The time has come to consider a phenomenon we shall call The Great Jazz Renunciation: to see how this pointless irritation has been joined to the goading of those who always hated jazz; to look at some good reasons for the renunciations while crying enough, enough, for god’s sake; to step outside jazz at one point and ask why we attack each other’s enthusiasms in all arts and sports, and finally to ask why we have embraced enthusiasms intensely enough to be irritated anyway.
For the renunciation is usually followed by a carping that in its obsessive persistence resembles that of the person who has renounced faith, or found it, or has made the familiar transition from rabid leftie to goading voice of the right.
Recently I read some renunciation theology by a local musician – a great one as it happens – who first established the fact that there had been a time when he listened to almost nothing but jazz. We shall return to this, and I should note that although it began along classic lines it turned out to be something less than a complete renunciation. It serves in some ways as a model. Perhaps I have never experienced the renunciation because there never was a time when I listened to almost nothing but jazz. Someone began scanning my records once and mused, ‘Old Hungarian Organs? New Guinea rainforest music? Carl Perkins boxed set? Well, nobody could accuse you of being a jazz snob!’ But I have been one at times, and am still sometimes accused.
Jazz, like all enthusiasms you do not share, can seem like a quasi-religion. But then so can your football club. Indeed rock has also become an ethos and an oft-proclaimed faith. You rock, he rocks, she rocks, it rocks: rock and roll! Rock and roll! What is this? It is human. It is human to relate all your enthusiasms to the big one. Often enough it is the ocean in my case. It is also true that jazz has had a core, if unrecognized importance, as a stream of music where developments in ‘serious’ concert music have been simplified or twisted, syncopated and sometimes more obviously energised; thus bringing elements of high modernism to another, not always so well-educated audience. At the same time it has been serious itself and has produced developments of its own, which have exerted some influence the other way even as recently as the minimalist composers, who, unlikely as it may at first seem, drew inspiration from Lester Young, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.
What is important about that? Well, this serious, or at least not entirely commercial or light entertainment-oriented, music has been a focal point – it has produced some of the rallying strains of modern thought (not all of which has stood the test of time, but all of which has been worth investigating, having sought aesthetics and meaning, and even justice in an accelerating world). It has been a crucial meeting place and point of exchange between black and white, Jew and gentile – not forgetting the curious conversions to Islam that go back at least to the 1940s.
It has helped broadcast the values of America at times – such as during the Second World War and the ensuing reconstruction of Europe and Japan – when that has been a good thing; and at times when it has looked dubious. From within America strands of jazz culture have challenged aspects of the American way.
What jazz religionists have found hard to accept is the possibility of another music emerging to usurp some of jazz’s roles. Indeed, jazz’s very relevance. This led to an intensification of snobbery, for which jazz aficionados (there’s a word!) became as notorious as classical music connoisseurs.
But jazz is still criticised, reflexively, as if its ethos had not significantly changed. Or as if there were not something in the music that had created enthusiasts, who may then have developed an immature sense of superiority, short-lived or long-lasting. Or as if rock had not developed a superiority too: a mystique of bad boy rebels and rock chicks; an ethos that is still supposed to threaten the straight world. Like jazz, it no longer threatens any significant part of the straight world. It is part of the straight economy and of the routine decadence of the West. I’m sure George Bush would begin grooving (albeit with that wry grin we love so much) if rappers or rockers played before him. Just as Richard Nixon sat at the piano with Duke Ellington. I remember a rock critic bewailing, a film about Elvis’s Las Vegas years, that the audience was not made up of real rockers but matrons in beehive hair dos. Hey! Many of them were the original rock and rollers. I was there in the 1950s. Some of them had beehives right back then. Let us not bullshit ourselves too much. Nevertheless, in a very broad sense jazz and rock still stand for freedom in the face of ferocious fundamentalism.
Before we wander a little in the wider world, let me give you a brief example of jazz renunciation, and another of the general jazz derision against which this occurs. Rick Rue approached me once to deliver the news that, ‘Chris Abrahams is getting right away from that jazz thing’. Chris Abrahams had divorced himself from jazz years before this – he had given good reasons (and repeated them to the point of tedium). It was a long time since I had associated him with jazz. So what is this obsession? Why can they not let it go? Needless to say, Rick had once been a big ‘free jazz’ man.
Here is a sample of the general static. Following her song cycle collaboration with Paul Grabowsky, poet Dorothy Porter was asked by an ABC radio interviewer whether she liked jazz. Sure, she said, but not to the point where she knew who was in all the bands. This was met by knowing laughter. Ah yes, jazz fans. Train spotters! I have never known a serious rock fan who did not know who was in the major bands, and in many obscure ones besides.
I should add that on the ABC’s Sunday Arts Porter pointedly reminded the interviewer that she had also collaborated with Paul Grabowsky. Operas and films based on her poetry had been cited in the introduction and during the interview, but no mention of this jazz project. Porter reminded them, and declared Grabowsky a wonderful musician.
Just one more in the latter category. Andrew Denton told interviewee James Morrison that he just didn’t ‘get’ jazz. Reasonable in the context, but when Australian rugby captain George Gregan told him that he listened to Miles Davis before a game, Denton once more said that he didn’t get jazz, and then expressed incredulity that anyone could be inspired by listening to it. Now I could not give two shits what music Andrew liked or didn’t like. I hated tripe (the intestines, the sauce and the pathetic mint garnish) when I was a kid, and still do. Fascinating? No.
What is morbidly fascinating is the persistence of all this. Let us step outside music for a while into that other huge quasi-religion and source of self identification.
If you think you are unpopular, consider this: I enjoy all four football codes shown on television. This means that I cop four times the indirect abuse. One curious insult is ‘the round ball game’. It is a kind of tautology. The soccer ball matches the universal understanding of a ball – something approaching a globe – yet those who employ this sarcastic description usually follow some game they are happy enough to call football, even though the pointy solid geometrical shape being kicked, thrown or punched around really stretches the idea of a ball.
What is this loathing for a game that has long been loved by much of the world beyond America and Australia (there has always been more soccer in America than you might imagine: my uncle Charles Valentino was goalkeeper for his college team back in the 1940s)? It is a loathing that persists from the days of extreme Australian insularity. In that refo-hating era our most obscure and inane customs and pastimes were superior to any of the rubbish the world could offer.
Parochialism does not explain our need to attack each other’s enthusiasm for arts or sports long established here. It does go some way toward explaining the widespread loathing for the Tour de France. I have a racing bike, but I ride not in lycra but old fashioned bike shorts and a T shirt. Yet it is not motorists who abuse me (I am the most skillful and courteous of riders) but ancient hippies by the roadside yelling, ‘Wanker! The Tour de France is in Europe!’ You wanker! Simply because I am riding fast.
Well, you know, who cares? These ancient men are usually younger than I am, which is sad, but the assumptions are worth looking at. In attacking each other’s enthusiasms we attack each other’s identity, and we make assumptions about the nature of the hated enthusiasm. Usually it is imagined that you want to be Miles Davis or Lance Armstrong; that you want to be a hero, that you are pretending to be in the tour every time you ride, even when you are lost in a gliding dream along convent walls, by purple tibouchina and dusty pink crepe myrtle, in Sydney’s western suburbs. Of course the teenage boy playing air guitar in front of the mirror is viewed with kindly indulgence. They are aspirants in the right religion. They worship the right gods.
I have no desire to be Miles Davis or Lance Armstrong, but I certainly enjoy what they do. Let me give you a glimpse into my pedestrian mind that you might have pause next time you begin to summarise somebody’s enthusiasms.
This I found in my diary.
‘Tour begins. New aerial works beautifully. Long green vistas given depth by big foreground trees as if I am watching in 3-D. The bikes spin out from that framing foliage and away along the road toward a vanishing point that lies somewhere through the heart of the horizon’s gentle hills. It is not the point of infinity, it is a line running parallel to the curved earth, which will always meet its tail, cycling forever like the spinning wheels in which two or three glittering spokes will be caught in focus for an instant. Cut to camera up the front of the peloton. What is better than watching the French countryside pass at the speed of a racing bike?’
That’s enough sport.
For the renunciator jazz can do nothing right. The attitudes of jazz players are all wrong. The analysis can verge on mind reading. Guitarist Robert Fripp is often quoted, saying in effect that rock musicians appeared suddenly with all the freedom that jazz musicians had sought in vain. What is the evidence for this? Well, just look at bespectacled, suit-buttoned Paul Desmond (so like the great Buddy Holly) on the one hand, and wild, free Jimi Hendrix on the other. In two documentaries that I have watched, Hendrix quite rapidly reached the point where he felt trapped by expectations to keep playing Wild Thing and setting his guitar alight. Experimentation on his part was seen as not rock and therefore pretentious.
Paul Desmond was tied to a contract that stopped him from recording with any pianist other than Dave Brubeck, due to the huge popularity of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. This is a singular instance. Even so it did not stop him recording with guitarist Jim Hall, in various duos, and in a piano-less group with Gerry Mulligan. With the one caveat, he played with the people he really wanted to play with. He played exactly as he wanted to, with absolute freedom. Further, he always expressed disdain for the view that he was the one important member of the Brubeck Quartet. He loved playing with Brubeck, and whatever you might think of Dave, the two inspired each other.
Perhaps Fripp meant that so-called free jazz was a blind alley. If so, it seems odd that his own performances seem entirely appropriate when presented on a program of free jazz.
At the time I first became aware of the jazz renunciation I interviewed Chris Abrahams, who said that he still listened to Archie Shepp, but declared that jazz was ‘twice around the paddock to show what you can do.’ That there is something in this was brought home to me when I saw an ABC re-run of Maynard Ferguson with guest James Morrison playing at the Basement. That was ugly – it was hideous – but I remain quite astounded that Chris saw all jazz in these terms.
In fact the jazz renunciation focuses, implicitly or explicitly, on bop, which comprises almost the entire syllabus at most conservatoriums where young musicians study jazz. There remains a network of bebop purists (in the real sense), who can be quite unpleasant, but they are scarcely at the centre of the jazz activity that interests me. Furthermore, some of them have changed.
Now let us look at purism. The jazz renunciator we began with – it is Lloyd Swanton and his aim in the end was to offer guidance rather than renounce – expressed surprise that jazz musicians have not been more influenced by the sessions they do. All that different music: why haven’t they used it in their jazz playing? He conceded that some had begun to do so. Indeed. It has been going on at Jazzgroove for quite a while now. Years ago I played a recording of British band Loose Tubes to a friend, who said, ‘It sounds as if they have played lots of different sessions and they’re having fun with it in their own way’. Long before that, Latin music, Afro Cuban music, the bossa nova, classical music both Indian and western all influenced jazz.
In what other music have idiomatic expectations been more challenged than in Duke Ellington’s A Tone Parallel To Harlem, Art Blakey’s Drum Suite, John Coltrane’s Om, Albert Ayler’s Spirits Rejoice, Pharoah Sanders’s Jewels Of Thought, Joe Harriet and John Mayer’s Indo Jazz Fusion, Charles Munro’s Eastern Horizons, Louis Armstrong’s Potato Head Blues and so on? Some of these prefigured the exotic colours you will hear in young jazz today.
I suppose it still sounded like jazz, and that is bad. Lloyd did say that he could understand older musicians being purist. It seems to me that the desire to play a particular kind of music is not purist in any meaningful sense. It becomes purist when you condemn any other way of playing. Do we say those musicians are purists (in a pejorative sense) who love to play the blues of, say, the Chicago period, or country musicians who love to play in the manner of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys? Or rockabilly? Oh no. That’s roots music. They are the salt of the earth.
I have known some of the above who have exhibited the same snobbery for which cranky old jazz buffs are notorious. As it happens I heard Hank Williams, Tex Morton, Chet Atkins, Roy Rogers, Jimmie Rodgers (the singing brakeman) and so on in the 1940s long before they were born. It was on the radio, and I sometimes worked on a riding school way out west during my school holidays, where I heard nothing but country. When I hear country music I still smell horses and leather, stables, lucern and manure. I don’t listen so much now, but I do not renounce it. Why would you want to cut off a rich era of your life? I say forget cranky old jazz buffs. Give me people like Zac Hurren and Katie Noonan who love music with an innocent joy that puts the jazz renunciation, or any other renunciation, into a grey and puzzling area.
For it is as grey and puzzling as any other theology or ideology. There is a feeling that jazz must be hunted down, as right wingers fanatically hunt down all remnants of the left. Barney McCall has a go every time I see him. ‘You know the shuffle rhythm? That’s the jazz guys getting onto R&B but they can’t do it!’ If I try to point out that many jazz musicians were in at the beginning of R&B, he jumps elsewhere, and keeps jumping, like a performing flea. The rock critic Robert Palmer is also a jazz enthusiast and has written notes for jazz reissues. He is particularly interesting on Thelonious Monk. Yet in the booklet for the Atlantic Ornette Coleman set he noted that Coleman had played Robert Johnson to his band, saying he wished they could play the blues like that and they had shaken their heads and said, ‘A whole band playing that stuff together!’ Then, according to Palmer, they went back to ‘their finger-busting melodies and abstruse chord inversions.’
You see jazz is a kind of regulated economy, while all these other forms have the vitality of the free market. They are from the streets. This is a wilful misunderstanding. Coleman’s musicians were shaking their heads at the idea of playing with the freedom Johnson had, alone with his guitar, to speed up, slow down, use free rubato, together as a band. Hell, they came freakishly close! And surely the point of Coleman’s music is not finger-busting melodies and abstruse chord inversions.
A tenet of jazz renunciation is that jazz players after a certain period were too technical (even when, like Coleman, they were allegedly primitive). Lloyd says that many modern jazz bassists sound to him like mud. It is fascinating to see how people who share many musical enthusiasms hear some things so differently. They sound very articulate to me. Some mud. I know the prime suspects are Scott LaFaro and Richard Davis. Lloyd has told me they are too technical. I couldn’t care less how technical they are. I have only a broad sense of what is difficult on the bass. I love the way Richard Davis opens the music out by varying his volume, by walking just enough, moving to oblique positions, making patterns up high that create a dancing maze with the piano’s treble figures (hear him with McCoy Tyner on the Joe Henderson album In’n’Out), dropping suddenly to a resonant bottom tone.
Lloyd compares this stuff with the bass on Patsy Cline records, which is so easy to follow, doubled as it is by viola an octave above. You can follow it easily on a car radio! The point here, I think, is that this is bound to be accessible to far more people. I am reminded that Bryce Courtney said that he could not see the point of writing if he had as few readers as Tim Winton (who I thought was doing alright!). Personally, I could not be bothered writing if I had to write like Bryce. I know I will never be popular or critically acclaimed, but I survive okay, and I would write for the pleasure of writing in my own weird way even if I could get no work.
Life and art are full of paradox. Modernism, for instance, is a much broader and more unruly field than many postmodernist pop culturists will allow, but there is a strain of modernism that has to do with geometrical cleanness, with mathematical relationships. I love some of it. I love Mondrian. And I love bebop for all that it introduced a more systematic study of harmony – of chords most specifically – and rhythm. Certain freedoms came with this, and a particular intensity. I hear the super-speed of some bebop not just as a macho technical thing, but as an aesthetic, a sensation. So does Bernie McGann. Likewise, volume in rock may be macho, but it is also a dimension of the music.
In the much hyped war between pop and high art, severe modernism and kitsch are placed at the poles. Kitsch is garish, lurid, awkward sometimes in its attention-hungry shapes. But it does grab our attention because these things are in us: in our subconscious, in our very being. And modernists like Picasso did not scorn it. They used it. Just as many popular and cult comics use the linear perspective mathematically conceived during the Renaissance.
One of the things that has always interested me about jazz is that it developed an intellectual interest in harmony and rhythm, yet could also absorb various rule-breaking incursions.
In every other item on the ABC’s Sunday Arts you will hear the word ‘trangressive’. Usually it is `sort of transgressive’ or kind of transgressive or, like, transgressive. Or kind of like transgressive. I give no ordure for transgressive. I could not donate deux merdes. Every form will be, like, transgressed in time.
Ellington, Charles Mingus and Miles Davis all declared that they did not want their music to be called jazz, due to the narrow expectations of critics. But Mingus and Ellington continued to talk, all their lives, about jazz, as a tradition in which they were vitally involved.
I love the eclectic Jazzgroove things. This does not stop me listening to the whole tradition. It satisfies and vivifies me. If it fails to do this for you, just move on!