"A genre unto itself"

[Joseph K]

Reading some comments on youtube, I came across on one about John McLaughlin's amazing album Devotion: that it was like a whole genre itself; and I thought yes, the use of the Lydian mode which ties the album together, the riffs and vamps like a dream version of Hendrix with jazz chops it's all quite unique and McLaughlin never returned to it - then I started thinking about this and how it kind of applies to quite a few albums in the restless era of the latter half of the 60s into the early 70s: albums that are unique and unreplicable (this ought to be a word, but a red line has appeared under it...) basically all of Miles' work between 68 to roughly 72.

Does this describe any of people's favourite albums here? Perhaps this concept applies to the world of 'classical' music in forms other than the album. And while I enjoy many post-bop, hard bop and bebop albums, they often tend to be homogenised in terms of timbre and texture compared - not a criticism, for I love many albums like that - with Miles' early large ensemble fusion work with each album seemingly inhabiting its own sound world.

It's also a reason I find it peculiar why people who don't like 'fusion' cannot see that, more than any other variety of jazz, it is itself an umbrella term that describes things as disparate as other umbrella terms like 'classical' music... I guess in my head right now I'm imagining like a family tree of jazz genres and there are quite a few under the 'fusion' label, which are all quite distinct, and, to return to the original point, could be narrowed down to individual albums - for me at least.

[Serial_Apologist]

Not thinking specifically in terms of jazz and its idiomatic inputs and offshoots, but when it comes to the term "postmodernism" I do find difficulty in distinguishing between it and good old eclecticism, namely where different stylistic characteristics or elements within the generic umbrella (eg "classical music"), which have evolved independently of each other and often in different parts of the world, are brought together into one work. Viz. The Soldier's Tale (Stravinsky) and Sinfonia (Berio).

[Richard Barrett]

when it comes to the term "postmodernism" I do find difficulty in distinguishing between it and good old eclecticism

There you find yourself in agreement with Alex Callinicos in his Against Postmodernism - he then goes on to ask why a new word was coined for something that wasn't new, and came to the conclusion that this was to do with young intellectuals of the disappointed '68 generation having grown up into academic positions and needing to justify their abandonment of revolutionary politics by declaring that such "grand narratives" were an illusion. The problem with eclecticism as I see it is that it too often takes place on a highly superficial level (which isn't true of Sinfonia obviously, or Devotion). I like the idea of a work being a whole genre in itself. Many of Stockhausen's compositions between the mid-50s and mid-70s could be so described.

[Joseph K]

I like the idea of a work being a whole genre in itself. Many of Stockhausen's compositions between the mid-50s and mid-70s could be so described.

To the first sentence - yes, so do I. To the second - Stockhausen was precisely someone I had in mind when I wrote the original post.

[Serial_Apologist]

I probably haven't explained myself very clearly.

There is, or there once was, a view of classical music that saw this music, in terms of its language - the harmonic and rhythmic procedures and instrruments used in its performance - as integrated wholes. That is to say wholes in terms of a consistency having evolved between the abovementioned constituents over successive historic eras, in which initially "crude" folk elements would be sublimated into melodic-harmonic structures. This evolutionary process had evolved from a to and froing between sacred and secular, in which, up to roughly speaking the start of the Baroque period, contemporary with Monteverdi and Fuchs, the tipping of the balance in favour of ecclesiastic influences borne of the formalisation of contrapuntal practice revailed beyond the Late Renaissance and into the era of opera, and thence the infusion of instrumental character into vocal line.

In all this the folksy character that had initially informed sacred music and then secular instrumental music was thereby sublimated, to be enfolded beyond recognition into the more measured musical phraseology to come. While composers of the Classical period would set folk poetry, folk tunes would undergo rhythmic and harmonic re-upholstery to render them suitable for formal presentation in palaces and aristocratic balls. The "roughnesses" Beethoven re-endowed music with amounted to stretching the elaborated scaffolding developed from Bach onwards through Haydn and Mozart, rather than breaking with its basic formal tenets.

Germany's was always upheld for consistency in advancing the terms of its own tradition according to its own criteria. Wagner represented a sort of watershed: after his elaborations and expansions of harmony the picture divided in two, between a lineage drawn from Haydn via middle period Beethoven and Schumann to Brahms, and one going from Beethoven (9th symphony and Mass) via Weber to Wagner, and thereafter to Strauss, Mahler and Reger. From a reputational pov with concert promoters and publishers, the course of those outside this ambit who rose with the advent of Nationalism in the 2nd half of the 19th century, were forced to deal with the overwhelming weight of itsl presence: the more geographically distanced you were, the less ingrained the habits of musical thought. The Russian school (The Five) would have felt freer to draw on native folk idioms, or develop quasi-folkstyled simulacrums using old or exotic modes in harmonic constructions that did not need to present flattened seventh (for instance) as chromatically unresolved, than would a composer wedded within the German musical universe. Whenever a German composer either referred to folk idiom or back to an earlier period he would do so in terms of the received orthodoxies - Strauss's carefully-crafted imitations of mid-17th century French Baroque music in "Le bourgeois gentilhomme" (1912) are thus left unintegrated into a predominantly post-Wagnerian idiom, like postcard images of far-off mythical lands.

Schoenberg perpetuated this fidelity to the Austro-German way of thinking music. Schoenber regarded hmself, and his pupils, as expanding the innate properties of the Germanic way of conceiving music as the only proper legitimacy. He was hostile to composers using folk materials unadorned, as Stravinsky, Falla, Vaughan Williams, even Bartok (who in some ways was closest to his philosophy) were doing in order to "escape the influence of Brahms". As in painting, one line in the development of modernism was in the direction of abstraction; the other - which went by way of Russian influences and re-examinations of the pre-diatonic - would go by way of Debussy and, in turn, Stravinsky, to accessing musical languages outside the Western tradition. Colonialism and Imperialism had opened up the World to young composers rebelling against the conservatoire - Balinese Gamelan to Debussy at the Paris Exhibition in 1890. Here was a music without the climactic tendencides of the Euroclassical tradition, ready to be co-opted for purposes of contrast and illustration, alternating betwen states of stasis and dynamism. But howevermuch some aspects of western music became coloured by exoticism, this still amounted to incorporation: the whole-tone chords Debussy used in "Cloches a travers les feuilles" ("Images" Book 1, 1905) represented a suspension of rushed, pressured time, rather than Time's dismantlement in the mathematically predetermined structuralisms later taken to point zero by those destined to carry Debussy's unintended consequences to their limit in the early 1950s. For Schoenberg, those same whole-tone harmonies, in "Pelleas und Melisande" (1903) and thematically in the exposition, and reiterated briefly at the end of his First Chamber Symphony (1906) signified unresolved conflict and the agony of that irresolution. The one occasion in which Schoenberg did turn idiomatically to ethnicity, in his "Kol Nidre" (1938), the "Jewish" scales were deployed thematically, in the way he had subjected thematic germ motifs to dodecatonic procedures in much of his other music, post 1923.

Amid this counterposition of alternative modernist pathways - Wagner/Brahms -> Mahler -> Schoenberg -> Webern - > Stockhausen, versus Debussy -> Messiaen -> Webern -> Boulez - with its teleological drive towards absract purity and autonomy - composers who either indiscriminately drew from whatever sources they found congenial while opening avenues to non-classical, non-Western, and popular musics, the term eclectic has been ascribed, with the veiled implication of paucity of inspiration, inconsistency, non-seriousness, or inability to square up to the vital options confronting the modern composer.

Until the 1960s, that is, at which time, it might be argued, the abstraction, in the literary and visual as well as music, that had dominated the "high arts" postwar, gave way to inclusiveness, now embraced under the rubric of multi-culturalism. If art is one among many means, transcending the divisions of language, in which we are bequeathed the means to demonstrate what we have in common - that what I see, hear etc is the same as you from your perspective - then common means of communicating, transcendent of this or that background or perspective, are on hand to propose a higher unity in outlook and consequent empathy. Rightly, there is no reason for any form of artistic expression or tradition to dominate or be regarded as superior or inferior to any other; some will go as far to insist that the attribution of superiority to any particular form of, say, music, is no more than a hangover from colonial times, when technologically more productive nations imposed their will on those less advantaged by geography.

I have a feeling jazz may have an important part to play in where culture goes. What there is in the practice - at its best joining of performance principles with understandings of globalisation as a One Humanity conception have secured from all the musical and cultural inputs that continue to make jazz what it is - derived as jazz is from facilitating the personal through the interpersonal in spontaneously making music in convivial surrounds. This, as as long as the possibilities are embraced in a spirit of risk-encouraging growth, rather than succumbing to the lure of nostalgia. Beyond jazz - in ways that either render the term "jazz" redundant or descriptive of the best, most searching, open, creatively consequent cross-cultural fertilisations, those that do survive - (as have the eclectics among the modernist composers who have succeeded in winning over substantial sections of a listening public once largely wedded to the popular classics) - have the added obstacle of Capitalist Realism to contend with: the selective and perpetually repeated presentation of bits and pieces of music by composers de-contextualised from circumstances and the forces underlying them, and consequent public programming to reductive consumerist ends.

[Ian Thumwood]

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It's also a reason I find it peculiar why people who don't like 'fusion' cannot see that, more than any other variety of jazz, it is itself an umbrella term that describes things as disparate as other umbrella terms like 'classical' music... I guess in my head right now I'm imagining like a family tree of jazz genres and there are quite a few under the 'fusion' label, which are all quite distinct, and, to return to the original point, could be narrowed down to individual albums - for me at least.

The "problem" with fusion is that it became a catch all term which masked a wide variety of styles, some good, some pretty terrible. You might start off with something edgy like "Bitches Brew" but ultimately fusion opened the door for stuff like Kenny G and his ilk. For me the problem is that fusion is ok as long as the music does not lose any integrity. As soon as it becomes a cut and paste exercise of adding Indian, African, Americana , South American influences where these elements become dominant, I am afraid that I am inclined to pass. Not a fan of McLaughlin although I recognize his musicianship. It is just a matter of taste. By the mid 1970s the whole oeuvre had the potential to sound marginally better than Rick Wakeman but I think the over-bearing commercial pressures had the result of taking the edge off the a lot of jazz that took this route. There are some interesting points in the late Jimmy Heath's book which outlined the pressure from record companies to make the Heath brothers band more commercial to the detriment of the music. Getting in to jazz in the early - mid 80's, there was a feeling of relief that the influence of fusion had passed and that it was something that had to be sloughed off.

Where I agree with Joe is that a lot of the music did become it's own genre although not limited at all to John McLaughlin. Check through the catalogue if 1970s and mid 80s ECM artists and you see a multitude of musicians creating their own "brand" of jazz, whether it was John Surman, Oregon, Edvard Vesala, Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber, etc. Much of this music had not precedent and still sounds highly distinctive. Many of these musicians ditched the keyboards too even if the likes of Surman and Metheny were using technology to push the concept of jazz further out. Given the absence of one key" influencer", jazz was free to take any kind of path it wanted and, rather than being eclectic, I think a lot of original music was made at this time. Because musicians like Ralph Towner or John Abercrombie are so familiar, you tend to forget how original they were at the time. Also, I think Eicher really had his finger on the pulse at this time so that "fusion" acts like Weber's "Colours" sounded nothing like anything else at the time. Personally, I think that the first 15 or so years of ECM offered plenty of music which was far more interesting than some of the over-wrought music I feel McLaughlin produced. If you want Indian influenced jazz, try Collin Walcott's exceptional "Cloud Dance" which is far more subtle and uncluttered. I prefer anything with John Abercrombie on it to McLaughlin's pyro-technics but I suspect that is a personal thing.

If you want to be "purist" about the more traditional idea of Fusion, I would tend to agree with SA that a lot of the more interesting music came from UK based musicians like Neil Ardley or Mike Gibbs. However, I feel the better bands are the exception to the rule. The looseness of any relationship with jazz in it's more traditional meaning ultimately meant that a good proportion of fusion doesn't quite stand up these days. What might have sounded edgy in 1978, now sounds pretty twee in comparison in many instances. All in all, the jazz -rock / fusion era in jazz was pretty much akin to the Swing Era in the broader sense where the commercial nature of the music robbed it of it's sincerity. Much of the music now sounds gimmicky.

[Joseph K]

I don't think, Ian, that you can ascribe responsibility to something as abstract a term as 'fusion' for Kenny G - it's a weird kind of anthropomorphism, of sorts. But I see you acknowledge that there are good examples of fusion, and that commercial aspects were prevalent in earlier jazz as well - so good.

Thanks for the essay, S_A. I see your point about 'Capitalist Realism' except to say that it's all too real and capitalist - whereas 'Socialist Realism' had very little to do with socialism, so there is no symmetry, which one might see it as implying. I saw that you'd written an explanatory post earlier and I only just read it - I mean, I don't take 'fusion' to imply (necessarily) 'eclecticism' and thus be a postmodernist thing. But thank you for the historical context your post provides.