Thinking about jazz criticism...

Little by little, inch by inch, essay by essay, I am discerning a shift taking place in my intellectual and aesthetic comprehension of jazz. And, most surprising to me, it is being informed by the Ralph Ellison, Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch school of jazz reflection.  Not that I accept as gospel everything offered in the Ken Burns documentary, Jazz, as the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  There was simply too much that was overlooked in this monumental exercise in visual history.

But having read and reread Ellison's brilliant, Shadow and Act, as well as Marsailis' Moving to Higher Ground - to say nothing of reflecting on the debate set forth in the documentary, Icons Among Us - I sense that Crouch is right when he writes: "I am quite sure that jazz is the highest American musical form because it is the most comprehensive, possessing an epic frame of emotional and intellectual reference, sensual clarity and spiritual radiance."  
And I am particularly awed by what he writes next:

If it wasn't for the blues, there would be no jazz as we know it, for blues first broke most clearly with the light and maudlin nature of popular music.  Blues came up from this land around the turn of the century. We all know that blues seeped out of the Negro, but we should be aware of the face that it also called backward into the central unites of the national experience with such accuracy that it came to form the emotional basis of the most indelible secular American music. That is why it had such importance - not because it took wing on the breath, voice and fingers of an embattled ethnic group, but because the feelings of the form came to magnetize everlasting from slavery to war to exploration to Indian fight to natural disaster, from the woes of the soul lost in unhappy love to the mysteries, terrors and celebrations of life that stretched north from the backwoods to the steel and concrete monuments of the big city.  It became, therefore, the aesthetic hymn of the culture, the 20th century music that spoke of and to modern experience in a way that no music of European or Third World origin ever has... In the music of the blues the listener was rescued from the sentimentality that so often threatens the soul of this culture, either overdoing the trivial or coating the significant with a hardening and disfiguring syrup.

Two insights strike me as essential here

+ First Crouch celebrates the birth of the blues from an aesthetic perspective.  He owns and acknowledges the racial and class realities of the origin of the blues, without ever pandering to a racially exclusive ideology or aesthetic.  "There is a dream world in the world of jazz," he writes, "that is much richer than anything one will encounter in the ethnic sentimentality of Afrocentric propaganda." For what those young jazz artists who reclaimed and refashioned the blues tradition symbolize:

... is a freedom from the taste-making of mass media (that embraces) a vision that has much more to do with aesthetic satisfaction than the gold rush culture of popular entertainment, where one takes the cliches of adolescent narcissism into the side of the mountain rather than a pickaxe, some pans and a burro.  These young Americans have not been suckers for the identity achieved through unearned cynical rebellion; they seek individuality through affirmation, which puts them at war with the silly attire and hairdos that descend directly from the rebel-without-a-cause vision of youth that Hollywood began selling nearly forty years ago... Less in awe of youth than quality, those who would be jazz musicians (born of the blues) would also be adults, not just shriek for adult privileges, then cry foul when the responsibilities are passed out.  They have a healthy respect for the men and women who laid an astonishing tradition down. 

In a word, Crouch honors the foundation of jazz built upon the blues as an art form that taps into the soul of our era.  To be sure, it has deep roots in the African-American world, but is not owned by it in any exclusive way.  "If social problems in and of themselves were the only things that provoke the creation of great art," he writes, "a century as bloody as ours would have inspired far more original and profound aesthetic achievement than it has."

No, the miracle of this improvisational art is the fact that the techniques of Africans arrived with evolved into aesthetic conceptions that reinvented every kind of American music they came in contact with, from folk to religious music to dance tunes, and finally achieved the order that is jazz, where all those aspects of American musical expression were brought together for a fresh synthesis... No matter what class or sex or religion or race or shape or height, if you can cut the mustard, you should be up there playing or singing or having your composition performed.

+ Second, Crouch takes on the cynical and even sentimental stereotypes of the blues and places it within a larger cultural context. He knows, for example, that part of the American cultural mythology loves the image of the rough and tumble "bad boy" who creates beauty out of his pain.  There are tendencies "in our contemporary popular art ... (that celebrate) our love of the scandalizing bad boy and outsider."

We have moved swiftly from the cardboard goody-goody to Cagney, to Bogart, to Edgar G. Robinson, motorcycled forward to Brando and James Dean, hopped the racial fence to play out sadomasochistic rituals with Miles Davis, Malcolm X and Spike Lee, not leaving out all of the adolescent rock- and-roll intoxication our society guzzles to the point o hangovers left now by Prince or Madonna or Public Enemy.

All of this, he concludes, "clearly express our young people's dissatisfaction with the shortcomings of our culture, but it is a dissatisfaction had on the cheap. In the world of the prematurely cynical, the bad boy reigns, for he represents retreat into pouting anarchy... or an unearned cynicism that is no more than a brittle version of sentimentality." With this, Crouch challenges in music what others have taken on in the visual arts, cinema and other parts of the creative arts:  namely, if the arts don't deepen our quest for truth, beauty or goodness in ways that strip away the pastiche of ideology and sentimentality, they fail to nourish our souls.  

And while my love of jazz (and blues) moves beyond the historic days of bop and cool with a commitment to applying to contemporary music the same creativity and love of beauty that the old master brought to their show tunes, there is something to be said for the insights of Crouch, Ellison and Marsalis.  Jazz poet, Jayne Cortez, puts it like this:

I crisscrossed with Monk
Wailed with Bud 
Counted every star with Stitt 
Sang "Don't Blame Me" with Sarah 
Wore a flower like Billie 
Screamed in the range of Dinah; 
and scatted "How High the Moon" with Ella Fitzgerald 
as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium Jazz at the Philharmonic 

I cut my hair into a permanent tam 
Made my feet rebellious metronomes 
Embedded record needles in paint on paper 
Talked bopology talk 
Laughed in high-pitched saxophone phrases 
Became keeper of every Bird riff 
every Lester lick as Hawk melodicized my ear of infatuated tongues
Blakey drummed militant messages in soul of my applauding teeth 
Ray hit bass notes to the last love seat in my bones 

I moved in triple time with Max 
Grooved high with Diz 
Perdidoed with Pettiford 
Flew home with Hamp 
Shuffled in Dexter's Deck 
Squatty-rooed with Peterson 
Dreamed a "52nd Street Theme" with Fats
and scatted "Lady Be Good" with Ella Fitzgerald as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium Jazz at the Philharmonic 

I love having fun with jazz - I celebrate its depth and abandon - AND I believe that given my country's ambivalence (if not disdain) for the intellectual, I need to keep wrestling with this material in all its bounty. Just as I need to practice scales and form, I need to keep on with the critical intellectual reflections, too. 

credit: http://www.eleftheria.gr/index.asp?cat=43&aid=54432#.UnPCzHCsiSo