The story of jazz - the eighties, nineties and noughties

[Guest]

I think I can follow the story of jazz through to the 1970s. Then I lose the plot a bit.

I would be interested to hear what forum members think are the defining points of each of the eighties, the nineties and the noughties. Which is the strongest and weakest decade and why?

Also, is there already any noticeable trend to this decade that makes it different from the last one?

[Serial_Apologist]

I think I can follow the story of jazz through to the 1970s. Then I lose the plot a bit.

I would be interested to hear what forum members think are the defining points of each of the eighties, the nineties and the noughties. Which is the strongest and weakest decade and why?

Also, is there already any noticeable trend to this decade that makes it different from the last one?

Phew - it's a big subject, Lat!

You mean changes that have taken place in America, here or worldwide?

Unless someone else wants to have a go, I'll try & get back on this tomorrow.

S-A

[Byas'd Opinion]

I'm not convinced that musical developments can be tied neatly to calendar decades, but here goes. I lived in Edinburgh up till the mid 80s and since then I've been in Glasgow, so people elsewhere in the UK or outside the country might see things differently.

The Eighties

• Jazz trendy for a while in the UK. A bit of real crossover with the pop/rock/funk scene. A number of good young British players emerged. Not all lasted the course, but among those who did were Courtney Pine, Andy Sheppard, Tommy Smith, Julian Arguelles and Django Bates
• Saxophones, especially tenor saxophones, rule
• Top notch American players regularly visiting the UK (not just for festivals): I remember seeing Art Pepper, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, George Coleman, Bobby Watson, Jay McShann, Art Blakey......
• The emergence of a much-hyped neo-conservative school in the US who thought that jazz stopped with Art Blakey. (Wynton Marsalis etc.)
• Some of the best music being made by players who'd come up in the Seventies avant-garde and were now incorporating older styles of jazz in their music without becoming at all backward-looking, such as David Murray and Henry Threadgill

The Nineties and early Noughties

• Jazz now deeply unfashionable again
• Number of US visitors dropped off, partly for economic reasons and partly because the elder statesman were dying off
• Growing awareness of European, esp. Scandinavian, jazz. Worrying number of Jan Garbarek clones
• No real stylistic changes

Late Noughties on

• Another wave of promising young UK players coming through. Too early to say who'll become major figures, but it won't necessarily be the most hyped ones
• A bit of a rekindling of interest in fusion and electric jazz?
• More young folk in audiences than over the past fifteen years or so. It's the middle-aged folk like myself who seem to be missing
• Emergence of the EST style of groove-based piano trio

Okay, who's going to be first to argue?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

not argue byas'd appreciate the effort .... i do think that there is a scene now in New York and New Jersey perhaps that is creative ....

[Serial_Apologist]

There was also the influence of hip-hop in the 90s, here and in America, which appears to have fallen off somewhat of late - partly reflected in Steve Williamson's career fall-off as outlined in Jon3: interesting to see that he now associates with the free jazz/improv scene, folowing in the footsteps of Jason Yarde and Orphy Robinson among others of the original Jazz Warriors.

In the last decade much of the jazz commentariat's attention has ben lavished on Scandi jazz - the influence of the EST-type group, as well as Molvaer's area, in which real-time sampling is used more to atmospheric add-on than the structural determinant it is in Evan Parker's Electroacoustic Ensemble and like groups - and this is beginning to be heard among many emergent bands today. Several of these are emerging from the co-operatives such as Leeds Jazz, F-ire Collective and Loop Collective: co-operatives have also become a renewing force in the gathering and watershedding of ideas and fresh people into and within this country. This development is pragmatic under present and likelily continuing economic conditions, and also promising in proliferating the generation of new ideas.

There is probably more of a drive among the new generation to identify and amalgamate influences into their music reflective of Britain's ethnic diversity than was the case, say, 10 or 15 years ago, and imv this is all to the good. Worthy of mention, as regards new British jazz, are the numbers of musicians from abroad involved, almost amounting to a sort of quid-pro-quo for the departure of Django Bates and Iain Ballamy to two of the countries which have sourced us these musicians.

[Ian Thumwood]

As with a lot of jazz "analysis" I think that there has been a lot of stereotyping about what happened with jazz in the 1980's with it being distilled down to New-neos, the New Youk downtown scene and , in the country, the kind of revivalism spearheaded by Coutney Pine and Andy Sheppard which, in my opinion, didn't reall amount to anything. The most interesting new jaz in the UK seemed to come from Loose Tubes. However, the reality was far more complex and more interesting. I would single out the following as being significant:-

1. Last recordings of Swing Era artists like Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Jay McShann , Woody Herman, etc. In some cases, the results would prove to be more impressive than generally credited.

2. Younger players like Wynton Marsalis encouraged a return to more traditional "jazz values" which initially was a good thing as jazz hit a trough from the late sixties and all through the 1970's albeit there were some very notable exceptions. By and large, the 1980's was the decade when jazz got back on track. Following on from this, the success of Marsalis allowed some of the more notable players from 50's and 60's to be more visable such as Joe Henderson and Don Pullen.

3. Heyday of ECM record label. New groups like keith Jarrett trio and John Abercrombie trio as well as strong recordings from the likes of Egberto Gismonti, John Surman, Dave Holland, dino Saluzzi, Edward Vesala, etc, etc.

4. Rise to prominence of the jazz guitar which shed it's rock associations. e.e. Abercrombie, John Scofield, Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny. This resulted in a counter-culture to Hard Bop by taking on board influences of country, "Americana" and other non-jazz musics. Also note benefit of technology. Th 1980's was the decade when jazz guitar really came into it's own,

5. New York "Downtown" scene. This now sounds pretty dated in my opinion.

6. M-base and emergence of the likes of Steve Coleman, Cassandra Wilson, etc.

7. Gil Evans "Monday Night " orchestra - Not a great band but a major influence on MMW who were very significant in the next decade. First seeds of "Jam bands" started with this orchestra.

8. Re-defining of Big Band jazz with the likes of Loose Tubes, George Gruntz, Mike Gibbs and Carla Bley by the end of the decade, which looked to progress the writing beyond Gil Evans. This tendancy increased in the 1990's and 2000's.

9. Avant garde ideas started to get incorporated into the mainstream and the general demise of head-solo-head / 'round the block kind of jazz which started to sounded stale and jaded by the end of the decade. More attention given to writing.

10. Arrival or establishment on the scene of musicians such as Geri Allen, Branford Marsalis, Mike Brecker, Don Grolnick, Robin Eubanks, Tom Harrell, Dave Liebman, etc. General rise of a generation of musicians who represented the most impressive "en masse" wave of significant talent since the early 60's. i would suggest that this is the one element that had the most lasting impact / impession on jazz.

11. Paul Motian trio ~ refining what a jazz trio could sound like.

12. Global approach to jazz explodes. Abdullah Ibrahim's Ekaya really hits form.

13. Last decent Miles Davis album ~ "Aura."

14. More commcercial organisation of jazz festivals ~ especially in Europe.

[Lateralthinking1]

These are fantastic posts. Really informative. Many thanks for them and the more the merrier.

I am getting from the comments a sense of jazz being rather less innovative than in earlier decades - fewer dominant styles in a process of moving forward - and yet far more diverse. If so, I would suggest that this runs in parallel with other genres.

I have also picked up on elements of crossover in the many references - funk, hip-hop, world, even Americana. I would be interested to hear how people think such things have enhanced and detracted, and whether the rises and falls in popularity can be linked to the levels of popularity found for other genres at any recent point in time.

Also, how far can the term jazz be stretched? Is there a point at which, say, Bill Frisell drops away from it. East/West to me is jazz but I am not so sure about Disfarmer. I have read favourable comments on this board about Soweto Kinch but I wonder about his jazz credentials and then an outfit like Portico Quartet who won a jazz award but could be heard as having almost a new age style.

I don't want to hammer it all down and, of course, much is down to individual perception. When though I first heard Kinch, I thought that it was the beginning of a whole new movement but a few years later he seems to be a bit of a one-off.

[Serial_Apologist]

These are fantastic posts. Really informative. Many thanks for them and the more the merrier.

I am getting from the comments a sense of jazz being rather less innovative than in earlier decades - fewer dominant styles in a process of moving forward - and yet far more diverse. If so, I would suggest that this runs in parallel with other genres.

I have also picked up on elements of crossover in the many references - funk, hip-hop, world, even Americana. I would be interested to hear how people think such things have enhanced and detracted, and whether the rises and falls in popularity can be linked to the levels of popularity found for other genres at any recent point in time.

Also, how far can the term jazz be stretched? Is there a point at which, say, Bill Frisell drops away from it. East/West to me is jazz but I am not so sure about Disfarmer. I have read favourable comments on this board about Soweto Kinch but I wonder about his jazz credentials and then an outfit like Portico Quartet who won a jazz award but could be heard as having almost a new age style.

I don't want to hammer it all down and, of course, much is down to individual perception. When though I first heard Kinch, I thought that it was the beginning of a whole new movement but a few years later he seems to be a bit of a one-off.

What you say about Soweto Kinch is probably just about right, Lat, though he does continue furrowing along his particular "knowing" fusion of postbop and rap. Personally I don't think of the Porticos as jazz, more a sort of Minimalist/Ambient hybrid with a thin skin of improvisation.

I'm probably on shaky ground here, not having considered jazz's relation to other music in that way, but it occurs to me that jazz tends to evolve at its own pace, regardless of what is going on in other genres. Jazz has always taken on board from other musical genres, but imo most successfully when on its own terms: viz the rhythmic digital complexities of drum 'n' bass in sublimated ways entering the vocabularies of contemporary jazz drummers. The nearest that I can think of of a convergence between jazz and other more popularised genres predates the period chosen as your topic of enquiry, and that would have to be the Progrock and Funk/Disco period of the mid-1970s, and for the fact that all three genres were effectively exhausted for a complex of reasons, commercial and to do with social and political changes, it is instructive that jazz had by then the inbuilt survival resources, musically and self-organisationally, to absorb what it found congenial and (horrible term) move on.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i am now very unsure about flagging innovation as a hallmark of aesthetic choice in jazz ..... there are now many very adventurous and technically virtuosic artists exploring the spaces opened by the pioneers .... sometimes i find their music far preferable to the 'innovators' ... many paths have led to pretty quickly exhausted improvisatory resources ... now the artist must face the range of stylistic and methodological issues that the art has created and that palette is wider and deeper than ever before .... to synthesis a personal voice and improvisatory approach now is a different predicament than it was .... compare and contrast Hancock and Jarrett say or look at the whole flock of saxophone players currently offering riveting improvisations for examples of the choices that can be made now... maybe jazz now offers less 'innovation' but artistic creativity is at a much higher premium ............ and i do think that some of the 'innovation' of the free improv scene has driven away the jazz audience, not offered too much in the way of a creative platform and is of less and less relevance to the art .... eg the current Wayne Shorter Quartet is neither free nor formalised but has most audiences agasp at its creative effort ...

[MrGongGong]

I'm no Jazz expert (or even enthusiast) but I do think it's important not to confuse Jazz with Improvisation
in some "Jazz" there is less improvisation than in a Haydn string quartet
and there is much improvised music that has little to do with Jazz
much of what went on at the LMC in the 1980's when I used to do gigs there sometimes was, (IMV) not really to do with Jazz at all , even though many of those people were claimed by the Jazz enthusiasts

[Ian Thumwood]

Calum's ppst effectively sums in up. I totally agree with this. There is almost a case for the "ground rules" being established for jazz between 1917 and 1970 and that this effectively produced the canvas upon which the jazz musicians of the last 30 years could experiment.

Picking up on "dominant" styles, I think it is probably correct that there has been no one voice who has really steered jazz in a particularl direction like louis, Bird or Coltrane but there is little need to do this. Any innovations in improvisation are incremental or a new voice may have a persuasive influence over their peers (probably the best example of this is Brad Mehldau who is amazingly influential with the jazz festival I attend each year being full of clone trios) but not offer anything too new. Without doubt, the jazz scene over the last 30 years is more varied, interesting and diverse than at any time in it's history.

I was curious to read Byas'd opinions about each of the decades. For me, the 80's rolled into the 90's and I felt it just showed an increasing degree of maturity with artists like bill Frisell and John Scofield who I was heavily into at the time. This was probably true if many other musicians as well although newer talent seemed to rise thick and fast whether it be Dave Douglas, Chris Potter, Joshua Redman, etc, etc. This process is still continuing thankfully. For me, there was a distinct chance around 1999/2000 as the Nu jazz fad kicked in and there seemed a period when the 21st century would see a flood of piano trios and "Scandi jazz." EST now seem pretty forgetable and I am pleased that much of this really tedious stuff is now far less popular. The "groove-based piano trio was a nightmare scenario and it is great to see the likes of Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer steering this instrument back to a proper path.

Picking up on the Frisell east/ West CD, I alwaus prefered the exceptional "Quartet" which is a curious post-modern take on the kind of jazz performed by Adrian Rollini in the 1920's, No doubt that this is jazz and still the best tecord BF has made under his own name in my opinion.

[Tenor Freak]

The Eighties

• Jazz trendy for a while in the UK. A bit of real crossover with the pop/rock/funk scene. A number of good young British players emerged. Not all lasted the course, but among those who did were Courtney Pine, Andy Sheppard, Tommy Smith, Julian Arguelles and Django Bates
• Saxophones, especially tenor saxophones, rule
• Top notch American players regularly visiting the UK (not just for festivals): I remember seeing Art Pepper, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, George Coleman, Bobby Watson, Jay McShann, Art Blakey......
• The emergence of a much-hyped neo-conservative school in the US who thought that jazz stopped with Art Blakey. (Wynton Marsalis etc.)
• Some of the best music being made by players who'd come up in the Seventies avant-garde and were now incorporating older styles of jazz in their music without becoming at all backward-looking, such as David Murray and Henry Threadgill

Okay, who's going to be first to argue?

Not much to argue with there, it pretty much chimes with my own memories of jazz in Britain in the 1980s. As you say, there were a lot of British tenor saxophone players emerging, here's a not-at-all comprehensive list in addition to that above:

• Steve Williamson
• Dave O'Higgins
• Tommy Smith
• Iain Ballamy
• Ed Jones

I had a thought the other day when listening to a Tony Kofi CD, that back in the 80s and 90s, all the younger players copied Trane, which sounded so modern then, and sounds vaguely old-fashioned, now. Obviously the better players have moved on from that (Ballamy, Williamson).


A couple of things I would add. Yes, jazz was trendy for about 30 seconds amongst a certain middle-class yuppie (remember that word?) crowd. The music was used to advertise various types of product. I present this gem of commodification from 1986:

(BTW Don't Drink And Jive)

Around that time I used to go to a jazz workshop in Richmond (SW London) where various turtle-necked people would show up. One became the advertising editor of The Wire and boasted about his Selmer Mark VI tenor sax.

I am always saddened slightly when I think of Wynton Marsalis, and what he could have become had he not decided to go the way he went. His album "J-Mood" is brilliant. Still, at least now we have Ambrose Akinmusire.

And for me personally, getting hold of some Blue Note reissues on heavy vinyl with the thick cardboard sleeves was something special. I still play some of them today.

[Ian Thumwood]

Ways wondered if the older bloke in that advert was an actor or a real musician.

For me the 80's / 90's tend to blend in to each other with the only notable downside being the speed with which bands like Loose Tubes and Bass Desires quickly broke up. The big difference seemed to be around 1999 when , all of a sudden, there was a lot of groups who were using sampling or dance club beats.For about 5 years, the press seemed really encouraged by this "Nu Jazz" but never got into it. This was the first time that I ever felt that I was getting old and started to think that earlier jazz was better!! About 2003/4, I had a long discussion with apromoter of a jazz festival in Belgium who told me that she thought that this music had a massive future and looked like presenting a major sea-change in the music as it managed to interest a far younger generation. Funny that it never really managed to establish any lasting impact and much of this stuff has gone by the wayside, the laptops getting ditched, the sampling banished and the over-whelming monotony confined well and truly to the history books. However, i think it did represent a point when the 80's mantra of "Tradition" got booted into touch in a pretty savage fashion with comments like "jazz with a rock attitude" starting to be a badge of honour amongst younger bands. Never a fan and good to see the balance somewhat addressed ten years later.

[Tenor Freak]

The big difference seemed to be around 1999 when , all of a sudden, there was a lot of groups who were using sampling or dance club beats.For about 5 years, the press seemed really encouraged by this "Nu Jazz" but never got into it. This was the first time that I ever felt that I was getting old and started to think that earlier jazz was better!!

There was a lot of that kind of thing going on, and it never seemed very convincing. Having a DJ with turntables just seems to get in the way of the other instruments in a jazz ensemble, and the language of the music has evolved without needing samples.

I do like sampling etc but the context has to be right, and ambient/IDM music seems a much better fit.

[Byas'd Opinion]

Here's some late 80s Tommy Smith for you. Also in the horn section are Colin Steele on trumpet and Phil Bancroft on 2nd tenor, both of whom are well-established on the Scottish jazz scene. The guitarist is Nigel Clark, now one of Carol Kidd's regular accompanists.