4. An Old Feud
The appropriate counterpoint when preparing to meet Wynton was reading George E. Lewis’ brand-new history, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.
What a fantastic book! I recommend it unreservedly. I am now embarked on a quest to listen to as much AACM music as I can. A year from now I will have a post on DTM about the best discoveries from my researches.
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The AACM and the Young Lions started off on the wrong foot with each other in the 1980’s and by the 90’s they were enemies. One of the most riveting passages in A Power Stronger Than Itself is Lewis’s perspective on the rise of the Young Lions. Lewis is scrupulously fair - he even quotes Muhal Richard Abrams as praising Stanley Crouch’s piano playing?!? - but the resentment is clear.
Many of the AACM’s followers are less even-handed, even to this day. A great black American drummer told me at a festival this past summer he wanted to kill Wynton and Crouch.
I understand where this attitude comes from. Earlier in this commentary I wrote, “The great sadness of this era was how little the best musicians of the Young Lion school (all of whom were black) exhibited knowledge or concern about the previous generation of black innovators connected to free or experimental jazz: Henry Threadgill, Julius Hemphill, Roscoe Mitchell, Sam Rivers, Dewey Redman, and Oliver Lake would suddenly have less work due to the attention given the Young Lions.”
Of course, any musician should be allowed to explore their path unconcerned with whether it's circumscribed or open. But I can't stop feeling that ignoring free and experimental jazz was the greatest weakness of the Young Lions.
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However, there is a rarely-made argument for the Young Lion's side too. In A Power Stronger Than Itself, George Lewis uses this offhanded quote by superb AACM drummer Steve McCall twice:
The AACM story is about musicians resolutely seeking the new. They were, to a person, representatives of the African Diaspora. (They voted out the one early white member, Emmanuel Cranshaw. Cranshaw’s lonely picture in A Power Stronger Than Itself is the height of pathos.) Probably as some sort of consequence of being connected to the black community, all the best AACM music has a funkiness, earthiness, and general humanness that makes their music obviously better than a lot of classical music that has much of the same affect and effect. (This is the part the Young Lions just didn't seem to get.)
A great example of this earthiness-meets-experimentalism is 1968’s Anthony Braxton with Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, and Steve McCall on BYG. This album is surely a jazz classic, documenting four important AACM members at the very beginning of four illustrious careers.
Part of the disc’s success is due to Steve McCall’s gentle but pleasingly controversial percussion commentary. His quote “The standard music, we’ve all played it,” makes a lot of sense here, as in, “It’s time to play something brand new.” Listen to how McCall accompanies a brilliant Braxton line by just squeezing a drum head --
-- to say nothing of his roiling fire underneath Braxton in flight. Here McCall's "stops" (perhaps a reaction to Braxton's cut-up phrases?) are unlike any New York energy free drummer of the sixties.
All of this is wonderful. But McCall’s statement “The standard music, we’ve all played it,” is also used by Lewis as ammunition against the rise of the Young Lions when parsing the 80’s. This is less impressive.
The 70’s collective Air was Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins, and Steve McCall. Threadgill is one of the greatest jazz composers and his outstanding Sextett from the 1980’s was exactly the kind of band the Young Lions might have benefited from considering seriously. (I contrasted Threadgill endorsing Dewar’s and Wynton endorsing Movado in this old D:O! post.) Fred Hopkins, while he could be hung up on the same sonic problems that plagued every bassist in the 70’s, was the unquestioned heavyweight on the NYC black experimental scene. And McCall’s work fit right in, especially on something like the mostly rubato Air Time.
But Air remains best known not for Air Time, but for their 1979 “hit record” Air Lore, a collection of early jazz like Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin. This move towards the old was universally praised by jazz critics at the time, and more recently some have pointed towards Air Lore as “What Wynton tried to do, but earlier and better.” (It is interesting to note how well the band dresses for the photo on Air Lore, even down to listing wardrobe and shoes by designer. This, more than the actual music, is what foreshadows the Young Lions!)
I want to love Air Lore too. But I’m just not sure about Steve McCall here. Clunky, sloppy drumming when played with great time is one of the great pleasures, but I’m not sure if McCall’s time is quite good enough to pull it off. I don’t think it’s amateurish, exactly...but I do think that I should not have to wonder about it. Try the Db blowing section in “King Porter Stomp”:
Certain modernistic jazz players can be successful not caring that much about the beat while still playing the beat. Paul Bley, Richard Davis, and others somehow make this work. But in Jelly Roll Morton? There is no early jazz that doesn’t treat the beat as a life-or-death matter. If Air Lore does really work (I can’t concede that today but I’ll keep listening) it works as a naive, “directly channeled from the masters” palimpsest, not as an accurate, learned tribute.
The main reason I am highlighting Steve McCall - whose energy and sound palette is always admirable, even when I can't get with his beat - is that he passed away almost 20 years ago. There are other AACM attempts at “bebop,” “ragtime” or “jazz” by living musicians that are even harder for me to like. However, these musicians don’t have enough work (or general respect) for me to feel comfortable criticizing them in print.
George E. Lewis himself as a trombonist has great time and an authentic jazz beat, but that is just not really true of a lot of classic AACM members. He doesn’t illuminate this basic fact in A Power Stronger Than Itself, and maybe it doesn’t matter: The best music of the AACM relates to the jazz beat only rarely.
It is telling that the most swinging late 50's Chicago rhythm, Ahmad Jamal, Israel Crosby, and Vernel Fournier, is not addressed in A Power Stronger Than Itself, even though the first batch of AACM musicians must have known about them. Perhaps the Pershing Lounge was considered inaccessible from the South Side.
To his credit, Lewis does quote Amiri Baraka as saying “I want to be completely honest there - I would rather hear Wynton Marsalis in an Ellington concert that what Bowie or Threadgill do. Even when I value them for certain things they have brought into being.” I’m with Baraka on this one. In this postmodern era, the jazz beat seems like something the young improvisor should at least know about before discarding it.
And I can guarantee this: the lack of a reliably heated, swinging beat is why the Young Lions didn't check out more experimental jazz. Pursing a reliably heated, swinging beat was their mission and their accomplishment. I really, really don't want to put on Air Lore for a first generation Young Lion and hear what they have to say about it.
My feelings have changed over the years: the first time I heard something like Wynton and his large group playing Armstrong’s “Cornet Chop Suey,” I was shocked and probably horrified. Now, maybe I think it is actually kind of badass. At any rate, at this stage of my development, I have more to learn from Herlin Riley here than from Steve McCall on Air Lore. (Especially in this case, I rue the concreteness of the written word: Maybe in five years I’ll be declaring “Steve McCall on Air Lore is just the best!”)
Comparing Wynton’s musical universe to the AACM’s is fraught with danger. Each camp pursues such different goals that the commentator can only stub his toe eventually. The only reason to attempt initiating such a dialogue is to encourage considerations that most musicians understand instinctively but somehow get left out of so much discussion in print.
A much better comparison is Muhal Richard Abrams vs. Sun Ra. I am just beginning to study both of their music, so I am not the person to do it. But I do have the temerity to suggest a starting point: both men recorded a brilliant live solo record at about the same age: Vision Towards Essence was made when Abrams was 68, and Solo Piano Recital: Teatro la Fenice Venizia was done when Ra was 64.
I can confidently assert that Sun Ra swings harder and Muhal Richard Abrams has more control of harmony. But for now, I leave the rest for someone else to discuss. Perhaps Vijay Iyer? His analysis of Andrew Hill is a brilliant parsing of Hill's surreal rhythm, far better than I could do myself.
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My quibbling about an authentic jazz beat aside, I think Lewis is correct to feel resentment of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Surely Lewis is on point in this paragraph from A Power Stronger Than Itself:
In contrast to the ideologically charged atmosphere on Lincoln Center’s jazz side, its classical side tended to avoid extensive public critiques of experimental music in its chosen, European-based tradition. In fact, composers seen as “fringe” elements were quietly supported, even as it was acknowledged that the public was not necessarily excited about hearing their music.
In his mission to garner respect for the pure jazz tradition, Wynton has rarely tossed experimental music a bone.
(I laughed out loud when I read the JALC print advertisement for the ballyhooed John Zorn/Cecil Tayor gig at the Rose Room last year: “Musical wanderlust will be satisfied.” Has there been a more backhanded blurb in history?)
Surely any serious creative player regardless of ideology will agree with the essential truth of Roscoe Mitchell’s statement in A Power Stronger Than Itself:
The tradition will never be re-created as strongly as it was by those who invented it.
Wynton’s standing as innovator, auteur, curator, and gatekeeper could only be enhanced by some small but significant experimental wing of JALC.
At our interview, I brought Wynton a copy of Roscoe Mitchell’s recently reissued Nonaah and told him to check out the outstanding saxophone quartet version of the title track. (It's really one of the best things I've ever heard.) He thanked me and put the CD on his coffee table. Hey, I tried.
