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A Generation Problem? |
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At age 15 we began collecting records. Fragile 3-minute disks. At 78 rpm they uttered those sounds that were sheer horror to our parents and meant The World to us.
As it was part of good family tradition to have kids learn an instrument, we obtained, thank God, a foundation in occidental music. We got together and became shockingly bad amateur Dixielanders. However, we all had a good ear and we therefore made fun of the world of "hits" and kitschy earworms. "Pop" or "commercial" were all cusswords to us. When another of our Jazz idols had found out that he or she would no longer need to vegetate at the existential minimum by making concessions to the mass public, he/she was finished as far as we were concerned.
Our music required active listening. It has an arrangement between beginning and ending. Soloists improvised. Interpreters wrote new melodies on old "standards", which could nonetheless be recognised via the harmonic chord sequence. An exciting game, full of enjoyment.
Ten years later: The trumpet had been sold, the piano
silenced, the daily drag of professional life had taken over. But
still Jazz was made, recorded and listened to in America and in
Europe. For us passive or still active Jazz fans the emerging new
style contrasting from traditional improvising patterns with
unexpectedly complicated sequences, was still an artistic
experience. The Be-bop of Charlie Parker was definitely a
highlight in the evolution of Jazz. Despite its complexity it
would still swing! The absence of this hard to define element
would have constituted enough reason to us to denounce the label
"Jazz" to such experiments: It don't mean a thing, if
it ain't got that swing.
During that period Joachim Ernst Berendt had written an
intelligent book about Jazz. His most important discovery: A new
style emerges at a rate of about every ten years. Mostly it is
Afro-Americans whose music is then "refined" by whites.
So New Orleans style evolved into Dixieland, Chicago into Swing
and, finally, Be-bop into Cool.
By now six main directions could be distinguished and already
there was a kind of pre-nostalgia, the return to old ways of
playing, e.g. Neo-Dixieland. Things were swinging tremendously,
the future of Jazz looked bright.
By the end of the Sixties, however, it became clear that
something went awry. More than a decade had passed without the
Berendt effect becoming evident.
Today one must ask: What is it that happened to Jazz? The
commercially controlled nostalgia wave had long since offered us
new interpreters of old styles, but where had the real evolution
gone after the bop era? Should the Rock-, Beat-, Funk-, Pop- or
Disco music be considered as guiding for new stylistic
developments? Or is even one of the countless short-lived
experiments in Jazz that we should consider as the new style?
The first group, by definition, is hardly eligible. It consists
of corny rhythms, accentuated on the third beat, is sung or
rather, shouted and has an electronic fadeout instead of an
ending. Subtlety is missing and Improvisations or instrumental
soli are next to unknown.
Of the second group it cannot be expected either because most of
the experimental styles simply do not swing.
Still, synthesis of Pop music and Jazz seem to prove that there is a new form of music after all, alas not the long awaited evolution of style in Jazz. The fact that nobody has yet loudly complained about its failure to appear may have one of several reasons:
Pop music is thought to be the new style in Jazz
The sum of countless experiments to free Jazz is considered to be
guiding
The general opinion is disguised to avoid admitting that nothing
is to be heard out of nothing - very much like some critics of
modern paintings or sculpture.
Reluctance to object because nobody wants to follow the steps of
those, who tempted to kill our love for Jazz years ago.
No doubt, Pop is the Great and Almighty Jazz Killer. To this
effect is promoted in a unprecedented way. So powerful a
commercial enterprise is Rock music that it borders the violation
of a taboo to make this statement. At the least one contracts the
wrath of an entire generation of hip-wiggling transvestites
showing faces as distorted as their guitars' sound and backed by
a gigantic industry. A generation bestowed with financial means
like none before it. Whereas the Jazz musician of the Forties had
to sport a solid character in order to accept the poor income
from making valuable music as opposed to simply go commercial and
hit big time with much less effort.
On our radio stations sung music, defined by rhythms heavy on the
third beat and a fadeout in place of a clever ending make up
about four fifth of the music aired between two blocks of
information at prime time. In fact "Music" has become
synonymous with the porridge passing as Beat, Pop, Hip Hop, Trip
Hop, Crossover, Dub, Industrial, Rock, Hard Rock, Jungle,
Ambient, Salsa, House, Hardcore, Techno, Folk, Blues, Country,
Ethno etc. To the exclusion of classical and Jazz music, of
course. If you doubt this, then what do the letters MTV stand
for? Right, Music Television. What music do they bring?
Classical, Jazz? No way!
Movie: Ray Brown on his (and Ella Fitzgerald's) son making money with pop music (QT, 68 kB)
Sound track of movie (QT, 64 kB)
It would be wonderful, if all our radio and TV stations acted to stop the slow dying of Jazz in our latitudes ("I think that certainly within the next ten years jazz will be defunct": Oscar Peterson). But please, not in the form of academic lectures. Rather by presenting more recordings of all styles and not only shortly before midnight. Talking should be limited to information on who played what, where and when.
Now that most young people have switched to pop music stations there should be ample justification to open channels offering a lightly digestible mix of easy going Jazz and Classics. First of all the ratio of vocal to instrumental presentations should be 1:10 rather than the other way around as it is now.
If Jazz is to avoid becoming a museum piece from the
first half of the 20. Century, then the squeaking, gargling and
growling sax soli of the so-called avantgarde must be replaced by
swinging new sounds.
By its separation from rigid blowing rules Jazz has allegedly
been freed. In reality, these pseudoelitarian experiments have
only succeeded to annoy the majority of simple Jazz lovers along
with the legion of potential disciples. It is impossible to
appreciate why a rhythmic meter and a harmonic concept should
ever have put this music in chains. In condescending irony those
"front-line artists" use the words "melodic"
or "catchy" for all that used to be called cantabile.
Some of them now even prefer to address their product as
"improvised music". Good so, because improvisation is
just about the only element left over from the time of real Jazz.
Oscar Peterson on the predominance of vocals in pop music (QT, 240 kB)
Sound track of movie (QT, 148 kB)
I cannot absolve the media from a certain co-responsibility that musical quality is going to the dogs with young listeners; that Michael Jackson is better known than Niels-Henning Ørsted-Pedersen.