JE Blog

Signifyin’ in Rhythm

Joseph Murphy | March 1, 2011

*They come in search of the source
of the mystery”
- Ralph Ellison

The task of writing about jazz is forever plagued by its own insufficiency. Much of that lies in the challenges to creating context – to play the day, scene or moment as the masters would so signify with a single blue note, a punctilious diminished chord or declamatory press roll. At best, we labor to signify’ – or point indirectly - with proper attention to the ephemeral mystery of the music, its cultural context in time and, if we’re lucky as well as knowledgeable, something of its crafting. No surprise then that the writing that best captures the music’s quality most often comes from the poets, not the critics, pen.
These standards found expert application in 2010 through three books that crossed my desk; Robin D.G. Kelley’s magisterial biography, “The Life and Times of Thelonius Monk: An American Original; George Lewis’, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music” and Howard Mandel’s “Miles, Ornette, Cecil; Jazz Beyond Jazz”

Jazz biography remains a tough gig; often, despite best intentions, attention to musical detail, craft and formative context give way to purely narrative histories or hagiographic entries in defense of a particular artist. With few exceptions, advance and research funds can be slight and the publishing angles slanted toward the salacious aspects of the jazz life – a trend most prominent in the many ‘junkie memoir’ that dot the jazz bio canon. Too often, the citations of other critics substitute for original critical thinking on the music itself and fail the standards of scholarship set by literary biography.Somehow, Robin Kelley manages to get past all of those hurdles – well, almost - in his telling of the life of Thelonius Monk. Considering that no composer is more central to our moment in jazz in terms of influence, homage and airplay than Monk, and none more maligned by the typing of his eccentricities, it is to Kelley’s enduring credit that he got both detail and context, narrative and history right while giving us a full sense of Monk the man; husband, father, friend and teacher and unequivocally setting him at the center of the emerging revolution of bebop.

In the bargain we get a cutaway view of New York in the post war period, of the Baroness at Central Park West, the Termeni’s of the Bowery and Hammerstein at Birdland, Minton’s in Harlem where Monk honed his style as house pianist, of Blakey and Elmo Hope and Trane’ taken off Miles band to clean up and learn the system. And of the deep fellowship that existed amongst the founding fathers of the bop lineage despite the defilements of poverty, racism and heroin.

Best of all, we experience Monk in the fullness of his overcoming as the shear force of his voice broke through to the acclaim of a world that finally caught up to what he’d been doing for twenty five years.

Monk wore a custom ring: MONK, strewn with diamonds across the border. This he would hold upside down so to read KNOW at appropriate moments of emphasis, both as talisman and as a credo. It was his response to the world. Robin Kelley makes it clear that, despite a difficult decline of increased mania and Poundian silences, Monk knew always what he was about. Singular, ironic and deeply honest in music and life.

Unlike Kelley, Trombonist, composer and jazz studies Professor George E. Lewis, has the task of discerning and documenting a movement rather than a man yet, much like Kelley, ends up describing a community in its complexity and fullness.  As the title of Lewis’ epic history of the Chicago based Association Advancement of Creative Musician (AACM) suggests, organizing Chicago style has a history of its own of which Saul Alinsky and a certain Chicago tempered denizen of the White House are only the most prominent adherents.

And organize doth Mr. Lewis with great skill – taking fifteen years of research, first hand accounts and personal experience into a history not only of Chicago’s enormously influential jazz arts organization but of the Great Migration that brought these sons and daughters of the South to the South side of Chicago to gestate a African American cultural Mecca of sustaining vibrancy and creativity.

Despite the pitfalls of writing an “insider” history, (Mr Lewis, born in Chicago in 1952, joined the AACM in the early seventies and has been amongst its most prolific composers, performers and recording artists) he  brings a scrupulous historian’s eye and ear to the proceedings as we get the oral testimony of participants set against hard scholarship as well as well applied  dashes of political and social theory.

All in the telling of how a Rosicrucian leaning pianist and teacher by the name of Muhal Richard Abrams parlayed his Saturday morning theory classes on Chicago’s South Side into an academy spawning a grounds up, aesthetically self contained. movement undaunted by imposed musical and social limitations on creation. And to Abrams door came the likes of  Roscoe Mitchell and Leroy Jenkins, Henry Threadgill and Anthony Braxton, what was to become the Art Ensemble of Chicago, AIR and the Creative Construction Company who took the AACM message to the world.

But  this is not a story of individuals but self empowered community where,  “Yes, we can” was the rallying cry taken up from the civil rights era and applied to everyday creative life that conveys not only the story of the AACM but the story of Chicago’s white hot music scene.

If the above names don’t entice there’s cameos a plenty from the likes of Sun Ra, Johnny Griffin, Gene Ammons, Von Freeman and Bunky Green to whet the appetite of any down home Chicagoans who have been touched by Windy City Soul as well as detailed capsule histories of “Downtown I and II”  and the dance of the AACM in European new music communities.

As the late trumpeter Lester Bowie expressed it:
“No one really had our kind of approach. We were into all of the music
where some cats were into parts of it. The music of the AACM was all
about everything. It could be about African rhythms one thing and show
business the next. Whole notes, silences, could be R&B, could just about
be anything..”

Looking for a history of how true education and empowerment go hand in hand?

Or of how esthetic formation rises from culture, A Power Greater Than Itself, gives it all in abundance as few histories or critical biographies do.

Toward the end of Lewis’s work appears a young budding jazz enthusiast with open ears and a willingness to trumpet in the Chicago press the challenging and vibrant music of the emerging AACM

In his critical survey, Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz that  Chicago veteran, the now NY based  jazz journalist Howard Mandel, shows us that jazz writing can sometime mean not only defense of particular artists but defense of discrete stylistic periods within an artists entire work as well.

Mandel actually takes us back to Chicago in recounting his early experiences with the music of Miles Davis by way of  taking up a spirited defense of the post –electric music, an appreciation gap that exactly contours to generational lines in its embrace or rejection of the rock ‘other’. A little of this  “Miles and Me” cultural memoir goes a long ways and Mandel could have cut the deep background here, but his breakdown of the music in terms Miles set for his entire opus hits the mark with close listenings and attention to the directions of contemporary musical crosswinds.

A similar personal engagement informs the book’s middle chapter on Ornette Coleman; with Mandel recounting his youthful introduction to  Coleman’s music, its slow ingress into his musical consciousness to his full fledged birth into a Coleman acolyte. As with Miles, emphasis is placed on close readings of the post seventies work – with multiple excursions into the works and words of Ornette sidemen Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Don Cherry and others – as well as much gnomic parsing of OC’s notoriously challenging musical and personal philosophies. OC has  twisted a few writers heads in knots (see AB Spellman “Four Lives in BeBop for one prominent example) so Mandel does well here to let OC speak for himself and contents himself to create context and delineate the music’s advance through the labyrinth of rejection and acceptance that has marked unrelentingly individualistic career.

The music of Cecil Taylor, moreso than perhaps any other performer under the rubric of Jazz, invokes the blind men and the elephant parable with its component parts demanding a broad and sighted view to render it whole. This, as well as Taylor’s less approachable personal demeanor, sent Mandel toward a more objective analytical approach of influence, form and vocabulary. Still, he proves up to the run – taking on the multiple tropes of the Taylor style (once described to me by his early bassist Buell Niedlinger as a “mash up of Ellington, Erroll Garner and Bud Powell”) and their integration through transcendent technique into a music beyond category.

Mary Lou Williams as well as Ellington, dance and poetry, musical shamanism of transglobal reach and through the ether you catch a wisp of Monk or James Jamerson bass lines or Scriabin tracing a pastel line in the air.  Howard Mandel does the job here of showing that we need not fear, as the Lester Bowie quotation above exemplifies it’s all music.

joseph murphy


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