Icons Among Us – A Meditation
Posted on | June 22, 2010 | 1 Comment
by Nou Dadoun
In 1955 Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff produced a remarkable book which documented the “Golden Age” of the early days in Jazz up to the heyday of 52nd Street. Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya! The Story of Jazz As Told By The Men Who Made It was (as the subtitle implies) completely constructed from the artists’ own words edited and sequenced to construct a fascinating narrative.
Back in 1955 Jazz was about to enter another “Golden Age” – one which Nat Hentoff was well-positioned to document in other ways as one of the proponents of Candid Records. But things were not all rosy, there were disagreements between the traditionalists, the swingers and the beboppers about what jazz actually was (and who got to define it), economics and the advent of TV were wiping out the big bands like dinosaurs, Charlie Parker would be dead within the year and Rock n’ Roll was just around the corner.
Fast forward to 2010 and quietly over the last couple of decades, a new golden age has emerged. The technology has changed but the approach is the same – let the musicians express themselves through interviews, take that raw material and use it to build a coherent narrative. The resulting film Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense does not try to tell a historical story as Hear Me... did. Rather it uses interviews with contemporary artists with some select mentors and commentators to provide a snapshot of the state of Jazz along with the dilemmas and challenges facing its practitioners and its supporting community. And perhaps not surprisingly, the contemporary issues have many similarities to the ones that the music has faced and dealt with in the past. (And as an improvement over the book, you get to hear the music too!)
The film itself is a labour of love and it shows; it was produced as a four part/hour documentary for the US-based Documentary Channel. Constructed from over 75 hours of filmed interviews and performances, it was then further edited down into this 90 minute theatrical release. Before seeing the film, I asked co-director Lars Larson whether it was a rejoinder to the Ken Burns series which was criticized in the jazz community for giving short shrift to the post-1960 development of the music. He pointed out that they had started work on this film back in 2003 before Burns’ series was released and that the creative team saw the two documentaries as complementary – I suggested that Imagine The Sound could probably nestle comfortably on the shelf between them.
The original four broadcast episodes were The Quiet Revolution, 12 Notes in Real Time, In the Spirit of Family and Everything Everywhere. Although the theatrical film is not thematically divided in the same way, it manages to touch on many of the recurring issues that are discussed and argued over in the jazz community. These include:
- The New Standards: contemporary jazz artists are moving away from the great American songbook and looking for inspiration in more current rock, pop and hip hop sources. Bill Frisell plays Dylan’s Masters of War; Tineke Postma, Ernst Glerum and Han Bennink use the music of Villa-Lobos as a departure, Bugge Wesseltoft uses Norwegian traditional music and European art music, The Bad Plus use rock and pop tunes, Vijay Iyer plays M.I.A. hip hop tunes.
- The relevance of jazz to contemporary issues and its role in the wider culture: Paul de Barros points out that at one time jazz was tied to the civil rights movement and the music had a political component – the dilemma being ” how do you make jazz relevant in the wider society today“. He points out that for all his controversy, Wynton Marsalis has made a convincing social argument for supporting and spreading the music.
- Definitions of Jazz which includes Jazz is an African-American music versus Jazz is a World Music: Robert Glasper looks to Europe and says that that music doesn’t have soul, that’s not jazz… Courtney Pine says that he plays jazz with his soul and the essence of his UK and Caribbean experiences. Bill Frisell says, “I just don’t like it when the name of something has the effect of excluding something. If you say it’s one thing then it can’t be something else and that doesn’t work for me. The words are always smaller than what it is you’re trying to describe. And for me jazz is infinite.“ (Personally I like the definition that Bill Shoemaker gave me a few years ago: “Jazz is whatever you say it is…“)
The importance of community; craft versus innovation; the role of jazz education – these are all issues that are widely discussed in jazz forums and roundtables, it’s good to see them presented in a coherent way onscreen. And the film-makers are to be commended for not providing pat resolutions, there is a thought-provoking give and take where contrasting viewpoints are given equal weight.
At the screening on Saturday at the Vancity Theatre, the Q&A session provided a number of other interesting questions for B Dahlia, one of the producers, who was in attendance:
- Why weren’t there more women represented in the film?
- Why was there no jazz from Asia [or Africa]?
- Why was there no “hard-edged” jazz? (The questioner declined to give an example but it would be easy to substitute Ken Vandermark, Mats Gustafsson or John Zorn here.)
- How do you reach out to new listeners?
Apparently a companion book is underway that can fill in some of the gaps and present the discussion and music to an even wider audience.
The film closes with a touching scene in which Donald Harrison is doing construction work on his New Orleans home post-Katrina. He picks up a a cement pail and accompanies himself in a field holler – putting into reality Terence Blanchard‘s lesson “The music is not about you, it’s about the music; make it about the moment.”
On the cusp of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival’s 25th Anniversary, it was heartening to realize that most of the artists in the film have performed at the festival (in fact, some were filmed at the festival) and that the festival is addressing many of these questions and in an ongoing way in the real world.
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June 24th, 2010 @ 9:15 pm
There’s not much that I can add to Nou’s excellent review, except to say that producers did a masterful job of distilling a vast amount of material to create a focused narrative for this theatrical version. Particularly impressive was the survey of the many diverse sub-genres considered “jazz” by their proponents, and their inevitable effect on the debate as to “what *is* jazz?” A real eye-opener.