20.05.1999

Juxtaposition

Courtney Pine Band at the Liverpool Philharmonic

Courtney Pine has been touring with this particular formation for a couple of years now.

Remarkably, Pine appears to be carrying his audience along with him. Those winning saxophone runs are now being fleshed out by spare hip-hop beats and scratches. Some of this success appears to flow from the persona of the man himself. Pine may now be decked out in combat clothing, but he exudes not a hint of arrogance, combining a didactic purpose with a sense of charm and engagement with the crowd.

Before introducing DJ Pogo for a solo slot, Pine recalled the low regard in which the saxophone had been considered at the turn of the 20th century. On the verge of the 21st, the turntable is being disparaged in a similar fashion. Watching Pogo cutting the vocal hook from Eminem’s ‘My name is’ before an audience predominantly composed of middle-aged jazz buffs is one of the more bizarre cultural experiences to be presently had. Stranger still to report that they liked it.

Juxtaposition is clearly the aim of this performance. Hearing Pine’s saxophone and Pogo’s scratching weaving elegant, improvised, threads around one another heightens our consciousness of both elements considerably. The trick was repeated on a lovely version of Billie Holliday’s ‘Don’t explain’, begun in a conventional jazz manner, only to be elaborated further with some pounding sampled beats.

Attempts at a ‘fusion’ of jazz with hip-hop (‘jazz-rap’) in the past have largely foundered on either having to fill a commercial niche or from the fact that a mere ‘fusion’ of two styles will usually lead to artistic incoherence.  Pine’s experiment shows that sharp counterposition is a better method of musical composition, in that our awareness of genre and sound is pushed to a higher plateau. Some of the best hip-hop artists have used jazz samples ‘unconsciously’, in order to augment and expand a syncopated sound. Pine’s achievement is to work this revolution consciously.

The Courtney Pine Band also provide a partial solution to our reading of jazz music which has all too often denigrated into naturalism. Jazz has been indelibly associated with the universal themes of human freedom and expression. The incursion of hip-hop onto its cultural space profoundly alters this understanding. Hip-hop places a technical division (the turntable) between ‘real’ music and the sampled sound, stripping the artistic process of creative mysticism. It is an intensely ‘fictive’ musical narrative and thus has the unfettered ability to historicise the universalistic impulses of jazz.

For a genuine and hugely entertaining illustration of this process, Courtney Pine deserves nothing but unblemished praise.

Phil Watson