Jazz Family Values

Joseph Murphy | November 29, 2010

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”
- Ernesto “Che” Guevara

“Man, they tell you there are boundaries to music, but there are no boundaries in art.”
- Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker

Your correspondent returns from a week catching the sounds of the annual Earshot Festival in Seattle, contemplating jazz family values. While ‘family values’ is a phrase we associate with the whims of politicians and cultural demagogues looking for moral bedrock to stand on – from which they can exclude the great unwashed – the values of our great jazz family are more inclusive; redolent of the plural values that mark multi-faceted world culture. Right? How can exclusive values animate a Creole zed polyglot form such as jazz whose lifeblood has drawn nourishment from Souza to Stockhausen, marching bands and bordellos alike.

Therein lies the rub.

Amongst the offerings of the Earshot Fest was the screening of an episode of the documentary series “Icons Among Us” entitled “The Spirit of Family,” that preceded a performance by the drummer Brian Blade and his Fellowship Band, among the bands featured in the film. At its root, the episode set out to explore the feelings of solidarity and expressions of love associated with family as manifested in and expressed by the working jazz band. But, after much testimonial from musicians to this effect, and with a feint towards the intersection of such values with the culture at large, the action quickly veered into the all too extensively policed borderlands of jazz absolutism. Here our credentials were to be inspected by Border Guard in Chief, W. Marsalis.

“Poor Wynton”, was my first thought as his immaculately attired self popped up on screen once again articulating his philosophy of jazz as gated community guarded by wise patriarchs, “how did the fresh kid out of N’orleans and the Blakey band with the attack of Roy Eldridge and the articulation of Clifford Brown end up an institutional front man for the Meaning of the Blues Inc.?” But here he was again, covering much the same territory that gave Ken Burns’ “Jazz” a noxious polemical taint and alienated a couple of generations – both older and younger – whose experience of and explorations of the music fell outside the strict confines of gospel, swing and blues comprising the Marsalis Brand; demoted by electronic fiat to the cultural status (and employment opportunities) reserved for religious heretics in Restoration England.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers of “Spirit of Family” took the poisoned bait and ran with it to a trio of young, white, rock and pop influenced piano/organ trios (Bad Plus, Jacob Fred
Jazz Odyssey and Medeski, Martin and Wood) as rebuttal witnesses; eliciting a couple of
unintentionally hilarious interviews that played like the rock ‘mockumentary’ Spinal Tap while invoking a somewhat shrill whine of, “We’re jazz too.” One could only recall, while watching the Jacob Fred Odyssey hold forth on their mission as musical shamans with all the nervous sincerity of a group of stoned marmots facing down a hungry mountain lion, the adage, “Be careful what you ask for.”

For what is being asked for by the respondents reverses the (Groucho) Marxist dictum of never belonging to a club that would have you as a member ( not to mention eliding the obvious racial coding implicit in border patrolling of jazz). If jazz family values becomes a matter of keeping the outside out and the established order in – call it aesthetic redlining -the emancipatory and oppositional aspects of the music fall prey to inertia and are all too easily supplanted by market values dressed up in drag as musical values.

When Ezra pound famously exhorted his generations of artists to, “Make it New” he didn’t follow up with, ‘then put it in a museum and watch it calcify for a few generations until no one cares anymore.” For anyone, be they musician or jazz lifer, the emancipation felt upon the Road to Damascus encounter with Pops, Bird or Trane, the prospect of jazz as closed form encased in the aspic of institutional restraint should serve as a daunting reality check. If interpersonal solidarity and the expression of love are the true family values inherent in jazz then the museum – as well as the market – are no places to call home.