The Shape of Jazz Today

To really get at the state of jazz in 1972, we have to start by getting rid of “jazz.” “Jazz” is merely an old term which, though many of us still feel affection for it, is useful mostly as a catchall to describe incredibly diverse strains of music, and has begun to approach its total obsolesence as what has been traditionally been called jazz finds watershed blends with music of all types. The result, however, is not the dilution or erosion of the core of the jazz feel,, but the emergence of a new, cross-generic music of infinite freedom.

Rock is the “outside influence,” as it were, which has changed the face of jazz the most. All of the most innovative and influential jazzmen and bands have been strongly influenced by rock, if they haven’t come to jazz directly from rock bands and rock culture. Miles Davis’ recent music, the work of the Tony Williams Lifetime and then John McLaughlin’s incredible Mahavishnu Orchestra, Gato Barbieri’s searing cry, even the strong comebacks of Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus — all have looked around them, taken elements from all musics, and created something new and vibrant and pure.

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. Miles, meanwhile, soars closer to rock than ever on his latest album, Live-Evil.

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 A ACM 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.

Idiomatic syntheses within a jazz framework found perhaps their supreme expression to date in the recent release by the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, Escalator Over the Hill An extended work, it combined a bizarre Brechtian libretto with the most heterogeneous collection of musicians and styles in recent memory. We have finally seen the day when Linda Ronstadt and Gato Barbieri, Jack Bruce of Cream and Don Cherry can be heard on the same record, in the same coherent and fully qualified composition, all working together and making it work perfectly.

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-feaching - 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. Wayne Shorter, the tenor man from Weather Report, and another Miles alumnus, is shaping up as one of the influential horns of the 70’s. Herbie Hancock has come all the way from “Watermelon Man” (again through the Miles academy) to his own profoundly individualistic explorations of still more frontiers, without even sacrificing an ounce of primal funk in the process. The list goes on and on, as does the space in which the musicians travel, but the space of this program does not.

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 musicians are actually beginning to make money.