By Peter Aspden
Off to the House of Commons, no less, a place where one is
advised to steer clear of any mention of culture. Politics today, more than
ever, is anti-cultural: shrill, superficial, laughably confrontational; an
arena in which blandness and facility with Play School language are the keys to
a thriving career, and intellectual complexity is regarded as an unfortunate
handicap. On the rare occasion that a Member of Parliament reveals some kind of
cultural hinterland, he or she is lauded as some kind of playful maverick
fatally afflicted with a weirdness that will ultimately prove the obstacle to
them reaching the highest office. Kenneth Clarke? Excellent man,
would have made a great leader. But those suede shoes; and doesn’t he love
jazz?
He does indeed. But so do a number of Right Honourable groovers. My drink at
the House last month was provided under the auspices of the All-Party Jazz
Appreciation Society. You can always tell when an art form is in crisis: a
telling staging post is the formation of an appreciation society. Its members
know that the art form in question can no longer reliably be expected to
produce sufficient spontaneous energy to keep it fresh and relevant, so they
dutifully roll out the membership application forms, and hold meetings in unlikely
settings to impress upon onlookers their cultural virility.
Then there are the speeches. I have never come across any
jazz occasion that does not feature someone earnestly exhorting that jazz is
not dead, nor does it even smell funny. This desperation to establish jazz’s
vitality (there is always a dull mention of “young people”) is a giveaway. The
bunker mentality is palpable.
We hear all kinds of arguments: look at the recent successes
of Jamie Cullum (a charming and talented young man,
but merely a throwback to the age of intelligent crooning); count the number of
live gigs (featuring bands playing mostly 50-year-old material); revel in the
success of the current British jazz boom (yes, there are some lively bands
around, but they have singularly failed to capture the popular imagination -
how many have you heard of?).
I partly blame the performers themselves, who (with the honourable exception of Cullum)
give pitifully little thought to presentation or stagecraft, preferring to
noodle introspectively in a quiet corner with a taciturn intensity (let’s call
it Boys in Their Bedrooms syndrome) that does nothing to make their music
accessible. The opening concert of this year’s London Jazz Festival featured
the highly rated Tord Gustavsen
trio, a group that played with such pretentious quietude, all melancholy
ripples and tinkles, that the only thing missing was a complementary
aromatherapy massage. Jazz is out there, its adherents keep telling us; but it
is deep, deep in here, say too many of its practitioners, curled semi-autistically over their pianos and saxophones.
To be fair, that has always been a tension inherent in even
the best jazz music. It is an art form that is full of contradictions: in its
smooth, highly polished mode, it is the ultimate background music: inoffensive,
mellifluous, cool. But in the hands of some of its tortured protagonists, there
is no sound more pregnant with emotional upheaval. There is Ella and there is
Bird: both intensely musical, but coming from opposite parts of the human soul,
the languid and the lacerated.
There is one indicator that jazz is currently as relevant
and popular as ever. I went to buy a new CD release some weeks ago, but
couldn’t find it at any of my favourite discount
shops in Soho, which had sold
out. Over to a major chain store, and the CD, available at full price, proudly
topped the album charts. Which would have been nothing to
remark upon, if it hadn’t been recorded a thumping 48 years ago. The CD
features two of the jazz greats, Thelonious Monk and
John Coltrane, performing live together At Carnegie Hall, as the title states.
Not the least interesting thing about Blue Note’s release is the discovery of
the original tape, which was made earlier this year by a jazz specialist at the
US Library of Congress. Here was an authentic masterpiece, gathering dust in a
vault somewhere for nearly half a century: popular-culture archaeology - no,
not an oxymoron - of the most romantic kind.
The performance is a highly charged document of two virtuoso
performers at the peak of their game. Coltrane, who had been fired by Miles
Davis earlier in 1957 for his drug-addled unreliability, had just kicked heroin
cold turkey. He returned to New York
full of hope and energy, and got together with Monk, who was on the cusp of
achieving mainstream success. Their five-month engagement at the Five Spot was
a spectacular success, and led to their benefit gig at Carnegie Hall for the Morningside
Community Center in Harlem.
The evening was a triumph, and is presented here in all its promise of greater
things to come: round the corner were Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme, Monk gracing the cover of Time magazine.
It was jazz’s golden age. We put the CD at the top of the
charts in acknowledgement of that. Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that
jazz is in crisis. It tootles along perfectly respectably, but inevitably lacks
the resonance of its pioneering days. The same thing has been happening, for a
couple of decades, to pop music too. The early 21st century has other wonders,
so we should not worry unduly. An appreciation society is as good a way of
saying it as any: this music is a magnificent part of our cultural history. Let
us not be ashamed of looking back, and revelling in
it.
12/3/05
Source: peter.aspden@ft.com
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