Don MacLean Got the Year Wrong

I watched the tenth DVD of the ten-disk series Jazz last night. What a relief. It’s over.

I noticed something as I made my way through the documentary. It starts out enjoyable and then turns into a big drag. Why? Bebop.

At the beginning of the series, they talked about African roots and Haitian music. That stuff may be a lot of hogwash, depending on whom you listen to, but it’s interesting. Then they moved on to New Orleans and the first real jazz. Then we learned about Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke and the other early greats.

After that, the series moved on to swing, which is wonderful music. Chick Webb. Benny Goodman. Artie Shaw.

Eventually, the program made a turn. I believe it happened when they brought up Coleman Hawkins and a seminal recording he made. “Body and Soul,” I think. He abandoned the melody and went off on his own path. If Ken Burns is to be believed, this is pretty much where bebop started. First thing you know, you’re watching Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and the music just…plain…STINKS.

I was thinking about it last night. Rock and roll is not the reason jazz died. That’s a whiny excuse. Jazz died because it became unpleasant to listen to. The musicians no longer thought about the fundamental purpose music has always served, which is to please the ear while conveying enjoyable emotional content. They only thought about cleverness. Invert a chord. Mess with the timing. Shun harmony in favor of constant dissonance. Eventually, they ended up playing music that sounded GREY. It’s like a grey wall splattered with random blotches and splashes of grey paint. A paint blob may be light grey, or it might be charcoal grey, but in the end, it’s all still grey. Nobody wants to hear that stuff.

There’s a reason musicians have always used dissonance sparingly. It’s tedious, oppressive, and melancholy. It is the sound of despair. It’s fine to toss in a few flatted notes here and there, like seasoning, but when the whole tune is dissonant, it’s like a pot of stew with a pound of cumin in it. It’s too much. The music no longer conveys things like optimism, high spirits, nostalgia, or love. It conveys pessimism and alienation. If I want pessimism and alienation, I’ll watch Andy Dick and read The Catcher in the Rye. I don’t need to torture my ears with it.

Notes are like color. What happens when you take paint in the seven colors of the spectrum and stir them together? GREY, with a little brown.

Jazz musicians seem to think the heart of music is progress. It’s not. Emotion and beauty are at the heart. It’s okay to play the way musicians did sixty or seventy years ago. There is nothing wrong with playing the way Benny Goodman did, or the way Bix Beiderbecke did. The fact that they got there first doesn’t make your contribution invalid. Combinatorics is such that there is a virtually infinite number of ways to play any song. Even “Jingle Bells.” You will never run out of ways to express yourself. You don’t have to turn the music inside-out in order to be somebody. Chopin said he never played any of his pieces the same way twice.

Classical musicians still play Chopin and Scarlatti and Mozart. Thank God. What if they decided Chopin’s waltzes were no longer fit to be heard, because the ideas were a hundred and seventy years old? What stupidity that would be. Modern pianists still do beautiful, unique things with this music. Listen to Richter, and then listen to Rubinstein. Different, but equally valuable. On the other hand, modern classical music, which is infected by the progress bug, is an abomination. It’s like sitting in a room in a dreadful De Stijl building, with the walls plastered with Jackson Pollack paintings. The point isn’t to enjoy it. The point is to be seen claiming you enjoy it. And smoking French cigarettes, if at all possible.

And the things the jazz “scientists” did…are they really that impressive? Is emphasizing a different beat rocket science? Should you get a Nobel Prize for starting measures with dissonant notes and making them resolve? It’s not string theory, believe me. It may be creative, but it’s not the discovery of relativity. It’s impressive that people can do these things on the fly, but so what? If the end result is unlistenable for a reasonably sophisticated audience, you might as well be playing silently, in your head.

I could make pizza with jakfruit sauce and limburger cheese if I wanted. I could use flour made from dried yuca. It would be highly original. Would you want to eat it? Would you wake up in the morning and think, “Man, I have to have some of that jakfruit pizza today”? Jazz musicians think too much about ingredients and not enough about the dish.

The funny thing is, the thing that killed jazz was not, itself, creative. Coming up with new musical ideas was creative. Forcing people to adopt those ideas and making them choose musical pigeonholes was the opposite of creative. No musician should think he has to do what the people around him are doing. That is one hundred and eighty degrees away from the fundamental concepts of art and creativity.

I’ll bet musicians who insisted on respecting melody and chord changes were ostracized back in the bop days. My knowledge of human nature says it must have been so. Everybody wants to be original, just like everybody else, because if you’re not the right kind of nonconformist, you’re never going to fit in. That idea is as old as the world.

Jazz people love to say the Beatles killed jazz by competing with inferior music that was easier to listen to. The Beatles didn’t kill jazz. They showed up after it was dead. There was a giant hole in our popular music. It had to be filled. Besides, other musicians had been jumping into that hole for a decade or so. The Beatles did not invent rock and roll. It was the predominant popular music in America, years before they arrived. Jazz musicians who whine about the Beatles need to be made aware of names like “Buddy Holly” and “Elvis Presley.”

If jazz musicians were currently playing music as enjoyable as Benny Goodman’s, they’d do just fine. Look at Diana Krall and Harry Connick. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to call themselves scientists, and they wouldn’t hit the trashy heights of the true giants of rap and bad dance music, but they would make a good living. Instead, they want progress. They can have it. I’d trade a thousand Keith Jarretts for one Nat Cole. I’d trade them for almost anything, just to make their music go away.

I can listen to Miles Davis, and I like some of John Coltrane’s stuff, but that’s about as far as I can stand to go. I bought two albums featuring Charlie Parker, and they’re downright obnoxious. No wonder he was depressed. “It’s brilliant.” Great. Come get it. I’ll leave it by the front door. Call me a hick. That’s fine, but remember, critics used to go wild over the stuff I listen to. I guess they were wrong.

When you come right down to it, no matter how rarely you watch the Food Channel, and no matter how little your pans cost, and no matter how unfamiliar you are with the latest foodie jargon, you will be a good cook as long as you can make a nice biscuit. A good biscuit is better than bad pheasant under glass, and very few people can make one.

The same principle applies to music. Because the musicians didn’t get that, clever jazz had no chance of survival as a popular art form.

Your Choice

Here, look at Artie Shaw and Charlie Parker. Which would you rather listen to for two hours?

By the way, Parker’s song is about his heroin dealer.

More

Interesting quotation from Miles, the autobiography of Miles Davis:

Birth of the Cool became a collector’s item, I think, out of a reaction to Bird and Dizzy’s music. Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren’t a fast listener, you couldn’t catch the humor or the feeling in their music. Their musical sound wasn’t sweet, and it didn’t have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss. Bebop didn’t have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn’t even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging–but they weren’t sweet. But Birth of the Cool was different because you could hear everything and hum it also.