On jazz

The Montreal Gazette published an opinion piece I wrote responding to an earlier piece about what is and is not jazz: "Don't Discount the Evolution of Jazz" (not my title though). Unfortunately, but hardly surprising, it's not exactly what I intended so here's the real thing.


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Jonathan Goldman’s recent Gazette opinion piece (“Montreal International Jazz Festival: This isn’t jazz”) reflects a common perspective among contemporary jazz musicians that some of what is now called jazz fails to meet various definitional criteria. Based on his “nearly 15 years…of instrumental practice, listening sessions and reading, plus two music degrees,” Goldman attempts to define jazz according to three requisite characteristics: the blues, swing rhythms and improvisation. “The fewer of these elements a musical style has, the more distantly related it is to jazz. Thus, R&B is closely related to jazz, in that it contains elements of blues and swing, though it lacks improvisation. Rock ’n’ roll is even farther from jazz, having in common only elements of the blues vocabulary.”

One must wonder how he can be unaware of the plethora of improvisation in R&B from Louis Jordan to Mary J. Blige and that of improvisation and swing in such rock groups as the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. However, on the basis of these qualities he then goes on to exclude the group She & Him from consideration as jazz claiming that the group’s inclusion as a headlining act at the Jazzfest “shows that, for all intents and purposes, jazz is dead.”

What is interesting about such jeremiads is how common they are in jazz’s history. In the 1930s, fans of the older Dixieland style lamented what they saw as the crass, watered-down commercialism of the-then popular Swing bands. In the late 1940s, the debate shifted to the innovations of Bebop with partisans of Swing attacking Bebop’s technical difficulty and resistance to audience dancing. Around 1960, Free Jazz’s abandonment of traditional chord-scale relations aroused no shortage of controversy with Down Beat magazine proclaiming Goldman’s very own hero John Coltrane as seemingly “bent on pursuing an anarchistic course…that can but be termed anti-jazz.” And in the 1970s-80s, Jazz Fusion divided musicians and critics with some seeing its incorporation of rock and funk elements as the wave of the future, while others, such as Wynton Marsalis, argued that such influences, together with its lack of swing, placed it outside the jazz tradition.

This short detour through jazz history shows that any presumption to defining a trans-historical essence of jazz is a fool’s errand. Jazz has been many different things to many different people. Guy Lombardo, for example, made far less use of the blues, swing and improvisation than many R&B and Rock groups have. But despite these limitations, his group was among the favorites of jazz legend Louis Armstrong. And though many bossa nova songs are now considered jazz standards (think “Girl from Ipanema”), they have even less of a connection to the blues and, furthermore, don’t use swing rhythms.

I would hardly qualify She & Him as strong representatives of jazz today although at least one of their songs, “Never Wanted Your Love, does use swing rhythms. But as my historical survey has shown, whatever the presence of Goldman’s three criteria might be, they are hardly sufficient for defining jazz given its variety over the last century. It is often forgotten that until the late 1940s, jazz was popular music—intended for the entertainment of listeners and dancers with little artistic pretention. Since this is clearly what She & Him intend as well one could reasonably argue, contra Goldman, that they are in fact more true to the original meaning of jazz than those he thinks properly define it today.

More valuable, however, is asking why debates about jazz have aroused such controversy. Balanced between the high art values of classical music and the explicit entertainment of pop, jazz musicians have desired both the artistic respectability of the former and the commercial success of the latter. But unwilling to choose they fight all the more to protect their proverbial turf from popular music interlopers.

As a sometime jazz musician myself, well aware of the difficulty in making a living as such, I don’t blame them for doing so. But instead of lamenting whom the Jazzfest books, musicians such as Goldman should use their supposedly superior skills to create better music with the same popular appeal as those ostensibly non-jazz groups they decry. If people like She & Him’s music then who are we as musicians to argue over labels? Perhaps we need to make a greater effort to play music that more people might enjoy so that we’ll be the ones performing at future Jazzfests.

For jazz will only die when musicians stop creating music that challenges and appeals to an ever-changing musical audience.