Duke Ellington died on May 24, 1974. Within days, Miles Davis had recorded a tribute, "He Loved Him Madly" (alluding, of course, to Ellington's "Love You Madly"). Across the Atlantic, Philip Larkin was also moved by Ellington's death: "Let us bury the great Duke," he wrote (alluding to Tennyson's poem on the death of Wellington). "I've been playing some of his records: now that he and Armstrong have gone jazz is finally finished."
Miles Davis died on September 28, 1991. On October 12 of that year, Keith Jarrett and his trio recorded "For Miles" and "Blackbird, Bye Bye" as their tribute to him.
In the fall of 1996, Jarrett became ill with chronic fatigue syndrome. "It should," Jarrett said, "be called Forever Dead Syndrome." He couldn't do anything, couldn't play the piano. For someone who claimed that "playing the piano" had been his "entire life," it was like not existing.
Recorded at his home studio in rural New Jersey, The Melody at Night, with You (1999) was the album of Jarrett's convalescence. In a way, it was a very modest offering: an hour of old love songs and standards played solo, on the piano, with little sign of the surging improvisational gusto that marked Jarrett's epochal Köln Concert of 1975. When he took a break from playing improvised music to begin recording Bach in 1987, Jarrett remarked, "This music doesn't need my help." This time around it was the pianist who needed the help of loyal old tunes like "Someone to Watch over Me" and "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good." Finding themselves needed and profoundly appreciated, the songs flickered back to life.
If this seems a sentimental reading, consider Jarrett in the wider context of jazz at the tail end of the century through which it streaked. Was it not appropriate -- inevitable, almost -- that one of the greatest living jazz musicians should have succumbed to exhaustion when the medium in which he was working had utterly exhausted itself?
From the early forties to the late sixties, jazz strode confidently into the future, constantly revolutionising itself. Such was the speed of development during this period that, in its aftermath, musicians could build careers stocktaking the immense hoard of cultural riches laid in by the likes of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis (with whom Jarrett played in the early seventies). As a consequence, the forward momentum of the music diminished to the point where it became choked by the enormous weight of the past. Like the Mississippi, the jazz delta began to silt up. The only direction was sideways -- east more often than not -- to the edges of the form, into world music.
The center, meanwhile, could not hold. Jazz as jazz died. Perhaps, ironically, that is the lesson of the comprehensive documentary series Jazz, by Ken Burns: Jazz is history. That may also be why, having ridden the crest of a stylish jazz revival when first released, movies like 'Round Midnight and Bird have rapidly acquired the patina of period pieces or costume dramas. The same point can be made the opposite way: Some of the best new jazz releases are actually old releases remastered and repackaged. Specialist publications aside, the only place where jazz commands extensive media attention is on the obituary pages, when living legends die. Not surprisingly, concerts by jazz giants often have the reverential stuffiness of improvised mausoleums.
I hear a clamor of objections. Isn't this simply another of the "premature autopsies" denounced by Stanley Crouch? Aren't these concerts almost always sold out? Isn't the audience invariably ecstatic with gratitude? Since old rock bands keep coming back from the dead, reforming, touring, why shouldn't old jazzers keep playing for as long as their fingers are nimble? Why shouldn't talented young musicians have the chance to explore the legacy of Charlie Parker? They can, they should. But jazz is like Woody Allen's shark: It has to keep moving, otherwise it dies. That's inherent in the idea of its animating characteristic: improvisation. The Who can play "Won't Get Fooled Again" again and again, forever and a day, without undermining the song's credibility. The Stones songs that work best in concert are the ones -- as Martin Amis puts it -- "already embossed on the responses." Change is imminent to jazz. Wynton Marsalis has done much to raise awareness of the jazz tradition, but his conservative approach drew an inevitable rebuke from the late Lester Bowie, who energetically espoused an alternative tradition of change, innovation, and revolution.
The problem -- as anyone who has heard Archie ("gonna be a re-re-revolution") Shepp perform in recent years will testify -- is that the modes of change have themselves become dated, fixed (gonna be a re-re-repetition). The allure of the avant-garde has become primarily nostalgic. (There is something pleasingly apposite about the section labeled "Secondhand Avant-Garde" in Ray's Jazz Store in London.) Borges noticed that the problem with Apollinaire's experimental poetry is that "not a single line allows us to forget the date on which it was written." One's enjoyment of contemporary jazz quartets and quintets playing bop of a very high standard may not be diminished but it must be informed by the fact that music like this was first heard more than half a century ago. It's not as thoroughly quiff-bound and retro as rock and roll, but jazz, now, is not just part of the American academy, it's part of the American heritage industry. http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1682&referrer=alert