haven't read this stuff in a long time, but i seem to recall that cool jazz is considered pretty white so i can see why marsalis feels the way he does. can you dance to it? it ain't black jazz if you cain't. if it don't move yer hips, it ain't jazz!!! damn it. black jazz got subsumed into soul with a big brass section. Kelley
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I think this is a mistaken way to look at it. What was going on was a split in the black community between its intellectual and cultural elite, its avantgard and its ground in mass experience, and that was reflective of the rest of the country as well. But there is nothing non-black about it. If anything it was a kind of black arrival or confrontation with Art. Monk, Powel, Parker, Gillespie, Percy Heath are very black, and fully conscious that they were meeting something for the first time, as if they were a delegation out to meet Modernity on its own terms. It wasn't just some vaguely popular music anymore. It was like for keeps, in a way that straight popular entertainment is never for keeps.
I think it was Carmen McCray who was talking about hearing Monk in the late Thirties or early Forties and the weird sounds she heard. She said something to the effect that she thought they were making creep show music, like for horror movies. In other words they were experimenting with surrealism---how to get out there in sound. This was a completely different impulse than playing something to dance to, or sing along with. If you think about that a moment, you can see this is what an art impulse might look like, pure weirdness. Nothing seems to fit together and it doesn't seem have any purpose. It's not beautiful, its edgy, and disconnected.
I've never written about jazz before and its like I am trying to explain something that can't be explained. On some level, when I really started listening to it, it open a door on the same kind of world that abstract painting opens. It's a confrontation with the conflicts in modernity, with a world that is supposed to make sense and doesn't. It's a depiction of the landscapes that are there and are not there, at the same time.
In any event, it died sometime in the mid-Seventies. You could probably pick a point in Miles Davis that would work as a marker, say after Bitches Brew or somewhere in there. But see this is exactly the same era that Modernity itself was put into the dust bin. Paz called it the death of the future, and I still think that is just about the best way to describe it. Miles said in an interveiw once, you know it gets old after awhile, getting up there and playing the same thing, year in and year out, it just gets old.
So the confrontation with Modernity, fell along with its dragon. I mean there are a long list of reasons, and I am still trying to sort them out. It seems to me that in that equation is where you have to start all over again, and for some reason it just isn't getting done. Its pretty easy to lay out the capitalist media reasons, but somehow that isn't enough.
Chuck Grimes