by Nate Chinen
Righteousness was easier to locate in the ruminative, beseeching music of Alice Coltrane, who carried on a spiritual quest after the death of her husband, John, in 1967. A pianist and harpist originally rooted in bebop, Alice had played in late editions of John Coltrane’s bands, alongside powerful musicians like bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Rashied Ali, and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders—all of whom appeared on her first solo album in 1968. Over roughly the next decade, Alice Coltrane personified a swirling current of astral consciousness in jazz before establishing an ashram in the Santa Monica Mountains. But the earnest asceticism of her approach made it easy for the jazz establishment to relinquish her to the hinterlands: she was marginalized in jazz history even as her music assumed totemic properties outside it. Decades later, the horizon-scanning spirituality of Kamasi Washington’s music would be one sign that Alice Coltrane was receiving her posthumous due. (Another sign was the glowing response to a compilation of her ashram cassette recordings, The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, released on the stylish world-music label Luaka Bop in 2017.)
But the shocking void left by John Coltrane’s death couldn’t adequately be filled by his widow, nor by even the most powerful disciples—like Sanders and saxophonist Archie Shepp—whose exertions, on Coltrane’s old label Impulse, came branded as expressions of “the New Thing.” For a more general populace, the audience still catching up with Coltrane’s skyrocketing abstractions, there was an opening for someone speaking that dialect in a more reassuring key.
One such figure was the tenor saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd. Preserving an acoustic postbop palette but with some groovy adornments, he projected the simmering spirituality associated with Coltrane, not in a blush of opportunism so much as cosmic alignment. Like Coltrane, Lloyd had a powerfully intuitive quartet, one that surrounded him with possibility. It featured a brilliant and impetuous young pianist, Keith Jarrett, and an elastically groove-minded young drummer, Jack DeJohnette. (Cecil McBee was the band’s first bassist, followed by Ron McClure.) The Charles Lloyd Quartet struck a nerve especially with rock audiences, for a host of reasons. “That group came together at a time when the socioeconomic and political environment of this country was opening up,” reflected DeJohnette. “And we had a vibe. We could play grooves or we could play abstract. Nothing was ever done the same way twice.”4
Lloyd’s quartet had a hit album in Forest Flower, recorded at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966, and soon became a fixture at the Fillmore, Bill Graham’s hippie temple in San Francisco. Lloyd often shared a Fillmore concert bill with acts like Jefferson Airplane, and he recorded another live album there in ’67, calling it Love-In. Later that year his quartet became the first jazz group to appear in the Soviet Union without sponsorship from the U.S. State Department. DownBeat anointed him “Jazzman of the Year.”
Some interested observers mused hopefully that Lloyd’s outreach to the flower-power crowd might signal a new blush of prosperity for jazz, a corrective for all of the crucial ground that had been lost to the counterculture. Martin Williams, a leading critic, was more skeptical. “Lloyd certainly puts on a show of sorts,” he sniffed in The New York Times. “With wildly bushy hair, military jacket, and garishly striped bell bottoms, he looks like a kind of show-biz hippie. He usually sounds like a kind of show-biz John Coltrane.”
The fixation on Lloyd’s appearance, and the intimation that he was less a hopeful shaman than a cynical showman, found an echo almost half a century later in the conversation around Kamasi Washington. The Epic came in at number 4 on the 2015 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll, but the veteran critic Francis Davis, in his official annotation of the results, waved a dismissive hand: “Strings, voices, cosmic graphics, Washington’s dashiki and all, it’s merely jazz like we haven’t heard it in a while—an intentional throwback to those ‘spiritual,’ early ’70s Impulse, Black Jazz and Strata-East LPs whose greatest appeal might be to listeners too young to remember the dead end for jazz this sort of thing led to back then.”5
Beyond the generation-baiting tone of the critique, the parallels are striking: here we have an ardent, communicative, spirit-minded, post-Coltrane tenor saxophonist stirring up the passions of a youthful, politically activated audience, and reaching well outside of jazz while continuing to play it, with a fiery and cohesive band. “Will Charles Lloyd Save Jazz for the Masses?”6—that was the headline of Williams’s review in the Times in 1968. It’s sardonic, but on some level it’s still an endorsement of the premise that jazz did, in fact, need to be saved.
This trope has been as durable as it is powerful: it served as a defining character trait and plot device in La La Land, the 2016 Damien Chazelle film. A star-crossed musical romance with a touch of Hollywood satire, La La Land dramatizes the emotional growth of Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a journeyman jazz pianist with antiquarian tastes. His love interest, Mia (Emma Stone), is an aspiring actress who stuns him one afternoon—by saying she hates jazz. Affronted, he spirits her off to the Lighthouse Café to hear some jazz in person, proceeding to talk over the music.
“It’s dying,” he says after one tune draws to a close. “It’s dying on the vine. And the world says, ‘Let it die. It had its time.’ Well, not on my watch.”
If Sebastian stops short of uttering the actual phrase “save jazz,” that’s a technicality. When Ryan Gosling went on to host Saturday Night Live the next fall, his opening monologue hammered at the point. “You guys know I saved jazz, right?”
The joke landed partly because of the dopey cliché in Gosling’s sentiment, which well predated the Technicolor fantasia of La La Land. Kamasi Washington had implied something analogous during interviews that invariably revolved around the issues plaguing jazz in our time. It bothered him that the power center of New York had marginalized places like South Central Los Angeles, where the music had a real bond and history with its community. He was frustrated that young audiences, particularly young black audiences, often saw jazz as impenetrable or pompous, stringent or arcane. He didn’t see why the music had to succumb to cerebral interiority, alienated from the movement of bodies in rhythm. He believed that reverence for the past, rather than flickering in a votive, could light a torch for the tasks at hand.
His convictions carried weight because of his resonance with a popular audience, one that saw him as the most exciting jazz musician in ages. The uncommon intensity of that regard was sharpened by the desperation of a musical community aware of its own marginalization. All of which begins to explain how Washington, a musician only provisionally and warily accepted by jazz’s body politic, could suddenly become its most visibly empowered spokesman. But how could he be the one to save jazz? Whom was he speaking for? What was it that he would save?
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“Conservation” is another word for saving. And the idea of conservation first began to exert a powerful pull in jazz during the 1970s, a decade in which American interests at large seemed to mobilize around the idea. (The Environmental Protection Agency was established, by executive order, late in ’70.) The music’s elders and originators were shuffling off in greater numbers—Armstrong died in ’71, Ellington a few years later—fueling a disquieting fear that the jazz tradition itself was now endangered, like the ozone layer or the Pacific harbor seal. This feeling thrived in some influential corners despite the continuing work of musicians in the jazz mainstream, like the pianist McCoy Tyner and the guitarist Jim Hall. It thrived despite the vitality of a post-sixties avant-garde, whose ranks included Ornette Coleman and others in his circle, like the cornetist Don Cherry; Cecil Taylor, a pianistic world unto himself; and the membership of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a rigorous, freethinking collective more commonly known by its acronym, the AACM. The prolific, often daringly original efforts of these artists didn’t provide a great deal of comfort to those fretting about the legacies of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Benn
y Goodman.
Compounding this insecurity about jazz’s aesthetic survival was the tidal wave of fusion, which swapped out a swinging and lyrical sensibility for something more bombastic and turbocharged. Older jazz musicians griped about fusion the way a neighborhood’s longtime residents might talk about new freeway construction. But the single greatest catalyst for the mutant genre was, at least on some level, one of their own: Miles Davis, the combative yet tersely poetic trumpeter who had played bebop alongside Charlie Parker before delineating the cooler side of hard bop (in the fifties) and the bleeding edge of postbop (in the sixties). His groove-rich, darkly entrancing album Bitches Brew—recorded within a few days of Woodstock, the sprawling peace-and-love confab in the summer of ’69—represents one of the small handful of decisive inflection points in jazz history. Musicians who played on the album would go on to form the defining juggernauts of fusion’s first wave: Weather Report, Headhunters, Return to Forever, the Tony Williams Lifetime, the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Après Bitches, le déluge.
If “jazz” is to be understood as the music made by jazz musicians in their time, then fusion should have represented a new chapter of the jazz tradition, an evolution of style. And because bands like Weather Report reached a mass public, eventually playing to sold-out rock arenas, you might say it was one answer to jazz’s audience problem. But nobody of prominence made this argument, because fusion was such an alien, steroidal variation on the jazz language, and so entangled with commercial motives. Most figures in the jazz establishment, like Martin Williams, regarded it as a mistake, if not an affront.
What response could there be to the indignities of the age? One answer was to double down on core values and marshal the troops. After an ugly surge of youth unruliness prematurely ended the 1971 Newport Jazz Festival, its producer, George Wein, moved the following year’s edition to New York City, in a big-deal, big-tent production whose offerings sprawled from New Orleans brass bands to a symphonic new work by Coleman to a midnight jam session that sold out Radio City Music Hall. The critic Albert Goldman, in a report for Life magazine, drew on his impressions of this festival to stake a claim: “The comeback of jazz is clearly the top American music story of 1972.”7 (This in the year of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace and Al Green’s I’m Still in Love with You—not to mention Neil Young’s Harvest and the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, which could be seen as American music stories despite some geopolitical technicalities.)
Goldman was on target insofar as “jazz” could be a marker of showbiz flair in pop culture, a kind of vogue. Clint Eastwood made his directorial debut with Play Misty for Me (1971), a psychological thriller partly shot at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where a band led by Cannonball Adderley made a cameo. (The film’s title invokes “Misty,” a standard by the pianist Erroll Garner, which provides a central plot device.) Diana Ross, the glamorous disco goddess, portrayed Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), a biopic steeped in tragic lore. The choreographer and director Bob Fosse breezily flirted with jazz iconography in his film Cabaret (1972) and his Broadway musical Chicago (1975), each a smash hit; he later won Academy Awards and wide acclaim for an impressionistic autobiographical feature called All That Jazz (1979). A more golden-hued Jazz Age nostalgia pervaded the Hollywood movies The Sting (1973) and The Great Gatsby (1974), both starring Robert Redford.
Most of these popular entertainments exploited jazz imagery with jaunty insouciance, as a backdrop or a signifier. (In that sense, La La Land simply carried on a dubious tradition.) The self-appointed stewards of the jazz tradition might have found this more aggravating had they not been deep into their own conservation agenda. One consequential outcome of that agenda was the formal construction of a jazz canon, through initiatives like The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, a six-LP boxed set curated and annotated by Williams and issued in 1973. That same year saw the formation of the National Jazz Ensemble and the New York Jazz Repertory Company, organizations devoted to preserving and reviving the music’s history in performance.
These repertory organizations were, like the Smithsonian, principally concerned with canonization. They often built their concerts around transcriptions of important records or landmark solos. The work was archival and academic as well as artistic, but it all flowed together: Dick Hyman, the musical director of the New York Jazz Repertory Company, was celebrated for his grasp of antiquated piano styles, including those of ragtime heroes like Scott Joplin and Eubie Blake. (When the producers of Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology were deciding how to begin an updated compendium in 2011, they went with Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” which had also opened the original set. But they chose a jazz-repertory version recorded by Hyman in 1975, as if to endorse the idea of a post-historical age.)
The parallel between jazz repertory programs and the work of Western classical institutions was intentional, part of a push toward dignity for an African-American art form. The phrase “America’s classical music” was coined around this time, in a doctoral dissertation by the veteran pianist Billy Taylor, who later carried it into wider circulation as a jazz educator, a correspondent for CBS News Sunday Morning, and the jazz director for the Kennedy Center. “It is both a way of spontaneously composing music and a repertoire,” Taylor wrote, “which has resulted from the musical language developed by improvising artists. Though it is often fun to play, jazz is very serious music.”8
The new jazz historicism rumbled throughout the ecology of the art form. Some members of the old guard, who had lived through epochal changes only to slip into one or another form of career purgatory, saw material returns. A stateside appearance by the tenor saxophonist and longtime expatriate Dexter Gordon became an irresistible human-interest story, as did the reemergence of Jabbo Smith, a trumpeter once said to have rivaled Armstrong.
Within the avant-garde, which in the sixties had been dominated by a rhetoric of newness and hurtling progress, traditionalism became a viable mode. The AACM, founded by musicians with a traditional foundation, produced notable statements along these lines. Among them was an album in two volumes actually bearing the title In the Tradition, by Anthony Braxton, a saxophonist known for his arcane compositional systems. Another powerful alto saxophonist with an avant-garde profile, Arthur Blythe, released his own album called In the Tradition: a program of Ellington, Coltrane, and Fats Waller made new by a band with Stanley Cowell on piano, Fred Hopkins on bass, and Steve McCall on drums.
Hopkins and McCall were two-thirds of the collective trio Air, along with Henry Threadgill on saxophones and flutes. That group won DownBeat’s coveted Album of the Year honor for Air Lore—a new spin on Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton, effectively an act of radical jazz repertory. Conservation didn’t have to be conservative.
Even fusion coughed up a major contribution to the cause. Herbie Hancock, who had earned his first gold album with the street funk of Headhunters, formed V.S.O.P., an openly throwback acoustic postbop quintet. First assembled for a Hancock retrospective at the 1976 Newport Jazz Festival–New York, the band—its acronym evoked top-shelf cognac as well as the tagline “Very Special Onetime Performance”—was cast in the image of the peerless 1960s Miles Davis Quintet, in which Hancock had played. Notwithstanding Davis, who was in murky self-exile at the time, it brought the whole gang back together: Hancock, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the bassist Ron Carter, the drummer Tony Williams. Filling in on trumpet was a swashbuckling peer, Freddie Hubbard. Hancock later remembered the group’s revived-yet-changed rapport in jazz-repertory terms: “It somehow made the past become new again.”9
Less than a decade had passed since the dissolution of Davis’s quintet, upheld then and now as one of the most advanced small groups in jazz history. The relentless upheavals of the period made it seem much longer than a decade. V.S.O.P. received such thunderous approval in New York that its one-time performance led to a world tour, where it met with equally clamoring enthusiasm. Even before releasing it
s debut in 1977, the group had appeared on the cover of Newsweek under the splashy headline “JAZZ Comes Back!”
That specific choice of language—an echo of Goldman’s “comeback” line, and of Homecoming, the 1977 album that heralded Dexter Gordon’s return—reflects a prevailing new narrative for the music. The implication was not just that jazz had rebounded, but also that some of its most gifted prodigals had returned to the fold. It was convenient to cast this turnabout as evidence of some kind of sober realization, a putting-away of childish things. The jazz-repertory movement, rooted in its noble conservation strategies, could claim credit for tilting the culture toward this baseline of historicism. Its advocates would claim that it saved the music’s roots from obsolescence and extinction.
Still, working jazz musicians in the seventies were contending with difficult conditions: in the record industry, where rock and pop were the priority, and on the ground, where audiences weren’t easy to rally. The economy was in a recession; New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy. Jazz clubs, of the sort that had sustained musicians in Manhattan for more than forty years, were dwindling in number and purpose. For the more intrepid artists, the action shifted to a confederation of lofts and other noncommercial, artist-operated spaces in Lower Manhattan, like Studio Rivbea and Ali’s Alley. A shadow history of jazz in the 1970s could be set entirely in this milieu, among post-Coltrane/post-Coleman mavericks like Arthur Blythe, the tenor saxophonist David Murray, and the cellist Abdul Wadud. Some of these artists were members of the AACM; others, like the saxophonists Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill, had come out of another collective, the Black Artists Group. They all shared a commitment to fierce originality and self-determination, along with a driving interest in new forms and approaches. They firmly belonged to the jazz tradition, but over time they were largely written out of its mainstream histories.
