I just wrote about the music I listened to during that fruitful year. Now let me talk about the effort –intellectual and attitudinal- it took to process all that new music.
You need to appreciate the amount of processing going on inside my head. Sure, you can trace the antecedents of every performer and album I listed to. None of them came without ancestors. But now I had to place them all in a new, more expansive framework.
I had listened before then to forward looking jazz –Mingus, George Russell, Dolphy, just to name a few. I’d heard Carla Bley’s DaDa opera, Escalator Over the Hill, and enjoyed t it, also Miles’s electronic forays and a few wild things like Gil Melle and his little group using electronics. And on the side, back at Wells College, I’d had head to head sessions with a professor in the Music Department who was just learning how to play the Moog synthesizer (the college had acquired one, I forget how) and played Stockhausen, Boulez and Xenakis for me in an effort to convert me.
So I wasn’t a virgin to modernity, not even in jazz.
But for reasons of time and money, I’d missed out on a transformative moment in jazz when all kinds of things changed, big time. It was most audible in the AACM musicians –their mix of experimentalism and traditionalism, ignoring the boundaries between contemporary composed music and improvised jazz as if they no longer mattered. But it was occurring elsewhere, not just in Chicago. For one example, I didn’t appreciate then how much jazz was changing in Europe –Philip Brotzmann, Evan Parker, the coming wave of new experimentalists…
I listened hard and steady to a lot of new stuff that year. It made me rethink what music is. It’s difficult not to sound hokey describing it but going through it, there were many moments when I’d listen to a new album and say to myself, “What’s going on here?” I just didn’t get it. Not at first. But then I’d listen again, and again, and the music’s logic and charm gradually sinked in. It was like what had happened to me listening to new classical composers –I had come to classical music with a much less extensive, less articulated background so time after time, I found myself navigating new waters, trying to figure out not just what was going on in the music but why sensible people found it appealing.
This may help. I’m going to play four piece. Notice the changes.
The first is the Gary Burton quintet, one of my favorite groups, Eberhard Weber sitting in as guest. Note the date. It’s 1977. The music is modern in tone but it’s basically conservative. It’s good music but it doesn’t rock any boats.
Gary Burton: “B&G (Midwestern Night’s Dream” (1977)
Compare that to this cut by Roscoe Mitchell playing one of many versions of his composition, “Nonaah.” This one runs 22 minutes 10 seconds, played solo. Notice ehow it complicates and moves away from classically pretty toward the middle of the piece. It was recorded the same year as Burton’s piece but doesn’t come from the same universe. You can appreciate them both but you need to do some adjusting in expectations from the one to the other.
Roscoe Mitchell: “Nonaah” (1977)
Here are TWO Cecil Taylor cuts, recorded sixteen (1961) and eleven years (1966) earlier. Chronology means nothing here. Cecil’s vision runs miles ahead of Burton’s and parallel to Mitchell’s, music wise.
Cecil Taylor: “Bulbs” (1961) –Roswell Rudd and Archie Shepp solo along with Taylor
Cecil Taylor, “Steps,” from Unit Structures (1966)
So tell me, which sounds newest to you, and why?
That one year, I negotiated the distance from Burton to Mitchell to (almost) Taylor.
That’s where jazz had gone in the space of a decade and a half that I had fallen behind on listening to it. I had a lot of catching unto do.
MUSIC & ME 