The New Thing

Ladies and gentlemen, our first number is based on the traditional nineteen--nineteen beats to the bar. The subdivision goes like this: three, three, two, two, two, one, two, two, two. Actually, that's just the area code." (Laughter) "And that's the name of the piece." This is Don Ellis, trumpet in hand, addressing the crowd at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival.

Ellis then turned his bearded young face to his band and illustrated simplicity lost by shouting off the tempo: "Three, three, two, two, two, one, two, two, two."

It was Ellis who, in the not-too-distant past, named the jazz of the Sixties the "New Thing." Let's see what's new about it.

As most of us know, jazz was born around the turn of the century in whorehouses and at Southern funerals and parades, a folk music conceived in Africa. As all of us know, it was taken North on the Mississippi and it became popular--the music of the 20th Century.

In the Twenties, European harmonic devices were introduced and a jazz giant such as Bix Beiderbecke could reflect the influences of Ravel and Debussy. But it was still primarily a good-time music--music to dance, drink and make love to.

Carnegie Hall--1938. Benny Goodman's famous concert launched the career of jazz as listening music. It was the beginning of a revolution, a revolution that developed slowly at first, however. In the Thirties and early Forties, jazz remained basically as it had been. But further change was inevitable.

Bebop arrived in the mid-Forties--Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and dissonance. Chord changes turned more intricate, the beat more subtle. One had to know something about music in general and about the rules of bebop in particular to fully understand it. For example, it helped to know that Miles Davis' Little Willie Leaps was based on the chords of All God's Children Got Rhythm. It was essential, to appreciate the brilliance of his inventiveness, to know that Charlie Parker substituted his own more complicated chords on whatever songs he played.

The physical--the swing--still predominated, although somewhat more disguised. Jazz was still in the tradition of Broadway--song-and-dance music, sing-along music, partying music. But it was changing, no longer solely an intuitive thing. Musical knowledge, technical proficiency and general intelligence were more necessary. It became increasingly helpful to know how to read music. Jazz was growing up. And it was moving inexorably toward the concert stage.

Miles Davis was the big man on the scene in the Fifties. In his group were the late John Coltrane on tenor saxophone and one of the strongest rhythm sections ever assembled: Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; and Philly Joe Jones, drums. The group was free, physical, intellectual--and they communicated. They were modern as modern should be: Saarinen's TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport, Giacometti's sculpture. Clean open spaces, beautiful lines, complicated design simply projected, grainy textures. They played melodies and still worked largely in saloons.

Then, ten years ago, Ornette Coleman's first record was released and the revolution was in the streets. Coleman marked the end of the necessity to use any chords at all. The record itself was revolutionary in implication rather than in actuality, consisting of bebop-type melodies played in a more or less traditional manner by Coleman's alto and Don Cherry's trumpet. However, the solos in many places were free of chordal limitations, and these places were signposts indicating the road jazz was going to follow in the future.

In a development perhaps not as well known but equally important, a drummer named Sunny Murray broke through the time barrier in the early Sixties and stopped playing anything resembling a regular pulse.

No chords, no beat, nothing to whistle, no objective standards. Complete abstraction came to jazz in the Sixties, about 50 years after it arrived on the painting scene.

Of course, people continue playing other ways and many remain creative: Coleman Hawkins, Art Farmer, Dave Brubeck, Cannonball Adderley, Oscar Peterson and Miles Davis, for example. However, they are no longer in the vanguard. The mantle of modern has been taken from them by those who demand a greater freedom of expression, who do not want to be tied down to somebody else's rules. They wish to be composers, not interpreters. They are searching. So far, however, the main discovery seems to have been a new way to utter chaos.

Painter and ex-jazz musician Larry Rivers comments on the situation this way: "Ornette Coleman seemed to produce absolute apathy in a lot of people. It happened earlier in painting and in 'serious' music. You don't know what it's about--notes or what. I don't mean to put that music down, but when a style of art had interest for a group of people, you mean to say that after it loses its front-page value, it's no longer valid? If that's true, life seems hopeless.... Then the sort of Broadway version of life and art--'she had her day'--is that all there is to it? I don't know.... I can see, though, how the whole thing about chordal structure can seem silly.... Art has expanded. We've included more things because more things have become boring. There had to be other places for men to go to bring back a little delight, so they began experimenting with other things. Broadening the arena."

An article about the New Thing in The New York Times Magazine was headlined "Black. Angry, and Hard to Understand." This is misleading.

Integrated bands are not unusual. White trombonist Roswell Rudd works with Archie Shepp's group, bassist Dave Izenzon with Ornette Coleman. There are other examples. So the music is not "black." Negro poet LeRoi Jones shouted black-nationalist slogans in Down Beat and on record liners for a while, linking his political and social ideas to the new music. However, they were his ideas, and it was not his music. He was using it for propaganda. The music is better than propaganda and most of Jones' musician friends have since disassociated themselves from him over that issue.

The music sounds angry at times, it is true, but those who play it, almost without exception, belie that label. They are of the left, most of them opposed to the Vietnam war, opposed to the traffic-ticket-fixer personality of Lyndon Baines Johnson and concerned with the mounting tension between the races in this country. But who isn't? So many of us are angry and frustrated these days. The new jazz players reflect the time, as does their music, but they do not exaggerate it.

The music may be somewhat hard to understand. Anything new is. But there are basic observations to be made.

Don Cherry is soft-spoken, lucid and intelligent. Brought up poor in the Watts district of Los Angeles, Cherry has not been made any richer by his art. But it is clear that he is totally committed to it. His eyes gleam as he speaks. "To me, the New Thing is just another way of saying 'music today.' There really is no such thing as new music, just music 'now.' The Swedish word nu means 'now.' I think of myself as playing the 'now thing.'"

Coal-black, with clear eyes, alto saxophonist Marion Brown lives in a loft next door to where Cherry lived, in a commercial district near the Brooklyn end of the Delancey Street bridge. The area is deserted after dark, permitting all-night practicing. However, Marion Brown is listening to Mozart on FM radio as he paints his pressed-tin ceiling. He lives outside the establishment by choice. Until such time as it will accept him on his own terms, he will remain outside. With a bachelor's degree in music education from Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia, his home town, he could earn a more-or-less comfortable middle-class living if he so desired. But he has chosen to live the life of the avant-garde. "I think of myself as an opera singer--a coloratura," he says, turning up the Mozart. "I am concerned with arriving at the abstract lyric."

Lyricism is scarce in the new jazz, however. John Coltrane, who died this past summer at a tragically young 40, abandoned his rich melodic communicative bag of the Fifties and, reflecting the predominant characteristic, shouted abstract energy in the Sixties. His solos became loud and harsh, crowded notes crushed by honks and screeches, containing little of what is traditionally thought of as beauty. And they often lasted as long as an hour. No compromises with the market place. Speaking in a pianissimo curiously unlike his music, he said: "I don't know what the New Thing means. I don't feel that what I play is necessarily even jazz. I'm merely trying to understand music--I'm just playing music. I have a desire to go to the basic elements of music and come out with value, to go right into the heart, strip myself of the old and be truly creative. That's what the New Thing is about, I suppose. To me, though, the word 'jazz' doesn't define anything. It's only music."

Jimmy Giuffre is another established star from an older school who left a commercially accepted style in search of adventure in abstraction. He has a pale-white face, neat gray hair and a manner in keeping with his part-time role as teacher at the New School for Social Research. "The new jazz does not necessarily have a steady beat or chord progressions. It is at least partially abstract. I played totally abstract music for a few years and some people had the impression that I wasn't interested in communicating. Although this wasn't true, I understood what they meant. I have been thinking for some time about putting more recognizable forms in my music. This has resulted in my new group, with which I use more established and familiar elements--as a dialog, mostly. Some people relate to pure abstraction--they find enough in it alone--but in general, I don't think I had enough familiar elements in the past to keep my audience."

The New Thing isn't concerned with I Got Rhythm or Stardust. Jazz is now separated from Broadway, from 32-bar tunes, from simple melody, from tonality. In a recent television skit about jazz musicians, Sid Caesar was satirically perceptive when he said that one of the cats in his band plays radar "so he can warn us if anyone is approaching the melody."

Where, indeed, is the melody? Who cares? With freedom has come alienation--alienation from the past and from the audience. Real freedom includes the freedom to make rules, and rules are still lacking. Too often, the new music tears away the shackles of the past, offering only disorder as a replacement. And audiences have been feeling notoriously free to dislike or to ignore it. With audience rejection has come paranoia, and blame is placed on the audience for not understanding the music. "Something must be wrong with them--they don't like us."

The jazz fraternity is confused, adrift from one another and from society. The old resents the new and vice versa. There is little dialog. The younger public seems to prefer rock 'n' roll and even aging hipsters are often heard to say, as they listen to the Rolling Stones, "Jazz is through, man." Job opportunities are vanishing at the same time the population of the world, and of jazz musicians, is exploding. The new jazz is divided in its poverty, the players assuming some of the social characteristics of hungry hounds as they pick about the back alleys of art, competing for meager sustenance.

The situation is slightly better for the New Thing in Europe. American free jazz players are increasingly popular there. Many European jazz musicians switched to the new freedom soon after being introduced to Ornette Coleman. The European audience is more enlightened and comes closer to supporting the music. It has had a particularly strong influence in eastern Europe, where people such as Dr. Pavel Blatný and Jaromir Hnlicka are experimenting with new ways of arranging and composing for big orchestras. A composition in the new language by pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, titled Global Unity, was performed at the Berlin Jazz Festival last November. The reaction of the audience and critics was mixed, some calling it the first successful experiment in composing for a large group in the new idiom, others saying that Global Unity was only "musical chaos."

There is no doubt that much of the new jazz is chaotic--in fact, that's too orderly a word in many cases. The lack of discipline, the abuse of freedom, is prodigious. Solos are often too long, rules nonexistent or overly permissive. The scene is a musical version of the type of nonconformity wherein a man grows a beard in defiance of the establishment (continued on page 216)The New Thing(continued from page 126) and then goes to live in a neighborhood populated by other men with beards. If the music is truly "free," why do the majority of saxophone players use the same harsh sound? Why do so many of the drummers sound so much like Sunny Murray, exploding and surging, unoriginal and too loud?

Many free players confine themselves to one dynamic--crescendo. Starting forte, they increase to infinite-forte and stay there, spewing noises without musicality or taste. The philosophy: "Nothing must come between the heart and the sound, not even music. The world is very different now and we must create music that is just as radical. No inhibitions. Technique and analysis can hang you up. The human race is in trouble because of throttled emotions, a failure of positive energy. We must change, change at any cost. We must throw over what came before, just because it came before."

Energy and emotional purity are sacred--dogma. But it would be wrong to generalize that all the new jazz is unbridled, untutored energy. Don Cherry's trumpet is sweetly lyrical; Marion Brown sings like the coloratura with whom he identifies. Sun Ra and the ten members of his Solar Arkestra improvise collectively on instruments such as spiral cymbals, bells, wood blocks, bass marimba and electric celesta--quiet, almost religious music. Ornette Coleman remains a tasteful master of jazz abstraction.

Bob Pozar is a young drummer who plays with Bill Dixon, a trumpeter/composer who was doing the New Thing before it was named. Bob is 25 and, like some others living with the music, is conscious of its problems and lucid in talking about them. "Jazz is an audibly handed-down folk music. You can learn only by listening, not from a textbook. You mimic it, and that's the reason so many players sound alike. There are some players who never get past the mimicking stage. This music is now-going through a period similar to the time when a flood of imitators followed right after Bird and Dizzy. Nobody can tell what's wrong or right now, though, because there are no criteria. Sooner or later, someone will come along and set them up. Either these criteria will be a tribute to bebop, like bebop was to swing--making it beautiful--or else they will be a destructive, maybe the end of jazz. There's a lot of pure destruction in it now. We are hearing more bullshit than anything else, but there are guys who, like Bill Dixon, are trying to use everything good in the roots--classical music, folk music, jazz--trying to make a free music within barriers."

Abstract jazz is actually much like Dixieland, to the extent that it is largely collective improvisation--a dialog. Swing and bebop were a string of speeches. You are on your own playing the New Thing. You must reach down into yourself and play your own song. The song will change to fit your mood or that of the people with whom you are playing. But it is always your own metabolic melody. You are the songwriter--George Gershwin is no longer available to lean on.

Tenor saxophonist. Albert Ayler's song makes me forget that there are still trees in Vermont and clean air over the Atlantic Ocean. He is the artistic reflection of the worst part of my life. Fire engines; jammed sidewalks; three packs a day; rivet guns outside my bedroom window: roaring, crowded subways; everybody running, making it--desperate and scared. The anger and frustration of speed-up. However, his total involvement is clear to see and frightening in its intensity. He makes love to his tenor saxophone, holding it high in the air, moving his lips lasciviously around the mouthpiece, producing spirited squeals like the two-backed animal in heat.

Albert Ayler is a major hero of the new music. People speak of him reverently. But he is poverty-stricken in the world and lives largely by the generosity of friends and admirers.

Dave Brubeck has heard Ayler and says: "I think time will tell us who is best in this music. One frightening thing is that people who hold to the avant-garde will drop Ayler as soon as he's accepted. Some people require only that something be new--it makes no difference to them whether it's good or bad. As soon as he gets accepted, the first clique that supported him will leave. His image will change. The very thing considered radical will someday no longer be radical. I wonder if he will then choose to be accepted or radical. How people handle success is the key to their survival.

"A lot of the new players seem to think that the world owes them something--instant acceptance, for example. They don't realize that you have to create your own breaks. Nobody will do it for you. When we were first getting started in San Francisco, we played at any school that would have us--free. We'd get up early in the morning, bleary-eyed after working late the night before in a club. We felt it was important to create our own audience for the future.

"Nobody ever gets anything for nothing in jazz. I couldn't get a record company to record me, so I formed my own label, Fantasy. My wife and I hardly ate in a restaurant for three years because all our money went into it. The younger guys today don't seem to know how to keep jazz going, economically speaking. It's necessary to subsidize jazz with an occasional hit. People should be more aware of how to survive.

"Did you hear the beautiful New Orleans march Archie Shepp played as the audience left after his concert at Newport last year? I think he should have played that first. It would have brought more people to his side--they would have listened to his music with more sympathy. You've got to say hello the right way, at the right time. You've got to put your best foot forward, sense the audience. The new players will have to learn to do this or their music will not survive, will not communicate to the very intelligent audience of today."

Guitarist Charlie Byrd thinks, like Brubeck, that the new jazz has something of value. He says, "I'm no champion of the so-called New Thing. But I like what they say they are trying to do very much. I'd like to be in on that myself. The idea of breaking down the rhythmic and harmonic barriers is very appealing to me."

However, not all of the mainstreamers agree.

Pianist and disc jockey Billy Taylor: "During the Fifties, I was house pianist at Birdland for over two years. I played with everybody. There were some guys who could play and some who couldn't. These days, anything is considered valuable, regardless of content or musicality, and this bugs me. It particularly bothers me how little some of the avant-garde guys know about music. Actually, though, I liked Ornette's earliest work. To me, that was his most interesting period."

Trumpeter Art Farmer: "There is a 'no' inside me about the New Thing. There are no criteria for judgment. The supporters seem to accept everybody, and that's no good."

Byard Lancaster is in his early 20s. He plays abstract jazz on alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet. He believes in his music but also in the necessity for a knowledge of roots, in the importance of an understanding of the responsibilities of freedom. "I like to play for students. My band gives concerts at schools for nothing, every chance we get. The best part of these concerts is the discussion period we always try to have afterward. We want to explain our music to kids who like rock 'n' roll or classical music. We want to play for them and communicate with them."

On his neatly typed, mimeographed résumé, Lancaster explains how he feels about his music: "I believe that the new music is about the incorporation of all sounds: the expansion of the senses. Jazz was limiting, but now we may go forth. Ask yourself. Whose vibrations am I in tune with? Which wave lengths do I prefer? Who stimulated me? When, how and why? There has always been something new and there always will be something developing. Avant-garde must mean just an addition of new material to what has already been established."

Byard Lancaster conforms to no cliché of a jazz musician. He doesn't use the vernacular, he gets up early each morning, he isn't a junkie. His life style is part of a general and conscious effort on the part of younger jazz musicians to change their image. Jazz is no longer drinking music, at home only in saloons, at wild parties or in brothels. It is contemporary chamber music, more appropriate to a concert hall. So they think. And they want to establish a new tradition.

Jazz has little history, no long tradition like painting or classical music. Although the jazz musician is royally starving in the grand old tradition of the starving artist, starving for his integrity, this sacrifice is not even recognized by the establishment. Rockefeller subsidizes poor painters. After all, didn't the Medicis? It's hip for a wealthy family to do that in this country: they figure they might go down in history as the patron of a future Michelangelo. But no Medici or Rocke-feller ever was a patron to a jazz musician. Besides, everybody knows that jazz is only a branch of popular music. Right? It doesn't need financial assistance, because. . . . Well, those guys could have a big hit and really score at any time. Right?

Wrong!

George Russell, for instance, who pioneered the use of modes in jazz during the Fifties, has never had a hit. A mode is a form of scale that dominated European music for 1100 years (approximately 400 A.D. to 1500), strongly influenced composers for another 100 years and has since reappeared from time to time in the work of composers, especially in the 20th Century. The style of Miles Davis' present group, and of his recordings over the past five years, is a good example of modal jazz. George Russell lives in Sweden--he could not make a decent living in America. His experiences with the establishment are enlightening. "In 1953. I applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation for the purpose of doing further research in the new theoretical areas opened by 'The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization.' After a period of some months, the copies of the books that I had submitted were returned to me with a letter stating that my request had been denied, but giving no reason for the rejection.

"I think it is generally known now that boards that appraise the merit of a request for a fellowship in music are classically oriented and take a dim view of the cultural value of any contribution coming from jazz. The attitude of the Foundation does not even permit jazz to be considered a part of the field of music that it recognizes.

"At present, I am working on book two of 'The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization.' which deals with compositional principles and will contain examples from Bach, Webern, Wagner, Stockhausen and others. I suppose that, in my case, the authorities who judge applications for the Guggenheim Foundation didn't wish to accept the fact that a discovery of the knowledge that links traditional tonality to modern chromaticism had come to light through jazz, after being overlooked by theorists of 'serious' music for 300 years." This lack of official and public support has turned many bitter.

Archie Shepp is sitting by an open window in his loft on the Bowery. The sound of the garbage trucks floats through. "I'd like to see the people playing the new jazz make the kind of money commensurate with their art. If America is not going to give it to us, we'll have to fight for it."

Pavel, seven years old, is one of Archie's three children. He has a sweet smile and wears a round button saying. Member--Healthy Teeth Club. He walks with his mother, who is wheeling a baby carriage past the bums hanging out near their door.

Inside, Archie speaks quietly. He is sitting beside a bookcase containing such volumes as The Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung (four volumes). The Complete Works of Montaigne, Naked Lunch, Bertrand Russell's Mysticism and Logic, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Records by J. J. Johnson, Art Tatum. Sonny Rollins, Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp and others from every school are piled up outside their jackets, appearing well used.

"My life view is fundamentally optimistic. It's got to be or I might as well give up. I've put a lot of my life into jazz music. These days I am making a living from my music, although it's pretty marginal. My contract with ABC Paramount, which allows me to make two records a year under my own name, has permitted me to survive. But I rarely work clubs anymore. Jazz music isn't right in clubs now--the form has become too sophisticated. I like the intimacy of clubs, though, and I wish there were some way to combine that with the more formal qualities of a concert hall--cabaret theater, maybe. Jazz has lent other art forms its informality, the idea of the audience relaxing while it goes through a cathartic experience. That should be maintained to some degree.

"But attitudes are going to have to change. The one thing you must exclude is that this music is unsalable. It's possible to sell anything in this country. In this area of music, though, there is a lack of money spent on promotion. That's the only way to succeed at these things--we know that. But jazz musicians are involved with the very lowest, the most inarticulate, the least intelligent people on the entrepreneurial level. They know or care nothing about the thing they work with. They are concerned, most of them, purely with the commercial and financial standpoint, unlike in the theater or in painting, where you do have some knowledgeable people. At least they care about what they're investing in. You'd be hard pressed to find a man risking his money with classical music who didn't know something about it, didn't care something about it."

So, abstraction isn't welcome in jazz clubs. The customer either becomes totally absorbed with the music or runs away from it in terror of its undisciplined strength. Either way, he doesn't drink. The concert hall is a more appropriate place. However, even long-established symphony orchestras and classical chamber ensembles find it impossible to survive without subsidies or endowments. Despite the fact that he's involved in the only native American art, only one jazz musician--Ornette Coleman--has ever been given even a token grant to help him perform his music here. The Ford Foundation disgorges millions into the coffers of symphony orchestras so that they may continue to bring the public European music in a tradition that, as Henry Pleasants says in his book The Agony of Modern Music, is now "a dead art." The State Department exports jazz as a highly productive sales aid in a campaign to sell the world our way of life. Al home, however, the jazz musician is neglected, unwanted and hungry.

The New Thing is not here by accident or in passing. It reflects all too well the moral infections polluting the American fiber. It reflects also our healthy energy. It reflects the confusion and uncertainty of our times. It is both our strength and our weakness. Whatever its faults, it is honest--and it is our own. We should encourage it.