Classical Writers Should Avoid Jazz

The work of musicians, like the work of politicians, is subject to many different interpretations.

I was in the audience Sept. 10 when Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed at the Hollywood Bowl. But my experience that night was vastly different from the one presented by Times reviewer John Henken (Calendar, Sept. 12), who seems to have suffered a bout of cultural indigestion at the “multicultural” event conceived by Peter Sellars.

True, the concert was not typical Tuesday-night fare at the Hollywood Bowl. Season subscribers expecting another soothing evening of European classical music were confronted--in some ways assaulted--by an innovative program that sought to demonstrate the uses of North and South American folk-based music by 20th-Century composers and performers.

While Henken was entitled to his opinions about the relative virtuosity of the two orchestras and their individual players, his overall reaction to the concert fundamentally misread Sellars’ intentions.

Henken’s misunderstanding of the concert’s purpose was matched by his attitude toward Haden’s musicians. To describe the Liberation Music Orchestra’s efforts as “politically correct but often musically suspect” and even “far from orchestral” uses a standard of classical music criticism that does not apply to the Haden jazz ensemble.

If Sellars had intended to demonstrate conventional orchestral effects at this concert, there would have been no need to include the Liberation Music Orchestra on the program. It would have made as much sense to hire the Los Angeles Philharmonic to play the African National Congress anthem as arranged by Haden and Carla Bley and the other pieces in Haden’s repertoire.

But that was not the point. The point was to enable a Los Angeles audience to hear creative music from a composer-performer leading an ensemble of virtuoso musicians for whom the music was originally composed. Due to the passage of time since composers of the standard orchestral repertoire were actively performing, this has not been common in recent Western art music.

Because jazz is a relatively new music, this tradition of the composer-orchestra leader-performer is still alive. Indeed, it is integral to jazz music itself. The Duke Ellington Orchestra was a prime example of the tradition, with Ellington himself leading the orchestra in pieces he had written with orchestra members such as Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney and Ben Webster expressly in mind. Charlie Haden is one of several active jazz musicians carrying forward the tradition of the composer-orchestra leader-performer.

I don’t necessarily expect Henken to reflect this tradition in his reviews. But I think that The Times made a mistake in choosing a critic who mainly covers classical music to review that evening’s concert.

A similar problem arose in 1990 when the multicultural offerings of the Los Angeles Festival challenged The Times’ ability to interpret and explain out-of-the-ordinary, unconventional, non-European cultural events.

The Times needs to understand and adjust to the new reality of Los Angeles, in which these seemingly “oddball,” “multicultural” events redefine the mainstream and become the wave of the future in our city.

As a politician, I know what it’s like to be misunderstood by the news media. Let’s see the Calendar section lead the way in educating Southern California audiences about the wondrous cultural innovations all around us.