Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

  The record producers, critics, and other nonmusicians who dub them Young Lions tend to be too committed to the eternal verities of jazz, to its traditional structural and rhythmic language, to be entirely comfortable with the frequently messy and sometimes anarchic work of the radicals.16

  But the disdain for experimental practices outside certain parameters was vociferously shared by Marsalis, who declaimed the avant-garde as a harbor for those too lazy or incapable to seriously engage with technique. And fusion, as he saw it, was empty and crass.

  Marsalis’s rhetoric and example were alluring to a mass audience: Time magazine put him on its cover in 1990 beside a boldfaced headline proclaiming “The New Jazz Age.” Among the tropes laid out uncritically therein was the claim that jazz “almost died in the 1970s,” reinforcing the dubious prospect of resurrection.

  What heralded this bright new age was a second pack of Lions, precocious torchbearers groomed by the record industry to fit a reassuring image and narrative. As a cover story in The New York Times Magazine put it, they were “Young, Gifted and Cool,” equipped with major-label resources, including meticulous wardrobe and grooming consultation. Among those in this crew were the Hammond B-3 organist Joey DeFrancesco, the guitarist Mark Whitfield, the pianist Marcus Roberts, and the trumpeter Roy Hargrove.

  A package called Jazz Futures, conceived by Wein around the same time, gathered a cadre of these hyped young players in one touring band; the roster included Hargrove, Whitfield, the pianist Benny Green, and the bassist Christian McBride. The group performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, released a live album on a major label, and seemed to formalize a consensus around the new cream of the crop. They mostly stuck to a grooving hard-bop mode, recalling the 1950s and early ’60s, and barely touching the dissonance and rhythmic gamesmanship that Marsalis had explored on his first few albums.

  With developments like these, a message was absorbed by the aspiring next generation of musicians: that there was a beaten path to a successful career in the jazz mainstream, and that it ran through the standard songbook, the bebop stylebook, and a regulation suit and tie. By the mid-nineties, a seasoned jazz critic (Francis Davis again) could reflect on this climate and come to a rueful conclusion: “The real story is the commodification of youth.”17 He didn’t mention Jazz Futures, which was just as well: that might have been too on the nose, given the name’s connotation of a busy trading floor.

  The encouraging story told by the Young Lions’ rise—from a certain angle, a perfect outcome for the crisis of continuity that the 1970s had seemed to pose—was dependent on the perception of jazz as a fixed set of values. Among them was a nobility of purpose that ran contrary to the shiny prerogatives of pop. But this led to a weird insularity from the rest of the culture, as the scholar Ronald Radano has observed: “It is as if jazz has survived as a protected gem of black creative wisdom, growing and changing yet miraculously unaffected by the overarching shifts in American life.”18

  Marsalis, for one, was determined to pull the culture along with him, carving out a space for jazz that was enlightened, enfranchised, and recognized as such. There were, of course, many other possibilities. Some followed a staunchly alternative path, and others ran in crooked parallel. A few eventually proceeded from the subversive premise that “Rockit” and “Knozz-Moe-King” weren’t the diametric poles they’d been made out to be.

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  Kamasi Washington mostly toiled in a journeyman’s anonymity before overnight success located him in his mid-thirties. Raised in the working-class African-American communities of South Central and Inglewood during the crack cocaine epidemic and its related spasms of gang violence, he was a product of West Coast hip-hop culture—but also like Marsalis the son of an underappreciated jazz musician, the saxophonist and flutist Rickey Washington. When he made The Epic, the younger Washington chose to open the album with a meaty, bobbing overture redolent of Young Lion dynamics, with a slick update in production values. He called it “Change of the Guard,” which sounds like a proclamation of self-arrival. But Washington had different implications in mind, as he told Josef Woodard in an interview for DownBeat:

  It was written for my dad, for the generation of musicians who didn’t necessarily make albums or get out there in a way that people would really know about them. It was almost like a generation lost, that generation of guys who graduated from high school in the ’70s. The generation after them, with Wynton and those guys, got the spotlight. That’s why I wrote “Change of the Guard”—for that generation of musicians in L.A. Usually, the whole world sees this passing of the baton, but nothing like that happened here.19

  Washington decided to pursue jazz himself as a middle schooler, spurred in part by hearing records by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers—quite possibly including the early-eighties edition that featured the Marsalis brothers. Blakey’s music spoke to him culturally, not as a dispatch from some temple of high culture but as a word from the street: “West Coast hip-hop had that heavy sense of the beat, and Art Blakey played with that, too. It sounded like something that Dre would have sampled.”20

  Starting on alto saxophone, Washington soon graduated to his father’s tenor, on which he began to find a voice. Among his mentors was a music teacher in Watts named Reggie Andrews, who had formed a Central LA magnet ensemble, the Multi School Jazz Band. The band was filled with other talented and industrious young players, like the brothers Stephen Bruner and Ronald Bruner Jr., virtuosos on, respectively, bass and drums; Ryan Porter, a trombonist; Miles Mosley, a bassist; and Cameron Graves, a pianist.

  This familylike peer group of musicians, along with Tony Austin, a drummer of similar taste and ambition, would eventually form an artist collective called the West Coast Get Down, workshopping one another’s music and playing in one another’s bands, including what would become the Next Step.

  First, though, they all freelanced for an array of pop and R&B artists. Washington had formative experience in a big band led by the venerable composer Gerald Wilson, but his earliest touring opportunity came with Snoop Dogg, the sly, drawling gangsta rapper. It arrived via a recommendation from another Multi School Jazz Band alum, Terrace Martin. Years later, Martin—an alto saxophonist with a honeyed, imploring tone, and a shrewd producer of hip-hop and R&B besides—would again bring Washington into the hazy stir of a hip-hop production. This time it was To Pimp a Butterfly, a magnum opus by Kendrick Lamar that was, by an alignment of critical acclamation and popular approval, 2015’s album of the year.

  Washington plays on just one track of To Pimp a Butterfly, a lacerating confessional titled “u.” But he wrote all of the album’s string arrangements, and because of the pervasive presence of his peers—notably Martin, on alto saxophone and production, and Stephen Bruner, aka Thundercat, on electric bass and ethereal vocal falsetto—his contribution felt larger and weightier. As a lone operator, Washington might have gone unheralded in the general public, like Eli Fontaine, the Motown saxophonist who played the bittersweet alto solo on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” But there was strength in solidarity, and of course in excellent timing. Few, if any, of those countless articles about Washington failed to mention his connection to Kendrick Lamar, often squarely in the headline. (Esquire again: “The Robe-Wearing, Kendrick-Collaborating Genius Who Might Just Save Jazz.”)

  Washington steered clear of hip-hop beats or electronic production on The Epic, favoring a style more in tune with Alice Coltrane’s astral soul jazz. The cover art encouraged this interpretation, depicting the tenor saxophonist against a sci-fi backdrop of interplanetary alignment, a cosmic medallion resting on his chest. It was no wonder so many people mentioned him in the same breath as Coltrane, whose late-period music vibrated with a questing spirituality, and Sanders, who extended that agenda for the Aquarian age.

  And The Epic—recorded during a marathon block of studio time that also yielded albums for the other members o
f the West Coast Get Down—recalls that lineage unabashedly. A manifesto of vaulting intensity and monumental scale, it crashes through an Afrocentric range of styles: surging hard-bop, steroidal jazz-funk, viscous soul. There are heavy, reverberating echoes of the black church, and not only on the tracks where Washington used a gospel choir and strings. There’s tremendous vitality to the music, even in those moments when it feels like an eighteen-wheeler rig hurtling too fast down a two-lane highway—maybe in those moments most of all.

  The album also has tedious ruts and draggy patches, themes that feel overstated or undercooked. Its sprawl and all-around muchness are an aesthetic choice, an effective one, but it can be hard to see through the muddle. As for the musicianship, it’s a feast of imploring spirit and fervor, but less impressive when subjected to close scrutiny. Washington’s own mix of lyrical cries, expressive overblowing, and machinelike patternwork doesn’t actually much recall Coltrane or Sanders so much as a consortium of strong but lesser lights—like Ernie Watts, an LA session ace steeped in midcentury bebop and rhythm-and-blues, or Grover Washington Jr. (no relation), a soulful melodist who pointed the way to smooth jazz.

  In any case, it would have been impossible to top The Epic—a fact that Washington tacitly acknowledged by making his next statement not in album form but rather at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Harmony of Difference, as he called this piece, was a multimedia installation involving film as well as music. Music was accompanied by moving images on three walls of the gallery space: mainly slow, panning video depicting abstract paintings by Washington’s sister Amani. The music itself, later released as an EP, adhered to the sound and personnel of The Epic, branching out at various points into slo-mo disco or heaving samba. The tunes bore evocative, ponderous one-word titles, like “Desire,” “Humility,” and “Knowledge.”

  The finale, “Truth,” wove in elements from each of the five preceding tracks. In the installation it came paired with a fourteen-minute film conceived by Washington and directed by AG Rojas. The film—a stylish, dreamily lit procession of images shot in South Central and East Los Angeles—features a lot of ocean spray, flower petals, and interstellar nebula. Young black faces are caught in contemplative poses. And during the tenor solo that takes up the middle portion of the track, the camera lingers on an iconic still image: the Roy DeCarava photograph known as Ellington Session Break, 1954. In the picture, two musicians sit on folding chairs in a stark, high-ceilinged room (New York’s Webster Hall). They’re facing different directions, each immersed in a newspaper, while a coat rack hulks in the foreground, laden with topcoats and fedoras. Using digital tools and a trick of perspective, the video slowly moves in on the figure in the corner, the one with both feet resting on the lowest rung of a ladder. Just before a cutaway, he turns his head, as if aware of our creeping eye.

  This Ellingtonian throwback was more than an arbitrary reference. On Harmony of Difference as on The Epic, Washington’s tone, with its growly rasp, occasionally recalls Ben Webster, the irreplaceable tenor saxophonist in Ellington’s bands from the mid-1930s to the early ’40s. There’s a famous DeCarava photograph of Webster and John Coltrane locked in an embrace, the younger saxophonist burying his head in the older’s lapel. The image is tightly framed, ineffable, a blur of movement and emotion. But one thing it communicates clearly to a jazz viewer today is the generational chain of succession. Webster—in his early fifties in this photograph, older than Coltrane would ever live to be—seems to embody a kind of harboring reassurance. “It may look as if he is giving Coltrane his blessing, but it’s impossible to tell whether we are witnessing a greeting or a leave-taking,”21 the critic Geoff Dyer has observed.

  For Washington, whose vocation dictates that he grapple with both Coltrane and Webster, jazz’s deep legacy and iconography could probably feel at times like a hall of mirrors. His apparent solution was a pick-and-choose historical veneration, along with a canny sense of the weight that he displaces in his time. His innovations rest mainly in presentation and framing, and in the power of conviction that keeps the West Coast Get Down from spinning out into a dozen directions. What rattled some of his jazz detractors was the absence of a disciplined new voice. The usual attention-grabbing young jazz arrival comes with some thoughtful tweak to the conventions of the instrument. There was no question that Washington exerts a commanding presence with his horn, but he seemed to be the rare example of a major arrival in jazz who brings no new vocabulary or inflection to his instrument.

  What he did bring was a robust, affirming narrative for a music plagued with uncertainties. He talked about the spirit of jazz in terms of communicative exchange and spiritual inquiry—what he took to be universal human truths, with the broadest possible appeal. And his attitude about the music’s popularity was defiantly sanguine, the very picture of positive thinking. “I’ve never believed in the idea that jazz is dying and people don’t like it,” he said. “People who have taken the time to investigate jazz, they like it for their whole lives.”22

  By this light, Washington and his colleagues were doing the work of Johnny Appleseed across a sprawling topography. Whether the masses they reached could be converted into a new generation of aficionados was ultimately not his concern. The reigning class of jazz aficionados, after all, included a lot of people unimpressed by Washington’s contribution to the methodology of the tenor, and even ambivalent about the fervent crush of his music.

  It’s possible to hold views like these and still recognize his importance as an emblem and a catalyst. Washington swept in with a combination of traits ideally suited to his moment, some inherent and others projected onto him. He wasn’t the first to be anointed in this way. He surely won’t be the last.

  Arthur Blythe, In the Tradition (Columbia)

  Herbie Hancock, Future Shock (Columbia)

  Wynton Marsalis, Black Codes (From the Underground) (Columbia)

  Wynton Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis (Columbia)

  Kamasi Washington, The Epic (Brainfeeder)

  2

  From This Moment On

  Introducing Brad Mehldau opens with a quick spray of staccato: tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, like someone knocking impatiently at a door. It’s the preface to Mehldau’s arrangement of a show tune, “It Might As Well Be Spring,” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein film musical State Fair. The song had long been a verifiable jazz standard, with dozens of canonical recordings: by singers like Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone, and by others ranging from the pianist Bill Evans to the trumpeter Clifford Brown.

  Mehldau’s version arrived in 1995, precisely half a century after the line “I am starry eyed and vaguely discontented” made its way into the popular lexicon. He and his trio had made a neat structural modification to the tune, tinkering with its pulse in a way that their syncopated prelude set in clear relief. Instead of the even 4/4 cadence known as common time, the track races along in 7/8, creating the impression of a rhythmic hiccup, or a sprint with a hitch in its stride.

  Jazz musicians have been dabbling in irregular meters since well before Dave Brubeck’s enormously popular 1959 album Time Out, which made them an exotic selling point. What’s striking about Mehldau’s performance is where he ventures after the opening vamp, phrasing the melody in a cool, flowing cadence even as his partners, the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Jorge Rossy, busy themselves with percolating chatter behind him. In his articulation of the theme, and in a solo full of deft intricacies punctuated with breathlike pauses, Mehldau gives the song a sleek, appealing contour. His performance doesn’t feel herky-jerky or cerebral. It feels natural, even inevitable.

  With hindsight, in fact, it’s almost too easy to see how this version of “It Might As Well Be Spring” became holy writ for a legion of subsequent jazz pianists, many of whom would never dream of playing the song in pedestrian 4/4. (When the ballyhooed piano prodigy Joey Alexander r
ecorded his debut album in 2014, it featured a version of the tune in the same 7/8 meter—and with Grenadier on bass, for good measure.)

  Like so much about Mehldau’s career, “It Might As Well Be Spring” proposes a personal realignment of the jazz-piano continuum, a mode of playing rooted in the postbop tradition but reaching in earnest toward an identifiable new dialect. It was also the official shot across the bow by an artist who, by virtue of timing as much as temperament, would soon become jazz’s version of a hyperliterate, half-reluctant generational symbol. An inward-seeking rhapsodist with a wary ambivalence about jazz’s canon and conventions, Mehldau cut the figure of a late-twentieth-century existential hero, with a creative identity both restless and self-directed.

  His virtuoso style—a confluence of silvery precision, ambidextrous ease, floating equilibrium, and courtly lyricism—has traveled widely since Introducing Brad Mehldau. You’ll find traces of it among a remarkably diverse coalition of gifted younger pianists, from Fabian Almazan to Glenn Zaleski. (Sometimes you’ll find more than traces.) A few inheritors, like Gerald Clayton, have openly acknowledged the debt, framing Mehldau’s idiomatic signature as an essential link in the evolution of jazz piano. Mehldau was the first member of his peer group to exert this level of influence, and in that sense he’s a bridge from jazz’s late neoclassical era to its postmillennial mainstream. If you were an improvising pianist coming up at any point since the mid-1990s, he was as plainly unavoidable a point of reference as McCoy Tyner, Wynton Kelly, or Ahmad Jamal—a few of the essential figures in his heroes’ gallery, back when he was getting started.