Jazz on Film: new “Icons” offer jazz as philosophy

music by John Scofield, Avishai Cohen, film clip, and commentary

For anyone who’s gotten into a discussion about what jazz is and is not, this one’s for you. For DJs and aficionados who read album liner notes and magazines and scour the record store bins this one is for you too. For all the people who are curious about jazz and what’s happening today this is one you need to see. I predict that after watching “Icons Among Us-Jazz in the Present Tense” (2009, directed by Michael Rivoira, Lars Larson and Peter Vogt), you’ll want to find someone to have coffee or drinks with and talk through what you just saw, and you’ll want to hear more of the music that is in it. It’s that deep.

This documentary originally aired on the Documentary Channel as a four-part series. It jumps headlong into the complicated philosophy of jazz as an art form and its role in society. During this 90+ minute edited DVD, we are introduced to a diverse cross-section of artists, young and old, each with incredibly thoughtful, and at times profound ideas and feelings about the meaning of their art and their commitment to developing their craft. It also shows them playing some pretty fantastic music. Just a small sample of the music includes Esperanza Spaulding at Newport, the Lincoln Center Orchestra in rehearsal, Brian Blades Fellowship Band, Donald Harrison, Roy Hargrove, Norwegian keyboard and beats master Bugge Wesselhoft, and Medeski, Martin and Wood. The DVD extras include 75 additional minutes of three concerts.

It begins with different artists talking separately about what being a jazz musician today means. We hear trumpeter Nicolas Payton waxing zen-like and letting us know that in order to understand jazz one “needs to leave the way in order to find the way” and forget all of what they have learned to be open to experiencing creating music in the moment. Wynton Marsalis opines that other art forms spend lifetimes getting deeper into their meaning but jazz is the one form where people try to get as far away from it as possible. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard states that the quietest revolution in jazz in his lifetime is going on right now by young cats who also have a real sense of vision. We meet a number of them during the film.

Players like Herbie Hancock, Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas, and Avishai Cohen express concerns that restrictions placed on the meaning of jazz that include some and exclude others, limit an artist’s growth, and ultimately is not helpful to advancing the art. They are agreement that what jazz is goes far deeper than what words can offer. Saxophonist Skerik offers the delightful metaphor,  “You will go and shop at Aisle 14 of Home Depot only! But wait, there’s 30, 40 aisles. There is so much music out there.”

Musician after musician expounds how jazz is a philosophy.  How do we know what is real goes straight to the heart of the question what is Jazz?  Herbie Hancock says that the purpose of music is to serve humanity and the purpose of one’s life is to do likewise. John Medeski says that “music should take you places, give you visions. That is [its] shamanic roots. It should take you to places inside yourself.” Critic Paul De Barros argues that unless musicians can frame their music into a cultural, historical and social way of relating to it, jazz will have no meaning to new listeners. But jazz is not simply a commodity, a thing to consume. Others say the point of their music is to change the energy in the room, to go to a place with listeners that can only be shared at that moment in the now. Young people, in particular, are searching for that energy, that in the moment feeling.

The film points out that in the 1950s and 1960s jazz records sold and jazz served as the soundtrack and the cultural roadmap for a new generation. It spoke to the restlessness of youth and the desire for freedom of expression from a conservative majority. Its artists first introduced the U.S. to the concept of what it meant to be cool. Their music also spoke to the issues of the day, integration, Civil Rights, Black liberation, and it began to bridge cultural divides bring in melodies, rhythms, and instruments from around the world.

However, by the late 1960s jazz was eclipsed, first by rock and later by reggae and rap/hip hop as the voice and style of a new generation. While there have been individual jazz artists who live politically and socially engaged lives and many who embody a spiritual approach to making music, as an art form and a genre in the last 40 years it has been somewhat drowned out by other, decidedly more popular forms of music. This is in part why some argue that jazz is dead.  Instrumental music just doesn’t move the marketplace as vocal pop does. Jazz’s fashion sense seems more rooted in the past than the future. The film takes this on in a variety of ways. Author Ashley Kahn says that the triumph of jazz is that a great musician is able to play his music in the blues world, in the hip-hop world, in the classical world, the fusion world. Name another genre where this is possible.

The film contains a great many messages about the meaning and relevance of jazz contained in this film, too many to adequately capture in a 1000+ word essay but here is one. Jazz artistry is a reflection of the best that society can be. In Jazz, a person’s race, gender, age, even whether you can see doesn’t matter. All that does is whether you can listen and whether can you play. Playing jazz is like creating the ideal of a democracy where everyone can be him or herself and is simultaneously working to create something for the greater good.  For the listener, at times the music is complicated and challenging to follow but that is mostly because it is heard in comparison to so much music that is overly simplistic and requires almost nothing from a listener. The magic of Jazz is that there are infinite possibilities of what can be created, even if you are only operating within the 12 notes of a chromatic scale. This film takes you inside those 12 notes and inside the players who care deeply about what they create. Viewing it can give you new visions about the purpose and place of jazz in your life and our society.

Music on this feature is by John Scofield, “Hottentot” from the CD A Go Go, and Avishai Cohen, “Pinzin Kinzin” from the CD Gently Disturbed.