Advertisement
Advertisement

Make It New: Reshaping Jazz In The 21st Century

"Some of Beuttler’s interviewees are often tiresome and pretentious. Maybe that’s another tendency: the willingness of modern art practitioners to waffle about what they do in lieu of doing it. One’s reminded of a lengthy question about his music put to Erroll Garner, who replied 'Hmm'"

Bill Beuttler’s interesting and timely book, in its format at least, is a 21st-century counterpart of Joe Goldberg’s Jazz Masters Of The 1950s, published in 1965. Both choose a representative group of musicians to indicate what’s new and changing and, in the author’s view, significant. Goldberg’s dozen profiles contrast with Beuttler’s eight, which include a band, The Bad Plus.

‘We do not understand what the relationship is between Bill Frisell and society’

Beuttler, formerly a jazz writer for the Boston Globe, shows in what manner his examples – Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Miguel Zenón, Anat Cohen, Robert Glasper, The Bad Plus and Esperanza Spalding – are engaging with society. Such engagement in jazz’s recent past has often been personal and more narrowly focused. Writer Paul de Barros claims that musicians such as Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins should be seen and heard as black people in a white society, a view that would explain their furnace heat. But de Barros concludes: “We do not understand what the relationship is between Bill Frisell and society”.

Advertisement

This is unfair, not only to a white musician chosen at random but also to the music he makes. It also implies that jazz belongs to African-Americans. Beuttler’s description of jazz as increasingly a worldwide activity indicates that this has not been so for ages. Moreover, it’s an insult to African-Americans whose continuing proprietorial influence, if it existed, would limit jazz as a creation – their creation – incapable of development except by them alone.

Circles are always being completed and trends ever advancing, women in jazz being a good example of the latter. Jazz has been either “straight ahead” or eclectic and divergent (not straight ahead). A new generation of African-American jazz musicians, especially after the election of Trump, is living through renewed black oppression and taking cues from popular genres in which fulmination has long found a voice. The magnitude of other changes – basically an eclecticism far more intense and widespread than 1970s “fusion” – is encapsulated in something trombonist, composer and academic George Lewis told Beuttler: that he should abandon the label “jazz” when discussing the music in this book.

So, has jazz moved on to something else of which it will only be remembered as a precursor? Should there be a new name for Anat Cohen’s pursuit in music of “groove, of happiness, of silliness, of playfulness … moments of retrospection … of introspection”? Spalding says: “I sing the blues, I sing folk, I sing jazz, classical. I’m a poet, an actress, I know how to make really good cornbread”. Glasper admits: “Basically all the guys in my trio listen to hip-hop. We all check it out. When we lock into the groove we groove really hard”. But Zenón is keen to emphasise the lineage of which so much of today’s jazz is but the latest manifestation. Iyer’s influences, too, are from that lineage but he also wants to discover how compatible tabla and mridangam sounds can be incorporated into his piano playing. And so on for the others.

Some of Beuttler’s interviewees are often tiresome and pretentious. Maybe that’s another tendency: the willingness of modern art practitioners to waffle about what they do in lieu of doing it. One’s reminded of a lengthy question about his music put to Erroll Garner, who replied “Hmm”.

Enough said, as it were. Where once musical revolutions created their noisy detractors, listeners these days who don’t like what they hear just switch off. Beuttler doesn’t pursue issues as much as offer descriptions, explanations and points of view. Even if we turn off, we like to know where we are.

Make It New: Reshaping Jazz In The 21st Century. By Bill Beuttler, Lever Press, pb, 295pp. ISBN: 978-1-64315-006-2. $19.99

Latest audio reviews

Advertisement

More from this author

Advertisement

Jazz Journal articles by month

Advertisement

Tor Yttredal & Roberto Bonati: Some Red, Some Yellow

The Norwegian Yttredal (born 1962) and the Italian Bonati (born 1959) have been colleagues and friends since 2013 when they initiated what would become...
Advertisement

Still Clinging to the Wreckage 10/20

There’s a good case for claiming that the Vic Dickenson Septet date of 29 December 1953 is one of the finest jazz recordings ever...
Advertisement

Kenny Werner: in praise of detachment

Kenny Werner’s 2018 solo album The Space was a work of striking lyricism and improvisational inventiveness. The album’s title was of great significance for...
Advertisement

Free Play: Improvisation In Life & Art

Never mind AI, a greater threat to actual jazz might lie in Stephen Nachmanovitch's idea that 'every form of conversation is a form of jazz'
Advertisement

Miles Davis: Birth Of The Cool – the film

Fans of Miles Davis may remember some grainy old footage of the trumpeter shadowboxing in a gym sometime during the mid-1960s. It’s a clip...
Advertisement

JJ 12/69: Don Rendell/Ian Carr – Change Is

By all accounts this is the last LP in the Rendell/Carr partnership which has produced much good music and several durable al­bums. Change Is...