Live Review: McCoy Tyner

McCoy Tyner, Piano
Charlie Parker Jazz Festival – August 28, 2010
Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem

It was an emotional experience seeing the last living member of John Coltrane Quartet perform (after nearly 40 years; my bad). Tyner’s bearing in pictures from the days of the classic Coltrane quartet projected Eastern asceticism and deliberate humility (contrasting a certain wild energy of Elvin Jones, both musically and personally). Yesterday he seemed more outgoing and personable than I remembered. He brought his family and introduced them with a very American down-home friendliness to the crowd in front of him.

Those who expect to hear the complex but swinging right hand acrobatics Tyner used until the 1970s would have been disappointed. At yesterday’s concert, his playing was reminiscent of Abdullah Ibrahim or Keith Jarrett, sustaining incantatory ostinatos for whole numbers, and across numbers. In terms of the piano, it was all about how both hands work together, not melody (right hand) and accompaniment (left hand).

His first piece was the most intriguing. He set up a counterpoint between two very regular melodies, with chords changing with each melody note. It was classic (or classical) in its strict development and balance, but African in its polytexturality and churning depth below the surface.

Other songs included the standard I Should Care, Coltrane’s Mr. PC, and his own Blues on the Corner. On the latter two, he punctuated the ostinatos with some short, stabbing clusters. But otherwise his measured pace seemed appropriate to an elder statesman, rather than a young firebrand.

The First Thing Bird Would Have Said

Revive Da Live
Charlie Parker Jazz Festival
(Raydar Ellis, Ben Williams, Justin Brown, Jaleel Shaw, Marcus Strickland, Marc Cary, Corey King and Ingmar Thomas)

“It’s too loud.”

This all star group’s aim, according to the program, is to “explore the genius of Parker by combining music from his past with modern day interpretations” in order” to educate and inspire broader audiences about the depths and origins of today’s popular music.”

The funk beats, a rapper, an electronic keyboard, and the modal harmonies so compatible with the ethos of the 1960s rock generation, would have been unfamiliar to Parker. But my gut feeling is he would have understood those things, because they are musical choices and he understood that music must change.

But the excessive volume—sensed even where I was at the other end of the park space from the stage—seems unmusical, and that, I submit, is where he would have drawn the line. These are all fine musicians, who offered very confident, interesting improvisations—no qualms there.

Why must it be so loud to appeal to “broader audiences”? (read: those unwashed multitudes who only know rock or hip-hop.) That seems to me to be caving in to corporate-backed technology and mass media as fast as Harry Reid caves in to the Tea Party. It’s one thing to use a public address system. It’s another to achieve a level of volume so electronic and alien that it subtly undermines the audience’s health. (Yes, I mean health.)

I’m not saying that it was ear-splitting. Just uncomfortable to body and breath. It’s about respect for nature, for public space, and the conviviality of the outdoor festival audience. An impromptu conga circle group was playing simultaneously (maintaining their regular Saturday meeting, one presumes). That sound added to the chaos. But close up, they seemed hipper, in the sense of understatement: more sensual, more about drawing you in than pushing you back.

I don’t know whether this acoustic problem was the responsbility of the producers, rather than the musicians. This is not the only jazz concert I’ve been to with this issue. It can’t be because I am old—I grew up in the ‘60s when loud became de rigeur (in every sense of the Gallic word). Can we talk about this, please?

The group updated a standard Bird recorded, I’ll Remember April, and his own Now’s The Time and Little Willie Leaps. The latter replaced the looping, difficult up-tempo rendition Parker chose with a much slower, straight-eighth note version made to fit a funk beat. The effect was to turn Parker’s roller-coaster into a treadmill.

What Bobby Hutcherson is doing NOW

"You haven't heard him recently?" said guitarist Peter Bernstein. "It's really different now."

Bernstein was referring to a change in Hutcherson's playing in the last several years.

"He used to come on with this incredible force, playing a rush of notes. Now it's different. But I can't put it into words." Pete did say that he was using shorter phrases, but declined to say what he was doing during that shorter time.

"Understatement?" I asked, to which Bernstein said that wasn't really it.

I'll venture to try to describe what I then heard Hutcherson do, with the hubris of one who would dance about architecture.

It was packing a number of ideas into a short space. Not understated as much as densely compressed. Each phrase suggested several different musical directions, but did not complete or follow through with or exhaust those directions. Each direction pointed way outward, but didn't travel there before another challenge was seamlessly taken up.

On "Nancy with the Laughing Face," for example, Hutcherson completed one arching phrase that first introduced a fairly startling whole tone scale, then went in a modal fourth pattern far from the original key.

Typical materials from the chromatic language of bop and beyond. But the phrase was only a bar long.

The effect was like vertigo, as I reacted to this surprising interruption to the lyricism of the song, then experience another swoop away from the expected so soon.

It's like poetry. To suggest more than one says, by using ambiguity, allusion, ellipsis. Holding eternity in a grain of sand.

Bringing the Audience Back In

Who’s listening?

I pose this question to musicians, and especially to people writing and thinking about jazz, such as journalists, historians, educators and researchers. Those of us who are intensely involved in jazz may have been preoccupied with the production end: the music itself, the people who play it, and at times those who record or promote the artists. Without taking on any particular instances of this “productivist” bias, in this post I would like to simply suggest that there is much to learn about jazz by looking at the consumption side of the equation: how it is consumed, when it is (or was) consumed, by whom, and why.

We have some basic data about jazz listeners’ age, income, gender or skin color, particularly in the last twenty years or so. I do not know of anyone who has gone deeper with this data to ask what trends say about the reception or development of jazz. What sort of experience are audiences or record-buyers having, and what stays with them after the set is over or the CD player shuts off? Has their profile changed since the “Golden Age” of jazz (or since various ages whose “goldenness” is perennially contested)? Whatever the data suggest, what would that mean for the trajectory of jazz since, say, 1945, 1965, or 1985?

Information about audiences may be harder to come by the further we go into the past. But I submit that it would possible to research it by creatively looking at live performance reviews, advertisements in jazz magazines, sales data, and historic photographs and film clips. There are theses to be written, and methods to be explored, based on these research sources.

If we knew more about them, perhaps it would be possible to view audiences, then and now, as actively shaping jazz rather than passively consuming it. After all, if jazz is truly democratic, shouldn’t the people who appreciate it be thought of as part of the creative process or evolution of jazz? There is a tendency among jazz aficionados and experts to look at audiences as naïve or susceptible to a herd mentality. But there may be things that audiences know intuitively that those of us on the “production” side may tend to forget. The ways certain performers get evaluated might change if we looked more carefully at what it is that audiences tend to respond to.

Ahmad Jamal, Gene Ammons, and Dr. Lonnie Smith come to mind as examples. All three are masters of their music and successful entertainers. The latter, however, has been a liability for them in their critical reception. (I can cite evidence but my word will have to do in this short space.) By dismissing these artists as “second-string”, we have missed the fact that being an entertainer is not incidental to their work but is a deliberate, fully-realized part of their art. Consider Jamal’s electric mix of meticulously arranged structure and spontaneity, Ammons’ cool economy and story-telling flair, Smith’s wild and risky search for new material every set, paralleled by his own narration on the mic.

Audiences eat this stuff up. But why? We will never know if we focus only on the detailed fabric of the improvised line—its convolutions and complex harmonic layers and cross-references. (Jazz has gotten very baroque, and the details are sometimes too fleet even for experts to follow or discuss.) What Ammons, Jamal, and Smith have in common is a masterly feel for how a whole solo or set are organized (or deliberately not organized, given that we are talking about improvised music here.) Audiences respond intuitively to the pacing, larger formal patterns, and the potential for surprise and drama that control of these elements can bring. Are these structural elements something we can afford to dismiss in talking seriously about jazz?

There are political as well as aesthetic reasons to bring audiences back in. The growing interest in jazz in academia and in popular attention in the last 20 years or so has been motivated in part to reclaim and affirm a vital piece of African-American culture. Towering figures like Ellington or Coltrane, whose voices may indeed have advanced their people, get a lot of ink. But what about the other jazz artists who sold well with “ordinary” black folks? If sales are any indication, working class black people during the 1950s preferred soul or funk jazz over hard-core bebop. (If you want to argue with this claim, you are welcome. The debate itself would further my main point that audiences matter.)

There have been few if any articles about jazz players with funky roots like Arnett Cobb, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, or Jimmy Smith. I can’t think of any tributes to them at Lincoln Center. Yet they not only appealed to black audiences, they were influential as artists. Is there implicit condescension to this segment of the historical black audience for these artists? Is there a class as well as racial bias in this pattern? The problem is artistic and political. Sonny Rollins loved Louis Jordan’s music and saxophone playing, yet there has never been much written about Jordan. What does the canonical Rollins see in Jordan that the critics and historians, the ones who canonized him, have missed? Have they made Rollins into an “elite” artist, a status he might reject?

It is true that the most original, influential, and productive figures like Rollins will and should receive our appreciation as such. But isn’t the way they, too, “played” their audience, and appealed to eyes and minds as well as ears, a part of the fascination they hold? Lester Young’s angular stance matched his angular approach. Is that a mere accident of history? Miles Davis may or may not have turned his back on the audience. But who was more concerned with image and taking the pulse of the time than he was? Even the famously undemonstrative John Coltrane brought drama and meaning to performances with his feats of endurance, his spiritual motives, and his leadership of a quartet that was so free yet thought as one with him. One of jazz’ most challenging musicians is thereby also one of its best selling.

Young performers are taught to emulate these great musicians’ licks and chord changes. Are they taught, in any direct way, to engage an audience? (If anyone has examples, I would like to know.) Research and education on jazz is in some sense presenting it to an audience of readers, students, and, indeed, potential listeners. It follows that fledging jazz musicians must be the ones to promote their music in every sense if it is to have a future. And, if promoting music is the goal, one must understand the audience in question.

Being mindful of one’s audience is important even in the most challenging forms of jazz performance. Even, that is, in those often presumed to have bravely charged ahead in spite of what appeared to be limited audiences. As George Lewis notes in his book A Power Stronger Than Itself, which is about the experimental Association for the Advancement of Creative Music of his native South Side of Chicago: free or avant-garde jazz is perfectly capable of winning over audiences. The trick is in how and where it’s presented, and there may be ways of presenting specific kinds of jazz. (Big-ticket nightclubs never clicked for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, for example; they played the college circuit instead.)

The reception of “free jazz” shows that “selling out” and “remaining pure” is a false choice. Capitulating to a “crowd” mentality on one hand, and remaining heroically, perhaps tragically, aloof from popular acceptance on the other are two sides of the same coin. If an artist is to communicate, she or he has to approach the Other, even if that meeting must be only halfway. The same is true of those who document or interpret the artists’ work.