I bought this 1970 magazine when I saw the full page John Coltrane photo by Bob Thiele. What I didn't expect was the associated article by John Postgate. I hadn't seen another article by him in my British jazz magazines from (mostly) the 1960s. It was the article title that initially had me searching online. Apparently an eminent British microbiologist, Fellow of the Royal Society, amateur dixieland musician and jazz writer. He was Gramophone's main jazz critic for more than twenty years ! Firstly, I'm sure the title was a take on the Blackface 'light entertainment' TV show, The Black and White Minstrel Show that ran during the 1960s and 1970s. A show that with today's beliefs is seen as highly offensive. Not just today's beliefs - I remember it being 'well dodgy' when I was young. Postgate states that jazz in 1970 is in disarray. I've seen many examples of the old guard during the 1960s complaining about modern jazz and avant-garde. However, never one who is quite clearly extremely ignorant but tries to claim intellectual authority on the subject at the same time. And from as late as 1970. It's true that jazz was in transition in 1970, but Postgate insists that the spirituality of Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders 'seemed rather ridiculous from a few thousand miles away'. With Archie Shepp it had 'taken the form of a violent verbal aggression'. Apparently Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler and all had not established a creative momentum - and this was written in 1970 ! Fusion (or jazz rock), which was in its infancy in 1970, gets dismissed out of hand. Not only fusion but modern classical music and poetry too - 'it might be music by John Cage, Rod McKuen or any other weirdo'. The author also states that 'these proposals are based on the flimsiest of hearsay', so you also have to question the editor. I also wonder if Ben Sidran distanced himself once this was published.
I have other more worthy articles waiting for inclusion in the blog, but this one just jumped out at me.
THE BLACK AND WHITE SHOW 1970-80
A speculation on the future of jazz
JOHN POSTGATE
IN THE EARLY fifties, jazz lovers of more than about ten years' standing used to worry about the parlous state of their music. It may seem ridiculous today, but at the time things did not look too good. Bop and the New Orleans revival had split jazz lovers into two camps, neither of of which recognized that the fight was over. In fact, bop had already really finished and New Orleans jazz had become transformed out of recognition: seekers of the spirit of Parker's Dial sessions found Miles Davis's Move; followers of the Hot Five found Wooden Joe Nicholas. What both sides failed to recognize, and I think most middle-of-the roaders missed it too, was that bop and the revivalist movement had given jazz a momentum, an impetus, sufficient to spawn a new generation of jazzmen and to keep the music rolling for at least another decade. The self-searching of the then modernists, expressing itself in cool jazz, West Coast jazz, soul jazz, modal jazz, 3/4 and other odd-timed jazz, was part of the natural flowering of a developing music; it was parallelled by the triumphant, if short-lived, wave of 'trad' and both movements together formed part of a period of assimilation, a coming together of musical idioms. Ronald Atkins once called the fifties an era of consolidation; it was an era in which the rather maligned term 'mainstream' became useful, simply because the idiomatic distinctions between the more creative musicians in the older and newer idioms was becoming blurred.
In retrospect, it is obvious that the rise of bop and the bop-New Orleans schism were relatively trivial incidents in the musical development of jazz. The shock of bop, to ears not attuned to it, was certainly great. But it was exaggerated by the recording ban imposed by the America Federation of Musicians in the early forties and also by the exigencies of World War 2. In Europe, at least, most jazz lovers became thoroughly confused; many (like me) reacted strongly against the new music, yet even those who went along with it were muddled and regarded musicians such as Coleman Hawkins or Charlie Ventura, as readily as Charlie Parker, as leader of the movement. Today when extensive re-issue programmes on LP have enabled us to hear more of the music of the thirties and forties than was conceivable in those days, we can recognize clear lines of stylistic development from the jazzmen of the Swing era to the bop musicians. I am not just referring to the much quoted sequence which goes: Armstrong-Eldridge Gillespie-Davis, nor the slightly more subtle sequence of Trumbauer-Lester Young-Charlie Parker, but to many less obvious (and sometimes more defensible) links. Bill Coleman, for example, was playing in the mid-thirties with an effortless control of the upper register of the trumpet which presaged the fluency of the bop trumpeters; and, more significantly, his rhythmic sense - his ability to place his notes around the beat - gave a springiness to his playing which only became widespread among the later bop trumpeters. Compare and contrast the styles of Bill Coleman and Clifford Brown and you will find that the major differences are idiomatic and not rhythmic. In a similar way, Jabbo Smith was exploring angularity ten years before Gillespie; Pete Brown was pushing the outer reaches of the common chord, without losing touch with the blues, well before Parker showed him how (and, incidentally, mucked up Brown's playing for a decade). Benny Carter was playing so cool that, in the hands of Lee Konitz and Paul Desmond, his approach survived even the onslaught of bop. And Coleman Hawkins just carried on developing in the midst of them all, so to speak.
The point I wish to emphasize is that be-bop, normally regarded even today as a musical revolution in jazz, was nothing of the sort. It seemed revolutionary largely because the jazz public fans and critics - were looking the other way. They created a diversion, albeit an immensely productive one, by initiating and supporting the revivalist movement so that bop burst upon them unawares.
HIS VIEW of the turbulence of the forties has a bearing on what we can properly call the "classical" period of jazz - using that term analogously to its use in orthodox music. Hodeir pointed out in Jazz: Its evolution and essence (1956: Grove Press, New York) that the classical period of jazz started about 1925, with the Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens. Few would dispute this proposition, but Hodeir was writing a bit too early in the history of the music to recognize that he was still in the classical period, so he closed it down with Minton's and the rise of bop. His thinking has dominated much of jazz writing ever since. Yet, as I have just pointed out, the fifties were a remarkably tranquil period, during which musicians schooled in seemingly diverse idioms could play together without doing violence to their personal modes of expression, Some, such as Johnny Hodges, remained aloof, but generally speaking bop and swing came quietly together. The musical forms of the thirties had, seemingly miraculously, survived a frontal attack and, though at the time Miles Davis's Kind of blue sounded remote from Strayhorn's Cue's blue now, the differences already seem relatively superficial and will, in a decade or so, seem to jazz lovers very minor. It was a period when we realized that Hawkins sounded as well with Clayton as with Milt Jackson, that Harry Edison mixed as well with Jimmy Forrest as with Benny Carter, that Monk and Bud Powell were from the same stables as James P. Johnson, Duke Ellington and Earl Hines.
I should therefore say that the classical period of jazz ran from 1925 until about 1962. If a line is to be drawn, as it probably is, it comes some time after 1960, when something comparable to a real 'modern' period was started by Ornette Coleman. That statement immediately begs two questions: did Coleman really start a new era? And might I not be repeating Hodeir's error by magnifying a transitional turbulence into a stylistic revolution? I had better admit at once that I shall not be able to answer either question definitively, but both are worth discussing for their bearing on the future of jazz.
Today jazz is in disarray. The death rate among musicians who made their names in the thirties and earlier, though long expected,has reduced jazz lovers of my generation and earlier to a state of melancholy introspection: witness the sad articles and comments which Jazz Journal and Jazz Monthly have carried in the last few months. Well, a decade ago lovers of New Orleans jazz were feeling the same way; they had their Cap'n John Handy as we have our Ruby Braff to restore our morale transiently, but the situation is none the less dispiriting. But as far as the music is concerned, the personal preferences of a generation of fans are largely irrelevant; most thinking jazz lovers realize at heart that if a music dies with its musicians, then it was a moribund music anyway. And in fact, the mainstream idiom -- if I may refer to that accumulation of diverse influences as an idiom for the moment - is far from dead. Throughout Europe there exists a sort of jazz underground: musicians of adequate competence, rarely if ever recorded except when an older American jazzman comes through, who play jazz ranging from near trad to the frontiers of the avant garde. They survive by playing to small local audiences; as in the rhythm club days of the thirties, the music still draws sympathetic musicians together for its own sake and a small audience can still be found to support them. What is missing, of course, is anything comparable to the big Swing bands to provide the 'overground': either to supply a living or a cause to rebel against.Only 'pop' exists which (since we are not the Sunday Times), we can dismiss as a musical force because, though very different in sound, it bears a similar relation to jazz as did Guy Lombardo or Henry Hall in the Swing era.
One thing seems very clear. The new wave - Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler and all - have not established a creative momentum within the music remotely comparable to that initiated by the be-boppers and revivalists. There has been no musical surge like that which pushed jazz into the fifties. One may yet come, in which case I am just making Hodeir's mistake again, but I think the evidence of the last decade is making it increasingly improbable. We can accept that Coleman, Shepp and Ayler may have liberated themselves musically but they have not liberated jazz; Max Harrison's suggestion, hedged rather carefully in his piece on Coleman in Jazz on Record (1968, Hanover Press: London) that Coleman might represent the birth of jazz as an independent music must be taken as optimism rather than as an opinion of consequence. Today, for fairly obvious reasons, Europe provides a better seed bed for the development of jazz than the U.S.A. and, if one listens to European jazz - or reads about it when one cannot listen - it seems that more is owed to Coltrane, Rollins and Mingus than to Coleman, Shepp and Ayler. British jazz provides as good an example as any: "composers" such as Westbrook or Collier set up a few melodic fragments analogous to a riff of the old days and have their men blow for an hour or so on this basis. Is it any wonder that the first musician who seems to blow something coherent is received with loud acclaim? For Heaven's sake let us sometimes remember that freedom of self-expression is productive only when one has something to express. (Incidentally, the poverty of the themes in present day jazz is most disturbing. Have musicians run out of reasonable permutations and combinations of the 36 or so notes in the median range of the diatonic scale? Hoagy Carmichael constructed Riverboat shuffle from three basic melodic phrases (two in the verse, one in the chorus). Such squandering of ideas would seem profligate today - or is someone fooling someone?)
SORRY, I BECAME distracted, What I should have been saying is that, when the men in groups such as Westbrook's or Collier's get blowing, what one hears are echoes of Mingus, Rollins, Coltrane or Dolphy, not Coleman, Shepp, Ayler even though the tonal developments and distortions of these latter musicians may be superficially present. It would be possible to lump Mingus, Rollins and Coltrane with the American avant-garde as collective progenitors of the most advanced European jazz but, and I agree that I am on slightly unsteady ground here, this seems to me to be an incorrect view. Mingus, Rollins and Coltrane pushed what I have called classical jazz to certain harmonic and improvisational limits; Coleman et al. broke through those limits in ways which were logical and not intrinsically difficult for others to adopt. (In theory, as I pointed out some eight years ago, the principles of free jazz could even be applied to the idioms of the Swing era or New Orleans jazz, though for fairly obvious reasons they have not been,) To make their "break through", as Max Harrison has rightly told us again and again, the avant-garde returned to the most primitive forms of jazz (or at least they set up contemporary analogues of the earliest forms). It follows that free jazz need impose no idiomatic structure of its own and is capable of idiomatic development at least comparable to that separating New Orleans from bop.
Yet no such development has happened. There are intrinsic restrictions to free jazz arising from the need for collective understanding, but none that is not familiar to jazzmen of earlier eras. Even so, when one listens to the 'hunched up squeal' so typical of the up-to-date jazz that ought to carry the influence of the newwave what does one hear beneath the shriek? Rollins, Coltrane, Mingus? So it seems to my admittedly unsympathetic ear. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I should not trust my own judgement here because my own listening, though earnest and dutiful, has not brought me into any great sympathy with the most modern idioms. But specialists on the new wave seem now to be reaching agreement that the movement has been disruptive in a way that bop never really was; that, for all the beauty they may find in it, it has been a cultural failure. Why?
My own view is that, just as the critics and fans were looking the other way when the upheaval of be-bop took place, so, in the last decade,the American negro, still the fountainhead of jazz, has had his mind on other things. Jazz musicians are persons of considerable intelligence and sensitivity - I hope I may make this assertion in these pages without having to defend it, since it must be obvious that the structure of jazz is such that sensitivity without intelligence is not enough (in this context, verbal articulacy has no relevance to intelligence). The negro jazz musician, moreover, is one of the very few people within the American negro community who is relatively free. He may suffer - we have all suffered vicarious agonies on behalf of our coloured jazz idols - but within the confines of American negro culture he is of the elite. He is one whose own efforts have brought him admiration, even sometimes wealth, from the white community. At its crudest, jazz has for years provided the negro with one of his few routes out of the ghetto.
The older musicians took this as it came. Even Billie Holiday, who suffered more than most, retained a non-racist outlook and an absorption in the music, if we are to believe her autobiography. Though none of the older jazzmen could entirely escape the insults which the colour of their skins brought upon them, until the sixties the wider struggle of the American negro could remain a compartment of their lives - or so I deduce from interviews, statements and writings derived from such musicians as Red Allen, Sidney Bechet, Ellington, Armstrong, Clark Terry and so many others. Lack of commitment to the negro cause was naturally impossible, but detachment in varying degrees was both feasible and practical. Today such detachment israrely possible.Racism has entered the music, whether jazzmen (or audience) like it or not. The ghettos are simmering and jazzmen, as the elite oft he community, must be in the forefront of some kind of action. With musicians such as Coltrane or Pharaoh Sanders their action took the form of a kind of spirituality which seemed rather ridiculous from a few thousand miles away; with Shepp it has taken the form of a violent verbal aggression; with others it has taken various forms of commitment, verbal or active. In effect, racism in one form or another enters into all formal (and many informal) remarks of modern negro jazz musicians because social pressure demands at the very least reflection on the negro's problems, and reflection cannot but lead to commitment. Such commitment has also to be overt: when older musicians such as Armstrong or Ellington resist (in the sense of suggesting restraint), they are accused of everything from Uncle Tomism to selling out to Mr. Charlie.
ALL THIS IS so well known that readers may wonder why I keep on about it. After all, jazz lovers with any interest in sociological matters at all have known for years that negro jazzmen have an elite status in the negro community which has no parallel among white jazzmen in the white community; they have also recently become aware of the pressures on negroes of such status to adopt extreme attitudes in the present negro struggles. The point I wish to make for present purposes, however, is that the musical consequences of these pressures have been a frantic and, in effect, a stultifying quest for originality.
It is a truism that artistic creativity rarely flourishes when the artist is relaxed: economic, social or psychological pressures are almost always necessary. But it is also true that such pressures need to be oblique; they must not involve the creative process directly or the cathartic effect of creation is nullified. Self expression in the jazz idiom was for Parker and Young, even for Ellington and Armstrong, one escape from the social pressure consequent on being negroes in the U.S.A. a few decades ago. For today's negro jazzmen it is no longer an escape. It is part of a response to those pressures.Moreover,it is an unsatisfactory response, because jazz has long since ceased to be a negro music. Whether today's activists like it or not, the jazz idiom crossed the racial barriers four decades ago and this process cannot be reversed. In practice it leaves the modern, negro-racist jazzman in an exasperating position which is not without its humorous undertone: whatever hip and ideologically sound musical innovations he may come up with,he may be sure that white,as much as coloured, musicians will be developing it, even improving on it, in no time at all. If today's negro jazzman is trying to reclaim his "racial" music then, from his viewpoint, it is continually being stolen from him. So the pressure mounts and what we have seen in the sixties has been, at least in part, a headlong rush into varieties of self-conscious 'originality' which has often reduced creativity to affectation.
In itself this would not matter, beyond being a nuisance for those of us who prefer their jazz to be good. But it has a more basic consequence: in the process the links which jazz once had with the mass of the negro community have been severed.
When did the break occur? I form the impression that Wes Montgomery was the last of the jazz musicians whom most critics would accept as an innovator who retained genuine contact with the negro community.By this I mean that his music was enjoyed by the negro masses with complete love and understanding; it was as much a part of negro culture as the blues or Ray Charles. I would also suggest that Coltrane was the last innovator to retain formal contact: that his music was widely listened to, but with respect rather than love and understanding. (These proposals are based on the flimsiest of hearsay, and on intuitive impressions derived from the sort of music which seemed to be in demand on radio programmes popular with negro audiences during my occasional visits to the U.S.A. during the sixties. The worst kind of journalistic source material? I cannot deny it. The reader need not agree about the musicians; he need only accept that somewhere between Montgomery and Coltrane the links were weakening rapidly). Coleman's, Shepp's, Ayler's music neither makes a mass appeal nor commands respect; it might be music by John Cage, Rod McKuen or any other wierdo, except that its practitioners mostly have black skins. Since Coltrane, the ghetto - which I distinguish from its socially conscious leaders - has remained solidly with negro pop which, in our language, is soul, gospel and blues - the sort of half-jazz which Whitney Balliett calls 'rock'. (It seems that white pop, progressive pop, underground pop and whatever else may appear on the pop scene since I type this has little status within the ghetto. For present purposes I discount the teen-age pop fan, whether black or white,)
Jazz, in the hands of the new wave negro musicians, has ceased to be part of a folk heritage and has become part of an assertion of what amounts to a racist posture. And racism is a horrible, destructive thing. I do not suggest that contemporary negro jazz is consciously evil, because that would be to attribute a degree of explicit articulacy to the language of jazz which it does not possess. merely point out the almost obvious fact that the new association of jazz with a social and political struggle has been as artistically destructive as, for example, socialist realism was to painting in the U.S.S.R. But I ought not deny the avant garde all aesthetic credit:the language of jazz has been enriched in the sense that aggression and fury are now part of its emotional vocabulary. Ellington conveyed these emotions to some degree even thirty years ago; there is nevertheless a real difference between Cootie's anger and Shepp's fury. Perhaps the shriek of frustration will stay, but, though the new wave may have produced islands of creativity, their final impact has been destructive.
Will jazz survive this crisis? Or are we witnessing the final disintegration of the twentieth century's multi-racial folk music? I do not know, of course, because economic as well as artistic factors will influence the answer. But artistically there seem to be good reasons why jazz should survive. I have pointed out that there is nothing in the mechanics of the new music which is incompatible with the tenets of classical jazz. Free jazz could easily be assimilated into the main stream of the music, to enrich its idiom and expression as did the music of Chicago, of Kansas City, Minton's etc. etc. Moreover, Europe is indeed acting as an artistic buffer. In most European countries, musicians exist who can play most kinds of jazz,andplay well. But a holding action is not enough: I do not see Europe stepping up its production of Django Reinhardts to make up for the loss of the American negro - if he should ultimately opt out of jazz.
SO ONE CAN simplify the question. Is there any prospect that American negro jazzmen will restore their links with the negro community? Phrased like that, the answer is self-evident:they are doing so, but the critics are, once again, looking the other way. An instructive record was issued recently (Cannonball Adderley's "Country Preacher", Capitol E-ST 404; dismissed on largely justifiable musical grounds by Brian Priestley last September), in which he was making an undisguised attempt to bring a mass assembly of 'Operation Breadbasket' in Chicago back into the jazz fold. Ray Charles's band is still a jazz band; at least a year or two ago, Hank Crawford's records were big sellers in the South. Though we do still see imbecilities taking place - Miles Davis following Maynard Ferguson into the phoney ramblings of electric rock - I have the impression that the ghetto is engaged in a holding action,too. "Soul", with its affinities to jazz and the blues, may, despite its unpopularity with most critics, be the music we should be watching, for it may well be the ghetto's response to the disintegration engendered by the avant garde. In which case there exists a sound basis, both in Europe and in the ghetto, for a resurgence of jazz as soon as the black avant garde can sort itself out.
Acknowledgement: I have drawn freely on conversations with Dr. Ben Sidran during a study of Black American music at the University of Sussex and am indebted to him for making me think about these things constructively and for interpreting to me both musical and social attitudes of modern American negro musicians. He is in no way responsible for any opinion I have expressed.
Reference : Jazz Monthly Dec' 1970
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