Let’s take a stroll down East Garfield Boulevard, on the south side. You won’t need a police escort: we’re going back 50 years and the joints, as they used to say, are jumpin’. Just off the corner of State Street is the swanky Club DeLisa, run by three Italian brothers who made a fortune selling moonshine up and down State until repeal came, when they opened this place. They’ve got a chorus line bouncing onstage, cards and dice are flying in the basement, but the real action in here is music–the sublime and ravishing sounds of jazz. And so it is all along the boulevard: at Michigan we pass the 65 Club and the Speaker’s Inn, a little farther on Bruce’s Lounge, then the El Rado at Prairie. It’s one spot after another up to the Rhumboogie near South Parkway (Martin Luther King Drive), which happens to be owned by the heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Louis.
The fate of Garfield, and a hundred other streets like it on the south side, is well known. But what about the music? Did jazz really pass through a golden age, or do we succumb to a gauzy, not to say reactionary nostalgia when we think so? It’s impossible to know for sure, but two books have just been published that throw a little light on the matter: The Jazz Scene, by Eric Hobsbawm, takes the onwards-and-upwards view of artistic progress; Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965, by David Rosenthal, celebrates a bygone period with a loving and vivid portrait.
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Rosenthal’s book fits more squarely into the standard critical format: there are many pages, some of them quite interesting, telling us about the players and records he digs and why. But he too has a lot to say about the context of the music in his period. The interviews he did with musicians and producers in the last years before his death (Rosenthal died at 47, right after the publication of Hard Bop in 1992) offer an especially lively picture of the jazz scene in the 50s and early 60s. He also has something the historian, in this case, did not: the hindsight of 30 years. Hobsbawm wrote his book just when hard bop was reaching its peak, so he could neither see it clearly in relation to what went before nor interpret the traces of decay that began to appear, in the nature of things, at that very moment.
Innovation, commercial success, return to the roots–this cycle is intrinsic to the evolution of jazz, and one of the best things about The Jazz Scene is that it tells why this is so. Jazz, Hobsbawm reminds us, is folk music. But unlike the dulcimer strummers and accordion squeezers of other lands jazz musicians are city folk, and their art, like everything else in the city, refuses to stand still. It’s always looking for ways to outdo itself, and is sustained in its search by the rich ground of black urban life. Here is where jazz, for the better part of its history, had to pay its way. Not only did jazzmen have to answer to their tradition, their peers, and their own sensibilities, they also had to satisfy a savvy and demanding black audience. The result was a constant tension between creativity and commercial appeal, but as long as it remained unbroken it was immensely fruitful. Out of it sprang the greatest jazz of the century.
Hobsbawm’s political beliefs also color his view of the future of jazz. In his introduction to the new edition he admits that the book now seems to capture a golden age, and wonders if jazz is not in danger of becoming too settled and comfortable, just “another version of classical music.” But the struggle must go on, and in the end Hobsbawm finds hope right where socialists have always found it, in the mere survival of people and ways that one day, they believe, will flourish again: “Jazz,” he writes, “has shown extraordinary powers of survival and self-renewal inside a society not designed for it and which does not deserve it. It is too early to think that its potential is exhausted.”
This decline was abetted, as Rosenthal and Hobsbawm both point out, by the exit of middle-class blacks from urban ghettos. It was the social mix in places like the French Quarter of New Orleans, Harlem, and Chicago’s Black Belt that made them the living heart of jazz for three-quarters of a century. When the mix was gone, the heart stopped beating; black kids stopped dreaming of playing that horn. Now, “they got the blaster in their ear and they got it on the wrong stations. . . . They want to hear that slave beat,” laments the young reedman David Murray in Hard Bop. Is there a better emblem of the decay of the postwar ghetto into today’s “inner city” than the annihilation of jazz by rap? Hobsbawm calls it “the opposite of the great and profound art of the blues,” to which he might have added anything that ever went by the name of jazz–except for free jazz, that is: it also vented anger, promoted revolution, and sounded bad.
For the last ten years or so we’ve been hearing about the great revival of jazz among a group of highly skilled younger players. And they have produced a lot of excellent music, but it’s a “revival” in the strict sense: “The basis of what is played today,” says Hobsbawm, “is essentially what was played in the ‘forties and ‘fifties.” Hard bop is once again the reigning style. The best players can now blow hot, cool, and gutbucket jazz too–anything in the “tradition.” (Dixieland seems not to qualify, probably because it already had its revival in the early 40s when middle-aged white audiences adopted it as their own museum music. It now sounds too pale and musty.) Like well-trained classical musicians, jazzmen today are competent in all periods. Marcus Roberts can re-create ragtime, boogie-woogie, stride, and bebop piano styles with marvelous ease. Technically, he’s a much better player than Thelonious Monk ever was. But Monk grew up with those styles and, unlike Roberts, made something original out of them. He didn’t revere the past; he embodied it.
