CHAPTER 14

Historicism: Jazz on Jazz

OUTLINE

1) The Weight of History

a) In 1925, Don Redman, then with the Fletcher Henderson band, arranged “Dippermouth
Blues,” a piece from Louis Armstrong’s book of compositions that Armstrong offered to
Redman. It was recorded as “Sugar Foot Stomp.”
b) This was not the first nor the last time Henderson had looked to jazz history for
inspiration, as illustrated by his recordings of “Copenhagen” and another based on the
third strain of Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp”—all of them successful.
c) So far jazz history has been considered as several things:
i) Art for art’s sake: an art that progresses through radical leaps of creativity by master
musicians.
ii) A “fusion” tradition that changes in response to contemporary pop culture.
iii) The Henderson example offers a third way: historicism, wherein jazz creativity is
viewed as bound up with its past.
2) Historicism: A Definition
a) In contrast to the idea that individuals create great work independent of history,
historicism (Georg Hegel) posits a dialectical relationship between the past and the
present. Artists engage with the past when they create new work.
b) 1980s: New Historicism claimed that art must be viewed in its historical and
sociocultural context, in contrast to the New Criticism, which denied context as important
to understanding art. In jazz, these two views complemented each other. Martin Williams
is probably the leading advocate of the New Criticism in jazz.
c) In the 1970s Williams created the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, which was a
mainstay of jazz education for years. But as one who ignored context, he would leave out
important aspects of performances, such as Jelly Roll Morton’s comic introduction to
“Dead Man Blues,” which he considered irrelevant. A historicist would find this
introduction illuminating.
 d) In the twenty-first century artists try to energize the present by mining the past through
interpretation and homage. In the 1950s and 1960s jazz musicians tried to create new and
original works. These are mined by present-day musicians through three kinds of
historicist principles:
i) Revival of entire idioms.
ii) Original music that celebrates the musical past.
iii) Modernist interpretations of jazz classics.
e) All three can be found throughout jazz history.
3) Reclaiming and Defining the Past: From Bunk to the Academy (1940s and 50s)
a) The first historical-focused movement occurred in the late 1930s with the publication of
Ramsay Jr. and Smith’s Jazzmen (1939), which argued that authentic jazz was an African
American, blues-based music derived from New Orleans. The authors almost completely
ignored swing. In the course of researching his book, William Russell discovered
trumpeter Willie “Bunk” Johnson (1889–1949).
b) Johnson claimed to have played with Buddy Bolden (he was too young for this to be true)
and influenced Louis Armstrong (this was denied by Armstrong). Johnson recorded and
toured, starting in 1942 for around five years, as a representative of the “real” jazz.
c) Technically limited, he could play blues well and was a decent lyricist.
d) On the plus side, Johnson and his supporters forced a reconsideration of early jazz,
resulting in a rediscovery of the work of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton; they
introduced a coterie of traditional New Orleans musicians, one of whom, George Lewis,
went on to play an important role in reestablishing the French Quarter as a tourist
attraction.
e) The Lenox School of Jazz
i) The 1950s were characterized by new styles, players, and composers that also
instigated a look at older schools like swing.
ii) In 1958 Stanley Dance, who hated bop, coined the term “mainstream,” which
included those musicians between traditional jazz and modernity. The definition
changed in the 1960s to include bop and then, in the 1970s, any jazz that was
acoustic, as a reaction to fusion in the latter case and the avant-garde in the
former. “Mainstream” came to represent ongoing developments absent of the
most recent trends.
 iii) Although jazz was slowly making inroads into academia and the arts
establishment, jazz activists started institutionalizing jazz history in their own
schools, writing about jazz in books and magazines and holding public
discussions.
iv) In the meantime, musicians started crossing stylistic lines, with modernists paying
tribute to traditional music.
v) Much of this educational activity took place in the Massachusetts cities of Boston
and Lenox. The year 1957 saw the first dedicated jazz curriculum (intended for a
white student body), taught by a faculty that was integrated but mostly black—
another first—under the direction of John Lewis. Students had to audition to get
into the school.
vi) There were forty-five students and thirty-four faculty members in the first year,
including many of the top jazz musicians of the day, who had learned by doing
but were now faced with figuring out how to pass on their knowledge for the first
time (Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Oscar Peterson, George Russell, Jimmy
Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, J.J. Johnson, Max Roach, and others). Both jazz
history and jazz technique were taught. The school closed in 1960.
vi) By that time, jazz studies was making its way into other schools, including the
Berklee School of Music in Boston. The first degree in jazz studies was offered in
1947 by the University of North Texas in Denton.
f) The Newport Jazz Festival
i) George Wein, owner of two jazz clubs in Boston, was asked by Elaine and Louis
Lorillard in 1954 to program some jazz concerts in an unlikely spot—a center of
old money, Newport, Rhode Island. Although there was some resistance at first,
jazz at Newport was eventually accepted as a symbol of enlightenment and fun.
ii) Wein became a powerful jazz impresario. Taking his cue from the Lenox School,
he included panels and workshops as well as concerts that featured every major
jazz artist of the day and some not usually considered part of the world of jazz,
including Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, and Mahalia Jackson.
iii) When the festival was suspended in 1960 due to rowdiness, Wein moved it to
New York City, where it grew even larger. He went on to start festivals in France,
New Orleans, and elsewhere. By 2006, festivals had become a major part of the
 jazz landscape on six continents.
4) Avant-Garde Historicism and Neoclassicism (1970s and 1980s)
a) Historicism was almost totally absent during the 1960s, when the first wave of avant-
garde musicians emphasized new directions, but the eclectic second wave of the 1970s
did not ignore jazz history. It was also during this period that record companies started to
release box sets encompassing the music of a certain musician, era, movement, or record
label.
b) At the same time, a number of “living legends” who had left jazz for studio work, the
academy, pit bands, or Europe returned to an active jazz performance schedule, priming
audiences for almost anything.
c) Loft-era musicians drew on older resources combined with new ways of playing to create
“free jazz”—meaning they were free to play whatever they wanted.
d) During the 1980s, one response to this approach appeared in the form of neoclassicism.
Older styles, practices, and techniques were viewed, not as a resource for new music, but
rather as an object of homage and a definition of the “real” jazz.
e) This traditionalist approach to jazz paralleled the conservative nature of political culture
during the Regan era of the 1980s.
f) The prevailing anti-intellectual and nostalgic feelings of this period precipitated hostility
toward the arts, reduced arts funding, and encouraged censorship.
g) Some jazz musicians, alienated by fusion and the avant-garde, began to explore jazz
history by paying homage to deceased or neglected musicians like Billy Strayorn, Miles
Davis, Thelonious Monk, Tadd Dameron, and Herbie Nichols. Keith Jarrett launched a
trio that specialized in playing jazz standards.
5) Wynton Marsalis (b. 1961)
a) A leader of the neoclassical approach, Marsalis rejected the avant-garde, fusion, and
informal personal styles of modern musicians, preferring instead an elegant, formal attire
reminiscent of the Swing Era.
b) He won Grammy Awards for both jazz and classical music and changed the direction of
jazz discourse from one of progressive modernism and eclecticism to one of strict
interpretation of mainstream jazz.
c) Many musicians found him divisive, but he was accepted by popular culture as he
immersed himself in many forms of jazz historicism, including the repertory movement,
 recordings that interpreted older musicians, and original work that probes African
American history in a variety of formats.
d) Born in New Orleans, Wynton comes from a musical family. His father was a teacher and
well-known jazz pianist.
e) In 1980, while at Julliard, he joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, recording on
Blakey’s Album of the Year. He toured with Herbie Hancock and then started his own
historicist group with his brother Branford based on the 1963–1968 Miles Davis group.
f) Although the press celebrated Marsalis as a personality, it no longer responded to jazz as
it once did. Marsalis’s historicism resulted in jazz competing with itself. Jazz sales
plummeted, and even Marsalis was dropped by the Columbia label.
g) Seeing the writing on the wall, Marsalis started touring and teaching and increased his
fund-raising. He changed his style to an earlier style à la Ellington, while loosening his
strict definition of jazz by recording with Willie Nelson.
h) Most of his recordings have focused on acoustic jazz, plumbing repertories that range
from the contemporary to the antique.
i) “The Pearls”
i) Here Marsalis pays tribute to his fellow New Orleans native, Jelly Roll Morton, with an
album devoted to him, acknowledging the leap from Morton’s generation to
Marsalis’s—not with a few glib reference points, but rather with a conviction that old
forms of jazz require their own virtuosity.
ii) Perhaps the high point of the performance is the repeat of the trio, where the band
embellishes the music specifically in the style of Morton.
6) Repertory vs. Nostalgia
a) Some performers, like Harry Connick Jr. and Diana Krall, took a more nostalgic
approach by reviving styles from the 1940s and 1950s.
b) Films about jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker, the jazz scene in Kansas City in the
1930s, and the life of fictional jazz musicians also contributed to jazz nostalgia.
c) The jazz repertory movement, consisting of large jazz ensembles performing original
arrangements of previous bands or new versions of classic works—essentially operating
as tribute bands—started in the mid-1970s with George Wein’s New York Jazz Repertory
Company, which had rotating directors such as Cecil Taylor, George Russell, and Paul
Jeffrey, and with Chuck Israels’s National Jazz Ensemble.
 d) During the mid-1980s, this idea continued in the form of the American Jazz Orchestra led
by John Lewis. It played music by past jazz artists, both well known and rare, including
Ellington’s Black, Brown, and Beige. Composers from previous eras were also invited to
write and conduct new works.
e) The most durable of these ensembles is the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which started
in 1987 under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. This success led many high school and
university music programs to introduce classic jazz repertory into their ensembles.
f) In recent years, the JLCO has had competition from the West Coast in the form of the
SFJAZZ Collective, an eight-person all-star combo. Each season has seen the group
dedicate its concerts to the works of a jazz composer: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane,
Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk—even pop star Stevie Wonder. In 2013, the group
acquired its own state-of-the-art performing facility, the SFJAZZ Center in downtown
San Francisco.
7) The New Mainstream: Homecoming
a) By the 1970s, when rock had taken over the music business, acoustic jazz was in deep
trouble.
b) Clubs closed by the hundreds; entire black neighborhoods were wiped out by urban
renewal. All the important independent jazz labels—Prestige, Contemporary, Blue Note,
Riverside, Fantasy—went on the auction block and became either reissue labels or fusion
outlets, while the major recording labels dropped their jazz departments and signed the
few remaining musicians to one-off albums instead of the usual year-by-year contracts.
c) All this started to change when tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon decided to return from
Europe in 1976 and seemed to initiate a trend of returning jazz artists.
d) As historicism continued to play out through the last decades of the twentieth century,
these musicians were helping to develop a new mainstream—one that combined
innovation, fusion, and aspects of historicism in original and imaginative ways.
e) Betty Carter (1929–1998)
i) Her career had a brief, unlikely liftoff in 1961 when she and Ray Charles recorded a
superb album of duets, producing a minor hit with “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
ii) She later rebelled, earned a reputation as “troublesome,” and left the business as she
raised her two sons.
 iii) She orchestrated a surprising return in 1969, when she founded her own record
company, Bet-Car. It soon became apparent that, much as Sarah Vaughan was the voice
of bop, Carter identified with the slightly younger generation associated with the avant-
garde; one of her loyal supporters in this period was Cecil Taylor, her senior by two
months.
f) Michael Brecker (1948–2007)
i) Michael Brecker made his name on the tenor saxophone at twenty-one, playing with
the popular jazz-rock band Dreams. He was promptly drafted for a recording session
by Miles Davis and achieved commercial success co-leading the Brecker Brothers,
with his trumpet-player brother Randy, one of the finer fusion groups of the 1970s.
ii) He was as much in demand in pop (John Lennon, Steely Dan, Paul Simon) as in jazz
(Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner).
iii) Brecker’s career ended suddenly at age 57 when he was diagnosed with
myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a blood condition resulting in progressive bone
marrow failure.
g) Jason Moran (b. 1975)
i) An exemplar of the successful contemporary jazz musician despite the remote
standing of jazz today. When he was thirteen and heard Thelonious Monk’s recording
of “’Round Midnight,” it led him to other jazz pianists, both old and new.
ii) The diverse influences of the avant-garde, historical performances, and fusion
resulted in a wide-ranging musical platform on which to make a new personal
statement in the current scene.
iii) Moran studied at the Manhattan School of Music with pianist Jaki Byard, who
recorded with Mingus and was known for his eclectic style as a leader.
iv) In addition to absorbing Byard’s inclusive attitude and the features of the individual
styles represented in Byard’s style, Moran studied with two 1960s and 1970s avant-
garde pianists, Andrew Hill and Muhal Richard Abrams, while adding all three
pianists’ relatively neglected compositions to his repertoire.
v) Each of Moran’s album releases represented a distinct project with its own goals and
parameters. His albums include works based on the music of Ellington and Byard,
movie themes with Sam Rivers, album-length explorations of the blues, and original
works, all of which are meant to combine contemporary musical ideas with the
 traditional, resulting in new but recognizable music.
vi) “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic”
(1) Moran developed a self-sufficient solo piano style that is illustrated in his varied
interpretation of James P. Johnson’s 1930 “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic.”
(2) Moran’s treatment of this piece includes varying the form, harmony, tempo, and
flow while remaining basically faithful to the primary theme.
(3) Moran ironically defamiliarizes the piece by both partaking of it and radically
changing it through his own quirky and elusive playing.
8) The Historicist Present
a) In 2008 a jazz musician won a Grammy Award for album of the year for the first time in
forty-four years: Herbie Hancock for River: The Joni Letters, based on the music of Joni
Mitchell.
b) How long jazz can continue gazing into a rear-view mirror while gliding forward is
anyone’s guess.