Oregon Music News

by Tim DuRoche

Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli

The 2010 Alaska Airlines Portland Jazz Festival is focusing the spotlight (a bright shining Nordic light, as it were) on the work of a handful of Norwegian Jazz musicians. As a New England-born Unitarian, raised largely in Minneapolis (amongst a largely Lutheran, Scandinavian-descended populace) that seems like a Garrison-Keilloresque set-up at first glance. But if you follow jazz punditry at all, you’ll know the lineup is inspired partly by Stuart Nicholson’s beatification of Scandinavian jazz, Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has it Moved to a New Address); but more directly by Jazz Fest director Bill Royston’s recent face-to-face encounters with the work of artists like Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli, Christian Wallumrød Ensemble and In The Country.

Despite coining the hideous word “glocalisation,” Nicholson’s book inspires a lot of questions about the fate and state of jazz: Is JAZZ at this point still an American form? Why do we continue to devalue and disavow our greatest contribution to the arts? What can we learn about our own values from this global re-introduction to jazz? As Royston noted at OMN here recently, “We wrap ourselves around this music and we say it’s our own, but we don’t support it. We expect the music will survive in the marketplace like any other art form.” It’s a bitch.

Jazz has always had a tough time at the table in this country— from early reactions as a moral panic (like “the sound of whips in the Sousa-filled night” said poet Ed Dorn) to its use as a cultural weapon during the Cold War to its place now as a rich global form, that some think is “diluting” the music.

Christian Wallumrod

At the height of the Cold War, we loved standing up jazz (along with abstract expressionism) as a shining examples of Freedom, Individuality in the face of the Red Menace. Sadly, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, European jazz and improvisational artists far surpassed American jazz in the realm of freedom. For decades, some of the most interesting developments in jazz and improvised music have been coming out of Europe. Not just Norway, but Holland, England, France, Germany, Belgium and so forth. We love experiencing American pop music forms delivered back to as as fresh borrowed idioms—think about Algerian, Bhangra, or Urdu hip-hop, rock music reinvigorated by Fela or King Sunny, Israeli singer-songwriters, or dance-hall and dub. Why shouldn’t the same occur with jazz?

“Jazz,” said the renegade historian J.A. Rogers, “is a marvel of paradox: too fundamentally human, at least as modern humanity goes, to be typically racial, too international to be characteristically national, too much abroad in the world to have a special home.

The tradition of this music, “the essence of the music, is change itself,” reminds pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. Unlike some artforms, it truly can be all things to all people: Chicago, New Orleans, West Coast dixieland, small-group swing, big band, bebop, hard bop, cool, Third Stream, New Thing, soul jazz, boogaloo, jazz-rock, fusion, free-jazz, non-idiomatic improvisation, avant-garde jazz, new Dutch Swing, freebop, nu jazz, neocon, acid jazz, smooth jazz, chill jazz, vocal jazz, vintage popular song, grindhouse, etc. Royston noted that the Norwegians are doing much more interesting work than much of what you’ll hear in Manhattan—much of the most interesting work happening is happening very far from Manhattan, what was once the “jazz capital of the world:” including bastard Brooklyn, the Bay Area, the suburbs of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Chicago, Minneapolis and so forth. And the reason is the artists have rejected the hegemony of the Stanley Crouch-Wynton dogma and accepted that jazz is now a global form.

In the country.

Musicians aren’t concerned with categories for the most part. As makers we continue to view music horizontally, while critics, historians and the industry insist on vertical categories. That’s nothing new. There are some folks who think that the nature of the universe is permanence; there are some who will argue that surely the nature of the universe is innovation and change. The former like their permanence of the variety–easy to snap their fingers to; the latter crave the outer limits and adventure of the shape of jazz to come. It’s always been that way—from Parmenides and Heraclitus to Charlie Parker and Peanuts Hucko, Frode Haltli and beyond.

It’s easy to forget that jazz is about confluence and it has been since it’s birth way back when. This most wonderful four-letter word, this mash-up circumstance of pan-Caribbean/African rhythm and European pomp, has always been about multiple perspectives and rich, multilayered storytelling. To build on Ornette’s phrase, this is our music. . . all of it: from ragtime to no time. Nothing illustrates this idea of jazz as an expansive continuum, a lively exchange between past and future, multiple traditions and unfettered creativity, more than acknowledging diverse voices and influences and wide-ranging idiomatic threads (austere post-classical , Sufi ritual music, Gagaku court music, Indonesian gamelan, Balkan, Nordic folk, electronica, etc.).

Jazz for decades has returned to formulae that works—the young man in suit playing Lee Morganish harbop archetype, time-trapped crooner accessorizing vintage pop—because, like the tyranny of kitsch, they can fit into consumer-simple bins and boxes. But how many times can we allow the ghosts of hard bop and mainstream jazz-past to haunt us.

Much of the composer-oriented, texture rich work of the Norwegians fits the jazz-criteria of Gary Giddins’ and Scott DeVeaux’s recent history of the music. They begin with empathy, active listening, but they don’t allow themselves (like so many of their American counterparts schooled in Jazz Studies) to be cowed by its classical status, the anxiety of influence, or the ironic taffy-pull of historicism and cleverly radical recombination. Tradition, reminds Gustav Mahler, “is the passing on of fire and not the adoration of ashes.”

But if we limit Jazz’s definition to Crouch et al’s monoculture, conservative, blues-based, swinging model then we do a disservice to the future of the music, and we choke jazz in the same way that Bush/Rove suffocated democracy, one of our other great ‘gifts’ to the world.

As an exercise let’s use the gift and luxury of our visiting Norwegian colleagues and the totality of this year’s Portland Jazz Festival to investigate a return to traditional values. No. Not what you’re thinking. For a second let’s embrace the traditional American value of “cultural pluralism” (for some background read up on your Alain Locke and the Harlem Renaissance and his inspirations in pragmatist American philosophers like William James and John Dewey). Cultural pluralism, a value as American as jazz, democracy, and baseball is about high-fiving the uniqueness of different styles and folkways coexisting within an open, democratic society. Seen through that lens it’s easy to see the contributions of our Norwegian brethren as another ingredient in the stone-soup—or in the gospel according to Marsalis, seasoning to this delicious gumbo. While it may sound unlike your daddy’s Brubeck, it embodies all the values that make this music great: risk, innovation, freedom, recombinant energy and emotion, and volleys of fierce commitment and desire.