Disclaimer: this is a draft from January. It was quite an amusing re-discovery, so I shall post it here in its unabridged form. Un-polished, too…
Being somewhat an outsider (by choice) to the jazz tradition, got me thinking recently - does a common practice already exist for our métier the way it does for European classical music? And if so, where lay its boundaries? While other streams and practices have already experienced their “postmodern” period, is jazz’s finest hour coming up now?
Maybe my recent move to Paris, where the scene tends to stick to the tradition more devoutly, is what sparked this percolating thought. And most certainly, it has to do with the Max Roach centennial. Coming back and listening to Max in 1960, right after he made waves with his brilliant series of post-Clifford albums1, one can’t help but notice the degree to which the rhythm section was liberated in the span of what, five years? I’m mostly referring to Parisian Sketches, of course, a slightly off-kilter record made in the Spring of 1960 in its namesake city, with a three-horn front line that features Stanley Turrentine in full-on bop mode. Julian Priester, who replaced Ray Draper at the low-brass seat, seems like a natural choice for this as well.2
Sketches was for years, and still is to me, the epitome of American Jazz Musicians In Europe™. Mingus would cut his landmark Antibes record later that summer, and many others would follow suit.3 Maybe it’s just me, but there’s a far greater degree of freedom that being away from the home scene affords a common practice musician, even if he helped created that common practice in the first place. Maybe this time it’s me?
Given this long preamble, how can we plausibly justify jazz not advancing nearly as much in the 60-odd years that followed? Loaded statement, for sure, but hear me out: what you call advancement, I would call sidestepping. It’s as if we stopped caring after 1969. Yes, it’s obvious that audiences were lost on jazz because of the allure of rock and other, even more popular things that followed. The 70s-80s were particularly cruel to common practice folk, with the dual menace of computer-based music and genre schizophrenia. (Just look at progressive rock and the consequent pushback of punk - two completely over-the-top genres that kept fueling each other.) Couple that with dubious recording techniques like the advent of the magnetic pickup and new ways of drum miking (I’m looking at you, stadium rock), and you start to understand people who talk insidiously about “the death of jazz”.
If we check on those common practice musicians in Europe, though, we might find that they seemingly froze in time, or even backtracked a bit. Dexter, for one, would make a career’s worth of recordings for Steeplechase in 1974-1976, starting with the legendary The Apartment. Is this the beginning of the end of the common period? Maybe, especially since Sophisticated Giant (1978) represents a Round Midnight-esque take on definitive common period material.
But wait! A question to ponder: How does the Great American Songbook relate to this common practice period? Do they go hand in hand? Is the GAS our own version of sonata form?
All of these are hard questions. Do we even need to define common practice for jazz? It might be useful, since nobody’s entirely sure where jazz is going now. If the 1960-1965 trajectory is a clue to anything, it’s to the relentless power of a songbook. I’m not saying the songbook, but maybe we need to start considering a new one? Maybe, since the one we’re using now is a messy mélange of 1930s show tunes and 1960s cutting-edge originals, the bop resurgence of the 90s should also be considered common practice? Is durability the mark of a good addition to the songbook, and only time will tell?
My personal goal, as always, is to craft a collection of music that would be so singular, it can amount to a language in itself. Huge, but manageable if you write a lot of lead sheets. Maybe one in a hundred will be worth it.
Weekend Listening
Today I shall leave you with the two records in question.
Great as far as title tracks go, penned by Bill Lee.
And perhaps more central to the conversation, here’s a nice cut from Parisian Sketches:
The recording is pristine and the Sonny Clark head sounds great sans piano. I bet it’s a head arrangement, but it’s gorgeous nonetheless. Whereas most 32-bar forms alternate between major ‘A’ sections and minor bridges (or vice versa), this one has a bit of both in every section; the slightly unexpected resolutions make for a very rewarding form, one that does not meander too much by way of its predictable ‘A’ section - the one that appears three times as much as the bridge.
Replacing the piano with Ray Draper on tuba, starting with +4 at Newport, gave way to Deeds, not Words, and other piano-less masterpieces. One may even speculate that those sides helped nudge Charles Mingus into a similar approach some years later; this is all the more plausible since Mingus and Roach shared their independent record label, Debut Records.
Priester was always one to display a penchant for participating in the most interesting sessions, from Sun Ra to Herbie’s Sextant band, and later with the early Dave Holland Quintet.
Sahib Shihab in Denmark, Dexter in Paris, and precursor Don Byas in the Netherlands are a few of the big ones. Red Mitchell would move to Sweden in 1968… the list goes on.