The History of Jazz (87 page)

The jazz scenes in Latin America and Asia Pacific are hardly so self-sufficient, and this is perhaps due to the comparative scarcity of institutional funding and support. This does not mean that these regions do not produce great jazz talent, but rather that they have trouble nurturing, retaining, and sustaining it. Hence those strange anomalies in the history of jazz: that Afro-Cuban music has typically found a more secure economic base in New York than in Havana; that bossa nova needed to come to the United States to develop a large global audience; and that the most visible attempts to merge jazz techniques with Indian and South Asian musical traditions, from Bud Shank’s 1962
Improvisations
project with Ravi Shankar to John McLaughlin’s Shakti band and John Handy’s collaborations with Ali Akbar Khan during the 1970s and onward to the present day, have been promoted by U.S. record labels and supported largely by fans in the West.

The 2008 compact disc
Miles From India
, an exciting meeting ground for jazz icons and leading Indian musicians, could stand as a symbol for this state of affairs, not just in its performances, artfully produced by Bob Belden, but even in its very name, given how exciting currents in South Asian jazz are taking place thousands of miles away from their Indian sources of inspiration. Almost at the same time that Belden was putting together his East meets West project, alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa was building a following for his own Indian musical roots in projects such as
Kinsmen
, featuring Kadri Gopalnath, and
Apti
, with his band Indo-Pak Coalition. Gopalnath, a pioneer in adapting the saxophone to Carnatic musical traditions, made a stir when he was invited by altoist John Handy to come onstage at the 1980 Jazz Yatra festival in Mumbai. In contrast, Mahanthappa—who was born in Trieste in 1971 and grew up in the United States—is a jazz player first and foremost, yet it is striking how congruent his postbop sax stylings are with the South Asian musical elements he has increasingly assimilated into his work. Mahanthappa’s sometime collaborator, pianist Vijay Iyer, has also risen to a place of prominence on the jazz scene, and though he sometimes draws on non-Western traditions in his performances, no one would ever mistake his brisk, angular keyboard stylings for so-called world music. Iyer, educated at Yale and Berkeley, is the American-born son of Indian immigrants, and his personal musical lineage is as likely to link back to Thelonious Monk and Andrew Hill as to precedents from Asia. With advocates such as Mahanthappa and Iyer, India can boast of world-class talents on the jazz scene—albeit second-generation ones—but it is revealing that these creative currents are centered far outside of India’s borders.

Elsewhere in Asia, Japan has the most developed jazz scene with the strongest institutional supports. Yet a mere listing of prominent Japanese-born jazz artists—such as pianists Toshiko Akiyoshi, Makoto Ozone, Hiromi Uehara, and Y
suke Yamashita, guitarist Ryo Kawasaki, saxophonist Sadao Watanabe, trumpeters Terumasa Hino and Tiger Okoshi—fails to convey the importance of this nation as a vital force in the economic well-being of the art form. Japanese audiences have supported the music with an enthusiasm and discernment that is rarely matched elsewhere, and the number of venues offering jazz, whether live in nightclubs and concert halls or via recordings at the country’s many jazz cafés, puts most of the rest of the world to shame. It is inevitable that these savvy fans will increasingly devote their attention to nurturing homegrown acts rather than celebrating the achievements of the American masters of the art form—a process that is already well underway, although rarely noticed by U.S.-based observers of the jazz scene. Elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region the situation is even more embryonic, yet the growing trend toward inner-directedness and self-sufficiency is evident, in varying degrees, almost everywhere. The evolution of the local and regional jazz scenes in these countries will be exciting to watch in the coming years, and though one would be foolhardy to try to predict specific developments, one can safely anticipate that the nations of the Asia Pacific will increasingly influence, rather than merely follow, trends in the jazz world.

This same dislocation has been even more visible in the world of Latin jazz. Although Jelly Roll Morton long ago spoke about a “Spanish tinge” that was an essential ingredient in jazz, the overt development of a distinct Latin jazz idiom took place only in fits and starts. Machito, born Francisco Raúl Gutiérrez Grillo in Havana, set an influential example with his 1940s bands, and his mambo hit “Tanga,” composed by his brother-in-law Mario Bauzá, was a major milestone, as was Machito’s 1957 album
Kenya
, which stands as one of the defining statements of the genre. Dizzy Gillespie’s work with Luciano “Chano” Pozo, discussed earlier in this book, was also a signal event, and in time almost every major jazz bandleader was featuring Latin jazz material or pursuing entire Latin theme albums. But New York, not Havana, would prove to be the center of the Afro-Cuban musical revolution, where—adding to the complexity of the geographic lineage—Puerto Rican musicians often played the central role in this process of migration and definition. The career of Tito Puente, New York–born of Puerto Rican descent, is a case in point. While with Machito’s band, Puente brought the timbales to the front of the bandstand and played them while standing up—a move both symbolic and viscerally attuned to the central role of rhythm in this music. In later bands under his own leadership, Puente did much to introduce Latin rhythms into the mainstream of American music. As Latin music played by Latin musicians found economic support and a fan base in the jazz world, its growth was invariably accompanied by the relocation of leading players to the United States—a trend we see, for example, in the careers of percussionist Mongo Santamaría (born in Cuba in 1917 but relocated to New York in 1950), pianist Eddie Palmieri (whose parents moved from Puerto Rico to New York in 1925, where Eddie was born ten years later), saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera (born in Havana in the 1948, but seeking asylum in the United States in 1981), and pianist Danilo Pérez (born in Panama in 1965 but moving to the United States in 1984), among others.

Brazil has long enjoyed the most stable homegrown jazz scene of any South American country. True, it has also lost talent to the United States, starting with guitarist Laurindo Almeida’s move to join the Stan Kenton band in 1947 and accelerating during the bossa nova craze of the 1960s. But many of the leading Brazilian jazz figures either returned home or never left. In addition to their role as global ambassadors for bossa nova, Antonio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto gave Brazilian jazz a sense of self-directedness and independence that it retains to this day. Even though the leading Brazilian jazz artists of more recent decades— Egberto Gismonti, Hermeto Pascoal, Eliane Elias, Luciana Souza, Airto Moreira, Flora Purim, and others—often show only the loosest ties to the bossa and samba traditions, they have inherited a confident sense of national musical identity that persists even while various styles go in and out of fashion. Yet just as important is the distinctively Brazilian tradition of sophisticated pop music, which has allowed figures as diverse as Milton Nascimento, Elis Regina, Ivan Lins, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Djavan, Gal Costa, and others to exert an influence over the jazz world even though they themselves are not jazz musicians by any conventional definition of the term.

And finally, what of Africa? This continent, which provided the building blocks from which jazz was constructed in the United States, has often been forgotten by the jazz world. Widespread poverty makes it an unlikely place for a major jazz act to tour, and the challenges of building a substantial jazz career from an African base are almost insurmountable except for the most driven and determined of individuals. Even back in the 1950s, the “township jazz” sound of southern Africa, with its strong rhythm-and-blues elements and absence of modern jazz mannerisms—think of it as hard bop without the bop—showed that fresh sounds could arise from this part of the world, although few overseas were paying attention at the time. A handful of African-born talents have managed to come to the attention of jazz audiences since the 1960s. Duke Ellington’s championing of pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand) was an important moment in the validation of African jazz. Yet it is striking how few later artists—with the notable exception of the musicians who came out of two influential South African jazz bands, the Blue Notes and the Jazz Epistles, such as trumpeter Hugh Masekela, saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi and pianist Chris McGregor—have been able to gain the attention of global fans. It is all too telling that when an artist overcomes these obstacles, as guitarist Lionel Loueke has recently done, it was only because the musician came to America and not because America noticed what was happening in Africa.

But even these few precedents indicate that African jazz is a distinctive idiom and not just a mirror of trends from abroad. Who can doubt that major jazz talents will rise from this continent, a birthplace for so many musical styles, and a land that may perhaps be economically poor but is so rich in its sonic traditions? And what a grand moment that will be—when the continent whose diaspora made jazz possible becomes a vital partner in shaping the art form’s future evolution. Our story then will almost have come full circle.

Yet the genealogies of the players themselves will almost certainly be less crucial to the future history of jazz than the intermingling of the panglobal sounds they have inherited. When it first appeared as a commercial phenomenon, jazz may have stood out as a specific local style, a certain way of playing instruments and combining aural textures, with a lineage traced back to New Orleans. But with the passing years, jazz has become more an attitude than a static body of practices, more an openness to the possible than a slavish devotion to the time honored, and no single city or country or region can contain its omnivorous appetite. Looking back at the first century of jazz’s history, its most identifiable trademark may simply be this unwillingness to sit still, this mandate to absorb other sounds and influences, this destiny as a music of flux and fusion. As such, all addresses are its home, but none are likely to be its resting place.

Notes

1
. Ned Sublette,
The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo
Square
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2008), p. 282.

2
. Sterling Stuckey,
Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black
America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 16.

3
. See Henry Kmen, “The Roots of Jazz and Dance in Place Congo: A Reappraisal,” in
Yearbook for Inter-American Musical Research
, vol. 8 (Austin: University of Texas, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1972), pp. 5–16; Jerah Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation,”
Louisiana History
, Spring 1991, pp. 117–157; and Sublette,
The World That Made New Orleans
, pp. 120–121, 274–277, 280–282.

4
. Samuel A. Floyd Jr., “Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry,”
Black Music Research Journal
, vol. 11, no. 2 (1991), pp. 265–287.

5
. Sidney Bechet,
Treat It Gentle
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), p. 6.

6
. Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, vol. 6 (London: Methuen and Co., 1912), p. 16.

7
. Alan Lomax,
Mr. Jelly Roll
(New York: Duell Sloan & Pearce, 1950), p.62. See also John Storm Roberts,
The Latin Tinge
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. pp. 34–39.

8
. See Gwendolyn Midlo Hall,
Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 28–55.

9
. John W. Blassingame,
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-bellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 39.

10
. Alan Lomax,
The Land Where the Blues Began
(New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 81.

11
. Bill C. Malone,
Southern Music, American Music
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), pp. 18–22. See also Ken Emerson,
Doo-Dah: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Robert C. Toll,
Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); and Dale Cockrell,
Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

12
. See Ted Gioia,
Work Songs
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).