UNDERSTANDING
JAZZ
There was a time when
jazz could be described as the music of the black American, but in an age of
multi-racial interest in and commitment to jazz, that is no longer necessarily
the case. If anything, jazz ceased to be
a black man's music with the dawn of 'modern jazz', and we may note an acoustic/electric
distinction between the traditional and the modern.
Since the twentieth century was a predominantly petty-bourgeois
age, I think it only fair to define jazz as a form of serious petty-bourgeois
music. I would even go so far as to say
that it was the American equivalent of European classical music, which, in the
twentieth century, also developed a specifically petty-bourgeois integrity,
though one more conservative and, contrary to superficial appearances, deeply
rooted in tradition than its American counterpart. Although, following Schoenberg's lead, much
of this European music is atonal or, at any rate, relatively atonal compared to
nineteenth-century Romanticism, it has remained largely acoustic, not rivalled
the best modern jazz in the use of electric instruments. Furthermore, it has retained, in the great
majority of cases, a dependence on scores and conductors, thereby betraying a
respect for conceptual appearances which, except in a small minority of cases,
is not to be found in modern jazz, or even, as a rule, in its traditional
precursor. Clearly, American jazz is
more transcendental than European orchestral music and thus entitled, in my
opinion, to be regarded as a mainstream, as opposed to subsidiary, form of
petty-bourgeois serious music. And this
in conjunction with a similar distinction which I have elsewhere applied to art
and which can, I believe, be applied to most other subjects as well, depending
on whether they pertain to the genuinely petty-bourgeois nations of the Western
world, like America and Germany, or to the pseudo-petty-bourgeois ones, like
Britain and France, which are still firmly rooted in bourgeois tradition.
Thus, in art, the distinction between Expressionism and
Impressionism, as pertaining to the genuinely petty-bourgeois civilization in
the earlier stage of its development, and Cubism and Symbolism, which pertain
to their materialist and spiritualist counterparts respectively within the
confines of the pseudo-petty-bourgeois nations, is paralleled, in music, by the
distinction between jazz on the one hand and classical on the other, a
distinction itself capable of being divided into a spiritualist and a
materialist side in each case, so that we may speak of acoustic tonal jazz as
the materialistic counterpart of late-Romanticism and, by contrast, of electric
tonal jazz as the spiritualistic counterpart of neo-Classicism. We may also mark the evolution of jazz from
an earlier to a later stage, again paralleling the evolution of classical from
late-Romanticism to non-serial atonal composition on the materialist side, and
from neo-Classicism to serialized atonal composition on the spiritualist side,
which I shall define in terms of atonal electric on the one hand and atonal
acoustic on the other. Thus where the
one side signifies an expansion of spirituality with the assistance of electric
instruments, the other side signifies a contraction of materialism through the
use of acoustic instruments - something that has also happened in European
serious music, though, in my estimation, to a less radical extent.
If, then, jazz may be claimed to have progressed from a stage
stemming from bourgeois tonality to a stage aspiring towards proletarian
atonality, and to have done so from two points of view, viz. a materialist and
a spiritualist, is there any possibility, I wonder, of its evolving beyond this
latter stage to an absolutely proletarian one?
The answer to this has, I think, to be - no. For jazz, whether acoustic or electric, would
cease to be jazzy if it abandoned the one thing that keeps it tied to the
relative, albeit extreme, petty-bourgeois level - namely, percussion. Jazz, of whichever variety, is the wedding of
pagan rhythmic vitality and consistency to either tonality or atonality
produced on mostly artificial instruments, formerly saxophones and trumpets,
latterly electric keyboards and guitars; though the two kinds of instruments,
corresponding to an earlier and a later manifestation of the artificial, often
overlap in practice. Jazz is simply
incapable of evolving beyond petty-bourgeois criteria. It cannot be the ultimate music since, to all
appearances, it is a penultimate music, relevant to an
extreme relativistic civilization.
Beyond and above modern jazz must come the universal proletarian music of
electric atonality.
Why should music progress to an atonal integrity? The straight answer to that is: in order to
escape from rhythm and thus be in the best possible position to intimate of the
Divine Omega, that is to say, to impress rather than to express. Melody reflects an atomic integrity to the
extent that it is composed of rhythm and pitch - the former horizontal, the
latter vertical. Melodic music is
therefore quintessentially relative, a compromise, as it were,
between rhythm and pitch, which is only possible and morally acceptable during
an atomic stage of civilized evolution.
Before this compromise arose, music was absolutist on the horizontal
level of rhythm, a music of the soul, feminine and
sensuous. After it has passed, music
will become absolutist on the vertical level of pitch, a
music of the spirit, masculine and intellectual. Such music can only be atonal, or
non-melodic, the complete antithesis of pagan music, having transcended rhythm
in its absolutist dedication to pitch, whereby a musical impression of the
transcendent will be achieved. That is
the moral significance of atonality, and such atonality can only be truly
transcendent, and therefore in the best position to intimate of the Divine
Omega, when projected from an electric basis - the most artificial, or
synthetic, technical medium.
By contrast, jazz never abandons the percussive root and is
consequently always part expressive.
When atonal and electric it can be predominantly impressive but, as
already noted, it would cease to be jazzy (and thus to swing) if ever it became
exclusively so. There are, of course,
jazz albums which abandon the percussive root intermittently, and certainly
this can be said of the now-defunct American band Weather Report. But, overall, jazz predominates on such
albums within any particular composition, and must necessarily continue to do
so, in the context of relativistic civilization. Conversely, when the melodic or atonal apex
is abandoned, as it often is on albums that feature a drummer in the role of
band leader, the resultant music sinks beneath jazz to a purely rhythmic level,
approximating to the pagan, and may be defined as the most evil music
conceivable. Again, jazz usually
predominates on these albums, and sometimes the overall balance is such that
pure rhythm will be preceded or succeeded by pure pitch or, at the very least,
unaccompanied melody. For it often
happens that one extreme calls forth another, and certainly I can think of a
number of compositions in which frantic rhythm from the drums is countered by
electric atonality from either sax, guitar, or keyboards, so that the
impression created is of a music in which the parts are at loggerheads and
seemingly indulging in a musical tug-of-war between rhythm and pitch, alpha and
omega. This is not, to say the least, a
particularly laudable situation! But
neither, for that matter, is the analogous context of a 'melody' at war with
itself, now predominantly rhythmic, now predominantly atonal, and indisposed to
the preservation of a melodic compromise, or classical balance. And yet these situations mirror the
evolutionary struggle which is constantly taking place between rhythm and
pitch, as between evil and good, soul and spirit, in an extreme relativistic
age. Such struggles are also taking place in European classical music, though,
as a rule, on less radical terms.
When we ask ourselves what it is that makes jazz a serious or
civilized music, I think the basic answer has to be: its commitment to
instrumentality, and therefore relatively high degree of artificiality. Vocals do of course occur, but usually as a
minor rather than a major ingredient in the overall instrumental scope of an
album, as pertaining, on average, to one or two tracks, and then more usually
of a religious connotation - one compatible, needless to say, with
petty-bourgeois criteria. For it is
virtually axiomatic that to be civilized, particularly on the extreme
relativistic level we are discussing, music must be either exclusively
instrumental or accompanied, in part, by vocals of a religious
significance. An album of romantic
songs, on the other hand, falls somewhat short of the civilized by dint both of
its excessive commitment to the voice - a natural instrument - and the sexual
or emotional content of the songs. Being
civilized, at whatever stage of class evolution, is to a large extent
synonymous with being religious (spiritual), though being sophisticated is a
subsidiary requirement more likely to find favour among materialists, whose
music, while being exclusively or predominantly instrumental, isn't consciously
intended to convey a religious notion.
No doubt, much of the jazz I characterized, a short while ago, as
materialist, through its dependence on acoustic instruments, is only entitled
to consideration as a civilized music on account of its technical
sophistication. But by this fact alone
it stands in an inferior relation to its spiritual counterpart, whether of the
tonal or atonal varieties.
While we may therefore be justified in discriminating between
the civilized and the barbarous, as between jazz of one kind or another and
such popular romance-biased kinds of vocal music as blues, soul, funk, reggae,
rock 'n' roll, pop, rock, and punk, it often happens that respected jazz
musicians abandon the civilized level not for the barbarous as such - though
the incorporation of, say, rock elements into jazz creates a 'fusion' music
which may broadly be defined as bourgeois/proletarian - but a kind of popular
petty-bourgeois level, implying the production of albums with a preponderance
of vocals, and vocals, moreover, of a romantic and/or sexist nature. And yet, as a rule, these musicians cling by
a slender thread to their civilized roots, even if ambiguously, and retain at
least one track of either pure instrumentality or a vocal bias whose
connotations are distinctly religious.
With the greatest, most civilized jazz musicians, however, there is
little or no concession to the popular at all.
Musicians like Jean-Luc Ponty and John
McLaughlin have been producing a succession of instrumental albums year after
year. They are fast becoming something
of an exception in the realm of modern jazz, a small minority of the
consistently civilized. Perhaps it is no
mere coincidence that both Ponty and McLaughlin are European?
And yet a European in jazz is almost as unusual as an American
in classical, not merely in terms of performance but, more significantly, of
composition. Why is it that, just as
there were so many great European classical composers in the twentieth century,
there were, comparatively speaking, so few great European jazz composers in
it? And, conversely, why should there be
so many great American jazz composers but, by comparison, so few great American
classical composers? Is not the answer
to both these questions that whereas classical is pre-eminently a European
phenomenon, jazz is an American one pre-eminently, and that, though
cross-fertilization does occur, the mainstream commitments to each type of
music will be regional, accruing to the continental divide. The American jazz composers who adopt
classical influences are as rare a breed as the European classical composers
who adopt the influence of jazz. Rarer
still are the American classical composers and the European jazz composers, both
of whom, though working in an alien tradition, sooner or later tend to bend
their respective types of music back towards their native influences, so that
American 'classical' becomes jazzy (Copland, Gershwin, Barber, Bernstein, et
al.), whilst European 'jazz' becomes classical or, at any rate, retains a
respect and proclivity for classical procedure (Ponty,
McLaughlin, Catherine, Weber, Hammer, Vitous,
Ackermann, et al.). And this no less so
when the composer/performer concerned has spent many years on the other
continent, particularly in the case of European jazz musicians who have
emigrated to or chosen to work in
