"Jazz for the New Century" - Nate Chinen. Upcoming book...

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

One for all the "where's it going, where's it been, what's its name, alive, dead, resting", angry protagonists on this board?

"Playing Changes : Jazz for the New Century"

Nate Chinen

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,14 Aug 2018-Music-288 pages

0Reviews

From one of jazz’s leading critics comes an invigorating, richly detailed portrait of the artists and events that have shaped the music of our time. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, here is the first book to take the measure of this exhilarating moment: a compelling argument for the resiliency of the art form and a rejoinder to any claims about its calcification or demise.

“Playing changes,” in jazz tree path through a chord progression. Nate Chinen'sPlaying Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of real changes—ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical—that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music. He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music.

Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters—from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding—who have exerted an important influence on the scene. This is an adaptive new music for a complex new reality, andPlaying Changesis the definitive guide"

Nate Chinen is/was a jazz writer for the New York Times and also Programme Director of WBGO (Jazz Radio), Newark US.

BN.

My incendiary jazz pamphlet, "If it ain't on Bluenote..." is at present at the Soviet typesetters.

[Ian Thumwood]

Stuart Nicholson wrote a similar book called "Jazz: The Modern resurgence" at the close of the 1980s which is quite interesting. It nicely captured the vitality of the jazz scene in the 1980s when you could still hear musicians who had been around in the 1930s as well as a lot of new stuff, whether musicians influenced by Wynton or other directions. He was a but dismissive of ECM which I really loved at that time but he subsequently revised his thought in the 2000's in a follow up that I did not read which suggested that American jazz was dead and the European movement was the main thrust of interest. The names suggested in the publicity are suggestive that he know what he is talking about s these are characters you would expect to be reading about in such a book. There does not appear to be a reference to either the British or European scenes in the publicity and it would be interesting to see if Chinen's take is as positive as say a magazine like "Jazzwise" which gives equal measure to both sides of the Atlantic.

I stumbled up this really interesting article yesterday where drummer / bandleader Sherrie Maricle is put on the spot to identify bands in a blind fold test. These interviews are fascinating, not least when the musicians fail to recognise well-known characters !

https://jazztimes.com/departments/before-and-after/sherrie-maricle-big-band-history/

I would expect Maricle's opinions differ substantially from some held in this board but I concur with a lot of her comments. It is intriguing to read her comments about the International Sweethearts band which I can never recall hearing yet which had a really good reputation at the time. It has been air-brushed out of history. The performances discussed include the usual suspects such as Buddy Rich, Mel Lewis, Philly Joe and Elvin yet the most interesting comments concern the writing abilities of Maria Schneider and Alan Ferber. The latter two assessments really chime in with my own thoughts on the contemporary scene. I am a fan of both Schneider and Ferber and, in my opinion, would belong at the forefront of any book that discusses the current state of jazz. There is a lot of contemporary jazz which I feel is very over-rated and labels like ACT and ECM whose output probably takes more column inches than the music merits. I keep on coming back to this idea but contemporary big band writing is at extremely high levels now and the likes of both Schneider and Ferber remain for me two of the most important musicians in this field today. It always interests me to read SA's opinions which equate jazz sophistication with more improvised styles of jazz which took their cues from the revolution in the music from the 1960's. I partly concur with this and believe that the avant garde today is the most interesting element in jazz but I place it along with writing for large ensembles at the forefront of the music . There is a lot in jazz which is modish and gimmicky at the moment and I feel perhaps over-praised. This is why I found the Maricle interview interesting. She is not only relatively unknown in the UK ( she is something of a female Wynton in the US) but she clearly sees the same forces at work in big band jazz.

[Serial_Apologist]

Stuart Nicholson wrote a similar book called "Jazz: The Modern resurgence" at the close of the 1980s which is quite interesting. It nicely captured the vitality of the jazz scene in the 1980s when you could still hear musicians who had been around in the 1930s as well as a lot of new stuff, whether musicians influenced by Wynton or other directions. He was a but dismissive of ECM which I really loved at that time but he subsequently revised his thought in the 2000's in a follow up that I did not read which suggested that American jazz was dead and the European movement was the main thrust of interest. The names suggested in the publicity are suggestive that he know what he is talking about s these are characters you would expect to be reading about in such a book. There does not appear to be a reference to either the British or European scenes in the publicity and it would be interesting to see if Chinen's take is as positive as say a magazine like "Jazzwise" which gives equal measure to both sides of the Atlantic.

I stumbled up this really interesting article yesterday where drummer / bandleader Sherrie Maricle is put on the spot to identify bands in a blind fold test. These interviews are fascinating, not least when the musicians fail to recognise well-known characters !

https://jazztimes.com/departments/before-and-after/sherrie-maricle-big-band-history/

I would expect Maricle's opinions differ substantially from some held in this board but I concur with a lot of her comments. It is intriguing to read her comments about the International Sweethearts band which I can never recall hearing yet which had a really good reputation at the time. It has been air-brushed out of history. The performances discussed include the usual suspects such as Buddy Rich, Mel Lewis, Philly Joe and Elvin yet the most interesting comments concern the writing abilities of Maria Schneider and Alan Ferber. The latter two assessments really chime in with my own thoughts on the contemporary scene. I am a fan of both Schneider and Ferber and, in my opinion, would belong at the forefront of any book that discusses the current state of jazz. There is a lot of contemporary jazz which I feel is very over-rated and labels like ACT and ECM whose output probably takes more column inches than the music merits. I keep on coming back to this idea but contemporary big band writing is at extremely high levels now and the likes of both Schneider and Ferber remain for me two of the most important musicians in this field today. It always interests me to read SA's opinions which equate jazz sophistication with more improvised styles of jazz which took their cues from the revolution in the music from the 1960's. I partly concur with this and believe that the avant garde today is the most interesting element in jazz but I place it along with writing for large ensembles at the forefront of the music . There is a lot in jazz which is modish and gimmicky at the moment and I feel perhaps over-praised. This is why I found the Maricle interview interesting. She is not only relatively unknown in the UK ( she is something of a female Wynton in the US) but she clearly sees the same forces at work in big band jazz.

Most kind of you to say so, Ian. I would argue that there have been two major revolutions within the jazz tradition: bebop and free jazz a two-stage process of emancipation with universal implications albeit the outcome of unresolved racial issues, Stateside, at any rate initially in the case of free jazz, which would have become more emblematic of the sixties were not that decade as much about consumerism as anticapitalism. There were parallels with the musical revolution brought about in the immediate pre-WWI era of Euroclassical music by the well-known handful who broke with past practices to make way for the new, inasmuch as subsequent practices had to take account of them, even if this was in the way more conservative representatives of each tradition were forced to define their adherence to past practices in relation to the changes; but with the exception of the musical languages carrying the messages, which were to do with carrying through the implications for the rest of how music is put together of what happens if, in the one example, you drop tonality as your central organising principle, and in the other, you drop chorus and indeed, eventually, any pre-set compositional structure as your basic organising principle. Because in the former it was a question of the composer at his or her desk grappling with the materials of music, whereas in the latter it was a case of musicians on the bandstand working our co-operatively, and often in full public glare, with varying degrees of forsaking hierarchical roles. In this the jazzers were, as has been seen, taking on aspects of Euroclassical Modernism, but doing it on jazz's terms. This has been what has allowed jazz to be judged the true inheritor of progressive modernism - those very terms being at one and the same time questioning of the idea profoundly questioned by Parker, Gillespie, Powell, Roach & co in the 1940s that a particular section of society lacked the cultural, if not natural, endowment, to do what white, usually conservatoire composers rebelling against worn out academic practices, had managed to achieve in writing "La Mer", "the Rite of Spring", "Erwartung" or "Porgy and Bess", and delivering a sound message to successors to challenge the idea that advancing musical means of expression had nothing to do with bringing about a fairer, more inclusive society. In so doing, symbolically the challenge was one of recognising those advances if jazz was to be as much about reflecting and being a part of change for the better as maintaining itself as a broad church, with the kinds of entertainment value without sacrificing skill and quality represented by Dizzy Gillespie from the 1950s at one end to the minority-appealing explorations of Cecil Taylor, Coltrane and the AACM musicians and groups in the '60s. The trick, or the favoured balance, for me at any rate, is in safeguarding the experimental and its defining praxes as vital if jazz is to continue to provide, or return to providing, the cutting edge musical counterpart to social and political change it did in the 1940s and 1960s - which for all the above reasons it is capable and centre-placed to do - and not lose nerve by becoming just one alternative form of musical creativity to a once-relevant modernism in the classical sphere that has itself lost its way, with of course honourable exceptions we are, ahem, privileged to knowledge of courtesy especially those availing us of their work and wisdom on this 'ere forum.

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

The problem I find with the traditional narrative about jazz is that the idea that soloists or movements being seminal tends to overlook the facts that a lot of changes such as Be-bop and Free jazz had their antecedents far earlier. I just feel that to limit jazz to just two "major" revolutions is pretty simplistic as there are other equally important changes that tended to creep up within the music without getting the attention of Charlie Parker or the Free Jazz stuff of the 1960's. I feel that each decade seems to have its major shifts with the kind of changes that took place after Louis Armstrong representing a paradigm shift in what went before. It always make me scratch my head that the 1920's is referred to as "The Jazz Age" because the music in the latter half of this decade was so different to what had existed prior to about 1926. You could do worse that read the excellent Ralph Berton book "Remembering Bix" which is explicit in chronicling how a swathe if jazz musicians instantly became redundant musically because of the innovations of Armstrong. Personally, I think Armstrong is far more significant in the long term than Parker. Move forward to about 1937 and Basie's band represented another revolution but this time rhythmically with the result that anyone who did not take the lead from the Count was likely to sound anachronistic. Modern rhythm came about in jazz largely through the involvement of Basie and the whole notion of swing than ensured pretty much lasted for about two decades. If you switch to the period after Free Jazz, I think that the music has covered an awful lot of ground in the ensuing 50 years. By your definition, the two significant developments took place within a 25 year period within a style of music which has a recorded history of 100 years. This is largely why I don't buy some of your arguments, especially as jazz has increasingly become less and less a reflection of social history and more artistic.

All through the history of jazz, the understated element in the music which became increasingly important was composition. Despite the innovations of players like John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor who redefined jazz in the 60's, jazz composition will always outlast these changes because it is something that if a key component to the music. I recognise that the changes brought about by these kinds of players influence composition but they are not the only factors. Duke Ellington's approach was largely unique and original but I feel he remains a cornerstone of the music. For me, big bands are like the equivalent of symphony orchestras in jazz and whilst they have had a fairly standard line up, there have always been attempts to experiment with instrumentation with bands like Seeger-Ellis's orchestra in the 1930s. Of course, you get writers like Gil Evans who radicalise the whole concept of jazz writing and make everyone else re-think their concepts but I don't see big band composition as being any less radical, "cutting edge" or "innovative" than other forms or styles of jazz. I love the idea that jazz writers can create a distinctive style through their composition or even think about how they write . There are elements that can remain largely "free" in large ensembles (the recent Taylor Ho Bynum disc is a good example) but , to be honest, listening to this kind of stuff is interesting but significantly less so than writers like Schneider or Ferber who have a more mature concept. There is so much variety with big band jazz that I feel is it significantly under-represented, almost as if someone wanted to discuss Classical Music but declined to mention any symphonies. I have records by bands as diverse as Benny Goodman, McKinney's Cotton-pickers, Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman. Maria Schneider, Thad Jones, John Hollenbeck, Brotherhood of Breath, Mike Gibbs, Kenny Wheeler and Alan Ferber to name a few. In this country there have been writers such as Mike Westbrook who have employed the big band are their made tool of expression and it is fascainting just how many "soloists" actually want to explore this oeuvre too ranging from the likes of Tom Harrell, Jimmy Heath, Roy Hargrove , Anat Cohen, etc. The music covers nearly 90 years of composition and I just feel that this writing has tackled all the problems jazz has sought to address from making reed instruments swing ( not mean feat in the 1920s!) through to looking at how the music tackles form and orchestration. Composers are recent as Jim McNeely and Bob Brookmeyer have explored ideas with large ensembles which stand toe-to-toe with Cecil Taylor as pushing the envelope. I would be very interested to read what Nate Chinen has to say about big band jazz.

I don't necessarily see that jazz reached some sort of zenith in the 1960s and think that jazz goes through both periods of innovation and up blind alleys from time to time. Some of the Swing bands in the 30's and 40's resulted in a water-down of jazz even if you can admire bands like Glenn Miller's for other reasons. I don't see these big bands as being any different from what happened with fusion in the 1970s and what I think has happened in the last 10-15 years insofar than popular music influences have dominated the music at the expense of innovation. "Go -Go Penguin" are simply a manifestation in our time of what Glenn Miller was doing in 1940. You could argue that the influence of EDM is not different in this respect, There have been some serious steps forward in jazz since the 60's and even the so-called avant garde players of that decade mellowed quite considerably by the 1980's. You only need to listen to something like Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy to appreciate that. However, what ever has been popular, fashionable, politically conscious , "cutting edge" in jazz, there has always been a big band jazz ensemble to reflect this. I just think, and this is entirely personal, that we are in some sort of golden age of big band writing where all sorts of possibilities are being explored. I feel that it is a style of jazz that doesn't get sufficient credit on this board.