by Nate Chinen
3
Uptown Downtown
John Zorn was in his battle uniform—camouflage cargo pants, hooded sweatshirt, high-top sneakers—as he paced the stage in the Rose Theater. He seemed lathered up and agitated, alto saxophone hanging from a strap around his neck. This in itself wasn’t unusual. But the circumstances were: Zorn and his band Masada were about to perform their half of a double bill with the redoubtable pianist Cecil Taylor, under the auspices of Jazz at Lincoln Center. The concert, in March 2007, was the result of a first-time invitation for both Taylor and Zorn, each a galvanizing figure in the postwar American avant-garde. Given the setting, their presence suggested an incursion.
Zorn seemed to think so, anyway. “Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend of enlightened programming here!” he barked from the stage. “There are more young faces in the audience here than there have been since the inception of this place!”1
He was taking aim at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which in less than twenty years had amassed an imposing cultural stature and tremendous resources—along with a conservative reputation in line with the image of its artistic director and public face, Wynton Marsalis.
As Zorn made his proclamation, he was standing in the largest of three performance spaces in Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s home on the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. This facility, the first of its kind for jazz, had been completed a few years earlier at a cost of almost $130 million. The grandeur of the complex fed a suspicion in some circles that Jazz at Lincoln Center was a behemoth, gobbling up philanthropic resources for jazz while sternly dictating its aesthetic boundaries. Marsalis had taken to calling it the House of Swing, an epithet intoned as a welcome to concert audiences—but also an implicit admonition that this was no kind of place for the unswinging. For reasons like these, devotees of experimental music saw Rose Hall as loosely analogous to the Imperial Death Star, while someone like Zorn—spontaneous, unruly, irrepressible—stood for the plucky Rebellion.
Another way to understand Zorn’s appearance on the Rose Theater stage was as a tenuous alignment of cohabiting forces. Jazz at Lincoln Center embodied one institutional model for jazz. The avant-garde was connected to others, most of them adaptive and informal. Zorn was the very picture of self-reliance, an artist who’d created his own support structure: he was the proprietor of a thriving independent record label, Tzadik, and a small but vital nonprofit performance space, The Stone. He received major commissions from the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had built a dynamic network, at once intimate and global, around his work and the work of his peers.
A similar spirit of dauntless enterprise had kept Cecil Taylor going in the 1950s, when he developed some of the earliest free-improvisational techniques in spaces like the Five Spot, and the ’60s, when he was involved in the founding of the artist-run Jazz Composers Guild. But Taylor also cultivated relationships with high-culture institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he performed a number of times over the years. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. The MacArthur Foundation, whose fellowship amounts to a kind of knighthood in American culture, had selected Taylor for its honor in 1991. The same had happened for Zorn in 2006, six months before he stood on the Rose Theater stage.
There’s a danger of false equivalency in the suggestion that Jazz at Lincoln Center, with an operating budget north of $40 million, could find any counterbalance in experimental artists creating their own infrastructure, through a piecemeal of gigs, composer grants, and foundation support. But framing the situation in stark David-and-Goliath terms oversimplifies the complex ecosystem to which all parties can’t help belonging.
However you choose to see it, the institutionalization of jazz—through performance organizations, commissioning bodies, and educational programs—exerted profound influence on the music during the period that began in the late twentieth century. The effect was pervasive, touching the music’s aesthetic development along with its audience and business models. Zorn has a part to play in that story as well as Marsalis, with neither as squarely opposed to the other as the popular history might have you believe.
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Every Goliath has its David phase. The jazz world was in the throes of its so-called renaissance when, in the mid-1980s, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—a citadel of high culture, home to the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City Ballet—began to consider ways of diversifying its audience. Jazz was raised as an option, but only in the most provisional terms: when Lincoln Center’s Committee for the Future issued an audience-development report in May 1986, its findings concluded, in part: “No compelling case can be made for adding a new constituent in an area like jazz.”
Still, the organization made a pitch to Marsalis, who already had proven himself fluent in both jazz and a classical métier. In 1987, working with the Lincoln Center staff member Alina Bloomgarden, he programmed a three-concert series, “Classical Jazz,” to run in late summer, when resident companies like the Philharmonic were away on tour.
Marsalis was asked to program another round of “Classical Jazz” in 1988. To promote it, he wrote an article for The New York Times that staked an aesthetic position. The piece bore the headline “What Jazz Is—and Isn’t,” and in it Marsalis articulated his core belief that the music has a determinative essence and can be understood within objective parameters, including swing. He also insisted that at this stage in its history, jazz had to choose between one of two existing models: classical and pop.
It was clear which of those options Marsalis endorsed. A classical approach would emphasize a time-honored literature and an acceptable language, placing new work in a stable artistic context. A pop approach meant dilution, bastardization, and debasement. “To many people,” Marsalis lamented, “any kind of popular music now can be lumped with jazz.” At the time of his writing, Kenny G, the pied piper of smooth jazz, was finishing his fifth studio album, which would sell more than four million copies in the United States. Against the backdrop of such blatant heresies, Marsalis argued, a generation of musicians was coming up without the rigors of history. He posed a loaded question: “How can something new and substantial, not eccentric and fraudulent, be developed when the meaning of what’s old is not known?”2
Pop wasn’t the only unwelcome paradigm for Marsalis; so was the entire hemisphere of creative approaches aligned with what he considered a Eurocentric avant-garde. Abstraction, atonality, anything that subverted formal practice—he saw these elements as the result of misplaced priorities by the critical and academic establishment. When Marsalis talked about classical music, he didn’t mean twentieth-century serialists and chance merchants like Pierre Boulez. As the composer, trombonist, and scholar George Lewis has noted: “In a critical discursive shift, the term ‘classical’ became less a description of a musical tradition than of an attitude—one of reverence and preservation.”3
Lewis, a longtime member of the AACM, points out that one exclusionary effect of this rhetoric was the erasure of composers like Anthony Braxton and Anthony Davis, who had been working for years with orchestral or operatic forms. Their work fell out of the critical discourse, he argues, because of “the promulgation of a revisionist canon that emphasized a unitary, ‘classic’ tradition of jazz.”
Marsalis had a powerful intellectual ally in Albert Murray, the cultural critic, novelist, and blues philosopher who saw jazz as the ultimate expression of an African-American drive toward elegant purpose. In Stomping the Blues, an influential essay collection published in 1976, Murray had argued that the blues found its highest expression in jazz, granting a ritualistic power to triumph over adverse conditions. The music, as he put it, was “equipment for living.”
Murray, along with Stanley Crouch, a former loft-scene drummer who had become a prominent jazz critic, formed a brain trust against which
Marsalis could bounce ideas and test his moorings. Once, in a lengthy conversation that was documented and later published, Murray advised Marsalis to think of the avant-garde in military terms: “Avant-garde means shock troops, explorers, and whatnot. You can’t be a pathfinder unless you have a turnpike or superhighway coming behind you.”4 By this light, Murray added, the one indisputably avant-garde musician in jazz had been Louis Armstrong.
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The aesthetic framework that Marsalis developed, with input from Murray and Crouch, was essential in building the case for Jazz at Lincoln Center. Central to their thesis was the conviction that jazz embodies a model of democratic action, and a prism through which the American experiment can best be understood. It was a concept with tremendous appeal: beyond advocating for the conservation of a musical tradition, it proposed a grand vision of cultural heritage, one that rewrote even the national sins of slavery and racial injustice into a narrative of transcendent resilience. This understanding would eventually form the backbone of Ken Burns’s Jazz, and a bedrock of education initiatives like Jazz in the Schools, sent to high schools across the country by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The concept was less broadly familiar in 1989, when Lincoln Center formed an exploratory jazz committee whose members included Murray, Marsalis, and Crouch. The committee—chaired by Gordon J. Davis, a key member of Lincoln Center’s board—issued a report. “We rigged the conclusion so that Lincoln Center should create a permanent jazz program,” Davis recalled. And the ideological engine behind the programming proved vital in sealing the deal:
It’s like a good political campaign, in the sense that when you’re trying to raise money for a candidate, you try to have a way of describing that candidate in terms of aspirations and ideas. And if you’ve got a good idea with some substance that you believe in, that is the best way to raise money. That is the thing that will open people’s minds and get them to understand that you are not involved in something monosyllabic or single-layered. And from the first meetings in that committee, that was in the room. Because Albert was in the room, because Stanley was in the room, because Wynton was in the room.5
Lincoln Center began the process of forming a jazz department, and Davis, as chair of the jazz committee, assumed the responsibility of solidifying financial support. This proved daunting, given that there was scant philanthropic precedent for such an effort:
There were people on the board of Lincoln Center who thought this was nuts! The odds were ninety to one that we had any chance at all. Raise money? Do you have any idea how hard it was to raise money for jazz in 1989? People looked at us like we were crazy!6
But Jazz at Lincoln Center became an official department of Lincoln Center in 1991, hiring Rob Gibson, formerly with the Atlanta Jazz Festival, as its director. The news made the front page of The New York Times, which reported that the program’s projected budget was $1 million. As if to underscore the scope of this coup, the article included a quote from Nat Leventhal, the president of Lincoln Center. “I had the same prejudices about jazz that opera lovers or ballet lovers might have,” he said. “But I’ve learned a lot, and now I am a convert. There is as much richness and as much variety in Duke Ellington as there is in Mozart.”7
The new organization’s first season included a smattering of events around New York City, but its centerpiece was still Marsalis’s “Classical Jazz” series at Alice Tully Hall. And along with a sense of arrival in the precincts of high culture, there came a greater and more pointed brand of scrutiny. Musicians complained about the collegial makeup of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, accusing Marsalis of nepotism; critics attacked the historicist programming, lobbing a charge of conservatism. Still others in the press took issue with the project’s sociocultural foundation. Whitney Balliett, reviewing a “Classical Jazz” tribute to Ellington for The New Yorker, praised the musical execution but noted that a stark minority of performers in the series had been white. Raising the specter of reverse racism, Balliett cleared his throat: “Blacks invented jazz, but nobody owns it.”8
Marsalis and his constituency were predisposed to view an argument like this as baseless from the start. And as Jazz at Lincoln Center weathered the controversies, its footprint and coffers only grew. By 1996 it had amassed enough support to secure full constituent status at Lincoln Center—joining the likes of the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera and earning the right to form its own board.
“It deserves the place,” Leventhal said at the time of the announcement, referring to the organization’s seat at the table.9 Marsalis noted with satisfaction that the news sent a message around the world about jazz’s value as a fine art.
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In 1987, the same year that Lincoln Center served its first helping of “Classical Jazz,” an upstart young promoter named Michael Dorf was breaking in the Knitting Factory, four miles south, in a former Avon Products office near the Bowery. On some level this was a late reverberation of the loft scene, which had tapered off in the face of a recovering city economy and a new crop of commercial jazz clubs, including the Blue Note (est. 1981) and the new Birdland (est. 1985). But the Knitting Factory also came out of a do-it-yourself punk underground. Its ideology, to the extent that there was one, ran in opposition to aesthetic rules and definitions. In his first press release, Dorf made a point of declaring that “the Knitting Factory considers many things art and is open to suggestions.”10
Thanks to the enterprising work of musicians like the keyboardist and composer Wayne Horvitz, the Knit quickly became a clubhouse for an experimental fringe drawn to the sorts of musical ideas that, to borrow Marsalis’s phrase, might proudly be filed under “eccentric and fraudulent.” One of the club’s other early leaders was Zorn, whose performances could take the form of procedural game play, and whose frame of reference ran deliriously through surf music, roadhouse blues, free jazz, cartoon music, and extreme metal.
Already a creative cyclone with a decade’s worth of documented provocations in New York, Zorn had broken through to a wider public with his 1986 album The Big Gundown, a postmodern spree through the movie themes of Ennio Morricone. In 1987 he released Spillane, his nod to the pulp mystery writer Mickey Spillane. A deck shuffle of musical styles made new by juxtaposition and panache, it featured a clutch of Zorn’s contemporaries, including Bill Frisell on guitar, Anthony Coleman on piano, and Bobby Previte on drums. John Lurie, of the “fake jazz” band the Lounge Lizards, provided occasional voice-over on the twenty-five-minute title track, muttering the hardboiled thoughts of Mike Hammer, Spillane’s franchise private eye.
Zorn wasn’t averse to paying homages, provided they were on his own terms. His 1986 album Voodoo was a repertory tribute to the bop pianist Sonny Clark. And one of Zorn’s most talked-about performances in the Knitting Factory’s inaugural year was a joyously splenetic tribute to Ornette Coleman, featuring his fellow alto saxophonist and iconoclast Tim Berne. (The crowd spilled out onto Houston Street.)11
Berne was a second-generation by-product of the loft scene, though he might not have put it that way. Originally from Syracuse, New York, he had grown up with Stax and Motown soul, barely listening to jazz. He first picked up a saxophone in college, around the same time he heard the alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill, a member of the Black Artists Group. Berne was instantly riveted by Dogon A.D., Hemphill’s 1972 debut, which grounded experimental urges with Stax-like earthiness: a deep soul cry, a slow-cooker funk groove, Adbul Wadud’s guitarlike cello growl. When Berne moved to New York City in 1974, he quickly found his way to Hemphill, becoming a disciple, an assistant, and a friend. Hemphill was in the process of releasing his own albums through a tiny independent label, Mbari, and Berne helped out. When it was time to begin putting out his own music, Berne followed Hemphill’s lead and formed a shoestring label in 1979, giving it the tongue-in-cheek name Empire Records.
; When Berne landed an unlikely deal with Columbia Records in the mid-eighties, it was more or less by happenstance: the guitarist Gary Lucas, an acquaintance from Syracuse, was writing ad copy at the label, and had put in a good word.12 Berne made an album with Frisell, the cellist Hank Roberts, and the drummer Alex Cline, pursuing a scratchy-but-soulful ideal loosely related to Hemphill’s, though its formal character was stubbornly original. Berne hadn’t been signed to Columbia as an outright experimentalist—he later speculated that label executives, hearing a demo he’d made with Frisell, expected something more like new-age music—but his album, Fulton Street Maul, released in 1987, had a jagged fury that left no doubt. One track, “Unknown Disaster,” opens with a lunging cello vamp in irregular meter, over which Frisell’s electric guitar sprays wild and disorienting electronic effects.
Moments like these made Fulton Street Maul a conspicuous outlier on a label roster so heavily vested in the Marsalis business—even though Columbia during the eighties had also been home to Weather Report and the post-Ornette bluesman James Blood Ulmer. To the surprise of skeptics at the label, Berne’s experiment met with spectacular acclaim. Jon Pareles began an appraisal in The New York Times by proclaiming: “It’s only February, but one of the year’s most important jazz albums has just been released.”13
That language notably placed the convulsive designs of Fulton Street Maul at the forward flank of the jazz continuum, despite Berne’s hedging ambivalence on the matter. “I’m trying to figure out how not to sound like a jazz band,” he said in the same Times article. Describing his approach to “Unknown Disaster,” he explained: “I didn’t want a guitar solo over the vamp, I wanted a noise solo—total annihilation right at the start.”14 But because of the integral role of improvisation in his music, and the fact that Berne was a saxophonist indebted to Hemphill, it made sense to file Fulton Street Maul under jazz. It also reflected a growing critical dissatisfaction with jazz conservatism, and with the related idea that the music’s mainstream was no longer straining against formal limits. There were enough raves for Berne’s album that Columbia saw no choice but to let him make another one, Sanctified Dreams.
