The History of Jazz (76 page)

The trio Medeski Martin and Wood, formed in 1991, may be even more typical of funky jazz in the postfusion age. These musicians adopt technology when it suits them—adding turntables, synthesized sounds, and other plugged-in ingredients as needed—but are also comfortable going “all acoustic” too. The band started out as a conventional jazz piano trio and only gradually came to embrace an electric sound, first as an easier way of taking their music on the road but eventually as a key part of their group identity. Yet the biggest change here versus the heroic age of 1970s fusion is the gritty garage band attitude of their public image. This trio—composed of keyboardist John Medeski, drummer Billy Martin, and bassist Chris Wood—attracts an audience that often has only the vaguest notion of bebop, swing, and other jazz styles, but who are mesmerized by the raw energy and infectious rhythms that are this band’s calling cards. Indeed, one can’t help but be struck by the contrast with the electric jazz groups of an earlier era. Instead of emulating the slickness and concert hall glamour of these predecessors, this trio takes pride in a back-to-basics, jam band ambiance that is more a rejection than a continuation of the fusion tradition of famous forerunners such as Weather Report, Return to Forever, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Despite these varied and formidable precedents, the most successful—and controversial—form of plugged-in improvisation in the postfusion era has been the style of music known as “smooth jazz.” The early roots of this genre can be traced back to the 1960s, when producer Creed Taylor masterminded a series of commercial albums for the Verve, A&M, and CTI labels, presenting leading jazz artists in slick settings well suited for radio airplay and crossover sales to pop and soul music fans. One could see the new sensibility emerging in the Taylor-produced efforts by Wes Montgomery, Freddie Hubbard, George Benson, Stan Getz, Hubert Laws, Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, and other leading performers, in which every detail, from the cover artwork to the arrangements and song selection, reflected the savvy marketing conception at work behind the scenes. Yet the mercantile motivations underpinning these albums did not detract from the music making, and Taylor’s efforts have mostly held up well with the passing years, largely due to the high caliber of the creative talents at play and the first-class production values involved. “By 1970, rock had overwhelmed most other genres,” Taylor later recalled. “Many other jazz albums from this period looked shabby and sounded slapped together. My strategy was to invest heavily on the talent, sound quality and look of the records.”
¹⁵
Although some critics carped at the commercial elements that dominated Taylor’s approach—string orchestras, cover versions of rock tunes, image-oriented covers that rarely featured the performers—the public embraced these releases with enthusiasm. In the early 1970s, Taylor’s CTI was achieving sales of jazz records comparable to those generated by the major labels and inevitably inspiring imitation from entertainment industry players with deeper pockets.

During this same decade, a new wave of smartly packaged crossover jazz acts enjoyed enormous success. Yet their music represented a departure from the Creed Taylor formula, which had been built on taking proven jazz artists who had already made a reputation in straight-ahead jazz and adding a pop or rock twist to their music. The new generation of smooth jazz artists had, for the most part, modest reputations—or in some cases were completely unknown—among serious jazz fans before they became stars. The jazz establishment grumbled at what was perceived as the overnight success of upstarts who hadn’t paid their dues. The record labels and concert promoters, however, were in no position to quibble, dazzled as they were by huge sales of albums such as Chuck Mangione’s
Feels So Good
(whose title single climbed to number four on the
Billboard
charts), John Klemmer’s
Touch
, Spyro Gyra’s
Morning Dance
, and other 1970s projects that took in some elements of the fusion movement but married them to pop-oriented melodies and danceable beats. In other instances, former Creed Taylor artists jumped ship to more powerful labels and bigger successes. After moving to Warner Bros., George Benson’s career hit the big time with
Breezin’
, which sold more than two million copies. Grover Washington had enjoyed popularity with his recordings for Taylor’s Kudu label but reached a far larger audience through his 1981 collaboration with Bill Withers on the hit single “Just the Two of Us.”

Yet the term
smooth jazz
did not arrive on the scene until the 1980s. The music industry had toyed with various ways of labeling this style, some preferring to lump it into the fusion or New Age buckets, or coining the cumbersome title “new adult contemporary.” In the final result, market research rather than the jazz critical establishment decided the matter. Cody/Leach, a research outfit, undertook a study for WNUA in Chicago that showed positive listener response to the name “smooth jazz.” As a result, jazz would be forever linked with a style of easy listening music that many opinion leaders in the art form would prefer not to exist—or at least not inside the gated jazz community—and which, they griped, simply encroached on the livelihoods of legit acts in their field.

Casual listeners were blissfully unaware of the controversy surrounding these pleasant sounds that enlivened their morning commute or served as unobtrusive background music to dinner or a second glass of chardonnay. Headlining acts of the 1980s such as the Rippingtons, Dave Benoit, Acoustic Alchemy, and the Yellow Jackets were especially powerful in generating radio airplay—an achievement all the more impressive given the gradual disappearance of straight-ahead jazz from commercial radio stations during this same period. But the successes of these artists were modest by comparison to the towering giant of smooth jazz—indeed, almost its defining figure—Kenneth Gorelick, who, operating under the name Kenny G, would go on to sell more records than any jazz instrumentalist in history. More than fifteen million copies of his 1992 release
Breathless
were purchased by fans, many of whom had probably never bought a sax album before. This same artist set another breathless mark five years later, putting his name in the
Guinness Book of World Records
by holding an E-flat note for forty-five minutes and forty-seven seconds in an impressive demonstration of the technique known as circular breathing. It is hard to say whether such a feat enhanced Mr. G’s reputation among jazz insiders or simply reinforced the view that he was a novelty act outside the scope of serious consideration.

In truth, the jazz component in this music is modest by any measure, yet there is a real issue here that the jazz world can hardly dismiss. At a time when jazz is largely excluded from television and commercial radio, and its most cherished masters can walk unrecognized down the streets of every major city in the land, the word
jazz
still retains a mystique that marketers often try to usurp. A Google search on the term will come up with millions of references that have nothing to do with the music fostered by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington: links relating to a car made by Honda, a basketball team in Utah, a technology platform promoted by IBM, or strange hybrids such as Jazzercise, jazz pants, or jazz hands. Usually the lack of connection with the jazz art form is obvious in these instances, but sometimes the matter is more ambiguous. This leads to disturbing innovations, such as the jazz event with no jazz—as fans witnessed at the 2009 Sonoma Jazz Festival, which booked Joe Cocker, Ziggy Marley, Keb’ Mo’, Shelby Lynne, and Lyle Lovett—all fine acts, but none of them with any ties to the music discussed in this book. As a result of such encroachments, practitioners of the core jazz tradition must learn ways of navigating, and indeed of surviving, in a world that not only marginalizes their contributions but is ready even to usurp their identifying label and confuse the next generation of potential listeners. In recent years, political pundits have made us sensitive to the need to “frame” a viewpoint in the right terms in order to create a space for it in the public sphere. The very concept of jazz now seems in desperate need of this type of framing. Jazz artists themselves must either take the lead in this process or see themselves increasingly squeezed out of the commercial activities that are the sustenance for the practitioners of any art form.

A different type of fusion, represented by a mixing of jazz and classical music, also emerged as an important movement during the 1970s. The ECM record label, founded in 1969 by Manfred Eicher, would play a major role in promoting this new and, at times, contentious approach. True, there had been many previous fusings of jazz and classical music—from Gershwin to Third Stream—but none were so influential and far-reaching in their implications. Whereas most of these earlier attempts had emphasized the compositional and formalist aspects of the music, the ECM artists maintained a commitment to the primacy of improvisation. They sought nothing less than a broadening of improvisational techniques to include the full vocabulary of composed music. Instead of the conventional mainstream jazz sounds—syncopations, blues notes, ii–V substitutions—one found a panoply of other devices: drones, ostinatos, vamps, impressionist harmonies, Schubertian melodies, shimmering arpeggios, undulating rhythms, rhapsodic interludes, pristine polyphonic exercises, and jarring expressionist explosions. Yet this was no tepid attempt to recreate the classical improvisation styles of previous centuries. A host of African American and non-Western sounds were also important ingredients in this sonic smorgasbord of influences.

ECM would also stand out as the first major jazz label to rely heavily on non-U.S. talent, and this commitment to broadening the geographical base of the music would prove as important as the distinctive sounds associated with the company’s imprimatur. These recordings introduced many jazz fans to the work of Jan Garbarek, Egberto Gismonti, Enrico Rava, Naná Vasconcelos, Tomasz Stañko, Terje Rypdal, Eberhard Weber, John Surman, and Kenny Wheeler, among others, most of them little known on the global jazz stage before Eicher sponsored them. This advocacy, which respected no national or cultural boundaries, enabled ECM to play a major role in the blending of world and ethnic music elements into jazz, and thus added one more ingredient to this new kind of fusion. By any measure, this was an iconoclastic approach at the time, one that challenged the conventional wisdom on many fronts. Even so, Eicher was anything but dogmatic, promoting the works of a range of stylists far afield from the so-called ECM sound, including those more overtly rooted in the African American tradition, such as Jack DeJohnette and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as well as contemporary classical composers as different from one another as Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt.

No artist better exemplified this powerful synthesis of disparate styles than pianist Keith Jarrett. The influence of classical music is, at times, as pronounced as the jazz ingredients of his playing—hence, it came as little surprise that Jarrett eventually chose to pursue separate, if complementary, careers in the two idioms—while elements of different ethnic musical traditions also figure in his playing and composing. Yet the calling card of Jarrett’s achievement is less the breadth and depth of his influences than his ability to blend these various sources of inspiration into a coherent, persuasive whole. Nowhere is this clearer than on his solo concerts, lengthy excursions of completely improvised piano music that refract a kaleidoscope of aural colors through Jarrett’s highly individualistic perspective.

Jarrett’s far-reaching musical interests were evident from his earliest days: at age five he performed on a televised show hosted by Paul Whiteman and, at seven, he gave a two-hour piano recital to a paying audience, working his way through Beethoven, Mozart, and Saint-Saëns and capping the concert with two of his own compositions. In his teens, Jarrett attended a jazz camp sponsored by the Kenton band and later went on tour with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians. Through Waring’s intervention, Jarrett was offered the chance of studying with Nadia Boulanger, but the young pianist declined. By the time he entered the Berklee School of Music, the budding Boston jazz conservatory, Jarrett was already a seasoned pianist with solid playing experiences under his belt.

Jarrett only lasted one year at Berklee before being expelled—ostensibly for playing on the strings of a piano. Soon after, Jarrett moved to New York, where he caught the attention of bandleader Art Blakey. Jarrett made only one record with Blakey, the vibrant
Buttercorn Lady
release, but the twenty-year-old pianist’s solos on “Secret Love” and “My Romance” were enough to generate excitement in the jazz world. Four months with Blakey were followed by a longer stint with Charles Lloyd, a charismatic saxophonist with a Coltrane-oriented sound, who attracted a young audience via an eclectic mix of acoustic jazz-oriented music. Drummer Jack DeJohnette, a powerful and sophisticated percussionist, also worked with Lloyd during this period and would participate with Jarrett on a number of important later projects. In 1970, both Jarrett and DeJohnette joined Miles Davis and played important roles in what was one of the trumpeter’s strongest fusion bands.

Jarrett’s career gained rapid momentum after his departure from Davis in 1971. He initiated his ECM relationship with a duet recording with DeJohnette and an extraordinary solo piano release,
Facing You
. The latter marked a compelling departure from the conventions of mainstream jazz piano, delineating an orchestral two-handed approach that revealed Jarrett’s novel, integrated concept of harmony, rhythmic momentum, and melodic phrasing, perhaps demonstrated most notably on the ten-minute composition “In Front.” Jarrett’s 1973 masterpiece
Solo Concerts: Bremen and Lausanne
built on these same elements in two titanic improvised performances, three hours of inspired keyboard music. Jarrett’s follow-up
Köln Concert
may have lacked the depth of
Facing You
and
Bremen
, but it attracted a large nonjazz audience with its sparse, simple harmonies and flowing melodic lines. The record quickly sold over one million copies and spurred a rash of imitators. It is only a slight exaggeration to claim that the burgeoning market for New Age music grew out of the influence of the opening twenty minutes of this recording, a mostly diatonic improvisation built primarily over a simple two-chord progression. But Jarrett quickly moved on to other projects, leaving it to other, far lesser talents to build on the commercial potential of this quasi-minimalist approach.