Still at home. Still lucky enough that COVID-19 hasn’t attacked anyone in my immediate circle, but the recent deaths of two heroes, John Conway and Lee Konitz, make the virus feel like the Grim Reaper. It’s not clear that those two giants were going to make career leaps had the virus not swept them away, so the loss is perhaps not as tragic as the untimely deaths of younger, undiscovered geniuses. The pandemic has compressed the continuous drip of death into a nasty spike, further cementing the fact that we are entering a new era. A big question is, “will Lee Konitz’ career die with Lee Konitz?” which is a way of asking what the future of live and recorded jazz will be once the short-term crisis is ameliorated. For ~70 years, despite many signs of progress, the world has been more stagnant than perhaps was expected. Computer technology is the outlier; if you took away all the screens, how would you know it wasn’t the 1970’s? Or, where are the revolutions in medicine, ecology, psychology, transportation, energy, etc. that should have accompanied the computer revolution? And, even if it is a bit sad to say, jazz has not really gotten better since the death of John Coltrane in 1967. Few titans remain from before then, and the “middle generation” that came of age afterwards has survived on 1) institutional backing and 2) the diminishing possibility of surviving as a gigging jazz musician. Will it really be possible for someone my age to forge a career as a jazz musician the way, say, Sonny Rollins or Dave Liebman did, playing club dates, touring, and/or teaching at jazz colleges? Record deals are ridiculously scarce and maybe not so helpful in the first place; for the time being, there are zero live gigs to be played, and even before COVID, the pickings were rather slim. MSM and Berklee only have so many job openings, and to be honest, I get the sense that jazz colleges aren’t fooling kids into paying exorbitant sums as they used to… probably for the best; the emphasis on college, especially for artists, will likely decline in the coming years.
So what are these brilliant young musicians supposed to do? Many are in debt without skills that pay the bills during a pandemic. I would like to hope that people who are stuck at home are picking up new instruments and that my friends can teach them, but that seems unlikely to be a robust survival plan. Live-streamed concerts fail to capture some essential Dionysian magic, for jazz especially. Home recording is an option for some but certainly not all, and even so, then what? Bandcamp/SoundCloud release to a few dozen people? I am asking all these questions without having answers. I have predicted to friends that the next frontier in creative (American) music will be computational, at the intersection of videogames and music as we know it now. Just as American jazz picked up the torch of enjoyable yet creative/progressive tonal music from European Romanticism in the early 20th century, composers, programmers, and designers will probably take the torch from jazz as we go deeper into the 21st. Common practice European classical music became institutional museum music; it only survives as such, and its direct descendants in the classical academic world are thriving in certain sense, but at the expense of scale and accessibility. It is not hard to find the corresponding story for jazz. The “deal with the devil” that jazz made with educational institutions safeguarded it from totally languishing into obscurity, but probably also sealed its fate as eventual museum music from the 20th century. Wynton Marsalis leads this project, and though many of my peers disapprove of his work, I actually think it’s for the best, and probably necessary for the survival of jazz. My approval of this project is partly rooted in my prediction that the up-and-coming punk geniuses of music will gravitate towards aforementioned computational formats the same way that those kinds of kids gravitated towards jazz improvisation in the last handful of decades. Wynton pushes to exalt jazz because as a historical phenomenon, it has yet to fully enjoy the respect it deserves. Part of his claim is that the major arc of jazz is complete; the Bach-Mozart-Beethoven-Wagner legacy may have its jazz answer in Armstrong-Parker-Coltrane-Marsalis. Indeed, there exist significant musicians in their respective styles after both of those arcs, but the trajectories are inward rather than outward. One can argue that Wagner set in motion the impending doom of tonality and enabled the impulses towards abstraction, esotericism, and ultra-specialization, Babbitt being the ultimate flowering of that impulse. The story in jazz is of course different but comparable. The early progressive albums of Marsalis, like Black Codes, feel like mature saturations of the ideas of the mid 1960’s, suggesting that other jazz artists should find other paths, outside that dominant central culture. Herbie and Wayne had done a good job of changing with the times while others basically kept to their old scripts and rode the waves of their earlier careers. (Joe Henderson showed some reflections of the 1970s, for example, but really he was playing 60’s jazz until he died. Keith Jarrett and Paul Bley survived by putting piano improvisational genius on display without deviating too far from standard practice; Barry Harris, Kenny Barron, and others were even more conservative but the same idea applies.) Despite the successful ventures of The Bad Plus, Eric Lewis, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Logan Richardson, and other jazz artists who drew on rock and popular music from after the 1950s, it may (unfortunately, to some) be the case that jazz improvisation, at least the theoretical descendant of bebop, is best suited to the song structures of the era it came from. In other words, the arc of post-bebop is finite, and was doomed to wither in the 1970’s and beyond, not to be resuscitated by rock, hip hop, or whatever. Cuban and Brazilian musics were, then, lucky pairings. But that is not to say jazz improvisation is done forever — one can still play in the old styles, and who knows? perhaps Middle Eastern music or some other musical culture will provide new soil for jazz to till. The point is that it’s likely time for jazz to crystallize its history and start transitioning away from a punk artform toward an exalted, institutionally supported one.
I think you get the picture if you know a little classical music history and a little jazz history. Getting back to the social/economic point, I wonder if there will be a “fork” among my friends and peers: will some stick to traditions, cling to jazz and hopefully survive off of gigs and maybe some institutional backing down the road, while others move towards other formats of musicmaking that are less traditional but more cutting-edge or at least more connected to modern technology? If this split happens, both positions will be tough. The competition for traditional jazz gigs, tours, and teaching positions will surely be fierce and defeating. On the other hand, if progressive music moves towards computation, games, VR, or whatever, those of us who spent years on instrumental technique and historical listening may feel that our skills are not relevant enough, that we “missed the boat.” There will be successes and failures on both sides. We can only hope that the peaks are very high and that the valleys are not too low.