From: "paul childs" <npchilds at connect.ab.ca> Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 14:48:33 -0700
I’ve been meaning to write this little screed for another listserver dealing with African-American music but I thought I’d subject this list to it first.
Indulge me for a second and let explain my background. I come from one of the ‘better’ neighborhoods in Ottawa, Ontario. Senior bureaucrats, lawyers, diplomatic staff, military officers, a former Prime Ministers PPS was one of our neighbors. Yer basic privileged neighborhood, and about as white as a Wonder bread and mayonnaise sandwich. Music (jazz, later punk rock) for me, and my somewhat narrow circle of friends was an escape; from the crap that infested the radio in the mid to late 70’s, from neighborhoods that stifled interest in anything outside of what you were expected to do, and escape from a school system that prized conformity above originality.
I was exposed to jazz early on, and grew to love it. On the one hand, my mother liked jazz; in fact she saw one of Art Peppers first performances after he got out of jail. On the other, she had no idea what he had been through until she read a biography 15 years later. Jazz then had no identity beyond the music, racial, intellectual, cultural, whatever. The upside of this was being exposed to a variety of music; the downside was not knowing where it came from. As I listened to more jazz and began to understand its origins and its purpose I saw the prime role that race plays in it. So the Ken Burns series is correct in emphasizing the primacy of race in the growth of jazz in the 20th century.
What troubles me is the central role Marsalis is playing in the series. I’ve seen the man perform several times, own a lot of his CD’s and my kids learned music with his video series, and he is a brilliant player and teacher. But when he performs, the music he plays is, in most cases, older than me, and I'm 41. For Marsalis, and now Ken Burns, jazz stopped growing in the sixties. This is absolute crap. For a man who makes a lot of noise about respect for music and musicians he seems to have no trouble dissing the pioneers of the 60’s. Marsalis wants to argue that ‘black consciousness’ (for lack of a better expression) grew up with jazz, but suddenly once jazz stopped being what he likes (i.e. anything other than swing), the music doesn’t matter. Marsalis does understand the role of race in music and his music is rich in that understanding, musical and cultural; Black Codes from the Underground, Blood on the Fields and so on.
But his limited view is why two year periods get an hour and half early in the series and the last 41 years gets one episode at the end of the series and less than 50 pages in 500 page book. I’m only going on reviews here but the comments sound correct; Burns and Marsalis argue that jazz was dying by the 60’s. By playing Ellington in a repertory arrangement (jazz repertory! The mind boggles at the ramifications of that statement) Marsalis sees himself as resurrecting jazz, defined as swing and little else.
I cannot pretend to understand the nature of being black in America, or the connection that jazz would have to your soul in that culture. But I do know that connection wasn’t severed 40 years ago when Miles recorded Kind of Blue or Ornette Coleman recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come.
There, I feel better now.
PC N Paul Childs This address or <npchilds at hotmail.com>