Jazz Is For Your Heart

exerpted from the liner notes to Mood Swing by Joshua Redman.

"According to popular notion, jazz is something which you research and study, inspect and dissect, scrutinize and analyze. Jazz twists your brain like an algebraic equation, but leaves your body lifeless and limp. In the eyes of the general public, jazz appears as an elite art form, reserved for a select group of sophisticated (and rather eccentric)intelligentsia who rendezvous in secret, underground haunts (or accessable ivory towers) to play obsolete records, debate absurd theories, smoke pipes, and read liner notes. Most people assume that the appreciation of jazz is a long, arduous, and painfully serious cerebral undertaking. Jazz might be good for you, but it just isn't any fun.

This image is simple, powerful, and dangerously appealing. But it is also egregiously false.

Jazz is music. And great jazz, like all great music, attains its value not through intellectual complexity but through emotional expressivity. True, jazz is a particularly intricate, refined, and rigorous art form. Jazz musicians must amass a vast body of idiomatic knowledge and cultivate an acute artistic imagination if they wish to become accomplished, creative improvisers. Moreover, a familiarity with jazz history and theory will undoubtedly enhance a listener's appreciation of the actual aesthetics. Yes, jazz is intelligent music. Nevertheless, extensive as they might seem, the intellectual aspects of jazz are ultimately only means to its emotional ends. Technique, theory, and analysis are not, and should never be considered, ends in themselves.

Jazz is not about flat fives or sharp nines, or metric subdivisions, or substitute chord changes. Jazz is about feeling, communication, honesty, and soul. Jazz is not supposed to boggle the mind. Jazz is meant to enrich the spirit. Jazz can create jubilance. Jazz can induce melancholy. Jazz can energize. Jazz can soothe. Jazz can make you shake your head, clap your hands, and stomp your feet. Jazz can render you spellbound and hypnotized. Jazz can be soft or hard, heavy or light, cool or hot, bright or dark. Jazz is for your heart”.

-Joshua Redman

Top Ten Jazz Men 1950-1965

Silly as such lists are, and vane, I can't resist them.  Making them is fun and structures my collecting and listening.  For this one I was thinking of jazz artists who cut such a big figure that one cannot think of jazz in that period without them. One cannot imagine the history of jazz without them.  To some extent, I am guided here by popular awareness.  Are there some who everybody knows, if they know anything about jazz at all?  Are there some who everyone who listens to jazz at all knows?  

With that in mind, the first two places were easy.  

1.  Miles Davis
2.  John Coltrane

Everyone who has ears knows about those two.  Moreover, both had a tremendous influence on the direction of music.  Some would place Trane first (the nickname, like the force of the simple first name "Miles", indicates my point).  I would not.  

I think that number three is almost as easy.

 3.  Thelonious Monk

 Monk straddles two great periods in jazz: the bebop era and the hard bop era.  He is very much a force in the target period, and his most essential recordings are made in that period.  What would jazz be without Brilliant Corners?  But Monk is chiefly important for the astounding influence that his compositions had.  How much of the hardbop corpus would disappear if, Doctor Who style, one could remove him from the picture?  That is even more true of Avant Garde jazz.  Take Monk out, and where would Cecil Taylor, let alone Steve Lacy be?  Monk is an easy third. 

4.  Ornette Coleman

 I have come around to loving a lot of Coleman's music.  It took awhile.  There is no denying his impact on modern jazz.  I remember an interview with rock guitar great Johnny Winter, when the very white guitarists said that he was interested in Ornette Coleman.  I doubt very much whether Winter really listened to Coleman.  The fact that he knew his name nails Coleman for fourth place.  He was the new thing. 

5.  Charlie Mingus. 

If you don't know Mingus, you don't know modern jazz.  Maybe 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' is enough to get fifth place.  I'll just stick with this: if you don't have Ah Um, and Live at Antibes, you have a big hole in your jazz collection.  

Okay, 1-5 wasn't all that hard.  6-10 is another thing.  Here goes:

6.  Eric Dolphy.

Dolphy's tenure was astonishingly short, but as I have written more than once, he planted his flag on some many jazz continents that it is like he owns the globe.  Who can imagine what Trane's work, or Mingus' work, or Andrew Hill would have been without him.  Easy six.  Easy seven:

7.  Art Blakey. 

Maybe Blakey should have been ranked higher.  His Jazz Messengers band turned into a fundamental institution in modern jazz.  So many great artists cut their teeth with his beat behind them, that you'd need a staff to keep track of them.  The body of work he produced is priceless.  If seventh place is right, it is only because he kept his own personality in check and allowed his proteges to emerge on their own.  God bless Blakey.  

8.  Sonny Rollins. 

 Rollins at the Village Vanguard.  Saxophone Colossus.  Rollins has had staying power.  Like the Rolling Stones, that counts for something.  I just can't imagine a collection, however modest, without him.  

9.  Bill Evans.

Evans is Sui Generis.  Maybe he deeply influence jazz piano players, but mostly what you get from the critics is that this or that guy (say, Brad Mehldau) is like Evans because his style is introspective, and he's white.  Evans was uniquely resistant to the flow of jazz around him.  But his body of work is monumental and irreplaceable. Without the first cascade of notes in 'Gloria's Steps', or the delicious scrabbling of LaFaro's bass, where would we be? 

10.  Joe Henderson. 

Ten was hard.  Henderson is a long way down in terms of influence and documentation from Miles and Trane.  But when I glance at the line of Henderson recordings on my CD rack, I always smile.  Henderson's work is priceless.  If I had 1-9 (box sets where available) to take to a desert Island (guaranteed iPod supply and power), I'd add Joe.  I wouldn't be board.  Make that, I wouldn't be bored.  Ever.  

Well, that's what I got.  Joust if you dare. 

Martial Solal & Dave Douglas

Here's a little love in the form of a consummate jazz duo: piano player Martial Solal and avant garde trumpet man Dave Douglas.  This is one of those cases where you get to the heart of the music by going through the cover and album title.  Rue de Seine puts us in Paris, a city I have otherwise never visited.  Martial is apparently legendary in France, which is a good place to be legendary.   There is a brilliant piece on him at the British Guardian.

Martial Solal lives in Chatou – the island-like Paris suburb on the Seine they call the ville des impressionistes. His house is so unlike any jazz musician's home I've visited that I feel I've flipped into a parallel world. Peering like a child through the high metal fence at a tree-shrouded villa beyond an ornamental garden, I'm in a fairytale in which jazz artists are feted, instead of consigned to dividing up the door money. But eventually I have to break the spell, press the buzzer, and wind my way through the shapely flowerbeds to meet France's most famous living jazz artist.

Yes, it would be nice if all jazz greats had ornamental gardens.  But it's hard to argue that legendary American jazz men aren't treated pretty well.  See Wynton Marsalis.

The Solal/Douglas duo is very impressive.  Duos are often a bit dry, but this is anything but dry.  I have a special fondness for one number, a tribute to soprano sax genius Steve Lacy.  So I will offer that.  

Martial Solal and Dave Douglas/Blues to Steve Lacy/Rue de Seine

 You can pick it up at eMusic for a song.  You don't want to miss 'Elk's Club' and their inventive interpretations of 'Have You Met Miss Jones?' and 'Body and Soul'. 

Best Live Jazz: Davis & Griffin @ Minton's Playhouse

That's Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Johnny Griffin.  It's fun to piece together a great live jazz set published on several different albums.  Eric Dolphy and Booker Little at the Five Spot comes to mind.  On January 6th, 1961, Davis and Griffin blew Minton's Playhouse in New York City out of the water.  Most or all of the event is captured on two records: The Tenor Scene, and Live at Minton's. 

This is gorgeous hard bop, soulful and ebullient.  I confess, I can't tell who is playing which sax.  I have loved Johnny Griffin for a long time.  All the Lockjaw Davis stuff I have has Griffin on it, well, except for Very Saxy.  That is a gem on its own.  

There was a lot of Monk exposed to Griffin and Davis' exegesis on that January night.  Here is one sample:

Eddie Lockjaw Davis & Johnny Griffin/Well, You Needn't/Live at Minton's

Here is the rest of the band: Junior Mance (p) Larry Gales (b) Ben Riley (d).  Griffin is an under appreciated deacon in the church of Monk.  Give this one a listen, download it from eMusic, and drop me a note. 

The Poetry of the Jazz Trio

What distinguishes jazz from all or almost all other music genres is its poetic dimension.  I mean "poetic" in the modern sense: a form of communication that says as much by what it doesn't say as by what it does, and that condenses whole volumes of thought and experience into a few subtle hints.  I recall a very early poem by e. e. cummings: 

Oh, the pretty birdy, O,
with his little toe, toe, toe!

You can imagine that toe, toe, toe, being tapped out on a piano.  Cummings wrote that when he was three years old.  O!  

Almost all jazz does that same trick.  We don't know what kind of bird it is, or how big it is, or what color it is.  But we can get the movement of the three claws and the impression that it makes on the child's imagination.  

Here is an example of what I am talking about.  

Abdullah Ibrahim/Duke 88/Yarona

There's not much of the bird in that.  But you have the whole bird nonetheless, and you appreciate what you have.  Of course, the undisputed master of the jazz trio was Bill Evans.  Evans was better than any other jazz man I have listened to at mastering subtly.  He is always engaged in a duet with silence, and the silence says as much as he says.  Here is a taste:

Bill Evans/Blue in Green/The Complete Riverside Recordings

 The closest thing to that kind of poetry in more recent jazz, perhaps, is the work of Brad Mehldau on his marvelous "Art of the Trio" albums.  Here is Mehldau's little birdy poem. 

Brad Mehldau/Black Bird/The Art of the Trio 1

If you are trying to build a decent jazz collection, get Yarona, and all four of Mehldau's Art of the Trio albums.  Aim for everything by Bill Evans.  And drop me a line.