(House in Cotton Field by Romare Bearden.)
As implied before, the Young Lion sound lurks in TBP - not much, of course, but it is there like some vestigial root. (We apply just a hint of Young Lion procedures to “Long Distance Runaround” on our next album with Wendy Lewis.)
It’s also in the sound of most of the best American jazz in our peer group. It was just so hip in the 1980’s, all those black guys in expensive suits playing hard music with serious attitude. It’s this simple: when those Marsalis albums started dropping in the mid-eighties, we all thought, “This is really cool!” and bought them.
In fact, the Young Lion movement may have been the last time jazz was really cool in a populist sense. There was even a Hollywood movie (Mo’ Better Blues) and a high-end project with a rock star (Dream Of The Blue Turtles).
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By this point, it should be obvious that I believe that the premier pianist - and possibly the premier instrumentalist, period - of that era was Kenny Kirkland. Kirkland’s best recorded playing is on Wynton and Branford Marsalis albums. In our chat about pianists, Jason Moran said, “He was the guy. The last innovator. He took the Herbie/McCoy thing to the next ship.”
However, this opinion - which is shared by almost all American jazz musicians about my age - is, amazingly, far from a consensus worldwide. On the excellent bootleg free jazz blog Inconstant Sol, “Boromir” posted a rip of a Miroslav Vitous gig and writes:
So...obviously, Boromir, who normally specializes in people like Alexander Von Schlippenbach, has never even heard a Marsalis record?
But I doubt Boromir is a musician. My jaw dropped when I saw this quote from British pianist Neil Cowley:
I checked out Cowley’s mySpace page and dig his music: bravo. But, honestly, saying that the Kenny Kirkland you know is the work with Sting is like saying you love Sting but have never heard The Police. (Apologies to Cowley if he is misquoted here.)
Not that you need to know anything about straight-ahead American jazz to make great music. You don’t like it? Fine. Ignore straight-ahead American jazz with absolute impunity.
But I’m a bit uncomfortable with the common current critical trope displayed in a 2004 article by Nathan Holaway:
The writer goes on to cite great albums of innovative music coming out of Europe at the moment, like Erik Truffaz’s Revisite:
I have no interest in criticizing Truffaz, who’s a very nice guy in person and an intriguing musician. And unlike some of our peers, The Bad Plus feels no automatic American chauvinism against European jazz music: I wrote the first article in DownBeat about Django Bates, have promoted Benoît Delbecq, and believe my obit for Esbjörn Svenson is the only detailed commentary on E.S.T. by an American musician. I’m even looking forward to hearing Neil Cowley live.
But I distrust this level playing field, “Truffaz vs. Marsalis,” that Holaway proposes. The word “virtuosity” is probably important here. The Marsalises, Kenny Kirkland, Jeff Watts - these are players that dialogue with the past in a sincere, virtuosic way. Musicians like Truffaz consciously dial down “jazz virtuosity” and with good reason, since meaningless virtuosity is boring. But virtuosic jazz is really hard to play, and, frankly, is tied up with social and racial issues of American history.
The more you know about jazz, the more you respect it. Too often there is lack of knowledge (and respect) when these comparisons are made.
Consider that archaic forum for jazz expression, the jam session. This is one of the best places to hear a Young Lion-type player. Stories abound about every black virtuoso on Holoway’s list getting up sometime to sit in somewhere and shocking everyone else present with their heat and command of the jazz language. Trust me, this is not easy to do. Real jazz is HARD TO PLAY. To deal it out unworriedly - with a band you don't know, in front of an audience looking on with a mixture of expectation, skepticism and indifference (if those three qualities aren't present it isn't a real jam session) - requires real dedication to the craft.
This skill is not the greatest skill in music; conceptual and aesthetic issues are more important in the end. Many of my all-time favorite musicians are not guaranteed “jam-session domination” the way, say, James Carter is. Still, respect for that ability must be given.
In Ben Ratliff's Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Ratliff writes of Mulgrew Miller and gives us an important Miller quote:
...Miller is widely seen by jazz musicians as a master, and outside of musicians, as a bit of a bore. There is no identifiable element of extramusical transgression inside or outside his playing; he is not combining languages; he is not giving bourgeouis culture the finger; he is not straining credulity. He is not asking you to alter his life. He plays jazz as black music, and there is a deep sense of propriety to it, but it's not also history and politics and musicology and philosophy: it is music alone.
In an interview for Down Beat in 2005, he talked about moderation and refinement, about a standard of language for jazz piano, about jazz as folk music, and the idea that "folk music is not concerned with evolving."
A lot of people do what a friend of mine calls "interview music," [Miller said]. You do something that's obviously different, and you get the interviews and a certain amount of attention. Jazz is part progressive art and part folk art, and I've observed it to be heavily critiqued who attribute progressivity to music that lacks a folk element. When Charlie Parker developed his great conception, the folk element was the same as Lester Young and the blues shouters before him. Even when Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane played their conceptions, the folk element was intact. But now, people almost get applauded if they don't include that in their expression. If I reflected a heavy involvement in Arnold Schoenberg or some other ultra-modern composers, then I would be viewed differently than I am. Guys who do what I am doing are viewed as passé.
Again, see Nathan Holoway for confirmation of Miller's perspective.
Like any other professional jazz musician, I have serious respect for Mulgrew Miller; there are specific examples of my praise in the Young Lion post. However, although I don't think this myself, I can readily understand why Miller is considered "a bit of a bore" outside of professional circles.
Perhaps the problem isn't Miller but the environment at large, which Miller rightly thinks is generally unreceptive to his perspective. If there were enough clear-eyed, intelligent supporters of his artistry perhaps his communicative powers as a player would really begin to soar. (That moment almost happened for him in the 1980's, when there was a lot of energy surrounding the Young Lion movement.)
Obviously, my own concerns as a player are not similar to Mulgrew Miller's. I am comfortable being an improvising musician who is more engaged with "progressivity" more than with "jazz folklore." That's really who I am; to give up that perspective would be an artistic lie. (If I had miraculously somehow landed that aforementioned imagined gig with Betty Carter, I would have ended up setting fire to the piano or playing naked or something.)
But I do worry about it. The natural, correct balance of folklore and progressivity has never been so awkward to manage in jazz as it is now. I hope the next generation(s) of players will have an easier time of navigating these troubled waters than mine has. It's a schism that shouldn't even be a schism, and it's bad for everybody.
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One thing that could help the schism is if the centrist players swallowed their understandable pride in achieving straight-ahead mastery and encouraged the experimentalists. (This almost never happens.) Read on.
