This is not about listening to jazz at home, which is how we’ve done it for most of the last 100 years. The radio, the stereo, 78s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, what else is there to say about them? They deliver music to our ears, and while that may not be the best way to experience jazz, it’s the most convenient and creates the greatest accumulation of experiences. And in listening, quantity is its own quality.
This is about being in the audience for jazz without ever leaving your home. Because that’s where we are at. Drop the prescriptive terms for plain language: stay away from groups of people so you don’t give them something they’d rather not have and so they don’t give you the same. The easiest way to do that is to stay home as much as possible.
That’s an easy game of abstract logic. Living that way is harder. And it really makes no sense whatsoever for music, which is a social activity, something people make together going back to the origins of the identifiable human species. I can’t prove it, but I would argue that when the first person made the first music, humanity was born.
That there are solo artists reinforces this. Playing by themselves, they require an audience more than any other kind of musician. People in a group can play for each other – the solo artist needs a crowd more acutely than any ensemble. (The exception is Glenn Gould who, once he abandoned concert performances, made music in the recording studio only for himself, but he was as much an oracle as a musician.)
I think about this all the time when I’m in a concert hall or a club – it’s a conscious part of my listening, getting a read on how other people are reacting, getting a sense of that invisible but very real oxytocin bond that builds among the audience and across from them to the musicians, a feedback loop of community feeling, solidarity in the experience. The first Saturday in March I was at the Jazz Gallery for the Tyshawn Sorey Sextet, and knowing that I was part of a crowd was essential to how phenomenal the performance was.
Sorey is one of the great jazz drummers, with incredible technique and musicianship, and he’s also one of the leading composers in new classical music. He’s one of the very few who, when he sits down to play, plays jazz, and when he sits down to write, writes stuff that is not at all jazz (the late, truly great André Previn also comes to mind), and his accomplishments at each have made him a well-deserved MacArthur Fellow. At the beginning of March, he self-released his first just-jazz album in a while, Unfiltered (digital only at https://tyshawn-sorey.bandcamp.com), and that’s the music he and his group played at the show, one uninterrupted set lasting a shade over two hours.
The album is one of the finest jazz records made in the 21st century, and the night felt historic. In one way that was a given, as it is whenever any deep-thinking jazz musician plays. Sorey and his group of tremendous young musicians were building off two of the most important foundations in modern jazz, the Miles Davis Quintet circa 1965-68 and Charles Mingus’s 1964 band and the recordings from their live tour. Like both those groups, the musicians (saxophonists Nathan Reising and Morgan Guerin, vibraphonist Sasha Berliner, pianist Lex Kortan, and bassist Nick Dunston) had the incredible ability to switch what they were doing – a solo, a particular rhythmic pattern or cadence – to something drastically different with a seamless immediacy. That’s not just chops in terms of how quick the hands are, but in the mind’s agility and the ability to play with the intensity and passion that has the musician lost in the music flowing through them while at the same time listening with great focus and sensitivity to what is going on around them. It is the height of musicianship and jazz playing and has never been surpassed.
That Sorey’s Sextet was playing at this level was indeed historic: it just has not happened that often. Jazz fans are lucky that we can hear so much of this, from Dean Benedetti following Charlie Parker around with his disc-cutter recording apparatus, Columbia Records setting up their microphones at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, December 22 to 23, 1965, the concert recordings and radio transcriptions that by happenstance documented so much of Mingus’ sextet on the road in 1964 – we can hear history being made in the moment, and no matter how often we listen to those records, they always sound new because they are the sound of new ideas emerging. It’s like listening to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity again and again, it’s always going to be astonishing.
This was historic too because it was new ideas emerging. The group played with the concepts and means that Davis and Mingus left here for us to learn, but within the framework of Sorey’s large-scale compositional form. They bit, they swung, they burned, all the while moving through an enormous through-composed landscape, the kind of endlessly developing phrases that have much more to do with the legacy of Wagner and Mahler than jazz song form, even at its most sophisticated. Einstein took the world that Newton accurately described and showed how it worked at levels never before imagined, and Sorey took mainstream modern jazz and made it into an epic journey that had previously been the domain of poetry and opera. In both cases, everything looked the same yet history had been changed.
But then what do we know about history? Jazz is so alive, and jazz musicians are so good (they’re like baseball players, you have to be really goddamn good to just be in the middle of the pack), and so much of the music has been made in front of small crowds, with no audio captured, that we just don’t know what we all have likely missed. And there were only so many people at the Jazz Gallery on March 7 (the last night of a week-long run). Nowadays the bulk of live gigs are recorded somehow, but that doesn’t mean the music will ever find its way to more than a few select sets of ears. With the clubs closed, musicians are streaming, but the effect has been one of loss; jazz just doesn’t lend itself to streaming like classical music, based on preordered instructions, does – there is so much history not being made, so much lost to time, like, Roy Batty said, “tears in rain.”
I kept thinking of the classic A Night at Birdland albums from Art Blakey, with Pee Wee Marquette announcing at the start, “Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, we have something special down here at Birdland this evening, a recording for Blue Note Records. When you applaud for the different passages, your hands go right on the records there, so when they play them over and over throughout the country, you may be someplace and say, well, that’s my hand on one of those records that I dug down at Birdland.” I witnessed history down at the Jazz Gallery, I hope everyone around me felt the same way. And when the world opens up again, go out and catch some history in the making. You may someday get to say, “That’s my hands on one of those records.”
