytic way of seeing, and early cubism is kind of dry, but later
cubism got very luscious and colorful and beautiful and gorgeous. The stuff
they did in the thirties is as pretty as anything you care to see. It is
very accessible that way, but they never would have gotten there if they
hadn't done that first spade-work, so to speak, and dug out what they were
looking at. I am using cubism as an example, not because it partakes of all
these other kinds of modernism which Stanley knows I don't like, but because
it is a thing that is still there. A serious painter who tries to take that
on and deal in that language -- whether it be French or Spanish or from Oklahoma
-- is dealing with the real aesthetic, and is dealing with something that
has not gone away, and that is still fresh. You can't just go and copy the
old paintings, but there is so much there that hasn't even been exhausted
yet.
SC Do you know what? That is exactly
the problem of jazz. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a drummer a
named Bill Stewart, after I heard him play with Brad Mehldau and guitarist
Peter Bernstein. Afterwards, we were hanging around talking about all of
the things that just go by in jazz. There is so much material, it doesn't
make any difference what period you listen to, there are so many ideas, so
many conceptions, so many things that musicians have played. They go into
the studio one day, make a record, but then never make another one like it
again. In the music there might be something that the piano player does,
or something that is voiced in an Ellington arrangement or something Tadd
Dameron did -- you name it -- and somehow jazz musicians just don't seem
to notice. I think that one of the great problems of jazz criticism in these
magazines is they really are not very good at illuminating the varieties
of possibilities within the music itself. I wrote one article for Jazz
Times in which I was saying that there was a very small group of innovators
in the forties and fifties, people like Charlie Parker, Mingus, Bud Powell,
Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Ray Brown, Oscar Pettiford.
Now, what was everybody else supposed to do? Stop playing? One of the things
I pointed out is that if you read jazz criticism, you would basically conclude
that during the sixties, there were two major tenor sax players, John Coltrane
and Sonny Rollins, with Wayne Shorter being number three and maybe Albert
Ayler being four. Now, all of that saxophone that people like Joe Henderson,
Charlie Rouse, Hank Mobley, Lockjaw Davis, and Paul Gonsalves were playing;
these are great jazz individualists, and why should a young saxophonist only
know that there were only about four guys, when there were a number of tenor
players who didn't play like Coltrane or Sonny Rollins? They just fall off
the map. Loren and I were talking earlier that if you don't know jazz, you
wouldn't even know that Don Byas existed. You would hear there was Coleman
Hawkins, then Lester Young came up with an alternative to Hawkins, then Dexter
Gordon came along and then Charlie Parker. People like Don Byas just disappear
in jazz, and they have something very rich to offer.
| MB It's the mentality in the visual arts
that can be traced right back to a guy named Clement Greenberg, and that
school of criticism. These folks came out of a Marxist tradition. They were
not Stalinists, they were Trotskyites who believed in cutting-edge arts that
would push the world toward a socialist future. Don't ask me why they believed
this, but they believed it. Greenberg's most famous book of essays is Art
and Culture, in which he praises all of the modernist artists of the
hour, including Pollock and the abstract impressionists -- anybody he can
get his mitts on. They are always praised in the same terms. They are the
avant-garde in the political sense, they are the leading cutting-edge not
only of artistic change, but by implication of social and political change.
This is the mentality that many of the critics work from. I don't think half
of these people can tell you where they get their ideas from, but that is
where they get them from. There is a vacuum at the heart of it, because they
don't really think that the latest avant-garde jazz artist is going to cause
a political revolution, but it is still this idea that there is a single
cutting-edge, that history is moving forward, that we are marching into the
future. It is all that way of thinking. I think somewhere in your column,
Stanley, you talk about the idea of art always making progress. We need to
question that idea. Is Mozart a mere precursor to Anton Webern? It doesn't
pay to look at art that way. That is not how it works. |
Clement Greenberg |
SC That is something Eric Reed and
I were talking about recently. He said he was talking to the pianist Claude
Bolling in Europe, and asked him what happened to stride? How did stride
disappear from jazz? Bolling said it disappeared because it was very hard
to play, and when Bud Powell came along, piano players said, "Phew! Thank
goodness we can get away from it. Now we do not have to deal with Fats Waller,
Willie the Lion, and all of those guys." He didn't mean that Bud Powell couldn't
play what he was playing, but that is another example of what I meant a little
earlier about these various elements of jazz that keep getting lopped off.
At a certain point, people could play extremely well melodically through
these tunes. In the beginning, some people could play by ear and they weren't
really harmonically sophisticated -- Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins and those
kinds of guys. Then you have Don Byas, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker,
who can play good through chord progression. Then you have people like Miles
Davis, who put together the telling, poetic melodic style -- the harmonic
complexity. Now, though, we are at the point where all of that music
has added up to people playing fifteen or twenty choruses of what sounds
like exercises over one or two chords or vamps on every tune. So, you go
to clubs and all of that music of Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, and the best
of Coltrane, leads to you hearing today's musicians play one tune after another
on a vamp. It is just like the stuff narrowed itself down. What I have often
attacked musicians and critics on is the narrowness of their vision, just
like what you are saying, Martha. If it is the trickle-down Clement Greenberg
vision, it is not a vision that parallels the realities of the music or the
music's greatest possibilities. The fact that during that period in the sixties,
you had all of these people who were playing, who could really play. There
was Stan Getz, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, Jim Hall,
Ahmad Jamal, and so many others who could play, but when you pick up a jazz
history book and get to the sixties, it is Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane,
blah, blah, blah. Those others were there. Believe me, I was on the scene,
and there were plenty of other people who could definitely play, and they
played all kinds of different ways. That is part of what we need in jazz
criticism, is an openness -- not so much just to novelty -- but to creative
ideas within the arena of jazz. See, it is very easy to take something that
doesn't relate to jazz and just put it in the middle of it and say this is
my new project. An artist can say that he went to Bali and heard Balinese
music, and decided to incorporate some gamelon on a particular piece. Ok,
then, of course, he will get on the cover of Jazz Times. "Loren
Schoenberg's Gamelon Symphony, Written for Three Toothpicks."
MB Well, you can incorporate different
instruments into a musical language.
Albert Murray
*
Wynton Marsalis
The Party's Over
|
LS There is a guy out on the
West Coast who did what Duke did on the Far East Suite, and what Dvorak
did with his New World Symphony, taking inspiration from one place
and then synthesizing it and putting it back within their own context. I
think that is actually very close to what we are talking about with some
of Dave Douglas' things. Someone who has done what I think a lot of people
are saying that Dave Douglas has done, but I believe who has done it better,
is the person on the Coast, Anthony Brown, who interpreted Ellington's Far
East Suite, actually using some far east instruments on it. So, while
reorchestrating Ellington's Far East Suite, he kept it -- and this
is where it gets into the indefinable -- within the jazz idiom.
But if I could just hijack this discussion for one moment back to what happened
to Stanley at Jazz Times, which is one element here, and it also relates
to Clement Greenburg, is the role of the critic as the person who is the
artist's sponsor. There is the perception of Stanley and Albert Murray as
being the "men behind Wynton Marsalis," as a result of Stanley's mentoring
of and friendship with him. Critics get upset by this, but they also want
to have their guy. They want to be seen as the person behind a David Murray
or a Dave Douglas or a whomever. The jazz critics and all of the others are
missing that point, frankly. Of the jazz critics, Stanley Crouch is an invisible
man to them. It's a cliché, but it is true. They know about what Stanley
writes in the Jazz Times magazine and gets these responses back, but
they may not be aware of Notes of a Hanging Judge and his other books
of essays, or of what he writes for the New York Daily News, or any
of his other work. Consequently, they interpret pretty much anything that comes out of
Stanley's mouth as another shilling for his boy Wynton, as opposed to a serious
critic giving him due for helping bring someone of Marsalis' caliber up to
the plate. Would you agree with some of that Stanley? |
SC I would say this. That might be
true. I don't live in the world that those guys live in, so I don't really
know what their psychological relationship to me might happen to be. But
I will say this. I have no doubt that there is great glee felt in the spiritual
Mudville's that they live in at the fact that they can take their little
slingshots and shoot them at Marsalis because he now purportedly represents
the establishment, which is what they think they are in rebellion against.
As I said in "Putting the White Man in Charge," a lot of these guys see
themselves as some kind of neo-abolitionists and that their job is to rescue
the Negro from the "plantation of no publicity" to the "Canada of attention,"
perhaps resulting in record dates and maybe even an audience. Some of these
critics talk about my relationship with Marsalis as an unprecedented relationship
in which a writer has influence on a major musician. But finally, I would
say this. What I find more than slightly remarkable -- and I think Greg Osby
would attest to this if anyone wants to ask him -- is how Marsalis has been
categorized as this backward looking musician, when in fact he has written
and recorded so much music that were it to be released under the name of
someone else, it would be perceived as some kind of rejuvenation of the
avant-garde, or a reapplication of the kinds of successes of Ornette Coleman.
_______________________________
Roundtable conversation took place on May 4, 2003
_______________________________
Stanley Crouch products at Amazon.com
Martha Bayles products at Amazon.com
Loren Schoenberg products at Amazon.com
*
If you enjoyed this discussion, you may want to read our interviews with Stanley Crouch, Martha Bayles, and Loren Schoenberg.
Thanks to Paul Morris and Eric Busch, who assisted in the publication of "Blues For Clement Greenberg."
*
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
|
