“If you over­esteem great men, peo­ple become pow­er­less.” –Lao Tzu, from the Tao Te Ching (Num­ber 3).

Musi­cians lis­ten. Or at least, they should. Espe­cially jazz musi­cians, who do most of their learn­ing by lis­ten­ing to records by (por­ten­tous pause … ) “The Mas­ters:” those rare über-geniuses cho­sen by a Higher Power to live and per­form amongst us mor­tals for a brief his­tor­i­cal moment (before alco­hol or heroin or pistol-packing girl­friends punch their ticket to the after­life), spread­ing a mes­sage of truth and beauty … whose exam­ple (so we are taught by [well-meaning, if inept] teach­ers, [well-meaning, if clue­less] crit­ics, and the [not-so-well-meaning] all-purpose mis­an­thropes who seem to com­pose a major seg­ment of the jazz com­mu­nity) reminds us that no mat­ter how hard we try — no mat­ter how many hours we prac­tice, or how touched by inspi­ra­tion — we’ll never-ever-ever-ever-ever–ever mea­sure up. I began lis­ten­ing addic­tively to The Mas­ters in my teens, par­tially for spir­i­tual and aes­thetic rea­sons, but mostly because I wanted to be a jazz musi­cian and that’s what you did if you wanted to play jazz. Unaware and there­fore unaf­fected by the naysay­ers, I thought there was a seat at the table with my name on it.

My lis­ten­ing pro­gressed quickly. As lead alto sax­o­phon­ist in my high school stage band, my lis­ten­ing first ran to loud and showy ‘70s big bands like May­nard Fer­gu­son and Woody Her­man. That shit got old fast. Later, I started play­ing in R&B bands and small fusion-oriented groups, and I began lis­ten­ing to funk sax­o­phon­ists like Can­non­ball Adder­ley, Stan­ley Tur­ren­tine, David San­born, and Grover Wash­ing­ton, Jr. I dug that music, but I craved some­thing deeper, more com­plex, both intel­lec­tu­ally and emotionally.

I dis­cov­ered that some­thing one Christ­mas. My dad gifted me a Char­lie Parker album. It was my intro to Bird, and it turned me on to bebop. I started lis­ten­ing (and learn­ing) to Bird, Sonny Stitt, Phil Woods, Dex­ter Gor­don … all the cats. The next Christ­mas, my dad gave me my first Coltrane album — the Pres­tige stuff, with Red Gar­land and Art Tay­lor, among oth­ers. While Trane was play­ing a man­ner of bop on that record, it stim­u­lated my curios­ity about his later music. Before long I came to Live at Bird­land, which had actu­ally been in my father’s record col­lec­tion all along. The album blew off the top of my head, reveal­ing the wet shiny wrin­kled pink goo inside.

From there, I fol­lowed the arc of Coltrane’s career, from A Love Supreme to Med­i­ta­tions, Inter­stel­lar Space, and the rest of his ultra-outré, late-period music. Coltrane’s “free” stuff led me to check out the other great free play­ers, whose sen­si­bil­i­ties influ­enced my own devel­op­ment as a player. Free jazz became my entire focus. I lis­tened, lis­tened, and lis­tened some more. My col­lec­tion of vinyl grew into the hun­dreds of albums, no small feat at a time in my life when money was way scarce. Lis­ten­ing was my reli­gion. It was fun. It was educational.

Until it wasn’t.

The law of dimin­ish­ing returns kicked in. After a cer­tain point, I was not only learn­ing less; my obses­sive lis­ten­ing was actu­ally mess­ing with my mind. I’d get stuck in a rut try­ing — uncon­sciously — to do what Coltrane was doing, or what Ornette was doing, or Shepp, or Rollins. By the time I hit my mid-20s, I was judg­ing my own play­ing on the basis of how much it sounded like those cats … which was a huge prob­lem, given that I was (and still am) con­sti­tu­tion­ally unable to copy any­body. I can’t even if I try. As soon as a Bird or Trane lick starts to emerge in one of my impro­vi­sa­tions, I sab­o­tage it — twist it, maul it beyond recog­ni­tion, ren­der it ironic — before it arises. I can’t help it. Some­thing in me will not coun­te­nance mim­icry in any way, shape, or form.

Of course, you can’t very well sound like some­body else when you won’t allow your­self. Duh. I knew this (no one rec­og­nizes my occa­sional obtuse­ness bet­ter than me), yet I still couldn’t help con­stantly com­par­ing myself to the cats whose music sprung from my stereo speak­ers. It was absurd on so many lev­els, but whad­daya gonna do? I was inse­cure. I was self-loathing. I was, uh … confused.

It was some time (years, actu­ally) before I finally found sat­is­fac­tion. The solu­tion? Stop lis­ten­ing to The Mas­ters so much and begin lis­ten­ing more fully to me. Once I did that, insight fol­lowed. I under­stood that what I played had sub­stance. It didn’t sound like Coltrane or Cole­man or Mumbly Joe or whomever. It sounded like me. Not only that; the more I worked on my own thing, the more my play­ing began to nat­u­rally reflect my val­ues. As a result, I began to really dig my own music for the first time. I became my own favorite sax player. That’s not to say I con­sider myself bet­ter than any­one, espe­cially The Mas­ters. I don’t, but nei­ther do I put them on a pedestal (not even Mumbly Joe). I just am. I’m not in com­pe­ti­tion with any­one. I’m just try­ing to cre­atively express the music per­co­lat­ing in my mind and heart. If I’m true to myself, it makes sense that I’d like the results, right?

I didn’t real­ize it at the time, but I’d over-listened to those guys, and in the process was unable to hear myself. I had a vision, but I didn’t trust it. Instead, I tried to make it con­form to some­one else’s, and that’s a recipe for cre­ative entropy, if not total self destruc­tion. Lis­ten­ing is one thing; relat­ing to another’s art so obses­sively that you negate your own cre­ative poten­tial is some­thing else. Regard­ing the work of Coltrane et al as exam­ples of jazz’s infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties — and not some myth­i­cal ideal one must embrace or die — allows me (and oth­ers like me) exactly what I sought in the begin­ning: a seat at the table. Turns out, I’m com­fort­able there.—Chris Kelsey, August 2009

How many of you know that Azz Incor­po­rated is “a mul­ti­fac­eted enter­prise pro­vid­ing essen­tial prod­ucts and ser­vices to global mar­kets with empha­sis toward the gen­er­a­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of elec­tri­cal power and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of hot tip gal­va­niz­ing to pre­vent the dam­ag­ing effect of cor­ro­sion in steel products?”

Well, I do, because when I was on vaca­tion last week on a lake in Ontario, I left my lap­top open on a table in the cabin’s screened-in porch, and a damn squir­rel snuck in when I was out on a beer-run and chewed of the damn let­ter “J” on my key­board, which I was able to replace, but which I now have to use sledgehammer-like force to make work, mean­ing that now every time I type the word “jazz” it comes out “azz,” includ­ing the many times a day when I visit my favorite Web site, Jazz.com, result­ing in mul­ti­ple vis­its to Azz.com, which is the Web address of the afore-mentioned “mul­ti­fac­eted gal­va­niz­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion of corroded-steel-cage-match-loving hill­bil­lies from Mars,” or what­ever the hell it was.  Did I men­tion that the squir­rel also pooped on my computer?

The moral to this story is: Don’t go on beer runs in Canada, because the coun­try is full of venge­ful red squir­rels who wait until just the right moment, then chew through screens and poop on com­put­ers, which they hate.

There. I ust had to get that off my chest.

I was asked yes­ter­day by some­one who read my essay on the state of jazz in the early 21^st cen­tury—about how the per­cep­tion of jazz as an old-timey music has kept away young lis­ten­ers, and how a great deal of the most cutting-edge new jazz dis­dains or eludes the label—whether it was impor­tant in the long run that we keep call­ing any new music jazz. With the rapid dis­so­lu­tion of bound­aries in all aspects of com­mu­ni­ca­tion thanks to the new media, does the cat­e­go­riz­ing of any work of art even make sense? Does it mat­ter what we call it?

It’s a good ques­tion, and I think the answer is clearly “no” … with a reser­va­tion. Artis­tic evo­lu­tion is hap­pen­ing at such a rapid pace; few dis­ci­plines, gen­res, or idioms stand still long enough to merit hav­ing a unique label. In the case of jazz (or “azz,” as my dys­func­tional “j” key seems intent on spelling the word), it seems inevitable that the con­stant cross– and re-pollination of musi­cal styles and gen­res will even­tu­ally — maybe soon — ren­der the term as archaic as the music it’s widely under­stood to describe. It’s cer­tain that such a devel­op­ment won’t dampen anyone’s cre­ativ­ity. Present and future artists will con­tinue be influ­enced by musi­cians who, today, we think of as “jazz musi­cians.” Great, inno­v­a­tive music will con­tinue to be made in the spirit of jazz, even if the term falls out of use, or indeed becomes per­ma­nently asso­ci­ated with the music of a cer­tain era, long past.

Yet while I think in my heart of hearts that the term “jazz” will ulti­mately out­live its use­ful­ness, I don’t look for­ward to that day. For some­one inter­ested in the evo­lu­tion of a cer­tain con­tin­uum of cre­ative musi­cal endeavor, the word serves an invalu­able util­i­tar­ian pur­pose: it acts as a thread – gos­samer per­haps, but strong as piano wire – tying the music of Arm­strong to the music I make and Mark Ribot makes and Darcy James Argue makes, and untold num­bers of artists now work­ing and as yet unknown to us. Sim­ply put, the word helps us make con­nec­tions. Mak­ing con­nec­tions is the essence of under­stand­ing life: our rela­tion­ship to each other, our envi­ron­ment … the uni­verse. I won’t let the word get in the way of what I want to do cre­atively. Rather, I’ll use it as a kind of men­tal and ver­bal short­hand that helps me bet­ter under­stand from whence we came, and where we are at the present moment. For me, that’s a good enough rea­son to keep it around.

Before I left on vaca­tion almost two weeks ago, Terry Teachout’s Wall Street Jour­nal piece on the dying jazz audi­ence was begin­ning to irri­tate (Warn­ing: Simp­sons ref­er­ence ahead ) the weirdos down at the worm store. (My col­league Ted Gioia actu­ally raised the issue ear­lier in a post at Jazz.com.) I spent a good part of my week on the shores of beau­ti­ful Horse­shoe Lake in Ontario rumi­nat­ing on the ori­gins and impli­ca­tions of the prob­lem. The fol­low­ing essay is the result.

Big Trou­ble!

From our “Reap What You Sow” depart­ment comes news of a recent study that bodes ill for America’s Only Orig­i­nal Gift to the Arts and Human­ity (A.O.O.G.A.H.), also known as “jazz.” The National Endow­ment for the Arts recent Sur­vey of ­Pub­lic Par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Arts con­cluded that live jazz suf­fered a double-digit decline in atten­dance from 1982 to 2008, and that the median age of jazz lis­ten­ers rose a whop­ping 17 years — from 29 in ’82 to a pos­i­tively geezer-ish 46 in 2008 (ahem, I’m 48). The study also found that atten­dance at jazz and clas­si­cal con­certs by young adults aged 18 – 24 has declined the most com­pared with other art forms. Bot­tom line: today’s young peo­ple find jazz every bit as appeal­ing as reruns of Father Knows Best. If things don’t change — as more and more senior cit­i­zen jazz­bos pay their final cover charge for that Big Jam Ses­sion in the Sky (“… there’s also a 2000-drink min­i­mum, but don’t worry, you’re gonna be here for a while”) — fewer and fewer tables will be occu­pied in the earthly jazz clubs. The sit­u­a­tion is grim, say some mavens. Jazz’s end is at hand.

Of course, in this time of con­vul­sive change in the way peo­ple con­sume music, a sin­gle sur­vey by some fancy pants gov­ern­ment agency can’t tell the whole story. But com­bine it with other recent devel­op­ments — the Three Stooges-like self-immolation by the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Jazz Edu­ca­tors (prob­a­bly the pre­mier jazz sup­port orga­ni­za­tion until its igno­min­ious col­lapse in 2008), the loss of New York’s Newport/Kool/JVC Jazz Fes­ti­val, the decline of jazz radio, the pre­car­i­ous state of jazz jour­nal­ism, the whole­sale deser­tion of jazz by major record labels — and the evi­dence is nigh over­whelm­ing: not only is jazz not gain­ing new lis­ten­ers, it’s los­ing by attri­tion those it has (“I’m shocked, shocked … !”).

How did this hap­pen? Well, almost 30 years ago some very influ­en­tial peo­ple decided that jazz’s future was in its past. They began run­ning a Back to the Future cam­paign empha­siz­ing styles of music that had bloomed decades before … and the bloom was well off the rose. In the process, they ban­ished from par­adise any­one who plugged-in, played music with a back­beat, or oth­er­wise diverged from the path estab­lished by jazz’s pan­theon of heroes (Arm­strong, Elling­ton, Parker and a pre­cious few oth­ers). They trans­ported jazz back to a pre-avant, pre-fusion, pre-1960s Leave it to Beaver world. Charged with run­ning the Way Back machine was the chief ances­tor wor­shiper, jazz’s Eddie Haskell: a young trum­peter from New Orleans by the name of Wyn­ton Lear­son Marsalis.

Our Story So Far …

Like Beaver Cleaver’s bête noire, Wyn­ton Marsalis worked hard to please his elders, although to be fair, Marsalis mixed sin­cer­ity with his obse­quious­ness; his rev­er­ence for your father’s (and grandfather’s) jazz was appar­ently gen­uine (to mix a tele­v­idic metaphor: in Wynton’s world, father really did know best).

It’s no coin­ci­dence that Marsalis’ rise coin­cided with the 1980 elec­tion of Ronald Rea­gan to the Amer­i­can pres­i­dency. In ret­ro­spect, the trumpeter’s con­ser­v­a­tive aes­thetic lean­ings are eas­ily seen as the jazz equiv­a­lent of the geri­atric for­mer actor’s “Morn­ing in Amer­ica,” with its evo­ca­tion of an ide­al­ized and utterly myth­i­cal past. A polit­i­cal zeit­geist that had moved from “speak­ing truth to power” in the ‘60s to “telling lies to the pow­er­less” was tailor-made for the über-conformist Marsalis, who gained trac­tion as a major fig­ure by blam­ing jazz’s per­ceived ills largely on an already mar­gin­al­ized group of musi­cal exper­i­men­tal­ists. If there were a cabinet-level Sec­re­tary of Jazz, Marsalis might as well have been Reagan’s choice, so emphat­i­cally will­ing was he to look back­ward for inspiration.

Marsalis whis­pered sweet noth­ings his seniors longed to hear: Jazz had lost its way in the ‘70s, what with all that commie-inspired free jazz and fusion and funk and what­not (Just Say No to Drugs … also, the Art Ensem­ble and Grover Wash­ing­ton, Jr.!). The apos­tates were con­spir­ing to sap and impu­rify jazz’s pre­cious bod­ily flu­ids, and it was up to a new gen­er­a­tion of sharp-dressed young rebop­pers to set things right.

Con­ser­v­a­tive musi­cians, writ­ers, and lis­ten­ers middle-aged-and-older who felt betrayed or passed-over by what they con­sid­ered jazz’s turn to the left got pos­i­tively tumes­cent when lis­ten­ing to the clean-cut, immaculately-dressed Marsalis chan­nel the pre-electric Miles Davis and ser­mo­nize about the sacred jazz “tra­di­tion.” Now here was a young­ster they could work with! Some­one who, with their help and sup­port, could emerge as the leader of a move­ment that would rid jazz of pinko influ­ences, and in the process put their music back front-and-center where it right­fully belonged. Marsalis was that rarest of birds: a youth­ful cur­mud­geon, a tal­ented and charis­matic young man who thought like old folks.

And lead he did. Crit­i­cally lauded from the time he burst on the scene as a clas­si­cal– and bebop-loving prodigy, Wyn­ton was placed in the van­guard of the new tra­di­tion­al­ist move­ment. From the early ‘80s on, he made scores of records for Colum­bia doc­u­ment­ing his rearview vision, lam­bast­ing heretics until such time that he became so rich and pow­er­ful — prin­ci­pally as Artis­tic Direc­tor (for life, appar­ently) of the insti­tu­tional behe­moth Jazz at Lin­coln Cen­ter — that he needn’t bother.

Marsalis’ and Columbia’s exam­ple inspired the major record com­pa­nies to sign other dap­per young jazz musi­cians of a con­ser­v­a­tive bent. Dur­ing the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, retro was in. So in, that it essen­tially became the only game in town. Jazz — which in the ‘70s had seemed like such a big tent — now became nar­rowly defined by the power bro­kers to suit those who played older styles. The fusion move­ment pio­neered by Miles Davis and prop­a­gated by his dis­ci­ples was con­sid­ered an abom­i­na­tion by believ­ers in the one true faith, as were free jazz and much Euro­pean jazz that didn’t suf­fi­ciently swing or pay proper obei­sance to the blues. Marsalis, his fol­low­ers and his enablers had fixed jazz (in the eyes of a gen­eral pub­lic that really wasn’t pay­ing close atten­tion) as music strictly gov­erned by immutable laws passed long ago. And those laws were not sub­ject to broad — never mind cre­ative—inter­pre­ta­tion.

Dire Con­se­quences!

The ascen­dance of this short­sighted phi­los­o­phy had an unin­tended but entirely fore­see­able cost. From the per­spec­tive of a pub­lic that was ever more accus­tomed to rapid and non-stop change (no less in the arts than in tech­nol­ogy; indeed, the two are often inter­twined), jazz essen­tially became a motion­less relic: ser­vice­able as a way of evok­ing a period ambi­ence in a movie or TV com­mer­cial, per­haps, but ulti­mately lack­ing in con­tem­po­rary relevance.

Hagio­graphic pro­files of Marsalis inevitably give him credit for stim­u­lat­ing inter­est in jazz when it had reached low ebb, but in real­ity he was stim­u­lat­ing inter­est in an increas­ingly archaic style, not the idiom as a whole. In fact, jazz was alive and extremely well in the ‘70s in the fecund areas of fusion (Miles’ bands, Weather Report, Return to For­ever, Her­bie Hancock’s bands, The Brecker Broth­ers, and many more) and free/avant-garde (Art Ensem­ble of Chicago, Arthur Blythe, the AACM, and Ornette Cole­man were among those cre­at­ing exper­i­men­tal jazz of tran­scen­dent qual­ity). In con­trast, older styles received less crit­i­cal and pop­u­lar atten­tion (even though many great swing and bop musi­cians were still play­ing at a very high level), not as vic­tim of some nefar­i­ous con­spir­acy or a tragic decline in societal/musical val­ues, but as a result of styl­is­tic evo­lu­tion. Jazz wasn’t dead, it was just search­ing for what’s over the hori­zon. That is, until the con­ser­v­a­tive claque hijacked the boat and towed it back to dock.

Wyn­ton wasn’t a sav­ior. He was a revival­ist, and revivals are almost always fads. Sadly, the middle-aged swing and bop lovers oper­at­ing in the upper ech­e­lons of the jazz indus­try didn’t rec­og­nize tra­di­tion wor­ship as a fad. On the con­trary; suc­cumb­ing to an epi­demic of wish­ful think­ing, they mis­read it as a last­ing phe­nom­e­non and endeav­ored to make it a per­ma­nent state. They suc­ceeded to an extent, in that they con­vinced an influ­en­tial group of edu­ca­tional and cul­tural arbiters (uni­ver­sity music schools, lavishly-endowed arts orga­ni­za­tions, Ken Burns) that jazz is — like the music of the great Roman­tic clas­si­cal com­posers or Bon­nie and Clyde’s death car — some­thing old and valu­able that needs be preserved.

So it was that jazz entered the acad­emy, with horns a-blazing and non-profit sta­tuses a-pending. Twenty-odd years later, how­ever, jazz’s gate­keep­ers were forced to con­front the unfor­tu­nate real­ity that young peo­ple do not con­sider the acad­emy hip (sur­prise!). Con­se­quently — and per­haps calami­tously — jazz’s embrace by the cul­tural estab­lish­ment was accom­pa­nied by the music’s inabil­ity to attract young lis­ten­ers, to whom the idiom as rep­re­sented by its osten­si­ble standard-bearers (notably Marsalis and his con­fr­eres) is hope­lessly old-fashioned and unin­ter­est­ing. In try­ing to foist Louis Arm­strong on a Will.I.Am world, the reac­tionar­ies turned jazz into a museum piece. And you know how tough it is to get kids to go to a museum.

All Is Not Lost!

The good news is, there’s plenty of new jazz that’s not hope­lessly old-fashioned, that isn’t ready to be rel­e­gated to the base­ment of the Smith­son­ian, and lest you think I’m hope­lessly depressed by the music’s cur­rent state, I assure you that I am not. Away from the (rapidly dim­ming) spot­light that’s been trained on the con­ser­v­a­tive main­stream, jazz has con­tin­ued to evolve and grow apace. A lis­tener just now emerg­ing from Wynton’s time machine might be sur­prised to find hordes of tal­ented jazz musi­cians unafraid to draw inspi­ra­tion from the worlds of hip-hop, rock, clas­si­cal, noise, electro-acoustic impro­vi­sa­tion, ambi­ent, and an infi­nite vari­ety of other sources. Some of their music leans toward pop, other is more exper­i­men­tal, and while none of it would likely win the Marsalis Seal of Authen­tic­ity, each is in some man­ner a man­i­fes­ta­tion of jazz. The trou­ble is, while the musi­cians by and large rec­og­nize that, con­sumers might not.

In a recent New York Times piece, Nate Chi­nen sug­gested that one rea­son the afore­men­tioned NEA sur­vey reg­is­tered a decline in atten­dance at jazz events is because, in essence, some respon­dents (many of whom we can infer are not East or West Coast-based hip­sters, but just reg­u­lar peeps from Des Moines and Peo­ria who had enough time to answer a ques­tion­naire) might not have known jazz if it bit them on the ass … and those who do know would rather call their pre­ferred music any­thing — or noth­ing — before call­ing it jazz (that’s how un-hip jazz has become in the public’s mind). Chi­nen cited Medeski, Mar­tin & Wood, Robert Glasper, and drum­mer Jim Black’s Alas­NoAxis as jazz-inspired groups and artists who draw a large part of their audi­ence from out­side jazz — jam bands, in the case of MM&W; hip-hop in Glasper’s; and noise-rock in Alas­NoAxis. I sub­mit that these lis­ten­ers are either unaware of the music’s prove­nance or the unwit­ting vic­tims of the con­ser­v­a­tive faction’s stul­ti­fi­ca­tion of jazz — they’ve been taught that jazz is old, bor­ing music from the ‘40s and ‘50s and there­fore not rel­e­vant to their lives. From that per­spec­tive, any music that’s excit­ing and con­tem­po­rary can­not pos­si­bly be jazz.

Some smart and artic­u­late folks have striven to rebut the idea that jazz lis­ten­ers are going the way of the dodo. Chi­nen cites healthy atten­dance at New York gigs by artists like these as evi­dence of jazz’s appeal to a young-ish audi­ence of sig­nif­i­cant size. Critic Howard Man­del has con­ceived an inge­nious use of Twit­ter as a way for jazz lovers to alert the world that their cher­ished music is alive and well. And Vijay Iyer was invited by a radio pro­gram to go mano a mano with Tea­chout. I wel­come these opti­mistic out­looks and sus­pect they’re all onto some­thing — things are not as dark as a sin­gle egg-headed gov­ern­ment sur­vey might lead us to believe. But if you don’t believe there’s a prob­lem, you’re whistling past the grave­yard. The evi­dence to the con­trary is too compelling.

How to reverse it? Con­ceiv­ing some “five year plan” isn’t the answer. Who knows where we’ll be in five min­utes, much less five years? No one can plan for every con­tin­gency. Jazz is cre­ated in the moment. We have to be pre­pared to impro­vise. Being sen­si­tive and respon­sive to what’s going on around us, right here, right now — that’s the jazz way.

A trip of a thou­sand miles begins with a sin­gle step, and our first step should be to con­sciously revise our atti­tude about what is or isn’t jazz. If you like bebop and only bebop, or New Orleans-style and noth­ing but, then bully for you. But you don’t get to define the whole of jazz in those terms. Some­one tried that, or some­thing very like it, and it didn’t work. Instead, start­ing now, we should embrace the term in its loos­est sense and apply it to every­thing that can con­ceiv­ably fit (Chi­nen does it, and good for him; wit­ness the eclec­tic mix of acts he chooses for his weekly Jazz List­ings in the Fri­day Times).

Jazz suf­fered when we allowed the con­ser­v­a­tives to nar­row its def­i­n­i­tion. Make the deci­sion that those days are over, and act on it. From this moment, let’s drop the admis­sions test and let in any­one who wants to be a mem­ber. Jazz is what­ever it wants to be. It’s MM&E and Robert Glasper and Alas­NoAxis … and Roscoe Mitchell and Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer and Mostly Oth­ers Do The Killing and Jes­sica Lurie and (type the name of your own favorite fringe-dwelling, genre-busting artist here). It’s also Wyn­ton and Wes­sel (Ander­son) and Wycliffe (Gor­don) … but as of now, it’s not just them (not that it ever was). Indeed, they’re behind the curve and los­ing ground by the minute.

Dis­miss the idea that if music doesn’t sound like some­thing Pops or Duke or Bird might’ve played dur­ing their life­times, it can’t be jazz. A bet­ter approach would be, if it sounds like some­thing those guys might play if they were alive and in their cre­ative prime today, it is most def­i­nitely jazz (and that, I sus­pect, could include almost any­thing). We don’t know what they’d sound like now, but it’s a lock their music would absorb con­tem­po­rary influ­ences from all over, just as it did in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s when those cats were at their peaks.

Reject the con­ser­v­a­tive mind­set of the last quar­ter cen­tury. It’s as dead in jazz as it is in pol­i­tics. Jazz doesn’t need walls built around it; it needs the walls demol­ished. Name a great jazz musi­cian who obeyed all the rules and I’ll show you a jazz musi­cian who was nowhere near great. The high­est trib­ute we can pay the mas­ters is not to wor­ship their image, but to man­i­fest their adven­tur­ous spirit. I’m bet­ting if we do, jazz will thrive in ways it hasn’t in decades, and its audi­ence will grow across gen­er­a­tions, beyond our wildest dreams. — Chris Kelsey, Horse­shoe Lake, Ontario, August 2009.

Whilst over­haul­ing my Web site, I’m also re-writing my “offi­cial” bio in a man­ner more suit­able to my cur­rent sta­tus as an “inde­pen­dent artiste” (mean­ing I no longer feel a com­pul­sion to feign respectabil­ity in order to pla­cate or attract the inter­est of  mag­a­zines or record labels – be they new or those with which I already have a rela­tion­ship [Jazz.com, Jaz­zTimes and CIMP], although the lat­ter group are all good sports and I don’t think they’d really care). I’ve decided to share it as I write it in blog-post form. It can also be found on my bio page. This is the first install­ment.

Chris Kelsey was born in Ban­gor, Maine on June 5 1961 to Barry and Judy Kelsey. Maine proved far too ecologically-varied and close to nat­ural bod­ies of water, how­ever, so the fam­ily moved to Okla­homa, a flat and dry (in more ways than one — the beer was 3.2 and the state didn’t allow the legal sale of liquor in bars until the ‘80s) place, where they’d live for most of the next 25 years (except­ing four years in Texas, an even flat­ter and dryer place).

Chris showed excep­tional musi­cal apti­tude as a child and began play­ing flute at the age of ten. Flute was soon sup­planted by the more-socially-acceptable-for-a-heterosexual-male alto sax­o­phone, which became his pri­mary horn for the next 18 years. Chris won lots of awards as a school­boy sax­o­phon­ist, earn­ing schol­ar­ship offers from col­leges far and wide. The thought of leav­ing Okla­homa to attend music school never seemed to occur to the timid, jazz-loving ado­les­cent, how­ever, and he ended up mak­ing the worst pos­si­ble choice of schools — the Uni­ver­sity of Okla­homa in Nor­man, a mere 10 miles or so from his par­ents’ home.

The best thing about the OU School of Music was its kick­ass march­ing band, which played in sup­port of the school’s even more kick­ass foot­ball team. Unfor­tu­nately, the rest of the music depart­ment was mediocre,  made worse by its vir­tu­ally non-existent jazz com­po­nent. Chris attended OU for three painful, largely friend­less, and almost wasted years, before finally get­ting off his ass and trans­fer­ring to Cen­tral State Uni­ver­sity (now the Uni­ver­sity of Cen­tral Okla­homa) in Edmond, which — while not exactly the hub of non­con­formist cre­ativ­ity that Chris craved — at least had a thriv­ing stage band pro­gram. After two rel­a­tively happy years at Cen­tral, Chris earned his Bach­e­lors Degree in Music Edu­ca­tion, which he was never to use, thanks mostly to a pro­foundly trau­matic student-teaching expe­ri­ence in his last semes­ter (much scream­ing and throw­ing of drum sticks, mostly at but not by Chris).

Chris took his diploma and – rather than teach or play what he con­sid­ered demean­ing com­mer­cial music gigs – got a job as a con­ve­nience store clerk in Nor­man, work­ing the grave­yard shift (noth­ing demean­ing about that). Chris’ store was known through­out the land as the pornog­ra­phy capi­tol of cen­tral Okla­homa. Chris’ shift — 11 pm to 7 am — com­prised the prime porno-viewing hours, and in those pre-internet days, the only way for a cheap­skate perv to get his free porno fix was to stand in front of the mag­a­zine rack at his friendly neigh­bor­hood con­ve­nience store, head down and shoul­ders hunched for hours and hours, study­ing intently the con­tent of such pub­li­ca­tions as Big Boobs (not to be con­fused with Big Boobs Dou­ble D-Plus!), Leg Show, Lipps, Club, and the noto­ri­ous BUF (the title an acronym for “big ugly females”). For the more literary-minded, the store also sold such erotic paper­back mas­ter­pieces as Dogged Out Nun and Les­bian Soror­ity Gang Bang (don’t ask me, I was scared to even look at the cov­ers, much less read them). Work­ing alone dur­ing those wee hours, Chris never lacked for com­pany, albeit silent, sullen, and exclu­sively male.

After two years at the con­ve­nience store, Chris helped his par­ents move to Florida, where he worked for a cou­ple of months at another con­ve­nience store in order to save enough money to move to New York City, which he did on Octo­ber 21, 1986 … by coin­ci­dence, the night of Game Three of that year’s World Series between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox. The Mets won that night, which Chris saw as a good omen, being a rabid life-long Mets fan. They went on to win the Series in mem­o­rable fash­ion, after which they were cel­e­brated with a ticker tape parade, which Chris attended, los­ing a shoe in the incred­i­ble shoulder-to-shoulder mob that lined Broad­way (he rode home on the sub­way half-shod).

To be con­tin­ued …

As the younger brother of the supremely accom­plished John F. and Robert Kennedy – and the youngest son of the ter­ri­fy­ingly ambi­tious Joseph Kennedy, Sr. – Ted Kennedy had a lot to live up to. JFK did what he could to ensure that Ted would start at the top, find­ing a place-holder to keep his for­mer Sen­ate seat warm until young Edward was old enough to run and claim it as his own. Claim it he did, yet he didn’t treat the job as a birthright, but rather a sacred trust. None of the Kennedys – and few politi­cians of any stripe – bet­ter exem­pli­fied the con­cept of noblesse oblige. Despite some rough patches, Ted proved him­self the most ide­al­is­tic, least Machi­avel­lian of the broth­ers, and in many ways the most effec­tive pub­lic ser­vant. We can only hope that his final wish to see an effec­tive, com­pre­hen­sive, afford­able pub­lic health care sys­tem in this coun­try comes to pass. Per­haps the fuss sure to ensue in wake of his death will serve as a final push to get it done. It would be the ulti­mate trib­ute to a great man.

The Brooklyn-born and Boston-based saxophonist/clarinetist/theorist Joe Maneri died yes­ter­day. He was 82.

There are many musi­cians and writ­ers more qual­i­fied to eulo­gize Maneri than I. My take on his music veered from whole­sale enthu­si­asm to intense skep­ti­cism – the for­mer based on the sheer aural sur­prise he man­i­fested every time he put one of his horns to his mouth, the lat­ter based on a cer­tain amount of what I per­ceived to be hype as regard­ing his vaunted “micro­tonal” the­ory of impro­vi­sa­tion. All of my favorite sax­o­phon­ists were mas­ters of micro­tonal inflec­tion (Ayler and Cole­man, fore­most), so I found it rather hard to get too excited by an entire con­cept built around it.

I even­tu­ally real­ized, how­ever, that I was let­ting my hide­bound cyn­i­cism get in the way of appre­ci­at­ing his music. I never seri­ously under­took to dis­cover the method to Maneri’s mad­ness, other than to sim­ply use my ears and knowl­edge of the sax­o­phone and impro­vised music to make sense of it (it was fas­ci­nat­ing in its rich­ness, an utterly dis­tinc­tive amal­gam of Ornette, bop, Klezmer and other folk musics … and the kitchen sink of 20th cen­tury art music, besides). In the end, all hype and crit­i­cal mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion aside – some of it, per­haps and unfor­tu­nately, by me – Maneri was sim­ply one of the most orig­i­nal and sub­limely expres­sive sax­o­phon­ists in the his­tory of jazz-derived music. Few jazz reed play­ers have explored the sound-making capa­bil­i­ties of their instru­ments with greater inge­nu­ity and intrepidity.

In once char­ac­ter­iz­ing Maneri as sound­ing like a sun-warped 78 of Lee Konitz slowed down to 33 and 1/3, I wasn’t try­ing to be a smart ass, but was, rather, grasp­ing for an effec­tive way to accu­rately describe his unique sound. It’s sad to think that sound has been stilled. We won’t hear its inim­itable likes again.

… please check back later!

CK