Blues Up and Down: Jazz in Our Time

by Tom Piazza

The winner of an ASCAP award in the field of music writing presents a fervent argument for the continuing role of jazz music in today's culture, sustained by players' tradition and brilliance, despite the death knell critics have sounded since its birth.

Genres: Music, Jazz

194 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1997

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a bit of worthwhile stuff here...in case you're not familiar with the likes of Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and the like this will more than likely whet your whistle. If you are, then it'll just refresh your memory and your taste buds.

The travelogue about a jazz festival in Senegal (a near-miss of being published in The New Yorker, which is a story in and of itself) builds to a very powerful conclusion about listening to a jazz band in Africa, with the haunt of history over the shoulder.

The portrait of Wynton Marsalis, spending some serious time with him on the road as he plays his ass off and gives assertive but enriching lectures to high schoolers, is very well-drawn, precise and nuanced.

For the record, I'm definitely a fan of Wynton's music, perhaps only a smidge more so than his brother Branford. I don't for a single second bother with his boorishly flat denunciations of rap and pop music in general, which I think display too much of the stentorian voice of Stanley Crouch reverberating in his ear. Duke Ellington was a great man, and there's no reason at all for him not to be anyone's musical lodestar. But we can't all be Duke Ellington! Sometimes we should be more than happy to settle for being The Ramones, if you know what I mean.

There is a lot of discussion of the 80's-90's era "jazz wars," which of course I wasn't around for at all, and though I understand the need for that aesthetic battle in some sense (like they say in the Godfather, sometimes you gotta get rid of all the bad blood) it doesn't make much of a difference to me as a lover of the music.

I think jazz (in whatever form it ends up taking) gets WAY too little attention from the mainstream for it to matter much. Let's get more people listening to and appreciating Art Blakey or Ben Webster or John McLaughlin or Anthony Braxton or Mahavishnu Orchestra first, before we start beating our heads against the wall about what is and what is not "true" or "authentic" or "honest" jazz. I just happen to like the Marsalis's music a lot, and though I dig all available avenues of the tradition I'm more of a hard bop type of guy at heart. But that doesn't mean that the rest is junk.

The author clearly understands this, and I'm glad for it. And what's especially important about this is that he takes the debate into a much larger argument about art which is reasoned and sensitive and deep and worth thinking about. I'm not the creative artist that I'd like to be, but I hope to be getting there, and as a critic I do think the point being made here is very useful to anyone who aspires to be an artist and assumes that just belching something out makes them an artist:

"If an art has a function outside itself-- say, to accompany ritual, meditation, or dancing-- then there will be parameters determining what is acceptable, what makes adequate art. In places where music is used for a certain type of dancing, for example, people will leave the floor if the agreed-upon accents are not delivered adequately.

But for many who consider themselves urban sophisticated moderns-- the alienated postwar stock from which present-day jazz reviewers draw their ranks-- art serves a different function. For them, the role of the artist is to dramatize something. The artist himself is an exemplar; the actor-out of a paradigm; if the artist is a jazz musician, he or she must act out of a paradigm of unfettered spontaneity and iconoclasm.

The problem is that once artists begin to play to this view, they are finished as artists. They are left with only their own reflections to contemplate, rather than putting time into their materials and what they are doing with them. They themselves become the work of art-- painted into a corner of narcissism that is the final revenge of the untalented upon those with talent.

This attitude reduces artists, in relation to both their own conscious minds and the culture into which they are born, to primitives or naifs. As such, they much be protected from too much contact or concern with "civilizing" influences-- and certainly should be discouraged from trying to articulate their own approach to their work, as Marsalis has discovered. If it is the reviewer's role to talk and explain and codify and think, and the musicians' to give out raw material from the wilds of the subconscious, then reviewers stand in the same relation to musicians as anthropologists to aborigines....

If you feel that consciousness is a curse, you might naturally want to protect others from it, especially if you see in them your best hope for being able to escape it yourself. It was this phenomenon that the pianist Bill Evans addressed in a set of liner notes for the Ben Webster/ Joe Zawinul LP Soulmates when he wrote "'free expression' as such exists most perfectly in infants, and their irresponsible and disorganized behavior can hardly be called art. I suspect that a deliberate seeking for lack of consciousness is apt to be the result of a fear of consciousness...I think no freedom is worthwhile that is not the result of responsible dedication. Furthermore, freedom of expression does not have to be sought. It is the natural outcome of disciplined work."

Meanwhile, jazz, like life itself, goes on."