All That Young Jazz

Deep in the city’s cultural memory ring the hot jazz of Jelly Roll Morton, the R&B; drawl memorialized in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins books, and West Coast cool. But the Central Avenue scene died here in the 1960s. Where’s our equivalent to the ongoing $5 Friday-Saturday midnight jam at New York’s Blue Note? With the ‘90s demise of 5th Street Dick’s and Billy Higgins’ World Stage, the youth culture is gone, boy, long gone ... or maybe just waiting for the club kids to come back.

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It’s a Sunday night at the Jazz Bakery, and Los Angeles’ most secret underground music scene flickers briefly into view. That is, if you’re looking for it. Brilliant 27-year-old pianist Jason Moran leads his trio through a blazing, genre-defying set, sending shards of jazz tradition clattering and splashing against the monastic confines of the room. They look the image of late ‘60s bebop, handsome black men in suits, except this music is on a trajectory toward the now.

Deft practitioners of a hard bop-free jazz collision, Moran, rising star drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen set the tiny audience on its heels, moving in enormous, spacey leaps from classical works by Schumann and Ravel to a Moran original called “Thief Without Loot.”

But it isn’t until the trio lays into a lovely Bjork song, “Joga,” that it shows it knows the secret handshake of the young Los Angeles jazz scene. Moran lights up the interior of the Bjork tune like a CAT scan, exposing the individual bones of the melody and coloring the spaces in between with raw improvisation. Hearing it, it’s impossible to think of the song the same way again.

“Earlier you asked me what I was into, how I’d characterize the local jazz scene for young players. This is it right here,” says Reade Pryor, 19, one of the two college-age fans at Moran’s show that night. Tall and thin, wearing sideburns and a goatee but otherwise conservatively dressed, Pryor is a drummer studying jazz at USC. He shows up alone, and no one would ever know he’s one of many hundreds of students here who make up L.A.’s inchoate, almost latent young jazz crowd.

Pryor represents exactly what’s going on with young jazz in L.A. He rarely frequents top jazz venues like the Bakery, Catalina Bar & Grill or Spazio; they’re too expensive and not devoted to the cutting edge. He’s more excited about what’s going on in his school, where he’s hearing aggressive young devotees charged by a new, emerging sound: a mix of pop, rock, classical, world beat, folk and electronic music, as well as jazz standards from the ‘20s to the ‘02s. He’s being mentored by some of the finest talents among seasoned jazz professionals, many of whom live and teach here.

In fact, all the elements of a youth jazz culture are moving below the surface. But Pryor and other young artists hesitate to consider it a coherent scene. That’s because the only thing missing from their scene ... is the scene itself.

By the time Moran’s trio closes with Afrika Bambaataa’s 1982 hip-hop crusher “Planet Rock,” the definition of what can be jazz is cracked wide open again. Notably, its version of the song is not one that modern DJ or hip-hop heads would drool over--it’s slappy, distended, cosmo-funk more in the tradition of Lester Bowie and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. It’s pure, challenging jazz, and not catering to any trends.

“I guess the best description of what I’m attracted to would be avant-garde,” says Pryor. He notes a recent USC appearance by bassist Christian McBride, one of a ‘90s wave of serious young composers, remarking that McBride presented not only his own work, but also a Weather Report medley and then the Police’s “Walking on the Moon.”

“I loved it,” Pryor says with a laugh, “but afterward, I was thinking, ‘Wait, what was that? Can I define it? Should I be able to define it?’ This is what’s happening right now.”

The New Standard, and the Working World

What’s happening right now is a period of incubation. Six years ago, Herbie Hancock put out a jazz album called “New Standard,” covering hits by folks like Nirvana, Stevie Wonder and Prince. It’s not an earth-shattering album, but several young players mention that Hancock was onto something. The kids want a new standard. They want, as Patti Smith once said, “to live in enlightened times.”

Radical jazz has found decent-size audiences at various magical points in history--the hard-bop era of Coltrane and Miles in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the free jazz that followed on bop’s heels into the ‘70s, even the downtown New York “new music” scene of the late ‘80s. But this is not one of those times. “The innovative scene is there, it’s just not that visible,” says Danny Nielsen, 39, an L.A. jazz pianist, teacher and film composer. “Here, if it was a Saturday night and you were looking for it, you’d have to go look for it.”

Even then, what you’d find, most likely, is working-man’s jazz. Swinging standards delivered by nimble musicians who can play the stuff in their sleep. On a typical Friday night at Spazio, for instance, the veterans on the stand pick deftly from a repertoire of standards a hundred years deep, throwing in an original composition once or twice a set. But it’s a safe bet to say that every song’s gonna swing pretty cool and regular.

That’s the real world facing young talents now, and that’s just fine with Scheila Gonzalez, 30. An award-winning sax player who came out of the Fullerton College and Cal State Northridge jazz programs in 1995, Gonzalez has relentlessly pursued her music in an eclectic array of gigs, ranging from cruise ships to big bands to TV pilots. A regular member of at least four big bands, she says the key to her survival is pure networking.

“In my R&B; life, I play keyboards with a cover band and love it,” she says and laughs. Upbeat and armed with moxie, chops and a winning smile, Gonzalez has the survivor’s attitude that is not addressed directly in most jazz studies programs, but which a great many teachers try to communicate privately to their students. Is it capitulation with the status quo? Sure.

But it’s not enough to ‘shed (that’s short for “woodshed,” jazzspeak for holing up to practice in seclusion). Gonzalez’s vision for her own music is tempered by practical necessity: A musician’s gotta work.

“I feel very blessed to be playing the kind of music that moves me, which is jazz,” says Gonzalez. “You can be the most stellar musician and ‘shed 24 hours a day for years. But unless you get out there, no one knows who you are.”

The jazz world has come to know Gonzalez pretty well. She’s made a name for herself locally with the Bobby Rodriguez Hispanic Musicians Assn., the sax quartet Four on the Floor, an all-female ensemble called Maiden Voyage and her own 10-piece ensemble, DekaJaz.

All-woman bands are a niche that’s given her lots of work and moral support. In 2000, she was invited to play with the New York-based all-woman group Diva, which led to a tour of the Caribbean, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the far corners of the globe. Having played everywhere, including the jazz mecca of New York, she still feels as if Los Angeles offers her the best opportunity to make a living as a musician. Still, the longer she plays, the more she feels the call to innovate. “If I’m going to be hustling this hard and then booking my own ensemble as well,” she says, “I want them to be playing my music.”

No Stars, No Hits, No Scene

It’s possible to hear an actual recording of the conflict at the heart of jazz now. Just listen to “Verve Remixed,” the latest release from venerable jazz giant Verve Records. It’s on constant rotation on KCRW-FM (89.9). One of the pet projects of Ron Goldstein, president and CEO since 1998 of the Verve Music Group, the album celebrates what many jazz critics and purists have decried as the ultimate violation: DJ remixers like Richard Dorfmeister or Tricky stripping the vocals off classic tracks by Nina Simone, Carmen McRae or Sarah Vaughan and reworking them into dance mixes. Adding injury to insult, purists say, Verve then also released an album of the originals, “Verve Unmixed.”

“I don’t blame [the critics] for not liking it,” says Goldstein. “We went into some sacred ground with these great singers. But I’m trying to bring jazz to young people.”

With jazz reduced to an estimated 2% share of the total music market and still shrinking, major labels like Verve, Blue Note and Columbia Legacy make their loot off back catalogs. With more than 1,500 essential albums from every star imaginable, Goldstein inherited one of the deepest. He went hunting for new edges, helping to engineer such phenomena as Diana Krall’s 2001 monster album “The Look of Love.” He admits that progress with new straight-ahead jazz is slow.

“The outlook is not really great for young players,” Goldstein says. “We need a group that you might call a ‘wave.’ There was something similar to that about 10 years ago with Joshua Redman, Nicholas Payton, Christian McBride, Roy Hargrove, Marcus Roberts. Unfortunately, it didn’t last an awful long time.”

What’s holding back the wave, he says, is the lack of hits. “The playing is brilliant,” Goldstein says. “But no one, no one, seems to be creating music that is connecting to an audience out there.”

Goldstein is sure of one thing: The breakthrough’s not going to come from copying heroes past. The early ‘90s wave of Redman and Co. already tried that in their neo-bop stylings. They’re charming and good-looking. They wear the suits. They craft intellectually challenging music. But, says Goldstein, they’re out of step with the kids.

“Why aren’t there younger people coming up who love hip-hop music and are incorporating some of the current trends into what they’re doing?” he pleads. “I mean, wouldn’t Miles Davis have done a hip-hop jazz record right now?”

The purists may cry foul, but Goldstein’s going to give it a try. His new baby is what he calls a “def jazz” album featuring young trumpet pioneer Roy Hargrove teaming with the most recognizable voices in R&B; and hip-hop soul, including D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, ?uestlove from Tha Roots, and Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest. The idea of the still-untitled project is, of course, to get it bumping out of car stereos and in the live venues where R&B; draws massive crowds.

“The younger audience is not accepting jazz in traditional forms,” Goldstein says. “We’re trying to wake some people up out there.”

Too Cool for School?

Hidden away from ears that want hits, a new sound is fusing. The current club climate has forced it into the schools to form and grow.

“Among the students and faculty at school, there’s this kind of new genre emerging,” says Lisa Harriton, 21, a graduate student in piano at USC. “It’s kind of like a fusion of pop and classical and jazz all in one. After a recent student concert, I said, ‘Wow, I feel like I just went to church!’ It’s more than just notes, it’s spiritual.”

But the veracity of the jazz found within the walls of academia versus the sound that evolves late at night in clubs is another debate raging at the heart of jazz.

In recent years, jazz studies enrollment has been on the rise at USC, CalArts, the Cal State universities at Northridge, Los Angeles and Long Beach, and even at UCLA’s relatively new offering--all programs that didn’t even exist in the ‘70s. The Southland is saturated with young jazz talent. But are any of those players an undiscovered Bird, Duke or the leader of a future Weather Report--the kind of stars that can reclaim a music that is now a cultural phenomenon and make it a social phenomenon again?

“Something that jazz musicians have always disliked about classical music is that it has a history of institutional structure,” says Jordan Wardlaw, 21, a first-year graduate student in saxophone and woodwinds at USC. “That has a real home in Europe. In America, if jazz is really going to be this powerful market trend, it has to be free, it can’t be institutionalized.”

“The schools are thriving. All the good players are ending up there,” says Danny Nielsen. “But the kids that are seeking serious jazz as a career are using this as a refuge. This is where you go to find the jazz community. It’s become academic.”

True enough, since the first jazz programs at Boston’s Berklee School of Music and North Texas State in Denton were born in the 1970s, jazz has become a viable academic pursuit. There are practical incentives. It’s tough for budding composers to get a quartet together from the far-flung corners of the city. In school, however, they just bring the charts to class and have a whole orchestra at their disposal. The schools are the closest thing we have to a jazz neighborhood like Greenwich Village or the French Quarter, but the door is closed to the public.

“You can’t walk into a Bach concerto and just sit in,” says Nielsen. “But jazz is made that way. Guys used to walk into 5th Street Dick’s and play. The person that’s going to make the next big change is rarer now that the clubs aren’t happening. A Bird, Mingus, Miles Davis is not emerging now, because they don’t have that community to grow up with in public.”

Still, there is migration from schools to clubs. John Clayton, co-leader of the popular Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra, says that he hears about new talent the old-fashioned way. “Word of mouth,” he says. “It travels like wildfire. When a student or a young player is on fire, inspired and in love with the music, everybody in the jazz community hears about it.”

Jazz Is Dead! Long Live Jazz!

Despite all the obstacles and second-guessing, more and more young people are playing jazz in L.A. They’re not moving away to New York or Chicago or Boston, thinking it’s better. They’re counting on the scene here to gel. Or not.

“I don’t hear people at school saying, ‘Oh, I gotta get out of here and go to Chicago or to New York, where there’s more of a live jazz scene.’ They’re going to stick it out,” says Pete De Siena, 23, a graduate student in trumpet at USC. “I have a whole bunch of music school friends in New York, and I get weekly reports back from them, saying, ‘Oh, we’re not doing anything,’ or ‘I just picked up a job at Barnes & Noble.’ ”

To that end, he’s getting a degree to fall back on. De Siena came here from the New York area and was initially shocked at how difficult it was to find the “scene” in Southern California. “It’s growing on me,” he says. To De Siena, L.A. is still the place to work as a studio musician, get live and tour gigs, write jingles and scores for film and television, and to teach. And, evidently, to play live jazz.

“The biggest problem with the development of young voices in L.A. is venue,” Clayton says. “They need a garage.”

A musician grabbing a drink between late sets at Spazio agrees. “What we need is a good hang,” the musician says. “A bar. A dive where hot players go just because they know people are listening. Nobody’s listening here, they’re too busy eating dinner.”

One interesting recent development is the return of late-night jazz at Rocco down on Santa Monica Boulevard’s theater row. Once perched up on Bel-Air’s Beverly Glen and catering to the high-end supper crowd, the club run by Rocco Samozzi, himself only 30, has gone more musically and culturally adventurous in the form of a boho cafe theater. There’s no liquor license yet, but the cover’s usually only $10 for some of the most way-out jazz in the city. Plus, sets don’t usually start until 10:30 p.m. and continue into the wee hours.

“Most of the music that’s happening here is a synthesis of classical music and traditional jazz and rock ‘n’ roll and world music and avant-garde,” says Rocco’s music coordinator, 30-year-old Matt Piper. “There are a lot of people making individual statements here; they’re not trying to conform to any expectation or any preestablished school.”

Reopened nearly a year, Rocco has evolved into the kind of free music commune that the Knitting Factory never became on this coast, a redoubt for forward-thinking music like that of CalArts graduate James Carney’s trio or the L.A. Jazz Quartet. One recent night, while the Rob Blakeslee Quartet grappled with the febrile lines of hugely expansive structures approaching free jazz, Piper skittered from the couches down front to the espresso machine in a T-shirt commemorating Japanese avant-noise ensemble Acid Mothers Temple. From Eastern Bloc avant-garde to blues-skronk, the idea is new music, and that idea is something that’s been sorely lacking in L.A.

“Out of this kind of adversity is born strength,” Clayton says. “The youth will find a place to bring us this music. Once the music is really that urgent, they will find a place to play it.”