THE history of an art form is more than just the biography of
its exemplars. But you wouldn’t know it by reading most histories of jazz. (I’m
speaking here of some books I really like, by the way.) A fresh, engaging new book
by Marc Myers, a Wall Street Journal contributor, tells the story so differently
than the way we normally hear jazz history that reading it is a kind of
unfolding revelation. Even if you know the overall story pretty well.
Why Jazz Happened, published this month on the University of
California Press, calls itself the first social history of jazz; it
concentrates on structural factors – economic developments, demographic shifts,
changes in technology, and so on. We get appearances from Charlie Parker, Miles
Davis and Ornette Coleman, but we get recording bans, suburbanization and race
riots as well. And it’s told smoothly and often briskly.
Unlike most cultural histories, this one doesn’t overlook
the role of the West Coast. (Speaking of the West Coast, RIP to Concord, CA
native Dave Brubeck.)
Here’s my exchange with Myers, whose award-winning blog
JazzWax
is well worth a look as well.
Part of me wonders why it took so
long for someone to do this. But: What made you want to write this kind of
atypical, outside-in musical history? Did you have a specific historian or
historical school in mind as a model?
Most jazz histories have been written
from the inside out—meaning the writer’s perspective and conclusions were based
largely on the artists and the albums they recorded. Such books don’t often
account for external forces or the economic, business, cultural and
technological events that took place and had an impact on artists and how they
thought and created.
When I was studying history in
Columbia University’s graduate program in the 1980s, social history was hot.
“What” was important but so was “why,” and “why” was often much more interesting
in explaining timelines and outcomes. So whether you were researching the Civil
War, Imperialism or the Depression, the facts themselves were essential but so
were the socio-economic issues that enabled such events to take place when they
did.
I wanted to approach jazz the same
way. Instead of treating it as a string of musicians and recordings, I wanted
to see what forces outside of jazz caused jazz styles to change so rapidly
between 1942 and 1972. By forces, I mean the opportunities that musicians faced
and he pressures they faced. What I discovered is that the 10 major styles that
surfaced between 1942 and 1972 did so for reasons that went beyond the genius
of the artists.
You concentrate mostly on the years
1945 to ’72 – less than three decades across the century-long span of jazz as a
distinct musical form. What made those the key years?
Before 1942, jazz was largely dance
and folk music. From the start in 1917—when jazz was first recorded in New
York—the music had a practical purpose. Its fast pace and steady tempo was
background for those spending a night out in restaurants or ballrooms. And if
you liked the music you heard there or on the radio, you bought a phonograph
and records. Or jazz was the blues—a folk form imported from the South and
interpreted by ever-larger orchestras. There was some jazz improvisation during
the period, but not much.
After 1972, jazz becomes a repertory
form and remains so today. Musicians specialize in one or more established jazz
styles—bebop, hard bop and jazz-fusion, for example. And audiences attend clubs
and concerts to hear music that was once played by musicians in their record
collections.
But between 1942 and 1972—what I call
jazz’s golden three decades—you see the rise of improvisation, composing, arranging
and artists with socio-political statements to make. This trend doesn’t happen
out of thin air. Unlikely events outside of jazz create opportunities for
changes to occur and put economic and social pressures on musicians to
re-invent jazz repeatedly.
One of your best chapters, “Suburbia
and West Coast Jazz,” is primarily about L.A. in the ‘50s. Why did that time
and place seem crucial to the music’s story?
West Coast jazz has long been thought
of as a movement led by white musicians who left big bands and settled in
California. The laid-back contrapuntal, sound of sextets, septets and octets at
the time has been viewed as a byproduct of Gerry Mulligan’s influence after he
arrived in Los Angeles in 1952 and formed his piano-less quartet.
All of this is true to some extent
but it doesn’t tell the full story. The suburbs of Los Angeles developed faster
than any other part of the country after World War II, resulting in millions of
new homes, wider freeways, bigger shopping centers and a white society completely
detached from the inner city. With new homes came phonographs and an interest
in high fidelity and LPs, which were relatively new.
Economic segregation was enforced by
local police and real estate covenants, which kept blacks grounded in South
Central Los Angeles. The result was a white mass culture existing in
ever-growing suburban rings around the older city. The expanse of Southern
California had little in common with the density and diversity of New York. So
the music came out of a different culture and experience fed largely by bliss.
Interestingly, widespread drug use in California by jazz musicians at the time
didn’t intensify the music.
West Coast jazz isn’t bad or good.
It’s just another style that emerged from a different set of environmental
factors—like the jazz that came out of New Orleans, Chicago or Kansas City.
Certain factors contributed to its development and success. Interestingly, the
sound of West Coast jazz owes a great deal to the surf, the longer sunsets and
the unbridled optimism that many musicians, particularly white ones, felt at
the time.
Your book feels especially fresh on
the issue of race. Did the civil rights movement help assemble the coalition of
the jazz audience during the good years, and drive it apart – or at least
destabilize it – later on?
It’s impossible to study the
development of jazz in the second half of the 1950s without considering the
Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. From the 1920s through
the mid-1950s, black musicians who toured the U.S. faced unspeakable
indignities, harassment and racial terrorism. Even though many of these artists
and bands played in black communities, they had to travel long distances
through a racially charged landscape, often at their own peril.
By the late 1940s, the climate
started to change rapidly. Baseball starts to become integrated in 1947, the
U.S. Armed Forces is integrated in 1948 and music becomes a unifier among teens
in the early 1950s with the rise of the 45-rpm and independent radio. The
Supreme Court decision made government segregation laws unconstitutional. Which
sounded great on paper until it became clear that many parts of the country
were continuing their segregationist practices as though nothing had changed.
Those who had been assumed racial equality would take place overnight found the
civil rights struggle dragging, particularly in the South.
Throughout the ‘50s, what you hear in
the music of Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Horace Silver and
virtually all jazz musicians—black and white—is growing frustration with the
status quo and a need to express how they felt as individual artists. While not
every track recorded during this period is a political statement, the spiritual
urgency that surfaced along with the celebration of Africa and other homelands
has much to do with the need to be heard.
By the 1960s, racial injustice is
still an important issue for many black musicians. But for millions of white
and black teens, the Beatles and Motown become more important. Jazz during this
period grows increasingly avant-garde—partly a result of jazz musicians’
frustration with shrinking opportunities in clubs and recording studios and the
rise of pop-rock and soul, which they found aggravating. Jazz in the 1960s
becomes disenfranchised, leaving musicians despondent and angry, which creates
schisms between black and white artists and audiences.
The usual critique of a work of
social history is that it is somehow deterministic. So I’ll ask: Given all
these outside factors – technology, economic and demographic shifts, cultural
trends, and so on – could things, with a different cast of characters on the
artistic side, ended up differently for jazz?
For the sake of argument, let’s
assume that someone like Charlie Parker existed in the 15th century and someone
like him exists today. What I mean by this is that if recording technology,
records, radio, the jukebox and all of the other factors that existed in the
1940s had been around in 1045 and consumers could afford them, someone with a
saxophone might have invented bebop back then.
We know about Parker only because his
music was documented, and that was possible only because smaller record labels
emerged in the mid-‘40s to capture him. We’re just lucky that Parker was up to
speed artistically when these events took place.
So, it’s my belief that jazz
history—like all history—is 50% individuals and 50% conditions. The telephone
would not have made any sense in the 1700s. If Alexander Bell invented it then,
the phone would likely have been used to hold horseshoes in place or weigh down
broadsheets. Artists have nothing to say if no one is listening, and people
only listen if the artists’ works are accessible and meaningful.
The same is true of jazz. Parker,
Hawkins, Silver, Clifford Brown and Hank Mobley were motivated to create and
recreate the music they make because there were economic incentives and
technological developments to do so. Count Basie led quite a few bands from the
1930s through the early 1980s. Each was different because Basie shrewdly
re-invented his sound to suit commercial needs. The fundamentals were there—the
piano, the swing and soloists. But the arrangers changed as did the soloists,
and they were recording what would sell to new audiences.
Your book closes with guarded
optimism on how jazz has survived all these decades of tumultuous changes
without losing its soul. What are some of the great careers or albums since
1972 – what we might call, borrowing from Arthur Danto on art, jazz after the
era of jazz?
Jazz continues today but the
re-invention of new jazz styles has pretty much ground to a halt. It’s not that
jazz musicians have run out of ideas. There’s just less of an economic
incentive to take risks. There’s also nothing to prove by inventing new forms
of the music. I suspect that dozens of new jazz styles have surfaced and
evaporated since 1972—largely because none of them excited audiences or record
labels, or other forms of music were a better investment.
I doubt jazz will ever change at the
same rate it did between 1942 and 1972, when roughly 10 major styles surfaced,
each one topping the one before it. Why not? First, concert audiences now
expect a visual component. Rock and pop concerts deliver music and performance
to stimulate excitement. Jazz, like classical, is largely static—musicians on
stage playing. Second, universities aren’t putting a premium on teaching jazz
and exciting young minds.
Young music fans have little interest
in jazz because they haven’t been exposed to it in schools. I constantly hear
of students who don’t really care for jazz because the professors they had were
nasty or boring.
Unless jazz musicians today
recognizes that they must do what jazz musicians have always done—integrating
other contemporary forms of music and re-inventing jazz to say something more
exciting and relevant—musicians will always be standing on stage playing the
music of someone who died 30 years ago. And unless schools hire teachers and
professors who are excited by the social history of jazz—the dramatic story of
how jazz came to be and evolved—jazz will remain a classroom elective in which
students use the time to text friends. For jazz to reach younger generations,
it must be positioned as a dramatic story, not a series of albums.
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