last changed on 21 May 01 by
There's still time to destroy plenty of cliches, including ones about what kind of jazz comes out of New Orleans. The modern happened here, but not like r & b did. A lot of musicians who were playing modern jazz made better money & a notch in history by creating the New Orleans rhythm & blues sound, something distinguished by the five-beat clave-inspired syncopated line: the legacy of Congo Square and the Caribbean. AFO, All For One, represented the American Jazz Quintet: Alvin Batiste, Harold Battiste, Ed Blackwell, the elder Marsalis, Richard Payne & William Swanson. They made the music Kalamu ya Salaam called the "birth cry" of modern New Orleans jazz. These guys also played the music your big sister learned to dance to.
Free jazz, or "creative music," however, is something else. You could imagine a New Orleans sound stripped down, with an instrument playing alone what might have been played by an ensemble, a sound isolated. silenced instruments around it. Or a battery of horns pushing the sound in different directions, or conversing, one on one, with the sum total being the buzz and frenetic energy of a wild party. (Ornette Coleman, on this 1961 recording I'm listening to, sounds to me like he's picking up in mid-bar some places, like he's playing what he could have played around a featured instrument, colorations? Remember this is a non-musician talking, I'm just trying to get answers.) All for one: one for all/free, for all. Funny how "free for all" has come into our language to signify a fight. The keynote term is "collective improvisation:" this is what floated New Orleans jazz at its beginning, and it is the operative mode in the new music.
The Rob Wagner Trio and Naked Orchestra cds have been spinning back to back in my disk player so much recently that I've been thinking of them almost as a single experience. I've also been trying to make sense of the flood of music I heard at the Zeitgeist Creative Music Festival, with improvisation or creative music making the strongest impression. Though these recordings are not "free jazz," they push the limits of what has come to be associated with New Orleans, independently of the traditional jazz, contemporary brass band, or conservatory jazz sounds.
The confusion gets worse.
Rob Wagner came to New Orleans from Chicago where he was a member of the original Gilgamesh Mythophonic Orchestra. A number of the players in Jonathan Freilich's Naked Orchestra played in the New Orleans version of this band. Saxophonist & poet Harry Lenz re-formed Gilgamesh in New Orleans and soon it was at home in both the poetry and music communities. Using written instructions to cue the musicians, Lenz (also known as Richard Theodore) created a wealth of amazing music. But in the big picture, free form jazz groups in New Orleans in the 90s never had a chance. Before Gilgamesh (in my memory,) Kidd Jordan & Al Fielder in the Improvisational Art Ensemble, Kidd's no-compromise band, drove people, literally drove them out of the tent at the Jazz Festival a few years ago. Me, I just sat there & held my ground, gripping my chair in my hands, because I'd be damned if I would hear any live jazz that was going to intimidate me. A couple of times I felt that seat try to throw me & run out itself. But anything that's a challenge to the aural receptors has got to get a second date. The New Orleans emphasis on passing a good time doomed this music to obscurity, not out of lack of interest in it, but only because the jazz musicians could get paid to play r & b, rock, and mainstream jazz!
With the last years of the millenium passing like a broken record in this city-owing to economic realities as much as artistic license-you can play anything you want in your garage, as long as your neighbors can stand to listen. And after 40 years of development, you have a lot to choose from on the internet or in your headphones.
The music is making headway. Playing this music in clubs is another deal, but it probably won't take any time at all for its listeners to find it even where it never seemed to have appeared before. In the age of the cowboy capitalist, there are more musicians ready to take a chance too, but in another direction, away from the money. After the recklessness of punk-there has got to be recklessness in jazz, & ironically so, because the punk godfathers, the MC-5, who took shape under the influence of Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and Pharoah Sanders, played what they called "avant-rock." This music is avant-jazz.
-- Dennis Formento
Dennis Formento is a poet and edits Mesechabe: the Journal of Surregionalism. He performs his poetry with the Frank Zappatistas, a cadre of creative musicians.
For other surregional experiences, see resodance.com/mesechabe
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last changed on 21 May 01 by