Playing Changes Read online

  ALSO BY NATE CHINEN

  Myself Among Others: A Life in Music

  (with George Wein)

  Copyright © 2018 by Nate Chinen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Chinen, Nate, author.

  Title: Playing changes : jazz for the new century / Nate Chinen.

  Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2018. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017058677. ISBN 9781101870341 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 9781101870358 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jazz—2001–2010—History and criticism. Jazz—2011–2020—History and criticism.

  Classification: LCC ML3506 .C54 2018. DDC 781.6509/05—dc23. LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2017058677

  Ebook ISBN 9781101870358

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v5.3.2

  ep

  for Ashley, Athena, and Rosalie

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Nate Chinen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  1 Change of the Guard

  2 From This Moment On

  3 Uptown Downtown

  4 Play the Mountain

  5 The New Elders

  6 Gangsterism on a Loop

  7 Learning Jazz

  8 Infiltrate and Ambush

  9 Changing Sames

  10 Exposures

  11 The Crossroads

  12 Style Against Style

  Afterword

  The 129 Essential Albums of the Twenty-First Century (So Far)

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  A Note About the Author

  Foreword

  “A secret, a secret, I’ve got a little secret.” Cécile McLorin Salvant flashes a grin as she sings this playful taunt, the preamble to an old show tune, “If This Isn’t Love.” She’s at the Village Vanguard, which has entered its ninth decade with an indisputable reputation as the most hallowed jazz club in the world. In a couple of days Salvant would release a double album largely recorded in this room. But she doesn’t so much as mention it during the set. Her only partner onstage is the pianist Sullivan Fortner, and she seems determined to meet him in an elegant free fall, making adjustments and testing out methods on the fly.

  The burden of jazz history lies in wait for a moment like this. Headlining the Vanguard to a sold-out crowd without a proven set list is a recipe for all manner of anxiety, not least the anxiety of influence. But over the course of her casually stunning performance, on a late-September evening in 2017, Salvant shows that she’s neither wrestling with ghosts nor shouldering a weight of obligation. Instead, she carries herself like the beneficiary of a trust: she’s got a little secret, and she’s letting her audience in on the action.

  She knows better than anyone in the club that “If This Isn’t Love” was a calling card for the sublime jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, who recorded her definitive version in the 1950s. There’s a hint of Vaughan in Salvant’s bell-like tone and swooping inflection, but also abundant creative liberties in her phrasing. Rather than evoke the past from a stance of decorum or deference, Salvant is bent on stirring it up with sly intellectual rigor. Given how much effort has gone into the canonization of the jazz tradition, she’s a stealth subversive, working within a recognizable framework in ways that feel ecstatic and unbound.

  The emergence of a jazz artist as audacious, unconflicted, and grounded as Salvant, at this stage in the game, suggests both the fulfillment of a promise and the rejection of an idea. During the waning phase of the last century, jazz was enshrined in the popular imagination as a historical practice, a set of codes to be reenacted endlessly. Market forces—primed by a relentless campaign of reissues and compilations, tributes and emulations—had fed a common perception that the music reached its peak in a distant golden age. What could Salvant possibly be if not a throwback? The art form had already completed a full life cycle of creation, maturation, obsolescence, and revival.

  Gary Giddins, the astute jazz critic, once delineated that trajectory in an essay with a cheeky title, “How Come Jazz Isn’t Dead?” In it, he argues that the development of any musical form can be divided into four stages. The first is Native, followed by Sovereign. Then comes Recessionary. Finally, we arrive at Classical—when “Even the most adventurous young musicians are weighed down by the massive accomplishments of the past.”

  Most mainstream narratives of jazz over the last several decades followed the general contour of this model. Critics and historians, planting their surveying equipment on Classical bedrock, took their measure of the music along a timeline. So it was no surprise that the conventional framework suggested an inexorable march of progress. And it made sense that jazz, especially for those outside its orbit, meant something openly retrograde. When Giddins updated his four-stage paradigm in 2009 for Jazz, a sprawling history coauthored with the scholar Scott DeVeaux, he suggested that it might help to envision the music in a “post-historical” mode. That notion seems almost custom-fitted to Salvant, with her refusal to be typecast by precedent.

  But she’s just one figure in a vast new complex, the dimensions of which make the four-stage paradigm feel reductive. What the most recent jazz surveys and histories tend to ignore is an explosion of new techniques, accents, and protocols that define the state of the art in our time. Some of this happened in response to widespread upheaval. As the art form began to settle into its second century, its practitioners faced tougher conditions than any previous generation: a broken infrastructure, an uncertain course, a distracted, if not alienated, consumer base.

  But more than one wave of improvising artists has confronted this tumult, seizing license to create freer and more self-reliant forms of art. Raised with unprecedented access to information, they scour jazz history not for a linear narrative but a network of possibilities. Their frame of reference is broad enough to encourage every form of hybridism. They understand jazz as something other than a stable category. And their work has evolved the music—insofar as harmonic color, dynamic flow, group interaction, and a complex yet streamlined expression of rhythm are concerned.

  Jazz has always been a frontier of inquiry, with experimentation in multiple registers. That’s as true now as it has ever been. But to a striking degree, avant-garde practice and formal invention have now insinuated themselves into the mainstream, shifting the music’s aesthetic center. Not even a resurgent strain of hot-jazz antiquarianism—the province of out-and-proud nostalgists—can stem the current trend toward polyglot hypermodernism, toward unexpected composites and convergences.

  This book begins with a reflection on the crisis of confidence that distorted jazz’s ecology during the late phases of the twentieth century. Tracing a historicist agenda that actualized in the 1970s, mobilized in the 1980s, and all but tyrannized the 1990s, this narrative sets an important context for our present moment of abundance. As the music transitioned out of the last century, it became increasingly clear that a conscientious foothold in tradition could work in peaceful tandem with many approaches that fall outside a strict definition o
f jazz. The whole idea of a definition, in fact, was beginning to feel outmoded. Whatever you choose to call the music, “jazz” is as volatile and generative now as at any time since its beginnings. Instead of stark binaries and opposing factions, we face a blur of contingent alignments. Instead of a push for definition and one prevailing style, we have boundless permutations without fixed parameters. That multiplicity lies precisely at the heart of the new aesthetic—and is the engine of its greatest promise.

  1

  Change of the Guard

  Kamasi Washington stood tall on a lot of big stages during his Year of Ascendance. Swaying in tempo, pushing heavy gusts through his tenor saxophone, he exuded the regal composure of a conquering hero: dauntless, doubtless, ablaze with rugged purpose. His sound on the horn—rangy and intemperate, or clipped and urgent—suggested an almost tactile force, a physical fact. He cut an equally imposing visual presence, in an unkempt Afro, a thick beard, and a dashiki, its patterned fabric loosely draped over his burly frame. And as his band raged around him, the music’s exultant sprawl enacted a ritual of transcendence. It was all rattling and ecstatic, maybe a little mystical. For many who bore witness, it was, brazenly, something to believe in.

  These details formed a reliable constant throughout Washington’s rocketlike path from local notoriety to global celebrity after the release of his debut album, The Epic, in 2015. A soft-spoken but resolute musician rooted in South Central Los Angeles, he emerged as jazz’s most persuasive embodiment of new black pride at a moment when few forces in American culture felt more pressing.

  Washington, whose image suggested a revival of Afrocentric ideals from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, encouraged this interpretation. He was a known affiliate of Kendrick Lamar, the ambitious, insurgent, politically engaged young rapper from Compton. And Washington spoke often, pointedly, about his experience as a young black man in America. For the penultimate track on The Epic, he offered “Malcolm’s Theme,” a solemn vocal feature with lyrics adapted from Ossie Davis’s eulogy for Malcolm X. The album’s valediction, “The Message,” was an odd-metered funk raga in which Washington opened his solo with a quickening flurry of rhythmic punches, moved on to feverish incantation, and finally resorted to screaming through his horn.

  The Epic sprawls across three discs, with a suggestively cosmic vibe and occasional blasts of choral voices and orchestral strings. It elicited breathless acclaim from an assortment of media outlets that ordinarily have little use for jazz. With it Washington won the inaugural American Music Prize for best debut album, beating a field that included major arrivals in pop, country, and R&B. He appeared on both of PBS’s marquee talk shows at the time, Tavis Smiley and Charlie Rose, gamely responding to questions like the one Rose asked about jazz’s position in the present musical climate.

  “Well,” Washington said, clearing his throat, “I think jazz has been trapped in a poor image.” He went on:

  And I think that it has been trapped in this image of something that is a historic relic, or something that is made to serve some purpose other than to just enjoy. And I think it’s a music that, it’s the reverse. It’s such an expressive music, and when you hear jazz, you really hear a commune of people who are expressing themselves together.1

  He was speaking with vested interests, having embarked on his first headlining tour in late summer of 2015. With his band, the Next Step, he’d galloped across the United States and Europe and off to Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. They played the coolly discerning Big Ears Festival, in Knoxville, Tennessee. They played at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, attended that year by nearly seventy-five thousand freewheeling fans. They played to capacity crowds in New York—not only at the Blue Note Jazz Club, where the line stretched down West Third Street, but also at Webster Hall, a cavernous rock room, and in Central Park, under a summer night sky. They played a triumphant stand at Coachella, the desert summit of California boho-chic, where Washington was interviewed by Esquire. The resulting article ran with a headline that captured the spirit of the moment: “Kamasi Washington on the Pressures of Being Called Jazz’s Savior.”2

  * * *

  —

  When Washington referred to jazz’s “poor image,” he was in fact describing the opposite: a common understanding of the music as something rarefied and precious, and also a bit of a bore. Since the early 1980s, jazz had become synonymous with respectability, befitting the designation of “America’s classical music.” It was refined and safe, a signifier of adult sophistication suitable for coffeehouse ambience or the advertising of luxury goods. It was staunchly historical, endlessly concerned with recapturing the mood of 1959, or 1963. And it was the recipient of support from institutions like Jazz at Lincoln Center and the National Endowment for the Arts. When the average person thought about jazz, the image that came to mind was often something stylish but inert, as much a function of iconography as of music making.

  According to the most widely disseminated histories of the music—like Jazz, the 2001 documentary series by Ken Burns, watched by more than 30 million viewers on PBS—this was the natural due of a discipline that had reached maturity sometime around midcentury. Whatever happened after that point was to be framed in self-referential or nostalgic terms, as the retelling of a familiar story. If that meant placing jazz and its traditions under glass, sealed off from the messy roil of pop culture, so much the better. Didn’t jazz deserve as much? Its heroes had fought valiantly, through the twentieth century, for this level of respect.

  For an artist like Washington, respect wasn’t the issue at hand. What he was talking about, and attempting to address in his music, was jazz’s grasping struggle for relevance. And it’s possible to see how one campaign set the terms for the other: how jazz won a Pyrrhic victory when it secured highbrow stature as “the quintessential American art form.” There had been unintended consequences, repercussions in the culture. Some of them were insidious and difficult to parse, and others were screamingly clear.

  If your experience of the music came through institutional channels, you might reasonably assume that jazz stopped growing and changing a long time ago. There are scores of musicians whose work has proven otherwise, supporting the idea that jazz is actually in the throes of a brilliant new evolutionary phase. But the machinery of culture and commerce is far better primed to highlight historical achievements. Each of those present-day artists compete in the same marketplace as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker. And at a time when jazz album sales suggested a bleak Darwinian outcome—routinely accounting for less than 3 percent of the industry tally, and sometimes as little as 1.4 percent—many successes came with the assurance of time-honored quality. A five-CD boxed set titled Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of America’s Music sold forty thousand copies before the first episode of the series had aired.3

  All of which set the stage for Washington’s emergence as a great new hope for the music. Whether he was qualified for such a task was beside the point. There’s a powerful insecurity built into any call for a jazz savior: the very idea presupposes a vital deficiency in the art form. Washington was merely the latest embodiment of an idea, the details of which are dynamic and fluid, like atmospheric conditions. Whatever it is that jazz is understood to be sorely lacking at a given moment—that’s what a savior is expected to deliver. Cultural esteem. Social currency. Historical connection. Contemporary agency. Institutional elevation. Street-level energy. Renewal. Definition. Freedom.

  The music’s foothold in popular culture bears a precise correlation to the reports of its health or decline. Whatever is actually happening with the state of the art, among the musicians who make up its constituency, exerts less influence there. So the injunction to “save jazz,” as if the art form were a damsel trussed on the railroad tracks, came into widespread circulation in the 1960s, one of the most vibrantly creative decades in the music’s history. Partly it was a reaction to the rise of
a fast-moving avant-garde that seemed to call everything—form, fixed tonality, even rhythm—into question. The alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman was the era’s main agent of change, throwing down a challenge that the more forward-thinking of his peers felt compelled to accept. The press and the public were under no such obligation: in 1961, when John Coltrane was leading a bravely expeditionary band with the Coleman contemporary Eric Dolphy, a critic for DownBeat—the leading jazz magazine—infamously assailed their music as “anti-jazz.”

  But the scarier threat came from the outside, as rock ’n’ roll, which had coexisted uneasily but tenably with jazz in the 1950s, devoured the culture almost whole in the sixties. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin: their emergence as a bloc profoundly undermined jazz’s hold on the public, especially among young audiences. A few jazz musicians in that demographic, like the vibraphonist Gary Burton, chose to lean into the curve, forming the earliest bands in the hybrid form that would come to be known as fusion. Others grimly persevered, or dug further and more intently into abstraction.

  Still others, like the organist Jimmy Smith and the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, strengthened their bonds with an African-American popular audience, working in the affirmative subgenre of soul jazz. Among the albums released by Adderley was a funky live-at-the-Troubadour set from 1971: The Black Messiah, named after a tune by his keyboardist, George Duke, who would have a prolific solo career of his own, merging jazz with funk, rock, and R&B.

  A similar confluence of styles formed the aesthetic profile for CTI Records, founded in 1967 by the veteran producer Creed Taylor. With high production values that extended to Pete Turner’s album-cover photographs, CTI created a new commercial lane for already-established jazz musicians; its early roster featured the likes of guitarist Wes Montgomery, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, and flutist Herbie Mann. CTI’s production and marketing openly courted a crossover audience, setting the terms for what would later be termed smooth jazz—and enacting what many jazz partisans considered a deviation from, rather than an extension of, the righteous evolutionary path.