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Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition And Innovation

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DaCapo does it again, bringing back into print the best jazz criticism. I read this collection of Giddins' Village Voice essays a couple of years after it was first published by Oxford in 1985. The picture of jazz it captures from the early '80s is, for better or worse, not so different from the picture today. No revolutions, just an ongoing period of recombinations and the uneasy coexistence of various styles.

Giddins is catholic in his enthusiasms, but I was and continue to be more interested in the avant-garde. In addition to swing and bop players (including Monk, from whom he took his title), here are some of the players he writes about, mainly their recordings, but also some concerts -- Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Ronald Shannon Jackson, James Blood Ulmer, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams, James DeJohnette, Andrew Cyrille, James Newton, Anthony Davis, Arthur Blythe, David Murray, Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd, the William Breuker Kollektief, and Alexander von Schlippenbach's Global Unity Orchestra.

He concludes a review of the "Young Lions" performance, including the 21-year-old Wynton Marsalis, at the 1982 Kool Jazz Festival in NYC with these prophetic lines: "My intuition tells me that innovation isn't this generation's fate...the neoclassicists have a task no less valuable than innovation: sustenance. [M]usicians such as Marsalis are needed to restore order, replenish melody, revitalize the beat, loot the tradition for whatever works, and expand the audience. That way we'll be all the hungrier for the next incursion of genuine avant-gardists..." (161) Of course "this generation" cannot be reduced to the neoclassical revivalists, but to the extent that they have dominated the jazz world since the mid-'80s, Giddins had it right "on the money," in every sense of the word.

That tendency has now persisted long past the time it was (arguably) making a needed contribution. Contrary to Marsalis, the living soul of jazz is creative improvisation, not ossified composition! As of 2005, jazz is still in need of rejuvenation. Having a jazz museum at the Lincoln Center is fine, but jazz can only be kept alive outside of museums through constant innovation.