11.09.1997

You don’t play in clubs

Phillip Watson reviews 'Free jazz: a collective improvisation' (Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, Atlantic CD)

For those of us who spent their cultural adolescence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world of jazz music symbolised a sense of hallowed mystery. Various musical cliques, centred around the labels Mo’ Wax and Acid Jazz, shrouded their (often innovative) re-interpretations in an atmosphere of quirky cultishness. The supreme benevolence of hip-hop consistently threw fragments of saxophone, piano and double bass back at us, serving up the past, present and future of popular music as a seamless laboratory of sound.

Contemporary musical discourse is of course littered with definitions and categories. Consider the following extraction from a recent interview with the French pianist Jacques Loussier (fresh from an adaptation of Vivaldi’s The four seasons):

“The jazz people think I am not a jazz pianist because I do not play in clubs and do not play jazz standards. The classical purist says I am not a classical musician because I improvise and play with a jazz feeling” (Interview with Brian Hunt, The Daily Telegraph June 28, 1997).

Loussier is in fact describing an arbitrary schema whereby relatively rigid concepts are arrived at by a process of abstraction. This particular version of critical practice has a considerable heritage. The Russian formalist Tynyanov sought to account for the ahistoricism inherent in the formulation of literary ‘traditions’:

“Tradition, the basic concept of the established history of literature, has proved to be an unjustifiable abstraction of one or more of the literary elements of a given system within which they occupy the same plane and play the same role. They are equated with the like elements of another system in which they are on a different plane. Thus they are brought into a seemingly unified, fictitiously integrated system” (cited in T Bennett Formalism and Marxism London 1979, pp57-58).

The manufacture of such eclectic typologies is indicative of an essentially reified epistemology, a prescriptive reflectionism that is simply unable to grasp the dynamic of popular culture.

If we attempt to understand new pieces of art upon this basis, one of two things will probably occur. Either a process of subtraction takes place, whereby a number of surface characteristics are painlessly extracted in order to include the work under the rubric of a pre-selected category (‘improvisation equals jazz’); or typologies become so stretched and all-encompassing that they are rendered meaningless. In both scenarios, innovation is constrained into the mere function of a ritualised ‘other’.

One therefore turns to Free jazz (recorded in December 1960) with a sense of rare delight. Coleman’s liberation from the increasingly ossified harmonic framework of bop and toward what Jost has characterised as a “deeper unity of theme and improvisation” was a truly radical departure, emptying a given form of its accepted content and transcending this form in turn (E Jost ‘Free jazz’ in B Kernfeld (ed) The Blackwell guide to recorded jazz Oxford 1991, p387). Jost goes on to remark that Coleman’s “break from a traditional system of rules led to a precarious situation full of contradictions and insecurity, for with the liberation from old norms the question arose what this liberation should be for” (ibid p385).

It is with the dubious benefit of hindsight that we can pose a tentative answer. Coleman’s exploration of the imprecise contours of avant-gardism can still vividly illustrate the essential abstraction of our rigid musical typologies. This need not dissipate a sense of awe in the face of a constant and evolving stream of musical alchemy, but, as Ornette Coleman remarked himself, “Let’s play the music and not the background”.

Phillip Watson