Occupy Jazz!
when labels dance and refuse to die
The hall of the prestigious American University is a turbulent mass of black hoodies and dandruff. Feigning absorption, drummers practice polyrhythms on portable drum pads, hoping their gnarliness is noticed. Are those pianists nervously tapping their thighs, or are they fiddling out Cecil Taylor-esque clusters? In every nook, under every seat, filling every spare centimetre of the room, lurk alto-saxophonists like pigeons.
This is Jazz, the 21st-century version stamped and approved by your friendly educational institution. I spent quite a bit of my teenage years in places like this: in schools, weekend programmes, and summer workshops, competing with, for the most part, other young white men for that most obscure glory, jazz prowess. Even though these institutions would have described themselves publicly in Third Way slang - 'fostering community through music', 'young people sharing creative experiences' - we all felt the white heat of masculine competition when it came to standing up in front of everyone and playing. It was about speed, noise and strength. Rare in those days to hear a solo which wasn't exclusively semi-quavers. On one of these programmes a story whipped round the group about one of the participants, a particularly uncompromising tenor player, who, it was said, would come home from school, lock his bedroom door and throw the key out the window, forcing him to practice until his father came home from work many hours later to set him free.
In this environment, you would do well to learn much at all about the political history of the music we were copying. Jazz, once a complex assertion of life and intelligence by black musicians against white people who sought to deny it, became a parlour game for the musically over-sensitive. It didn't help that most of the faces were white. 'Who are your favourite pianists?' one might ask, to which it wouldn't be surprising to hear: 'Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau.'
As all things become their negations at the extremes, the severance of the music from its racial history in these places caused a bizarre, oppressive conservatism about what counted as 'jazz'. Counter-intuitively, the whiteness of the cohort didn't create any impulse towards more recent forms of jazz not played exclusively by African-American musicians. Anything resembling the free jazz of Ayler, Coleman, or even Seifert and Stanko, was strictly out, and, to take a more remote example, the occult scrapings of 90s and 00s Scandinavian improvised music would have been considered inappropriate. 'Jazz' was bebop through modal jazz, with the occasional fusion hit and contemporary hard-bop imitation as seasoning. (This happened largely despite the fact that the teachers were generally lovely, open-minded, and more diverse than the participants. The structure of the institution functioned despite their best intentions.) These young white boys, as well-meaning and impeccable as they might have been, were being schooled as jazz bouncers, learning to recognise in an instant any sounds which could not gain admittance, and would not be stamped for approval by their validating solos.
In 2011, trumpet player Nicholas Payton posted a blog with the title, 'Why Jazz isn't cool anymore'. Payton doesn't beat around the bush.
Jazz died in 1959.
There may be cool individuals who say they play Jazz, but ain’t shit cool about Jazz as a whole.
Jazz died when cool stopped being hip.
Jazz was a limited idea to begin with.
Jazz is a label that was forced upon the musicians.
The musicians should’ve never accepted that idea.
Jazz ain’t shit.
Jazz is incestuous.
[...]
The very fact that so many people are holding on to this idea of what Jazz is supposed to be is exactly what makes it not cool.
[...]
Jazz worries way too much about itself for it to be cool.
Jazz died in 1959.
Before the post, most would have called Payton a jazz musician. After growing up in New Orleans he released a few more or less recognisable jazz records. His reasonable success and facility with jazz idioms meant that his firm rejection of jazz stirred a fair amount of interest.
His main point is that jazz' obsession with gate-keeping, with what 'it is supposed to be exactly', makes the idea of it dead. 'Too many necrophiliacs in Jazz', he says, or, deliciously mocking those who label and create simultaneously, he asks, 'Who thinks of what they’ll name the baby while they’re fucking?' The most important part of Payton's argument is that retrogressive jazz culture is an unsubtle way of limiting the scope of black artists' achievements. He articulates this more fully in a later post:
To speak of “jazz tradition” is like speaking of “racial justice.” It’s not possible to have justice within the confines of race because race was specifically designed to subjugate certain people to an underclass so that the “majority” thrives. [...] There has never been any tradition within jazz other than to ensure Black cultural expression is depreciated and undervalued.
'Jazz' is a prejudicing and restricting category, because how can you take the music of
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and call it “JAZZ”? Their music doesn’t all sound the same. In many cases, they didn’t necessarily like each others’ music. And what makes them socially different from Ray Charles, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson?
This is not simply an abstract point about a set whose members are too varied to be coherently understood as connected, although it is partly that. Mainly it is a specific political argument that black artists don't receive the same level of critical refinement as white artists. Payton is pointing out that, in comparison to common genre descriptions for other types producers of music which can be sarcastically niche ('stadium rock', 'shoegaze', 'ambientcore'), 'jazz' is suspiciously flattening. I've had cause to revisit Payton's arguments recently, because this phenomenon is perfectly evident in the way that the flourishing of UK improvised music has been spoken about. With popular artists like Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia, or Alfa Mist, we are seeing a similar flattening by association with 'jazz'.
In Payton's battle to free the music once called jazz from its cage, his most articulate antagonist is critic Stanley Crouch, for whom the boundaries of jazz are as obvious as mountain ranges, and must be policed lest bandits creep over the passes. Crouch, a prolific Jeremiah, often writes from the magnificent and enviable position of being able to pierce into the nature of 'jazz'. In a piece for Jazz Times, he swiftly pronounces that the essentials of 'true jazz' are 'pretty clear':
From Armstrong through Ornette Coleman and most of John Coltrane, we can hear particular things. We hear 4/4 swing, fast, medium and slow. We hear the blues in all tempos. We hear the meditative or romantic ballad. We hear what Jelly Roll Morton called “the Spanish tinge.”
Apparently unaware of the vagaries of group theory, Crouch selects what he intuitively thinks is jazz, identifies the common features, and then, with cigar-smoking ease, concludes that those common features are necessary and sufficient for jazz. Not only is this intellectually negligent, but it is inescapably backward looking and automatically prejudicial to anyone trying to make improvised music speak to or for experiences different to Crouch’s.
There are better defences of the word than this. One is about the pragmatic value of ‘jazz’ culture. The cultural shrubland of jazz festivals and labels in the UK supports more artists than the number of jazz fans would demand in raw market terms. For instance, while Shabaka Hutchings would probably wince at being described as a 'jazz musician', he might also acknowledge how regular gigs at jazz-styled events has allowed him to keep playing his music especially when starting out as a professional. Jazz can be a supportive institution.
More conceptually, there are defences of the word which point out that it shape-shifts. Wayne Shorter, one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, ever fond of the gnomic, has said that jazz means 'I dare you'. Even though this sounds a bit like a Nike advert, it is revealing that for him, the point of the label is striving, change, and unknowability: 'It means so much that is not there.' In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein famously defends the use of words with unknowable definitions:
Should it be said that I'm using a word whose meaning I don't know and so am talking nonsense? - Say what you please, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing how things are.
Perhaps then using the word 'jazz' does not commit you to a rigid definition. One might be able to avoid nonsense while being opened up to 'how things are', to the listening and playing which cannot be written down.
While one can identify some good done by the word 'jazz', I think that there is a fundamental tension between Shorter's view of jazz and the musical institution it exists as. The very idea of it as an improvised and thus non-repeatable art form compromises the kind of argument which views the music as reified part of the culture industry and evaluates its benefits in that way. 'Jazz' is not a rigid designator which refers to the same thing in all possible worlds. Now, this in itself is no great achievement, for most other words are not rigid designators, and indeed this was Shorter's point in the first place. ‘Jazz’ is interesting because its most prevalent features - improvisation and change - imply that it could never be a rigid designator. Or, to put it differently, the things which you could say that you know about a specific instance of jazz which make it 'jazz' are not even self-identical. If one were to say about jazz that it is an improvised music, and that it is a form of resistance, this wouldn't get you anywhere at all because 'improvisation' and 'resistance' do not even mean 'improvisation' and 'resistance' in other cases. If you break down jazz to these characteristics, you get precisely nowhere. Not only is ‘jazz’ as a label protean, the features that you could tentatively identify as shared across different examples are too. (You might reply that other art forms are in a similar position, but I would challenge you to name an art form which is at once so clearly dependent on protean improvisation and resistance and yet so blatantly demarcated and institutionalised in the popular imagination.)
Payton's arguments take on a new significance in this light. 'Jazz' is such a difficult label to accept because there is a deep conceptual conflict between the rigid word and the music which has had no necessary characteristics or definition. Since there is such a fundamental conceptual difficulty with the word ‘jazz’, the damage it does by limiting and flattening the productions of black artists is even harder to stomach. Why accept a label is harmful and has no real place in our intellectual intuitions? 'Jazz' originally comes from 'jasm', a variant of 'jism' from the 1890s, and was used by white Americans for a variety of purposes before being applied to Dixieland jazz in the 1910s. But once applied, it dried and hardened. Perhaps it is time to clean it off.
Other labels for the kinds of music often called ‘jazz’ wouldn't necessarily have this problem. For example, Payton proposes 'Black American music', or for his sound specifically, 'post-modern New Orleans music'. These labels are an improvement because they a) do not have the institutional baggage of 'jazz', b) because they are more specific, and therefore invite alteration and additional adjectives if necessary, and c) because they show that the most that can be said about this music is that its origins are in certain communities, at certain time and that much more would be violently confining. Payton is not yearning after a word which perfectly represents and specifies the music it labels, but instead asks for more modest and disposable designators.
‘Jazz’ will never stop being used as a word. There will be lots of people who are fine with this. There will be many who will still feel a twinge of discomfort at being called a 'jazz musician' or 'listener’. And then there will be those whose music remains unheard and unloved, echoing about Gothic halls of Jazz, a relic which many years ago stopped being a home.