by Nate Chinen
The wrongheadedness of Watrous’s argument was borne out by subsequent events. High Life would be embraced and lionized by admirers who could see past the synthesizer patches, recognizing an ambitious display of insight and orchestration. Holland, who had played alongside Shorter in a transitional late-sixties Davis quintet, called the album “an absolute masterpiece of compositional construction,”5 a milestone in the saxophonist’s body of work.
Holland is one of at least a dozen Milesian alumni who put the lie to any charge of squandered talent and opportunity. A bassist and composer with a sterling track record—starting with his first album, the avant-garde classic Conference of the Birds, in 1972—he established his own lane in the modern jazz mainstream, becoming one of the most trusted bandleaders on the scene. The Dave Holland Quintet, active from the late nineties through the mid-aughts, worked in a chamberesque but often swinging mode, with a contrapuntal front line of Robin Eubanks on trombone and Chris Potter on saxophones. (The band’s smartly explosive double album Extended Play: Live at Birdland, recorded in 2001 and released in 2003, is an essential document of the era.)
Others in Shorter and Holland’s peer group kept leading bands and releasing albums that burnished their stature. Hancock, Corea, and Jarrett loomed as a trifecta of piano exemplars. DeJohnette acquired a reigning preeminence as a drummer, second to none. And so it went; as hexes go, the Miles Davis Curse seemed in retrospect like a pretty good deal.
The Wayne Shorter Quartet was the best case in point, though it wasn’t as if Shorter had anything to prove. His repertoire for the band put so-called classic material, like “Footprints,” on an equal plane with his fusion inventions. One of the group’s signature tunes was “Masqualero,” which he’d played with Davis in both acoustic and jazz-funk iterations. Also in the mix were reclaimed Shorter compositions from the Weather Report book, and a couple from Joy Ryder, the even more flagrantly synth-heavy album that preceded High Life.
The band released only three albums in its first dozen years: Footprints Live! in 2002 and Beyond the Sound Barrier in 2005, followed in 2013 by Without a Net. But each of these albums, distilled from concert performances, received close and fervent attention. And when Shorter served as artist in residence at the 2017 Detroit Jazz Festival, at eighty-four, his performance with the band was predictably a marvel, brimming with kinetic mystique.
It hardly seems a coincidence that in the fifteen years after the emergence of the quartet, the aesthetic center of jazz moved perceptibly in the direction of a more collectivist, band-driven, exploratory ideal. “It really is something special that they’ve developed,” attested Chris Potter. “And I think that’s been an influence on a lot of us.”6 Younger players, just entering the conservatory, often cite the working Shorter quartet as a touchstone, having either seen it in action or pored over the recorded evidence.
So in addition to Shorter’s most celebrated body of work—his brisk and insinuative compositions, which have been closely studied by jazz musicians for decades—the newer generation has also had the opportunity to grapple with his elusive philosophy of play.
“This kind of stuff I’m talking about is a challenge to play onstage,” Shorter said in 2012, before citing a favorite source. “When Miles would hear someone talking about something philosophical, he would say, ‘Well, why don’t you go out there and play that?’ One thing we talk about is that to ‘play that,’ we have to maybe play music that doesn’t sound like music.”7
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Keith Jarrett became the most celebrated improvising solo pianist in the world largely on the basis of a single album, The Köln Concert. Recorded and released in 1975, it’s a document of unfolding rapture and willful transcendence, and in that sense true to the artist involved. His spontaneous concert performances—often voluptuous with melody but mercurial in their flow, as he “read” the mood and psychic energy of a room like a sensitive instrument—became a source of wonderment for audiences across a spectrum, from jazz and classical connoisseurs to the post-Woodstock enlightenment seekers you might customarily associate with new age.
Jarrett cultivated a separate, less heralded profile as a consummate small-group bandleader. His 1967 debut album, Life Between the Exit Signs, introduced a profoundly intuitive trio with the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Paul Motian. He reconvened that rhythm section a few years later, after leaving Miles Davis. Then the trio became a quartet with the addition of saxophonist Dewey Redman, who had made his name with Ornette Coleman.
The Keith Jarrett Quartet had a serious run in the seventies, releasing a succession of earthy, spiritually searching, temperamentally unruly albums on major labels. Decades later, Jarrett remembered the band, with wry fondness, as “this absolutely raw commodity,”8 perpetually on the verge of self-combustion. Among the band’s more unconventional practices was a fondness for branching beyond the musicians’ primary instruments: Jarrett often played soprano saxophone in the group, and at any moment there might be an interlude made up entirely of the clangor of steel drums or the rustle of shakers and bells.
There was nothing about the backward-glancing turn in mainstream jazz during the 1980s that would have happily accommodated the Keith Jarrett Quartet. That wasn’t necessary, in any case: the band had dissolved by then, and Jarrett focused his energies on a new alignment with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. After the release of its first three albums in 1983—Standards, Vol. 1, Changes, and Standards, Vol. 2—this group became known as the Standards Trio. It would be Jarrett’s principal outlet, both prolific and lucrative, for the next thirty years. And in some popular narratives of jazz, the earlier Keith Jarrett Quartet fell to the status of a historical footnote, or at least a secondary achievement.
The band found vindication in the afterlife, thanks to a jazz generation that revered its fearless ambition and boundless style. Branford Marsalis, introduced to the band’s glories by his pianist Kenny Kirkland, went on the record as an admirer. (The impressionistic Jarrett ballad “Rose Petals,” from a 1976 quartet session, appears on Marsalis’s 1990 album Crazy People Music.) But the more powerful endorsement came from musicians a decade younger than Marsalis, notably the members of an acoustic piano power trio called the Bad Plus.
Made up of three independent-minded musicians from the upper Midwest—the bassist Reid Anderson, the pianist Ethan Iverson, and the drummer Dave King—the Bad Plus formed in 2000, releasing a self-titled album on the Fresh Sound New Talent label. That album opened with a wry version of “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” by ABBA, and included a raging cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” by Nirvana. But there were also memorable original compositions on the album, and an overall spirit of rugged indivisibility that felt like a necessary tonic. I first heard the band in the same one-off Village Vanguard booking that secured their signing to Columbia Records. Like the A&R executive in the room, I was sold.
The resulting major-label debut, These Are the Vistas, appeared in 2003 to a mixed clamor of approval and umbrage. What was controversial about the band, for some, began with the opportunity it had been granted: this was in the midst of constrictions and cutbacks in the jazz record industry (neither the first nor the last of those), and there was consternation that a trio of irreverent white rabble-rousers had, in effect, skipped the line. There were all kinds of problems with this critique, among them the fact that it missed the point of the band’s extraordinary sound, which was difficult to describe without pulling apart the strands of its DNA. Iverson used his piano as an instrument of orchestral dimensions, equally prone to grandiloquent outbursts, cubist outlines, and intimate music-box patter. Anderson was deft and full-toned as a bassist, a master of supple undercurrent. King was working with a razor’s-edge flexibility, a steamroller’s barreling momentum, and a big jolt of wicked humor. Altogether the trio conveyed an impressive, elastic sort of unity, forged of quick reflexes and dramatic flair.
/> One part of the shared social fabric for the Bad Plus was generational: its members had come of age in the 1970s and ’80s, and hit the scene in the early ’90s. But another part, not to be downplayed, was a collective reverence for the Keith Jarrett Quartet. This reverence was well stated by Iverson in a blog post published in 2006. The premise was a personal canon of essential jazz recordings from just after the Vietnam War through the early Young Lions era. “To begin with,” Iverson wrote, planting a flag, “I believe the courageous, outlandish, down and dirty music played together by Keith Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian to be shamefully underrated and misunderstood.”
He went on: “Reid Anderson and David King also consider this to be one of the great jazz groups, right up there with the Coltrane quartet, assorted Miles Davis bands, Ornette bands, Duke Ellington bands, Basie bands, Monk bands, and whatever else.”9 The implication, at the time, was that this statement could be seen as mildly heretical at worst, and overheated at best.
The Bad Plus had other guiding heroes: one high-water moment in their ascendance was a 2005 concert opening for Ornette Coleman, whose composition “Street Woman” had become a reliable show-stopper for the band. (About a decade later, an expanded version of the Bad Plus, with Tim Berne and Sam Newsome on saxophones and Ron Miles on cornet, would pay touring tribute to Coleman’s 1972 album Science Fiction, a touchstone for all involved.)
In practical terms, another elder who loomed just as large for the band was Motian, who had followed his tenure in Jarrett’s bands with an agenda of stubborn and revelatory independence. A musician defined by the sly, suggestive economy of his drumming and the stark, deceptive ease of his compositions, Motian was a master of terseness, of the unfinished gesture that turns out to be complete in itself. His compositions have the pliant, patient certainty of folk songs. And his influence on the two or three generations after him was deep and quietly profound.
He was fifty in 1981, when he recorded Psalm, featuring a band made up of Joe Lovano and Billy Drewes on tenor saxophones, Ed Schuller on bass, and Bill Frisell on guitar. According to jazz’s actuarial standard, fifty doesn’t clear the threshold for a jazz elder—but the musicians in Motian’s band, especially Frisell, saw his validation as life-sustaining. The personnel shifted in the next few years, with Jim Pepper rotating in for Drewes. Then Motian pared down to a trio with Lovano and Frisell, marking this band’s arrival with an album called It Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago. Released in 1985 on ECM, it’s a sleeper masterpiece: an experiment in abstracted song form and trilateral accord, with a dogged pursuance of revelation.
Motian already had a claim to jazz history outside of Jarrett’s orbit: he was a member of the most influential iteration of the Bill Evans Trio, the one with bassist Scott LaFaro, captured in 1961 on the venerated album Sunday at the Village Vanguard. Motian had also worked with Mose Allison, the modern-jazz pianist and southern blues bard, among many others. But the music made by the Paul Motian Trio—later stylized as Paul Motian/Joe Lovano/Bill Frisell—might stand as his crowning achievement. For a certain kind of listener, its regular booking at the Vanguard became an important signpost on the jazz calendar in New York. Lovano would sometimes look out and see the same faces at the foot of the stage every night for two weeks.10
But Motian’s stature as a mentor grew exponentially after he made the firm decision, around 2006, to stop traveling altogether. Rather than traverse Europe several times a year, which he’d done for most of his life, he set a new working perimeter that evoked the vantage of Saul Steinberg’s most famous New Yorker cover: he no longer left Manhattan. The effect of this policy had something other than a restrictive effect. Some of Motian’s groups—like the one he semi-accurately called the Electric Bebop Band, which had seen young musicians like Kurt Rosenwinkel and Chris Potter move through its ranks—began playing more dates in town. At the same time, Motian was circulating more as an eminent sideman with artists who had grown up studying him on record, like the guitarist Ben Monder, the tenor saxophonists Bill McHenry and Tony Malaby, and the pianists Anat Fort and Dan Tepfer.
After Motian died in 2011, at eighty, the scope of his influence could be felt in the form of a void, expressed by a great variety of musicians worldwide, but especially in New York. “In my whole life I probably spent more time with him than anyone other than my wife,” Frisell told me a couple of years later, explaining that he still hadn’t gotten over the loss.11
But Frisell had been able to pay tribute on a few notable occasions, including the 2012 Newport Jazz Festival, when he appeared as a featured guest with the Bad Plus. Their set opened with one Motian composition and moved on to another. And after a sublime reading of “It Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago,” Reid Anderson stepped to the microphone.
“We are going to play one more song,” he said. “It’s another Paul Motian song, because we love Paul so much, and his music means so much to us.”
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The pianist, composer, educator, and organizer Muhal Richard Abrams was eighty-seven when he died, in 2017. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which he cofounded on the South Side of Chicago, had more than half a century of enlightened provocations in its rearview at that point, and untold others ahead.
Abrams was a brilliant, mostly self-taught pianist who combined a strong foundation in the blues with keen attunement to the shadow art of vibration and overtone. While he came up in a hard-swinging jazz context, and created some of his early work in that style, he was serious about a nonidiomatic approach to improvisation. This, along with a determination to explore his own compositional ideas, was what led him to form his Experimental Band in the early 1960s, with musicians like the saxophonists Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell.
“I needed a place to experiment with the things I wanted to do with music,” Abrams told me in 2008. “So I organized the Experimental Band, the forerunner of the AACM. And I fortunately attracted musicians who were interested in that. It included quite a few of the musicians that you know today that are very accomplished in what they do. The reason they could accomplish what they did is that they found a workshop where they could experiment and learn and test themselves as to what could be done with things they find out, in terms of research and study.”12
One of the great engines of experimental art in postwar America, the AACM had long enjoyed considerable support from the critical establishment, and the devotion of a small but vocal circle of followers. And Abrams had enjoyed the garlands of an elder statesman in his time, past the point of active oversight in AACM governance. In 2013 he joined Mitchell, the multireedist Henry Threadgill, and Jack DeJohnette for a special concert at the Chicago Jazz Festival, released under DeJohnette’s name on ECM in time for the AACM’s fiftieth anniversary. In that commemorative year, 2015, the all-star ensemble reconvened for a handful of dates, including a performance at Newport that was magnificent in its spontaneous formal coherence.
By then, something larger was happening with respect to the AACM’s foothold in jazz. It wasn’t just about the continuing advances of first-wave members like Threadgill, though that was a genuine source of awe. It was also that the organization’s aesthetic value system—among other things, a multidimensional view of culture and time, and a focus on spontaneous colloquy—had slowly infiltrated the music’s mainstream. The pianist Craig Taborn, who had turned on to the AACM as a teenager in the 1980s, remembers a period when jazz musicians of his generation were largely oblivious to its message. Talking about a musician like Threadgill, in certain circles, could feel like offering a secret handshake. “Now I can reference these people, and find a lot of young musicians who know what I’m talking about,” he said in 2015. “That definitely wasn’t happening in the nineties.”13
What was happening in the nineties, among other things, was a stealth expansion of AACM ideals. Taborn recorded and toured with the
Roscoe Mitchell Note Factory, alongside other free-thinking improvisers like the pianists Matthew Shipp and Vijay Iyer (in separate editions of the band). The Art Ensemble of Chicago was still an active concern. Lester Bowie was leading both Brass Fantasy and the New York Organ Ensemble, each a boisterous, audience-facing proposition. The multireedist Anthony Braxton was creating a flood of music—in concert, on paper, and on record—while holding court from a tenured faculty position at Wesleyan.
Threadgill, who had already exploded all preconceptions with Air in the seventies and his Sextett in the eighties, spent most of the 1990s at the helm of a band aptly named Very Very Circus. Featuring musicians like Marcus Rojas on tuba, Brandon Ross on guitar, and Gene Lake on drums, it was an ensemble of riotous polyphony over infectious funk rhythm. Its mad, exultant albums—none more so than Too Much Sugar for a Dime, in 1993—were critical darlings with a not insignificant commercial reach. (Two of those albums appeared on Columbia.)
All of which set the table for the early 2000s, when Threadgill formed Zooid, a band featuring sharp younger players like Liberty Ellman, on acoustic guitar, and Jose Davila, on tuba and trombone. This group was a laboratory for Threadgill’s latest intervallic and rhythmic systems, as well as a real-time dynamo. The hiccuping syncopations and chromatic tensions in the music were difficult to parse but easy to enjoy, provided your guard was down. And as the band plunged deeper into the Threadgill matrix, its reach broadened. A Zooid album, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016, making Threadgill only the third jazz musician to receive that honor, after Wynton Marsalis and Ornette Coleman.
