As someone who reviews jazz albums and writes essays about this music, I'm subject to the inevitable critique:Critic! Try making this music yourself, man!
Bingo.
In my case, however, I do know a bit of what it's like to flail away at an up-tempo blues or to try caressing "Lush Life" into painful beauty. That doesn't make all my reviews accurate, but the truth is: I know that conjuring this music to authentic life is high art. I fail at doing it all the time.
In the last month, my student jazz ensemble gave a two-evening performance. Sitting (and playing) with them under the lights, I got to thinking about the music I usually write about. Particularly, I found myself pondering some of the less-than-A+ reviews I've written in the last year — the kind of critiques that take the music to task for being less than stellar, overfamiliar, or safe. When is it enough for jazz to be "merely" wonderful rather than revolutionary? When is skillful and sweet, but not life-changing, more than up-to-snuff?
My students are often less than snuff-worthy. They do not form the typical jazz big band from a large public school. Rather, they're a small band featuring a healthy number of singers, few of whom have ever heard more than a handful of jazz records. The pool of talent at my small high school, while enthusiastic and sometimes remarkable, can be shallow. But when the rhythm section is moving down the track on, say, Louis Jordan's "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie", the blue-gelled lights make everyone feel just a little more like Don Byas or Billie Holiday. Something comes alive. Even amidst a heap of mistakes, I found myself thinking about how great this music is. How great it is and how hard it is. And how the magic of improvised music is something that few people really get to touch, anymore.
Take "I'm Confessin' That I Love You". Last year I reviewed the latest album by Lizz Wright, Dreaming Wide Awake, and I couldn't stop listening to her dreamy, slow-funked version of this old song. What a perfect song for my students: relatively basic harmonies, a light backbeat groove, a nice relaxed vocal. Piece of cake. But that was hardly the case.
What Wright and producer Craig Street made seem so off-the-cuff was a labor for my talented students. The singer, an 18-year-old with sure pitch and a ringing bell of tone, found it difficult to time the lyrics properly. Although we played the song slowly, she always seemed to fall behind the band and couldn't hear the timing of her entrance on phrases other than the opener. What Wright made effortless, Lily found puzzling. The bubbling groove on Dreaming sounded thudding when we played it, and so we shifted to a bossa nova beat. Some of the magic disappeared. The student musicians didn't understand how this treatment should be "cool" as opposed to "corny". I wasn't sure I understood either.
Still, when the tune locked in before an audience, I sensed that the kids were finally channeling something in it; hearing the rhythms of Louis Armstrong's voice or the pulse of Jobim under the surface. Lily relaxed into it for the first time, and the pianist repeatedly quoted the melody in his solo as if Monk were whispering into his ear. It got me smiling — and also admiring the smarts of Lizz Wright a little bit more.
Truth is: I wanted to elasticize my arms, snake them into the Internet and improve my review of Dreaming Wide Awake.
Other tunes had a similar effect. We played more than a couple of standards over those two nights. We faced the same dilemma everyone does: how to make them a little bit new, even our own. How?! These tunes have been done by a thousand artists better than we, so.... We slowed down the first eight bars of "Lullaby of Birdland" to a crawl, then leapt into the swing to dramatic effect. But the burlesque-rhythm-ed ending didn't gel. At least we tried. "I Could Write a Book" swung, no doubt, but I knew all along that the little arrangement of stops and starts I'd come up with for the first four bars of each "A" part was cribbed from records. We played "Don't Get Around Much" straight as an arrow and it was best of all. . . yet it also seemed the most like it was being done in some hotel bar or airport restaurant.
Who was I, then, to have so recently taken to task jazz singers Sarah Lazarus and Tierney Sutton for somehow not being the magical step-children of Sarah, Billie, and Betty Carter? I faulted Ms. Sutton for being too fancy and fleet-footed a singer, someone who was using speed and technique rather than feeling in remaking standards in her own way. Yet she had done the very thing that is so elusive. Standards, in her hands, had become musical Play-Dough or sonic pretzels, bent every which way yet still tasty. Unlike my students' pitch, Tierney's pitch was perfect under the most lickety-split tempos. Unlike my piano solos, Tierney always seemed to find a fresh harmonic nook when she was improvising.
Yet when I criticized Ms. Lazarus, I found her insufficiently bold. She'd kept herself to the mainstream approach, trying subtlety and grace as I had counseled my Ellington singer. I faulted Ms. Lazarus for falling into jazz singer clichés; bending notes into the usual blue shapes and jiggling-out the syllables of the tunes like a less-than-Ella First Lady of Song. Yet I would have rejoiced had Mandy been able to get even a fraction of those effects when she sang "Couldn't bear it without you / Don't get around much anymore".
Ms. Lazarus, you deserved somewhat better.
The instrumentalists in my group took a fly at Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man", and they sounded great on the melody, locking in over that timeless boogaloo groove. But when it came to improvising some blues, how good did we sound? We were average, including me. I played a two-chorus alto solo in which I worriedly avoided any clams, played maybe one hip flat-five and otherwise simply got through the 32 bars without embarrassment. But did I play any better than — or even close to the level of — Jay Beckenstein on the latest Spyro Gyra disc? [Laughter erupting like a volcano]: NO! My flute player out-hipped me, in fact, and my guitarists lit a fire beneath my middle-aged ass.
And so another lesson learned: even on relatively simple funk — even on the fusion-y smoove stuff that I have fun chuckling about in some of my reviews — there is a deep talent to getting hip R&B licks to lock in with the drums. I'm below-average at it. Marcus Miller and Gerald Veasley are superb at it. I itch to give their albums an extra point-out-of-ten as a tribute to my newly-recalled humility.
The toughest song we played all night was a tune I've routinely dismissed in conversations with friends about jazz. Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" was always a novelty tune to me; a bunch of classical-ish mumbo-jumbo in 9/8 time with about a billion mid-tempo blues choruses in the middle. But when I tried to teach the rhythm to my young drummer (2-2-2-3, 2-2-2-3, 2-2-2-3, 3-3-3, etc), well, my head started to hurt. Shifting from the complex and fast polyrhythm into the straight swing was, by itself, a deep lesson in why jazz (even at its simplest) is high art. Apologies to Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, to Eugene Wright and Joe Morello for ever even thinking that their classic quartet was somehow fluffy chamber jazz.
I routinely tell my students that jazz is intimately connected to American music, with the blues and its influence claiming the whole culture — from bluegrass to Broadway — as its offspring. So there was no way my student jazz band would get through the year without covering some Ray Charles. One ambitious and talented singer had fallen in love with Aretha Franklin singing Brother Ray's "Drown in My Own Tears", and we set about learning it — the slow drag of gospel 12/8 time sounding natural and sweet under our fingers. It may have been the best thing we did all night. But as the audience applauded, all I could think about was my friend Jason Miles.
Mr. Miles — a keyboardist and synth programmer who worked on several late-career Miles Davis albums and this year released What's Going On: Songs of Marvin Gaye — received my most brutal review of the year. I still don't like his record, which played in my ears as mostly bland and mechanical, but how am I any different than him? I love Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin (who doesn't?), and I set about copping their material for this performance. Was my students' work a significant departure from the originals? Only in that it was a tenth as good. A tenth as good as the originals and yet it was the very best thing we did all year! I could not be more proud of that performance, derivative and overshadowed as it was. But maybe, like that Jason Miles record, I fancy that it nods in the direction of giants and could bring a young fan or two back to the true source.
Jason Miles, man: sorry.
Okay, but does that mean I'm done as a reviewer? Will every disc from here on out be a "10" just because I'm not a better musician myself?
No way!
I'm sorry, sure. I'm humbled. I know this music is harder and more demanding and requires more grace and knowledge than most people know. I realize that the most humdrum of jazz musicians who put out albums on a real label are stone-mad wizards on their horns and kits and axes and throats. I know I'm just lucky to be listening.
But that's what I do — listen with as much care as I can. I try to love every record and every sound because I know that the musicians who devote their lives to jazz make a huge sacrifice. That's how tough the music really is. But on the other hand, some of the music channels magic and — precisely because of how demanding it is — some does not. I listen for the magic, as humbly as I can.
One of the easiest songs we played on either night was "Freddie the Freeloader", the Miles Davis tune from Kind of Blue. What a simple tune! The entire melody consists of 10 notes, none played quickly, only one an accidental. The band learned it in 15 minutes. We even sounded slick playing it, the swinging pulse staying light and elastic and tethered to the toes of the audience.
But when I got home late that Saturday and popped on Kind of Blue, staring at that midnight blue portrait of Mr. Davis, trumpet to his lips, the real thing — the genuine article — was something else again. In the greatest things there is simplicity and something indefinable. Those nights on the bandstand, I thought maybe some of the magic alit for a split second on my students and me. It was a light touch, sure, but a touch nevertheless.
So: a few apologies, but a lifetime of thanks to Miles Davis and the other geniuses of this music. And a promise to keep my ears continually open for more.
