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ARCHIVES | 1981

DOES JAZZ QUALIFY AS 'CLASSICAL'

By JOHN ROCKWELL JUNE 21, 1981
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The Kool Jazz Festival, which starts Friday and continues through July 5, is a
successor of the Newport Jazz Festival, and despite the occasional idiosyncrasies of
its director, George Wein, it remains about the most prestigious annual forum for
jazz.
But what is ''jazz''? We know that it is a decades-long tradition of American
music. But just where does it fit along the spectrum from entertainment to high
art? It has become commonplace to refer to jazz as an art form. But is it a classical
art, one that can be equated with the centuries-long classical-music tradition?
The very question of jazz's claim to classic status is of course a subjective
matter, and will strike most jazz fans as presumptuous. Jazz exists as a self-
contained musical world, with its own esthetics, traditions, performance circuits,
critical outlets and academic apparatus. Within that world, the paramount
importance of jazz is a given.
But from the perspective of someone concerned with music as a whole, and in
particular from the position of a devotee of classical music, the question does
indeed have relevance, and an attempt can be made to answer it.
The answer can be sought in two principal areas: the sociological and the
esthetic. Sociologically, one can argue that circumstances have enforced a
separation between jazz and the more ephermeral forms of popular music, and that
the division has helped legitimize the classic status of jazz. Over the past couple of
decades, jazz has become more isolated than before, having undergone a first
involuntary and then proudly defiant withdrawal from the commercial arena.
Throughout the first few decades of this century, jazz coexisted uneasily with
popular music. Part of the distinctions had more to do with class, race and
tradition than generic form. Popular music between the World Wars descended
from the European operatic tradition by way of Broadway and, later, Hollywood. It
was white music, even if blacks sometimes played it. Forms were set and mostly
simple. Jazz, conversely, emerged from black music. It was a more complex style
than popular music, both in its increasingly elaborate arrangements and in its
willingness to improvise virtuosically on pop themes.
With the advent of rock-and-roll in the mid-50's, however, both the older pop
music and jazz were threatened in the marketplace by the new, loud, youth-
oriented sounds. Older pop either retreated into nostalgia or adapted into today's
''middle of the road'' pop. Jazz, except for those musicians who indulged in popsy
''jazz fusion'' music or retreated into nostalgia themselves, became a de facto art
music - a condition symbolized by the curious parallelism in which approximately
5 percent of the record market for many years has been made up of classical sales
and 5 percent of jazz.
Thus, sociologically at least, there can be no question today that jazz is art, in
that the best of it has no real aspirations to charttopping commercial success.
Indeed, the most creative among today's jazz players now exist in a manner very
similar to the classical avant-garde composer - the same performance circuits,
grant sources, radio outlets and even self-images.
But if jazz can be called an art music sociologically, what about the esthetics of
jazz? Does a consideration of jazz from that point of view support the idea that jazz
has become a new kind of classical music? Here, one runs straight up against the
disdainful prejudices of Western art-music and its adherents. If jazz is a self-
contained world, so too is classical music, even if the classical tradition is far longer
and more complex. But neither complexity nor age can be equated with artistry,
and it is tempting to consider the relationship between jazz and classical music in
light of classical music's own present-day limitations.
Classical music in the United States stands for the simultaneously inspiring
and deadening weight of the European legacy to American culture. Ralph Waldo
Emerson's ''American Scholar'' essay is but one of the best-known cases of an
American intellectual calling out for American artists and scholars to stand on their
own and to work for the creation of an indigenous American culture. Jazz is one of
many kinds of American music that answers that call.
Classical music has hardly ignored jazz. Since Debussy, composers have
sought - sometimes admiringly, sometimes patronizingly - to capture the spirit and
the rhythms of jazz in their music. But that doesn't amount to a recognition of jazz
as an independent musical style worthy of parity with the classics.
Such an attitude was more closely approached in the 50's and 60's, with the
so-called ''third stream'' ideas propagated by Gunther Schuller. But here the
problem in practice was an awkward juxtaposition of improvisatory jazz and
notated classical styles.
The improvisatory tradition of jazz strikes some classical musicians as more
primitive than strictly notated music. But classical music has its own long and
honorable tradition of improvisation, and the slow stifling of improvisatory
practice in Western art music may have contributed to its creative stultification.
Others contend that jazz has a lesser claim to artistry because the nature of its
procedures has so far produced works of lesser length and scope than the largest-
scale scores of classical music. But bulk and art are not the same, and few deny the
greater rhythmic sophistication of jazz. An improvising jazz musician's creativity
evolves over time, as in the way in which several club sets can present different
facets of the same material. And recording has enabled improvising musicians to
aspire to a new permanence for their once-evanescent art.
In recent years, a whole generation of younger musicians has arisen that
seems equally comfortable both in jazz and in classical music, and especially in the
open kind of experimental music that flourishes outside the post-Serial classical
avant-gardism still dominant in the American Northeast.
For such musicians - one thinks of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Keith
Jarrett, Leroy Jenkins, George Lewis and many less-well-known names -the most
interesting new music today exists in a fruitful limbo between improvisation and
strictly notated music, drawing for its ideas from the varied traditions of the
European classics, the international avant-garde, jazz, Africa and the rest of the
third world.
From this perspective, even the great jazz musicians of the past were assuredly
classical artists in every sense in which a classical-music composer or performer
 can claim that title - the only differences being the precise nature of styles in which
a musician worked, the musical traditions to which he felt closest and the audience
to which he played.
In fact, there are those who contend that jazz should be prized as the really
creative classical music of today. In a series of books beginning with ''The Agony of
Modern Music'' in 1955, Henry Pleasants suggested that most 20th-century avant-
garde music had lost touch with humanistic relevance, and that the true musical
creativity of our era had been diverted into jazz. That may seem rather extreme,
but it is worth thinking about.
What is really happening in music today is that creativity exists in every form
of music, be it esthetically ''pure,'' academic or even commercial. In every form, the
creative composers and performers express something of enduring, ''classical''
value through their music, and the lesser lights fall prey to imitation.
A version of this article appears in print on June 21, 1981, on Page 2002019 of the National edition with the
headline: DOES JAZZ QUALIFY AS 'CLASSICAL'.

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