Fusion ok - official

He’s probably not the first saxman that comes to mind as a jazz-rocker (Mike Brecker, Tom Scott, Wayne Shorter?), but Dave Liebman mounted a laudable defence of fusion in interview in the New York Times on Friday.

He says that when he gets the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award in January, it will mark the establishment’s de facto validation of the fusion aesthetic, because few, if any, recipients of the award since its inception in 1982 have been as strongly identified with fusion and its challenge to mainstream jazz conventions.

His statement ought to provoke an interesting reaction from critics such as Gary Giddins who hold that fusion was an unfortunate temptation to which jazz musicians of good taste were driven by the privations brought about by the advent of rock.

Muted magic

Anthony Coleman as Satchel Mouth

It might seem odd, given that jazz is an aural experience, but Dan Pritzker has made a silent film of the Louis Armstrong story. Nature, and jazz, abhor a vacuum though, and showings of Louis in the eastern US, 25-31 August, are being accompanied by a 10-piece band led by none other than sometime Louis-reincarnation Wynton Marsalis. The screenings also feature pianist Cecile Licad, playing music by the 19th half-Creole New Orleanian virtuoso Louis Gottschalk.

Pritzker, billionaire son of Hyatt hotel founder Jay Pritzker, was to have made his directing debut with a film on Buddy Bolden but shelved that after taking inspiration from a showing of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights accompanied by a live symphony orchestra in 2001.

The website describes the film as a “homage to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin, beautiful women and the birth of American music,” in which “the grand Storyville bordellos, alleys and cemeteries of 1907 New Orleans provide a backdrop of lust, blood and magic for the 6 year old Louis.” There is no news as yet of showings outside the US.

Jazz not fit for US

The headline might thrill the hearts of those who think Europe is now the crucible of jazz innovation, but it actually announces something rather more banal. It’s the kind of punning title that has prefaced reports on the imminent launch of the hybrid version of the Honda Jazz and reflects the fact that the new petrol/electric model is not to be sold in the US, where the car has been called the Fit since it appeared in 2001.

Another jazz car - the  Eureka Vintage

But why does Honda not use the name “Jazz” for the US model? One will look in vain for American embarrassment about the low origins of one of its greatest musical creations. It turns out “Fitta” was the original name for the car but that it was abandoned for Europe when Honda realised it was Nordic slang for female genitalia.

So no, Eurojazzophiles, America has not, as more hysterical commentators might have it, been struck through in the jazz address book. Europe has though, created its own unique jazz, albeit nothing grander than a compact hatchback.

Weather bird

Barry Harris - reluctant testee

Bebop guru Barry Harris, the man whom Joe Zawinul credited with igniting his individuality, is in London this week to hold his annual jazz piano workshops and play Pizza Express gigs.

Oddly, given his expertise, Barry has always declined to sit a blindfold test with JJ. To be fair, perhaps, like Mike Stern in a similar situation, he would prefer not to pass judgement on his fellow musicians. But one never knows - no explanation is ever forthcoming. It perhaps should be rememembered that both players are Americans and may have encountered in Leonard Feather's tests for Downbeat what Pat Martino, presented with the same proposal a few years ago, said was an experience he wasn't about to be repeating.

The story of Zawinul's creative ascendancy arises from an interview some years back in which Zawinul told me he ran into Harris on a Manhattan street and Harris said, in effect: "You play great bebop - you sound just like me." At which, said Zawinul, he vowed never to play bebop again and began developing the epochal style evinced by Weather Report.

Sonny's wild rose

Rollins and medal

Sonny Rollins was on Sunday the first jazz player to be awarded the Edward MacDowell medal. The 2010 award is for composition, although both Rollins and presenting critic Gary Giddins made the point that jazz players compose on the spot (and rightly so, since jazz solos are more often arrangements of prepared motifs than pure improvisation). The award has been made annually since 1960 by the MacDowell artists colony in New Hampshire that was founded in honour of Romantic composer Edward MacDowell (1860-1908).

The Rollins award is not entirely, or even at all, a demonstration of the classical establishment basking in the reflected demotic glory of jazz. As Rollins pointed out, he and MacDowell go back. He said: ‘Edward MacDowell’s spirit engaged me many years ago when, as a child, I was inspired by his composition To A Wild Rose. Later, I had the opportunity to make it a part of my repertoire, performing it on many occasions and eventually recording it.’

The award is perhaps a little curious since Rollins is better known as an improviser than writer. Wouldn’t Wayne Shorter, who matches the vintage equally well, have been a closer fit for his groundbreaking Blue Note compositions of the early 1960s?

But 2010 is Rollins' year. He'll be 80, Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait Of Sonny Rollins, the biography by Bob Blumenthal is issued (review by Bob Weir in October’s Jazz Journal) and he's touring to octagenarian acclaim around the world.

Swing to the left

Coltrane - captain of industry?

Outside of the obituarising and (as Philip Larkin might have it) critical whoring that constitutes much newspaper coverage of jazz, it made the national press last week when Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, revealed the spending in his department during the last year under Labour. The figures showed that £3450 was paid from public funds to Improwise, a company that offers to improve management practice by applying the “jazz model”.

According to its website, Improwise, led by “organisational management expert and jazz pianist” Alex Steele, holds workshops using a jazz quartet to show how, “over the course of a 3-minute jazz piece, you can witness the growth of a newly formed business team [and] observe the simultaneous design and manufacture of a bespoke product delivered to the customer in front of your eyes.” In language redolent of an MBA lecture it goes on to ask: “What can we learn from the jazz life cycle and apply to development and delivery of your products and services?”

Elements of jazz, such as its fondness for improvisation and its “high tolerance for uncertainty” are proposed as exemplars for organisational practice. Among those invoked as role models are Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis (examples, in their defence of the wrong note, of how to “embrace errors as new sources of learning”) and John Coltrane (one of the jazz innovators noted for “continually re-designing and re-building their products, driving future demand and markets”).

In jazz, it says, “you only do something the same way once”, but it doesn’t mention that most jazz “improvisation” amounts to a parade of practised patterns and that classical players, working from a score, interpret liberally. Nor is there any inkling that as much might be learned about improvisation from a team of gardeners presented with a empty plot. Jazz has no monopoly on creative thinking. It does, however, have an artistic mystique and left-wing cachet that makes it rather saleable to those in search of the exotic and politically correct.

Perhaps more significantly for private sector customers, the site says nothing of the fact that reliance on jazz has traditionally been a fine way to live on the breadline, go bankrupt and, latterly, live with a fat student debt - except, perhaps, for those who turn to more lucrative work such as selling the idea that business should model itself on this largely impecunious art form.

Eastwood on jazz

Clint Eastwood, jazz fan and director of Bird (1988) talks to Jamie Cullum for his BBC Radio 2 show on 7 and 14 September from 7-8pm. Amongst other things he bemoans the braininess of jazz from the late 1950s onwards, saying "Everybody started getting very serious and I think that's when it lost a lot of its spirit."