The History of Jazz (83 page)

Although the term
postmodernism
might suggest an end point for jazz history, a happily-ever-after where all ingredients combine in ever-fresh recipes, the period of ascendancy of this freewheeling philosophy may have already passed. So much of the power of this music derives from the shock value attendant on its violation of boundaries and transgression of norms, yet this element of surprise is harder to come by with each passing year. The juggling of different jazz vocabularies will never entirely lose its piquancy, but these mash-ups hardly have the same jolt in the new millennium that they did in the 1980s and 1990s. In the aftermath of this age of cut-and-paste, with its aural collages made from snippets of everything from Ayler to Zorn, a more earnest and focused tone seems to be coming to the fore in the art form.

10 Jazz in the New Millennium

Even back in the 1970s, the jazz world understood that technology would change the music. Yet most performers, if pushed for particulars at that time, would have talked about the spread of synthesizers and keyboards, advances in electric guitars, and the impact of various other plugged-in devices on the bandstand. Who would have thought, back in those heroic days of jazz fusion musicians strutting like rock stars, that the real technological revolution would take place a generation later—but mostly offstage, in the ways music is conceived, recorded, distributed, marketed, and shared? Welcome to the jazz scene of the new millennium, where the music itself is evolving more slowly than everything surrounding it.

As I sit writing, I have two catalogs in front of me, both apparently sent as junk mail to the addresses of musicians and wannabe performers. “You’re not dreaming,” proclaims the cover of one of them, “1,000 CDs in jewel cases now just $890.” Make your own compact discs for less than a dollar each? Who needs a record label? The other brochure quotes slightly higher prices, but offers everything from eco-friendly packaging—with the CD trays made from recycled soda and water bottles—to promotion services that promise to get a compact disc with the musician’s songs into the hands of radio DJs, promoters, managers, record labels, and potential licensers.

What a dramatic change from the old days, when an unproven musician who wanted to release an album needed to convince “the man”—and invariably it was a man—at one of a small number of record labels to take a chance on a new artist. Nowadays, anyone and everyone can release a CD with a modest investment, paid for by a few gigs. And judging by the number of jazz compact discs coming out every month, countless musicians are taking advantage of this opportunity to become their own label. In the last year, I have received more than one thousand jazz CDs in the mail, sent to me in hopes that I would write a review, most of them financed and released by the artist. By my estimate there were probably a couple thousand more that were released but never made it to my mailbox (an oversight for which the postal worker who covers my block is deeply grateful). If one measures the success of the jazz scene by the quantity of product out there, then we are living in the Golden Age. More jazz recordings are released in a single month now than came out in an entire year back in the 1950s.

The irony is that this profusion of compact discs is happening at the very time that the CD is no longer necessary and is under attack from nimbler virtual ways of distributing music. Recordings can now be sent around the world at no cost with the click of a mouse—no disc required and even more eco-friendly than a recycled Pepsi bottle. Millions of tracks are available for purchase on dozens of websites, and even if you don’t want to spend any money, plenty is offered for free or accessible from various illegal sources. Musicians can easily find electronic distributors for their songs or (as they are increasingly doing) setting up their own web presence to promote and sell their work. Just as performers in the past needed membership in the musicians’ union or a cabaret card to launch their careers, nowadays they require a profile on MySpace, a Twitter account, and a Facebook page. A search for “jazz” on YouTube comes back with more than one million hits.

The ways this technological revolution is impacting jazz are both subtle and profound, with the digital track increasingly usurping the role once held by live performance. At the Punkt Jazz Festival in Norway, audience members can go to the Alpha Room immediately after a concert and experience a “live” remix of the music they just heard—with DJs and guest musicians reworking the songs assisted by a stage full of equipment; indeed the remix is the heart of the festival, and often more exciting than the initial performance. Back in the States, trumpeter Dave Douglas performs in a jazz club, and a few hours later is selling downloads of the music on his website. Crossborder jams are harder, given the time lag in sound traveling long distances, yet in 2007 Dave Brubeck pulled off a “live” performance with the BBC Orchestra during which the pianist was in a studio in Rockefeller Plaza in New York, while the orchestra and conductor were facing the audience in London. Of course, you don’t need to be a star to jam over the web these days, and if you aren’t ready for the competition, online music lessons are easily available on numerous sites—get some tips from an established pro in New York or Hollywood, without leaving your apartment in Budapest or Bangalore. In North Carolina, a startup company called Zenph Studios is producing jazz recordings without any musicians at all, creating software equivalents of great performers of the past, virtual pianists and virtual bassists that are essentially indistinguishable from the originals. Inexpensive software packages, such as Finale and Sibelius, allow composers the privilege of hearing orchestral realizations of their work without the need to hire a single performer. In short, every aspect of the jazz world from conception to consumption is being transformed by technology.

Not many jazz musicians use the word
disintermediation
in their conversations—it is a term more often heard in corporate boardrooms—but this may well be the most important trend impacting their careers in the coming decades. Disintermediation describes the removal of key participants in an economic process because they no longer add sufficient value to justify their roles. In popular parlance, it is called “cutting out the milddleman.” Who needs record stores if music is sold over the Internet? Who needs a record distributor, if no stores are left? Who needs a company to make a physical CD, if a download is just as good? Who needs an agent, if an artist can deal directly with club owners and concert promoters via the web and e-mail? Who needs a musician, if software equivalents are just as good, and much less expensive? Of course, you can’t dispense with everybody—and especially not with the consumer, increasingly an endangered species in jazz—but now all participants in the jazz value chain need to justify their contribution and defend themselves against the encroachment of others.

In this environment, jazz musicians have been forced to become entrepreneurs and savvy managers of their own careers. Not too long ago, it was a great rarity when a jazz artist such as Marian McPartland or Horace Silver decided to launch a homegrown record label. In the new millennium, this is commonplace, in fact far more typical than the old model of an independent company taking on the risk of promoting an artist. New types of organization are also emerging to empower artists and create support networks in this changed environment. The ArtistShare company, founded by Brian Camelio in 2001, allows musicians to tap their own audience base to fund creative projects. Fans who make contributions get special perks, which might even include an invitation to the recording session or having their name printed in the liner notes to the resulting compact disc. When an ArtistShare’s fan-funded project, Maria Schneider’s
Concert in the Garden
from 2004, won a Grammy, one of the key donors (listed as executive producer on the project) was invited to join Schneider at the award ceremony. Certainly this “label” (although Camelio is ambivalent about the term when applied to his business model) is no mere vanity outfit for the musician not talented enough to get a “real” record deal. Some of the finest jazz artists on the scene—Jim Hall, Bob Brookmeyer, Chris Potter, Brian Lynch, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Billy Childs and others—have embraced the concept, and (as Schneider’s Grammy honors attest) the resulting projects present some of the best jazz on the market. Could it be that this economic model—which bears an uncanny resemblance to the arrangements between composers and patrons that emerged back when the musical arts were first adapting to the dictates of capitalism—is also conducive to great art making? Certainly it represents a realistic response to the economic marginalization of jazz as an art form and the pressures of reconciling creative goals with dollars-and-cents practicalities.

Perhaps the increasingly unstable financial situation of the jazz world explains the greater tone of seriousness that seems to have entered the music in the new millennium. The ironic attitudes that had been so common among the first wave of postmodern players in the 1980s and 1990s have lessened; the playful mixing and matching of genres still takes place but far less often; and above all a new earnestness permeates the scene. Several factors have no doubt contributed to this state of affairs. After 9/11, a number of pundits proclaimed the “death of irony,” and the economic malaise of the decade did little to lighten the cultural tone, which even outside of the music industry is increasingly brusque and down-to-earth. But one suspects that a change in attitude in the jazz world would have emerged under any circumstances, just as we have witnessed similar shifts from playful to serious approaches in earlier decades—for example, with the rise of bebop in the mid-1940s and the emergence of the avant-garde fifteen years later.

No artist reflects this earnest attitude more decidedly than pianist Brad Mehldau. It is not just his tendency to quote German philosophers in his liner notes that contributes to this perception. (An academic paper available for download on the pianist’s website is titled “Smashing the Framework with a Piano Hammer: An Interpretation of Nietzschean Existentialism in the Music of Brad Mehldau.”) Nor is it Mehldau’s dour mien on his CD covers, where he seems to have a deep-set aversion to showing even a glimmer of a smile. Rather, the singular gravitas of Mehldau’s artistry comes most to the fore on the bandstand, where he combines the cerebral and lyrical in artful reconfigurations of popular songs and his own sharply etched compositions. The vehemence of this music is all the more striking when one considers Mehldau’s marked preference for pop and rock material that has only the loosest links to the jazz repertoire. He is just as likely to draw on the Beatles and Paul Simon for his set lists as on Monk and Trane, and Mehldau’s example is the key reason why songs by Radiohead and Nick Drake have now become jazz standards. That said, don’t expect to hear his versions on rock radio stations anytime soon. By the time Mehldau has refracted these compositions through his own house of musical mirrors, these former hit tunes have been turned into jazz art songs and bear the full weight of the pianist’s exploratory tendencies. The song he is playing might be “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” but when Mehldau’s trio performs it in 7/4 meter with dauntingly dense instrumental textures, you will be forgiven for not recognizing Paul Simon’s number one hit from 1975.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1970, Mehldau spent much of his youth in Connecticut and moved to New York in 1988 to study at the New School under Fred Hersch. The pianist’s early work inspired critics to make comparisons to Bill Evans, much to Mehldau’s displeasure. On one of his CDs he included a lengthy essay asserting his independence from this influential forerunner. “The constant comparison of this trio with the Bill Evans trio by critics has been a thorn in my side. I remember listening to his music only a little, when I was 13 or 14 years old, for several months. … Often what I am doing in my solo is basing its melodic content on the initial melody of the song. You won’t find the model for this approach in Bill Evans.”
¹
In truth, Mehldau’s earliest recordings are peppered with reminders of Evans’s work in the pianist’s choice of material, in his approach to phrasing, and in the interactivity between piano, bass, and drums; yet by the time Mehldau was in the midst of his
Art of the Trio
projects in the late 1990s, this artist was increasingly staking out his own territory, creating a vibrant body of work that was more likely to influence others than to show its own sources of inspiration. Mehldau’s advanced rhythmic conception and orchestral two-handed technique, his expansion of the repertoire noted above, and his musical rapport with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy (or Jeff Ballard on later recordings) made clear that a jazz performer could continue to work within popular song forms and conventional tonality while still pushing the art form in exciting new directions.

Just as Brad Mehldau has needed to assert his independence in the face of those who would like to pigeonhole him as a Bill Evans clone, pianist Matthew Shipp has often had to deal with those who want to typecast him as an acolyte of Cecil Taylor or enter him as a combatant in the free jazz controversies that began before he was even born. Yet Shipp is too complicated a musician for such simple genealogies, and though he is capable of titanic atonal attacks on the keyboard, as he has demonstrated ever since his apprenticeship days in the band of saxophonist David S. Ware, he can also flex his musical muscles within conventional chord changes or even while handling simple pentatonic-based figures. Indeed, his recordings include astringent versions of the most unlikely songs, such as “Frère Jacques” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” that coexist happily with his gritty interpretations of jazz standards and original compositions. Perhaps the best way of conceptualizing Shipp is to see his music as existing “on the edge” rather than (like many so-called free players) “over the edge.” In this regard, he is less an extension of Cecil Taylor and perhaps more aligned with the attitudes of predecessors such as Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Horace Tapscott, and Andrew Hill, who preferred to grapple at the boundaries of tonal systems rather than completely abandon their centrifugal hold on the music.