Rarely do you find someone who says “I like music.” it’s usually particular styles that appeal. And even if you do find the rare bird who seems to like all music I’m sure they would determine that some sound making performances are ‘not really music, thereby making the first distinction in naming or categorizing something: Determining what is and what is not.
We use categories of music to compartmentalize the overwhelmingly wide variety of music out there. Obviously there is a convenience in labels, without them casual conversation would not be possible. But on the other end of the pendulum you can get so specific, as to be obscure. Sub-sub-sub-categories might narrow down what something is but coming back up to the surface takes more explanation than is practicably necessary. …well I think I’m veering off from where I wanted to go with this thought. I guess I just wanted that idea in the front of the brain. The idea of Jazz as a category of music and how as a category it has become over the years so broad as to be useless without appending the type or sub-category of jazz.
Historically the trouble with the jazz name is twofold. On the one hand it has been use for too long, nearly 100 years, to describe too many styles of music. And on the other hand jazz has come to refer to a particular set of structural elements that, according to some, need to be there for it to sound like jazz. Key ingredients, in other words, for the jazz cookbook recipe.
I don’t have much trouble with the first problem, mostly it just leads to confusion as to what jazz is. What does it mean when we use the same word to describe late 70’s fusion and the 1950’s revival Dixieland? They are both “jazz” but share practically nothing else. Jazz can umbrella many different styles, much the same way the music category Rock functions. The only problem here other than the confusion, is that if everything is jazz then the word as a descriptive term becomes meaningless.
I like this category/sub-category flexibility with the term jazz. I can and do use this hierarchical terminology in describing the stuff I hear. It’s the recipe thing that I mentioned above that bugs me. My main bone of contention is with the conservatives who have enshrined jazz in a music academe with a list of do’s and do not’s.
As a proponent of “free jazz” (a sub-category term that needs its own further defining) I see this style as the last saving grace of jazz. It’s no coincidence that the movement toward experiment in the late 60’s paralleled the establishing of jazz music programs in universities. The sides were chosen as who would decide the fate of jazz. And guess who won? The establishment of course, they alway dominate the terms of History. But the great thing about jazz is that it is a sly bastard. You see jazz is a fluid term. It has a presence that won’t have it’s picture taken by history. The conservatives and their ideas of jazz are mostly talking about what jazz was. I want to get at what jazz is. Jazz is rebellion, Jazz is a shrugging off, a pissing on, a fuck you of the dictates of the establishment. Jazz is underground. It is practiced and enjoyed by a dedicated cadre of those who make the new and those who want to see/hear the new made right before their eyes/ears in a performance of spontaneously composed music.
When you have a jazz conservative telling you what jazz is, be they an academic type, a critic, or even a ligit jazz musician they are looking backward over history (convienently overlooking the blip on their radar screen of the 60’s free jazz movement). They are not conversant nor equipped to deal with the now. Their is is really a was. The rift is in the different groundings. Jazz in its essence is of the present moment, the spirit of improvisation is that it happens, when it happens. Between the action… oops just missed that… and the word… oops just missed that… there is always that lag time… oops just missed that. But the power is with the folks who want to tell you what jazz is, because they have the words to describe that present moment. And with the power of words they get to define what is. And their readers believe the words because the reality of the actual experience is too pants-shittingly frightening. And then follows the sad folly when so-called jazz musicians listen to the words that describe what their music is (was) and then make music that is of that discerned style thereby propagating the conservative myth building of Jazz. They don’t get it, that to make jazz, is in its essence is to go beyond jazz. Put yourself in the position of the greats who defined the turning points in jazz. For instance when a small group of jazz musicians in the late 40’s who wanted to shed the association with the entrenched jazz at the time, swing, and referred to their new way as Modern Music and Art Music, before finally settling on Be-Bop. Though their “style” is now studied, dissected and established as part of the canon, at the time it was radically new and no so much a style as a direction and that’s what made it jazz. The problem is that the term Jazz refers to a music style and action. When I play what I call jazz, I want to get at it’s source, get at the energy within the musical style. Jazz is an energy not a recipe. The only way to define jazz is to do jazz.
This has all been summed up far more poetically and succinctly by Eric Dolphy when he said.
“When you hear music, after its over, it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.”
Alonzo Holliday