The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

How valid is our ingrained expectation that the music should always be progressive, always break the mold, always embrace the newest new thing?

David Murray.

In the jazz world, no artist has been more representative of the Warholian spirit than saxophonist and composer John Zorn.

Jason Moran

Uri Caine,

The situation was so dire that Downbeat magazine launched a contest in 1949 to pick a new name for jazz. Many believed that the old name was tainted by negative associations, and the music needed a more respectable label. The winning entry, earning a thousand-dollar prize, was “Crewcut”—and what could be more clean-cut than that? As it turned out, the contest was soon forgotten.

This transition from jazz as outsider music to insider music gets taken for granted by almost everybody, but is arguably the most significant socioeconomic shift in the art form’s history.

Geri Allen

Joe Lovano,

Joshua Redman,

James Carter,

Chris Potter

Mark Turner,

Mary Halvorson,

in response to this pronounced academicization. I suspect that this is due to the peculiar qualities that the art form embodied from the moment of its birth.

Jazz has always celebrated spontaneity and improvisation, adaptability and living in the moment.

Sons of Kemet’s

I can’t help imagining this was how jazz must have felt, both beguiling and disruptive, to those first audiences who heard it in New Orleans more than a century before.

and that the most visible attempts to merge jazz techniques with Indian and South Asian musical traditions, from Bud Shank’s 1962 Improvisations project with Ravi Shankar to John McLaughlin’s Shakti band and John Handy’s collaborations with Ali Akbar Khan during the 1970s and onward to the present day, have been promoted by US record labels and supported largely by fans in the West.

The 2008 album Miles from India, an exciting meeting ground for jazz icons and leading Indian musicians, could stand as a symbol for this latter situation, not just in its performances, artfully produced by Bob Belden, but even in its very name, given how major developments in South Asian jazz are taking place miles away from their Indian sources of inspiration.

Machito,

Laurindo Almeida’s

But with the passing years, jazz has become more an attitude than a static body of practices, more an openness to the possible than a slavish devotion to the already proven, and no single city or country or region can contain its omnivorous appetite.

Looking back at the first century of jazz’s history, its most identifiable trademark may simply be this unwillingness to sit still, this mandate to absorb other sounds and influences, this destiny as a music of flux and fusion. As such, all addresses are its home, but none likely to be its resting place.

Kurt Elling

Patricia Barber

Cécile McLorin Salvant,

A huge percentage of the new albums they launch on the marketplace are carefully studied retro affairs, fed on nostalgia and an implicit assumption that the best young singers are those with the closest mimicry of old school attitudes and repertoire. These efforts do little to enliven the art form, but have contributed to a view, among some in the general public, that jazz is an old-fashioned kind of music. But even more egregious are shallow attempts to repackage jazz as a glitzy glamour-fed lifestyle product—an unpromising recipe for a genre whose best practitioners have typically resisted slick image-driven formulas.

Murray, Albert. Stompin’ the Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.