Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Taste and Love. Ever since Dixieland and ragtime, jazz has worked best, and spoken most eloquently for the black American, when it was most free and spontaneous. By the middle 1950s, after swing and bebop, jazz was wedded to the classics through the progressive jazz of Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet and others. It took on an increasingly formal, warmed-over character. At that moment, the need for the New Thing first stirred among future jazz movers like Alto Saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Pianist Cecil Taylor and Tenor Saxophonist John Coltrane...
Their goal was ambitious: to extend the language of jazz even farther than the progressives and, at the same time, restore its old freewheeling gut-blues intensity. Drawing on African primitivism, Mediterranean and Asian folk music, and sounding at times like Viennese atonalists, the new jazzmen vary tonal centers, when they are used at all, as often as they do moods. Basic rhythms, unavoidable before, are often merely implied or forgotten entirely now. But as Ornette Coleman says, "When it's done with taste and love, hardly anybody wouldn't like...
...ever the New Thing had a whole man, it was the late John Coltrane. An innovator, his "sheets of sound" technique and long (often 40 minutes) sonata-like solos on sax have revolutionized the jazz world. He was looked up to by other New Thing players as a friend and spiritual leader. "He seemed like a priest, the way he talked," recalls Saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, a former sideman and now leader of his own group...
...personally celebrated, the New Thing's future is shaky. Veteran Trumpeter Miles Davis has adapted to it successfully, but few of the men who originated it get high-paying gigs. Though they are beginning to find audiences on college campuses, they are rarely invited to the big jazz festivals. Like blues and New Orleans jazz before it, avant-garde jazz is already in the early stages of being borrowed from by commercial musicians, mainly white. In some barely recognizable form, its echoes and resonances may dominate part of tomorrow's pop-music scene...
Much of what can be said about the New Thing's expressiveness was said long ago about the birth of the old jazz. But it is essentially the music of a specific time and place-the time that of a black revolution, the place white America. To listen to it hard is to know at least something about the black man's struggle for freedom. "What does music mean?" asks Archie Shepp. "When you hear Debussy, don't you hear an era? Don't you hear an era when you listen to Stockhausen?" Is it possible...