The History of Jazz (81 page)

In many ways, the work of the AACM musicians signaled the first stirrings of postmodernism in jazz. Increasingly, the younger progressive players in the jazz world would temper their quest for new, radical sounds in favor of a pronounced eclecticism, one that included the embrace—sometimes the vivisection—of earlier styles and other traditions. In this postmodern sensibility, a two-stepping cakewalk could share the stage with an Aylerian exercise in saxophone glossolalia. This postmodernism was also reflected in a deconstructive attitude toward the music, a desire to break down styles into their constituent elements, sometimes focusing on one isolated aspect, at other times combining the pieces into surprising new wholes. This music was capable of evoking the high seriousness of earlier progressive styles, but postmodernism also experimented with a range of other perspectives including— but not limited to—pastiche, put-on, and parody. In this regard, the jazz world was following a path that other art forms had already trod. Its irreverent and encyclopedic approach to manipulating the materials at hand—largely made up of bits and pieces of past traditions—was comparable to contemporary techniques adopted by practitioners in literature, theater, and the visual arts.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the roots of this new perspective in a number of projects from the 1960s and 1970s. Not just the AACM, but artists as diverse as Carla Bley and Frank Zappa were using jazz elements, alongside other fragments of cultural detritus, in a manner that can only be deemed postmodern. Bley’s 1971 opera
Escalator over the Hill
was an artful blend of free, jazz rock, and classical influences. A series of later Bley projects amplified on these diverse sources of influence, with a playful, postmodern tinge often present, as in her “Spangled Banner Minor,” which scrambles the U.S. national anthem and other patriotic airs into a peculiar jumble of the familiar and strange. Other Bley pieces emulate the sound of a needle skipping on a phonograph record or scales played by a student at a music lesson. Steve Lacy’s work from this period also anticipated a number of currents that would crystallize in the work of such later postmodernists as Anthony Braxton, David Murray, and John Zorn, including a blending of a progressive aesthetic with an interest in celebrating past stylists (most notably Thelonious Monk, in Lacy’s case), as well as a commitment to frequent recording in diverse settings. Lacy’s early career, which found him working in varied idioms from Dixieland to free, made it clear that his artistic vision held few prejudices, and his later efforts cast an even wider net, incorporating electronics, language, vocals, and dance.

The New York loft scene of the 1970s drew on many of these postmodern tendencies and served as an especially fertile meeting ground for the different schools of progressive music trying to establish themselves in the jazz world. A series of recordings from 1976 drawn from performances at Rivbea Studio, the loft home of saxophonist Sam Rivers, and released under the name
Wildflowers
, showcased the tremendous heterogeneity of this hotbed of experimentation. One of the bands highlighted was Air, a trio featuring saxophonist Henry Threadgill, bassist Fred Hopkins, and drummer Steve McCall, whose work was reflective of the emerging aesthetic and as likely to embrace Scott Joplin as Albert Ayler. In addition to his legacy with Air, Threadgill forged a fresh, highly experimental body of work with larger combos drawing on sometimes surprising instruments (accordion, pipa, oud, tuba, French horn, etc.), most notably with his 1990s band Very Very Circus. In these various settings, Threadgill’s visionary music implied a rejection of existing jazz hierarchies and an egalitarian openness to a broad range of influences. After the often doctrinaire avant-garde attitudes of the 1960s, many musicians and fans welcomed this approach, one that avoided rigid adherence to any one school and celebrated the possibilities of sound over the rigidity of ideologies.

These new currents would flow far beyond Chicago and New York. The work of Hamiet Bluiett, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and other musicians associated with the Black Artists’ Group in St. Louis revealed a similarly expansive approach to jazz, which encompassed aspects of theater, poetry, and visual arts. On the West Coast, John Carter, who along with Bobby Bradford had formed a Los Angeles splinter group building on the avant-garde principles of Ornette Coleman, created a magnum opus of postmodernism during the 1980s with his five-volume
Roots and Folklore
project, which chronicled in words and music the history of African Americans. In Europe, Dutch reed player and composer Willem Breuker would pursue a similarly eclectic postmodern style with his Kollektief, which was formed in the mid-1970s. In Britain, Mike Westbrook brought everything from circus acts to the poetry of William Blake into his similarly expansive view of jazz performance.

Yet the biggest boost to this deconstructive approach would come from the AACM musicians. The influence of Ayler still predominated on many of the early Chicago school recordings. But it began to coalesce with other postmodern elements in the evolving work of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The Art Ensemble’s motto, “Great Black Music—Ancient to Modern,” fittingly denoted their attitude toward the tradition. Fragments of gospel or funk might rub shoulders with dissonance and noise. A stately waltz might disintegrate into musical anarchy. Their fondness for unusual garb and makeup and their borrowings from other genres (theater, dance, pantomime, comedy) validated the performance art elements that had long lurked below the surface of the jazz idiom. Their choices in instruments were equally diverse: banjo, bassoon, bongos, bike horn, bells—and this is just a smattering of the listings under the letter B—and hundreds of other items made their way onto the bandstand along with the standard jazz brass and reed horns.

The Art Ensemble initially featured Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, and, for a brief spell, drummer Phillip Wilson. The band ignored the division of labor traditionally practiced by most jazz combos. Although Mitchell and Jarman periodically stood forth to brandish their saxophones in the front line, they were just as likely to be accompanists as lead soloists, just as inclined to play percussion or unusual wind instruments—conch shells or whistles—as the alto or tenor sax. Lester Bowie could show off his mastery of a wide range of trumpet styles, covering the gamut from pseudo-trad jazz growls and groans to up-to-date funk grooves. But he also might energize an Art Ensemble performance by pounding on the bass drum or engaging in quirky and sometimes humorous onstage antics. Malachi Favors served as bassist for the group, but almost any stringed instrument, from banjo to zither, might show up in his hands, as well as the ever-present percussion instruments that became Art Ensemble trademarks. Indeed, the Ensemble reportedly brought some five hundred music-making implements with them when they moved to France at the close of the 1960s.

The Art Ensemble caught the attention of European audiences in this new setting. Within a few months of arriving, the band had recorded a half-dozen projects, including some of its finest work. The Ensemble was very much in demand, with recording opportunities supplemented by frequent concerts, radio performances, and commissions for movie scores. During this period, percussionist Don Moye joined the band, and though this addition was lamented by some of the group’s fans—who saw it as giving a more conventional rhythmic foundation to the Art Ensemble’s free-flowing sound collages—Moye’s background in free jazz and his wide-ranging collection of percussion instruments fit nicely with the Ensemble’s artistic impulses. By the same token, Moye added a more structured and overtly polyrhythmic, often more insistent, undercurrent to the band’s sound. By the time of their return to the United States in April 1971, the expanded Art Ensemble had gained a reputation as a powerful exponent of what critic Gary Giddins aptly called “guerrilla jazz.” Their variegated approach borrowed from earlier styles while undermining them. No sound, no approach, seemed out of place in the context of an Art Ensemble performance.

Concerts and club appearances conveyed the band’s essence in a way that the group’s later studio sessions often only approximated. In truth, this band needed to be seen as well as heard. Dressed in African garb, their faces painted or wearing masks, surrounded by their “little instruments”—so many that it sometimes took two hours simply to set up the bandstand—the Art Ensemble presented a striking appearance that had few precedents in the jazz world. The group’s various live recordings, such as
Live at Mandel Hall
,
Bap-Tizum,
and
Urban Bushmen
, may stop short of documenting the total experience of the Art Ensemble in performance, but they still manage to convey the band’s vitality and unpredictability, as well as its kaleidoscopic range. The Mandel Hall concert, for example, gyrates from fierce energy jazz to strutting backbeats and pensive interludes, interspersed with campy exhortations to the audience.

The postmodernist wave of 1970s jazz found a brilliant exponent and champion in another Chicagoan, saxophonist Anthony Braxton. When viewed in its broadest outlines, Braxton’s career bears a superficial resemblance to that of the Art Ensemble. Braxton too was an advocate of free jazz and an early member of AACM and, like the Art Ensemble, he moved to Paris at the close of the 1960s. His recordings have sometimes featured him alongside other AACM musicians; like them, his work crossed stylistic barriers, borrowing from a grab bag of genres. Yet Braxton, if anything, seemed to forage even more widely—could it be possible?—than his Chicago contemporaries. Indeed, no other figure of the period more closely epitomized the postmodernist zeal to rework all earlier traditions, digest every possible style, incorporate each disparate sound into his oeuvre, all under the banner of progressivism. Just a glance at the instrumentation of Braxton’s output tells much about his eclectic, and eccentric, approaches. He has written for two pianos, five tubas, even for four amplified shovels. One finds music for solo saxophone; for duo, trio, jazz quartet, string quartet; music for orchestra, for orchestra and four slide projectors, for orchestra and puppet theater, even music for four orchestras.

Braxton succeeded brilliantly in tearing down the artificial barriers that had segregated the avant-garde jazz community—often stirring controversy in the process. In contrast to the Art Ensembles’s motto of “Great Black Music,” Braxton daringly embraced European as well as African American visions of contemporary music and was not afraid to include Schoenberg, Webern, Cage, and Stockhausen among his influences, alongside Coltrane, Coleman, and Ayler. Further, he broke down the barriers between free and straight-ahead jazz, raising eyebrows by a series of “in the tradition” recordings featuring mainstream renditions of standards. He defied the dichotomies of white and black, still a stubbornly pervasive divide in the jazz world, by frequently lauding the music of Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh and by working in racially diverse ensembles such as the Circle quartet (featuring Braxton, Chick Corea, Barry Altschul, and Dave Holland) or alongside Dave Brubeck, or with various European musicians. He ignored the categorization that separated free players into New York energy jazz advocates and Chicago sound landscapists. Finally, Braxton refused to recognize any conflict between the emotional and cerebral aspects of jazz, even inviting ridicule by his embrace of intellectual mannerisms— playing chess, smoking a pipe, dressing like an Ivy League academic, discoursing on philosophy, using pseudo-scientific diagrams rather than conventional titles for his compositions—a thoughtfulness that also permeated his music. One of the ironies of Braxton’s career was that his tearing down of these Berlin Walls within the jazz psyche, this acceptance of any source of inspiration, without prejudice or bias, won him so few friends. “I don’t like Braxton,” one anonymous elder statesman of jazz told a journalist. “I don’t like that sweater. I don’t like that pipe. I don’t like that hair.” Reviewing Braxton’s career, critic Greg Tate concludes: “Braxton’s talent for inspiring antipathy may be unrivalled by any living jazz creature.”
⁵

Braxton’s diversity is amply represented by his prolific recorded output. His
For Alto
from 1968 legitimized the role of solo saxophone in contemporary jazz and was the most important effort of its kind since Coleman Hawkins’s “Picasso” from the late 1940s. His
Paris Concert
recording with the ensemble Circle from 1971 indicated that Braxton’s personal brand of abstraction could flourish in a hot-blooded jazz combo, perhaps best demonstrated by the quartet’s intense reworking of the standard “There Is No Greater Love.” Braxton’s recordings for the Arista label in the 1970s gave him unprecedented freedom to realize some of his more ambitious projects, including his
Creative Orchestra Music
(1976), which showcased Braxton the composer in a definitive postmodern effort, almost a compendium of musical Americana. Here Braxton shifts in midpiece from a Sousaesque march to Reich/Glass one-chord minimalism and Aylerian saxophone spasms, elsewhere evoking Ellington or AACM stylings. Other Arista works of note ranged from intimate duos with Muhal Richard Abrams to the massive
For Four Orchestras
. His work with mainstream jazz forms came to the fore in his
In the Tradition
recordings from the 1970s and continued with late 1980s releases focusing on the music of Thelonious Monk and Lennie Tristano. Various combo recordings on Black Saint, Hat Art, and other labels have further documented the incessant probing and roving curiosity of this key figure. His recordings have never found the large audience that tuned into Armstrong or Basie or Coltrane or Davis—those ABCs of jazz popularity—but Braxton would eventually become, like many of the previous “outsiders” of the AACM, a savvy insider, earning a coveted “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1994 and becoming a tenured professor at Wesleyan University.