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Cold Fusion Reaction
by Arthur Durkee (1992)
Start out with the blues, since everything does: “Whenever jazz
musicians do the blues, it’s a jazz blues. We as jazz musicians
get on our high horse, we wear the suits and we elocute, and we
claim that our music is superior to the blues. Not true.” –Branford
Marsalis, in an interview in Musician magazine (October 1992).
Now substitute for “blues” either of two words that often seem
to be uttered by jazz musicians with a sneer or an apology: “rock”
and/or “fusion.”
As the jazz scene stands today, “fusion” is out, while be-bop
is in. “Electric jazz” is tolerated, but it’s not as hip as copping
Charlie Parker’s licks. Even the word “fusion” is suspicious,
with the new term I’ve seen in the jazz press being “rock-influenced
jazz.”
When did “fusion” become a bad word? Sure, jazz/rock fusion lead
to some self-indulgent excesses in the 1970s, i.e. those long
pointless ego-pumping solos. But there was also great music made
by the likes of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Joe Farrell, and Jaco
Pastorius. In the hands of committed musicians, fusion could be
funky, musically satisfying, and good for your body.
So what’s going on? Lately, there has been a tendency to canonize
hard bop as the jazz “mainstream,” projecting an image of “straight-ahead”
jazz as limited to what was played in the 1940s and early 50s.
This trend has a spokesman and chief navigator in Wynton Marsalis,
who has more than once proclaimed that jazz is “black classical
music.” Wynton and his crew dress well, play music with technical
prowess, and generally take neo-conservative stances on musical
taste and repertoire. Most of these young neocons play with their
heads rather than from their hearts, in my opinion–they all play
really well, but they don’t engage my emotions as a listener.
(To be fair, there are some important exceptions to the neocon
trend among younger players, like Steve Coleman’s M-Base collective,
and Branford Marsalis’ eclectic bands.)
Why the neocon trend, then? Branford again, same interview: “Black
people in general run away from the blues. We’ve accepted the
Eurocentric value system. There’s an unbelievable level of shame
that’s attached to slavery, and the blues remind us of slavery....
So now you have black people listening to classical music to prove
they can be as white as white people are.” (Hear that, Wynton?)
It’s scary to contemplate, but the only black justice on the Supreme
Court right now is an extremely reactionary conservative whose
opinions share common ground with white supremacists.
This leads us to what most concerns me about the neocon trend
in jazz: like other parallel neocon trends nowadays, and reactionary
conservatism in general, it conceals a desire to arbitrate the
public taste. These are people who want to tell us what’s good,
and in some instances would like us to have exposure to only what
they tell us is good. The recent attacks on the NEA, and the election-year
attack on “Hollywood liberalism” are symptomatic of the broader
situation. (The evil part of this is the cynicism with which these
attacks are undertaken: the desire for power and control that
makes any tactic seem acceptable if the desired goals are achieved.)
What bothers me, then, is the growing conservatism of the jazz
“mainstream.” When did jazz become so conservative? When did it
lose the cutting-edge status that was part of the controversies
surrounding its earlier years? When did older styles of jazz become
reified and museumified by the purists? Why must this reverence
take place at the expense of neglecting the tremendous growth
years of the 1960s and early 70s? When did jazz come to spend
so much time looking backwards rather than forwards?
We need to bring fusion, or something like it, back into our
musical lives. We need that stimulus, the injection of energy
into our improvised music. I’m not advocating we abandon what
is good about jazz history. I am advocating we don’t spend our
lives there. More of us need to learn to play more styles.
How many of us, as jazz musicians, listen to music other than
what we regularly play? How many of us are willing to cleanse
our ears every so often with something we’ve never heard before?
Assuming we are, are we also willing to let what we listen to
influence what we play? I challenge you (as I challenge myself)
to seek out the musical genre(s) you most actively dislike and
listen with intention and interest–at the very least, to absorb
the possibilities of other ways of making music. There are a number
of musics I listen to regularly now that I used to hate–or be
afraid of. I love jazz, I bleed to get to great blues gigs–and
I love experimental, alternative, totally bizarre music just as
deeply. I like music that’s hard, fast, and loud. I also like
music that’s quiet, introspective, and beautiful. (Maybe it’s
time to fuse the ends of that continuum, as well.) I admire both
John Coltrane and John Cage, Charles Mingus and Shriekback.
Is there a future for fusion music? I am encouraged by the recent
punk/jazz crossovers I have heard, for example Naked City and
Primus. (I have a personal bias here, because my own music crosses
onto this turf.) Improvised music with the energy and outrage
of good alternative rock music. (I don’t mean “mainstream alternative”
rock, coming on the heels of the surprise success of Nirvana and
the Red Hot Chili Peppers–I mean the really dangerous stuff that
new “alternative” fans find threatening: Ministry, Skinny Puppy,
the Sex Pistols, Jello Biafra, and Controlled Bleeding.) Why is
truly alternative music so threatening? Because it threatens received
ideas of the status quo in artistically compelling ways.
How many kinds of “fusion” can their be? Lots! It doesn’t have
to be just jazz/rock. It can be jazz/folk, or jazz/folk/rock/classical,
improvisational punk, ethnic/jazz. I think of Bill Laswell’s projects
as both producer and bassist: his ideas about “improvisatory folk
music.” His albums are impossible to categorize, yet they all
contain a consistently high percentage of improvised forms.
So, we as jazz/other musicians must ask ourselves: Are we going
to let others dictate to us what is “good music,” and ultimately
what kind of music we choose to play? Are we, as musicians, going
to accept limits on what artistic expression we want to undertake?
Push the envelope, people. Take some risks. Crawl out on some
limbs. What have we got to lose but our prejudices?
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