The History of Jazz (78 page)

Although Granz typically preferred working with major names from previous decades, he also occasionally promoted lesser-known artists and newer talent. For example, virtuoso guitarist Joe Pass had spent much of his early career battling drug addiction, a struggle that found him spending lengthy periods incarcerated, at hospitals, or in halfway houses; even when he was playing music, it often was as an anonymous studio sideman or hidden in Las Vegas hotel bands. Yet in the early 1970s, when the guitarist was in his mid-forties, Granz aggressively promoted Pass in leader dates, prominent sideman gigs (with Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, and others), and concert appearances. Pass’s 1973 solo recording
Virtuoso
attracted attention for the guitarist’s speed of execution and astonishing technical mastery of the instrument. Inspiring comparisons with Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson,
Virtuoso
justifiably ranks among the half-dozen most important recordings of modern jazz guitar music. It was followed by dozens of other Pass recordings, as leader or sideman, on the Pablo label.

Pablo was far from an isolated example. Other labels thrived by focusing on mainstream jazz sounds played by middle-aged artists. Nils Winther founded the Steeplechase label in Copenhagen in 1972 and recorded over two hundred releases during the next fifteen years, including important projects by Dexter Gordon, Jackie McLean, and other American musicians, as well as such rising European stars as bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and pianist Tete Montoliu. The following year, Carl Jefferson started his Concord label in California, which specialized in albums by a wide array of players associated with swing, bop, and West Coast styles of jazz. During the course of the decade, other small labels—including Muse, Chiaroscuro, and Timeless—moved in a similar direction, keeping the flames of earlier jazz styles alive in the face of free and fusion fare. A host of seasoned jazz artists from earlier decades rode this wave, pursuing revitalized careers and proving that traditional sounds were again on the ascendancy. Altoist Phil Woods led several vibrant combos in the 1970s, including his European Rhythm Machine, and in the 1980s was joined for a spell by the stellar trumpeter Tom Harrell. Dexter Gordon returned from overseas, recording his celebrated
Homecoming
release for CBS. Stan Getz renewed his allegiance to straight-ahead jazz after his love affair with bossa nova and briefer flirtation with fusion. Even crossover stars, most notably Herbie Hancock, put away their electric instruments for a time to test the growing market for acoustic jazz. “Jazz Comes Back,”
Newsweek
proclaimed in a 1977 cover story focusing on the return of prominent jazz artists to more traditional settings—more than a year before Wynton Marsalis’s arrival in New York.

New mainstream artists began gaining notoriety alongside these veterans, with almost every style finding fervent advocates. In 1977, twenty-three-year-old saxophonist Scott Hamilton scandalized the New York scene with his “retro” tenor sound reminiscent of Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster and reflecting a private universe in which Coltrane or Rollins had never existed. Unlike the postmodernists, who were resurrecting old sounds with a tongue-in-cheek humor, Hamilton was dead serious about what he was doing, fostering these styles because he thought they “sounded good”—the most anachronistic of defenses, it seemed, during this ideologically-charged period of transition. Although some critics belittled or ignored his efforts, those who listened with open ears were forced to acknowledge his rare gift for improvisation. Hamilton might have been an extreme case, yet such historical consciousness-raising would prove a precursor of things to come. By the dawn of the 1980s, every style and sound from the music’s past seemed to find a ready audience, each one celebrated, fostered, and marketed alongside the most up-to-date offerings of the current day. Visitors to jazz record stores witnessed fascinating juxtapositions in the racks: George Lewis, the Dixieland clarinetist, sharing a bin with George Lewis, avant-garde trombonist; Woody Shaw lying adjacent to Artie Shaw; Ruby Braff rubbing shoulders with Anthony Braxton; or Sadao Watanabe sidling up to Ethel Waters. The extreme diversity of the traditions that were now acclaimed indicated the tremendous scope of the music’s history and the remarkable breadth of Buddy Bolden’s progeny.

The mainstream jazz vocal tradition was especially vibrant during this period. Although atonality and other experimental techniques had, at times, made inroads here, most jazz vocalists preferred to work with traditional repertoire and instrumentation. Many major artists who had emerged in earlier decades continued to dominate the world of jazz singing in the 1970s and 1980s. Carmen McRae and Betty Carter, who had first recorded as leaders in the 1950s, made clear that the Billie Holiday tradition could still sound fresh and new decades later. No singer since Holiday had been more adept at singing behind the beat than McRae, or more skilled at shifting from an intimate conversational delivery to hard-edged reconfigurations of melody and lyric. Carter also took extreme rhythmic liberties with her material, sometimes offering such arcane reinterpretations of standards that one is tempted to include her among the jazz avant-garde. Yet this brand of experimentation was one that found inspiration in the traditions of early masters, as disparate as Cole Porter and Charlie Parker, and—once again—Holiday, whose emotionally charged vision of invigorating jazz song with the raw honesty of the confessional also colored Carter’s work. Sheila Jordan took a similar tack, avoiding conventional readings of standards in favor of a more deeply personalized approach, best shown in her collaborations with pianist Steve Kuhn. Mel Tormé, who had refined a virtuosic singing style in early years, also found a ready audience for his serious jazz work in this period, which included successful projects with George Shearing, Marty Paich, and others. Tony Bennett, who had expanded his audience as a pop-oriented singer in the 1960s, rediscovered his jazz roots during the following decade, as demonstrated most clearly in two memorable albums of duets with pianist Bill Evans. All in all, the vocal arts stood out as the most tradition-steeped facet of the jazz scene during the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the young singers who initiated their careers during these years reflected this same immersion in the music’s history; and though the least inspired of them settled for a superficial supper-club elegance, the best of the new generation—Bobby McFerrin, Diane Schuur, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves— found ways of revitalizing the tradition.

This nostalgia for the music’s past was especially evident among practitioners of vocalese—a style in which lyrics are added to preexisting jazz melodies and solos. As this idiom gained wider popularity under the influence of such singers as Jon Hendricks and Eddie Jefferson, who had helped create the style some two decades before, or via high-profile projects by pop artists such as Joni Mitchell or the Manhattan Transfer, it became increasingly common practice for the vocalese lyrics to be
about
jazz musicians—hear, for instance, Jefferson singing eloquently about Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker; or Hendricks’s lyrics to “Birdland”; or, in a crossover format, Joni Mitchell focusing on Charles Mingus as the subject of her version of the bassist’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” In such settings, the jazz singer became something of a modern-day equivalent of the African griot, using music not just to continue the jazz tradition but also to relate its history.

The concept of preserving the music’s heritage through jazz repertory companies, akin to the way symphonies propagate the classical music tradition, also gained momentum during this period. In 1973, Chuck Israels founded his National Jazz Ensemble, and the following year George Wein promoted his New York Jazz Repertory Company. The Smithsonian Institution began taking an increasingly active role in preserving and promoting the jazz tradition during the 1970s, assisted admirably by jazz critic Martin Williams. Gunther Schuller pursued a wide range of activities during the decade—concerts, recordings, writings—to further the same agenda. Other signs pointed to a revival of interest in the jazz tradition during the 1970s: more reissues of earlier material by record companies; expanding attention to the music’s history and heritage at academic institutions; and the publication of a growing numbers of jazz books and journals.

Given these precedents, it would be wrong to claim that the mainstream acoustic jazz tradition was dormant before the arrival of Wynton Marsalis at the start of the 1980s. Rather than being its cause, Marsalis’s success was very much a product of this emerging historical consciousness. Even so, Marsalis must be seen as the key figure who, more than anyone else, vehemently asserted the centrality of this tradition in the face of fusion and free styles, and aimed to be its preserver, propagator, promoter, and publicist all rolled into one. His efforts often ignited controversy, yet even the heated disputes that flamed around him can be read as signs of the growing importance of jazz’s inheritance from past generations in the way the art form would be conceptualized and commoditized by both insiders and outsiders. At times ideological and aesthetic issues have gotten muddled in these debates, and one suspects that it will take many years before Marsalis the musician can be dispassionately assessed, without being lost in discussions of the personal or political trappings of his art.

Marsalis’s rise to fame while barely out of his teens was an unprecedented event in the jazz world. No major jazz figure—not Ellington or Armstrong, Goodman or Gillespie—had become so famous, so fast. The story of his formative experiences in music is compact and impressive. Born in Kenner, Louisiana, on October 18, 1961, Marsalis had the benefit of local teachers and mentors, such as Alvin Batiste and Danny Barker, who were living exponents of the rich New Orleans jazz tradition. Marsalis’s home life was equally supportive: his father, Ellis, was a professional jazz pianist, and in time Wynton’s siblings Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason would also pursue musical careers of note. At age fourteen, Wynton played the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. At seventeen, he was allowed to participate in the Tanglewood Festival and, despite being the youngest attendee, won an award as the outstanding brass player. At eighteen, he entered Juilliard. At nineteen, he was performing with jazz masters such as Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock. At twenty, the CBS record label signed Marsalis simultaneously to their classical and jazz artist rosters—an unprecedented move for the world’s most powerful recording company.

The wisdom of this step was quickly validated: within two years, Marsalis had won Grammy awards in both fields. Even casual listeners were now aware of his reputation. In the popular imagination, he was to the trumpet what Segovia was to the guitar, Van Cliburn the piano. Marsalis had a deep reservoir of talent to back up this flurry of attention. His recording of the Haydn Trumpet Concerto was impressive, especially in the cadenza, which was a breathtaking exposition of the young trumpeter’s rhythmic and melodic imagination. His performances with Blakey had quickly caused a sensation among jazz musicians. Not since the days of Clifford Brown had a young jazz trumpeter shown such tone control or fluid execution. Listening to his featured solo on “How Deep Is the Ocean,” recorded with the Jazz Messengers at the Keystone Korner in June 1981, one could easily imagine a spectacular future for this young virtuoso. His warm, fat tone was on exhibit in the slow introduction, and retained lucent clarity even in the fastest runs during the double-time section of the piece. A few months later, Blakey hired Wynton’s brother Branford to play saxophone with the Messengers, and a follow-up recording helped to amplify the growing reputations of both.

The two brothers were prominently featured on Wynton’s eponymous debut jazz release for CBS. This project was more of a hodgepodge than a unified artistic statement, but many of its individual moments were compelling: “Hesitation” found the Marsalis brothers evoking Ornette Coleman’s early style in a playful workout over “I Got Rhythm” changes; the shifting rhythmic moods of Wynton’s piece “Father Time” prefigured the trumpeter’s later concern with complex compositional structures; on “Sister Cheryl” Branford made his mark with an ingenious soprano sax solo that even outshined his brother’s formidable contribution; Wynton’s solo on “Who Can I Turn To” was a simple affair, but his trumpet sound was riveting in its depth and purity. His follow-up recordings
Think of One
and
Hot House Flowers
were similarly eclectic, ranging from the varied combo moods of the former to the sweet string orchestra-backed melodicism of the latter.

For another young trumpeter, these would have been laudable achievements. But the intense publicity and attention directed at Marsalis had raised expectations to a fever pitch that such efforts could do little to fulfill. Jazz listeners and critics who had grown accustomed to a history of towering figures—Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Gillespie, Davis, Coltrane, Coleman—each of whom had remade the music in his own image, expected something more revolutionary from the young trumpeter. His two follow-up recordings,
Black Codes (from the Underground)
and
J Mood
, attempted to break new ground. The ensemble textures were now more interactive than on previous Marsalis recordings, and increasingly the rhythm section was challenging the trumpeter. Marsalis’s compositions were also growing much more intricate. “J Mood,” for example, is a twelve-bar blues, but the main melody employs twelve very unusual bars: the meter changes with virtually each one, completing a total of thirty-six beats broken down (according to this writer’s ears) in the pattern 4/2/1/3/3/4/1/4/4/3/4/3. “Phryzzinian Man” from
Black Codes
takes a similar circuitous route, starting with a bar-length pattern of 4/4/2/4/4/2/3/2/4/4/4/4. The band returns to straight 4/4 during the solos—which is something of a letdown after the intriguing melody statements—however, the ambitions of the compositions showed the direction in which Marsalis was now moving.