Coherence

The British musician Graham Collier is an astute observer and a good writer. (Rifftides recently reviewed one of his early recordings.) In the current entry on his web site, Collier comments favorably on artsjournal.com blogger Terry Teachout's review in Commentary of Alyn Shipton's massive A New History of Jazz. Unfortunately Teachout's review is available on line only to Commentary subscribers. Part of it is quoted later in this posting. Collier questioned TT's observation that "it is by no means clear that post-modern jazz is itself sufficiently coherent to be grasped as a unified phenomenon continuous with pre-1970 predecessors."

Here's what Graham Collier wrote in response to Teachout's proposition:

To expect what has happened in jazz in the last 50 years to be as coherent as what happened before is to miss the wood for the trees. There was a change in jazz in the period between the mid 1950s and the mid 1960s which opened up the music in such a way that it will never be the same again, and this change made any "coherence" impossible. For me the pivotal point was Miles Davis's 1959 album Kind of Blue, but other musicians, such as Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, were each trying to open up the music in their own way.

The result has been the possibility of musicians developing their own way, showing influences (such as that of Ellington, Mingus and Gil Evans in my music) but realising that there is now room for unique jazz voices to develop. To invert my previous analogy, there are now lots and lots of individual trees and no wood will ever emerge.

My guess is that close listeners familiar with the first decades of jazz hear incoherence in plenty of new music after, say, 1958, the year of Ornette Coleman's Something Else. If we need a benchmark year, '58 is as good as any for the apparent start of a shift away from strict observance of traditional harmony and, to an extent, from melody and rhythm. (In Coleman's case, the shift was not nearly as radical as those who professed shock or outrage over it seemed to think it was.) You could make a case that the beginnings of a shift came in 1949, when Lennie Tristano recorded "Intuition" and "Digression." Although those free pieces did not start a movement, they forecast it. Pick a year. How about 1946? Shorty Rogers told me that to kill time between shows at the Paramount Theater in New York, members of Woody Herman's First Herd stood in a circle in the basement playing what fifteen years later came to be called free jazz. But who knew? Rogers said, "We'd never have dreamed of doing that in public." If we're dealing in forestry metaphors, the Herman Herd example is a case of a tree that fell, or grew, with no one hearing it.

Abandonment of approved guidelines governing coherence has been a fact of musical life throughout history. Otherwise, we'd be listening to clubs on hollow logs. Beethoven would have done things as Mozart did, Stravinsky as Brahms did.

I wonder if Graham Collier missed a larger point that Terry Teachout was making or suggesting in his Commentary piece, which is that when one is in the midst of any area of human activity, it is impossible to put it in historical perspective. It may be helpful to read Teachout's line about coherence in its fuller context at the end of his long review. Here are the final few paragraphs.

In recent years, many jazz musicians have looked for the answers to such questions in a famous remark made by the pianist Bill Evans and quoted in A New History:

"Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz."

Alyn Shipton clearly understands the implications of this remark, and the catholicity with which he describes pre-1970 jazz promises an equally clear understanding of later styles. "In what follows," he writes in his introduction, "I have attempted to examine what was being described as jazz throughout its history, and I have taken a very broad view of how jazz should now be defined." But, despite this broad perspective, he does not succeed in integrating postmodern jazz into his narrative.

His failure to do so reinforces my own belief that it is not yet possible to write a coherent historical survey that includes post-1970 stylistic developments. Not only are we too close in time to the jazz of the 70's, 80's, and 90's to write about it with detachment, but it is by no means clear that postmodern jazz is itself sufficiently coherent to be grasped as a unified phenomenon continuous with pre-1970 predecessors.

Still, even if the many kinds of music that we continue to call "jazz" no longer have enough in common to be discussed collectively, most listeners and critics, myself included, stubbornly persist in viewing them as parts of a whole, unified (in Bill Evans's words) not by their "whatness" but by their "howness." Perhaps some jazz scholar as yet unborn will be able to explain to our children why we were right to do so.

In any case, whether or not his political characterizations of market forces and of what "passes as jazz today" are accurate, Collier lays out an unavoidable truth facing all creative artists who depart from accepted norms.

The only problem for these individuals - who exist in every part of the world - is getting heard. And finding an audience among the increasingly market-led neo-conservative, re-creative and tribute-led music which passes as jazz today.