Customer Reviews

Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz

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If I was Mike Heffley's editor, or sat on his Ph.D. committee, I would treat this as a rough draft and call for severe reconstruction, eliminating whole sections and calling for more research to fill in missing parts. Alas, I am only a reader, left to plow through a sporadically fascinating but persistently annoying book on a great subject, the European free jazz movement(s) that began in the 1960s. Though a few years younger, I share Heffley's worldview -- progressive, keeping alive the liberatory impulse of the '60s, for peace and justice -- and I truly hoped that this would be a great book on some of my favorite musicians, including Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker, Alex von Schlippenbach, and Barry Guy.

This book began as Heffley's Ph.D dissertation in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, where he worked as Anthony Braxton's graduate assistant. (Heffley was a jazz trombonist before going into academia, and has recorded on Braxton sessions.) There are two levels on which a reader might have problems with this book. First, it is an academic work, dense with citations and abstractions, and that alone is going to weed out some readers. NS,SM is not light reading, it is not a work of journalism. I am an academic myself (a sociologist), and not intimidated by abstraction, so that's fine with me. But second, Heffley utilizes a series of what I consider to be quite dubious abstractions in order to analyze the music, causing me to shake my head in exasperation. Most of these he takes from the literature, so he can't be blamed for inventing them, only for citing them as useful ideas and using them as his organizing framework. Apparently his committee was duly impressed. But this causes two problems, because in addition to lengthy sections that I did not find convincing, it crowds out what should have been much more data, more detail, more rich description of the musicians, their concerts, their recordings, their social context, the business side, their factions and disputes, and so on. He conducted about 25 interviews during research in 1997.

Heffley explicitly focuses on Germany. He covers Italy, Scandinavia, England, Holland and France in one chapter and so his coverage is slight. Evan Parker, Barry Guy, Derek Bailey, John Stevens, AMM -- only mentioned in passing. And he includes a short chapter on world music links from European free jazz. It is interesting that the rise of free jazz in Germany is known as the Emanzipation, signifying both emancipation from the rules governing "old" jazz as well as emancipation from American and specifically African-American jazz, both old and new.

The best section of the book is Heffley's chapter on the East German free jazz musicians, focusing on the members of the leading Zentral Quartett (originally Synopsis): Gunter Sommer (drums), Ulrich Gumpert (piano), Ernst-Ludwig Petrovsky (reeds) and Conrad Bauer (trombone). It is a model for what the rest of the book could have been, masterfully combining musical and social analysis. The reader gets a good feel for life in the DDR (or GDR), how the musicians interacted with their West German counterparts, the role of the government and the grassroots, and the strong influence of German folk music in the new jazz. I learned little that I didn't already know about the West German musicians. Heffley's treatment was quite disappointing, especially since he speaks and reads German and has access to German writings I have to rely on him to share. The one really interesting detail is that pianist Schlippenbach improvises in the 12-tone system pioneered by Schoenberg!

But let me share several of the conceptual schemes Heffley uses, because that is what the book is about as much as the actual musicians and their music. One, taken from Richard Leppert, is a symbolic set of binaries: Holy/Religion vs. Eros/War, with each subdivided internally. Heffley applies these categories throughout the book in ways that might or might not be compelling to you or me. French free jazz is more erotic, German free jazz is more warlike. Stereotype or insight? From Jacques Chailly comes a theory of Western harmonic development, which Heffley uses to categorize Southern and Northern music (hence the book's title). Ancient Greece and Rome were supposedly more patriarchal, while the Northern barbarians were more gender equal, and this corresponds to more complex and nuanced harmonies. There may be something to this correspondence theory of music, music corresponding to social relations, but I was not persuaded by Heffley. Within this conceptual framework, Heffley tries to draw a parallel between J.S. Bach and Ornette Coleman. You may find this more compelling than I do, see for yourself. Using a typology of improvising styles from Ekkehard Jost (author of the seminal FREE JAZZ), combined with the Leppert scheme, Heffley asserts that France is in the Coleman/Coltrane/Ra camp -- "erotically syncretic, integrationist" (115), while Germany is in the more militant, warlike Ayler/Taylor camp. Again, there may be something to this, but it strikes me as dubious and an unnecessary conceptual construction.

In short, I find Heffley's postmodern and musicological theoretical scaffolding to be largely preposterous. He is on much more solid ground when he descends to the level of social history, talking about class and race and economics, and paying attention to the details of the musicians and their music instead of constructing conceptual schemes. If only he could have written a book along the lines of Scott DeVeaux's THE BIRTH OF BEBOP, or George E. Lewis's A POWER STRONGER THAN ITSELF (see my review), a history of the AACM. I wish that two of Heffley's key sources, books by Joachim Ernst Berendt (Ein Fenster aus Jazz, 1986) and Ekkehard Jost (Europas Jazz 1960-1980, 1987), were translated into English. I think they would both be more informative than NS,SM.

Once again, I share Heffley's vision of an egalitarian, peaceful world, and I share his enthusiasm for free jazz, which has freedom in its name. By all means listen to Brotz and Evan Parker, to Ornette and Cecil! For a great compilation of German jazz, West and East, including its intersection with Neue Musik, check out the Jazz Box in the Musik in Deutschland 1950-2000 series.

For the liberation of all sentient beings.