Palimpsest

Joseph Murphy | May 24, 2012

Palimpsest: Jazz and the Generational Continua am
Palimpsest – 1.A parchment or other surface which later writing has been superimposed upon 2. Something bearing the traces of an earlier time
“The Past is Never Dead, It’s not even past”
William Faulkner

Again the blogs erupt with obituaries, funeral orations and laments of the bitter and betrayed: jazz (again) is dead; died in 59’ or perhaps 81’, went to its grave a desolate orphan or a corrupt dowager, never fully appreciated, or over indulged onto a premature demise. Passed over and rendered obsolete by musics more reflective of the rhythms and melodies of the machine age. Disco, hip hop, house and trance. Pity the artifact, regard the exquisite corpse still exhibited at mausoleums such as Jazz at Lincoln Center or the 92nd Street Y, but mistakes it not for the living.
Perhaps it is the zombification of culture, backlash of the overlooked practitioners or the lament of the minority who has been marginalized into unwelcome oblivion. Perhaps it is a sign of the unrelenting cultural recession into illiteracy and the dominance of visual art and video or the tyranny of the moment reinforced by the ubiquitous, seemingly hard wired into our nervous systems, personal communication devices. Nonetheless, the rumors abound across the pixilated realm.
Of course, in order to confirm the death – be it from natural causes or homicidal intent – one must have a body. A defined unit of being. “This is jazz, alas, I knew him well.” But search as I might among the obits it is not clear that such a defined and embodied thing has ever really existed and it occurs to me that instead of a personage jazz is a story retold and recast by successive generations tracking on the changes languages undergoes in creolization. A story told in different variations in different settings to best capture the interface of myth and moment, time and motion. Jazz is of the voice – what linguists call ‘primary morality’ - not of the word as written into law. In jazz the “Law”, in Charles Dickens’ memorable words, “is an ass.”
Nonetheless, with the striations forming often around generational fissures, boundaries continue to be drawn at where you entered in to the ongoing call and response dialog that is jazz music. Coming from a home where Sinatra and Nat King Cole as well as Basie and Ellington were featured in the parental record collection but coming of age to Miles circa 1970 and late Coltrane, I was fully baptized in the faith by a crew cut, striped shirt jazz trio at a fifth grade assembly whose drummer had that forward swinging ching/ka-ching/ka-ching working. For others the call came via Bird taking “Koko” for an excoriating ride in 46’ or Pops on “Potato Head Blues” setting the standard for generations of improvisers and trumpet players. Although I came up in the era of free jazz trending into fusion, it didn’t take too long to start working my way back through the literature, its eras and points of transition, to form a greater narrative sense of progression, digressions and essence in the musical language. To recognize the integrity of individual voices telling stories both in and across time.
Yet those who would define the limits of form run the risk of becoming like the hermeticians of Biblical scholarship, policing the perimeter for traces of heresy, inscribing in the word the teachings of the noetic and aesthetic realm that passes from mouth to mouth. Not to mention that in the process of defining the law –setting boundaries – allows proper title to be established and the properly entitled the right to due compensation for their property. Jazz as a form of economic reparations for slavery now coming due much as the well placed Indian Nations reap livelihood from Casinos. Yet it’s another Faustian moment for jazz – short term gain and consolidation in that niche of the cultural economy but the acceptance of aesthetic and political boundaries in turn.
It is always during periods of formalization in art or literature that artists, sensing the creeping stratification of their form, attempt to pre-empt such limitations by remythification that returns the written law of codification to the oral mode of storytelling. Consider four jazz related texts that combine the facts and personages of the music into mythic storytelling.
We begin with Rafi Zabor’s interspecial jazz romance, “The Bear Comes Home” wherein an alto sax playing, English speaking mutant son of a Russian circus bear rises from the streets of NYC, pays his dues in the clubs while bumping heads with club owners, skeptics and the likes of Lester Bowie and Ornette Coleman (captured in a pitch perfect cameo, giving gnomic advice to a grateful Bear) before landing a record date, a girlfriend and a quartet to take on the road and while the book has a deeply comic bent right out of Dante it also covers the nature of the jazz abyss in depth and detail. Personification of the Bear does double duty here by underlining the animal anomaly and its stylistic implications in wry signification on both racial double consciousness and artistic double consciousness. This allows the narrative to assume the quality of mythic storytelling straight out Ovid and Homeric epic with a dash of Ralph Ellison urban surrealism. Like Native American conveyers of legend, Rafi Zabor speaks of a time when the animals were human too, making eternal sacrament in a jazz quartet His is a jazz fable of mutation; boundaries endured and exceeded.
In English jazz writer Geoff Dyer’s “But Beautiful” uses the common source material from the quelle of jazz history to reconstruct the partial and episodic into literary form, assuming the personas and applying third person omniscient narrative technique. Think of Bob Woodwards recent “insider “ journalistic narrative reconstructions and you get a pretty good idea of what Dyer is up to here. A questionable approach for journalism such may be but in Dyer’s empathetic and skillful imagination such a course of assumption works to convey the full range of pathos and exhilaration, despair and elation that marked such episodes as the last days of Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, the rage and glory of Mingus or the degradation of Chet Baker and Art Pepper. Anyone in the jazz life has heard these stories as part of the oral tradition. Yet here they take on the quality of the synoptic gospels transcribed many decades later into mythic representations of the original story.
Much the same approach was employed by Michael Ondaajte’s in his phenomenal 1985 fictionalization of jazz’s mythic progenitor, the New Orleans’s fin de siècle cornetist Buddy Bolden, Coming Through Slaughter. Here, the fictionalized biography interweaves present day journalistic observation with a type of literary archeology that uncovers the ruins of the music’s creation, the scope of its mystery embodied in one seminal figure and the ongoing struggle for perception of the past. In the compressed and well documented history of jazz, Bolden remains the pure embodiment of jazz myth, lacking representation but by word of mouth and a well layered lineage of sound upon which a style and a name were appended. Ondaajte’s stunning improvisation on a theme of Buddy Bolden takes the most rudimentary and creates a detailed fantasia of a life.
For those who like their myth in Socratic oral form we turn to bassist Victor Wooten’s 2006, “The Music Lesson” in which the renowned electric bassist with Bela Fleck and his own ensembles (and will be in trio at Montreal this June with Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller) becomes the pupil of an unlikely music teacher who uses a decidedly Socratic (by way of Carlos Castenada’s ‘Don Juan’) dialogue to instruct the recalcitrant pupil in the hidden correlations between music and the body, music and nature, music and the place beyond mind. While this is all done playfully, it is with a serious eye for real instruction in the relationship of music and musician in the world. A finishing school for musicians caught between knowing and feeling the music.
In all of these texts we find different strategies for expressing what linguists call, “illocutionary” activity between the musician and his world wherein the antiphonal relationship of music with listener – as well as reader with word - depends upon, as the late great Texas tenor Dewey Redman titled one recording, “The Ear of the Behearer”, Generational perspective may find us acknowledging our moment in time – and the music that marks it – to the exclusion of other moments but should not limit the ability to perceive the moving essence of spirit in sound, of virtuosity in execution or in aural history on offer from any period, dialect or variation in the music.

“music is action:the sound of bodies in motion. when we hear a rhythm, we imagine the act that gave
rise to it. some call it neural mirroring, or empathy. music and dance are linked in this way:
bodies listening to bodies, if music has ever moved you, then you already know."

So goes the introduction by Vijay Iyers to this no holds barred recording of, well, “dance tunes”, “Accelerando” (ACT) that draws down the aforementioned Henry Threadgill and Duke Ellington as well as Michael Jackson, Herbie Nichols and Heatwave …all by way of creating greater space to receive an accelerating world in our bodies. This is music that heals in a distinctly homoeopathic manner out of the Indian Carnatic tradition. Not too many people are exploring this territory but for genetic markers in Ellington and his heir Cecil Taylor, Mr. Iyer has an intensity and scalar identity all his own. Bracing and meditative.