White Jazz

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

White jazz--those were the words that kept running through my head. Why?
This evening I listened to three of America's finest jazz musicians tonight
at Birdland: Paul Bley on piano, Gary Peacock on bass and Paul Motian on
drums. And they all happen to be white.

"White Jazz" is the title of a James McElroy novel set in LA in the 1950s.
This is the time and place that keeps summoning McElroy. (It also is the
setting of his novel "LA Confidential," that inspired the script of the
blockbuster film.) For McElroy, white jazz is synonymous with West Coast
Jazz. Several musicians identified with this style function as minor
characters in his novel, including Art Pepper, the great saxophone player
who died a few years ago.

Pepper's "Straight Life" is one of the great jazz autobiographies. The book
was the joint effort of Pepper and his wife Laurie, the daughter of a Los
Angeles Trotskyist steelworker. Pepper had deep conflicts about race. One
of the most painful passages in "Straight Life" describes his feelings of
rejection after some black musicians tell him that they do not want to play
with a white man. He internalized his pain and became resentful of all
black musicians. In the 1950s, Pepper became a heroin addict and ended up
San Quentin after a grand larceny conviction. After his release in the
1960s, he discovered the recordings of John Coltrane and turned his back on
the West Coast style and developed a harder and "blacker" sound. He also
started working more with black musicians.

There really isn't such a thing as white jazz, just musicians who are
white. Yet, on the other hand, there have been distinct currents since the
beginning of jazz that do owe something to the racial identity of the
innovators. Take Bix Beiderbecke for example. Critics and historians would
consider Bix to be the prototypical white jazz musician, if that term has
any meaning at all. This cornet player appeared like a meteor in the 1920s
and had a brief but brilliant career until booze and consumption killed
him. His black counterpart was Louis Armstrong, whom he revered.
Armstrong's inspiration was the blues and ragtime, while Beiderbecke looked
toward the European classics. His "In A Mist," recorded shortly before his
death, is a lovely mixture of Debussyan harmonies and jazz syncopation
played on a piano.

The first time I heard live jazz was at Bard College in 1961. Paul Bley led
the band which featured Pharoah Sanders on saxophone. Sanders, along with
Coltrane and Archie Shepp, was to become a key figure in the 1960's
revolution in jazz, which black musicians spearheaded under the influence
of black nationalism. But this was early enough so that a distinctly
"white" stylist like Bley and someone like Pharoah Sanders could work
together. In a few years, a racial divide would make this all but impossible.

Paul Bley, Bill Evans and Lenny Tristano: these are three of the great
white pianists of the post-WWII era. Bley is still going strong, while
Evans and Tristano died long ago. Their roots certainly are in the
Beiderbecke tradition. The blues are a secondary element in their
performances. Each of them experimented with meter and harmony, using
techniques that suggest European influences, from Bach to Bartok. During
the 1950s and 60s, when black pianists were digging deeper and deeper into
the African-American experience through the use of gospel and blues, their
white counterparts were exploring music as a pure form. The racial and
musical divide was fairly deep, with the occasional pilgrimage made by
someone like Art Pepper.

I booked Evans for a concert at Bard College in 1964. He was deep in his
heroin habit at the time and had hardly a word to say to anybody. He sat
down at the Boesendorfer in a small recital hall on a warm Saturday night
in October and played for two hours nonstop. It was one of the finest
performances I have ever heard in my life. I have a vivid recollection of a
young art major sculpting a lion with fallen leaves outside the hall. Bill
Evans played in a deeply lyrical style, often in a trio with Gary Peacock
and Paul Motian. He transformed forgettable songs like "Nancy With the
Smiling Face," a Sinatra favorite, into gentle beguiling works of art. As
he sat at the keyboard, he could never stop thinking about where he would
get his next fix.

Tristano was a blind pianist who lived in Long Island and made few club
dates or recordings. He was a great teacher, however, and helped dozens of
students become solid professionals, including a singer named Carla White.
Carla co-led a band in the 1980s with Manny Duran, a polished trumpet
player with a classic bebop style. He is 70 now and has been playing
professionally since the late 1930s. He once told me how he started out in
jazz.

"I was listening to my radio in 1938 and all of a sudden I heard this
trumpet. It was Louis Armstrong and I couldn't believe my ears. I had never
heard anything that great in my life. That's what I wanted to do, play like
that."

So Manny Duran started out in a Mariachi band called "Los Gallos," the
roosters. "We called ourselves that because we used to play all night long
and welcome the dawn. Man, people used to feed us and serve us drinks even
when nobody had money. That was most of the time in the 1930s, especially
in Mexican neighborhoods in San Antonio. But we had fun." I interviewed
Manny and Carla for a jazz magazine once. When they made their first
record, Nat Hentoff wrote the liner notes. He cribbed my interview. I think
it's the best liner notes he ever wrote.

There is no longer a strong black identity in jazz, as there is not much of
a black nationalist movement. Most young black jazz musicians follow in the
footsteps of Wynton Marsalis, whom some people regard as a neoconservative.
He is the curator of the jazz program at Lincoln Center. His partner is
Stanley Crouch, the author of "The Hanging Judge," that takes aim at black
nationalism, rap music, and other pet peeves. Marsalis and Crouch view the
black revolution in jazz of the 1960s as a horrible excess akin to
bra-burning or bellbottom jeans. They are trying to recreate the classic
sound of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, but what comes out has more of a
museum quality than anything else. Part of the problem is that the vacuum
in black politics creates a cultural vacuum as well.

Jazz, like left politics, is marking time right now. It has always been
deeply sensitized to shifts in American society. The white, or West Coast,
jazz of the 1950s captured the detachment of a certain relatively
privileged layer of society from mainstream values. It adopted an
existentially "cool," mask-like form rather than one of protest. What could
be a more perfect analogy for the early nuclear age than an art-form that
seemed almost numb at times. In a few years, black jazz would find its own
unique voice as well, as the civil rights movement took shape. Charlie
Mingus was the prophet of this music, who wrote angry but beautiful songs
inspired by such events as the Little Rock desegregation battle. These
artistic dichotomies have deep roots in the racial contradictions of
American society. A new music would engage with these contradictions and
move to a higher level, but this can only occur when society itself
provides the inspiration. It will be obvious when that moment is at hand.

Louis Proyect