Over the past week — even as I obsess over the looming fate of abortion rights, the latest COVID case explosion, and the ongoing horror in Ukraine — I’ve found the time to think about “jazz.”
Maybe that sounds like par for the course here, in any given week. Fair point. But I’m referring as much to the scare quotes as to the word they’re scaffolding — so, the genre and its trappings. I’m talking about Jazz, the musical language and tradition also identified by some of its leading practitioners as “Black American Music” or “improvised music” or a more proprietary label, like Donald Harrison Jr.’s “Nouveau Swing.” I’m referring to the music’s metanarrative, in aesthetic and functional terms. This is a contested space. This is a Rorschach splotch.
One reason for my line of thinking is probably a mild hangover from Jazz Appreciation Month. Another is more circumstantial: last week, as part of a public radio music industry summit called the NON-COMMvention, I caught a keynote interview with Kelefa Sanneh, author of Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. The book was published on Penguin Press last fall, and I didn’t pore over it so much as plow through it, in a contented blur. This has a lot to do with the familiar pleasure of Sanneh’s voice on the page, and how he deftly folds touches of memoir into a purposefully non-exhaustive account of those seven genres: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop. Then there’s the amiable contrarianism of his bullish take on genre at this point in our postmillennial timeline — an era when, per the prevailing discourse, genre is something best transcended, blended, or defied (or defiled).
“A story about musical genres is necessarily a story about conflict,” Sanneh writes in his introduction, “as anyone who has watched the animated film Trolls World Tour can attest.” As someone who paid real money to watch said film in lockdown, I can in fact attest, under duress. Anyway, he goes on: “Performers and listeners alike figure out how and when to police the borders of their communities and argue about the status of those who find ways to ‘cross over.’”
Sanneh is a staff writer for the New Yorker, where he’s written with flair about everything from prizefighting to politics. Before that, he spent six years as a pop music critic for the New York Times. I was also a Times critic for the second half of his tenure, so I got to know K as a colleague — an insatiably curious critic who could find something fascinating in almost any genre, and find a way to fascinate his reader. That’s the core assignment for a Times critic, perfectly modeled in our era by Jon Pareles and Ben Ratliff, and now carried forward by Pareles, Jon Caramanica and outside aces like Lindsay Zoladz, Giovanni Russonello and Marcus J. Moore.
The NON-COMMvention is hosted by WXPN, and held at World Café Live in Philadelphia, where I caught up with K before his interview. (He had a question for me: was I also impressed by Derrick Hodge’s Color of Noize? Did I agree that it was a little slept-on? Yes and yes. As a matter of fact, I’d just seen Hodge perform that material at the NON-COMMvention, in a showcase presented and captured by WRTI.) Onstage, Sanneh bantered with veteran radio jock Dan Reed, from WXPN. They talked about K’s punk-scene origins — a highlight of Major Labels, for me — and the wane of scabrous music criticism à la Lester Bangs. In a quippy, discursive whorl, K described the excitement he feels when he parachutes into an alien subculture, even one as seemingly inhospitable as the crowd at a Morgan Wallen concert in Madison Square Garden. And when Reed asked him about the ambitious premise of the book, Sanneh conjured a vivid scene: staring at a blank Google doc with the header “Rock,” and wondering what he’d gotten himself into.
He's sketched out a version of this waking anxiety dream before, and it prompted me to ask the first question from the audience. I began by saying truthfully that I loved reading Major Labels, and don’t think it’s missing anything. (It wasn’t on my mind at the time, but I’ve since revisited Robert Christgau’s review, which K mentioned in the talk, and which specifically calls him out for glossing over Mount Rushmore figures like Louis Armstrong. This really isn’t an issue for me with Major Labels, because of the clear personal parameters that shape its purview. Pops has other champions.)
Back to my question. I noted that the span of time covered by the book — basically, from 1970 onward — happens to coincide with a whole lot of handwringing around jazz as a genre. So I invited K to participate in a little thought experiment: let’s say your blank Google doc bears the header “Jazz.” Where do you go?
He took a breath, and exhaled. Then he restated his brief with Major Labels, which is explicitly all about popular music, and the ways in which artists in those genres went about pursuing commercial interests. “To do that about jazz — first of all, I wouldn’t necessarily be the person to do it,” he said. He went on:
But sometimes I wonder whether the role that jazz has is a role that maybe we’re going to start to see some of the genres in the book have. Where they are supported by some other institutions, some non-market institutions — whether those be conservatories, whether those be other academies in higher education, whether those be institutions like Jazz at Lincoln Center. And that’s something I always think about in terms of hip-hop. For decades, I’ve been kind of wondering: is this process happening in hip-hop, where it becomes maybe more respectable, maybe less popular, maybe more supported? And as someone who obsesses over hip-hop in a way I don’t obsess over jazz, that process scares me a little. When I see, like, Hamilton, and I see Common at The White House, and I see Kendrick [Lamar] getting a Pulitzer Prize, there’s some part of me that’s like: Uh-oh. Is this it? Is this the moment when hip-hop stops being popular music in that sense — in the sense that it’s defined by people trying to make hits — and now it becomes kind of like “respectable” music?
Again with the scare quotes, which K didn’t state but heavily implied. “The question of how much respect people want from their genres, I think, is complicated,” he added. “Because often in America, when popular music gets respect, often that means it has ceased to be quite as popular as it used to be.”
Sanneh touches on a similar point when he writes in the R&B chapter about jazz’s disconnect from pop culture and pop radio in the 1980s: “(The exception was smooth jazz, which was, for a time, a modestly popular radio format — and which was also, tellingly, the one form of jazz that did not tend to command respect.)” Here, by the way, is a clip from Trolls World Tour — I watched it, K watched it, now you’re obligated — introducing the character known as Chaz, of the Smooth Jazz tribe. This is real.
You’re reading my newsletter, so I’ll pause here to say that the rise of jazz conservationism — as a reactionary response to market conditions, and the byproduct of a long, grasping fight for respect — comes up in the first chapter of Playing Changes. The chapter, which is titled “Change of the Guard” but could just as easily have been titled “Saving Jazz,” lays groundwork for the rise of institutions like Jazz at Lincoln Center. One of its main characters is Wynton Marsalis, who made it his business to firmly inscribe and police the borders of “jazz” as an art form. (His 1988 Times op-ed “What Jazz Is — and Isn’t” will forever be germane to this discussion.)
Another central figure in “Change of the Guard” is Kamasi Washington, whose hard-charging tune by that name is a standout moment on his 2015 triple album The Epic. I don’t think it gets said often enough, but at some point Washington made a conscious decision to proudly stake his claim as a jazz musician — rather than attempting to reposition himself beyond the scope of the genre, or issuing some kind of defensive disclaimer. We’ve seen more and more of this lately, from ascendent jazz hybridists like Jon Batiste and esperanza spalding, and the ever-expanding International Anthem universe, and the likes of Shabaka Hutchings and Nubya Garcia. I think it’s an indisputably good thing, because the music needs to keep finding traction at street level. And as for any concerns about the incorruptibility of the genre — I think we’ll be OK. Some of that is because Wynton and others never stopped holding the line.
“What is jazz?” is among my least favorite questions, but I’ve come to understand that it’s a useful one, and maybe necessary. As Sanneh persuasively argues, there can be something generative and affirming about musical tribalism. And conflict, at least within a genre discourse, is one sign of vitality. “Jazz” lives. Call it what you want.
Tangents:
- Sanneh mentioned Kendrick and the Pulitzers. And what are the odds, but within the last 36 hours, we’ve had news from both camps. After I watched the Pulitzer Prize announcement yesterday afternoon, I cued up Kendrick’s “The Heart Part 5,” which had dropped the day before. That was my second viewing, and I’m sure I’ll rack up double digits soon. Suffice it to say that the man deserved his honor, and it hasn’t knocked him off course yet.
- Over the weekend, I finally saw Pepperland, the Mark Morris Dance Group’s tribute to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, at Penn Live Arts. It was fabulous — and central to its success was the score by Ethan Iverson, which tossed The Beatles and Bach and The Bad Plus into a bag with many other rattling parts. In his writing and pedagogy, Iverson has done valuable work as a jazz traditionalist, but he knows better than most that we can have it both ways. (Big ups to Sam Newsome for the perfectly bleary soprano sax, and Ryan Keberle for some excellent tailgate trombone.)
