Oh for a schism, an entertaining rupture in the ranks so that one can watch militants spit venom across a void. Jazz had a famous one at the turn of the 1950s – “la mère de tous les schismes”, as a French colleague recently described it to me jokingly – between the traditionalists and the moderns, even though the tradition was in one case a disinterment and the modern had only just got itself going.
I was an adolescent at the time, but even without my later research, I realised that disagreement never seemed to have come to much, and appeared as a distant skirmish while we got on with listening to what we didn’t realise was pop music, its singers often a mere continuation, or a bastardisation, of big-band swing. Moreover, there was other music thudding in the background like jungle tom-toms sending a message. It was derived from R&B, about which those of us being seduced by Guy Mitchell, Rosemary Clooney and Frankie Vaughan knew little. Among those later swinging into the open on vines nurtured by R&B would be Bill Haley and Elvis.
My Uncle Phil told me that anyway the modern era of unintelligible peculiarity heralded by Parker ’n’ all was itself a continuation by any other name, and was neither unintelligible nor peculiar. He told me that devotees of Ken Colyer’s wobbly, homemade trumpet style who railed against Dizzy Gillespie had obviously never listened to Roy Eldridge. Not that there was a dearth of artisan trumpet players in Ole Noo Awleens. Phil had been listening continuously to jazz seen as a tumbleweed picking up odds and sods as it rolled everywhere, powered by the winds of public demand. Why anyone in the late 40s, he averred, should be interested in reviving the beginnings of a history that was barely half a century old by wrapping a new set of dentures around the gums of an old trumpet player named Bunk Johnson was the acme of baffling.
Phil agreed, however, with those who castigated British trad for its reliance on the banjo as a musical signifier, a sound likely to breed murderous intent in those who wanted to use it as a bludgeon. And he laughed at those “purists” who thought they knew how early jazz sounded when there were limited means of recording it and testimony could be gotten only from funk-clouded card sharps and pimps, and even then only as something struttin’ away in the background. He disliked the banjo not because it was or wasn’t inauthentic but because of its status as an instrument of torture. Now Jim’s passed, as the Americans say (as though the dead are going somewhere on bicycles), I can admit that banjos didn’t much bother me; after all, they provided the light bounce on which a heavier and declarative upfront trio of trumpet (or cornet), clarinet, and trombone seemed to tip-toe, often at speed. It was piquant. No, what bothered me was why none of my trad-obsessed friends – I’d left the big-band popsters behind by then – were not, at the same time, also listening to Tal Farlow.
The traditional-modern rupture was a significant source of conflict in the history of jazz so far. It mirrored what was happening in all the other arts in the 20th century. But the Dixieland reappearance known in the UK as trad was just a pesky side-shoot, sucking the life out of an evolving music. It was a reaction, with its own minor fissures of disagreement. Far more relevant was bebop’s arrival, with an audience that didn’t dance but sat down and listened: Ronnie Scott’s cigarette-smoking cadavers. Even when that ever-onward evolution of the modern had settled in the 1960s to consolidation, the avant-garde appeared from nowhere to perform without settled chart structures and progressions (arrival seems to be its perpetual state and consolidation its unwanted feature). And fusion’s manifestations in the 1970s made for a fracture that seemed seismic because electricity was involved. (All that said, I’m reminded that a traddie in a duffle coat grasping a pint of Old Peculier couldn’t do a lot of dancing.)
Lots of minor schisms then, subsumed under the traditional-versus-modern one. Take your pick. In poetry, according to the Canadian literary critic Hugh Kenner, Oxbridge MAs teaching Ontario schoolkids in the 1930s thought anything written post-Tennyson was beyond the pale: bizarre (peculiar) and meaningless (unintelligible).
Schisms today appear to have reduced even further in size, to the status of mild disagreement and studious avoidance, although arguments about what is jazz and what isn’t might suggest reasons for a Big Debate. Musicians seem more intent on grouting the gaps. Saxophonist Greg Osby says he’s been wary of perpetuating the bebop/hard-bop front line of sax and trumpet. “I’ve used guitar, vibraphone and voice, just to provide a broader palette of colours,” he explains. Drummer Terri Lyne Carrington recalls that Duke Ellington’s highest praise was to describe someone’s music as “beyond category”. Her trio with pianist Geri Allen and bassist Esperanza Spalding has been described as “moving beyond gender” and was, anyway, “different from a more familiar trio of men”.
Guitarist Lionel Loueke told an interviewer “First, I always want to push my limit; I always want to get something else… I try to find a new direction harmonically, melodically, and technically on the instrument.” Percussionist Pedrito Martínez doesn’t care what his music is called. “In my group, people can sing and they can play solos. I’m not worried about the name you give to it.”
All these aims and achievements are departures, however minor and personal. They turn the history of jazz into an ever-pullulating mosaic. As Uncle Phil might have remarked, even the major changes and their partisan support turn out on reflection to be not as momentous as first thought. You can’t beat a spat, though, for helping you defend music that others are ridiculing through a megaphone.
