Current Music: The Coltrane half of New Thing at Newport
"One Down, One Up" is a tune on an old Impulse LP (A-94, for those keeping score) called New Thing At Newport. It was good marketing — use side one's 1965 Newport Jazz Festival live set from their big star John Coltrane to promote the young performer on side two, Archie Shepp, whose touring quartet did a set the same day.
It was some of the earliest Trane I'd bought, back in the 70's, though it was chronologically later than most of the stuff I'd heard up until then, and it caught my ear quickly, built (I think) on a simple augmented-chord riff that didn't resemble any of his other compositions. Looking back, it was part of a sneaky transition*, in the months following A Love Supreme, from the "modal jazz" that built his latter-day fame — the live repertoire still contained older hit material like "Afro Blue" and "My Favorite Things", much like old tunes like "Blue Train" and "Mr. P.C." were in the book as he was beginning to build that latter-day fame — to the freer musics of those avant-garde enfants terribles (like Shepp) that he was trying to bring to the Impulse roster.
(*In fact, "Transition", recorded in the studio a few weeks earlier but not released until 1969, would have been a good example of that sneakiness.)
There's now another live "One Down, One Up", released in the last couple of years on a two-CD set taken from two WABC-FM broadcasts in 1966 from the Half Note in Manhattan. We are now pretty much near the end of the transition, and the end of the "classic quartet" (soon to be reconfigured into a more supportive, but not necessarily better, quintet nucleus), and the music has grown into something too huge for mass media:Rather than having the group make any kind of concession, the broadcast was more akin to casually dropping in for 45 minutes, regardless of where the musicians were in their set. In the case of the March 26th performance, which takes up one of two CDs in this set, the group had already been playing the title track of One Down, One Up for 35 minutes [and would continue for 29 more — try fitting all that crazy überblues on a side of vinyl] when [Portraits in Jazz host Alan] Grant began broadcasting, and was in the middle of "Afro Blue" when the time was up, resulting in a fade-out. WABC-FM is now WPLJ, a station that plays lite top-40 for commuters and dentists' offices, and the notion of a radio station doing a live remote from a jazz venue — a niche staple of the early decades of radio, and a factor in the increase in national mindshare for jazz during those years — is… a bit remote.
Renditions of "Afro Blue" and "My Favorite Things" from the '65-'67 period, hacked into something less and less familiar, more "avant-garde" than the original recordings and live performances, akin to what Miles Davis' quintet did with his own popular material (documented on the 1965 Plugged Nickel recordings), are a reminder of… fumes.
Davis and Coltrane still had some pull, based on their individual successes, based in turn on the marketplace successes of the music in previous decades; they could do something revolutionary in '65 (and still reach a large audience) because it existed on the fumes of a marketing-and-distribution engine built in the Swing era. Dance palaces; nightclubs; coast-to-coast radio broadcasts; widely-read weekly/monthly music magazines and trade publications; 78s, then 33s and 45s…
Forty years on, SunnO))) and Joanna Newsom exist on the fumes of a once-powerful engine (and the spawn of the Swing-era one — e.g., arena pop was/is a child of Woodstock, itself a child of Newport) built in the days of Sgt. Pepper; a glowing mention in the New York Times or on Pitchfork doesn't quite compare to the pop-cultural omnipresence you could have back in the day, but it's still a part of the system, albeit shunted to the minor leagues of a system that has shifted to selling blockbusters and back-catalogue, working hard to keep revenue streams at the levels of its glory days.
At some point in the cycle, the machine selling the art becomes more (self-)important than the art that's being made. Feed me!
Half-listening to Weekend Edition a week or two ago, there was a profile of a young saxophonist, a musician in Beyoncé's "all-girl" band. And it did little more than hit a bunch of buttons on the machine:- Promoting a new CD …check!
- A female musician! …check!
- She plays jazz (like many of our fine NPR affiliates)! …check!
- She's in BEYONCÉ'S band! …check!
And listening to excerpts from the CD during the interview, it's hitting a bunch of radio-airplay niches — a Latin groove here, a bordering-on-smooth-jazzzzzzz… there — as if the music was written to a business plan. Which it likely was.
It's a long way from that those two nights at the Half Note, when you could turn on the radio and have the future Saint John Will-I-AM Coltrane expand your mind for 45 minutes. |
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