We Hear America Singing, but What?

Jazz may seem to be little more than an irrelevant entertainment this week. There’s no question that there are far more vital matters to claim our attention. But a society is defined by many qualities, and each of those qualities is inevitably affected internally by the others as well as externally by the constant effect of forces from outside.

The devastating attacks this week on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington have been compared, with considerable justification, to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. Anyone who experienced those events has not forgotten those dates. And anyone old enough to comprehend the vivid television images of planes plummeting into skyscrapers will never forget what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

There’s a reason for that. It is directly linked to the gut awareness that something has changed, that life will inevitably be different from what it was before these events took place. With Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II. With the Kennedy assassination (and the killings of Bobby Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. that followed), a powerful new generation began to come of age and another, far more divisive, war would soon dominate the country’s life.

In each case, the reverberations were felt throughout American culture as well. For jazz, those reverberations produced two watershed periods. And, as with the larger consequences to the society as a whole, the transitions were difficult and far-reaching.

World War II, for myriad reasons, signaled the end of the swing era. The only period in American music in which the ambitions and interests of jazz musicians largely intersected with the receptivity of the popular music audience came to an end. Bandleaders and their players were drafted into the armed services; some--Glenn Miller was the most prominent--died in action. A debilitating strike by the musicians’ union helped bring vocalists, including Frank Sinatra, into the spotlight. At the same time, the rediscovery of such pre-swing era players as Bunk Johnson and Kid Ory, and the growing popularity of the feel-good music of the Lu Waters Yerba Buena Jazz Band triggered a revival of interest in Dixieland and New Orleans jazz.

Surfacing through all these events, from the horrors of the war to pop music’s efforts to offer a warm sense of reassurance, a new approach to jazz--bebop--arrived in the mid-’40s.

Different in tone and method from the swing styles of the previous decade, it positioned jazz as a music whose measure was provided by the encounter between the musician and the music, rather than between the musician and the audience.

Complex, difficult, breaking boundaries of rhythm and harmony, it also represented the arrival of an African American creativity that directly expressed the rapidly escalating demand for desegregation and civil rights.

Kennedy’s assassination was the start of another watershed decade, one in which the conservative, family-oriented decade of Dwight D. Eisenhower broke loose in all directions, triggered by the sudden, violent end of the promise and hope offered by a young new president. Street demonstrations, political unrest, growing involvement in Vietnam and the arrival of rock music and an activist generation announced yet another changing stage in 20th century American life.

Once again, the repercussions were felt in jazz. To some extent, in fact, the reverse was true: The revolutionary music of Charles Mingus, the break-all-boundaries improvising of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, the emotion-scouring playing of John Coltrane actually anticipated and warned of developments to come, of a refusal to accept business as usual.

That mind-set, that insistence on jazz as a mind-opening expression, on its capacity to speak for the society that surrounded it, eventually affected rock music (think Jimi Hendrix), interacting to produce the crossover fusion and electric jazz of succeeding decades.

This week, faced with another society-shifting occurrence, the inevitable question arises once again: What impact will it have on the music?

Thursday night at the Hollywood Bowl, Wynton Marsalis was to have offered a serendipitous response with the West Coast premiere of his “All Rise” by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and a 100-voice chorus. Serendipitous because the work calls for the ultimate oneness of things, insisting that the shift from one extreme to the other is an essential, ultimately affirming quality of life.

The manifestation of that shift is an essential aspect of music via its sounds and silences, Marsalis noted last week in discussing “All Rise.”

“When something stops and then it starts, it’s like it dies and then it lives again,” he said. “And it’s the same in relation to harmony. Some harmonies open up and then close again, and I have a lot of that in this piece, sometimes with the music oscillating, spinning in and out.”

Marsalis, stunned by the events of the week, understandably declined to make any direct connection to a work that was composed more than two years ago.

Yet it’s hard not to speculate what musical changes will emerge as the U.S., and perhaps Western society, goes into a wartime mode against an elusive and extremely dangerous opponent. Will they take a path similar to the optimism expressed by “All Rise,” or will they elect to travel a route through the confused and uncertain territory that awaits the entire society?

His Father’s Son: Few jazz artists have ever had to face the challenge awaiting tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. Born barely two years before the death of his legendary father, John Coltrane, Ravi has nonetheless elected to take on a similar career, playing the same instruments in the same genre. Call it a courageous act of artistic belief.

In the beginning, Ravi Coltrane--who bears a striking physical resemblance to his father--often appeared to be cloning his sound and style.

But more recently, he has begun to break out into his own arena of expression, relying on his obviously high-level musical genes (his mother is the talented pianist Alice Coltrane) and beginning to take on his own improvisational adventure.

On Sept. 25, two days after what would have been his father’s 75th birthday, Coltrane kicks off a six-night run at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood. It comes at a time when Coltrane, like the gifted saxophonist Steve Coleman, is dealing with having been dropped by his former record company, BMG, when he was in the middle of a promising trio project with his mother and drummer Jack DeJohnette.

“All in all,” Coltrane says, “it’s been a tricky year, and I’m just trying to stay afloat, musically and otherwise.”

Part of that effort will include Ravi Coltrane’s programming of a boxed set of John Coltrane material for Verve. But his talent deserves wider acknowledgment, a fact that should be apparent to anyone curious enough to check out one of his sets at Catalina’s.