Jazz Revolution · Tuesday May 22, 2007
The Jazz Revolution, written by Kathy Ogren in 1989, is an interesting example of a subject which at certain points moves beyond the parameters of jazz. Ogren cites Theodor Adorno, as many jazz theorists do, as a famous protagonist unsympathetic to the music:
Adorno’s analysis of the development of mass culture within advanced capitalist societies included an attack on jazz because it created the illusion rather than the reality of free creation, and thus revealed its location in mass culture. Adorno complained that “the authority of the written music is still apparent behind the liberty of the performed music” (Ogren 1989: 155).
But Geoff Dyer, some time jazz critic and interesting guy, said Adorno’s essay Perennial Fashion: Jazz “is a very silly piece of work indeed” (But Beautiful, 1996:221). But Beautiful is an interesting book; Dyer calls it “imaginative criticism”, where he invents fictional stories around the lives of famous jazz players.
I think in some respects Adorno was absolutely right, and it takes someone with his background to say it – someone with a critical, even condemnatory stance, built on the rigour of the academic outlook. Ogren’s book itself shows some of the problem – what revolution? While it’s certainly true jazz was an impressive cultural and artistic phenomenon there is – as Adorno implied – a hype factor to it as there still is with punk. I know, I was there. The music, while I didn’t like all of it and now even less, was undoubtedly a significant cultural shift. Suddenly, the rock dinosaurs carrying twenty lorries of equipment to each gig were being questioned, challenged, by unemployed yoof playing in a garage. But there, in fact, is one of the critical points to make: the false glamour of working class-ness, the pseudo nobility with a fawning acknowledgement from Marxist academia (yes, that’s the way most of academia is) whereas, in fact, while said community are sometimes wonderfully salt-of-the-earth with a rare spirit of mutual support against unkind society they would, it has to be said, often be a disappointment to comrade Karl. Polyester England shirts, lager machismo with back-up from tattooed ladies, and inarticulate tribal chippiness are identifiable parts of our world-leading ASBO society. Britain should be proud…not. Class has always riddled our sometimes-ridiculous society, and now it’s like decay in English oak. There won’t be a Revolution, Karl, because there aren’t any intellectual combatants – just middle class university lecturers getting warm and fuzzy over what is, in fact, a religious attitude despite your (Marx’s) condemnation of religion. Everyone has their drug; the religious version is easy to see, but the bedrock of complex academia is no less flawed: sociology is the opium of the intellectual.
The last time I entered one of the large working class areas near where I live (ten miles by road, thirty minutes by traffic, a cultural shift like crossing the Channel), I encountered a memorably emblematic situation. Ah, quick diversion down here to turn my car around, woops here come a group of yoofs – no, mustn’t pre-judge, stay calm etc – and like a whore in a nunnery causing a ruckus, or a nun in a whore-house doing the same, the predictable happened: I was verbally and socially assaulted for being on their turf, for being different, for simply being there. Enger-land, Enger-land! Thus my car was “crap”, etc etc, to which the ideal retort would have been “yeah but lend us a fiver for petrol lads, if you’ve got a fiver”. It is, quite literally, animal behaviour: based on pavement territorial rights, expressed with violence and hostility. It reminds me of a scene in the movie Alcatraz, where Clint Eastwood is instructed in the hidden pecking order for the prison yard steps: highest level gets the most sun, and is the territory for the most dominant inmate; go up there at your peril. Of course, Clint does exactly that. Well, guys, if your Mancunian pavement is of such importance to you, I will simply move along and not go there again. Got better things to do than argue over a scrappy bit of pavement – I don’t want it.
So, while Sid Vicious sang his parody of I Did It My Way, the sad fact is he never did. It wasn’t a revolution, he was a victim. Few people get it, do it, or know what it means to do it their way. While I wouldn’t characterise society as wholly brutish, being full of lots of lovely people, its overall structures frequently suck because they regiment and disempower people.
There was no jazz revolution. There was no punk revolution. I saw the Bill Grundy moment, I went to both Carnaby Street and more importantly the King’s Road, I bought the records, read the NME, and even went to a few gigs. There was no revolution. It was just a temporary statement of protest, eventually absorbed into the usual suspect scenario. John Lydon, perhaps the most iconic protagonist of all, is now a property millionaire living in sunny Los Angeles. Not so much No Holiday In The Sun Anarchy for The UK, John, as escape the UK and its crappy weather for a comfortable mansion (presumably), while maintaining a Richard III attitude that fools no one. There was no revolution. And the same applies to jazz. Lydon once acknowledged the Richard III influence on his deliberate persona, and we can enlist the help of Shakespeare further: all the world’s a stage, the men and women merely players. A revolution implies a definitive change from one thing to another, as a polarity fought and won between two opposing agencies. But there are more than two: society has a multi-layered complexity and operates accordingly as an overall system, within which different parts are played, come, go, and fluctuate in prominence. More like a procession of actors on stage, than AC changing to DC.
And yet, there is some value in pursuing the notion of jazz as a potent counter cultural agency. First, though I don’t want to dwell on this specifically (for considered, not naïve reasons), jazz originated in an oppressed black community where it must have been, obviously was, a wonderful outlet, resource, and symbol of hope. It was truly heinous, what the black community suffered. The fact that jazz derived from it is more interesting though, I think, as emblematic not of those specific conditions but as a situation most of us can relate to: oppression, injustice, and social desperation are unique to no particular group of people if we have a more fluid and enlightened understanding of those terms, free from their usual connotations. Wow, interesting: so, like, the particular sound, musical ethos of jazz, is probably a good example of inspired human creativity in adverse circumstances?? Yep. It probably is. It would probably be a different sound, had it not been gestated in those conditions. Just as punk came from Thatcher’s Britain, so jazz came from a past racist era. In that respect, I’m less interested in the particular black concern than a more general consideration of what jazz signifies. Indeed, some people adopted quite a dodgy attitude in this area, involving condescension and a variant form of racism built on fundamentally flawed thinking. They thought
Primitivism was an escape from identity…not the exploration of personal and racial pride that it had been for black writers in the Harlem renaissance…The music emerged…as a passage way..into the exotic world of black culture (Ogren 1989: 151).
Like a sexual bit of rough, the story told by Jarvis Cocker in his song Common People, earlier jazz fans saw it as an exotic counterpoint to bourgeois boredom, but where the notion of primitivism is the pertinent point to highlight. As a further comparison it’s arguable who exploits whom in the moment DH Lawrence portrays in his infamous novel, Lady Chatterley or the object of her affection, but as a long term scenario it’s abundantly clear who has the power, the privilege, the material comfort, the life. Early jazz fans were similar cultural tourists. There’s no doubt, if we’re honest, there’s sometimes a primitive component to jazz, but not what they were thinking. Primitivism is part of all of us, in a universally shared Id, seen in rock music, adrenalin sports, fast cars, and other arenas where we experience something raw and visceral. Some jazz was and still is like that, but so are other kinds of experience and situations. Some jazz is refined, delicate, and elegant; it varies quite a lot.
I acknowledge, firstly the black community context of jazz, and secondly its underlying counterpoint ethos. But these are neither matters of race, nor revolution; both exist and operate within an overall context – a system – thus representing interesting potentials and ideas pertaining to the entire human condition, not a few specific circumstances. It’s obvious, as Ogren states “jazz…served a social and cultural purpose for the blacks (sic)” (164). In that respect, I acknowledge it as a remarkable political achievement because I’m sympathetic to its ‘attitude’. The black community should never have suffered as they did; the fact that they did, and produced this beautiful music within that context, is a noteworthy fact.
However, my interest is not cultural tourism or the attitude demonstrated, for example, in the Drexel character played by Gary Oldman in Tarantino’s masterpiece film True Romance – but rather, an appreciation and interest in what is common amongst us, which race isn’t. Ogren refers to this, though, again, in an unacceptable context:
Psychologists and sociologists documented a subculture of jazz performance that may have intensified the public’s perception of jazzmen as deviants. Psychoanalysts in the 1950s, to take just one example, declared that jazz produced by a primitive group in an area where a less repressive morality flourished and which was by its very nature associated with vital libidinal impusleses – sex, drink, sensual dancing – precisely the Id drives that the superego of the bourgeois culture sought to repress (164).
Indeed. Sounds fun.
And Ogren continues:
The rise of the jazz age did signal the demise…of the genteel cultural values typical of the late nineteenth century. Jazz sounded modern because its lively and improvisational characteristics clearly differed from older formal and sentimental music. Furthermore, listening and dancing to jazz also enabled many whites to break with a tradition of more restrictive public behaviour (164).
And finally, we reach the more sophisticated viewpoint which, while acknowledging the previous stuff I’ve referred to, regards it in more considered and encompassing terms:
Many musicians, artists and intellectual who wanted to understand jazz adopted relativist attitudes. Their numbers were not great and their understanding of one or the other culture was frequently limited, but their disdain for absolutes and appreciation of diversity set them apart from the genteel tradition with its commitment to moral absolutes…But as (Sidney) Bechet understood so well, improvisational music promises no sure passages; rather it captures the inevitability of mobility and change. The jazz controversy signified the attempts of Americans to analyse the difficult and contested routes they had followed in the past, and their willingness to chart a more flexible, modern future (165).
Bravo. But revolution? No, Ogren; that paragraph, which is the truly revolutionary part of this subject, is the last paragraph in your book and left unexpanded and undeveloped. You literally stop at that point in your exposition.
The only footnote I would add concerns the debateable area of ‘relativism’, when it is divorced from humanistic values. In 2007, post 9/11 and post 7/7, we are re-evaluating “multiculturalism” and what that means. It’s essentially built on relativism, which is fine in principle but not, as we see in blighted British society, fine in practice, when it creates cultural separation and apartheid communities. And that, to conclude, refers back to a previous point: what is common amongst us, rather than culturally or racially specific. I think there is too much emphasis on so called cultural identity, predicated as it is on difference and frequently implying, in practise, a sense of adversarial grievance. Like dialectical materialism, cultural identity politics is an over-simplification and reduction of something subtle and complex: society cannot fully be characterised in crude material terms, and identity cannot be confined to or circumscribed by cultural environments where their very relativity indicates why this is so: born here, you are X person; born there, you are Y person; born somewhere else, you are Z: and Z doesn’t like X, etc. So why attach so much value to it, when it’s pre-defined accidents of birth and thus superficial? None of this addresses what is common – what a human being is – i.e. the complex psychological mechanism where the complexity does not mean we are confined to it, that we can think outside the box and, indeed, the capacity to do is a sophisticated and necessary strategy in the troubled world in which we live. Jazz, for me, while not revolutionary, embodies and expresses in a small but interesting way this kind of creative possibility. While Adorno was partially correct – yes, the quality of improvisation is somewhat mythological – jazz does, nonetheless, express and embody this like no other form of music. Further, it’s been substantially (but not wholly) characterised by a playing against-the-beat mood that coincides with a counter-cultural attitude. Whether because of slavery, or 1960s rebellion, it ignores the convention of a regimented time pattern thereby creating a sense of laid-back cool. The principle is itself not specific to any cultural situation; although it’s clearly embodied and given a context in the black origins of jazz there is, for example, a lovely moment in Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow Up where the photographer shows the woman he’s seducing how to move, feel, and respond against the beat, rather than with it. A quintessential jazz moment.