Two Jazz Albums Building on Past Masters

This morning through my feed reader I encountered the following headline from the Web site for The New York Times:

In 2019, Jazz Reckoned With Old Boundaries, and Marched Part Them

This turned out to be a Web page for a podcast, a medium I do not particularly like because I believe that reading provides more encouragement for reflection. What I could read was the introductory paragraph on that Web page:

Contemporary jazz musicians are limber, open-eared and risk-minded. They collaborate widely, and across genre. They look to nonmusical forms for inspiration. They make work that’s intensely personal.

Ironically, I had been thinking about “contemporary jazz musicians” a few days ago. Readers may recall that I wrote about Sophie Huber’s film Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes when it was screened at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July of 2018. Last year this film was screened on the Starz channel, and I decided to save a copy in my xfinity cloud space. However, it was only earlier this week that I gave the film a second viewing, which turned out to trigger my thoughts about whether there was a generation gap between the musicians recording on the current incarnation of the Blue Note label with Don Was as President and the many imaginative jazz musicians that had been influenced by the Blue Note founders, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff.

I watched this film for the first time with stars in my eyes, luxuriating in every detail of Wolff’s photographs while listening to classic tracks of the players in those photographs. The second time around both the photographs and the recordings had the same impact, but I found myself much more discontented with the present-day take on jazz as expressed by not only Was but also two musicians now recording on Blue Note, Robert Glasper and Ambrose Akinmusire. It was still fun to watch how they engaged with the likes of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter; but on my second viewing I was more struck by Shorter’s patience with the “young pups” than with the music they made.

This has led me to conclude that, as a serious listener, my tastes and my attention have become drawn to “historically-informed” performances of jazz based on the different ways in which jazz was being made and played prior to 1970. (By way of context, Was’ first album was a rock project produced in 1971.) In other words a respect for the historical context that guides my listening to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is balanced by a respect for a more recent context that guides my listening to the likes of John Coltrane and Miles Davis (both of whom Was regards as influences). I am not sure that this puts me directly add odds with those “contemporary jazz musicians;” but I think I can make a case that my priorities as a listener are definitely different!

Glenn Wilson and Chip Stephens on the cover of their Sadness & Soul album (courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz)

As a result, I was interested to learn of the release of two jazz albums this past October, both of which showed “historical awareness,” even if the playing itself was not necessarily “historically informed.” The first of these is Sadness & Soul, a duet album that sees pianist Chip Stephens playing with Glenn Wilson on baritone saxophone, presenting a repertoire that reaches back to George Gershwin and advances to compositions by both of the performers. (The title track is by Stephens.)

The second is an album whose full title is cleverly worded: Children of Art: A Tribe to Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Each of the first seven tracks presents a tune composed by a former Messenger. In “order of appearance” these are Lee Morgan, Walter Davis Jr., Cedar Walton, Shorter, Horace Silver, Benny Golson, and Hank Mobley. The performers are a trio led by guitarist Joshua Breakstone with rhythm provided by Eliot Zigmund on drums, and Martin Wind on bass. Breakstone concludes the album with his own composition, “Children of Art.”

Taking a commitment to “historical awareness” into consideration, I would say that it is easy to find satisfaction with Wilson’s approach to John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” Rather than trying to evoke memories of Coltrane’s tenor saxophone work, he finds his own paths along which his lower-register instrument can approach the wide-interval leaps of the tune with comparable agility and inventiveness. Similarly, Stephens works with Wilson to provide a “present day” account of “’Round Midnight” than never needs to try to mimic Thelonious Monk.

Children of Art, on the other hand, fares better in its intentions than it does in practice. I suspect that much of my disappointment comes from the absence of any reflections on Blakey himself. The Messengers were significant contributors to the hard bop movement; but Blakey was the one to put the “hard” in it, so to speak. His drum-work could be consistently intrusive without ever being offensively so. Instead, his outbursts challenged his Messengers to stand up to him, replying in kind with similarly aggressive technique.

Breakstone’s trio, on the other hand, is not particularly conducive to such dispositions. Thus, he is more interested in the tunes that the individual Messengers created than he is with the styles with which those tunes first emerged. Thus, the sincerest acknowledgement to the past has more to do with the album having been released to celebrate Blakey’s 100th birthday than with seeking out a latter-day perspective on the logic and rhetoric of Messenger performances. On the other hand listeners that are more interested in the tunes themselves, without worrying about the original contexts of performance, are likely to be well engaged with the breadth of invention exhibited by the seven Messengers honored by this album.