The History of Jazz (77 page)

During this period, Jarrett recorded a number of multifaceted, uncompromising projects for the ABC/Impulse label with an acoustic jazz quartet featuring Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, and Dewey Redman. A second “European” quartet, finding Jarrett alongside Jan Garbarek, Jon Christensen, and Palle Danielsson, recorded for ECM and adopted a more pastoral strain, most evident on the 1977 sessions that produced
My Song
. Jarrett returned to the solo piano format for his massive
Sun Bear Concerts
, which included the complete output of five concerts in Japan. These seven hours of keyboard improvisations might have represented a career’s worth of music for another artist, but for Jarrett it was one small part of an ever-expanding range of activities that found him also playing soprano sax, writing for strings and other classical ensembles, composing and playing original organ music, recording the piano music of G. I. Gurdjieff, and undertaking a unique 1985 project,
Spirits
, on which he created neoprimitive sound textures by overdubbing his efforts on a variety of unconventional instruments, from glockenspiel to Pakistani flute.

Around the time of
Spirits
, Jarrett’s music began taking on more traditional dimensions. As a bandleader, Jarrett had previously focused primarily on playing his own compositions and occasionally those of his sidemen. He now reversed directions, building entire performances and recordings around familiar jazz standards in the context of a trio with DeJohnette and bassist Gary Peacock. These were wholly successful, satisfying efforts: not since Bill Evans had a pianist developed the interpretation of standards in a trio format to such a high pitch. Perhaps the biggest surprise here was the depth of Jarrett’s commitment to the old songs. The Standards Trio would continue to be a major focal point for the pianist in later decades, representing a rare anchoring point in a career that, in earlier years, had been mercurial and unpredictable. This embrace of the tradition, however, extended beyond the jazz world, as demonstrated by Jarrett’s exploration of the classical music repertoire. While other jazz musicians had dabbled with classical music, few had attempted the range of efforts that Jarrett was now undertaking: he performed Bartók, Barber, Stravinsky; he recorded and released crisp, solid readings of Bach’s keyboard music, including the
Well-Tempered Clavier
and the
Goldberg Variations
; he championed the works of deserving contemporary composers such as Lou Harrison, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, and Alan Hovhaness. Other projects found him recording Shostakovich’s twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, or performing Handel, Mozart, and other composers from earlier centuries. He also continued to develop his own skills as a quasi-classical composer, and his growing maturity can be traced on a series of recordings:
In the Light
(1973),
Luminessence
(1974),
Arbour Zena
(1975),
The Celestial Hawk
(1980), and
Bridge of Light
(1994).

Despite these impressive endeavors, Jarrett has been far from universally loved in the jazz world. Almost from the start of his career, Jarrett’s demanding, often prickly personality led to a backlash, which the artist himself did little to discourage. In interviews, he was likely to answer a question with a question, or offer gnomic responses. On stage, he frequently complained and berated audiences, and even when playing the piano, his odd mannerisms—standing, swaying, grunting, moaning, humming—struck some as unnecessary theatrics. A profanity-laden outburst at the Umbria Jazz Festival in 2007 was so extreme that organizers vowed never to invite him back to the event. Time and again, this artist has offered up an unsolvable puzzle for fans who struggle to reconcile the intemperate man and his poised music, and though the jazz world has known many prima donnas and nettlesome characters over the decades, Jarrett stands out in this regard almost as much as he does for the sublimity of what he achieves at the keyboard.

A number of other musicians were pursuing a similar aesthetic vision during this period, broadening the techniques of improvisation to encompass a panoply of new sounds, yet—unlike the jazz-rock fusion players—emphasizing traditional, acoustic instruments. The group Oregon, formed in 1970 as an offshoot of the Paul Winter Consort, was an early exponent of this emerging style. The band’s individual members each played multiple instruments: Paul McCandless was featured on oboe, English horn, and bass clarinet; Collin Walcott’s instruments included sitar, tabla, clarinet, and percussion; Glen Moore performed on bass, violin, piano, and flute; Ralph Towner’s talents extended to classical guitar, twelve-string guitar, piano, French horn, trumpet, and flugelhorn. In total, the members of Oregon were capable of playing over sixty instruments. Such versatility invites an obvious comparison with the Art Ensemble of Chicago (discussed in the next chapter), which was also creating an eclectic approach featuring dozens of instruments during this period. Yet the similarities, for the most part, stop there. Oregon aimed to forge a unified, holistic sound, almost the exact opposite of the deconstructive techniques fostered by the Chicago postmodernists. In a series of 1970s recordings for the Vanguard label and later for Elektra, Oregon created a fresh and unconventional body of work, noteworthy for its sensitive and subtle integration of these various strands of earlier musical traditions. As the 1970s progressed, the group’s members increasingly focused on projects outside Oregon. Towner’s twelve-string work gripped listeners on his guest appearance on the 1971 Weather Report recording of “The Moors” (released on
I Sing the Body Electric
), demonstrating a mastery that is all the more extraordinary when one considers that he did not begin playing the guitar until age twenty-two. Towner also recorded a number of diverse and almost uniformly successful projects for ECM, including solo guitar efforts and collaborations with various other artists affiliated with the label.

Other musicians associated with ECM played a major role in this expansion of the jazz vocabulary. Beyond Jan Garbarek’s collaborations with Keith Jarrett, his leader dates for Eicher went a long way toward validating a distinctively European perspective on jazz, one that drew on both American precedents and folkloric elements from outside the United States. Steve Kuhn, a Harvard-educated pianist who had been an early member of the John Coltrane Quartet, recorded exceptional solo and combo projects that demonstrated his compositional skills and mastery of piano dynamics and tone control. Vibraphonist Gary Burton, who had anticipated the jazz-rock fusion movement with his 1967 recording
Duster
, fostered a more pristine, chamber-music ambiance on his ECM projects, which highlighted his adept four-mallet technique and rich harmonic approach on leader dates as well as in tandem with other artists such as Ralph Towner, Chick Corea, and bassist Steve Swallow.

As such instances make clear, the suposedly Eurocentric ECM label proved adept at finding talent that the major U.S. labels were ignoring in their own homeland, both American-born artists (Jarrett, DeJohnette, Burton, Metheny) as well as expats such as bassist Dave Holland, originally from Britain but a U.S. resident for most of his career. Holland’s releases stand out for their vital, cliché-free music making, evident whether he was recording as a solo bassist (as on
Emerald Tears
from 1977), serving as a member of a progressive jazz collective (as on his recordings with the Circle quartet from the early 1970s), or leading small combos and big bands. In the combo setting, Holland has compiled an impressive body of work over the course of four decades, as documented on projects such as the
Conference of the Birds
release from 1972,
Jumpin’ In
from 1983,
Dream of the Elders
from 1995, and
Prime Directive
from 2000. The core virtues of Holland’s music include its tight, metrically advanced arrangements, a transparent contrapuntal sound (typically accentuated by the absence of piano or guitar), and a disavowal of the familiar or hackneyed. Even when trying his hand at leading a big band, as Holland has occasionally attempted in the new millennium, he somehow manages to cut through the weightiness—of both the the format and its attendant tradition—in forging the same pellucid sound and nimbleness associated with his small combo works.

By the close of the 1970s, the collective impact of these various fusion efforts— whether the sources of inspiration were rock, ethnic, or classical music—had succeeded in aggressively expanding the boundaries of jazz. There was virtually no musical tradition that, by now, had not been touched by it. Given this dramatic extension, a period of retrenchment was not unexpected. The publication of Albert Murray’s book
Stomping the Blues
in 1976 served as an influential attempt to recall jazz to its origins as African American music. Murray emphasized the decisive role of the blues, which had figured insignificantly in the ECM efforts, and celebrated the sense of swing, so important to the jazz tradition, yet increasingly obscured in contemporary currents of improvisation. Although Murray could hardly have anticipated it at the time, his words would prove strikingly prophetic. A new generation of jazz players, who came to prominence during the next decade, would champion this same cause, initiating a host of historically-conscious efforts that attempted to promote the inherently African American elements of the jazz tradition. The age of forward-looking fusions may not have ended, but practitioners of these hybrid styles now needed to look over their shoulders as the past was trying to overtake them.

9 Traditionalists and Postmodernists

Free jazz may have promised a revolution, and fusion might have offered financial rewards, but anyone seeking controversy in jazz circles during the closing years of the twentieth century would have found it coming from a different—and at first unlikely—direction. After decades of debating the future of jazz, the arguments now focused on the role of the music’s past, and especially the resurgence of traditional mainstream acoustic jazz styles under the auspices of Wynton Marsalis.

In truth, these older styles had never really disappeared. During the ascendancy of free and fusion, mainstream artists had continued to follow their muse, although they rarely received the press, airplay, or record sales of the crossover artists. Indeed, the intense compression of jazz history had led to a vertiginous overlap of traditions and styles. At the close of the 1960s, jazz fans could enjoy the contemporary styles of the period; but, just as easily, they might attend concerts by Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, and Gerry Mulligan, among others. Even in the mid-1990s, many early pioneers of jazz music were still active, such as Stéphane Grappelli, who attracted votes in the first
Downbeat
poll in 1936 and, sixty years later, in the 1996 edition, again placed first in his category; or Benny Carter, who continued to demonstrate his immense talent as a soloist and composer sixty-five years after he built his reputation writing arrangements for Fletcher Henderson and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers.

The 1970s mainstream jazz sound continued to draw heavily on the swing and bebop idioms. Major jazz festivals often emphasized these styles, and a number of record labels promoted these once innovative sounds, now transformed into “heritage music.” Norman Granz, who had made his mark as a concert promoter and record producer during the postwar years, returned to active involvement in the studio with the founding of his Pablo label in 1973. Granz quickly gathered together a roster of some of the leading traditional stylists in jazz, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson, Zoot Sims, and others. The availability of these jazz legends was a telling sign of how little interest major labels were showing in mainstream jazz after the rock-dominated 1960s. However, Granz’s belief in the commercial viability of this music proved prescient. The Pablo recordings sold well, and the various artists associated with the label demonstrated that they could still pack nightclubs and concert halls.

Granz placed special emphasis on showcasing Ella Fitzgerald’s talent in the finest jazz settings. He had taken over as Fitzgerald’s manager in 1953 and soon after secured her release from Decca to feature her on his own label. Fitzgerald was a successful popular singer at the time, having sold over twenty million records since stepping in as surrogate leader of Chick Webb’s band in 1939. Now in her late thirties, she was at an age when most pop music stars have already started to lose their audience to younger and more up-to-date performers, yet Granz never paid much attention to keeping current angle, and under his stewardship Fitzgerald’s music reached a new pitch of artistry. Her 1956 release
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook
ranks among the biggest-selling jazz albums of the decade, put Granz’s Verve label on a firm financial footing, and even impressed Cole Porter himself, who reportedly remarked: “My, what marvelous diction that girl has.” Fitzgerald solidified her preeminence among jazz divas in memorable live recordings in Berlin and Rome, and in other “songbook” releases featuring her interpretations of popular standards by George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and Johnny Mercer. Under the Pablo aegis, Fitzgerald continued to record strong material in world-class settings, singing with the Basie band, engaging in duets with Joe Pass, fronting all-star combos, or working with premier accompanists who had supported her in the past, such as pianists Paul Smith and Tommy Flanagan.