Yesterdays

(Skip to around 4:05 to hear the beginning of pianist Aaron Diehl's solo.)

Vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant has a new album out. I'm really happy about this. Jazz these days has a habit of latching onto promisingly youthful new talent and christening it the Great New Hope - there was Esperanza Spalding, who is now only tangentially connected to jazz, and Robert Glasper, who is even less so. But Salvant is a photogenic and press-ready musician who actually seems interested in exploring and examining the jazz vocal repertoire established from the 1930s to the 1960s, rather than discarding it or simply parroting the past.

The new album got me on YouTube, looking for videos of Salvant, and this one - a performance of "You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me" - caught my ear especially. Salvant and Charenee Wade are excellent, channeling Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and others, as well as injecting an old standard with their own personalities. And the trio provides a good foundation for them to do so. But pianist Aaron Diehl's solo is, well, bonkers.

QUICK AND DIRTY JAZZ HISTORY LESSON FOLLOWS

Jazz has an easily digested history - it's the kind of jazz history most people blame on Ken Burns, which isn't really fair, because everything has this kind of history. By its very nature, you just can't include everything in a survey of a genre, and so, over the decades, a linear history of jazz has been established. It is both stylistic and individualistic, and looks roughly like this:

a) Style

Ragtime and stride -> New Orleans -> Swing -> Bebop -> Hard bop -> Cool jazz -> Post-bop -> "Avant-garde" -> Fusion

b) Innovators

Jelly Roll Morton -> Louis Armstrong -> Duke Ellington/Count Basie/Benny Goodman -> Charlie Parker -> Horace Silver/Clifford Brown -> Chet Baker -> Miles Davis -> Ornette Coleman (Albert Ayler if you're feeling generous) -> Herbie Hancock/Weather Report/Chick Corea

* * *

The two timelines above cover a period from roughly 1900 to around 1980, the time when histories and essays by Leonard Feather, Martin Williams, Francis Davis, and others became established textbooks. But after 1980, something interesting happened named Wynton Marsalis, and that interesting thing did another interesting thing:

The linear timeline of jazz broke.

The reason that we can formulate the history of jazz from 1900-1980 as linear, even in a simplistic way, is because there were dominant styles for the majority of that history, and those styles were additive, building on each other in roughly ten-year increments. We can formulate the history of jazz in a more abstract way like this:

c) Concepts

Rhythm -> Improvisation (plus rhythm) -> Harmony (plus improvisation and rhythm) -> Virtuosity (plus harmony, improvisation and rhythm) -> Roots (plus virtuosity, harmony, improvisation and rhythm) -> Coolness (minus roots but plus virtuosity, harmony, improvisation and rhythm) -> Looseness (plus roots, v, h, i and rthm) -> Freedom (plus looseness, rts, v, h, i, rthm) -> Electric (plus l, rts, v, h, i, rthm)

This abstract version of linear jazz history can be formulated any number of ways, but the point is that each new dominant style adds to the last one; the tradition is carried through, but the momentum is also moving forward.

Wynton Marsalis came along right as this timeline needed a new stylistic chapter. As clubs closed and audiences shrank through the 1970s, jazz had lost its place as a major player in the casual musical landscape. Wynton Marsalis had the opportunity to bring jazz back to the table, to revive the casual jazz fan as well as the hardcore jazz fan, to bring an influx of money to the jazz community (with an accompanying increase in records and clubs). And, in fact, Wynton Marsalis is seen as the most recent chapter of the Big Jazz History Textbook being written every day. Except:

When Wynton added his name to the timeline, he didn't really add his name at all. His own music was often incredibly interesting (and forward-thinking), but its whole attitude was one of homage - to Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, and the pre-1968 sound of Miles Davis. And in the end, Wynton's music got swallowed up by its attitude - in my opinion, he hasn't made any music equal to his first few records since the end of the 1990s. So, using a different measure of linear jazz history, what we have as our post-Wynton timeline is:

d) Eras

1900-1925 (New Orleans) -> 1925-1938 (orchestra era)  -> 1938-1945 (big band era) -> 1945-1955 (bebop) -> 1955-1965 (hard bop/cool jazz/post-bop) -> 1965-1975 (avant-garde) -> 1968-1980 (fusion era) -> 1980-1995 (New Orleans, bebop, hard bop, post-bop)

Wynton's attitude towards jazz was that the genre, and the public at large, had lost sight of what made jazz great in the first place: its legends. There's some weird politics mixed up in this - an overwhelming masculinity, a view of jazz as a hallmark of democracy that's reminiscent of Cold War cultural diplomacy - but at its heart, Marsalis wanted to bring jazz back to something it had moved too far away from. He wanted to put the avant-garde and fusion aside, and return to essentially pre-1965 jazz, when musicians wore suits and went on the road and had a real piece of the pie of American culture. And he did that - he wore suits, he went on the road (see the somewhat pretentious but interesting 2002 book Jazz In The Bittersweet Blues of Life, an account written "by" Marsalis with Carl Vigeland of a tour by his septet, or 1994's Sweet Swing Blues on the Road, by Marsalis and photographer Frank Stewart, described in the Amazon blurb as "[f]eaturing jive-talking cat daddies in the Second Line, gorgeous and mysterious women in the Sweet Refrain, exotic vistas in the Bridge, and musicians, like the J-Master on piano, who live the music the way they play it"), and he helped Ken Burns make Jazz, which hammered the stake of jazz firmly in the heart of AMERICA as a big, myth-generating concept. 

And for a while, it worked. Lots of other musicians wore suits and played like Cannonball Adderley, or Oscar Peterson; they worshipped at the altar of their idols (see: Green, Benny); they got big record contracts at Warner Brothers. This lasted from about 1980 to 1995, and then a few of these musicians realized that Marsalis wasn't going anywhere. His music was happy to stay right where it was, and while it had succeeded in creating a casual jazz fan, that casual jazz fan was also happy to stay right where Marsalis was. But some of the suit-wearing, standards-playing, Warner Brothers-recording musicians were named Joshua Redman, or Brad Mehldau, and they had some other ideas, and a lot of those ideas had to do with the Forbidden Fruit of jazz's neo-con movement - rock.

So Marsalis's disciples started falling away, and as they fell away, Marsalis-as-dominant-style diminished, and as that style (more of a look, really) diminished, the jazz community started to remember that there had been other styles around the whole time - the remnants of fusion, a thriving avant-garde scene, etc. Some disciples (and new faces) starting playing around with Radiohead songs (Brad Mehldau, The Bad Plus), and some of them started building their own songbook in a style Mark Turner recently described as "modern mainstream" (Kurt Rosenwinkel), and some disciples kept on keepin' on (Jeff "Tain" Watts). 

This resulted in what we have today in jazz - a collection of styles, a collection of niches, each with their own audience, their own labels, their own communities. There is no dominant style of jazz. The linear timeline has been broken. We don't have "hard bop" and "post-bop" and "cool jazz," we have Kurt Rosenwinkel and Django Bates and Tom Harrell and... and...

But Wynton Marsalis is still around, and as CEO of Jazz, Inc., he still has influence.

* * *

Pianist Aaron Diehl is 35 years old. He was born in Marsalis's heyday, when Wynton's music was becoming its most creative and also as the trumpeter was at his most brash and confident in his neo-con attitude (in 1984, Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times that "Marsalis... invariably performs in jacket and tie, has championed jazz's legacy as swinging, harmonically sophisticated music; [and] what's more, he has denounced some avant-gardists as 'charlatans'"). 

And now, Diehl is a composer and pianist lauded by the JJA, the American Pianists Association, and the Monterey Jazz Festival (last year's shows include high-profile tributes to Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins). He records for Mack Avenue, a traditionally-oriented label that also owns the MAXJAZZ imprint. And he is a Wynton guy - a sometime member of the Jazz At Lincoln Center orchestra who often plays at JALC's Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, a club for people who don't like basements that wears both its historical and corporate attitudes on its sleeve.

Which brings us back to the video that starts this little essay. Salvant is a refreshing jazz vocalist, a singer clearly attuned to the tradition of jazz singing and the standard repertoire but who, rather than following the Ella Fitzgerald mode, aligns herself through an emphasis on creative melodic embellishment over soloing to endlessly creative singers like Betty Carter, and in this performance specifically ties herself to Sarah Vaughan through her extensive use of range. Salvant is not the avant-garde, but she is no idol-worshipper - she wants to make new sounds. 

Diehl, quite clearly, does not. His solo, which starts at 4:05-ish in the video, is a nearly verbatim recitation from the Ahmad Jamal playbook, specifically Jamal's work with Israel Crosby and Vernell Fournier, from 1955-1962. Throw a dart at Jamal's output from this material and you'll hit at least one of the licks Diehl pulls out in this solo, but you can hear several in this T.V. performance alone.

By playing what is for all intents and purposes an Ahmad Jamal solo in 2017, Diehl is continuing Marsalis's legacy. Pareles quotes Marsalis as saying, "'If you play trumpet and you don't sound like Miles or Dizzy or Clifford or Fats, you're probably not playing jazz... If you don't sound like somebody else, you sound like nothing.'' 

This makes it not just a question of repertoire. It's a question, with Marsalis, of attitude. The reason Marsalis's historicism doesn't sound as vibrant today as Arthur Blythe's, or David Murray's, or... etc., is because it was not additive. Marsalis directly counters the entire point of the legends he worships - Armstrong, Ellington, et. al. - by explicitly rejecting the fundamental creativity, the searching for the new, that characterizes all great jazz musicians. Marsalis is truly reactionary in his rejection of originality - he retreats in fear to the safety of the already-established.

Similarly, Diehl applies no lens to Jamal's mannerisms and style in his "You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me" solo - he merely parrots that style. There is no Aaron Diehl in the solo - there is merely the idea of Ahmad Jamal that we already have. When Jason Moran plays Monk or Fats Waller, he does so as Jason Moran - even if he plays close to Monk's or Waller's style in places, at the fundamental level he is using the tradition, the history, as a vessel to deliver something of himself. The same could be said for Charles Lloyd and Coltrane, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans. There's a reason why Lou Donaldson and Sonny Stitt will always be subheadings in the jazz textbooks, and Charlie Parker will always be a heading.

This kind of strict historicism is antithetical to jazz itself, and it's a shame that the Marsalis-industrial complex still draws young players into its orbit. Musicians like Christian McBride have shown that you can be innovative and historical in the same career, but the Mack Avenue school only sees one side of the equation. And it's a shame that Salvant is content with a pianist who backs, rather than interacts with, her own forward momentum. I hope one day we get to hear her fresh approach to the jazz tradition and present with a band that loves tomorrow as much as yesterday.