Season Two: Pressing the Argument Against Modern Jazz
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ShareTreme’s second season doubles down on making modern jazz a symbol of soullessness.
Big Chief Albert stays in New Orleans despite a bureaucracy that refuses to give him any funds to rebuild his house. He sinks into a funk—even refusing to work on the sewing for the Mardi Gras Indian costume that normally defines him. Delmond is still in New York, where he has two conversations that begin to turn him around. First, some non-New Orleans musicians run down his hometown, specifically deriding the city’s traditional jazz scene (embodied by the famous Preservation Hall) as being “for tourists”. Second, his hip New York girlfriend gets annoyed with him for listening to LPs by Jelly Roll Morton and Armstrong. To her, it all sounds old and boring.
Playing at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, a premiere New York club, Delmond has a crowd that is thin and mostly indifferent. There’s tepid applause rather than dancing and cheering, and our modern jazzman seems to realize that his art is cold and fetid. How, he wonders, can I get the soul of New Orleans back into my art?
The answer presents itself on Mardi Gras, when Delmond happens to hear a boombox playing a Miles Davis track while an Indian parade, with its traditional tambourine groove and chanting, provides rhythmic underpinning. He can hear it: a fusion of New Orleans Mardi Gras sounds with modern jazz—heart and head, something new.
Del recruits his father Albert to “front” the group in a New York recording studio, playing percussion and singing, while he fleshes out the rest of the band with compromise—the quintessential modern jazz bassist Ron Carter on the one hand, but New Orleans pianist Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack on the other. The music is a fierce combination, hotter and less anonymous than the tricky stuff we’ve heard him play before, but also enriched by the sleek attack and musical sophistication of Del’s hard bop injection. For Albert, however, it doesn’t sound right. His gut feeling—and Treme’s argument, in microcosm—is that you just can’t get the right groove outside of New Orleans.
(For the record, this very record was essentially made in real life by alto saxophonist Donald Harrison in 1992. Harrison’s dad was, in fact, Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame and sang on Harrison’s Indian Red. Simon knows this, and so he has Harrison—playing himself—as the sax player on Delmond’s recording.)
The solution, then, is to rerecord the music in a New Orleans studio, where Albert feels it. It sounds great, and ultimately even Delmond’s cynical agent is moved to love it—and to contribute $5,000 to Albert’s home renovations. Moreover, Delmond decides to leave New York so he can help his dad rebuild at home. (In a particularly nice anti-jazz touch, Demond’s New York girlfriend Jill breaks up with him, essentially, because she does not want to let him store his jazz LPs—which she calls a “museum” of old 20th century music—in her apartment.)
The last episode, like every episode, iss drenched with glorious live music of every stripe but jazz: Lucinda Williams’ country-ish blues, Rebirth Brass Band playing “I’m Walkin’”, Davis’s band gets into both “Little Liza Jane” and James Brown’s “Sex Machine”, and The Iguanas appearing at “Jazzfest”. Great stuff, joyous stuff. But not jazz.
The Case for Modern Jazz in a Treme World
I don’t think that Simon hates modern jazz, but it’s undeniable that he sets up this kind of music as a symbolic/dramatic departure from the New Orleans soul that pulses at the center of the show. In the Treme world of tremendous class-consciousness, music that moves gets butt shakaing or is made by “regular folks” is king. Home cookin’ only, please.
However, it’s an argument or dichotomy that isn’t musically valid. Albert’s preference for recording in New Orleans, is dramatically compelling, no doubt, but species in the extreme. The music that beautifully and perfectly closes Treme second season is Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams”. If anyone embodies New Orleans, it’s Pops, but this tune—like most of Armstrong’s discography—was not recorded there. Armstrong cut this tune in November of 1931… in Chicago. And where did Armstrong live for most of his life? Why, New York, of course.
More importantly, the glory of New Orleans music is not the degree to which it is an isolated, localized colloquial joy. Rather, New Orleans is the perfect argument for variety and eclecticism—it is the American melting pot of culture, with Latin, African, French, Scotch-Irish, and Native American influences so gloriously mixed up together that the fusion is something wholly new. New Orleans gobbles up other inputs, not the other way around.
And jazz—the modern, up-to-date version that has its capital, arguably in New York—is just the same way. Modern jazz incorporates funk and classical, it loves to take on a Latin groove, and of course Brazilian music has had both rhythmic and harmonic influence. Through many different musicians from Coltrane to Rudresh Mahanthappa, jazz has fused itself with Indian classical music, and recent experiments in using klezmer melodies for jazz improvisation are rich and successful.
In essence, jazz history beyond New Orleans is the farthest thing from sterile and rule-bound. It continues the gumbo tradition of the Crescent City. Treme’s implied depiction of modern jazz as a steely citadel is wrong—but its ultimate depiction of a modern jazz musician (embodied by Delmond) becomes accurate when it shows his restlessness and desire for innovation and change. Season One Delmond is a bit of a straw man; Season Two Delmond is more like it—but for most of these musicians, the last thing they would do is leave New York and move back to a more provincial scene.
Buy, c’mon, Treme fans should be saying, “The music in the show—not the jazz but the grooving stuff like the theme, like the funky brass band music, like the Soul Apostle material—is just so great and so fun. Jazz, that modern stuff, doesn’t just seem more sterile or intellectual, it is more for the brain than for the ass. Admit it, Will.”
I can’t. I love Treme’s R&B as much as the next guy. But that doesn’t make modern jazz into a soulless automaton of music any more than the existence of a great hamburger invalidates the deliciousness of salmon poached with cilantro. They are two different, but related things. They’re both wonderful, but in a different way. Like New York and New Orleans.
Sure, modern jazz may be more for the head than the feet. Cabernet rather than IPA, Scorsese rather than Spielberg, The Wire rather than CSI: Miami. So, of all the people out there, surely Simon would be the last to suggest that an art form be judged by its ability to attract an audience or to ask less, intellectually, of its audience.
I can’t wait for Treme’s third season. I’m ready for more Delmond and more Kermit. I want to groove and to think in equal parts. I trust that jazz’s days as TV villain might just be over.
Here’s hoping Simon and his writers listen to Art Blakey or even some Vijay Iyer during their hiatus. They might dig Ambrose Akinmusere and his daring new trumpet or the jagged bass playing on Jamaaladeen Tacuma’s latest. New Orleans is great, but so is all that it spawned. May it all play on long into the future.
