Dominic Green uses the release of the saxophonist’s classic quartet’s ‘lost album’ to diagnose jazz. Ugh.
I also refer to a response from acclaimed jazz pianist Richie Beirach:
http://jazznewsyoucanuse.com/2018/08/the-end-of-jazz-the-weekly-standard-richie-beirach-response/ – Sigh. Another piece decrying jazz’ apocalypse is makin’ the rounds. This one, admittedly, has more detail and higher prose, but it’s still all a bit much. There are bits and pieces of evocative (if fanciful) description in Dominic Green’s around Coltrane. Some details are questionable. However, it’s mostly the larger point about jazz I’d argue that’s missing. To start with, it’s really telling how much Green keeps coming back to the details of European harmony and composers in reference to Coltrane and others. While Western harmony and sometimes classical music is an influence, is this truly what is at the forefront of jazz tradition? To that end, while I appreciate Beirach’s enthusiasm and well-informed commentary in his response - he largely focuses on correcting musical details in Green’s piece. However, I’d argue that he isn’t really addressing the core problem with Green, and many others like him. Neither of them addresses where jazz truly comes from and continues to inform its tradition. Jazz doesn’t simply emerge and rapidly change due to “modernism” (in some general sense). Nor can you readily fit all of jazz within any specific set of musical characteristics. Rather, jazz emerges from the particular social and cultural realities in America - in particular the realities for African Americans who contributed most to its origins. The musical traditions that African Americans that were a direct result of interacting, often quite subversively, with these realities which included to inherited music of the dominant culture. One of the most obvious examples that predates jazz is the spiritual - which retains the Christian message while indicating messages of cultural difference and freedom of oppression through musical and textual practices. (This kind of interaction is sometimes called “Signifyin’” - a term that comes from literary scholar, Henry Louis Gates.) None of this is controversial - in fact, all of it is essential to understanding the music. By the early 20th century, the aesthetics and eventual practices of jazz are difficult to pin down in part because they arise from several existing musical traditions and this time of (very) partial liberation. To me, jazz was an extremely sophisticated way for African Americans to interact and play with everything around them in a fluid way. The inspiration for interaction often included popular songs (their melodies, forms, and texts), other African American-rooted folk and popular music (blues, gospel, in addition to later genres) as well as with each other - that is, the other musicians as well as their audiences. This self-conscious fluid interaction in performance, much of it improvised, is largely foreign to European norms of performance. Like Green did, I’ll use Coltrane as a later example. While I’m not suggesting that Coltrane plays “My Favorite Things” the way he did to make an overt “point” about musical theatre, he also didn’t do it as a way of evoking "orientalism" as Green so offensively puts it. Rather, he loved the original song (he’s on the record about that) but he and his group were also having a conversation with the song and its associations. By extension, the audience of jazz listeners understands this conscious “defamiliarization” of the familiar; in this case the musicians are defamiliarizing not just a popular song but also how jazz practice works itself. Indeed, in this way, jazz musicians utilize interactive practices that emerge from African American culture. (There’s a highly influential article about this very recording and Signifyin’ by Ingrid Monson that I recommend.)
The example of Trane’s “My Favorite Things” exemplifies how jazz changes as it interacts with the people and history around it. Moreover, jazz practices become highly personal and complex because…it’s art! Green may not like some of these practices for his own preferences, but this doesn’t mean they result in any “death” of an entire tradition. He doesn’t have his finger on the pulse, in this sense; I’m afraid Green doesn’t get to make this diagnosis. In any case, I’d argue that all of us participating in jazz tradition inherit all of this cultural and social history, and I’d argue we should conscious of it. This doesn’t mean musicians and critics are always making overt social points in music or writing, but rather we should maintain an awareness and respect - that, to me, it is what is lacking in this piece. To that end, it is telling that Green does not use the words “interaction” or “conversation” in his piece, nor does he address these ideas anywhere. Though this a strong statement - I’d argue this is because he misses the point about Coltrane and, to an extent, jazz tradition itself.
