Future: Many Voices : Jazz’s Languages, Dialects Are Innumerable

The contemporary jazz era was ushered in on a chilly night in late November, 1959, at a somewhat run-down nightclub in Manhattan’s Third Avenue called the Five Spot. The evening’s headliner, the Ornette Coleman Quartet, had already released a controversial recording and raised a flurry of interest on the West Coast. But the New York City opening was eagerly trumpeted by some observers as the debut of the first significant alternative to the then-dominant be-bop and hard bop styles.

The time was ripe for something else. For better or worse, a new era for jazz was beginning, fueled by the energies of dramatically changing times. The dawning Kennedy ‘60s were about to replace the conservatism of the Eisenhower years with an upbeat new generationism. But be-bop, the hipster-embraced jazz form that had defined what little counter-culture there was in the ‘50s, was beginning to show signs of wear, unrepairable even by a second generation of hard bop players.

Not everyone was convinced, however, that Coleman was quite the musical messiah he was advertised to be. His notion that jazz could be played freely, in a kind of spontaneous musical anarchy, was viewed by many musicians and critics with suspicion--a reflection of his primitivism rather than his musical sophistication.

The weeks and months after Coleman’s debut were enlivened by a free-ranging debate over the merits of his music that rivaled--in both intensity and obfuscation--the dialectical differences between Trotskyites and Leninists.

In retrospect, Coleman’s controversial opening at the Five Spot appears to have been an event of symbolic rather than literal importance. It was, after all, John Coltrane, not Coleman who became the most influential player of the post-bop era. And Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor and George Russell, among others, had already been tilling their own radically new musical soil since the mid-’50s.

Coleman’s real contribution was more intangible but, in its own way, equally important. By making a sharp right turn away from the evolutionary flow of styles, he proposed, in effect, that jazz can be many things. While the most immediate consequences of that action were radical--sometimes in the extreme--the long-range result was the blossoming of a multitude of new jazz strains.

The next few years saw a virtual blitzkrieg of assaults upon traditional jazz techniques: Cecil Taylor’s relentless manipulation of huge blocks of percussive sound; John Coltrane’s expansion of the limits of both chromatic and modal improvisation; Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp’s heroic efforts to reach into the primal cry of music-making; George Russell’s precise applications of his Lydian Method of Tonal Organization; Charles Mingus’ astonishing ability to absorb the sounds and sights and feelings of a culture in transition and meld them into a new creative whole; Miles Davis’ exploration (still continuing) of the shadowy area between jazz and rock.

The list could go on, with greater and lesser names--from jazz action theater and aural versions of abstract expressionism and improvised pointillism and 12-note rows.

But as the ‘60s unfolded, and the energies of rock began to dominate public consciousness, much of the experimental music of the jazz avant-gardists began to feel wrong. Even the most receptive listeners found that the disturbingly nihilistic sounds of this music represented too accurate and too pessimistic a reflection of the anger and frustration coursing through American society.

As the baby boomers--the kind of vigorous young listeners who had traditionally been jazz’s primary audience--began to mature, they turned, instead, to other sounds. The songs and music associated with the great social and cultural upheavals of the Vietnam War and, in the early ‘70s, the collapsing Nixon presidency, were sung and played by rock musicians, not jazz musicians, as the baby boomers found more relevant solace in the easy accessibility, social awareness and musical energy of the new rock performers.

By the early ‘70s, rock dominated the public consciousness, and predictions of the imminent death of jazz were echoing through the jazz community--with considerable justification. The amazing success of Motown Records in the ‘60s had opened up pop music venues (with their commensurate commercial rewards) that would have been virtually untouchable by black performers a decade earlier.

As a result, the gifted young black urban performers who were at the cutting edge of jazz in the past had emerged in the ‘60s, instead, as Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Kool & the Gang, etc. And a burgeoning amateur and semi-professional interest in performing (music stores were selling more hardware than at any time in their history) quickly turned away from the demanding disciplines of jazz in favor of the easier, more lucrative potential of the various forms of rock.

Small jazz record companies went out of business and the majors, never the most avid supporters of jazz, poured massive amounts of money into the bigger bottom line potential of rock recordings.

But, contrary to some critical opinion, jazz did not exactly fade away during the bright summer of rock music. If there were decreasing numbers of young American hard boppers coming across the horizon, there was a pervasive jazz influence that reached into even the most unlikely territories.

And, if the decibel level of heavy metal bands like Led Zepplin and the moodiness of art-rock bands like King Crimson were their dominant features, the better players in such groups often reached for an improvisational freedom that was at least comparable to the jazz experience.

When singer-songwriters began to dominate the record charts, jazz influences of a different sort became apparent, in the rhythm sections as well as in the harmonic choices and blues phrasing of performers as diverse as Van Morrison, Carole King, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Tim Hardin, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Bruce Springsteen.

By the mid-’70s, when the rock engine was running out of steam and disco ruled, increasing numbers of young jazz musicians again began to turn to more direct forms of improvisation. Some--Stanley Clarke, Billy Cobham, Steve Gadd, Jon McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Bob James, Tom Scott, to name only a representative few--played in and around music that was on the fringes of rock. Others moved into different extensions of jazz. The work of players such as Paul Horn, Ralph Towner (with Oregon) and Paul Winter led to a pleasantly pastoral style that soon diversified into a myriad of forms generally bunched together under the grab-bag title of New Age music.

The stunning success in the early ‘80s of first Windham Hill Records, then a stream of other small, boutique-style record companies with New Age music, was probably an indirect consequence of the conservative winds sweeping across the country in the early ‘80s as well as the nesting patterns of the yuppie generation. At its best--typically in the work of players like Andreas Vollenweider, George Winston, Liz Story, Scott Cossu, etc.--New Age music replaces the rhythmic and harmonic urgency of jazz with a plethora of hypnotic pulsations and meditative aural densities.

But the most popular vehicle for young players since the mid-’70s, and the music which signals the complete recovery of jazz, has been fusion, a complex spinoff from the ‘60s recordings of Miles Davis and (a little later) Weather Report and Return to Forever.

A comprehensive list of fusion players would far exceed the limits of this article, but the best evidence of the style’s continuity and range lies in its capacity to encompass groups ranging from Spyro Gyra and the Yellowjackets to Kenny G and David Sanborn.

Equally important, in the ‘70s and ‘80s jazz, sometimes reflecting both the positive and the negative aspects of the integrating global community, finally evolved into a world music--the first true international language. Brazilian bossa nova in the ‘60s was an obvious early example of the way in which the music could be modified and adapted by cultures outside North America.

But there was a multiplicity of other variations, ranging from the cool didacticism of Northern European players like Jan Garbarek to the heat of African high life and Cuban salsa. In the East, the Japanese produced mainstream revivalists like Sadao Watanabe and genuine originals like Toshiko Akiyoshi, while Soviet jazz--notably in the person of the Ganelon Trio--moved toward the outer limits of the avant-garde.

In the commercial arena, jazz records have made a phoenix-like return, with major reissue programs from all the majors and a tremendous variety of new fusion, traditional jazz and New Age releases.

Nearly three decades after Ornette Coleman first suggested that jazz could sing in many voices, the languages and dialects of the music have become almost uncountable. The only limitations are those of perception. Who knows where it will go next?