The past is better
Stuart Nicholson
In The Last Empire, Gore Vidal's recent collection of essays, there's a moment when he touches on New York restaurants and in particular the long-vanished Chambord in Third Avenue. He relates the tale of an 'ancient bon viveur' who, in extolling its virtues, was admonished for living in the past. 'Where else can you get a decent meal?' came the testy response. The Chambord, it seems, had a uniquely talented French chef and his meals became the stuff of legend, never-to-be-forgotten experiences from a bygone age. Yet it seems dining out in America is not the only place where the past is a better place to be. American jazz is also beginning to appear like a series of never-to-he-forgotten experiences from a bygone age.
As if to emphasise this, two important albums have just been released, the first by the late John Coltrane combines his classic 1964 recording of 'A Love Supreme' with a live performance of the suite recorded at the Antibes Jazz Festival in 1965 (Impulse 589 9452). This was the only time 'A Love Supreme' was performed in its entirety in concert and is the first time the performance has become available, thus making it one of the most important jazz albums of recent times. The second is an album comprising entirely of previously unreleased material by the group Weather Report called Live and Unreleased (Columbia/ Legacy C2K 65526). Although wound up in 1985, the band was recently described as the most important in jazz of the last 30 years by one influential jazz magazine and these performances, together with Coltrane's previously unheard concert, show how, in America at least, the past is now beginning to overwhelm the present.
In fact, since the Eighties, American jazz, once characterised by a flight from the status quo, has gradually become characterised by a flight back to it. The reason lies in the dawning realisation that the music, once spurned because of its vernacular origins, was not just a valuable art form, but an American art form. Suddenly jazz was elevated to the heady status of 'America's classical music', even though one might have thought the music of people such as Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, William Grant Stills and Elliot Carter might have had prior claim to the title. Hand in hand with this new-found status came the deadening uniformity of cultural meaning as a new ortho
doxy of 'Jazz as America's classical music' became more concerned in preserving the sound of jazz from its Golden Years (1917-60) than acknowledging the contemporary, even excluding it from the narrative of ja77 history.
Rightly celebrated as a triumph of black engagement with modern life and of African American exceptionalism, a pantheon of jazz greats, a new jazz canon, was created to exemplify black achievement. As jazz emerged from the margins of American culture into its mainstream it had the laudable effect of forcing white America to confront and acknowledge black cultural achievement and excellence. But this cultural renaissance came with a price tag, since it artificially re-centred American jazz around a 'master narrative' of past achievement that has set in train countless young jazz musicians playing in the adopted voices of jazz's posthumous heroes of the past. This déjà-vu jazz, in essence virtuostic recapitulation, is curiously unmoving.
In the past, the mainstream coexisted alongside new developments — a Buck Clayton jam session alongside a Mingus imbroglio. a Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins duet alongside Ornette Coleman. But now the weight of the jazz tradition bears down on young musicians to the extent that in America there's a settled belief that, if you do not comfortably fit into the mainstream, then the chances are that you are probably not playing jazz at all. It has meant that in recent times the music once famously dubbed 'The Sound of Surprise' has not been sounding very surprising. Today, listening to Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' provides a sense of danger and adventure rarely encountered in the current American jazz mainstream.
This is in contrast to Europe, where its history and culture rest more easily on the shoulders, and the baggage of jazz's past is not the racially charged issue it has become in America. Not feeling constrained by American historical precedent. Europe has stepped into the creative continuum, claiming the vanguard of jazz, its cutting edge. While Europe reveres the great black masters, it also realises jazz is as much about the inexplicable as the explicable, and not about a fixed, traditional orthodoxy or the codification of the music into politically correct compartments. Here the music has continued to evolve and develop, while in America one is left with the rather uncom
fortable thought that, if a visionary like Coltrane or a band like Weather Report had appeared in the year 2000, their music might never have been recorded.
Previous page
