PART 1

SUBTITLE: On the occasion of the publication of "Future Jazz" [Oxford University Press], a thought-provoking collection of interviews by Howard Mandel, Luigi Santosuosso has met one of the most stimulating US jazz journalists to know more on his views about Chicago and New York, Wynton Marsalis and Muhal Richard Abrams, and what does it mean to be a ‘jazz guy’.


For years, the signature of Howard Mandel at the bottom of an interview, article or review has been synonymous with captivating and sophisticated writing as well as original views and genuine curiosity towards all things innovative and challenging in the jazz world; not the usual feature in the conservative world of U.S. jazz journalism.
For Mandel, open-mindedness is not a stylistic exercise, but rather the logical result of a certain type of 'musical imprinting' that could only happen in a certain place at a certain time: Chicago in the '60s, where Mandel's interest in music bloomed.

"When I began to listen - and in particular when I went to see Archie Shepp and John Coltrane for the first time - I took it for granted that I did not know anything, or that I knew everything. I mean, I was 15 years old.
Basically though, I realized I knew nothing about jazz. And I was rather in awe of it. So I was assuming that all that music had to be really worthwhile and I had to expose myself to it over and over again to really understand it."

In those years, Chicago was characterised by a flurry of musical activity that rendered it a more than valid alternative to New York, a situation that would not last long.

"Chicago is like San Francisco, New Orleans, Seattle, other big towns: it's a culture of its own. It's the third largest city in the country, but the major media largely ignore it because it does no longer have a major broadcast entity or recording company.
When I was growing up, on the contrary, there were major labels documenting the music that was being played there - Chess, with its Cadet and Argo sub-labels, and Mercury, which had jazz and r&b divisions - which gave some of the musicians of the AACM some employment. Lester Bowie, for instance, worked at Chess studios, played on R&B records. That commercial action represented also some protections for them from the trends of New York: they could say, 'let's do our own thing here and see what happens'..."

In this scenario, the role of the AACM, and of Muhal Richard Abrams in particular, proved crucial.

"I think that Muhal was a major force behind that and he was not afraid to say that he was possibly as unique as Ornette or Cecil Taylor, that he admired what they did but he wanted musicians to develop their own things which was - in the end - what Cecil and Ornette were doing. Cecil and Ornette did not say ‘play it my way’. They said: 'This is the way “I” play. It's got to be valid.' Chicago, I think, represents that idea."

Of late, Chicago has been experiencing a 'jazz renaissance', spurred on by the eclectic spirit of enterprise of reedman Ken Vandermark and journalist John Corbett, which - among other things - has rendered the 'windy city' the port of entry for many foreign improvisers into the U.S. jazz scene.

"Vandermark is a powerful musician with an international circle that he can draw on for ideas, people like Brötzmann, Mats Gustaffson, as well as the Chicagoans. Then, you have people like Ed Wilkerson, who very seldom gets out of Chicago - and I think that's a shame - and there is sort of the AACM spirit that continues to live there. However one question remains in my mind: Have people as brilliant as Muhal, Braxton, Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins and all the others -- the Art Ensemble, Amina Myers, Kalaparusha, Douglas Ewart -- come out of there recently? With new ideas, inflaming them? In that kind of way out situation where they are all bouncing off of each other? Maybe I am no longer easy to impress, maybe I am kind of jaded. However, Chicago is a healthy scene."

The search for an 'individual voice' that Chicago musicians were carrying out in the '60s is not very different - in the spirit if not in the outcome - from that currently undertaken by today's non-U.S. jazz musicians, who are trying to achieve a viable compromise between the jazz idiom and their cultural background.

"I think this could be one possible direction for the future of jazz. I think that recapturing the past and recasting it in new ways is one of the overriding points of any art. We try constantly to renew what we used to know, for the right now or for the future.
Everywhere there seems to be a big challenge to these ancient, maybe call them "rural," roots. We don't want to lose them; we want to integrate them with our own realities, even though we are not living anymore in a rural society. Jazz is a modernist expression. No, I don't think at all that it is a "post"-modernist art -- I myself don't think we're done with modernism yet.
As far as jazz goes: Will we deconstruct the boundaries between nations? We could. I guess that I am some kind of a universalist about this. This is why I believe that it's good that we have a universal music, as long as we don't loose our specific musics at the same time. So even if there will be a music that will gain a universal position - and this may be jazz - I still believe that there will be individuals who are making things of their own, through which they will distinguish themselves, to reflect their personalities or backgrounds."

Whatever the origins of the music to which Mandel listens, he still believes that it should respect certain 'core values'. Music, this way, becomes a mirror of the soul, a metaphor through which it's possible to discover Mr. Mandel's deepest convictions.

"This is when I realize that I really am a 'jazz guy', because I respond to jazz values and not to the other values, whatever they are. However, I don't think that there is an opposition between jazz and rock, or jazz and classical music. The real opposition is between jazz and music that is undemocratic, based on imposing ideas, controlling, deadening, suffocating,
stultifying. Those things that want to remove us humans from spontaneity, creativity, and interaction. So when I hear music that is doing that, I resent it."

When a journalist publishes a collection of the best interviews he or she has written, the result is too often a book that can be interesting only for the keenest readers, for those 'readers/researchers' that want to collect every single interview given by their idols.
Mandel brilliantly avoids this. True, his "Future Jazz" contains interviews written in the last twenty years, but they are used as a lens through which it is possible to read today's and tomorrow's music, a task that is further facilitated by a compilation (soon to be followed by a ‘Volume Two’), released by Knitting Factory Records, which represents a 'companion' to the book and contains some of the music that is discussed through its chapters (Eric Dolphy, Derek Bailey, Charles Gayle, Jazz Passengers, Gerry Hemingway, Marilyn Crispell and many more). The book's material, in turn, is organised so as to create a thematic continuum through the various interviews.

Interestingly, "Future Jazz" is opened and closed by two chapters that are directly related to the commercial aspects of jazz. In the first chapter, Mandel thoroughly discusses the 'Young Lions' phenomenon, and includes an analysis of its commercial promises. The last chapter is dedicated to the grim economics of jazz clubs and their struggle to survive and to continue to offer quality jazz.

"I deliberately chose to begin and end the book with a discussion of the business around jazz. Unfortunately, the business of music has a major impact on the creative aspect of music and is often ignored or else it is taken for granted and not investigated as it should be. We are not heavily patronized; public funding is not enough; we have to constantly think about how this music gets paid for... in a few words that is the reality of every musician's life.
An additional reason to introduce and end the book with those chapters is that they help to set the whole progressive jazz scene into perspective so that those people who are constantly wrestling with it can understand it better. Some of them say: 'this is just some kind of little bleep of music, we have never heard of it, it cannot be that important...' Yet, this music can be very important. What I am trying to say is: 'Maybe you have never heard of it, and maybe it is not very important, but maybe the reason you haven't heard of it is all this stuff around it, which explains where experimental work or innovative music exists within the whole continuum of commercial recording business’."

For Mandel, however, the reality of music's market can also prove a healthy antidote against jazz becoming a sterile and self-referential art form.

"Life is always very difficult for almost every artist, but this is something that keeps the music honest: it has to appeal to people. If this music is going to survive it has to appeal to people, in a commercially disseminated way. We can look at a model where that is not the case: contemporary classical music. Most of the contemporary classical composers - at least in the last generation - had academic posts. Because of the security in those academic posts they did not have to produce music that they would have to offer to the public. In such conditions the music can become so arcane that it does not reach the public at all. It is just composers writing music for other composers. This puts the functionality of music into question: is music an art for art's sake, or does it have another function?
In my view, the best music is that which is able to fulfil its own artistic facets but is also open and accessible to anyone that approaches it. Just because everybody can appreciate "Kind of Blue" that does not reduce its artistic quality. That's sort of an American idea. It does not follow the European model of music that was originally commissioned by the elite."

Another example of Mandel's careful planning of his book is represented by how he interspersed it with three chapters based on his interview with Wynton Marsalis, not the name one would expect to encounter in a book dedicated to 'future jazz'.

"There is no way to write about jazz in the last twenty years with the overview idea that I had and ignore Wynton. He has had a significant public profile and a big impact on the music business both the recording and touring business but also the institutionalization and fund-raising of jazz.
I didn't want to give him weight in one part of the book and then forget about him and I wanted to listen to other people and I wanted people to speak to or against what he said. Because my problem with him is that he comes out so monolithically, as if to say, ‘There's only one way to do it and it's my way to do it’."

Mandel uses the three chapters on Wynton Marsalis in a contrapuntal way.

"At the beginning Wynton talks about his background, how did he learn from his elders; then he begins to drift a little bit and starts speaking about what he thinks “is not jazz." At that point, I break the interview and start talking about some of the people that I think are important and more inspiring and that I heard long before Wynton even appeared on the scene. I try to define, this way, the basis of this experimental or innovative movement. I let them start speaking. These are pages on the AACM, David Murray, Butch Morris, Henry Threadgill, James Newton, Anthony Davis, Joe Lovano. Just like Wynton, these people started listening to music and playing as kids, they were aware of the music of their surroundings, they wanted to engage with it professionally.
Then, I return to Wynton and he tries to refine why he thinks what he's doing is the right thing. And to me he is not more convincing than before. Then, I bring in the Black Rock Coalition, some of the other expressions of music that seem even further away from the purist stream that Wynton believes in. Those musicians are also representing themselves in the same way; the fact is that musicians of all those different backgrounds share a lot commonality but, depending with the personality of the musician, you can end up with very different conclusions.
And that is what I wanted to show: that there are lots of different possible conclusions each musician can come to, and that therefore Wynton is not indeed the monolithic voice that has the whole overview of what jazz is and that's the end of it.
It all becomes very interesting in the last section of that interview: Wynton wanted to knock down and say very pithy things and be very sharp and dynamic to present himself as being ‘the wiz’. Again he demonstrates - I thought - his own biases.
We all have our own biases but I just wanted to show the many ways to do the same thing; there is nothing that gives him the exclusive right to laying jazz all out for us."

PART 2

SUBTITLE In the second part of this interview, Howard Mandel delves on the young lions phenomenon, on jazz’s fixation for self-definition and the role of women in jazz.


The continuous debate on what is and what is not jazz is perplexing. In what, at times, looks like a war of religions, the advocates of the most extreme stances seem to overlook the fact that jazz - just like any art form - is multi-faceted and it is thanks to this characteristic that it remains dynamic and able to survive. Jazz seems overly self-conscious about its self-definition, as if its legitimacy depended on how people define it. Is this the symptom of a crisis?

"That's true. Jazz musicians are protective of what they consider their art form, which is sometimes misunderstood or stolen from them. This is a music that originated in black American culture, and black America has been historically a part of the population that has been denied its validity and accomplishments. I think that especially in the '60s when racial relations began to change, black musicians and intellectuals asserted 'This is Black Music!' But this racial contention on jazz was a problem in the beginning of the spread of jazz, in the '20s and continues to be a hot topic today.
If we look at what jazz is commercially - and I am speaking of the highest form of jazz, but also not ignoring its watered-down version - there's a whole continuum of music and recognition that's always in contention. Does Kenny G want to wear the mantel of John Coltrane? And if he does, why? So that what he's doing, that's so commercially rewarding, is recognized as high art and is connected to that long tradition that goes back to Sidney Bechet or Louis Armstrong? Does that diminish jazz? Would jazz really be effected if everybody walked around saying: 'Oh yes, I love jazz, I love Kenny G and Boney James,' but then somebody played them some John Coltrane and their reaction was, 'What is that? I don't like that stuff!' And yes, a lot of that happens now."

Futile as this question may be, what is the essence of jazz, according to Mr. Mandel?
”It's a very elusive essence. I think there are essences and they all are reflected through the personalities of the various musicians. If we look at the career of somebody who had lots of variety, let's say Duke Ellington, one sees that he wrote suites, he even wrote for violins in his orchestra! Is that jazz? He also wrote pieces that do not swing in a conventional way. He wrote pieces that did not embody the blues. Was that jazz? But whatever he did, his music always embodied jazz values. He also used many of the jazz techniques -- vocalism, rhythmic momentum, polyrhythms that we all see as an expression of jazz from the most abstracted Anthony Braxton to the more traditional, a founding father like Jelly Roll Morton. This is an interesting question that I want to pursue in my next book: what happens where jazz comes into contact with cultural traditions that are not jazz. Do the jazz elements become so diffused they no longer have any potency, that they are subsumed or transformed? Does it become a third thing? If so what is that third thing? If we look at jazz in Russia, where they did not have a jazz tradition at all, there were all these people that really wanted to be jazz musicians but that's not their culture of origin, it's an acquired one -- so what happens when those cultures clash? What happened when Sun Ra and John Cage got together? I was there, at a concert on the Coney Island boardwalk – I wrote about how they communicated, as if across a chasm, from their respective musical universes? What does Steve Reich say about jazz? I did a Blindfold Test with him once for Down Beat: Actually it turns out that he has a deep knowledge for this music, and a great love - at least he did at the time - for Miles Davis's electric period, for instance. It's very hard to escape the jazz influence if you grew up in the United States. You may think you've done so, but no. This music is all around us. This is our national music. And this is also music that is going global. In Italy, in Amsterdam, in Sweden, Australia, Brazil... it is global because it represents the ways of doing things that work for many, if may not all, musicians. There's certainly a lot of widespread activity in musicians trying to forge alliances between jazz and whatever is true and unique in their own musical traditions.”

Probably spurred on by such uncertainty, and especially by the degeneration of the most superficial fusion, in the '80s there emerged the phenomenon of the 'young lions' or 're-boppers', as some like to refer to that group of young jazz virtuosos that, under the spiritual guidance of Wynton Marsalis, engaged themselves in the rediscovery of classic jazz.

"The 19 year old in 1982 did not recognize the music that Wynton was playing as old music. To them that was new. In the book I speak of this as the years of the Reagan reign: You can't separate art from the political currents that run in a country. This was time when a certain conservatism and nostalgia for the past was reigning in our political life. It was certainly something strongly related to that, and also to the age of the population suddenly emerging in jazz. You know, you skip what your father did, and you're interested in what your grandfather did. I think this is more or less what Wynton did -- though in his case, he played what his father did, too.
Back then, a whole new generation of musicians were coming out - they did not want to live in what they saw as the poverty or the bohemianism of the previous generation. They wanted to have the success that was being promised to them through commercially viable forms. They looked at certain standards of professionalism which they could admire and respect, such as that which Art Blakey represented, for instance, or Betty Carter. I don't think that there was anything wrong with that. These musicians put a lot of faith in education. This was probably the first generation of musicians who primarily had an advanced jazz education; by their time, there were many more college-level jazz programs around. Jazz education put an accent on virtuosity, on how to play difficult music slickly, and the way everybody had played before.
Also, in 1984 the CD started to really take off and up to that point reissue programs had not been undertaken with the thoroughness that would have come after the introduction of the CD. So suddenly there was an incredible amount of older music that was available again.”

Jazz was born in the United States, so it was perhaps inevitable that the U.S. would - chronologically - be the first place to become conservative about it.

"Yes. The whole thing that made the young lions thing so authentic, considering what they were mostly playing, was basically that it was a wave of young black guys from the South led by Wynton from New Orleans. If it had been originated by middle-age white guys from Denmark playing excellent late '50s hard bop people would have just said: ‘Okay, these guys are just re-doing something from the past’.
We should not forget that also lots of white guys, and older black guys, in the U.S., were playing the type of music Wynton suggested we should get back to, much before Wynton. There was a jazz repertoire movement; there were approaches to the music that were coming out of the jazz education areas.
And actually, the same thing had already happened among the jazz musicians of the '60s. Look at what Jacki Byard did. He was promoting the idea that black American jazz was a continuum and that people should not forget about ragtime, you should know about Fats Waller, James P. Johnson and that leads into Bud Powell and Monk and that all that developed into what he was into: playing with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, or Dolphy and Mingus. Byard maybe did not have the right gauge of his audience, or he was not the right guy to put this idea over, but it does not mean that those ideas hadn't been suggested before."

To a certain degree, therefore, the ‘young lions’ wave is the result of a lack of memory.

"In my mind, it's a question of educating. You can't say 'I love theater - Neil Simon is the greatest play-writer' and then say 'Shakespeare does just not mean anything to me, it's garbage.' You just can't say that because by now we have a very good perspective on theater.
On the contrary, we don't have a similar perspective on jazz, and jazz musicians are trying to protect their interests and I think that - in this sense - it is important to try and define oneself. It is important that musicians are trying to understand
what they are; whether they are artists, entertainers, whether they are providing background information or they are trying to really be prophetic and say something profound."

One thing that traditional and progressive jazz share is the scarce presence of women, with the notable exception of vocalists. If one browses the analytical index of future jazz they will find roughly fifty names of female jazz players (the 'ususal suspects': Geri Allen, Myra Melford, Amina Claudine Myers, Michele Rosewoman, Shelley Hirsch, Zeena Parkins and a few more). It's difficult to resist the temptation of asking Mr. Mandel, whose wife is the singer and composer Kitty Brazelton, about the reasons for this situation.

“It's just a long historical process. Women do like jazz. How many women have been seduced on the notes of "Kind of Blue"? I certainly used my jazz collection through all these years to seduce my girlfriends. I was very seldom interested in a woman if she wasn't interested in jazz. If she wasn't that meant she could not be very interested in me... You know my wife is a composer. Sometime ago I was told that we worked very well together because we both liked dissonances – I think that this has just to do with my personal interest in creative, powerful, open, listening, sensitive women.
It's a bad idea of the jazz business to exclude women. It's a big mistake of jazz magazines not to focus on how to win more female readers. Or if they have female readers, are they reaching them? Just on a commercial level it is very stupid; they are cutting off half of their potential subscription base.
There is a machoness in the jazz culture. You know, like black musicans were presumed to be loners; they were always out in the street. They were the rugged cowboys of music. And that was not a very attractive life for most women, if you have children, or you want to build a home and have some stability, as some women would, you need a place to work from. And if you look at successful jazz women, Mary Lou Williams, Marian McPartland, maybe Melba Liston, Carla Bley...they were able to establish a base from which to work, and then they could operate from there.
The jazz life often seems to require women to make some sacrifice that men are not called upon to make. Men assume they are going to have a home they are coming back to. They're a bunch of slobs. And they get their jollies in being in a demented late night jazz situation, you know. They like that freedom and restlessness. Maybe they're somewhat alienated from home life, maybe that's a classic thing amongst musicians, maybe they tend to become self-absorbed. I am not saying that jazzmen cannot establish a family but the jazz life has a strong appeal on some people that are alienated somewhat, and can find some kind of male bonding in constant travel....
For the money that is available in jazz, women who are accomplished musicians can do better. There are fewer of them and they have different kinds of competitions, challenges, and maybe they have other ways of expressing themselves that pay better. But that will change and is already changing now.
My wife, who teaches music, and has a doctorate in composition and leads a nine-piece exploded improvisational ensemble called Dadadah, says that when she tries to ask her students to talk about women in jazz or wants to discuss biases against women in music she asks them a basic question: Can a woman in our society be allowed to be a heavy weight like John Coltrane? Can you imagine that a woman be a powerful figure like Miles Davis? Until we can say 'Sure they can!' and until we have examples of women supported by the recording industry to establish themselves as those heavyweights, it won't happen But if we look, on the contrary, to the dance world, where it is commonplace (think of Martha Graham, Isadore Duncan, Meredith Monk, etc) that women are allowed to be heavy weights, they are leaders, choreographers...That's a model that we should look at."

Despite all its commercial troubles, the limited presence of women and the nostalgic tendencies of the many ‘re-boppers’ Howard Mandel remains optimistic on the destiny of ‘future jazz’. As he writes in the liner notes of the “Future Jazz” compilation (Knitting Factory Records): “Jazz, they say, is challenging, difficult, demanding depths of theory and background, elitist, specialized -- but nah, it just rewards attention. That attribute is in short supply. So my suggestion for listening: relax. Be where you're at, and still right on time. No hurry, the day is coming. Future Jazz will inevitably arrive. Sure as any music we know.”

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