Unpreparedness and Listening to Jazz

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“In the next few years, I listened with increasing frequency to the newer jazz forms, began to feel able to have my own pro-and-con opinions, began (I believe) to have greater understanding. At first it was frankly a matter of professional necessity for the most part, but eventually I began to realize that I had unknowingly passed some point of no return and was enjoying the music for its own sake. This sort of thing is impossible to pinpoint, I'm afraid: you can never really re-understand the tastes of the man you used to be, or retrace the gradual transitional steps. I have listened again to those 1945 Gillespie-Parker numbers and have been doubly amazed; both by how melodic and warm this music can be and by how narrow and musically immature was that other me (the one who was so totally deaf to its considerable merits).

This may seem a contradiction of the points I've barely finished making in explanation of my original 1945 attitudes, but I don't think it really is. It is, simply, that being "unprepared" in 1945 is no excuse for remaining that way forever. I am quite glad that I was first a "moldy fig," for I am very dubious about the likelihood of anyone's reversing the process and, after entering jazz by way of the music of the 1940s and '50s, being able to progress back to King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. And I would hate to have missed out on hearing the wonderful and exciting music of such men. I certainly propose to keep on listening to my Creole Jazz Band and Red Hot Peppers records, among others, and to continue to find them meaningful. But, on the other hand, I can hear no voices in them that tell me to stay away from the Modern Jazz Quartet.”

- Orrin Keepnews [Emphasis mine]

For many Jazz fans who were raised on the Jazz of the 1920’s, what could be considered as the initial phase in the development of the music as it progressed from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, even the music of The Swing Era that followed let alone the subsequent Bebop Era were not True Jazz.

Put another way, these movements were not the music of “their time” and therefore did not merit their attention or close consideration. They held to the view that  these subsequent developments in the music were aberrations and not to be taken seriously, lest one lose time enjoying the better Jazz of the early makers of the music.

Of course, such an attitude could be labelled defensive but not to the purists that held it.

I think we all fall into these muddles over the course of our Jazz listening careers because we prefer the familiar to the unknown.

Sometimes it takes a bridge that helps us - to use pianist Barry Harris’ phrase - “see out a bit,” in other words, make the transition from the old and the familiar to the new and unfamiliar.

Orrin Keepnews makes this case rather convincingly in a very personal way in the following essay entitled A Jazz-Pilgrim’s Progress which can be found in his compilation A View From Within: Jazz Writings, 1948-1987 [Oxford].

See if you can relate to what he has to say about his journey of discovery in the World of Jazz.

A Jazz-Pilgrim's Progress

1956

“Way back in the fall of 1945, when I had very recently returned from the Pacific and was only vaguely aware that all sorts of new currents were supposed to be swirling about in jazz, a very bright-eyed young man whom I had just met insisted upon playing some new records for me. He gave the impression of being about to produce the Holy Grail, or at the very least a live rabbit out of an old top hat. But all I could hear was a screeching, exhibitionistic trumpet, a whining alto saxophone, very little discernible melody, and no sort of reliable beat. I hated it, and informed the young man, in a patiently paternal way (I was at least three years older than he), that this noisy fad could never take the place of The Real Thing. For I was, by exposure and inclination, strictly a Louis Armstrong-Jelly Roll Morton man, and what I had heard was something called "be-bop"—early-1945 recordings by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

Such an experience was actually not too uncommon then. I may have had the new music thrust at me more abruptly than most, but quite a few traditional-jazz fans were, at about that time, more or less forced to listen to a couple of "far out" selections. Almost invariably, they recoiled several feet and then spent the next few years either trying to ignore or loudly preaching against all forms of modernism. There has been much written and spoken argument in the past decade about this antipathy, but I don't recall any notice having been taken of what I now consider to have been the core of the problem for myself and for a number of other defenders of early jazz. It was, simply, that we were not ready, were not at all prepared to listen to modern jazz.

Since only the really one-dimensional myths have any staying power, a great many people accept that fantastic oversimplification about jazz having been rather suddenly "born" in New Orleans. Quite similarly, it is almost as customary to accept bop as an instant revolution that was hatched overnight at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. But of course, just as a good many years and a wide variety of pre-jazz influences preceded New Orleans, the modern-jazz revolution has been gestating for a long time. You can go back and hear its first stirrings in, for example, some of Duke Ellington's records of the period when Jimmy Blanton was on hand, in Lester Young's work with Basie, in other big Negro bands, and in some of the small, nominally "Swing" groups of the late 1930s.

But the very important fact is that the typical traditionalist jazz fan was not listening to such music. I undoubtedly can no longer qualify as "typical," having sacrificed any such claims when I turned a hobby into a livelihood and turned myself into jazz writer and magazine editor, record producer, etc. But I was once, I suspect, a very typical sort of specimen: my interest began in the late 1930s, when I heard some records from the '20s; it was fanned by hearing live jazz at New York clubs like Nick's and the Hickory House (recommended by friends primarily as notably inexpensive places to take a date, and secondarily as places to hear good Dixieland). Thus the music that I absorbed was, roughly speaking, homogeneous. Armstrong, Jelly Roll, King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Bix — these were the records; in person, at the Greenwich Village and Fifty-second Street clubs, there were such as Wingy Manone, Jack Teagarden, Red Allen, Joe Marsala, Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, and the rest of the Eddie Condon mob. While all this certainly can't be called the same music, both the recordings and the live performances were specifically either in or closely derived from the original New Orleans tradition. Furthermore, although I wasn't particularly aware of it at the time, that live jazz had something else in common with those records: the musicians themselves, both in their way of life and in their music, were firmly rooted in the late 1920s, which was "their" time.

There was probably also a degree of snobbishness mixed in with such jazz tastes: not everyone knew about such things as recordings of the "pure" early jazz, or those small jazz groups playing in rather out-of-the-way places. Big bands and Swing meant "commercial" music, readily available to just anyone. Thus insulated, people like me had no need for the new snobbishness of the insiders who first adopted modern jazz. All in all, with my listening background, it would have been incredible if, at first hearing, I had (as the saying goes) flipped for Diz.

My personal alteration began with some rather accidental touches. In 1948, because I was newly involved in editing a music magazine and was potentially malleable, the head of a small jazz label spent an evening playing and explaining the very earliest Thelonious Monk records. Finally (possibly in self-defense), I found that I could at least feel and enjoy the beat. A year later, on a night when I had specifically gone to hear Armstrong and had been disappointed by a routine act, I reacted extremely hard to the other group in the place, which was the first George Shearing Quintet. (I remember being strongly impressed by his vibraphonist, Margie Hyams. Perhaps it was her effective use of an instrument that doesn't exist in traditional jazz — thus making comparison impossible — and that I had previously disliked — I've always considered Lionel Hampton a drummer gone wrong — that really began to turn the tide for me.)

In the next few years, I listened with increasing frequency to the newer jazz forms, began to feel able to have my own pro-and-con opinions, began (I believe) to have greater understanding. At first it was frankly a matter of professional necessity for the most part, but eventually I began to realize that I had unknowingly passed some point of no return and was enjoying the music for its own sake. This sort of thing is impossible to pinpoint, I'm afraid: you can never really re-understand the tastes of the man you used to be, or retrace the gradual transitional steps. I have listened again to those 1945 Gillespie-Parker numbers and have been doubly amazed; both by how melodic and warm this music can be and by how narrow and musically immature was that other me (the one who was so totally deaf to its considerable merits).

This may seem a contradiction of the points I've barely finished making in explanation of my original 1945 attitudes, but I don't think it really is. It is, simply, that being "unprepared" in 1945 is no excuse for remaining that way forever. I am quite glad that I was first a "moldy fig," for I am very dubious about the likelihood of anyone's reversing the process and, after entering jazz by way of the music of the 1940s and '50s, being able to progress back to King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. And I would hate to have missed out on hearing the wonderful and exciting music of such men. I certainly propose to keep on listening to my Creole Jazz Band and Red Hot Peppers records, among others, and to continue to find them meaningful. But, on the other hand, I can hear no voices in them that tell me to stay away from the Modern Jazz Quartet.

As I am far from unique in this matter of broadening one's jazz tastes, I imagine that all I gained from virtually forcing myself to listen to modern jazz was to achieve a device for overcoming ingrained prejudices. Others less stubborn-minded than I, or with more willpower, ought to find it even easier. I can also recommend the use of a simple paradox: concentrate on both the differences and the sameness. By the former, I mean that there's no use looking for absolute parallels: New Orleans jazz sprang from a particular time and place (that it can be enjoyed outside that context is quite true, but irrelevant to my present point); current jazz expression belongs to here and now. This is not a value judgment: there is some inferior modern jazz, of course, but there was also some pretty bad music played in Chicago in the 1920s, too (you just don't bother to listen to those records any more, and let it go at that). There is also a lot that is wrong with the world of here and now, and a lot of that is in the music, too. But it is our time, so that at the very least it has immediacy on its side. I'll go so far as to say that I can't understand any serious listener, unless he is in love with archaism for its own sake, not finding something of value for him in some aspect of modern jazz.

As for the sameness, the major link lies in the aims of jazz musicians: roughly, in working from "popular" musical frameworks to create valid individual and group expression. There are some modernists, like Gerry Mulligan, whose innovations have fairly readily discernible traditional roots. There is the continuing important use of instrumental blues. Finally, there's even occasionally a tendency to think in the same way. I've recently been listening to the work of an extremely far-out musician whose trio is experimenting with something completely novel. He described it to me as "collective improvisation. "The term had a strangely familiar ring that had me puzzled for a minute. Then I remembered. The first time I had heard it used, quite a few years ago, was to describe the music of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band!”