(From Newsweek, December 12, 1966) - USA
© Paul D. Zimmerman & Ruth Ross

THE NEW JAZZ

BY PAUL D. ZIMMERMAN & RUTH ROSS

THE
NEW
JAZZ

          On Nov. 17, 1959, a bearded prophet from Texas named Ornette Coleman carried his white plastic alto saxophone into New York’s Five-Spot Café and blew the jazz world to pieces. The molten, unchained improvisation of Coleman and his waistcoated trio of young musicians confused many listeners and even infuriated many jazzmen. Some walked out in disgust. English critic Kenneth Tynan cried, “They have gone too far.” But Leonard Bernstein leaped to the stand to embrace the new musicians, and advanced jazzmen such as conservatory-trained John Lewis proclaimed Coleman the apostle of a new age. The most violent, ambitious revolution in the history of jazz had begun.
          The rhythms of jazz have always been the rhythms of revolution, a personal revolution beyond all ideology and dogma. They were created by the American Negro who could find freedom only in such private and personal rhythms. Ironically, this was his greatest cultural gift to his country and became the most characteristic expression of that country. The history of jazz itself is a history of personal revolutions—the clear, classic, galvanizing trumpet calls of Louis Armstrong; the proud, complex elegance of Duke Ellington; the melodic eruptions of the Bird, Charlie Parker; and now Coleman’s searing self-revelations that triggered what has come to be known as the New Thing. The New Thing is the dominant movement in jazz today, enlisting the energies of a whole generation of remarkable young Negroes and reflecting, as jazz always does, the surrounding tensions of urban America.
          Fury:Its forms have been hammered out by the urgencies of a new Negro sensibility—which can produce the anguished sensitivity of a James Baldwin, the civilized sagacity of a Ralph Ellison, the proud dignity of a march on Washington—or the blind fury of a Watts riot. Racial pride, black consciousness, the frustrated anger of the exploited, the cry for equality and dignity and the demand for artistic legitimacy are the new music’s themes. “The jazz revolution is not a programmatic black-power movement,” critic Nat Hentoff points out. “It believes in soul and law and freedom. There’s almost a touching belief in music as a cleansing, purifying, liberating force, as if jazzmen were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They all want to change the social system through their music.”
          The esthetics of the new music is also its politics—freedom. The new jazzmen have ripped jazz from its formal moorings. Like their contemporaries in painting, theater, films and poetry, their art has become nothing but itself—pure sound, spontaneously created under the pressure of feeling and thought—not variations on a theme, not ruminations on a harmonic structure, but pure melody driven by inspiration. This is the music of Coleman and of older men such as pianist Thelonious Monk and tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, who in 1957, he says, “had a vision of the new music but I didn’t know how to realize it. It’s taken various men to make it manifest.” Some of these men are saxophonists Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Marion Brown and Archie Shepp, the brilliant pianist Cecil Taylor, and composer-pianist-leader Sun Ra whose “cosmic philosophy” and mystical mumbo-jumbo cannot conceal a unique musical talent.
          The new jazz is as personal as street cry and as highly organized as the most sophisticated concoctions of the classical avant-garde. Last month at Slugs’ Saloon in New York’s East Village, listeners packed back to the doors heard Ornette Coleman’s trio play the New Thing at its best. From Coleman’s new golden horn, golden sound in endless streams painted the house. Hoots and hollers, dizzy skidding scales, instant, fresh melodies, slashes of sound—then quiet, sweet lamentations in crying harmony with bassist David Izenzon while drummer Charlie Moffett beat out the pulse of this complex new organism. But, always, there was freedom—each man his own composer, creating and listening in a triple loneliness. There were no set harmonies, only the harmonies of crossing train tracks, of melodies that embrace and go their own way. “My music has its own law and order,” says Coleman. “I don’t have to create from the old patterns.”

Izenzon and Coleman: ‘I feel I can add to American culture’

          Hurt: He first started framing this new order in the 1950s in California and paid in blood and pain to enforce it. “The style being played in those days was more or less new melodic lines built on old chord structures. When I started composing my own melodies right on the spot,” recalls Coleman, “they kept throwing me off the bandstands. I wondered what I was doing wrong. But the only thing that was really wrong was that the guys didn’t know what I was doing. I remember four very famous jazzmen in Los Angeles let me play with them. Five seconds later they all walked off and left me alone before 500 people. I kept wondering why I shouldn’t play the way I want as long as it didn’t harm anybody. I was very hurt.”
          Coleman’s whole effort as a musician and a man has been to put this hurt behind him, and a thousand other hurts—his Jim Crow, dirt-poor Texas youth, his vicious beating in Baton Rouge in 1949 by locals who resented his music, his brutal bandstand snubbings. “The present begins when I start playing my music,” he says. “We have to create a present that justifies what we are and what we do. I do that in my music. Living in the present without letting the past affect you is the hardest thing you can imagine. A white American can wake up in the morning without having any past on his mind. But I can’t, at least not yet. Persecution stays in the memory.
          Barrier: Coleman, 36, has survived his past unembittered. He jokingly calls his life “the American nightmare” and “a very, very sad story,” but there have been rewards, too. “I’ve gotten the most ridiculous letters from people who put down my music,” he recalls, “and later they come up to me and hug me on the street.” But his ultimate aspiration, to make a lasting contribution to the culture of a color-blind America, is as distant as ever. “White people tend to see me as a Negro first, then as a human being. That creates a barrier. I feel I can add to American culture and help uplift it. I don’t want to be condemned by white people who are worrying about Negroes in general. If they can’t look for the pure human values first, they ought to move out to another planet.”
          Some of the new musicians, however, insist on their blackness as part of a larger movement to reappropriate jazz as an exclusively Negro art. “Black music,” says fiery, Negro poet LeRoi Jones, “is the music black people make. It’s a translation of the black man’s experience into music.” Jones’s definition pointedly excludes all white jazzmen who, he thinks, can only play a tepid imitation of the real thing. “Stan Getz makes a million and Lester Young dies in poverty,” he says. “Barbra Streisand steals from Lena Horne. Leonard Bernstein was at my house one night. I asked him why he made more money than Duke [Ellington]. Did he think he was a better conductor than Duke, a better arranger than Duke, a better composer than Duke? I told him he didn’t even dress as well as Duke. And he got up and walked out. The white man puts a straw in our brains and sucks out the juices. He makes our music his own the way a thief makes your money his own: he takes it.”
          White musicians, who have always viewed jazz as a cooperative effort in which white and black borrow from each other liberally, reject Jones’s divisive terminology. “What does he think Bix Beiderbecke was doing?” asks veteran clarinetist Pee Wee Russell. “Beiderbecke listened to everyone and everyone listened to him and they took it from there. The real greats in jazz never had any feeling about ‘black music’ or ‘white music’.” Bassist David Izenzon, one of a handful of white musicians who play the New Thing, answered Jones this way: “I have a few thousand years of tradition to contribute myself. Since I’m white and Jewish, perhaps a Jewish guy is going to realize when he sees me up on the stand with black musicians that this new music has something to do with him.” “The white man has to prove himself in any Negro context,” says trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, who plays in the new, integrated Mel Lewis-Thad Jones Band, “and that’s the way it should be. In this respect, the Negro gives the white man a better shake than the white man ever gives the Negro. I don’t care much for being a white person. There isn’t much to be proud of.”

John Coltrane: ‘It goes deep’

          Crutch: Even most black musicians won’t endorse Jones’s musical apartheid. Jones proclaims, “We are a nation of musicians,” but trumpeter Miles Davis who has always worked with whites, disagrees, saying: “We just don’t have no natural rhythm. I tried my damnedest to get some rhythm out of two black cats I know and I’ve got two hernias to prove it. In fact, I only know five drummers who can keep time. They ought to get off that black stuff. It’s a crutch.” Coleman agrees: “It’s a lot easier to yell than to make good music. Today every black guy with a horn says he’s avant-garde. That’s a lot of crap. He may be black but that doesn’t mean he’s avant-garde. It’s the same for electronic composers. They’re not all avant-garde geniuses. Hell, anyone can blow a fuse.”
          Edge: But Jones’s appeal is not to the black musician’s logic, but to his growing racial pride. The new jazzman no longer considers himself a Stepin Fetchit entertainer but an artist with the right to the respect paid any artist, white or black. “You can feel this new pride in the spirit of the music,” notes critic Hentoff. “You can see it in the way these guys come out and play. There’s nothing deferential about them. They seem to be saying ‘Keep quiet and listen’.” Archie Shepp, the 29-year-old tenor saxophonist whose sound cuts through the listener like the edge of a broken bottle, shares Jones’s belief in jazz as an educational force that tells the Negro who he is, where he came from and where he must go. “My music says poverty,” snaps the goateed Shepp. “It’s designed to move my people to change their condition. My music must revive in the mind of my people the image of the rain forest with all the dignity that was always there. My music tells my people to stand up and liberate themselves and that I stand with them.”
          Behind this cry for revolution lie more practical demands—the chance to play, the need for money and recognition and the age-old contention that jazz is as worthy of public support as classical music. “When you talk about a civic orchestra or symphony, nobody expects them to make money,” says Shepp, who had to feed a wife and three children on an income of $3,000 last year. “It’s only when a nigger enters the picture that he has to make money.” Cecil Taylor agrees: “The day before we left for Newport last year we were rehearsing at the home of a café owner in New York. When his wife heard us she told him you can’t permit this. Had we been a string quartet, she would have considered it a cultural feather in her cap to have us practicing in her building.”
          Taylor’s life has been a horrifying series of harassments by club owners, horrible pianos and economic barrel-scraping. “I can’t see for the life of me,” he says, “why the public can’t accept the idea that musicians involved in improvising all their lives can produce music as equally valid as any other.” Jazz, he believes, never really reaches the public. “You can’t have the real Negro image coming in on television when the wife and kiddies are seated at the dinner table. It’s all right to have Negro ballplayers or Sammy Davis, our modern Stepin Fetchit. But,” says Taylor, the “real Negro” with his new music has a message for everyone, “a revolutionary concept of what life is all about—living and enjoying it and enjoying the serious choices to be made.”
          Ugly: Shepp and Taylor spend their time tangling with the most visible obstacle to their livelihood, the club owner, demanding high salaries for jobs and cursing the club owners as racists when they refuse. “The ugly thing about these cats is that they think they’re music critics,” says the embittered Taylor, a small, almost feline figure with a mournful mustache. “For them to think of us as artists is out of the question. As far as they’re concerned, we’re products. We’re there to sell drinks for them.” The club owners offer a simple defense. The music does not draw. “I’m not in the philanthropy business,” says Art D’Lugoff, owner of New York’s Village Gate. “It’s just like a restaurant. I can’t afford to serve a losing item. There’s no conspiracy against these guys. Their music just hasn’t caught on. That’s all. They’re paranoiac.”
          Many seasoned jazz observers, like the “Jazz Priest,” the Rev. Norman J. O’Connor, who has involved himself with the problems of jazz musicians, believe that Shepp and Taylor and the other new musicians suffer more for their convictions than from their color. “They’re being completely what jazz musicians ought to be,” says the genial, silver-haired Paulist priest, “complete improvisers who pay dues to nobody but themselves. Ellington and Miles Davis have done this in a way, but they always know where their audience is and never put themselves so far out that you can’t reach them. But guys like Coleman and Taylor have stepped over the line and said ‘You follow me’ and, unfortunately, very few have followed.”
          It takes sympathy, education and an open mind to follow the new musicians whose shattering sounds offer as little familiar ground to the traditional, foot-tapping jazz fan as the works of Jackson Pollock afford the devotee of impressionism. The music is rich, violent and, at first, hard to listen to.
          Hunt:When Don DeMicheal, editor of Downbeat magazine, heard Coltrane’s new group “It repelled me. I hated what they were playing—those drums and maracas and bells and tambourines.” But DeMicheal changed his mind: “I do not pretend to understand this music,” he says now. “I doubt if anyone, including those playing it, really understands it, in the sense that one understands, say, the music of Bach or Billie Holiday. I feel this music . . . it opens up a part of myself that normally is tightly closed, and the seldom-recognized feelings, emotions and thoughts well up from the unconscious and sear my consciousness. Parts of Coltrane’s music are aural reflections of what I believe lies deep within each of us—the chaotic, brutish, wrenching torture chamber of humanness.”
          It would be hard to find men more talented and dedicated than Coleman, Coltrane, Taylor and Izenzon in any art. But jazz has always been dismissed by the foundations and cultural philanthropies in their hunt for worthies. “We have nothing under consideration at this time for the new jazz,” says W. McNeil Lowry, Ford Foundation vice president. “We consider it a legitimate part of the arts but nobody has come forward with a proposal about what we might do for this handful of musicians. We’ve always felt that jazz offers a much easier commercial place for an artist than a lot of the other arts.”
          Most jazz musicians die poor searching for this easy place. The 75-odd companies that record jazz make up less than 10 per cent of the total record market, according to Billboard magazine. The club situation is even worse, since only a handful—Slugs’, the Village Gate, the Village Vanguard in New York, the Plugged Nickel in Chicago and San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop and Both-And—are open to the avant-garde. “It’s a master-slave relationship,” says Coleman about the club and record situation. “The producer wants a happy slave and thinks he knows how to do it. But all he really wants is the slave’s music.” Sun Ra, whose Solar Arkestra of eleven players split $117 for five hours’ work at Slugs’ last month, draws even less from his records. “One record we made for Savoy,” he says, “has paid me $6 in five years.”

Sun Ra and Arkestra: Beneath the mumbo-jumbo, music

          Mythology: If Sun Ra is neglected by the impresarios, he is honored by many of the new musicians. “He’s our Basie and our Ellington,” says Marion Brown. “He plays the piano but his real instrument is the orchestra.” A gray, soft, rounded man in a beaten gold shirt and red pants, Sun Ra lives in a broken-down apartment near the Bowery embellished with “cosmic” paintings, plastic spheres and rubber balls suspended by string. He has created an entire universe out of Woolworth leftovers in which he is the sun god. “Ra is the mythical sun god of Egypt,” he explains. “At football games they holler my name—Ra, Ra, Ra—because they want victory.”
          Like Shepp, Sun Ra wants to reach Negroes with his music, but he is a severe taskmaster for his people. “I couldn’t approach black people with the truth because they like lies. They live lies. They say ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ but I don’t see them doing that. I don’t think of Negroes as my brothers.” Right now, Sun feels, the Negro wastes himself playing toady for the white man. He wants to change that with his music. “I’m a demon,” he says almost casually. “They respect that. I’m going to beat the superficiality out of them. I’m going to beat them and beat them and beat them. If you see me playing before black folks, you’ll see they’re uncomfortable because I’m playing beauty and they’re ugly. I can cleanse Negroes and whites too with my sounds. A. good brainwash would be lovely for them.”
          Gifts: Sun Ra places his itinerant childhood in “Alabama, Virgin-ja and West Virgin-ja,” where he found, as a child, melodies in his head that needed writing down. Later, in Chicago, he grew up on the music of Ellington, Earl (Fatha) Hines and Armstrong. “In Chicago, I played in Fletcher Henderson’s band. I was playing my avant cards but Fletcher still liked what I was doing.” And Sun Ra adds, “I have astro-infinity gifts to offer, solutions for all people and all nations concerned. I’m playing for the whole planet. I’m supposed to do the impossible, demonstrate to the people that there is something beyond the God they have been worshiping. My music is about friendship.”
          At his five-hour concert at Slugs’ Saloon last month, the sun god unleashed the full fury of his art and anarchy before a small, spellbound, sober audience of some 100 devotees. Boxed in on a tiny stage, Sun sat kingly at the piano, his head crowned by a cap of gold, his drummer backed against the backdrop curtains, his bassist hunched over his instrument. The rest of the Solar Arkestra—so called because “people pronounce it ‘arkestra’ anyway”—were forced to crouch along the edge of the stage, hardware in hand—trumpets, French horn, trombone. The program included everything from lush pastoral hymns to solid jazz and wildly improvisatory numbers. A motion-picture projector bathed the musicians in rotating orbs of light and they became African astronauts playing to the cosmos. “We need to get off this planet as fast as possible,” says Sun. “We’d better be out there when here blows up.”
          Sun Ra writes down most of his music but sometimes “I send out my waves to the soloists and they play a continuation of what I would have played, what I would have written had I had time. They have to read my mind.” He has gathered many of his musicians from HARYOU-ACT. “I look for the incorrigibles,” he explains. “If they don’t fit in with someone else, they’re gonna come back to me. That way I don’t have to worry about keeping a band together.” His counsel to his young musicians is this: “If you’re going to hate, start hating yourself. You can’t move out into areas of infinity with all these emotions. They slow you down. You have to be more pliable than a child. You have to be completely unrebellious.”
          A crucial part of the new jazz revolution turns on the search for a new, dignified setting for jazz in which the jazz musician is not exploited to sell drinks. “I would like to play for audiences who aren’t using my music to stimulate their sex organs,” says Ornette Coleman. “I find that concert audiences don’t use my music that way. A nightclub is not where jazz gets its best audience because it’s still based on getting drunk enough to go after the flesh nearest you.” Jazz has been moving into the concert halls and the colleges. Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra completed campus tours recently and, in New York, the 2,600-seat Village Theater has become the scene of rousing New Thing concerts. “Musicians,” proposes the young saxophonist Lee Konitz, “have to set up their own place that’s open 24 hours a day and gives every band a chance with the groups splitting the door money. It would be great to know there’s a place to hear jazz anytime.”

Shepp: ‘My music says poverty’

          Haven: Forty-year-old John Coltrane, the spiritual leader and father figure of the new jazz, may provide the unharassed haven the new jazzmen want. “I’m thinking of opening some kind of place where I could play whenever I felt like it and could invite other groups,” he says. Coltrane’s play-when-you-feel-the-spirit policy fits in nicely with his new musical aims. “My goal,” says the gentle, reflective Coltrane, “is to live the truly religious life and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there’s no problem because the music is just part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being.”
          The younger jazzmen revere Coltrane. “I was playing this concert,” recalls Marion Brown, “and when I’d finished a solo, I backed off the stage. There was Coltrane with the lights behind him, beatified. He held out his arms and took me in and I wept like a child. I’d been through so much and held so much in, but I didn’t cry until Coltrane told me I was all right.” The gaunt-faced Brown expresses most simply the cry for legitimacy of the new jazzmen. “When people hear the word ‘jazzman,’ the first thing they think is unemployed, then dope and sex, but the young guys aren’t like that anymore. I’d like a girl to be able to take me home and introduce me to her parents and hear them say, ‘Oh, jazzman, isn’t that fine’.”

Cecil Taylor: No place to play

          Ebullient: The prospect of jazz returning to the mainstream of American music is remote. The new musician might want the respect of the establishment but they are not willing to cater to establishment tastes. Coleman, Coltrane, Taylor, Shepp, Brown and Albert Ayler are pushing the revolution further and further away from the accepted landmarks of two-four time, blues harmony, simple melodies and sweet, soothing sounds. “To me,” says the bearded Ayler, whose ebullient “Ghost” has become an unofficial anthem of the new music, “conventional jazz is a joke.” He expresses his amusement in the Southern church-band tunes he works into his whinnying, boiling solos built like collages out of bits of this and that—blues, Dixie, gospel.
          Some years ago French composer-critic André Hodeir wrote: “Though today it is appreciated only by the happy few, the most advanced jazz has already launched invisible missiles in the direction of its future audience.” That audience, like the audience for everything that is new in all the arts, is growing, and it is an international audience. Ornette Coleman was a hero in Sweden, John Coltrane was strewn with flowers and paraded about the streets of Tokyo, and in a recent tour Albert Ayler was lionized in Berlin, Holland and France.
          What this young audience wants is the perennially young sound of jazz—the sound of America, a young country, and increasingly the sound of young energies everywhere. It is the sound of human possibility. Last week Ayler described what it feels like to be up on the stand in a club, the lights low, the smoke thick, the ice tinkling in glasses, the spotlight searing like a burning glass. “Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Right after that first sound comes, I just give all that’s in my heart to give—just give it all. I’m livin’ it, breathin’ it, drinkin’ it. I’m out in another dimension and I’m hummin’ a tune. I never stop. I’m hummin’ a tune when I’m talkin’ to you.”

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