Jazz Photography: Jazz And Jeet Kune Do · Monday December 25, 2006
I’ve come to the conclusion that jazz, like punk, is the name for a former musical phenomenon that largely no longer exists. In both cases you find contemporary sounds that do fit the genre, but in both cases it lacks the significance and the context of the original work, and there’s not much of it about. Some, but not much. There will never be another Clash, there will never be another Art Blakey, Gillespie, or Thelonious Monk.
Maybe the ethos and aesthetic of both punk and jazz were similar in the sense that they both had an anarchism, rebellion, and counter-culture creativity that made them inherently short-lived. In the first case, about which I can comment because I was there, it challenged a bloated super-pop world with an exciting rawness and aggression. Even my Dad, who didn’t like it, once remarked that at least it opposed the sugary crap you saw on TV: the Radio 1, Top Of The Pops, false-smile bullshit typical of the 1980s. Now it’s even worse, where despite pockets of independent talent like Oasis and Razorlight, the uniform scene is computer generated crap fronted by vacuous pretty girls and boys with about as much talent as a blow-up doll. In the case of jazz, I’m not an expert but understand how it partly arose from the oppressive conditions of the black community. In the beautiful words of Wynton Marsalis:
Most of the things you are surrounded with you don’t need. But when you have those things around you, it makes you feel good about living in the world. And it gives you something to look forward to, and it also gives you a way to connect with everything that has happened on earth. It’s like real poor people in the country, on a Sunday, would get dressed up and they wouldn’t have any money but just that little hat with the flower on it…just a little something to make you special and make you sweet. That’s jazz music (Jazz: A History of America’s Music 2002: 121).
Compare that to these words, describing a band:
London’s leading Latin American Dance band…widely experienced in the Latin and Jazz scene…This all singing band includes the traditional latin rhythm section, piano, guitar, bass, congas, bongos and timbale. It is fronted by Adriana Santana who has become the “Queen of Salsa” in London captivating the audience with her magnetic voice and sensual dancing. The Band’s eclectic repertoire is passionate, dynamic and eminently danceable: from the characteristically hot blooded tempos of Cuban Salsa and Brazilian Lambada, the traditional folk rhythms of Colombian cumbia and Dominican Merengue, to the latest Caribbean Reggae.
But where’s the jazz?
Or these words, taken from an internet radio station:
Indie jazz fusion in various flavors: rock, funk, folk, classical, Latin, Asian, European, World, and more
WTF? How can jazz be everything, and still be jazz? Answer is, it can’t. Historically, what happened is this “fusion” began in the 1960s and took on a contemporary popularity in the 1980s and when people like Courtney Pine realised it was the commercial way to survive. Result? – much of what is now called jazz isn’t; it’s a vague lounge music that may be talented and enjoyable, but it isn’t jazz. Stan Tracey, sometimes called the Godfather of British Jazz, epitomises what the genre is. But he’s now eighty years old, part of a former generation that has mostly disappeared. In a recent BBC documentary, Courtney Pine recounted a moment when he improvised some fusion stuff which prompted some objection from the band: you can’t do that, he said. Yes I can, Pine replied, I just did. I don’t know if Pine ever read any Bruce Lee and his martial art philosophy, but his remark directly parallels Lee’s innovative and non-conformist talent. Maybe, I think, he thinks he’s doing something similar. Bruce Lee once said exactly the same thing responding to an objection that only certain martial arts moves were allowed, according to the “tradition” of a cult-like martial style. These are some of Lee’s famous sayings, and you can see a parallel with the improvising jazz aesthetic:
Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own
All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns
Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself; do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it
Lee studied a diverse range of martial arts including Tai Chi, Hung Gar, fencing, boxing, and the core of his personal style, Wing Chun. In fact he researched most of the styles that exist. I once studied with an extraordinary Wing Chun teacher called Robin Gardiner, who came very close to a challenge match with Lee not because of egoism, but in the pursuit of excellence in the application and expression of principle. Lee discovered and refined the principles of those and many other arts, defining them as the basis for what he eventually called Jeet Kune Do – “the way of the intercepting fist”, a concept taken from fencing whereby the ‘stop hit’ – anticipating and then beating the opponent to a move – is the quickest, simplest, and ultimate way of ending a fight. He contrasted this against what he called “the classical mess” of traditional martial arts which are unnecessarily complicated and constrained.
At his MySpace web page, Pine himself describes his music as Nu Jazz Swing
I repeat: WTF?
One of the problems with the inheritance Bruce Lee left in the martial arts world is his ideas are used to justify mixing and blending different styles, and calling the result ‘Jeet Kune Do’ – anything goes. There are two problems with this. Firstly, Lee had understood the different styles before he began his improvising and refining process; he’d attained a high level of ability first, whereas other people just mix things up at a lower level of understanding. Secondly, the style itself is not the issue and personal interpretations inevitably and necessarily vary, according to temperament and physique. Lee himself advised this; you have to make the art your own. But the important point is that you understand and express the principles – which he delineated very clearly in his books, notably in the Tao Of Jeet Kune Do, some of which is summarised here.
I see a parallel here with jazz, emphasising as it does the quality of improvisation which is different to the craftsmanlike, reverential attitude adopted by classical musicians in relation their canon of work. Cecil Taylor said:
The thing that makes jazz so interesting is that each man is his own academy. By and large, if he’s really going to be persuasive, he learns about other academies, but the idea is that he must have that special thing. And sometimes you don’t even know what it is (Valerie Wilmer 1977 Jazz People: 28).
So-called Jazz Fusion, or for that matter “Nu Jazz Swing”, is no longer Jazz: it’s an art built on deliberate mixing and blending, for its own sake, in the process losing the essence of the original art for the sake of commercial popularity. It’s notoriously difficult to make a living from jazz: the Stan Tracey documentary made this very clear showing his great struggles while others went off mixing and blending and making money, trying to survive the Beatles revolution. It’s not easy to say what it is – no doubt a musicologist could do it better than me – but the sound of Blakey, Gillespie and Monk and for that matter Stan Tracey is clearly different to much contemporary work. For example there’s a swing to Pine’s compositions, a structure with a catchy tune and a repeating chorus, which you don’t find in original jazz – but you do find in the general genre of ‘popular music’ that gets played on BBC Radio 1. Dude, it’s just not Jeet Kune Do. It’s just, to continue the analogy, a mix of Hung Gar, wrestling, White Crane and Thai Boxing. You’re just mixing and blending, and you’re not the only one who does this.
Edit: comments temporarily disabled, because spammers keep trying to post crap at this article. They never succeeded, because I use good anti spam protection. Now I want them to go away and stop reading this article in the first place.