Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Part 7: Innovation Versus Performance
 |
| John Coltrane |
My old neighbor Joe T., now deceased, used to say that you don't know what you are thinking until you try to write it. He was careful thinker, and I came to believe he was correct. Joan Didion concurred, saying, "I write to find out what I am thinking." Yes, there undoubtedly is something to this, something that is lost in the era of the podcast. Vastly more people now listen to podcasts than engage in long form reading, which doesn't bode well for critical thinking. Unless one is gifted with fluency in extemporaneous speaking, or with conducting an interview, what actually is happening in a live conversation is that ideas start sliding all over the place, and while the listener thinks they know what they are hearing, if they tried to report back their impressions, they would be just that, imprecise and incoherent.
Which is a long way of saying that writing this series did indeed help me understand what I think about matters of influence and race in jazz. Most of the ideas presented here had been knocking around in my brain in inchoate form for many, many years. But the act of writing them seemed too difficult. Each time I tried, I found I couldn't untangle things well enough, I couldn't construct a line of thinking that was strong and supportable, that didn't collapse in on itself. But over the years my writing has improved, thus bringing my thinking along in the process.
But enough throat clearing, as they say. The other day my (provisional) conclusion on these matters appeared in my mind, simply and clearly. When it comes to matters of jazz and race and influence we need to separate things out. In terms of the establishment and development and evolution of the music, black musicians are the ones who have exerted the most and deciding influence, not least because of the cultures from which they emerged. Note that I say "deciding" influence. As we have seen throughout this series, even the black innovators were not deaf to the styistic calling cards of various white musicians, which they enfolded into their own. But if we set influence aside -- and here is the main distinction -- we see that when it comes to the actually experience of performing jazz, there are many, nay, countless, white musicians, as well as all the black musicians who aren't originators, either, who succeed in getting us to that place we want to get to -- in our minds and in our souls. Mind you, no one can take you to that place through imitation, which is uncreative. But you can be influenced by someone and still perform inventively and adventurously.
Let's just consider one example. The biggest influence on saxophone playing of the last 60 years (half the life of the jazz art form), is the one and only John Coltrane. A master of the hard bop style of the 50s (evidenced in his work with Miles) and a gifted and sensitive performer of ballads (exemplified in his popular LP with Johnny Hartman), beginning in the early- to mid-60s, he extended what it meant to play the saxophone and what a jazz song or a solo could even be. (Around the same time, Dylan expanded the conception of what a popular song could do.) In the manner of Coltrane, one would now see the solo as a venue of exploration, sonically, yes, but, crucially, in the realms of consciousness and spirit as well. Other players were also investigating these concerns in the 60s, but it was Trane who created the heroic model that all sax players henceforth would follow. Among them is the great Joe Lovano, an Italian-American from Cleveland. It's hard to say that Lovano has influenced the direction of jazz per se, aside perhaps from the stylistic spread and ambition of his work, but in the last 40 years there has been no better player of saxophone or jazz, and in listening to him I often get to that sacred place that jazz and jazz alone can bring us to. Trane, more than anyone, showed us what that place looked like, but thereafter it was an open house.
Comments
Post a Comment