by Nate Chinen
By the time of the second quartet album, Douglas was signed to a major label, RCA. He began his tenure with Soul on Soul, a tribute to the pioneering pianist, composer, and bandleader Mary Lou Williams. The most “uptown” release of Douglas’s career up to that point, it began with a jazz boogaloo called “Blue Heaven” and moved on to a clutch of other originals composed in respectful homage to Williams. (The title of the album came from Duke Ellington’s appraisal of her in his autobiography.) And at the center of the track list was a trio of Williams themes—“Aries,” from her progressive Zodiac Suite (1945); “Mary’s Idea,” from the band book of Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy (1938); and “Waltz Boogie,” a slinky theme song (1946)—arranged in a punchy, contemporary style.
Soul on Soul was an unqualified success in jazz terms, selling more than thirteen thousand copies and earning Douglas the stature of a leading figure in the music. He swept almost every eligible category in the 2000 DownBeat Critics Poll: Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, Trumpeter of the Year, and Composer of the Year. (As a measure of how quickly he had dashed from the margins to the center, he also won Talent Deserving Wider Recognition.) Some critics saw fit to champion Douglas as an alternative to Marsalis, who’d become even more of an establishment symbol since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, for his epic jazz oratorio Blood on the Fields.
The comparisons provoked some raw tensions—especially after Crouch, still the most vocal Marsalis confrere, chose to call out Douglas as the beneficiary of a pernicious agenda. In a 2003 column for JazzTimes, Crouch came out swinging: the piece, “Putting the White Man in Charge,” took aim at the institutionalized biases of a white critical establishment that purportedly hailed the likes of Douglas in order to suppress more deserving African-American counterparts. Crouch lobbed a specific attack on the critic Francis Davis (who “unintentionally makes it clear that he is intimidated by Negroes and also quite jealous of them”), but he saved his choicest barbs for the trumpeter of the hour:
Douglas, a graduate of Exeter and a dropout from the New Jersey upper middle class, is the perfect white man to lead the music “forward.” Unlike these misled uptown Negroes who spend too much time messing around with stuff like the blues and swinging, Downtown Dave brings truly new stuff into jazz, like Balkan folk material that surely predates the 20th century in which blues and jazz were born.20
Crouch’s argument naturally met with an outcry, and in what can only be described as an awkward turn, JazzTimes unceremoniously ended his column shortly thereafter. The reasons presented by the magazine’s editors had little to do with “Putting the White Man in Charge,” revolving around the difficulty of working with Crouch. But given the timing, it was all too easy to assume that a black voice had been silenced for calling out the white superstructure of his field.
Shortly after the termination of his column, Crouch stoked this very perception, writing an op-ed for Newsweek titled “The Problem with Jazz Criticism.” Writing from a stance of righteous indignation, he decried “a conspiracy of consensus based in modernist European ideas of avant gardism,”21 and made it clear he believed he’d been punished for speaking truth to power. Many of his colleagues, including Gary Giddins and the veteran jazz writer Nat Hentoff, spoke out in Crouch’s favor, without necessarily endorsing his view of the matter.
For Douglas, meanwhile, the brouhaha cemented an unfortunate perception of stark polarity between him and Marsalis. When he released his 2004 album Strange Liberation, the standard tactic in the press was to compare it with a contemporaneous new Marsalis release, The Magic Hour.
The New Republic’s David Hajdu made that contrast explicit, pitting Marsalis and Douglas against one another with a subtext of uptown vs. downtown.22 Thomas Conrad began a joint review in JazzTimes by quoting the old English saw that “comparisons are odious”—before going on to stipulate that “when it comes to Dave Douglas and Wynton Marsalis, they are also unavoidable.”23
The artists themselves had little to do with this dichotomy. Marsalis issued no denunciations of Douglas, and the respectful reticence was mutual. Still, surveying the prevailing rhetorical terrain, Crouch’s apparent nemesis Francis Davis noted in The Village Voice that “in terms of how they’re perceived, today’s trumpeters come in two varieties, Wyntons and Daves.”24
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Raising big money for jazz, ostensibly a larkish pursuit in 1989, had become standard practice by the turn of the century. It grew ever more targeted and efficient as Jazz at Lincoln Center settled into its permanent home, and other organizations began borrowing from its playbook.
One of the more prominent examples in the United States was SFJAZZ, the nonprofit presenting organization behind the long-running San Francisco Jazz Festival. In 2004, this organization formed its own repertory ensemble, the SFJAZZ Collective. Rather than a big band like the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, it was an octet, led for the first few years by Joshua Redman, and devoted in its first season to the music of Ornette Coleman. The group made a point of interspersing repertory pieces with original music by its members—and its repertory scope was wide enough to eventually include Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson as well as Wayne Shorter and Thelonious Monk. (For a couple of years, Douglas was its trumpeter.)
In another coastal parallel to Jazz at Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ moved into its own purpose-built home in 2013: a three-story, thirty-five-thousand-square-foot, $64 million building in the Hayes Valley neighborhood, one block away from Davies Symphony Hall. Funded both by foundation support and by private donations, including an anonymous lead gift of $20 million, the SFJAZZ Center opened with a season that reflected its big-tent vision of jazz. There were concerts programmed by five resident artists, including Frisell and the violinist Regina Carter. There were multi-night engagements by Mehldau, the tabla player Zakir Hussain, and the banjoist Béla Fleck. And during a gala opening, there was much conversation about what the achievement of the center might mean for jazz at large.
“Jazz at Lincoln Center has been incredibly successful,” reflected Redman in a dressing room on the second floor, “and if SFJAZZ can be successful, maybe one of the legacies will be that in the foreseeable future, they won’t be the only two. There’ll be other venues, other buildings for jazz that can enter the discussion.”25
As if to waste no time in fulfilling that prophecy, a small but state-of-the-art new jazz space opened the following year in St. Louis, Missouri. The Harold and Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz, a $10 million complex, was funded by a local African-American businessman with an abiding love of jazz. The centerpiece of the facility was the Ferring Jazz Bistro—formerly the Jazz Bistro, a beloved club, newly renovated and expanded. To break in the 220-seat space in the fall of 2014, some marquee guests were brought in from out of town: the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, featuring Wynton Marsalis.
The Knitting Factory closed its Tribeca anchor in 2009, opening a smaller space in Brooklyn with little if any attachment to jazz. (By then it had been bought by a company that opened satellite Knitting Factory clubs in Los Angeles, Spokane, and Boise. Dorf had parted ways with the organization in 2002.)
The Stone, which Zorn opened in 2005 in a former Chinese restaurant on Avenue C, saw a dozen years of resolute and uncompromising musical activity. For much of that time the space was programmed by a different artist curator each month—not just Zorn and his peers but also an expanding circle of improvisers and composers, from across a range of creative disciplines. Beginning in 2013, Zorn changed the programmatic format to a series of weeklong artist residencies, strongly encouraging his curators to present something different on each night of the run. The space functioned as a laboratory for new works, a gravitational center for the contemporary avant-garde, and a no-frills showcase with a high bar for artistic integrity. (No drinks were served at the Stone, and all door proceeds went directly to the musicians.)
Zorn an
nounced the end of this iteration of the Stone at the end of 2016. He then made arrangements to reopen the space in partnership with a prominent institution, the New School. The Stone at the New School, as this venture was named, would present music five nights a week, in accordance with the artist-as-curator model. The New School agreed to share operating and administrative expenses, and allow the venue to operate rent-free in the Glass Box Theater, an aptly named space just off the lobby of Arnhold Hall, the New School’s performing-arts hub, with one street-facing glass wall and another one that faces the interior lobby.
“It was fun and exciting to play on a dirty corner in the East Village,” Zorn told me in the office of Richard Kessler, the New School’s executive dean for performing arts. “Now I think this music really deserves to be seen in a different way.”
Careful to note that the Stone had not been squeezed out by rising rents or zoning issues, as was the case with Tonic and some other New York venues, Zorn described his decision as a matter of outgrowing the present circumstances, and also of expanding the possibilities for audience engagement. “With the landscape that we now have politically, economically, socially, culturally—I think ‘outreach’ is a good word,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to take something that’s really edgy, really honest, really imaginative, really creative, and take it out of some dark little marginalized corner space and into a place where people are going to see it. People that never even knew something like that existed are going to be exposed to it. We’re one block from a major subway. We’re really in the middle of the Village now. And we’re at an institution that’s been around for a hundred years, that has garnered great respect.”26
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Jazz at Lincoln Center crossed the threshold of its thirtieth anniversary at full steam, having preserved its aesthetic mission and its place in the cultural firmament. The organization’s programming still often skewed historical, with tributes to figures like Ellington, Coltrane, and Monk. But there was also a good deal of original music premiered under the organization’s auspices, composed by Marsalis and other members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, like the bassist Carlos Henriquez and the multireedist Ted Nash. As a composer, Marsalis remained keen as ever in his desire to situate jazz in a larger continuum, composing violin concertos, ballets, a Blues Symphony. His Abyssinian Mass, premiered in 2008, is a sweeping rollick custom-designed as a collaboration with the Abyssinian Baptist Church Gospel Choir. And a zippy, engaging suite premiered in 2016, called Spaces, put the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in dialogue with two brilliant young dancers, Lil Buck and Jared Grimes.
Marsalis made no revisions to his firm definition of jazz, as he quickly assured anyone with the gall to ask. But as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, he seemed to grow less interested in endlessly relitigating the issue. One concert in the Rose Theater in 2009 featured the Five Peace Band, a fusion supergroup with Chick Corea on synthesizers and piano and John McLaughlin on electric guitar. Later that year in the same hall, Ornette Coleman appeared with his quartet. There were enthusiastic collaborations between the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and friendly interlopers like Willie Nelson and Paul Simon.
And in the spring of 2017 there was an eye-catching weekend run in the Appel Room, the handsome, glass-faced amphitheater at the front of the Rose Hall complex. It featured Douglas leading New Sanctuary, an update of what had arguably been his least “uptown” project, steeped in strategies of noise, free improv, and electronic manipulation. The personnel included several prominent jazz avant-gardists well into their seventies: trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, alto saxophonist Oliver Lake, and drummer Andrew Cyrille. “It’s not every day you get to play with your heroes,” Douglas said from the stage.
But his ensemble was also well stocked with peers who had at one time been associated with the downtown scene in general, and the Knitting Factory in particular: Marc Ribot on guitar, Myra Melford on piano, Mark Dresser on bass, and Susie Ibarra on drums. During each performance, the musicians worked in a shifting series of configurations, while the others sat on either side of the stage. This methodology faintly evoked faraway loft-scene protocols—even as the band stood against a gleaming cityscape, the noiseless drift of headlights and taillights along Central Park South.
The music was a far cry from jazz historicism, and a riotously odd fit for the House of Swing. But Douglas had no use for yelping provocations, choosing instead to thank Jazz at Lincoln Center for its commission. Late in the performance, before an all-hands-on-deck finale, he also alluded to the state of political discourse in the early phases of a new presidential administration—an implicit reminder that some divisions are more meaningful than others.
“We’re all in this together,” Douglas said, his voice quavering slightly. “We shall overcome.”
Tim Berne, Fulton Street Maul (CBS)
Dave Douglas, Parallel Worlds (Soul Note)
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, All Jazz Is Modern: 30 Years of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Volume 1 (Blue Engine)
John Zorn, The Big Gundown (Nonesuch)
John Zorn’s Masada, Live in Jerusalem 1994 (Tzadik)
4
Play the Mountain
To hear him tell it, Steve Coleman had his first bolt of inspiration one afternoon on the South Side of Chicago, circa 1977. He was practicing his alto saxophone in a city park when he noticed some bees scudding about nearby. And in that moment, he was transfixed by their flight patterns, which seemed governed by an elaborate and esoteric schema.
“It’s totally unexpected that I would make any kind of musical connection to this at that time,” he recalled, a little over two decades later. “The bees were really just bothering me as I was practicing. But as I watched the bees, something—kind of a flash—hit me, and that took years to work out.”1
Some artists arrive at a mode of expression so intensely original that it’s tempting to place their work outside any known continuum. Coleman has been one of the most independent-minded, intently focused, and impactful musicians in the jazz idiom since he began releasing his own albums, in the mid-eighties. His creative output since has been exceptional in both its conceptual daring and its driving sense of purpose. But over the years, that body of work has also been framed, more often than not, as an exotic peninsula jutting out from the mainland, with only a provisional connection to the mainstream jazz tradition. Coleman might even put it that way himself, given his sharp ambivalence about the word “jazz,” and all of the reductive or prescriptive ways it has been deployed.
At the same time, he has made an imposingly deep study of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, among other recognizable figures. He considers himself a part of the same lineage, pursuing a similar process of transformation. With his flagship band, a changeable unit known as Five Elements, Coleman has put forward an audacious, insightful, and confluent style that lays claim to the broad sweep of jazz harmony and much else besides: cyclical rhythmic strategies adapted from West African and South Asian musics; numerological precepts inspired by ancient Egyptology and Yoruban orishas; the complex processes of human biological systems; the snap and trance of a James Brown funk groove.
A typical performance by Coleman and Five Elements, to the extent that you can responsibly envision such a thing, takes the form of a slithery, unbroken arc, with jazz-historical references popping up in a refractively cubist mode. You might hear the chord progression for a songbook standard like “Autumn Leaves,” stretched over a loping, asymmetrical pulse. Or Thelonious Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight,” obliquely drawn in shadow and line. Or a deconstruction of Parker’s “Confirmation,” identifiable by a few scraps of melody, glinting like sea glass scattered along a shore. You’d surely also hear pieces of Coleman’s own authorship, pugnacious, brisk, and taut.
Five Elements is a changeable proposition, and while ther
e have been several long-term editions of the band, it’s built to accommodate the occasional interloping acolyte. Because of this policy, Coleman’s band has been an essential crucible for many leading jazz artists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Some, like the tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, would begin their own solo careers in a Colemanesque sonic matrix before branching out on their own paths. Others, like the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, would encounter Coleman at a formative stage, internalize his philosophy, and apply it to a far different-sounding range of music. Vijay Iyer, one of a handful of important pianists to claim Coleman as a mentor, once memorably placed his influence on a heroic scale: “To me, Steve’s as important as Coltrane,” Iyer told JazzTimes. “He has contributed an equal amount to the history of the music. He deserves to be placed in the pantheon of pioneering artists.”2
The declarative panache of the quote is tempered only slightly by the qualifier. “To me…” implies personal opinion, but Iyer is hardly speaking for himself alone. Through dauntless persistence, a horizonless aesthetic, and a direct, far-reaching influence, Coleman has not only carved out a space along jazz’s contemporary frontier but also altered its tone and trajectory in the early twenty-first century.
For his part, Coleman sees himself merely carrying out an objective, fulfilling the vision that first revealed itself in that Chicago park early in his training. Bees were only the start of it. “I wanted to be able to look at a mountain and play the mountain,” he told a European interviewer in 2006. He went on: