By Mark Gauvreau Judge
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But then I suppose I’m not fit to judge. I came to jazz only about five years ago, just before the erstwhile swing boom. I liked some of the new swing music, which makes me a pariah in the eyes of “real” jazz fans, many of whom hated it the way punks hate the Backstreet Boys. Legendary pianist Oscar Peterson told Down Beat that he was “quite fed up with guys putting on porkpie hats, tilting their saxes like Lester [Young, the great Kansas City player], and calling it swing even though they still sounded like rock groups. Obviously, they haven’t done their homework and wouldn’t know Lester’s sound if it rolled over them in a steam roller.” Well, sure, most of the stuff was crap–most of anything is crap–but a few genuinely great songs were recorded: “Love” by the Camaros, “Pink Elephant” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, and just about everything on All Aboard! and Red Light! by San Francisco’s Indigo Swing. If nothing else, these served as a reminder that jazz was once the catchiest music in America. In listening to the massive Duke Ellington box set The Centennial Edition, I am struck by not only the instrumental virtuosity of Duke’s bands but also the sheer stickiness of the songs: “Sophisticated Lady,” “Day Dream,” “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” “Perdido,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “Cotton Tail”–the list could go on for pages. Before jazz became fat with government grants and cozy in its mutual admiration society with academic audiences, it required hits to survive, and hits require great hooks. Unless jazz musicians learn how to write tunes again, it’s doubtful that in another hundred years we’ll be celebrating anything except the bicentennial of Ellington’s birth.
For as much criticism as the swing revival suffered, the jazz mainstream isn’t coming up with anything more exciting. Self-appointed jazz ambassador Wynton Marsalis has released at least a dozen discs in the past year and a half, but I haven’t heard one of the songs on the radio. When confronted by Down Beat with the pathetic sales figures for jazz, Marsalis offered this: “Those numbers are just a way to demoralize musicians. Let’s look at all of what jazz has sold. Let’s tally up all the sales of all jazz records from the beginning of time–why then you’ll see some truly interesting numbers. Jazz today is like a big mountain that has a volcano with hot molten lava that’s getting ready to pour out.” This is ridiculous. What the numbers obviously mean is that the volcano is dormant.
Ellington, like Armstrong, wasn’t too wild about bebop or its offshoots, hard bop and free jazz. In his 1998 book of essays, Always in Pursuit, the unflinching critic Stanley Crouch tells a funny story about Ellington that sums up the problems jazz has had finding an audience since the bebop revolution: in the 60s, bassist Charles Mingus suggested to Ellington that they make an “avant-garde” record together, employing some of the chaotic elements then popular in the free-jazz movement. Ellington replied that he had no desire to take jazz that far back. Duke’s philosophy was based on the idea that “if it sounds good, it must be good,” and his music deserves every hosanna it received during his centennial last year. But the countless contemporary jazz musicians basking in his glow have yet to conjure even three minutes of magic on their own. As Duke might have said, until they do, their music won’t mean a thing.
