mfs@mhuxr.UUCP (SIMON) (12/05/84)
Critic Martin Williams has characterized jazz as going thru alternating phases of leaping innovation followed by refinement, exploration within known formats. I will agree that we have not had a brand new framework since Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor in the early 60s (Fusion was a revolution in instrumentation and tone color, not in harmony nor, most importantly, in rhythm) Today, however, a new generation of young musicians is here, including David Murray, Henry Threadgill. They are thoroughly aware of the 100 years of jazz tradition that has preceded them, from Joplin to Taylor, with Ellington and Parker in between. Their territory is the whole of jazz, rather than domains like bebop or swing. They are performing the crucial task of reexamining the assumptions of the past through the insights of the present. They provide fresh proof of the power and immediacy of, say, Jelly Roll Morton. More than rehashing old music, they are playing old forms. The difference is crucial. Having learned that there are no rules, they make intelligent, rather than rote choices on what rules they *decide* to play by, with the full knowledge that they can change the rules from tune to tune, or even within the tune. Thus can David Murray pay hommage to "Body and Soul" without sounding like Coleman Hawkins. Because these folks are not bound by the linear chronological history of jazz, they can demonstrate just how harmonically free Monk actually was (see Arthur Blythe's Monk LP of last year) or convincingly link Basie, Mingus and Coleman through their Southwestern, gutbucket blues, playing-at-the-Saturday-Night-function moaning styles (see Threadgill's "Just the facts and pass the bucket"), etc. To dismiss these people as somehow less creative than Bird, Trane, etc is silly, and worse, makes jazz an irrelevant exercise in nostalgia. The surest way to kill anything is to put it in a museum, folks. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing Marcel Simon mhuxr!mfs