Blood­less­ness is the enemy.

Jazz began life as a folk music, and therein lay much of its appeal – an appeal totally absent from most of the jazz pro­duced by today’s lum­ber­ing insti­tu­tions and uni­ver­si­ties. Acad­e­m­iz­ing brings about an alien­ation of the  music’s folk roots, pro­duc­ing a type of jazz that, values-wise, more closely resem­bles Euro­pean clas­si­cal music than the music of Arm­strong, Parker, and Coltrane. That clas­si­cal mind-set pro­duces musi­cians who avoid gut­bucket expres­sion­ism like they would some crazy uncle who lives in the bomb shel­ter he built dur­ing the JFK administration.

A cer­tain con­tem­po­rary sax­o­phon­ist comes to mind. (We’ll call him “Name­less,” since there are count­less oth­ers exactly like him. What’s the point in pick­ing on just one?) I first heard Name­less in the con­text of a well-known big band, where he struck me as a musi­cian of con­sid­er­able tech­ni­cal skill and not much orig­i­nal­ity. He could play in what­ever styl­is­tic bag the arrange­ments required, from early New Orleans to ‘50s hard bop. Every note was authen­tic to the period the music was meant to evoke. As a sax­o­phon­ist myself, I must con­fess that – for a moment – I got caught up in the vir­tu­osic aspect of his work. There will always be a part of me that admires and even thrills to some­one who can play so fast and pre­cise. Indeed, if tech­ni­cal abil­ity is the main cri­te­ria, this cat was one of the “best” sax­o­phon­ists I’d ever heard. So why did his play­ing ulti­mately leave me cold?

Because tech­ni­cal abil­ity is not the main cri­te­ria. Jazz isn’t track & field. Accom­plish­ment can’t be mea­sured empir­i­cally. If it could be, we’d have to rate Name­less as a supe­rior sax­o­phon­ist to say, Dex­ter Gor­don. After all, Name­less can play faster and cleaner than Dex­ter ever did.

Of course, such a notion is pre­pos­ter­ous. Gor­don had some­thing else. It isn’t only that he was a more orig­i­nal player than Name­less, although he surely was. As impor­tant, how­ever, is some­thing less quan­tifi­able – some­thing that can’t be explained by a solo tran­scrip­tion or a the­sis on impro­vi­sa­tional strategies.

It’s called “soul,” a term not much used in jazz crit­i­cism any­more, per­haps because of its sub­jec­tive nature; per­haps because crit­ics (most of whom are white) are squea­mish about pre­sum­ing to apply it (or a lack thereof) to the work of black artists. Soul is a real part of jazz, though. Dex­ter had it; Name­less, not so much.

Name­less is a very fine musi­cian in many respects. His play­ing is smooth, ele­gant, and obvi­ously tech­ni­cally bril­liant. In the end, how­ever, it’s glib. And glib­ness is the antithe­sis of soul.

Soul isn’t about black and white or blues and swing.  It’s some­thing that you might not be able to ade­quately describe, but you know it when you hear it. To ignore or down­play its exis­tence helps us under­stand jazz not a whit.

Soul is what Char­lie Parker was talk­ing about when he said, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”

Soul is the rea­son that if offered the choice of a limo and tick­ets to hear Name­less at Carnegie Hall, or a Metro Card and a chance to pay to hear John Zorn at The Stone, I’d take Zorn every time.

Soul is some­thing you can’t learn at Jul­liard or the New School. It’s not about notes and the­o­ries. It’s sure as hell not about rote history.

Soul is liv­ing, lov­ing, and los­ing. It’s life’s tri­umphs and dis­ap­point­ments – the joy, the despair, and every­thing in-between – chan­neled through your music.

It’s the sound of blood pump­ing through your veins.