Chapter 19
Black Music: Everybody?s Still Doing It
?Trouble is, he can?t play
it straight.? So said Charles Mingus about Ornette Coleman. Mingus had
been regarded as avant-garde in his own time, and should have known
better. In fact, he later assessed the situation more carefully: ?I?m
not saying everybody?s going to have to play like Coleman. But they?re
going to have to stop playing like Bird.?
Half a century after the
advent of bop it is now revival music, and a lot youngsters are playing
it without the fire of the generation of the 1940s, so that some of
it sounds like wine-bar Muzak. In the 1940s bop was controversial; similarly,
thirty years after the advent of free jazz one could wonder what all
that fuss was about. Ornette Coleman?s earliest tracks are simply and
perfectly beautiful, especially to anyone who listens to contemporary
classical music, to say nothing of horror-film soundtracks, where Hollywood
hacks have used ?weird? sounds since the beginning of talkies.
I have defined popular
music as commercial music, but what we used to call jazz has effectively
become art music, confusing my definition. You will find records by
Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon and George Russell in the jazz section of
the record catalogue, but all three are academics, like most classical
composers. There is not much room for art in a music industry dominated
by greed, but it is no coincidence that as the mainstream music industry
has concentrated on making deals, music that can be described as contemporary
has had to find a specialist audience.
It may be argued that the
best music has often had a small audience. The court composers of the
Renaissance who developed the classical forms which later flourished
in Vienna were working for a musically educated aristocracy, which did
not admit riff-raff to its music rooms. San Marco in Venice, the church
for which Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, uncle and nephew, composed their
innovative music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, held 420
people comfortably, which was exactly the size of the Venetian government;
there is no evidence that anyone else ever heard it. Opera was originally
created for an audience that represented a small proportion of the total
population of Italy around 1600. And it is fair to point out that some
people want to leave the theatre whistling the tunes or, to put it another
way, Schoenberg never wrote a comic opera. (Actually, he did,
Von
Heute auf Morgen
in 1928, but to be honest, Schoenberg was not a
funny man. On the other hand, we will wait a long time for a laugh from
Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music makes money, but is derivative and
second-rate.)
Irving Berlin said that
popular music is popular because a lot of people like it. But Berlin
would not sanction much interpretation of his songs, and Jerome Kern?s
estate did not like Dizzy Gillespie?s first recordings with strings
(1946), which were not issued for many years (despite some extraordinary
trumpet playing), nor the Platters? version of ?Smoke Gets in Your Eyes?
(1958) until they realized how much money they would get from a number
one hit.
The anti-modernists among
us will turn Berlin around and say that some contemporary music is not
very popular because not many people like it, but that argument will
not wash with me. Grandma Clarke?s idea of culture was a cracked 12"
78 of Madame Schumann-Heink singing ?Stille Nacht?, but that did not
stop me from embarking on a lifelong voyage of discovery. We do not
know how popular Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell or Braxton
or the others might be, because we do not hear them on the radio, nor
can we buy their records in the shopping-mall record outlets. Listeners
who allow music to be pigeon-holed for them are effectively shutting
their ear-holes. As one critic put it,
?People say
that modern music was tried and found difficult. I think it was found
difficult and not tried.?
There are many instances
of the public?s adopting new music more enthusiastically than the critics.
ASCAP used to complain with regard to BMI that if you restrict the public?s
listening, the public will quite happily settle for whatever it gets.
This, of course, ignored the monopoly that ASCAP and Tin Pan Alley had
operated for many years, but the statement is true enough as far as
it goes. Anthony Braxton has made albums of standards and of Monk?s
tunes, but you will not find them in the shopping-mall racks any more
than you will find his spikier stuff. It is also fair to add that the
music of such avant-garde rock groups as Suicide, Rapeman and Pussy
Galore is not meant to be easy-listening music, and is also not heard
on the radio or in the malls. But their thrashing is the sound of desperation,
without any leavening of beauty. Most contemporary music still makes
its point using acoustic instruments, and the musicians still listen
to each other without the help of thousands of watts.
In any case, jazz has not
been allowed near the centre of the marketplace for decades. That is
partly why several of the best-known young (mostly white) saxophonists
of today, although they play the same instruments as Johnny Hodges,
Lester Young and Ben Webster played, all sound like they are playing
for television commercials. Their carefully neutral tone is like the
cooked milk you get for your tea or instant coffee in British restaurants,
and the shopping-mall chord changes of their jazz present a big problem.
It must be admitted that the modal method offers a cop-out opportunity,
like having to use only the white keys on the piano. What they call
?smooth jazz
?
nowadays
is wrapped in cellophane, like one of those big Easter baskets full
of cheap chocolate and fake grass.
In fact, the word ?jazz?
does not mean much any more, so the real stuff we now call improvised
music, and even that label is not good enough; some modern music is
entirely improvised, and some not very much at all. Jesse Stone told
Frank Driggs that he wrote out the solos for his Blues Serenaders on
?Starvation Blues? in 1927. And despite all the efforts to create a
third-stream music over the years, jazz and classical (contemporary)
music have been cuddling together over in the corner while nobody was
watching.
As we saw in an earlier
chapter, pianist and composer Lennie Tristano was a retiring sort, whose
teaching points were adventurous harmony and complex inner rhythms.
Among his pupils were saxophonists Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh and Ted Brown,
of whom Konitz is the best known. Having studied with Tristano, he was
one of the few alto saxophonists who was not overwhelmed by Charlie
Parker. Warne Marsh died in 1987, still in obscurity; he made twenty
or so albums, most of them on tiny labels.
All Music
(1977) is
probably one of the best: touring with Supersax, a band that played
transcriptions of Charlie Parker solos, he made an album in Chicago
because Chuck Nessa offered him the chance. His tone was unique, and
his approach to tonality and his slightly quirky time (a matter of personal
accents) made him a more interesting player than most, for those who
cared to listen. Ted Brown recorded with Marsh and British-born pianist
Ronnie Ball in the 1950s, but made only one album as a leader, in 1956,
and did not make another for 29 years. I found Brown?s trio set
Free
Spirit
(1987), his second album for the Dutch Criss Cross label,
not on the radio, not in the media, not in a record shop, but in a friend?s
basement. For me it was one of the discoveries of a decade: Jacques
Scholes on bass provides a strong walking beat from which the piano
and the saxophone can launch themselves; Hod O?Brien?s agreeable, swinging
piano would alone be worth the price of the album, and Brown?s tone
is the kind of sound your best friend would make if he or she could
play saxophone. The whole thing is so mellow and so beautiful that it
is astonishing to realize that Brown had not made any albums for three
decades.
These people play standards:
Free Spirit
includes ?Body and Soul?, ?Darn That Dream? and ?Lover
Come Back to Me?. They play jazz classics, like Lester Young?s ?Lester
Leaps In? and Charlie Parker?s ?Relaxin? at Camarillo?, and their own
tunes, such as Brown?s ?Smog Eyes? and Marsh?s sardonically titled ?Background
Music?, all of which are more or less based on the same chord structures
that were used by the composers of the standards. And where else is
there to go? If you want something a little more adventurous, there
is the bold humour and unique tone of Von Freeman, and the ?metallic
cocaine bebop? of Fred Anderson, both black Chicagoans, both available
(though you have to try hard to buy good records) and neither particularly
hard to take for tender ears. Or you can listen to somebody who has
taken a leap and invented his own music, as Louis Armstrong, Coleman
Hawkins, Lester Young and Charlie Parker did in the past.
Enter Ornette Coleman,
and free jazz. Alto saxophonist and composer Coleman played in a school
marching band with reedmen Prince Lasha and Dewey Redman, and drummer
(and trumpeter) Charles Moffett. At sixteen he changed from alto to
tenor for a while, inspired by local tenor saxophonist Red Connors.
He had never listened to R&B as a boy, but played in R&B bands
to make a living, sometimes getting fired because he was trying to find
his own way; he settled in Los Angeles, working in day jobs while studying
theory. He did not find sympathetic collaborators until he had been
playing for a decade. He worked with trumpeter Bobby Bradford, drummer
Ed Blackwell and pianist and composer Paul Bley in the mid-1950s, and
then he began intensive private sessions with trumpeter Don Cherry,
drummer Billy Higgins and bass player Charlie Haden, the group that
became the Ornette Coleman Quartet.
After being introduced
by bass player Red Mitchell to Lester Koenig, head of the Contemporary
label, Coleman made his first album in early 1955,
Something Else!!!
,
with a quintet that included Cherry and Higgins.
Tomorrow is the
Question!
in early 1959 included Cherry, Shelly Manne and Mitchell.
Mitchell then introduced Coleman to third-streamers John Lewis and Gunther
Schuller, who helped him get to a summer jazz school at Lenox, Massachusetts,
and a gig at the Five Spot in New York in November. He had signed with
Atlantic, and made seven albums? worth of tracks between May 1959 and
March 1961 (there was still unissued material, and a six-CD set of the
complete Atlantic recordings was released in 1994). He played at the
Newport and Monterey jazz festivals, and a recording of a Town Hall
concert in late 1962 was issued on ESP, but he did not record again
in the studio until mid-1965. He was composing and studying trumpet
and violin, but he was also disgusted that Dave Brubeck?s quartet could
get much more money: Coleman demanded similar fees, and did not get
any work. He was criticized for this, but he had a right to price his
own work, and one can he has been a good deal more influential than
Brubeck.
Coleman?s appearance in
New York was a great shock, much more sudden than bop had been. During
the acoustic era a tin-eared A&R man at Victor would not record
Bill Challis?s arrangements for Jean Goldkette, and did not like Bix
Beiderbecke?s ?wrong? notes; in the late 1940s the boppers ran into
the same problem, and in 1960 it was Coleman?s turn. For a while he
was famous, as fame in jazz goes, though controversy does not pay the
rent. He played a white plastic alto saxophone, because he liked the
sound of it, and Cherry played a pocket trumpet. The instruments looked
like toys, which gave the critics something else to complain about (but
perhaps led to the Coleman title ?Joy of a Toy?). Some people thought
Coleman was a charlatan, but Leonard Bernstein was a fan, while George
Russell, who had written a textbook on the use of modes, knew exactly
what was happening: ?Ornette seems to depend on the overall tonality
of the song as a point of departure for melody ... This approach liberates
the improvisor to play his own song, really, without having to meet
the deadline of any particular chord.? I do not know what Coleman?s
theory of ?harmelodics? means, but it doesn?t matter; to the ordinary
listener the music is aharmonic.
Writing about music is
not as secure as working in the car factory, and certainly does not
pay as well, but it has one big advantage. There was no music in the
car factory, whereas while writing this I am listening to
The Art
of Improvisation
, a 1970 compilation of unissued Coleman tracks
from a decade earlier. ?The Fifth of Beethoven?, for example, with Cherry,
Haden and Blackwell, is enormous fun; it is a bright, funny, uptempo
piece on which Coleman?s alto sound reminds me of Eric Dolphy (who also
came out of intensive private jams in Los Angeles). The influence of
Charlie Parker is there, and also of Thelonious Monk, in that Coleman
is first and last a composer whose time is unique - like Monk?s, a matter
of phrasing and accents. As I listen, I hear Blackwell?s tom-toms in
a duet with Coleman, and just as I am chuckling at that, I notice that
Haden?s driving bass on the other channel is doubling the alto?s phrases,
and while my attention is away, Blackwell is up to something else. The
music has the cry of the blues in it, and we are reminded once again
that the blues was never a dead end in the black community in the way
that rock has become a blind alley for the white. The best black music
always has the blues in it.
It was called free jazz,
and some people still call it that, but it is certainly hard to see
now why it was controversial, or why it has not made more money for
Coleman, especially since some of the shopping-mall Muzak players of
today are trying feebly to imitate it. It was, of course, not free at
all, not as free as those experimental tracks Tristano made in 1949,
with Marsh and Konitz. Coleman?s Atlantic album of late 1960,
Free
Jazz
, was played by a double quartet of Coleman, Cherry, Haden and
Blackwell, and Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Higgins and the brilliant
young bass player Scott La Faro (who was killed in a car crash). The
album is generally regarded as a noble failure, though Max Harrison,
in his brilliant collection
A Jazz Retrospect
(1976), describes
it as a perfectly coherent whole, its shape arising out of its language.
In any case, this was not completely free either.
There is completely free
music. The British guitarist Derek Bailey is an exponent of it and has
written a book about it. But music seems to need a leadership factor,
however much the leader may rely upon or allow a supporting cast to
do its own thing. This is not to denigrate Bailey or saxophonist Evan
Parker or any of the free players; many of them are loaded with talent.
They know that improvisation is of enormous importance to music, and
always has been; and improvisation is one of the things missing from
today?s rock and pop; the Grateful Dead improvised for 30 years and
had an enormous following for their live gigs. It is not the public
that is afraid of improvisation, but the record companies and the broadcasters.
Yet the freest experiments have the smallest audience of all, for the
same reasons that spaceships do not carry passengers: the air is too
thin and the risk too great.
Ornette Coleman?s many
projects have included the
Chappauqua Suite
(1965), written for
a quartet and a studio band, and
Skies of America
(1972), for
the quartet and the London Symphony Orchestra. Coleman?s work at the
rehearsals and recording sessions earned him a standing ovation from
the LSO, but the project must have been a commercial disaster.
Dancing
in Your Head
(1973) was for sextet, two guitars and musicians in
Joujouka, Morocco. In the late 1970s he formed Prime Time, whose electric
sound was influenced by rock. Critics seem to have been disappointed
with whatever he has done for many years; he has perhaps not been as
influential as he was in those first few years, but then we do not know
what he might have done had he been able to do whatever he liked. He
set us all on our ears with a new kind of fire and beauty three decades
ago, and Harrison believes that Coleman was the single most revolutionary
musician in the history of jazz: while Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker
accelerated development, Coleman opened doors.
Cecil Taylor, who has almost
become celebrated, is one of the best-known international performers
in this music, and has many recordings under his belt. He first recorded
in 1956, with Steve Lacy on soprano and Buell Neidlinger on bass (both
of whom were white and had started in dixieland) and Dennis Charles
on drums. From his playing of standards, it was already obvious that
Taylor was singing in his own language. A fascinating if unsuccessful
session for United Artists in 1959 included John Coltrane (and was later
marketed under his name); the trumpet player was Kenny Dorham, a fine
bop musician who was already aware of Taylor?s reputation and did not
like it. (Taylor had wanted Ted Curson for the date.) Taylor soon decided
to play only his own music, developing his unique keyboard sound into
a musical world of tough, dancing beauty.
He and Neidlinger led sessions
on Candid in 1960-61 which were not issued in full until a Mosaic box
in 1989. In the early 1960s he was involved in a jazz composers? collective
in New York that failed. His Blue Note recordings,
Unit Structures
and
Conquistador
(1966), were breakthroughs, his first commercial
recordings for five years.
Like all the best musicians,
Taylor understood and valued tradition without being bound to it and
without showing any self-conscious need to be avant-garde. He has been
described as using the piano as ?88 tuned drums?, yet again and again
his sidemen and collaborators, such as Neidlinger, who once shared a
flat with him and watched him practise, speak of the importance of singing
and dancing in Taylor?s music. We are reminded again of Dizzy Gillespie?s
complaining that he could dance to bop: why couldn?t others?
Whitney Balliett compared
Ornette Coleman with Cecil Taylor:
Taylor and Ornette Coleman are the
nominal heads of the jazz avant-garde, but they are very different.
Coleman refuses to record or play in public unless he is paid handsomely.
Taylor until recent years often played for pennies- when he was asked
to play at all. Coleman?s music is accessible, but he is loath to share
it; Taylor?s music is difficult, and he is delighted to share it ...
The American aesthetic landscape is littered with idiosyncratic marvels
- Walt Whitman, Charles Ives, D. W. Griffith, Duke Ellington, Jackson
Pollock - and Taylor belongs with them.
But so does Coleman. Balliet
warns us that Taylor?s music is difficult, but he was writing about
an audience that had just listened to Oscar Peterson, and walked out
in droves on Taylor. It is a weird concert or festival that plans juxtapositions
like that. Contemporary improvised music is sometimes loud; so are symphonies,
and, like the symphonies, improvised music does not need electronics.
It sometimes has everyone playing at once; so did New Orleans jazz.
It is often passionate, even angry, but it is equally often about tonal
beauty. The screaming avant-garde electric rock group seems to attack
its roots; contemporary improvised music celebrates them, but it is
tough music for people who know that music is important.
The young Miles Davis had
evolved an economic style that did not require him to compete in a front
line with the fiery likes of Charlie Parker; his limitations became
his starting point. There had always been some danger in bop of using
too many notes, which might get in the way of the rhythm; in earlier
styles of jazz each note was an essential part of the story, while in
bop the overall feeling of the solo and the ensemble made the individual
notes less important. Bop was bound to cool off, and Davis had always
been a lyricist. Over the years since 1960 the modal style of composition
has sometimes produced players who sound like they are taking it easy,
but Davis?s combination of soul, economy and lyricism and the weight
of each note made him a complete master of the style. His effect on
the free movement has probably been underrated. His development was
always in the direction of a stripped-down music without any unnecessary
adornments (showing the influence of Monk), so that he helped to create
the new freedom to use structure and harmony as tools in the musician?s
kit along with melody and rhythm.
By 1965 his quintet included
Wayne Shorter on tenor; Ron Carter?s acoustic bass and cello had been
influential on Prestige albums with Eric Dolphy and pianist-composer
Mal Waldron; pianist Herbie Hancock and drummer Tony Williams rounded
out one of the most important rhythm sections of the 1960s. They would
all go on to become inspirational leaders and producers in their turn.
Davis?s group still played standards on the bandstand, and was more
adventurous in the studio;
Live at the Plugged Nickel
was made
in the Chicago club in 1965, but not released in the USA until 1976:
Shorter in particular might have been even more influential at the time
if this set had been released earlier. Their studio album
Nefertiti
(1967) was the last album Davis made without electric instruments.
Davis?s music became more
controversial and left some jazz fans behind, but commercially he was
the most successful jazz musician since Brubeck. Every album he ever
made is still selling, and eight of them made
Billboard?s
list
of the top two hundred best-selling albums during the 1960s, four in
the top hundred. Yet throughout his career he battled to squeeze out
of record companies, booking agents and promoters the money to maintain
the lifestyle to which he felt he was entitled. Monk had lost his cabaret
card and was unable to work in jazz venues in New York; Mingus struggled
through the 1960s; it is clear that very few of the best American musicians
of the past thirty years have received sufficient support from the music
industry to be able to do whatever they may have liked to do, in terms
of writing, recording and touring with larger groups, for example. Mingus
especially saw himself as a composer, his work all of a piece, yet his
gigantic
Epitaph
was not put together and recorded by a 29-piece
group directed by Gunther Schuller until 1989, a decade after his death.
But he had written an appropriate chant for the black community, which
adds to the flavour of his
Cumbia and Jazz Fusion
(1977):
Who said mama?s little baby likes shortnin? bread?
Who said mama?s little baby likes shortnin?, shortnin? bread?
That?s some lie some
white
man upped an? said!
Mama?s little baby likes
truffles
!
Mama?s little baby likes
caviar
!
As drummer Dannie Richmond
joins in, the chant is ?Diamonds! Diamonds in the nose! Diamonds in
the toes! Diamonds all our mama?s little baby!? And ?Schools! So our
kids won?t be raised to act like no fools!? But America did not hear
the message during Mingus's lifetime.
Cannonball Adderley was
the only jazz musician to rival Davis as a commercial success, but he
died young. Without a doubt the single most immediately influential
jazz musician of the 1960s, spawning legions of imitators as Armstrong,
Hawkins, Young, Gillespie and Parker had done before him, was John Coltrane,
who sought overtly spiritual values through his music - indeed, sought
to go beyond music with his horn - and almost single-handedly made it
hip to buy jazz records in an era dominated by rock.
In 1950, playing alto in
Dizzy Gillespie?s big band, Coltrane had been introduced to Islam by
Yusef Lateef. He later studied the cabala and Sufism, the mystical branches
of Judaism and Islam respectively. Coltrane had discovered the soprano
saxophone in 1959; in 1960 he first played it on a one-off album for
Atlantic called
The Avant Garde
, for which he borrowed sidemen
from Coleman, and also first recorded Rodgers and Hammerstein?s ?My
Favorite Things? on Atlantic. His ballad ?Naima? was named after his
first wife, and remained one of his own favourite tunes. He had always
played long solos, as though unable to get it all in; the ballads and
modal tunes began to set a pattern of an almost hypnotic function of
musicmaking. Just before his death he was experimenting with the Varitone
electronic device, which would have allowed him to play a duet with
himself in octaves.
In 1961 he was the first
artist signed to the Impulse label, a new jazz division of ABC-Paramount.
Africa/Brass
, on which he was backed by a large ensemble (including
four French horns), offers hints of African rhythms and Indian ragas,
as well as ?Greensleeves?. It was produced by Creed Taylor, but Bob
Thiele then joined Impulse; Coltrane had found a label that helped make
him the highest-paid black jazzman after Davis, and a producer who would
let him record as much as he wanted.
His epochal quartet included
Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones, a furiously polyrhythmic powerhouse
of a drummer, and McCoy Tyner on piano, a still underrated player whose
function was often to pour oil on turbulent waters. Among the albums
in 1962 was
Ballads
. Coltrane?s essential modesty came to the
fore on the date for Duke Ellington and John Coltrane (on various tracks
of which Duke and Trane swap sidemen); he had to be assured that one
take was good enough. With all his passion and religious intensity,
Coltrane was also always a lyricist, and named Stan Getz as one of his
favourite saxophonists. In 1963 John Coltrane with Johnny Hartman featured
a Chicago vocalist with a deep, beautiful voice whose career needed
help at the time.
The quartet recorded
A
Love Supreme
in 1964, perhaps Coltrane?s most famous album and certainly
one of his most fully realized: he said that the four-part composition
came to him all at once. His albums sold twenty-five to fifty thousand
copies, which was very good for jazz, but
A Love Supreme
made
it to six figures. As Bob Thiele remarked, you did not hear Coltrane?s
music on the radio, but he discovered that college students and young
musicians were buying it.
Ascension
(June 1965) was more ambitious:
a single piece covers an entire album played by eleven instruments (including
five reeds: Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp on tenors, John
Tchicai and Marion Brown on altos). ?Vigil? and ?Welcome? were recorded
by the quartet the same day, and in October ?Kulu se Mama? completed
an album of that title, a strongly rhythmic African-influenced piece
for octet inspired by a poem by Juno Lewis. The five-part
Meditations
was recorded twice: once with the quartet in September 1965, and again
by a sextet a few weeks later, adding Sanders and drummer Rashied Ali.
Coltrane?s soprano was
compared to the sound of Indian and African oboe-like instruments (today
all his imitators play soprano, and they mostly all sound the same).
He closely questioned Ravi Shankar, the genius of the sitar, about Indian
music (and named one of his sons after him). He was inspired by his
friend the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, whose albums had been
released on Columbia, but they never recorded together. He took to using
two basses, because the sound reminded him of African water drums. He
always valued Elvin Jones (despite Jones?s volatile personality and
voracious appetites) for his polyrhythmic abilities, but even Jones
was not enough; Jones left after Coltrane began using two drummers.
Tyner had already left, both because he wanted to pursue his own musical
ideas and because Coltrane had added his second wife, Alice, on piano.
(After his death she released Coltrane recordings with herself dubbed
on harp, which was widely regarded as a questionable move.)
Coltrane was never afraid
to use a certain coarseness of tone, or a squeak or an overblown note,
yet none of it was ever gratuitous. The hypnotic qualities in some of
his music worked perfectly, rather than sounding like hippie repetition
celebrating the stoned state, of which there was plenty in that decade.
Coltrane?s music, sometimes incorporating chanting, and often atonal
passages next to tonal ones, was a broad church. Artie Shaw was an admirer.
Coltrane had fans who were jazz enthusiasts and others who were hippies,
and he also had fans who didn't know much about jazz but were essentially
religious people, for whom Coltrane?s spiritual side was an open book.
Shankar liked Coltrane?s music, but was also troubled by it, for the
passion in the music was troubled passion: Coltrane was a gentle, modest
man who put everything he had into his vision of a world conquered by
a love which transcended race, religion or nationality. Perhaps he knew
that his was an unearthly vision, and that he did not have long to describe
it.
After Eric Dolphy died,
his parents gave his bass clarinet and his flute to Coltrane, who played
them both.
Expression
was made in early 1967, by the quartet
plus Sanders, and the music has been reduced to an emotional essence:
on ?To Be? Coltrane on flute and Sanders on piccolo accompany each other,
and on the rest of the album Coltrane plays tenor. Much of the music
is relatively quiet and reflective, yet there is none of the tension-and-release
structure normally associated with jazz: the emotional intensity is
complete, unrelieved and harrowing. He died of cancer in July of that
year. It would be interesting to know how sales of, say,
A Love Supreme
over twenty-five years compare with the total sales of, say, In-a-gadda-da-vida,
by Iron Butterfly, a piece of hippie junk that was number four not long
after Coltrane?s death.
There are those who regret
that so many tenor saxophonists have sounded like Coltrane since he
died, but that is not Coltrane?s fault. All the best have had large
numbers of imitators. Those influenced by Ornette Coleman do not get
many chances to be heard; there have been fewer places for young saxophonists
to play in recent decades, and fewer chances for them to hear each other.
Pharoah Sanders formed
a band that contained pianist-composer Lonnie Liston Smith and Leon
Thomas, a vocalist who had sung with Count Basie and whose bag of tricks
in the late 1960s included an evocative yodelling technique learned
from central African music. Archie Shepp was a failed guru in that decade,
a sort of safe shadow of Albert Ayler. He also recorded for Impulse.
His style was described as darkly operatic, but he changed it too often
and lost the thread, the theory becoming as important as the music.
In 1991 Shepp seemed to have mellowed - among the songs played at a
gig in London were Ellington ballads - yet still produced a unique sound
on his horn.
Miles Davis turned to electric
music in 1969 and sold records to the more stylish rock fans; from
In
a Silent Way
and
Bitches Brew
onwards he lost old fans and
made new ones. His sidemen from that period, electric pianists Chick
Corea and Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, guitarist John McLaughlin and
others, formed electric fusion bands, such as
Weather Report
and
Return to Forever
. Electric bass player Jaco Pastorius brought
considerable artistry to this music, and was destitute when he died
in 1987, not yet thirty-six years old, manic depressive and alcoholic;
the music seemed to have run out of steam as well. Its most ardent fans
would have to admit that the quality of the noodling was variable; other
fusions were going on which were not self-consciously forced, and did
not need electricity.
All these fusions, forced
and unforced, are a clue to the reason why there has been no single
influential figure in recent years such as Armstrong, Parker, Coleman
or Coltrane. Contemporary music has become an international and collectivist
endeavour, and a postmodernist one in that all music is now repertory
music. Such a multiplicity of styles is played everywhere that there
may never again be domination by a single individual. This is a serious
inconvenience to those young artists who need somebody to copy as they
start out, and this may be another reason why Coltrane has been so imitated:
there has not been anyone so powerful since.
Albert Ayler might have
been similarly influential, but he did not live long enough. The tenor
saxophonist burst upon the public apparently using the honks and squawks
of the early Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, but had more than that
in mind; he was searching even more aggressively than Coleman or Coltrane
for spiritual and musical freedom. John Litweiler wrote about two simultaneous
solos on ?Green Dolphin Street? on one of Ayler?s first albums, a tape
made for Danish radio in early 1963:
One solo is inside, in observance
of the bland harmonic structure (he pays dogged attention to turnbacks,
chorus outline, alarming turns of phrases from free motions to inside
tonality), and the other solo is outside by way of his sound (alternately
gigantic, braying, slurring, or else whiny and querulous) and his occasional
phrasing (fast, arhythmic, spiralling upward like fireworks from which
smaller explosions shoot off). There?s no doubt that in these performances
Ayler?s music is in great crisis; ?Summertime? ... accepts the crisis,
balancing the standard setting against his ideas of sound and his drifting
sense of tonality to result in a long, tragic masterpiece.
Ayler came from a middle-class
background, but knew the cry of the church, and had spent two summers
as a young man touring in R&B with Little Walter and his Jukes.
Then he seemed to take apart the history of jazz in order to reinvent
it. Soon, like Taylor, he began playing only his own music (he made
eight recordings of ?Ghosts?). Musicians like drummer Sunny Murray and
bass player Henry Grimes were already playing free, but under Ayler?s
influence they gained in authority. Murray, for example, was not a loud
drummer and never used a fancy kit, yet completely liberated percussion
by means of delicacy and dynamics. Ayler puzzled or irritated many;
Alan Bates recorded him for an appearance on a BBC jazz programme in
1966, but the BBC wiped the tape. He changed direction, changed to alto
(losing some weight in his music) and dabbled in Mexican and folk musics,
and in 1968 even tried rock on an album called
New Grass
. Some
thought he was in decline, distracted by the powerful effect the psychedelic
counterculture was having at the time, but Ayler, like Coltrane, was
searching for something beyond music. He may have been recovering his
sense of purpose in 1970, but his body was found in the East River,
his death never explained. His music ultimately included everything,
and for all the shortness of his career, he has been more influential
than most.
African drummer Olatunji
and John Coltrane had begun to form a centre for the creation of African-American
music, but it was never fully realized. Musicians began to see that
there was not enough room in the American commercial market for everyone,
and that they had no choice but to take matters into their own hands.
Trumpeter, composer and academic Bill Dixon was behind the ?October
Revolution?, a series of concerts at New York?s Cellar Cafe in 1964,
the same year in which lawyer Bernard Stollman formed ESP Records, an
almost underground label that recorded Ayler, Milford Graves and others
(as well as the Fugs and other New York City exotica). Dixon was a charter
member of the Jazz Composers Guild, with Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Carla
Bley, Paul Bley, Mike Mantler, Sun Ra, alto saxophonist John Tchicai,
trombonist Roswell Rudd and others; they gave concerts in late 1964.
Then Shepp signed a contract with Impulse, foolishly regarded as a sell-out
by some of the others, and, according to Valerie Wilmer, bandleader
Sun Ra professed himself superstitious: like a sailor, he did not like
having a woman on board. The Guild failed, but led to the creation of
the Jazz Composer?s Orchestra Association (JCOA), formed by Carla Bley
and Mantler. The first fruit was a two-disc set of Mantler?s thickly
textured music for a large orchestra called simply
JCOA
(1968),
with such soloists as Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd,
guitarist Larry Coryell, tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri and bass player
Steve Swallow. Further albums by Carla Bley, Charlie Haden, soprano
saxophonist Steve Lacy and others were released. Carla Bley became the
leader of one of the few avant-garde big bands, directly competing with
Ra for the audience: in music there is no more place for misogyny than
for racism. In 1970 the Jazz and People?s Movement interrupted taping
of the chat shows of Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett (thus
hitting all three television networks), and the result of this attention-seeking
device was an appearance on Ed Sullivan?s show by an all-star band including
Roland Kirk.
The Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon
Quartet and the New York Contemporary Five, for which Dixon wrote, never
had enough work. It was clear that the music had to be taken back to
the community from which it came, so that the community could demand
support for it. There was always an enthusiastic response to open rehearsals
and so forth, especially from young people, but there was never going
to be enough commercial sponsorship. Dixon taught art history for a
living; a University of the Streets was formed by Puerto Ricans in 1967
and Dixon helped form the Free Conservatory of the University of the
Streets the following year, leading an orchestral rehearsal which helped
to clinch one of the first federal grants for such a project. Percussionist
Milford Graves was also an activist in this field, and among other,
similar projects was Graves?s Storefront Museum, a warehouse converted
into a community project in Queens. In Harlem writer Leroi Jones (who
later became Amiri Baraka) had formed the Black Arts group, which presented
music in the street. The Jazzmobile was a bandstand on a truck that
in 1964 began to take music from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Encouraged
by the Harlem Community Council and originally sponsored by CocaCola
and Ballentine beer, it took the music to several New York boroughs,
often presenting it to black youngsters who had never heard it before.
People emerged from their houses out of curiosity and always responded
positively.
Despite all this activity,
the omens were never good. The artists who recorded for ESP were irritated
that it did not result in more income for them, but if the music is
not widely heard and the records widely distributed, there is never
going to be any money in a record label. When Roland Kirk asked Ed Sullivan
in 1970, several years after John Coltrane?s death, why he had never
had Coltrane on his programme, the most famous presenter of American
talent asked, ?Does John Coltrane have any records out?? An important
source for recordings of contemporary music, the New Music Distribution
Service, originally connected with the JCOA, lasted until 1990 before
going under.
The Black Artists Group
was formed in St Louis, Strata in Detroit; but easily the most important
of the collectives was the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians in Chicago.
Chicago has always been
a centre of musical activity. In the 1920s the scene of the thriving
black culture was virtually next to the Loop (the downtown area defined
by the tracks of the elevated trains). The recording of black music
in Chicago was hurt by one of Petrillo?s early strikes, but nothing
can keep Chicago down for long. In the late 1940s and 1950s pianist
and composer Andrew Hill, saxophonists Eddie Johnson and Von Freeman,
multi-instrumentalist Hal Russell and many others played in Chicago
clubs, and bigger names from New York also visited. Pianist Ahmad Jamal
formed a trio and became a national figure, and an influence on Miles
Davis.
The importance of Captain
Walter Dyett cannot be overestimated. He began on violin, and played
banjo and guitar in Erskine Tate?s Vendome Theater Orchestra; he conducted
an all-black US Army band, and in 1931 became bandmaster at Wendell
Phillips High School, the name of which was changed to DuSable High
School in 1936. According to Dempsey Travis, Dyett ?could hear a mosquito
urinate on a bale of cotton?. He directed five high-school bands and
the annual Hi-jinks show, which raised money to buy instruments (since
the Board of Education would not buy them), as well as an alumni band
which played in local clubs, at annual entertainments for Shriners conventions
and so forth. He taught Bo Diddley violin. His students over the years
included pianists Nat Cole, Dorothy Donegan and John Young, trombonists
Bennie Green and Julian Priester, bass players Fred Hopkins and Richard
Davis (who said, ?Maybe you weren?t afraid of the cops, but you were
afraid of Captain Dyett?), drummers Wilbur Campbell and Bruz Freeman,
vocalist Dinah Washington, reedmen Gene ?Jug? Ammons (son of boogie-woogie
pianist Albert), Eddie Harris, John Gilmore, Clifford Jordan, Johnny
Griffin and Von Freeman, and guitarist George Freeman. (The three Freemans
are brothers.) Some of them went straight off to work with Lionel Hampton
or Count Basie. The names of teachers are usually obscure, but they
are of the highest importance, and Captain Dyett was one of the greatest
of all.
Sonny Blount, a young pianist
and composer from Birmingham, Alabama, worked for Fletcher Henderson
at Chicago?s Club DeLisa in 1946-7; before long he was reincarnated
as a messenger from the planet Venus called Sun Ra, whose influence
and example have been priceless. ?Who knows the history of a prophet??
wrote J. B. Figi in a sleeve-note in 1967, for a reissue of Ra?s first
album:
July 12, 1956. Charlie Parker was
but fifteen months dead. John Coltrane was barely beginning to tug ears
as a sideman. No-one expected the still-distant messianic coming of
Ornette Coleman. The musician usually credited with being the first
of the current avant-garde to make his statement, Cecil Taylor, was
gingerly putting together his first pieces, and would have to wait two
months for his first recording date ... On that day, [the Transition
label] was busy elsewhere, having come to Chicago to summon to a recording
studio Sun Ra and his frankly far-out rehearsal band ... ?Music rushing
forth like a fiery law,? Sun Ra promises in a poem, and delivers. The
band moves like a big loose threshing machine through a field of heavy,
sun-swollen grain. This mystic band of Chicagoans, driven by donkey-engine
rhythms, roars, stomps, chugs along full of its own purpose, sounding
like a Midwestern riff-jump band and a wig band at one and the same
time, solos jumping out of the whole with spontaneity, yet spare and
telling.
That first album,
Sun
Song
, is now available on CD, and sounds as though it ought to have
been a
Billboard
best-seller in 1957. It is impossible now to
understand how those donkey-engine rhythms, like Chicago itself chunky
and swinging at the same time, could ever have been called ?far out?.
But we thought it was weird then.
The band left town in 1960
for a gig in Montreal: the club-owner seems to have been expecting a
rock band, and the gig was not a success. They drifted to New York,
and maintained a worldwide hand-to-mouth existence, staying together
because nobody else could do what they did, and because big bands are
important. Countless records with little in the way of documentation
were issued on their own Saturn label, and finally in the 1980s the
market and the listeners? ears began to catch up. Ra?s music had soon
admitted more abstract sounds, and later electronics, but never any
effects for their own sake; the band?s Buck Rogers costumes acquired
an African flavour. The act included powerful percussion pieces, in
which everybody in the band contributed to a multi-rhythmic sound that
could make the building jump; musical melodramas with reedmen chasing
each other around the stage, always with beautifully clear individual
tone and never dropping a beat or a note; and a cappella chants (?Space
is the place!?) that could make a mob follow them into the nearest teleport
chamber. Suddenly they might break into their version of a fifty-year-old
arrangement by Henderson, or Ellington or Lunceford. Long before he
died in 1992, Ra did not sound so weird any more; and the band?s earlier
work is being reissued on the Evidence label.
But back in Chicago, Sun
Ra?s departure had left a hole in the musical scene. Pianist and composer
Muhal Richard Abrams formed his Experimental Band to encourage creative
collaboration between composers and improvisers: ?Now I can take eight
measures and play a concert,? he later said to Litweiler. After several
years of Abram?s inspiring tuition the cooperative became official in
May 1965 with the formation of the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM), when thirty or so founders gathered at the
home of trumpeter Phil Cohran.
Cohran ran an Afro-arts
Ensemble, which included drummer Robert Crowder. Thurman Barker is a
percussionist whose career as a composer and recording artist had to
fight with steady demand for his skills: he had regular employment at
Chicago?s Schubert Theater for a dozen years, and only released his
own first album,
Voyage
, in 1984. Fred Anderson, a distinctive
tenor saxophonist and composer, ran a tavern, practising in the back
when business was slow. Anthony Braxton, an extremely bright, witty
and serious composer, reedman and leader, has since become one of the
leading international concert artists in contemporary music, working
as a teacher to pay the bills. Reedman Henry Threadgill, bass player
Fred Hopkins and percussionist Steve McCall formed Air, which became
well known on the concert circuit and made superb albums, but never
had enough full-time work.
McCall was replaced by
Pheeroan akLaff when New Air was formed in 1983, and at about that time
Threadgill also began putting together his Sextet (actually a septet,
counting the leader); after three albums on the New York label About
Time, Threadgill signed to Novus, a subsidiary of RCA/BMG, and the spelling
changed to Sextett; they had released three more albums by 1990. Threadgill?s
tunes were structured tone poems, not at all ?atonal?, but also used
gospel voicings and collective improvisation. Like all the best music,
they were unclassifiable and immediately unique, and the reeds, trumpet,
trombone, bass, cello and two percussionists played them with the spirit
of neighbourhood street music. In the 1990s Threadgill?s new group was
Very Very Circus, a septet containing two electric guitars and two tubas.
It keeps changing, and Threadgill keeps writing stuff completely unlike
anyone else's.
The purpose of the AACM
was to seek employment among themselves instead of waiting for somebody
to hire them. They began with concerts and open rehearsals of free jazz,
original compositions only, and composers wrote for anyone who wanted
to play. Perhaps it was the flavour of Chicago, laid back yet positive,
that made it work. The AACM has remained one of the most popular and
fertile collectives ever organized, despite the fact that, for example,
a series of ten concerts celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 1985
had to be run on a shoestring. The collective itself has never had any
money, concentrating as it does on presenting Chicago?s music to Chicago?s
neighbourhoods.
The best-known and most
successful progeny of the AACM has been the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
The original members, also founder members of the AACM, were bass player
Malachi Favors, trumpeter Lester Bowie and reedmen Joseph Jarman and
Roscoe Mitchell; Jarman had led an informal group with Barker and others.
Iowa-born Chuck Nessa, who worked in the Jazz Record Mart for peanuts
in exchange for the opportunity to produce some records, recorded Abrams,
Jarman and Mitchell for Delmark, then formed his own eponymous label
and recorded the nucleus of what was to become the Art Ensemble.
Three albums made in 1967-8,
released under the names of Bowie, Jarman and Mitchell, included trio,
quartet and solo items.
Old/Quartet
, with Philip Wilson (who
shortly after joined the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in order to make
a living), was their ?basement tapes?; a good introduction to their
casual brilliance, it reaches out to nourish its roots in the street.
Once again Chicago was a worldbeater in music, but this time fewer were
listening. Born and raised only 65 miles away, I did not hear of the
AACM until it had been under way for several years, and this was at
a time when there were more radio stations and the record industry was
moving four or five times as much product as 25 years earlier. America
can do a good job of keeping the best of itself a secret.
Mitchell?s
Congliptious
was recorded by a quartet of Bowie, Mitchell, Favors and Robert Crowder;
the other side of the record contained three solos, for Favor?s bass,
Mitchell?s alto and Bowie?s trumpet. After being asked by the journalist
Dave Flexenbergstein (of
Jism
magazine), ?Is jazz, as we know
it, dead, yet??, Bowie plays a seven-minute solo, built on what sounds
like a marching-band fragment, stopping halfway through to ask Flexenbergstein
to please remove his hat. Having established himself with his slurs
and burnished tone as the Cootie Williams of the avant-garde, he answers
at the end, ?Well, that, I guess, that all depends on, uh, how much
you know.?
Pianist Christopher Gaddy
and cellist and bass player Charles Clark were immensely gifted, and
seemingly had brilliant futures; they both died at the age of twenty-four.
They had both played on Jarman?s Delmark album
Song For
; Gaddy
died in 1968; Jarman recorded ?Song for Christopher? on his
As If
It Were The Seasons
, on which Clark played; then Clark died in April
of 1969 of a brain haemorrhage. These tragedies may have concentrated
the minds of the group: Mitchell, Jarman, Bowie and Favors left for
France (instead of New York, marking a change in the history and economics
of modern music), became the Art Ensemble of Chicago and, from June,
made about a dozen albums in less than two years, including studio sets,
live concert performances and a soundtrack for the film Les Stances
à Sophie, featuring Mrs Bowie, Fontella Bass, one of the best
voices in the black chart in the mid-1960s. (?Rescue Me? had been a
number one, on Checker.)
The soundtrack and the
tone poem
People in Sorrow
were recorded in Boulogne for Pathe
and issued in the USA on Nessa. Jean-Luc Young and Jean Georgakarakos
had formed a chain of record shops in France; they also formed
Actuel
,
a trendy paper, and, in 1967, the Byg label, for which they leased the
American Savoy catalogue and made over sixty albums of new free jazz,
much of it by Chicago artists. They went broke in 1975, mainly because
of spending too much money on one of the biggest festivals Europe ever
saw. There were accusations of carelessness with their properties, and
at one point they dumped carloads of LPs in America, getting into trouble
with the American owners of some of the material. Jean Karakos, as he
is now known, formed Celluloid in 1976 in New York, and several offshoots,
still serving experimental music. Young formed Charly in Paris in 1974
and moved it to London the next year. Charly reissues rockabilly, country
and R&B and has a delightful catalogue; its managing director, Joop
Visser, started Affinity in 1976 for jazz reissues, including most of
the Byg recordings.
Byg recorded several of
the Art Ensemble?s classics.
Message From Our Folks
offered Charlie
Parker?s ?Dexterity?, the percussion feature ?Rock On? and the moving,
hypnotic avant-garde revival meeting of ?Old-time Religion?, as well
as the tone poem ?Brain for the Seine?.
There?s A Jackson In Your
House
was a wacky, swinging statement of fact: there had been a
Jackson in the house for decades, and it was long past time that Robert
Crumb?s nervously sweating comic-book Whiteman (no relation to Paul)
joined the parade.
By early 1971 they had
recruited percussionist Famoudou Don Moye; in 1972 their performance
at the Ann Arbor (Michigan) Blues Festival was recorded; that album
and a 1973 studio set, both produced by Michael Cuscuna, were released
on Atlantic. More albums were issued on Freedom, Prestige and other
labels; they ended up on Manfred Eicher?s high-class ECM label in the
late 1970s, and recorded the mature classics
Nice Guys
,
Full
Force
and
Urban Bushmen
.
Nessa was twenty-two years
old in the mid-1960s. At first, he said, ?I honestly had no idea what
they were doing ... I had to figure out how this music worked and whether
it was bullshit or not ... The thing that was obvious to me was that
they knew what they were doing musically. I was lost but they had such
confidence in their presentation that I was drawn to it.?
[Roscoe?s] idea was for each to
make his own music but to have stuff happening on different levels that
meshed into a full sound, where each player would play at a different
tempo (say) to create a kaleidoscopic effect ... On Old/Quartet there
is a piece where you have really soft drum patterns with brushes, and
the bass playing a fast running line, with the saxophone and the trumpet
each sounding like they are playing a different kind of music. The overall
effect of the tension and release of this music is wonderful, and is
really hard to sustain. I think this was the greatest creative music
band that I?ve ever heard. They were incredibly consistent; it takes
intensive rehearsal to sustain that kind of music, and keep a flow going
in it.
Not long after being interviewed
at length in Canada?s venerable
Coda
jazz magazine, in 1993 Nessa
issued a limited-edition five-CD set of everything in his vaults by
these men, one of the releases of the decade. Working most of his life
as a record distributor, he has never made a profit from his tiny record
label and never will, but the twenty or so albums he made in Chicago
over a period of twenty-five years are pearls without price.
The Art Ensemble that went
to Paris was not Roscoe?s group but a collective, and the music changed;
some pieces were more Roscoe?s and some Jarman?s. Their ?Great Black
Music? did not just practise collective improvisation, but swelled and
roared with the sheer joy of it. Experiments with bassoon and bass saxophone
had generated a desire for an infinite number of textures and timbres;
everybody played ?little instruments?, an uncountable collection of
tuned and untuned percussion and horns from cowbells and woodblocks
to whistles, steerhorns, bicycle horns and garbage-can lids. Yet the
music is never cluttered, each timbre surprises in exactly the right
place and the whole contains the entire history of black music and the
black experience. A theatrical element - warpaint, costumes and mime
- probably inspired by Jarman, enlivened the act and helped maintain
the connection with community roots. Its absence took little away from
the recordings, however; the music works without a video.
That the great Chicago
tenor saxophonist Von Freeman is not a household name is partly because
he preferred to play at the Enterprise Lounge on the South Side rather
than chase precarious fame in less friendly environments. He tossed
off two albums for Nessa in one day in 1975, and anyone who owns them
knows that he belongs up there with Dexter, Rollins and Coltrane. He
was no doubt available to the younger generation for moral support;
his son Chico Freeman was a member of the AACM in the early 1970s and
became a prolific recording artist. Chico is a master of the reeds,
including the bass clarinet; his touring groups and albums have employed
such musicians as bass players Cecil McBee and drummers Elvin Jones,
Jack DeJofinette and Fred Waits. Chico is a composer, but not an avant-gardist,
and his music ought to work fine on the radio. You will not hear it
on the radio, though, and the last time I talked to him he was selling
computers on the side.
Anthony Braxton plays the
music of Monk and has made albums of standards; he writes books about
his own music, but his books make it look more difficult than it is.
His quartet - Mark Dresser on bass, Gerry Hemingway on percussion and
Marilyn Crispell on piano - set London on its ear in 1985, but Braxton
does not make a living composing and playing. Since the Art Ensemble
does not tour as much as it used to, Lester Bowie has been leading a
crowd-pleasing brass ensemble. Roscoe Mitchell is, in my opinion, one
of today?s greatest composers, whether he is warming up his alto saxophone
until it says, ?OK, you can play me now?, or demonstrating all the timbres
of which sixteen brass and woodwind instruments are capable, as in ?L-R-G?,
with only three musicians, or conducting ?The Maze?, for eight percussionists,
shot through with light, space and texture. But few have even heard
of Roscoe.
How the obscure pianist
and composer Joel Futterman survives is anybody?s guess. He spent two
years with the AACM, and released two or three albums on his own label
from 1979. The loss of his frequent collaborator, the great alto saxophonist
Jimmy Lyons, to cancer in 1986, was a terrible blow. His original, percussive
and tough-minded solo pieces and his trio and quartet work with Jarman,
Lyons, bass player Richard Davis and others deserve much wider exposure,
available on Ear-Rational and Bellaphon, two more of the world?s smaller
labels.
Whitney Balliett might
describe Futterman?s music as difficult. If you want sheer obvious fun
from the so-called avant-garde, you could have tried the white Chicagoan
Hal Russell and his NRG Ensemble. Born in Detroit, Russell worked in
Chicago most of his life, performing with such visiting firemen as Ellington,
Miles, Rollins and Coltrane. He played drums at Newport with the free-jazz
trio of saxophonist Joe Daley in 1963, began leading his own groups
in the early 1970s and only discovered that the reeds were his true
love around 1977. He led four younger men in a repertory of a couple
of hundred original tunes whose stomping vigour and zany humour had
to be heard to be believed. They made their first album in 1982; there
were only two personnel changes in over a decade.
On their albums the quintet
plays two trumpets, two basses, several reeds, drums, vibraphone, electric
guitar, didgeridoos and anything else they fancy. After hearing them
at the Moers Festival in June 1990 (their first trip to Europe), Steve
Lake wrote in the Wire: ?Tales of neglect are the stuff of jazz, but
I?ve rarely encountered a case as extreme as this one ... Trust me,
one of the hottest, hippest, wittiest bands on the globe.? Russell also
made a duet album,
Eftsoons
, with reedman Mars Williams, who
had been an early member of the NRG and re-joined in the late 1980s,
and a solo album (with a lot of overdubbing), Hals Bells. Only five
NRG albums were released (on Nessa, Chief, Principally Jazz and ECM).
Russell had once issued a cassette called
Don?t Wait Too Long Or
I Could Be Dead
; he died in 1992 at the age of sixty-six: the music
business had waited too long. Three of the younger men were not even
full-time musicians: drummer Steve Hunt worked in the family clothing
firm, and one of the others rehabbed houses. Such is the best of the
music business; but the NRG Ensemble carried on, with one of Chicago's
most resourceful musicians, Ken Vandermark, succeeding Russell, until
Vandermark and Williams got too busy with other projects. Russell never
enjoyed the success he deserved, but he taught a generation of younger
Chicagoans to do as they pleased and to fear nothing. CDs by Vandermark
and others on labels such as Okkadisc and Atavistic represent a generation
that kowtows to no one.
This chapter should be
several times as long. I have not said anything about Julius Hemphill,
Frank Lowe, Charles Tyler, Hamiet Bluiett, John Stevens, Leo Smith,
Rory Stuart, Edward Wilkerson, Jr, John Carter, Sunny Murray, David
Murray, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Charles Brackeen, Joe Locke, Phil Markowitz,
Slava Ganelin, Ran Blake, Paul Bley, Kenny Wheeler or Randy Weston.
Youngish people who carry on the traditions and may or may not do something
original someday are Jason Rebello, Tommy Smith, Andy Sheppard, Courtney
Pine, Marcus Roberts, Roy Hargrove, Christopher Hollyday, Terence Blanchard,
Donald Harrison and a bunch of Marsalises. These people are white, black,
American, British, Russian. (The Norwegian Jan Garbarek, born in 1947,
plays folk styles on the saxophones, and may have been one of the most
influential musicians in the world in the 1990s, for better or worse.)
They are revivalists and avantgardists. Not enough of them are women,
but Joanne Brackeen, Geri Allen and Marilyn Crispell, more or less in
that order of ?accessibility?, are pianist-composers worth any music
lover?s time. Bass player Richard Davis plays with post-bop revivalists
and then turns in the wittiest, most zinging and precise avant-garde
playing (with Futterman, for example) you have ever heard. Meanwhile,
so many people are still sounding like John Coltrane, who has been gone
over twenty-five years, that Scott Hamilton feels free to play in the
fifty-year-old Ben Webster style, and gets better and better at it.
Soprano saxophonist and clarinettist Bob Wilber, who studied as a teenager
with Sidney Bechet, has recreated Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington sessions,
and performed as a guest on an album of Bill Challis?s arrangements
recorded in 1986. Not only is improvised music alive and well, but revivalism
has never been in better hands.
Guitarist George Benson,
pianist Herbie Hancock and others have left jazz for high-class pop
or for rock fusion, sometimes coming back again. Producer and arranger
Quincy Jones seemed to have disappeared entirely into slick studio pop,
celebrated for his personal and commercial success. Miles Davis played
his spare phrases over disco-flavoured backing tracks in the 1980s;
you could hear more Miles by listening to his old recordings. Trumpeter
Donald Byrd left for academia and formed a band of students called the
Blackbyrds to play what amounted to disco, but at least they were flesh-and-blood
musicians instead of computers. We can call it selling out, but they
call it paying the rent. Arthur Blythe, a reedman, seems to change styles
with every album; as he put it, ?I don?t want to make records for posterity.
I want to make records for prosperity.? Benson has a family to raise,
and points out that when he recorded jazz, most of the record-buying
public never heard it.
Yet a former car dealer
has built a big catalogue on California?s Concord Jazz label, recording
mainstream jazz for an audience which had been starved of it for generations,
while the major labels waste so much money chasing bubble-gum blockbusters
that they cannot afford to bother with the audiences that are there.
And yuppies fill their shelves full of immaculately recorded note-spinning
?New Age? dinner party music, the contemporary equivalent of Mantovani?s
strings. They are probably searching for chamber jazz, but they never
learned how to listen. They should buy records by Stan Getz, Paul Bley,
Bill Evans, Ted Brown, but the jazz bins in the shopping-mall record
shops are full of the new mood music.
Will Ackerman ran a construction
company and also played the guitar. When he released
In Search of
the Turtle?s Navel
in 1976 for a few fans, naming the Wyndham Hill
label after his company, he effectively launched New Age, and had sales
of $20 million in 1984. The artwork on the New Age records resembles
that of ECM, the European label for improvised music formed by Manfred
Eicher in 1970. Guitarist John Abercrombie made nine ECM albums between
1974 and 1981, and there are so many albums on that label by several
people that some of them inevitably amount to note-spinning. Keith Jarrett
spins out his notes across entire albums, moaning along with it, and
sells many records, while the British pianist and composer Keith Tippett
remains virtually unknown.
Pure New Age, sometimes
confused by marketing people and by magazine critics with jazz, perhaps
began with the recordings of John Fahey and Leo Kottke on acoustic guitar
in the 1960s. It was sometimes called new acoustic, and indeed often
sounded folkish. The
Los Angeles Free Press
wrote of the album
Timeless
(1974) by keyboard player Jan Hammer and drummer Jack
DeJohnette: ?You lie back, close your eyes and journey-soft ...? If
we have loud narcissism in pop-rock, New Age is contemplative narcissism.
The new mood music is impeccably played and recorded, but my old Percy
Faith records have more musical content and less pretence. The acoustic
piano album
Pianissimo
(1990, on Private Music) composed and
played by Suzanne Ciani, was also immaculately recorded, but her piano
style on her soundalike tunes sounds to me like Carole King with a muscle
spasm.
Many jazz musicians are
still noodling. Chick Corea strolls onstage with so many electronic
keyboards around his neck it is a wonder the clatter does not drown
out the music, but in 1991 an album was issued in five or six formats,
including videodisc. Reedman Steve Coleman and others are playing something
called M-base, combining elements of rock with jazz. What I have heard
of it sounds rockist to me, but at least it is not background music.
Maybe something will come of the various fusions some day; after all,
most of Gunther Schuller?s third-stream music over the decades has not
been recorded, or even played. If contemporary musicians sign conventional
deals with major labels, tin-eared lawyers and producers try to tell
them what to play; perhaps it is just as well that nearly all their
best work is on dinky labels that the shops do not stock, many of them
live recordings from European festivals such as Moers, Willisau and
Zurich.
I began by describing the
popular songs of the eighteenth century as strophic - that is, repetitious,
so that the audience hears the melodic fragments over and over. It is
clear that the most profitable popular music has been repetitious in
nature, and that the golden age of American songwriting and the Swing
Era itself were accidents of history, perhaps never to be repeated.
Popular music since the invention of electrical recording has developed
a spectrum that now includes kiddie music at one end and at the other
music which is, to quote the title of Wilmer?s book,
As Serious As
Your Life
. But the word ?serious? in this context does not mean
without joy. Our greatest artists do not strike poses for the media;
the media do not pay much attention to them anyway. So why is it that
everybody?s doing it? If you have to ask, you are not listening. As
for me, new records by Braxton, Mitchell and the others come out faster
than I can afford to buy them, so as a music lover, I am happy. But
what about black pop?
In his book
The Death
of Rhythm and Blues
Nelson George points out that forty years ago
black communities had their own restaurants, hotels, baseball teams
and so forth. Then came improvements in civil rights. The best black
players were hired by major-league baseball and the black leagues went
out of business, and where are the black owners and managers in the
major leagues? Similarly, when blacks could use white restaurants and
hotels, their own smaller businesses went broke: thrown into the same
economic meat-grinder as the rest of us but with less money in their
pockets and fewer jobs, they can now vote, but their neighbourhoods
have crumbled. What remained of R&B was prettified, overproduced
and burdened with technology, like white pop. Bedroom crooners and often
beautiful ?sweet soul? voices were heard, but for the most part, unless
you were Lionel Richie, the business did not want to know about black
music. And meanwhile music education in the schools disintegrated. American
taxpayers will vote against anything that costs money if they get a
chance, so forget frills, like libraries. Forget music. The schools
in some American states almost closed in the late 1970s because there
was not enough money to keep the doors open; at the same time a new
generation of black kids were inventing rap.
You can draw a parallel
between black music and the American economy as a whole. The tiny middle
class are the composers and performers celebrated around the world:
Roscoe Mitchell, Leo Smith, Braxton and the rest, relatively poor as
they are. The working class is really nowhere: if all an aspiring young
black musician wants to do is play in the Hollywood studios or in a
symphony orchestra, there are not enough jobs.
And there is the underclass,
which could not even afford to go to discos, and had no musical training
whatever. But they had turntables and a few records. So they invented
their own mixes, by switching back and forth between two copies of the
same record, such as James Brown?s ?Get on the Good Foot?, the harder,
funkier music that disco had come from. Using microphones, they chanted
over their music, as in Jamaican dub, in which the DJ chants over an
instrumental reggae track (one of the first in the new rap genre was
Jamaican-born Kool Herc of the South Bronx). The inventiveness of the
street dancers was soon called breaking, or break dancing. The amateur
DJs would break into a street-lamp for electricity in the middle of
the afternoon, and by two or three the next morning there would be hundreds
of kids hanging out, watching the dancers, enjoying the sounds.
The fad was called hip-hop,
from a Lovebug Starsky record: ?To the hip, hop, hippedy-hop.? Then
it came to be called rap, itself originally from black slang, a trendy
1960s word for conversation. The chanting was supposed to be improvised,
and the whole thing remained a cult for a while, until it crossed over
into the commercial music business. Twenty-five years later the fad
is still with us.
?Rapper?s Delight? by the
Sugar Hill Gang (producer Sylvia Vanderpool again, seizing the opportunity
as she had done in the early days of disco) was a freak hit in 1979.
?The Breaks? in 1980 on Mercury was regarded as a novelty. Afrika Bambaataa
and his Soul Sonic Force were big in 1982; James Brown himself may be
heard in a duet on ?Unity? (1984). Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Sadler)
was one of the first to use ?montage? on records, adding sound effects
and making rhythmic fills by ?scratching? the stylus back and forth
in the groove. (He made a video with director Spike Lee.) Finally, Run
DMC, a trio from Queens, had the genre?s first million-selling album
in 1986,
Raising Hell
. Using a drum machine and scratching on
a double-deck turntable, the trio filled Madison Square Garden and were
seen as controversial, but stronger stuff was on the way.
Many people hate rap. Considered
purely as music, it is the ultimate reduction of pop to absurdity. Charles
Shaar Murray claims that rap was the most exciting thing to happen in
pop in the 1980s, but that?s not saying much. There are, however, interesting
things to be said about it, not least that it made its own way with
little help from the mainstream music business. Originally it was improvised,
and may have had some value as street poetry; the rappers prize words
and are more literate in their own way than your average pop star: where
words are found there must be a message. But the uncomfortable fact
is that rap was born of musical starvation. In the late 1980s the great
jazz percussionist and composer Max Roach received a foundation grant,
and was widely interviewed in American newspapers. One of the subjects
he spoke about was music education. No matter how poor they were, no
matter what kinds of backgrounds they came from, Roach?s generation,
including Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, had been able to get real
musical tuition, on real musical instruments, in the schools. But that
had changed. ?If you don?t like rap,? Roach pointed out to the American
people, ?you?re getting what you paid for.?
But each generation has
to make its own noise, invent its own genre; and what we paid for, or
did not pay for, is rap. ?The Message? (1982), by Grandmaster Flash
and the Furious Five, had more meaningful words than most pop songs
of that period; it is about the neighbourhood and its ?junkies in the
alley / with a baseball bat?. The rap groups did the best they could
to communicate with America about the conditions to which they were
confined, and to which their brothers and sisters are still confined.
The message, however, is still being ignored.
Boo-yah TRIBE were ?Six
Bad Brothas? of Samoan extraction from the Carson district of Los Angeles;
?Boo-yah? is derived from the sound of a sawn-off shotgun. Their track
?Once Upon a Drive By? tells of teenagers killing each other from the
car window while driving by; ?Rated R? is about how to use the word
?motherfucker? fifty times in one song. NWA (?Niggers with Attitude?),
from California, were the first successful rap group to come from outside
New York; their album was called
Straight Outta Compton
. They
too celebrate the world of drive-by killings and robbery with violence;
one of their tracks urges listeners to kill and fuck the police. Public
Enemy?s second album,
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
,
reached the top twenty in Britain. The group?s ?minister of propaganda?,
Richard Griffin, alias Professor Griff, said in an interview, ?The Jews
are evil. And we can prove this.? 2 Live Crew rap about bitches, dicks,
cunts and pussies: ?Forget the salad, just eat my meat?, ?I can?t be
pussywhipped by a dick-sucker?, and so on.
Of course, this stuff has
its defenders among today?s college professors and literary critics
- drama critic Kenneth Tynan thought that the Beatles? Sgt Pepper was
a turning point in western civilization - but they miss the point. As
David Toop noted in England, ?the concoction appealed to intellectuals,
who saw rap as the supreme expression of post-modernism, creative retro,
television inspired blip culture and goodness knows what else?.
The
New Republic
remarked that the rock critics ?are regularly laughable
in their nervous translations of the primal and the obscene into the
polysyllabic prettifications of their trade?.
The magazine quoted Jon
Pareles on the subject of rap: ?Rappers live by their wit - their ability
to rhyme, their speed of articulation and by their ability to create
outsized personas with words.? But not even a
New York Times
critic can justify rap by himself, so Pareles called in Professor Henry
Louis Gates, of Duke University, who has become a prominent black critic
by embracing the intellectual con-trick of structuralism, or deconstructuralism,
or post-structuralism, or whatever it is called this week. What 2 Live
Crew do, Professor Gates says, is ?take the white Western culture?s
worst fear of black men and make a game of it?. But the fear is 2 Live
Crew?s fear of women in general, and black women in particular. It does
not scare me, it disgusts me, and I do not think it is a game.
Gates soon got his own
space in The
New York Times
in which he carried on the literary
criticism: to understand 2 Live Crew we must become ?literate in the
vernacular traditions of African Americans?. We are now so anti-elitist
that we invent crackpot critical theory to justify anything as art.
The New Republic
again:
There are mistakes of which
only professors are capable, and this is one of them ... When you promote
?Suck my dick, bitch, and make it puke? into a ?vernacular tradition?,
you wound your culture. You teach that the culture need aspire to nothing
high, because the low is the high; and that your culture - in this instance,
the culture of Duke Ellington and Ralph Ellison - need look no further
than the street ... The truth about the street, of course, is that it
is the scene of the greatest catastrophe to have befallen black America
since slavery.
And so we get to the point.
Rap was an illustration not just of what pop music had come to, but
of what a nation had come to. We have known for years that American
black males suffer more strokes and heart attacks than American white
males. Murder was the leading cause of death among young black males
in Washington, DC; the life expectancy of a male in Harlem was shorter
than that of a male in Bangladesh. An American secretary of health warned
that ?the young black American male is a species in danger?. The rappers
saw Jews only as their local shopkeepers and landlords; nobody ever
taught them that for generations Jews were the best friends blacks had
in America, because they knew what it was like to be slaves thousands
of years before the first African was taken to the New World. Nobody
ever taught them that Jews as businessmen (and musicians) did more for
black music in this century than any other non-black group. Nobody has
ever taught them that men and women are supposed to console each other.
No doubt some of them have never heard of Duke Ellington, and even more
have never heard of Ralph Ellison. Nobody ever taught them anything
because they had no schools to speak of. All they have is the label
?underclass?, which means ?garbage?. Naturally they are angry. NWA?s
Easy-E ?sings?:
Do I look like a motherfucking role model?
To a kid looking up to me
Life ain?t nothing but bitches and money.
The rest of us may appear
to behave ourselves, but there is little evidence that we care about
anything more than Easy-E does. All the rapper knows is what he sees,
and he does not see a society which is interested in any kind of justice,
to say nothing of the quality of its music. He may appear to be a creep,
an idiot, a moron, but he is more honest than we are: he knows that
he has no control over his life, while we pretend that we have control
over ours. His anger is what we have paid for, or the result of what
we have not paid for; and his warning has been wasted, for rap has been
processed by the music industry.
There is already, of course,
white rap. Every black genre has been imitated so far, and not even
rap could escape. The Beastie Boys were among the first off the mark,
three middle-class boys whose parents are music business veterans; four
million copies of their first album were sold. Their second received
rave reviews in ?quality? newspapers: the one by David Sinclair in
The
Times
was headed ?Rude, lewd and shamelessly funny?: ?
Paul?s
Boutique
is strewn with foul language and lewd innuendo; it shamelessly
glorifies all manner of deviant, violent and criminal behaviour and
it unequivocally condones recreational drug-dabbling. It is also very
funny ... Brooklyn?s Beastie Boys have recaptured the essence of rock
as the perfect adolescent vehicle for the flaunting of outrage.? If
some of our children are murdering each other, they are just reviving
the whiskered old essence of rock?n?roll, invented by the media in the
first place. This is so funny I am holding my sides.
There must also be rap
that is completely innocuous, which happens as soon as a genre starts
making money. Some thought that Run DMC were funny in the beginning,
but, having been knocked from the commercial top of the genre by newer
acts, they were unintentionally amusing when they appeared on a British
music magazine programme in early 1991, obviously puzzled and uncertain,
these big black kids from one of the toughest neighbourhoods on earth.
So what were they doing about competition from the likes of Vanilla
Ice? They were in England to ?sample? Manchester bands for sounds to
use in their act. (That is one way to get out of Queens; last I heard
the police in Manchester still did not carry guns.) Vanilla Ice was,
inevitably, white, and had impressive cheekbones; he was described by
one critic as ?all mouth and trousers?, but his backing tracks were
very slick. M. C. Hammer was black; his ?We?ve Got the Power? was used
in 1991 in Britain as psych-up music for people selling time-share schemes.
A few of these youngsters
who grew up in the street were making money from hit records, but there
were many more still in the street, still angry and still shedding each
other?s blood. And as rap was legitimized and joined the mainstream,
it was clear that it now bore the burden of being a phoney sign of hope.
As fast as its obscene cry was mistaken for mere outrageousness, it
became one of the commodities which substitute for social and economic
stability, no more useful than any other and less useful than most,
because if it is not angry, it has no substance. Lloyd Bradley in
Q
got it right, reviewing Public Enemy?s
Fear of a Black Planet
:
?the music is only a background for the most singleminded attack on
the state of modern urban America heard on record?. Evidently that group
had not been bought off yet.
Of course, some older musicians
must try to make sense of rap. A year or so after his remarks on the
state of the music education in America, Max Roach told Chris Parker
in England that he was working with the Fab Five, and quoted them:
?The political system in the inner
cities has taken out all the cultural enrichment courses, no music,
no rhetoric, visuals, dance - so we created something ... no one gave
us anything, it?s pure.? So they came up with a way of dealing with
this world of sound and rhetoric, which is rhyme and visual, graffiti
and dance ... total theatre. So I became interested from that aspect,
but I have to have it explained by them.
Conventional methods of
making music have ?just about been used up. So if you don?t want to
repeat, you have to deal with this world out there that?s blessed us
with electronics,? says Mr Roach. Thanks, but when all the drummers
have been replaced by computers, I will stay indoors and listen to my
Max Roach records.
In late 1990 a piece called
Long Tongues: A Saxophone Opera
, by composer and saxophonist
Julius Hemphill, was seen at the Apollo Theatre. The interlocutor was
once master of ceremonies at a Washington club, and is now a street
sweeper. He shows a rap duo through black history since the 1940s: the
end of the Swing Era, the beginning of rhythm and blues and bop, later
modern jazz and several styles of dancing. In the end the rappers trade
licks with a saxophonist. I would rather see Julius Hemphill?s opera
than watch Michael Jackson?s movie again.
Moonwalker
had no story
to speak of, but lots of high-tech sci-fi fireworks, to make the children
happy, and good dancing. There was a wonderfully designed scene that
looked like a black club of the 1940s, and in the background a suggestion
of a piano and a saxophonist. Was there a piano in the soundtrack? Any
reeds at all? No: just the usual pop-rock, all at the same volume and
tempo. Jackson appears to be a sort of superhero in the film; he could
have made himself a real hero, by exposing all our children to his rich
cultural heritage, but he threw away that opportunity and opted for
flash. I wonder how much his multi-talented producer Quincy Jones had
to do with it, but I am reminded of James Blood Ulmer, on his album
America - Do You Remember the Love?
?I belong to the USA / I
don?t know if I want to stay.?
Having raped black music,
today we have world music, in which there are many lovely things. The
Cajun music of French-speaking white swamp dwellers in Louisiana, and
zydeco, the black variant, are happy and unpretentious folk-dance musics,
which may properly belong to folk roots rather than to world music.
Klezmer was being rediscovered, a sort of Yiddish dance music that has
things in common with Jazz, from the Odessa of eighty years ago. The
multipart harmony of a Bulgarian women?s choir was already familiar
to anyone who has heard Janacek?s
Glagolitic Mass
. Africans play
music resembling the blues on folk instruments, their time as subtle
and beautiful as that of Robert Johnson or Charley Patton. Forty years
ago the janitor at my primary school played Japanese 78s for us which
he had brought back from there after the war; they sounded infinitely
strange and interesting. I do not know whether they represented traditional
music or the Japanese pop of the period, but I do know that today the
Japanese play the most banal pop-rock in the world, adopting our poverty-stricken
values with perfect unselfconsciousness .
The performers of the music
of the so-called Third World know that they will not be allowed into
our marketplace until they have already been influenced by western pop-rock,
and in any case their own pop music has already been so influenced.
The songs of Thomas Mapfumo, in modern Zimbabwe, for example, although
they still sound like they ought to be played on the thumb piano, are
played on the electric guitar, and all at the same tempo. White and
black South Africans formed Juluka (which means ?sweat? or ?work?) which
performed beautiful folkish songs full of poetry and African harmony,
but that era is over; and Johnny Clegg has since formed Savuka (?we
have awakened?), which is ?dance music?, still African-flavoured, but
electric and with the usual thumping beat. Rai is the music of the north
African Muslim working class; it is already electric, and tacky nightclubs
are similar the world over. We have not heard much lately about fado,
a sort of Portuguese blues; perhaps the artists refused to be plugged
in. Jamaican reggae has already had its superhero, Bob Marley, who was
admitted to the pantheon by the sentimentality of the counterculture;
but the biggest Jamaican influence is the dub aspect of rap.
We can hope for a liberating
influence on our pop music from the Third World, but we will force our
trendy values on music from anywhere. Novelist Sousa Jamba, writing
for the Spectator, hoped ?that the "world music" frenzy will
not be ephemeral, like most things in Western culture?. He walked into
a London record shop to hear his mother tongue booming at him.
The Kafala Brothers, two
Angolan singers ... made me proud to be an Angolan: the lullabies were
the best I ever heard; and the words to the songs were first-class poetry
... But I fumed when I read the English translation of the songs that
came with the cassette. It read like the work of a semi-literate party
hack with an edict that he should give a political twist to every line.
One song, for instance, concerns a man returning to his village and
finding his relatives maimed. No reason for their injuries is given.
The song?s translation says that the injured are ?victims of the traitors
to the nation and the lackeys of apartheid?.
A girl called Yarima from
a Stone Age tribe in the Amazon rainforest married an American, and
went with him to live in televisionland. ?I did not know what music
was. My people have no musical instruments. All is chanting. When I
first heard your music I hated it. Then I started snapping my fingers
and tapping my toes. Madonna has a good voice and I like the way Michael
Jackson moves.? Never mind that the word ?chant? means ?song?; so much
for music. We cultists who have money in our pockets can celebrate six
centuries of music on records, but our own best musicians and composers
live on handouts. Our republic has failed; our Caesars have feet of
clay; the barbarians are inside the gates. We have seen the enemy; he
is in the mirror.