There’s a lot of talk lately about why jazz has been losing its audience despite decades of efforts to build infrastructure. There is hardly a university music program that does not include a jazz studies program and jazz festivals (and affiliated community programs) abound. The place of jazz in musical histories is secure and the tension between the “classical” and “revolutionary” approaches to jazz historiography seems no longer relevant with the revolutionary voices having left the field (or at least become as absent from the media landscape as jazz itself seems to be — who’s carrying on Frank Kofsky‘s work now that he’s gone). The deep rooting of jazz in the African American experience has been subverted by its widespread acceptance as America’s classical music, its one true art form. I think this has implications for the survival of jazz as a vibrant part of America’s soundscape. The classicizing of jazz has been going on for a while.
The publication of Grover Sales’ Jazz: America’s Classical Music in 1984 sparked an intellectual and cultural frenzy. Sales not only transformed jazz from a cultural product rooted in the African American experience to a cultural product rooted in the American experience, but he also reclassified jazz (an urban folk music) as a national classical music. Whether or not Sales was the first to meAntion jazz as America’s classical music is not as important as the amount of publicity the idea received from the first printing of his text…. Today, jazz is more highly regarded as America’s classical music rather than America’s “rare and valuable national treasure.” In my opinion, these are two diametrically opposed concepts. (The Non-Classical Nature of America’s Classical Music by Emmet G. Price III in All About Jazz, 2003).
In my opinion, there has been a big downside to the success of the classicizing of jazz. Like European classical music, there is a general perception that the best jazz has to offer is firmly entrenched in the past, and not in the sense of a tradition and roots to draw upon but dead masters to venerate. This approach stultifies symphony programs and pushes innovative music to the margins. It seems to be doing the same to jazz.
After being exposed to Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin — a piteous collection of pop dreck — I reluctantly turned my attention to the Turtle Island String Quartet’sHave you ever been…? While the latter’s set of Hendrix covers has not received the level of acclaim that Wilson’s butchering of the songs of the Gershwin brothers, it stands head and shoulder’s above it in terms of inventiveness and musicality. [I came to both these cds via NPR's music website, which features an interesting mix of artists but has never raised a critical eyebrow.]
“Reimagining” the works of classic artists is nothing new to Turtle Island String Quartet. Their previous interpretations of John Coltrane also hit the mark (on A Love Supreme). Here’s a sample, their rendition of “My Favorite Things” informed by Coltrane’s inspired 1961 recording of the Rodgers & Hammerstein composition.
Histories of American popular music have tended to create a clear bifurcation of “White” and “Black” musical genres. Country music has been portrayed as a genre primarily drawn from Anglo-Scottish roots. The significant influences of African Americans on the genre have been diminished or placed in a carefully constructed pre-history. African American musical genres have also been defined within strict boundaries—stripped of areas of inter-cultural contact, influence and collaboration. This separation was largely created by the commercial music industry during the 1920′s when widespread recording of “blues” and “hillbilly” artists began in the South. A&R representatives of northern record companies were instrumental in shaping the repertoire of black and white artists along perceived lines of marketability. The “blues craze” of the 1920′s had a particularly dramatic effect on the future of African American popular music. Most African American performers had a large repertoire of different types of songs but the only material most record companies wanted to record were blues. This had a powerful effect on shaping the perception of African American music that was subsequently reflected in scholarship on the blues. Early blues scholars were often preoccupied with looking for “authentic” blues, material uncolored by intercultural contact, not only with “White” music but also with commercial forms of African American music that they perceived as less authentically “Black.” Styles of the blues were legitimized by separating them from other styles of music and by constant reference back to their roots in rural black culture. (Callen, “A Deconstruction of a Constructed Genre: A Critical View of the Oakland Blues” presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Austin, Texas. October 1999.)
The quote is from my first conference presentation as an ethnomusicologist based on research I’d done on the West Coast Blues in which I’d found that the clear separations made between Black and White musical traditions in the U.S. were a misrepresentation of a history of continual exchange. It was something that was obvious and I should have known but ran contrary to the common sense version of American history that I had accumulated. My research on the West Coast Blues began my interest in the process of genre definition and those frequent moments when genre categories are inadequate and transgression is necessary and inevitable. Lately, it’s been interesting to watch the rediscovery (again) of the connections between jazz and country music — did everyone really forget Texas Swing and Bluegrass? Below are a couple of excerpts from an excellent Jazz Times article by Geoffrey Himes on the history of jazz / country collaborations and a new crop of “fusions” worth checking out — and advocacy for a definition of jazz less as a genre or style than as a process that can be applied to any musical material. The article is well worth reading in its entirety.
When Sonny Rollins released his Way Out West album in 1957, the cover featured the tall tenor saxophonist standing out in the desert between a bleached cow skull and a multi-armed cactus. In the William Claxton photo, Rollins cradled his horn like a six gun, planted his fist by his holster and peered out slyly from beneath a big gray cowboy hat. The cowboy theme carried over into the music as the trio of Rollins, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne played “I’m an Old Cowhand,” “Wagon Wheels” and the leader’s title tune.
It was an important record for several reasons. For one, the piano-less format allowed Rollins the harmonic freedom to break with bebop orthodoxy and to follow his melodic inspiration wherever it led. For another, it challenged the assumption that only blues, ballads and show tunes were the proper materials for jazz improvisation. The album proved that country music, even ersatz country music like Johnsy Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand,” could inspire great jazz performances.
Rollins wasn’t the first to point this out. After all, in 1930 Louis Armstrong had played trumpet on “Blue Yodel No. 9” by the “Father of Country Music,” Jimmie Rodgers. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys had recorded “Basin Street Blues,” one of Armstrong’s signature tunes, in 1946. But Rollins was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace country music so emphatically.
It has taken a long time, but country music is now winning grudging acceptance from the jazz world. One of 2008’s best-selling jazz releases was the Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson collaboration, Two Men With the Blues (Blue Note). This country-jazz hybrid was new territory for Marsalis, but Nelson has been singing and picking jazz standards all his life and even recorded a jazz-guitar record, The Gypsy, with Jackie King in 2001.
Another key release last year was Charlie Haden’s Rambling Boy (Decca), a collection of old country songs he sang as a young boy in the Haden Family. Before he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Ornette Coleman Quartet, Haden sang with his parents and siblings on the radio in Iowa and Missouri. Haden first hinted at those origins on his 1997 duo album with Pat Metheny, Beyond the Missouri Sky. Now Haden revisits the actual songs of the Haden Family with help from his kids, Metheny, Elvis Costello and such country stars as Rosanne Cash, Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs.
Jenny Scheinman, the jazz violinist who has recorded with Bill Frisell, Norah Jones and John Zorn, released two KOCH label albums in 2008. Crossing the Field is an instrumental jazz record with Frisell and Jason Moran, but Jenny Scheinman is a vocal project, featuring country and folk songs recorded with fellow members of Frisell’s band. (to read the rest)
Rollins, Haden and their fellow fusioneers take the approach that jazz is primarily a process, not a repertoire. Almost any piece of music can be given an elastic syncopation, substitute chords and theme-and-variation improvisation. Some tunes may work better than others, but Rollins has demonstrated that a successful tune might as easily be a calypso as a show tune, a Hank Williams song as readily as a George Gershwin number.
“Jazz can use any source material,” argues Scheinman. “Jazz is an approach, and you can start with any melody and make it work for improvisers. The tune is just the conversation topic, and you can take the topic anywhere you want.”
“That’s what’s so amazing about jazz,” Frisell agrees. “That’s why it’s such a perfect world to be in. I don’t think there are any rules as far as what you use as source material. It’s more about having the opportunity to take what you know, to draw from your experience, and do whatever you want with it. All my heroes—Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk—took the music that was around them, the music that they liked, and transformed it through their own eyes.”
If this is true, if jazz is a process that can be worked on any ingredients, what are the advantages of turning to country music for raw materials? Well, the genre is full of gorgeous melodies, aching emotions and rural textures that have been largely untouched by the jazz world. While blues, ballads and show tunes have been worked to exhaustion, country music represents a largely unplowed field. Here is a wealth of material just waiting to be alchemized into jazz, if only musicians and audiences can overcome their prejudices.
Pablo Picasso: “In painting you can try anything. As long as you never do anything over again.”
Miles Davis: “Now, nothing in music and sounds is ‘wrong.’ You can hit anything, any kind of chord. … Music is wide open for anything.”
Pablo Picasso: “You see me here, and yet I’ve already changed. I’m already somewhere else.”
Miles Davis: “Nothing is out of the question the way I think and live my life. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning.”
From the current issue of Jazz Times (July/August 2010), Nat Hentoff on a new Miles exhibit and book.
“A Fine Arts Museum’s Tribute to Nonpareil Miles.”
When I lived in Boston eons ago, the Museum of Fine Arts was within walking distance, and I often visited to get high on such paintings as a Renoir of a young couple in what looked like a New Orleans-style slow dance. I’d stand there fantasizing about taking the man’s place in the painting, but I never expected to find anything of jazz in this legendary museum’s exhibitions. Nor have I heard of jazz as a fine art in any of the other museums around the country. I have been at jazz concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but there’s nothing of Louis, Duke, Pres, Bix or Trane in the galleries there.
Suddenly, however, in a very prestigious museum of fine arts—having opened in April and continuing until Aug. 29—there is a stunning media exhibition on someone the museum accurately calls “one of the jazz world’s greatest innovators.”
Coinciding with the event is a very large-size, hardback catalog, on the cover of which—characteristically sizing you up skeptically—is Miles Davis. The book and exhibition are titled “We Want Miles: Miles Davis vs. Jazz.” And nowhere else have I seen so much of Miles, from his boyhood on.
Miles and I were friends—until Bitches Brew. He never forgave me for not turning handsprings over his venture into electronics. I felt Miles was electrifying without the added wattage. But since he was always trying something new, and always expecting attention, I’m sure he would have been delighted by this polyrhythmic, visual and sonic odyssey of his life.
This tribute to the always-alive music of Miles is not in an American museum; the ones here are not yet hip to jazz as an art. This awakening challenge to our treasures of high art is mounted by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It’s the first one there, but it has been brewing for a long time. (for the rest…)
An interesting series of posts on the origins of rave, ravers and raving to refer to party-ing and the backstory of the terms (loss of control, blind allegiance, etc.)
In previous posts on the origins of rave, ravers and raving, we have established that the use of these terms in relation to parties goes back as far as the 1940s and were used fairly widely in British jazz and later counter-cultural scenes from then up until at least the end of the ’60s. The use of the words rave/raving as in over-enthusiastic (‘raving mad’, ‘rant and rave’) go back at least as far as the early 18th century.
But when was the word raver, as in one who raves, first used as a noun? So far the first example I have found is from a 1704 translation of Plutarch’s Morals which criticises ‘Triflers and Ravers’ in the context of ‘Lies, fawning Speeches and deceitful Manners’.
A similar meaning was clearly implied in an 1845 article in the Institutes of the Christian Religion which states ‘Let all the hired ravers of the Pope babble as they may’. Similarly an article entitled Public Opinion published in the United States Democratice Review, (Issue 3, March 1856) denounces ‘your loudest ravers of disunion’ alongside ‘your Ism-ites, your Free-soilers, your Arch-Agtitators’ in the context of the lead up to the American Civil War.
Still haven’t found any use of these terms in relation to parties and dancing before the 1940s though – but will keep searching at the quite addictive Google News Archive and Google Books.
Like most musicians who suddenly burst onto the scene, Rudresh Mahanthappa has been working on his craft for a long time. His reputation as an innovative jazz musician and composer took a major leap from the realms of the cognoscenti into popular culture with the enthusiastic reception of his 2008 album, Kinsmen. That album featured the Dakshina Ensemble, co-led by Mahanthappa and fellow alto saxophonist Kadri Gopalnath. Kinsmen, which melds jazz and South Indian Carnatic music, ended up on more than twenty top jazz CDs of 2008 lists, and the prestigious Downbeat International Critics Poll named Mahanthappa a rising jazz artist and alto saxophonist of 2009. He also became the subject of numerous features in The New York Times, the New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. That’s how the message used to come down from the cognoscenti to us hoi polloi and, sometimes, even in this age of viral marketing, it continues to do so — and sometimes, it still works. (to read more got to East Bay Express).
Kind of Blue (1959) changed the course of jazz, bringing new sonorities and modalities to the forefront. It also helped open up and retrain the ear of music listeners and influenced creators of various genres from classical to rock. As rapper Q-Tip said in a 2008 interview, “It’s like the Bible, you just have one in your house.”
Swedish Hillbilly/Western Swing with some bluegrass tossed in? Bring it on! Fiddler Ralf Fredblad and company must have spent many a dark frigid Nordic night listening to the heart and soul of Appalachia. The Original Rockridge Brothers bang out some of the most authentic Hillbilly you’ll hear, without irony or any suspicious modern trappings. “Rockridge Hollerin’” is pure gold. (go to Musical Emissions)
Land of Kush -- Against the Day
Montreal composer Sam Shalabi has played or found his way to be involved in many genres, including punk, free jazz, improv. Lately he’s been composing for large ensembles, one of which is the 30 member Land of Kush. “Against The Day” is a five section piece whose foundation is haunting vocals, strings, and Shalabi’s Oud. Combining aspects of Arab pop with pysch, the piece begins with the eerie “The Light Over The Ranges,” before moving into the more trippy, Arabesque “Iceland Spar.” (go to Musical Emissions )
SPA MUSIC? New Book from Oxford University Press: Water Music Making Music in the Spas of Europe and North America byIan Bradley.
Many of the most famous composers in classical music spent considerable periods in spa towns, whether taking in the waters, or searching for patrons among the rich and influential clientele who frequented these pioneer resorts, or soaking up the relaxing and decadent ambience of these enchanted and magical places. At Baden bei Wein, Mozart wrote his Ave Verum Corpus, and Beethoven sketched out his Ninth Symphony. Johannes Brahms spent 17 summers in Baden-Baden, where he stayed in his own specially-built composing cavern and consorted with Clara Schumann. Berlioz came to conduct in Baden-Baden for nine seasons, writing his last major work, Beatrice and Benedict, for the town’s casino manager. Chopin, Liszt, and Dvorak were each regular visitors to Carlsbad and Marienbad. And it was in Carlsbad that Beethoven met Goethe. Concerts, recitals, and resident orchestras have themselves played a major role in the therapeutic regimes and the social and cultural life of European and North American watering places since the late eighteenth century. To this day, these spa towns continue to host major music festivals of the highest caliber, drawing musicians and loyal audiences on both local and international levels.
This book explores the music making that went on in the spas and watering places in Europe and the United States during their heyday between (…to read more)
Unsound New York website
“Hello, New York: Avant-Garde Eastern Europe” by Steve Smith (New York Times) — Krakow’s “Unsound” Festival comes to New York City with “programs of club-oriented electronica, indie rock, free improvisation, ambient music and contemporary classical work. In some programs such distinctions become meaningless: at the opening event, for example, Sebastian Meissner, a German electronic artist, will collaborate with the young Polish contemporary-classical group Kwartludium in a project inspired by the seminal California punk-rock record label SST.” (to read more)
I had a female impersonator for years named Jean LaRue. I didn’t tell you about that. She was out of Oakland. I don’t know if she is living or dead. She was with me for years. Name was Jean LaRue. (August 14, 1998 Interview of Clarence ‘Little Red’ Tenpenny).
“Little Red” was one of my richest sources of information (and knowledge) when I was doing research for my Master’s thesis on the blues nightclub district that existed in North Richmond, California from the mid-40s to early ’70s. Red mentioned Jean LaRue in our first interview but didn’t mention that she was a female impersonator until a later conversation. That remark sparked my interest and led to later research, which resulted in my writing “Gender Crossings: A Neglected History in African American Music”*, an analysis of the exclusion of female and male impersonators from the history of African American music. I’ve also written an encylcopedia entry for the long-delayed but forthcoming Encyclopedia of African American Music: “Transgendered Experience in African American Music” (a terrible title — not my choice). {Digital copies of this entry and/or my MA thesis Musical Community: The “Blues Scene” in North Richmond, California available on request
Female Impersonator Jean LaRue with the Red Calhoun Orchestra (from "Woman's a Fool to think her man is all her own" -- Nationwide Production, 1947 -- available from ACinemaApart.com) Not the Jean La Rue that Clarence Tenpenny told me about. La Rue seems to have been a popular stage name for female impersonators (i.e. the famous British entertainer Danny La Rue).
* published in Queering the Popular Pitch in 2006(Sheila Whiteley & Jennifer Rycenga, eds. – New York & London: Routledge). 2006.
