My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you that in 2020, the state of jazz is… well, I suppose it all depends on what you mean by “state.” In a country where the highest-paid public employees are football coaches and where artists are expected to work for the non-remuneration of “exposure,” jazz as a professional calling remains a daunting proposition. We like to talk about making things as both more honorable (see Shop Class as Soulcraft) and more socially and economically viable than any other path in life. The obsessive heuristics in the media-political industrial complex about “family farmers” and “working-class voters” show a confusion between the emotional value people have for things that they can hold in their hands and what people are willing to pay for. If we rewarded the actual makers instead of the takers, then brokers skimming a commission off every transaction would be the ones applying for food stamps.
So, yeah, if you want to be ground into powder by economic misery, be a jazz musician. But if you want to make explosively exciting and creative music, if you want to be in a position where live performance leads to transformation and ecstasy, then be a jazz musician. Because musically, jazz is in tremendous shape, as this winter once again proves.
Look up the 7th Annual NPR Jazz Critics Poll (it began 14 years ago at the Village Voice). Run by the venerable critic Francis Davis (all his books are worth reading), this year I was one of 140 critics to send in picks for best albums of the year. With all votes in, none of my top 10 made it into the overall top 10. You may think that makes me out of step with the mainstream, and of course you’re right, that’s my obligation as a critic. But that’s also a measure of the music’s health, as seven of the overall top 10 would edge into my 11th place. None were 11th best – at this level of quality it comes down to personal, gut response. There are more than 50 albums total on the list (there are different categories for rare and archival recordings, vocal jazz, latin jazz, and best debut) and just about all of them will give you pleasure.
New albums are only half the story, the rest happens live, and the best place to get even a small handle on what’s happening in jazz in the 21st century is the New York City Winter Jazzfest. If the mainstream (Blue Note records and club, for example) and the avant-garde (the Vision Fest) are two ends of the contemporary jazz continuum, the WJF fills the enormous space in between. It has been gradually moving away from the idea of preserving the traditions of swing and bop, and my impression is that that’s in part intuitive and also in response to where the crowds have gathered through the festival’s previous decade-plus. Jazz lovers have been paying for the good stuff.
The most valuable thing in American culture is the dollar. It not only buys things but bears social, intellectual, and moral standing. If you have a lot of dollars, you’re seen as not just wealthy but smart, and a good person. This is so pervasive that even the critics, who should know better, judge success based on how many tickets or units something sells.
In the overall scheme of things, jazz earns a pittance. With nothing, there’s nothing to lose, and so 21st-century jazz is not only high quality in the manner of its execution, but in the fearless way so many musicians are pushing the music around and seeing where it can go.
Where it’s going, as in classical music after World War II, is in all different directions. The variety of current trends is further testament to the music’s heath. There’s a group of musicians centered around the Pi Recordings label that are something of a Henry Threadgill school, using complex meters to produce a fiery pulse and playing contrapuntally intricate lines above. Pi also records drummer Dan Weiss’ math-rock/free-metal group Starebaby, and they played a wild set at the Sultan Room, dedicated to Neil Peart. The International Anthem label in Chicago is a home for exciting experiments in melding jazz with soul, gospel, hip hop, and the techniques and aesthetics of remixing, and was prominently represented at Webster Hall by drummer and bandleader Makaya McCraven.
Down in Texas, Astral Spirits has connected some of the finest contemporary improvisers with the Bandcamp/cassette tape marketplace – one of their 2019 releases features pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, who brought an exciting new quintet to The Dance on Lafayette Street. Still young tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis is the quintessential old-school jazz musician in contemporary form – he leads his own group, collaborates and appears with others, is a member of the two-fisted spoken-word-jazz group Heroes Are Gang Leaders – and his rhythm section of Luke Stewart and Warren Crudup III make punk-jazz bass and drums as Black’s Myths. They played Nublu and Heroes played the Mercury Lounge, as did drummer, vocalist, and bandleader Kassa Overall, who is making a seamless mix of jazz and hip hop that is smooth, sophisticated, earthy, and packs a wallop, like two fingers of fine aged single malt. The world of the WJF is so abundant that cutting-edge tenor players JD Allen and Noah Preminger weren’t even in the lineup, nor was Threadgill, who has a new record slated for later this year.
The WJF itself is still just a sliver of what’s happening and doesn’t even touch on the music you can hear at Jazz at Lincoln Center or clubs like the Village Vanguard or Birdland. That these places are still hanging in there as businesses (JALC, as an institution, is something different), and the good crowds of hip listeners, old and young, mean survival is still viable.
[pullquote]Even more, it’s necessary. American culture, in general, has a problem with beauty. That quality in any art becomes either a bourgeois commodity or repurposed as therapeutic – either way utility replaces essence. But beauty is the one thing that I hear common to all the new jazz thinking that reaches my ears.[/pullquote]
This is John Coltrane’s enduring legacy. His imitators have fallen away and musicians have found their own personal means of searching for the transcendent experience that was the non-musical point of his playing. Jazz improvisation is so firmly ingrained as an inherent practice of spiritual and intellectual transformation that it’s expected. To expect it is one thing, to experience it is different, and I was rather stunned by the sonic and emotional beauty I heard at Webster Hall from trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and McCraven’s band. They played with the physical energy of a rock band, Akinmusire pulling lyricism from out of a deep, personal place, and McCraven digging into the beats heard on his Universal Beings album to support great waves of communal feeling.
This was not prettiness, but beauty, the kind that comes balanced with the pain of creating it, the kind of beauty that can redeem the worst things in life. For why we as a country need this kind of beauty, listen to In What Language? (Pi Recordings) by Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd. An album of music and spoken-word narratives and vignettes, it came directly out of the beginning of America’s Forever Wars, the rise of the surveillance state, and government torture, all the things that put an end to our experiment in representative democracy and freedom. I know I’m dreaming as I write this, but if there’s any way back to what we’re supposed to be, the path is jazz.
