As you probably know, if he was someone you paid attention to, Ramsey died a couple of days ago. The In Crowd was one of the first albums I bought, when I was in high school. This got me thinking about music history in the US of A. This is just out of my head, I'm not looking anything up or linking to anything, so weigh tin if you think I get anything wrong.
From the 1920s, actually slightly before, through the 1950s jazz and popular music were closely akin. In fact jazz was popular music. Performers like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and the Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Cab Calloway big bands had large white audiences. White musicians developed a style on the borderline of jazz called swing, but general audiences didn't make much of a distinction. It was all the popular entertainment and dance music of the times, and the 20s and 30s became known as the Jazz Age. Of course, even though white people listened to Black musicians, the audiences were segregated, but that's another story.
In the 1950s and '60s, however, jazz and popular music -- both Black and white -- started to evolve apart. The important jazz musicians of the times -- Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and others -- developed a style that was challenging to listeners of traditional jazz and American popular music and found themselves with a niche audience. The wildly popular rock music that emerged at that time was rooted more directly in blues than in jazz; and popular Black music, rhythm and blues that evolved into the Motown sound, was also rooted more in gospel and blues.
It's not that musicians weren't listening to each other. There were attempts at jazz-rock fusion, such as Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, and even Miles took a stab at it, though he didn't really get very far. The movement petered out by the 1980s. Miles Davis was in fact a close friend of Joni Mitchell, whose music was certainly jazz influenced, and they'd spend time together listening to records. But when she asked him to perform on one of her albums, he declined. He said he didn't want to bigfoot her but I expect he really just thought they were in different places.
Anyway, to finally get to the point from the '70s through the '90s there were a few musicians who managed to live on the borderline, to play in jazz clubs and have their records in the jazz bin (remember record stores?) but also get top 40s airplay. Ramsey Lewis was one of them, along with George Benson, Grover Washington Jr., and Al Jarreau. Jazz purists tended to look down on them, as being shallow or sellouts or something like that. I think Ramsey started getting more cred when he stopped being popular. (Of course their radio hits weren't actually improvisational, so if you think it isn't jazz if it doesn't feature improvised solos then we just have a problem of definition.)
I think this is really unfortunate. Grover Washington's duet with Bill Withers, "Just the Two of Us," was not only a huge hit but an interesting piece of music. (It's really a Bill Withers song but it's on a Grover Washington album.) Anyway these crossover types had pretty much disappeared by the turn of the century. They could have given people a path back to jazz, if they had taken it, and if jazz musicians had offered a welcome to a rock and pop audience.
Nowadays, unless you're specifically a fan, it's unlikely you've heard of any contemporary who is considered a jazz musician per se, with the likely exception of Wynton Marsalis, whose name you know but whose music you probably do not. (He's actually committed to classical jazz, not modern or innovative forms.) Yeah, there's Esperanza Spalding who is maybe somewhere on the borderline and a few others but they aren't big sellers. I'm waiting to see if the current jazz community, incubating underground, won't emerge to produce more popular music for the new era. Anyway, Ramsey Lewis was a really great performer.
2 comments:
A worthwhile homage. Thanks.
North America was segregated once its transplanted European illegal immigrants began importing Africans to own, brutalize and enslave in 1619, and America has been a segregated country from the start. For reasons of power, greed and emotional arrested development, it refers to people with different-colored skin (but 99.99% genetically identical) as different "races" (when there's one human race, Homo sapiens).
But they've never stopped listening to African-inspired music. Today's refurbished-barn wedding parties, full of sweating, dancing Caucasians, would be silent without the hits of Whitney Houston ... Earth, Wind & Fire ... Marvin Gaye ... and the list goes on and on.
So-called "crossover" artists like the great Ramsey Lewis could play to all colors of skin because the airwaves were never segregated.
Music of a Caucasian band like Gene Krupa's "sounded" a lot like the that of the great Duke Ellington because Caucasian bands were imitating African American bands from the start because their music was so inspiring! African Americans could be kept out of public restrooms, Caucasian schools and pools and other meeting places, but their music was just too damn inspired to resist, so Caucasians imitated what they heard. Humans are inherently mimetic. American "popular" musicians of the 1930s, '40s and '50s were immensely talented, as were those in symphony orchestras and chamber music ensembles. Listen to the soundtrack from any cartoon or film produced in America in those years and you hear great musicians, even virtuosos -- like the truly unique trumpet master Mannie Klein, who could play impeccably in any style.
What separated jazz from other types of music was the way it was produced. As the great educator (and also a philosopher) Ellis Marsalis, deceased from Covid a couple of years ago, said, "Jazz isn't a kind of music; it's a way of making music." The jazz-inflected idioms of Louis Armstrong, America's greatest jazz innovator, couldn't help but be adopted into the vocal stylings of every single popular jazz singer and musician who followed.
But the segregation of American humanity into artificial groups for twisted economic and emotional purposes took its toll on music in the '50s and '60s. Armstrong and Ellington couldn't even attend the "Grammys," much less win one, while inferior talents like Presley and Sinatra could make recordings and movies by the dozens, no matter how cheaply done or artistically dubious. So the music diverged as well, artificially segregated by the reactionary de facto apartheid that ruled the U.S.
It's still around today. There is no "melting pot," just that basket of deplorables -- and the rest of the rainbow country that just wants to get along. With such great musicians as Ramsey Lewis having been around for decades, there's still a large chunk of the country that wants to eat, drink, view, listen to, believe and watch crap when it comes to their unconscious choices in food, beverages, movies, music, religion and politics. A good 30% or more of the American populace is effectively asleep. And because America has always exported its culture, it's a worldwide problem, just more intense here because of our toxic racism -- the belief that there are different "races" among humans, all descended from an African ancestor 80,000 years ago, traced through mitochondrial DNA using the same scientific method that doctors use to cure your cancer or operate on your viscera. But a lot of people here like to pick and choose which day and what time to believe in science -- or anything else. That's the tragedy and the problem: the war on truth. Because what jazz does, as an art form, is instantaneously translate the artist's truth into hearable, intelligible, moving sound. Jazz, like all great art, exposes the inner truths of life.
One important PS:
Note that learning to perform jazz is based on understanding its language and the interrelationships of musicians and vocalists who perform it. Gotta learn the language and the forms: Chord changes, soloing, comping, the function of the rhythm section, how to solo, how to write, etc. It goes without saying that it all has nothing to do with skin color. However, because of the twisted social structure in which we live, certain musicians are referred to as "jazz" musicians because of the misunderstandings created by our culture (and our lack of it), and our misuse of language. To me, there is nothing about Kurt Elling's music that resembles jazz. I can't stand listening to either his voice or his music. It does not distill his moment-to-moment perception of the universe into ascertainable sound; it's simply his "stylings" within carefully constructed arrangements. He's one of many artists doing his "thing." I find Bobby McFerrin, on the other hand, very listenable, even though he's not performing jazz either. I like Diana Krall and Diane Schuur, and I consider them jazz singers. Anita O'Day's recordings transfix me. Ira Sullivan could play!
I guess it comes down to words attributed to Louis Armstrong: If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know. But on the other hand, there are plenty of people -- listeners, DJs, "critics" (generally men without legs who teach running, but not always) -- who THINK they know what it is, and -- like in our current political and media world -- are allowed to call it that, even though it's not true.
Ellis Marsalis also said, "Music isn't about music; it's about life." And the ability to discern which music and music-making are truly alive isn't about taste; it's about awareness. "Woke" doesn't just apply to every other aspect of life, and there are unhappy people who try to bring music down, just as they attempt with every other aspect of life. They're busy dying, and people who can hear and acknowledge greatness in music and music-making are busy living :-)
Post a Comment