The Shape of Jazz Today

Looking back across the turn of the decade to the waning of the Sixties, it’s unmistakable that the great watershed, the supreme musical turning point, was the release of Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way album. Although the advances that that record made possible really began with its predecessors like Filles de Kilamanjaro, In A Silent Way brought a new direction to a whole generation of musicians. Incorporating elements of rock, electronic music, centuries-old folk song with traditional jazz and previous Miles music, the influence of that album and its successors, such as Bitches Brew, has been so vast that it probably can’t be measured for years. For a time it seemed as if every band in the world was trying out its chops on the new Miles riffs (which pianist Joe Zawinul, late of Weather Report, had as much to do with creating as Miles himself) and you almost began to wonder if the brilliance of the Davis-Zawinul feat hadn’t had the same ironically deleterious effect on lesser musicians that Charlie Parker had in the Fifties. Now, however, things have begun to level off, and musicians everywhere are applying what they’ve learned from Silent Way and its further definitions to the forging of their own songs.

A musician with a British rock background who played with Miles and has made a strong impact on his own is John McLaughlin. His first album with the Tony Williams Lifetime (a group led by arguably the best drummer in the world, and one who deserves to be heard more in ’72) appeared around the same time as Silent Way, on which he also played. Since departing both Miles and Williams, McLaughlin has formed his own band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which plays a highly spiritual, highly energized brand of music, beyond stereotypes of “jazz” and “rock.” Its power must be heard to be believed. There are many people who think this man is already the single most influential guitarist of the ’70s.

The spirituality that marks McLaughlin’s work is a theme running through a great deal of the jazz played in the last few years — some of it rather naive and pretentious, most of it both profound and musically apposite. In a very real sense, John Coltrane was the father of this — in such albums as A Love Supreme, Meditations and Ascension he reached levels of personal and musical transcendence that can be called cosmic without embarassment. His wife Alice has kept the spirit of his music alive in her own, as has his onetime sideman Pharoah Sanders, in a series of sweepingly beautiful albums manifesting both the religious nature of Trane’s legacy and an increasing reflection of the struggle for Black Liberation.

The twin themes of spirituality and Black liberation — or cross-cultural, cross-racial liberation, really — infuse much of the new, free music of the ’70’s: perhaps most notably that of the firebrand tenor man Archie Shepp, but the fusion is also evident in the work of Chicago’s AACM enclave, who will be one of the high points of this festival for many of us, as well as Roland Kirk, Marion Brown, the late Albert Ayler, Gary Bartz, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, Miles Davis again, and the New York Jazz Composer’s Orchestra.

As for Ornette himself, he has paralleled the stunning brilliance of Charles Mingus’ comeback with his own, and is making the finest music since his early 60’s Free Jazz album, another, equally far-reaching watershed. Everywhere one looks, jazz is not merely healthy — in contradiction to the brief late-60’s period of doldrums, when some people seemed to take the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as a signal that jazz was “dead” — but literally exploding. Sun Ra is still conducting audiences full-throttle on his Nova Express, still as many light-years ahead as he was in the 50’s, except that today the audiences are younger and more diverse than ever. Barbieri has applied the rhythms of his Latin roots to free music, with fantastic success. Joe Zawinul has moved from Miles through a solo album that was one of the most moving records of 1971 to Weather Report, a brilliant aggregation whose second album lived up to their initial “supergroup” hype to the point of surpassing all expectations.

In the end, perhaps* the greatest indication of the present healthy state of the music and spirit-feel known as jazz can be summed up in a single sentence: Some of the musicjans are actually beginning to make money.

Lester Bangs