Derek Bailey and the Death of Jazz (and the future of music blogging?)

In 1992, in conjunction with the release of the second edition of his landmark book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, Derek Bailey wrote and narrated a companion documentary series for Channel 4 TV in the UK. Roughly five years later, I got seriously interested in Bailey and his deliberately off-putting improvised guitar performances, and started an on-and-off love affair with the idea of tracking down and watching the documentary.

I wasn't serious at all about it - it has been screened a bunch of times, occasionally within a couple miles of me, and I wasn't thinking about it at the time. I finally sat down today with a couple hours to kill and stumbled across two of the four episodes posted here. I also found some ten-minute excerpts on youtube, and the clip below is one I find especially worth discussing right now:



The whole clip is worth your time. In the series (and the book before it), Bailey takes a look at the phenomenon of improvisation as an aspect of music making without regard to tradition or genre - there are chapters on music from all over India, on flamenco, on post-1960s "free improvisation," and all kinds of other stuff, presented in a mostly organized, but deliberately rambling fashion. It's an effort to pin down something about music that is, by necessity, not really pin-downable. In episode III of the four part series, Bailey looks mostly, but not entirely, at the jazz tradition. In these ten minutes, you get to watch Max Roach working with children and a lovely clip of a young Louis Armstrong, and hear a lot of facts, opinions, and errors about the jazz tradition. But the sentence that got to me today is Bailey's own, and shows up at about 5:30 of this clip:

“Great jazz now mostly belongs in the archives, and successors to the innovative giants of yesteryear are nowhere to be found. Kept afloat by the nostalgia industry and the education system, jazz is no longer the expressive force that uniquely combined a revolutionary art with working music.”

For me, this argument raises many more questions than it solves. If you look at any kind of music magazine that has been in publication for ten years or so, you'll catch a cycle in the criticism - Jazz (or rock, or hip hop, or opera, etc.) "dies" every few years, and folks lament and celebrate, and look around desperately for the Next Thing. That Next Thing, depending on the critic's point of view, either saves the dying culture for the next 20 years or so, or gives us a new direction in which to move forward in a new, post-rock, post-jazz, post-CD, post-whatever era.

This little critical cycle is almost invariably full of bad predictions and mislaid hopes. But what is curious to me about Bailey's line isn't so much what he's saying as the context, both historical and on the scope of the documentary, in which he's saying it. 1992 was not really a year for this kind of debate in the jazz world. That was all Down Beat was devoting itself to maybe ten or twelve years earlier, when fusion ruined everything. But by 1992, Wynton Marsalis was already old hat, and he had come on the scene with guns blazing to make America a Jazz Nation again, and the debate was squelched for a long while. And there was already the beginning of a resurgence in New York of 1960s style free jazz by then, and only a couple years later, Homestead Records would release an album by the David S. Ware quartet, at which point jazz was officially no longer dead, but the music that punk kids listened to when they became grownups. I think in this sense, Bailey emphasized the phrase "innovative giants" to good purpose, and as a pretty direct jab at both Marsalis and Ware. Bailey's own records, while not jazz in any kind of purist sense, sold out of the jazz section of most record stores, and he played as often as not in jazz clubs. And in the early 1990s, even as audiences for jazz had started growing again, the popular jazz artists were all looking back and not bringing much innovation to the party. Marsalis sounded like 1958, and the more advanced "avant-garde" wave all sounded like 1967. I think that that era in jazz has passed as well, but has it? On my more jaded days, I think that the most anyone is doing in jazz to make it sound like 2010 is covering old rock hits, like the Bad Plus does, or adding a danceable beat and playing for ex-Grateful Dead fans, like Medeski Martin and Wood did. I do start to wonder if there's a voice for this tradition now, even if not a herald of a new era, who is really bringing anything to jazz that hasn't been heard before. There's room for your comments here, and I'd like to hear them.

The other strange thing about Bailey's line is its placement in the special. We've just seen Max Roach, one of the most innovative, groundbreaking, and long-lasting musicians in jazz, teaching children, who seem to be taking his lesson well. Then Roach talks about jazz being sprung out of necessiity, that musicians like Louis Armstrong couldn't get formal music training so they improvised and then jazz was born. At which point, a few moments of a Louis Armstrong performance lead into Bailey's declaration. It's very strange, sandwiched between scenes of children being taught how to improvise by a jazz master, to hear a statement that indicates that all that footage is of an education process gone to waste. And it's further strange because Max Roach, musical genius that he was, had his history wrong about Armstrong, about the availabity of formal musical training (Armstrong had it, getting trumpet lessons in the orphanage at an early age) and the pervasive improvisation in Armstrong's music (it has become clear through careful listening to Armstrong's recorded ouvre, and to his copyrighted trumpet solos in the Library of Congress, that Satchmo wrote a lot of his stuff down, learned it, and played it more or less the same way for years at a time). It occurs to me that Bailey's decidedly non-linear approach to music is at work with his words here, and that the questions raised by his statement are more important than the statement itself. Again, I'd love to hear what you think.

The Spanish Avant-Garde, apparently.

Ubu-web, one of my favorite sources for information about and recordings of deeply weird music of the last century or so, has just posted a page dedicated to the Spanish avant-garde here.

I don't fully understand what that means yet, and I'm not terribly familiar with experimental music in Spain - my biggest exposure to Spanish creative musicians so far has been going to grad school where a composition professor was a pretty arch-conservative composer who liked to write everything in the same time signature. But briefly skimming, this seems like a pretty interesting anthology of strange music, with a range of sonic abnormality from proto-New Wave non-dance music (Esplendor Geometrico sounds like Suicide en Espanol) to environmental soundscape to academic electronic play.

I intend to revisit this link after a busy weekend with some more thorough reviews, but skimming briefly as I did this morning, I am hearing a pretty interesting document of Spain in the late 1970s. Not too different than what was going on in New York or London, but a bit more mechanical and aggressive than a lot of similar stuff from other countries. No doubt, with some extra time to reflect and listen closely, I'll find a way to talk about a culture coming out of dictatorship and dealing with newly found freedom after becoming accustomed to extreme control, or something like that. For now, at least I've found a fun web page to share.