The development—the development, not the existence—of jazz in the Western world still has many surprises in store for us. A form of music with such diverse potentialities has the power to assail our sensibility from all sides and on every level. But then, of course, we are prepared to cope with this siege: contemporary society has taught us to build defenses against the environment which it creates. More disturbing is the evolution of the most vigorous branch of jazz, commonly called “modern;” composed as it is of a succession of attainments and renouncements, it requires constant reappraisal. Every new choice constitutes a reassessment of a past opinion.
The situation would be less complex were it not for the fact that this deluge of creative activity enables part of jazz to rise above the world of mass consumption in which its lowermost strata are, after all, buried; that weird world in which mass music pullulates like some monstrous plant life; a world that resembles Nazi Germany insofar as it ruthlessly equates success with truth; a world governed by a single unwritten law: whatever is successful, is good. Such and such a song is a masterpiece; it has brought in a million dollars. As for its twin, whose title did not happen to catch the public ear, there are doubts as to its very existence. Does a dance record that sells less than 100,000 copies exist at all? Thus the Billboard ratings accurately determine the intrinsic value of each marketed product. However, a work of art is not a consumer product; it lives and dies according to internal forces, hangs neglected or revered on a museum wall with no memory of how or why it was born. At the time of its birth, who can evaluate its power and glory? The critics? They would have to be prophets. Our Parthenons and Mona Lisas will be recognizable as such only after our death. Until then, how respectfully or contemptuously should we regard them?
To avoid passing judgement, some people resort to classifying: “This music is not jazz,” they decide, simply because it does not make use of their favorite beat, or contains no precise reference to a blues style which they hold sacred. And this refusal to judge is a judgement in itself. Others righteously reject all classifications: “Let’s not talk about jazz,” they say, “let’s just talk about music. Our only criteria should be musical!” Who is it that takes these radical stands, one way or another? It is we. And we have each taken both at different times.
Each of us has been a classifier. We have liked a certain quality in a certain kind of jazz. If another kind lacks that quality, our reflex may be to exclude it from the world of jazz. “It has no soul,” or “there’s not enough improvising” (or any one of a hundred other reasons), “ergo, it isn’t jazz.” We want jazz to be just for us, we need to be protected and reassured. Familiar surroundings are the best shield against fear. We wage a familiar war, destroying the enemy before he can destroy us, before we even know that he is an enemy. Thus, anything that cannot immediately be assimilated to an already familiar and admired model, is destroyed before it can affect our sensibility in any way.
Each of us has also been a rejector of classifications. In all sincerity, we have tried to assess jazz as musicians rather than as jazz musicians, as music lovers rather than as jazz fans. “What do I care whether it’s jazz at all as long as it’s good music? For example, what does it matter if the steady beat is dropped when it is amply compensated for by the rich possibilities of the variable beat?” We want jazz to realize all its potentialities, we want it to merge with the full universality of music.
At the same time we are aware of having gone too far. Sensing that we are on uncertain ground, we cast about for a safety rail to guard us against falling into the absurd. For as it moves from steady beat to free beat, from tonality to atonality, as it gives up old techniques and turns to new ones, jazz may gradually lose its distinguishing features. And where will it stop? With Schuller? Stravinsky? Stockhausen? Fairly far, in any case, from what is commonly called jazz.
In this perspective, there is no sturdier safety rail than the traditional appeal to the element of swing. “If the swing feeling is the major ingredient in the essence of jazz, then jazz ends where swing does.” This is sound logic; the problem seems to be solved; we have found an apparently foolproof safety rail. Yet one small question is enough to undermine our certainty: are we absolutely sure that we can recognize swing in all its forms?
A half century of jazz has taught us that swing has hundreds of different guises . . . and that it can die.
Swing is many faceted. Frankie Trumbauer did not swing like John Coltrane. And this is not simply a matter of periods. Louis Armstrong does not swing like Roy Eldridge, who in turn does not swing like Dizzy Gillespie. Nor is it a matter of schools. Let us take three different combinations with one common denominator: Monk–Blakey, Monk–Clarke, Monk–Roach. All of them can be said to fall within the framework of a same school, yet they offer three different kinds of swing, three types of forces responding to different impulses. There is not one kind of swing, there are many; “swing,” as such, just does not exist.
We must push our investigations further. In order to appraise a musician’s swing, a distinction should perhaps be made between quantity and quality, difficult as these are to measure. Milt Jackson may swing less than Lionel Hampton (the drive is not so strong) but he swings better (his rhythmic sensibility is more developed). Swing may be conventional or vulgar (Roland Kirk, Les McCann); it may be “far out” or wild (Elvin Jones, Charlie Parker). Here is a glimpse of evaluation at its most subjective. We will come back to this problem later.
Swing is a form of magic. It may lose its power at any time. A piece that seemed so swinging yesterday may not seem so at all today. “Why shouldn’t it swing any more?” “Why do works of art so seldom retain their beauty?” We are beginning to realize that works of art move in a world as ruthless as the ocean depths: it is killed or be killed, eat or be eaten. What we call swing may, as we believe, be a vehicle of beauty, but beauty itself is no guarantee of immortality. Quite the contrary: a threat hangs over every form of beauty from its very inception. One of its essential aspects may cease to be perceptible, or else the beauty may appear in another form, similar to but greater than the first, and eclipse it entirely. Such and such a sax player, whom we once thought capable of swinging all his life, suddenly ceased to swing for us after we first heard Charlie Parker. His music had been alive in our minds and hearts; now it was dead. It had been eaten.
True, it is still alive in other minds and hearts. But what can this matter to us? It lives on in the way Stalin and Mussolini live on in old newsreels. The worshiping crowds still raise their arms in salute; they are no more obsolete than the jazz fans who remain oblivious to the Parker holocaust. What is dead for us is truly dead; only our own inconsistency could bring it back to life.
Yet where death is possible, so is birth. However great our dismay when familiar figures decline and disappear, it is far greater when caused by the invariably unexpected appearance of a new one.
The days are apparently gone forever when the appreciation of swing was a shared subjective truth. This was certainly an estimable standard of appreciation. Jazz used to be a simple, well-organized world in which values were seldom contested. In the old days, no jazz musician worthy of the name could fail to notice a really outstanding exponent of swing playing in a band entirely made up of good swingers. Enlightened spectators at a cutting contest would invariably applaud the soloist who outplayed all the others; whether his name was Chu, Bean, or Prez, he was the hero of the day. Those, however, were the days when jazz was still a popular art. We all know how deeply it has been transformed by the forceful personalities it has produced. As jazz became increasingly diversified, criteria became a matter of schools. Today, however, the individual musician seems to take precedence over the group around him. This has brought a change of perspective; consensus of opinion is a less meaningful notion than it used to be. If a musician is an original creative artist, on what grounds are we to decide that he doesn’t swing? And even if we feel that he doesn’t, whom can we take as a comparison? What if Elvin Jones’s playing were a refutation rather than an extension of Kenny Clarke’s and Max Roach’s? What if Ornette Coleman’s were a refutation of Charlie Parker’s?
The multiplicity of swing is an obstacle to evaluation which cannot be overcome by the defunct notion of shared subjective truth. Simply because everyone else agrees with us, we are not necessarily right, even if “everyone else” means the majority of professional musicians. We may grasp Louis Armstrong’s, or Charlie Parker’s swing, but a new kind of swing might catch us unprepared.
A new kind of swing means, in one sense, a new kind of freedom and a new kind of order. The relationship between the two may or may not be immediately apparent. This is where an element of uncertainty creeps in. Are we listening to the tentative gropings of a clumsy innovator? Are we listening to a feeble, distorted imitation of an established model? Or does the apparent disorder conceal a deep coherence which may become clear to us at any moment? Perhaps we are dealing with the highest form of beauty in today’s jazz. In a case like this, we can only let our musical intuition be our guide. It has been developed through repeated contacts with the objective realities of the past. Now it must serve as our compass.
The music played by a jazz artist is jazz. Fine. This musician whose music swings is a jazz artist; he is playing jazz. Fine. But what about that other man, whose music, in our view, does not swing? Is he a jazz artist playing jazz? And if so, are we in the wrong? This is where we turn to our compass; we shake it this way and that; we discover how fragile it is; but let us avoid referring to the opinion of this or that eminent colleague. He may well be as wrong as we are, for we are entering an age of disruptors.
And so our brake is useless. True, there are all sorts of others available. A European will accept any widening of the scope of jazz as long as it comes from the U.S.A. He feels that Americans have the same right of life or death over jazz that fathers had over their children in ancient societies. Even if he is not understood, the disruptor will be welcomed with open arms provided he is American—and preferably a Black, at that. Conversely, the European jazzman is trapped in a hopeless dilemma: either he is despised as an imitator or, if he does not imitate, accused of disfiguring. However, if this really is the age of disruptors, will the equation “jazz = American music” hold true forever? Why shouldn’t a disruptor come from the end of the earth?
A century or two ago, when Western music was still impervious to the “enrichment” of non-European cultures, its capacity for growth was self-contained. The attainment of a new form in the eighteenth century, and of a new style in the nineteenth, enlarged the structures of tonal music without destroying its foundation. At that time, musical art seemed mainly the business of the German-speaking peoples; yet Chopin and Berlioz, though they lacked some of the outstanding qualities of the great German musicians, cannot be accused of either imitating or disfiguring. Should a European jazzman prove capable of making a similar contribution, should his creation, evolved within the framework of jazz, prove to be coherently balanced and organized, however much it might disrupt, stylistically or otherwise, on what grounds could we possibly reject it?
This brake, then, is no better than the first. We live in a world which is dangerous, an adult world from which all brakes must be banished, even at the cost of our own peace of mind.
Perhaps we can better come to grips with a work of jazz if we assess it in purely musical terms. Beyond the general outlines that establish it as a work of jazz, there must exist intrinsic criteria which can serve to define its originality. Is it possible to isolate and evaluate these criteria? If so, would this not do away with the need to refer constantly to listening habits—or to a tradition—that weigh so heavily on our opinions? If the basic responsibilities were assumed by our musical intuition, would this not constitute a decisive, liberating step?
We are alone with the music we love. While we listen to it, it exists only in our soul. Do we really love it unless we do so for itself alone, regardless of the rest of jazz?
Our musical intuition tells us that Charlie Parker is still alive. We appreciate in his music certain qualities which we know to be characteristic of jazz, which refer to a familiar language. However, its lasting beauty is not due merely to the fact that those qualities are characteristic of jazz—this would be insufficient—but to the coherence and rigor of the structures which they bring to life. Many other jazz musicians are dead, even if they are still listed among the living, because the jazz characteristics in their music were less tightly knit together and failed to form an indestructible whole. Evaluating Parker in terms of criteria established by his music means, for example, properly appreciating a certain relationship between the tension created by his sound and the construction of his phrasing. This relationship partakes of the essence of jazz; it is all to the credit of jazz; but above all, it is a source of musical beauty which is inseparable from Parker’s work and which not even his imitators can take from him.
This analytical approach to musical perception may seem over subtle. It presupposes a keen ear and a thorough familiarity with jazz. However, it seems better suited to accounting for the achievements and failures of jazz. The mediocrity of a musician like Dave Brubeck should be self-evident; there is no need to do him the unwarranted injustice of excluding him from jazz altogether.
Though these are latent criteria, they do nevertheless have a kind of objective existence; they constitute an area of appreciation on which it is possible to shed light through analysis. Outside that area lie the dark dominions of pure subjectivity. When we move from the musical plane to the poetic, we sense clearly that values are no longer the same. True, there exists a close though indefinable relationship between the creative act and its consequences. Yet these consequences take place in us. Thus, the values peculiar to jazz seem ultimately to refer us back to human values in general, to values of a directly personal nature.
There is no way of predicting from one moment to the next the degree of musical achievement of a work of jazz, for it knits and unknits itself as it moves along. Certain potentialities are realized, others are not; the work attains its objective or it does not. However, we cannot simply refuse to evaluate a work’s poetic qualities, its level of aesthetic achievement; otherwise, we should have to regard a Strauss waltz as the equivalent of a Bach chorale. Reluctant as we may be to classify works according to genre (what can be more ridiculous than a bad tragedy?), we must not lose our sense of values. Even in the unsettled universe of improvised jazz, certain basic preliminary choices rigorously determine the negative limits of a work. We cannot predict what it will be, but we can predict what it cannot be. Apish society players cannot possibly attain the emotional intensity of Parker’s great paraphrases. At times, the choice of a theme is enough to determine the elevation or triviality of an unborn work. When Monk sits down to play Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, he is momentarily cutting himself off from a certain level of beauty which he might have reached had he chosen Evidence. However, he is obliged to enter into a relationship with the theme which is such as to give even the most subtle developments a vulgar tinge and continually tends to pull the work downward.
What is vulgar? What is elevated? There is no rule or principle which can decide for us. A work’s degree of ambition is no criterion: the world of jazz has its nouveaux riches, too. But neither is lack of ambition a sign of elevation; we tend to regard it rather as an admission of impotence. Something deep inside us seems to respond to a force of attraction or repulsion before we can even form an opinion. Music which we will later condemn as “stupid” or “contemptible” arouses an immediate reaction of physical repugnance. Yet others take pleasure of this same music, which in some cases may be well written—though not necessarily. The best approach to these telling discords is a humorous one. Experience has taught us that on this level of subjectivity, discussion is not desirable. Courtesy inclines us to conceal our nausea and stifle our laughter; intellectual integrity demands that we assume our responsibilities. It is a matter of intellectual temperament.
There is a tendency today to put a rather loose interpretation on the principle of intellectual steps as defined by Paul Valéry and to rehabilitate facile works insofar as they are supposed to prepare us gradually for the masterpieces. Yet if this is the hidden purpose of such works, why do they flout all the basic values of the art to which they are supposed to provide an introduction? When we are told that this or that rock ’n’ roll number is an initiation to the higher forms of jazz, we can only wonder how a plea in favor of mental and emotional deficiency can lead to self-surpassing. Are we dealing with some mystical process by which Tom Jones and Elvis Presley, through successive reincarnations, each stupider and more decadent than the last, finally become Monk and Parker? We see no need to stoop so low. Why bother with these hideous caricatures when the world of jazz has its respectable minor artists, perfectly suited for this intermediary role? One Ella Fitzgerald should spare us a hundred Nancy Sinatras. There are countless works of jazz with enough immediate appeal to provide stepladders for those who have not yet learned to jump. However, we must be careful not to overrate the importance of these pieces: there are so many of them that they would soon blot out the landscape altogether.
Our sense of rigor tells us that there is no such thing as a small masterpiece, barring, possibly, the criterion of dimension. In the long-range view, a perfect achievement in an inferior genre is a trivial one. The work of Tatum, brilliant and even faultless though it may be from a certain standpoint, calls to mind a doctor’s comment on a surgeon’s brilliant operation: “It shouldn’t have been performed at all.” An underdeveloped critical sense will degrade a work of jazz; an overdeveloped one will stifle it. If Hank Jones were not such a careful pianist both technically and stylistically, his music might reveal a more vital creative impulse. Which should we prefer: the perfect neutrality of one person or the decorative zest of someone else? The question is immaterial. As an alternative to this kind of jazz, we propose another which, imperfect as it is, attests to the essence of poetic truths of an entirely different order. We deliberately chose Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk as examples. When our musical intuition speaks out with such strength and clarity on their behalf, how can we imagine that we could be wrong? Our conviction could be shaken only by a contradictor whose musical intuition we consider to be equal or superior to ours. However, is there anyone in the jazz world who disputes the historical preeminence of Charlie Parker? And if so, whom does he rate above him? It hardly seems necessary to argue with those who take the “genius” of Ray Charles literally. Errol Garner also has unmistakable qualities and the Jazz Messengers are said to express a commendable drive. But what of it? After what Parker and Monk have brought to jazz, why dwell on these affable talents? After twenty years’ reflection, are we going to repudiate the strange fever that completely transformed jazz toward the end of World War II? Are we going to join in the heavy-handed efforts to set it back on the straight and narrow path of popular music? Are we going to concede that its aspirations toward something greater, something madder, were empty after all? In spite of Coltrane’s example, must we give up all hope of convulsive ecstasy? Beyond Miles Davis, is there no further chance for unearthly rapture? Admittedly, jazz for a paroxysmal expression conducted by musicians incapable of inventing the ways and means of their revolution does at least deserve respect—if we exclude the fakers with their eye on the public—insofar as it rules out any return to a system which now seems definitely obsolete.
However, a valid contestation does exist: it is from outside that the world of jazz is most bitterly disputed. Indeed, very respectable musicians simply reject Charlie Parker—along with all the rest of jazz. One of the most famous, making fresh use of Eric Satie’s expression, equates jazz with “background music,” and regards this as its only justification. Such a radical opinion apparently creates a forbidding alternative: either we shut ourselves up in our ivory tower, drape ourselves in righteousness, and maintain that ours is the keener musical intuition (a king does not duel with his subjects), or else we accept the truth of our opponent’s assertion and anxiously begin to wonder whether we have not been on the wrong track all our lives. If this were so, the most rigorous thinkers among us would certainly look silly! Fighting eclecticism in all its forms, they would have condemned Brahms, Ravel, and Tchaikovsky in the name of the highest musical values, and at the same time been heaping love and praise on a by-product of industrial society, on “background music!” What a strange aberration!
A bit too strange, perhaps. . . . This alternative stems from our sensibility alone. Let us see whether reason cannot surmount it.
We shall disregard the argument that our famous composer’s opinion is a result of ignorance, that he misjudges jazz because he is not really familiar with it. This kind of argument is too banal, too trivial to hold our attention. Let us suppose, on the contrary, that the prosecution has studied the brief, that it is not attacking jazz in its lowest forms but in its highest. Why are its conclusions still diametrically opposed to those of the defense?
Let us borrow an example from Einstein: an observer inside an elevator car and another on the landing looking through the glass door have very different interpretations of the phenomenon which they are watching. Perfectly logical chains of reasoning lead them to opposite conclusions. Let us bring this relativistic outlook to bear on our problem. If we may be allowed to borrow a term from physics, we might say that defense and prosecution have different systems of coordinates. Imagine them both listening to a Charlie Parker record. Can we really be sure that both are hearing the same music? In a sense, we cannot. Whenever dissimilar cultural references produce different systems of coordinates, interpretations of the facts cannot be identical, either qualitatively or quantitatively.
Either qualitatively or quantitatively: in our field, this means that differences in systems of coordinates affect the actual perception of the facts. The observer outside the elevator may simply not see certain events that take place inside, as though he were looking through a frosted pane. Jazz has perhaps brought on more cases of organic blindness than any other art. In this connection we might cite a fortuitous experiment carried out with the unintentional help of a classically-trained musician with a keen ear, capable of reading the most difficult scores. This excellent musician was put in charge of a recording session. Had he been dealing with a piece of “classical” music, it would have been inconceivable that any serious errors of execution could have escaped his notice. However, the score before him was a work of written jazz, and errors and omissions accumulated in rapid succession without drawing any reaction from him. This is because he did not hear the music that he had been asked to supervise; his system of coordinates was such that he was unable to grasp it organically.
True, our famous composer has never lent himself to a similar experiment. We have no reason to assume that the results would be the same, for his musical perception is known to be very highly developed. Let us grant that he is the exception, that for him the glass door in the elevator is perfectly transparent. It does not necessarily follow that his training, his cultural background, his commitments, his thought patterns—in short, everything that has made him what he is—have prepared him to experience the magic of jazz. We feel, on the contrary, that the phenomena which he is witnessing cannot mean to him what they mean to us. What can swing mean to this pioneer in “irrational rhythmics?” Or the chorus player’s circumscribed improvising to composer who has made such extensive use of aleatoric structures?
In return, a hypothetical condemnation of serial music coming from a jazz artist—but what jazz artist would dare voice it?—would also be primarily motivated by this difference between two systems of coordinates: the man of jazz would be incapable of appreciating the organic coherence of musical phenomena which have nothing in common with those that form the substance of his everyday musical activities.
Of course, well-meaning critics may regard our attempt to introduce a relativistic viewpoint as an unwitting deception, a stratagem aimed at clouding the aesthetic issues which we claim to be studying. “An extension of the curious method of investigation,” they might retort, “would lead us to wonder whether there is not artistic value in certain reputedly minor forms of expression such as the pop song. Might not Maurice Chevalier’s talent, which some regard as undeniable, transfigure songs like Valentine and Prosper? After all, Maurice’s career goes back prior to the first Original Dixieland record. Who is to say that within a given system of coordinates, Chevalier is not Joyce or Picasso?” We could reply that such a system of coordinates is inconceivable; otherwise it would already have been conceived of. Chevalier’s world is immediately accessible; no one has ever been stricken with perceptual blindness before Prosper or Valentine.
If, on the contrary, our suggestion is valid, it calls forth two immediate consequences. First, we cannot go on rejecting all classifications and at the same time pretend that our value judgements are absolute. One cannot be both inside and outside the elevator. In the second place, the alternative we spoke of no longer exists. It hardly matters who is right, those who claim that jazz is worthy of interest or those who claim that it is not, since they are not referring to the same system of coordinates. Arbitrating the elevator conflict, Einstein points out that “it is impossible to choose between the viewpoints of the two observers,” since, “each could claim the right to relate all the events to his system of coordinates” and since “both descriptions may be equally coherent.” Similarly, from the point of view of an observer whose system of coordinates is neither the jazz artist’s nor the serial composer’s, the conflict between jazz and serial music would probably resolve itself as an equivalence.
However, who could this observer be? Where would he come from? Could he be a refined musician of Far Eastern culture, a Vietnamese bronze or Tibetan monk? Should we bring forth from the depths of a primitive culture some Alakuluf paddler or Ona medicine man? Another observer might as well come down from Venus, still another from the seventh galaxy: their arbitration would be no more irrelevant. Serial composers and jazz musicians are all in the same boat, and its name is Western Civilization. We are no more universal than the society which nurtures our ambitions, witnesses our failures, and in whose mirror we must contemplate ourselves.
We are faced here with a basic paradox. Our relativistic approach is not operative from one culture to another, as we might have expected, but within a closed world. We are living at a strange conjuncture. A century ago, Western music, in spite of the traditional distinctions between serious, light, and folk music, had a basic unity. Johann Strauss did not betray Schumann, while Liszt, on occasion, could join forces with the Hungarian peasant. Today, things are very different; no intercourse or mutual influence is conceivable between serial music and jukebox tunes. The situation would be clear enough if the evolution of jazz had not upset everything and ruined the historian’s peace of mind. For indeed, just what is the nature of this other music which claims to be equally representative of our culture and which, like the Western music of the past, has its own internal hierarchies? What is this music which was once folk music and no longer is, which grew up in a ghetto and has such a deep influence on the mass music of the world, which contains, moreover—and in various forms!—its own mass music? What is this music that exists on several levels, with rock ’n’ roll at the bottom and the disturbing inventions of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk at the top?
Here we have a true form of coexistence unique in the history of Western civilization. True, it was prefigured in the Middle Ages when the trouvères and troubadours lived side by side with the austere church polyphonists. However, the music of the troubadours was only superficially diversified; it involved almost no aesthetic hierarchy. Moreover, the hiatus was only apparent; with the appearance of a composer like Adam de la Halle, profane music over techniques which until then had been considered the prerogative of sacred music. And when the two streams joined, it became apparent that their waters were the same.
The antithesis which concerns us here is far more radical. Naive though it may seem, our image of two systems of coordinates does convey fairly well the parallel between jazz and serial music. There is something shocking about this shared sovereignty. The mind balks at it. And however much we may suffer from the injustices involved in the negative attitude toward jazz adopted by the serial composers, generally so responsive to the myriad attractions of non-European traditions, we do ultimately understand it. All things considered, this attitude seems more realistic than the pious wishing of those who innocently believe that sooner or later there will be a fusion of the two kinds of music. Such a coalescing would be miraculous, for there are no morphological similarities pointing to any such synthesis.
The serial universe is one of discontinuity. It is based on a set of privative attributes (atonality, asymmetry, athematicism) held together by the unifying principle of the serial concept. Here the conflict between tension and relaxation, the key to all music, takes on new meaning. The serial framework suggests ways of renewing this conflict through the treatment of two components which had only secondary importance in classical music: rhythm and timbre. The notion of discontinuity has not simply done away with classical accentuation and tonal rhetoric, it has also given birth to a new type of “irrational” rhythm (in which the development of a rhythmic pattern is not reducible to a single note value) and cast timbre as such in an active role, tending to incorporate it into the polyphonic texture (the various timbres are subjected to a variation process and to a continual osmosis, involving attacks and dynamics, factors which are a function of both timbre and rhythm).
Jazz musicians responded very differently to the need to renew the conflict between tension and relaxation, although here, too, rhythm and timbre play major roles. (This reversal of emphasis is characteristic of our century and invalidates Olivier Messiaen’s famous proposition: “Let melody remain king.”) The chief difference is that while discontinuity sometimes plays an important part in jazz, jazz in itself does not constitute a universe of discontinuity. Here, the handling of timbre (the variations of sound production in a soloist’s playing) becomes a factor of variable tension overlaying the “active relaxation” (also variable) achieved by the soloist through swing. Various other aspects of the musical fabric may serve to create tension: the melodic line, the complexion of the individual chord, and its relative position on the scale of harmonic degrees. Another powerful factor of tension is the rhythmic construction of the phrase; syncopated notes, accents, and even the beat itself can reduce or increase tension. Finally, it is the rhythmic “density” which determines—mainly on the interpretive level, but also on the conceptual—the phenomenon of swing and, thereby, that of relaxation. These different elements interact, forming the dialectics of jazz.
Despite their schematic brevity, these descriptions ought to shed light on one important fact: serial structures, as a result of their discontinuity, enjoy utter freedom in both time and space (defining as they do their own limits through the serial principle), whereas jazz structures are linked to preexisting principles. The most advanced jazz contests these principles; but to contest is not to abolish. The syncopated note contests the beat, the asymmetric phrase the four-bar pattern, and the dissonance the tonal principle. These contestations help enrich the language of jazz; the aesthetic benefits which the great jazz artists can derive from them are obvious to anyone living within our system of coordinates, provided, though, that tonality, the four-bar pattern, and a steady beat be taken for granted as constituting the immutable essence of the mechanics of jazz. To do away with them would be to sap the very foundations of jazz, for it is our belief that discontinuity can exist in jazz only against a background of continuity.
When we attempt to define how this dialectics is implemented, we naturally look to the most highly sophisticated jazz, to the music we hold to be the most rewarding within the specific confines of jazz. Not Ray Charles, but Monk; not even Armstrong, but Charlie Parker. For obvious reasons, that jazz cannot hope, any more than serial music, to enjoy the attention of the general public, who are not equipped to experience swing beyond its most rudimentary form: the dance appeal. It is easy to imagine the average listener’s accusations of esotericism; they are the same as those generally aimed at serial music. “It has no form, no melody!” This is invariably the way those who cannot hear how Monk recomposes the material derived from the exploded theme react to I Should Care. However, simply because the best jazz, like serial music, is likely to meet with widespread incomprehension, it does not follow that they are blood relations. Certain characteristics of jazz, as mentioned above, are so foreign to the spirit of serial music that if they transplanted they would constitute unacceptable limitations.
Yet it is these very characteristics which provide the substance of the dialectics of jazz. The limitations of the jazz musician’s language offer a challenge that fires his imagination, and an obstacle that he never completely overcomes. This is what makes creation in jazz possible; it is also what makes it difficult. There are thousands of ways to play the game. Some musicians—the majority—choose to ignore the challenge and avoid the obstacle; others yield to their fascination for the absurd, for the vertigo of the unknown. It is impossible to maintain the level of one’s highest accomplishments, and even the greatest musicians sometimes weaken, lapsing back into popular music (from which even the most advanced jazz has never yet completely freed itself), or indulging in empty posturing. Jazz is not perfect; jazz has not reached complete fulfillment. Yet whenever a perilous balance is achieved on those peaks that are so difficult to climb, we know that jazz is worth our while. Only then does it capture an essential facet of contemporary poetics, only then is it an art.
Are the friends of jazz therefore destined to wait for the sky to catch fire, or at the very least for a shooting star to pass? Fortunately, experience has taught us that great jazz artists “find themselves” often enough so that we need not regard beauty in jazz as a statistically improbably contingency. However, we must not fool ourselves; in the best jazz, failure is the rule, success the exception. Paradoxical though it may seem, this is not true on every level. “The lower a jazz musician’s aesthetic ambition, the better his chances of successful accomplishment.” If there is any truth in this law, it means that there is little risk of failure on the aesthetic level of Louis Jordan or Fats Domino. After all, sociologists teach us that mass culture shuns failure, both personal and social (whereas the contemporary artist lives in the shadow of failure, is actually drawn to it). Of course, in dealing with these lower reaches of our system of values, we have long ago left the field of art for that of entertainment; and we can only concur with anyone who describes this jazz as “background music,” reserving for ourselves the bitter satisfaction of pointing out in return that the countless Franz Lehars and Edith Piafs of jazz are merely the counterparts of the puerile Saint-Saëns and shamefaced Saties who make up the bulk of serial composers.
Failure, as against success; art, as against entertainment. These distinctions are clear within our system of coordinates; they may be invisible to an outside observer. Yet it is hard to accept the idea that our serial composer should fail to find any difference between Monk and Bill Doggett. In the jazz that we admire, we feel that he ought to recognize some of his own concerns. Both forms of music are products of the same era and both tend toward the same “convulsive beauty,” even though they can achieve it only at opposite poles, even though the word “Dionysiac” has a different meaning in each case. However, their coexistence is not universally accepted. How can a dialog be started?
Are the barriers separating the two kinds of musicians insuperable? The imperatives of technical specialization would seem to indicate that for the present they are. It is unthinkable that a serial musician playing the piano in a jazz quintet could produce anything but a pale of Monk or Solal. And a jazz arranger’s attempt to write a serial score could only result in a shabby pastiche; the two forms of music cannot exchange artists. Can they exchange audiences? Here we must weigh our answer carefully. It is true enough that music lovers who manage to avoid today’s eclecticism, generally the sign of a complete lack of discernment, tend to be rather sectarian. They are Democrats or Republicans, Labourites or Tories. However, there is reason to hope that these narrow attitudes are temporary and are brought about by the too rapid development of musical sensibility. Perhaps a public freed from the conventional thinking prevalent in intellectual circles could acquire, through a doubly difficult education, a kind of ambivalent lucidity. We may already be moving in this direction. One is beginning to meet young people who seem capable of really appreciating both jazz and serial music. Is it an illusion, or are they really able to discuss subtle distinctions between the piano music of Pousseur and Stockhausen as intelligently as they compare the best records of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane? Have they really succeeded in switching back and forth from one system of coordinates to the other? In this age of specialization, one wonders whether such bilingualism is not Utopian.
Can we hope that one of these young people will find the answer to the riddle that no Oedipus has yet solved: what are the meaning and exact role of jazz in our society?
We are not dealing with painting as against sculpture, or theater as against films, but with one musical art as against another. Is this a sign of the tremendous wealth and variety of an expanding culture? Or of the exhaustion of a Western world which Jean Genet sees as “increasingly stricken with death and oriented toward it”? Are we witnessing the last moves of an endgame, or a turning point in a game still rich in unforeseeable developments?
In the last analysis, the philosophical evaluation of jazz hangs on these questions, which cannot be framed in absolute terms for lack of proper perspective. So, once more, we must elude them. However, perhaps we have performed a liberating gesture—or at least tried to do so—by better defining our reasons for loving jazz—and for not loving all of jazz.