I wrote this essay for a class and the assignment had rigid space constrictions. For that reason, this is not all that great of an essay. Still I thought it wasn't bad and added something new.
The Validity of Avant-Garde Jazz
By Micah Holmquist
February 2, 2000
Jazz critics are a cankerous lot. They dislike lots of things and love to argue amongst themselves. Usually these disagreements stay in the realm of preferences but one exception is the ire that the styles commonly called "avant-garde" receive. Mark Keresman did a review last month for jazzreview.com —a site for which both Keresman and myself are staff writers- which described the results of the avant-garde as "the self-indulgence of the squawk-&-doodle free improv-scene." This comment is ironic because many people who do not listen to jazz would describe everything from the bebop on as consisting of squawks and doodles. These criticisms thus become an attempt to say that the avant-garde of jazz is not really in the jazz canon and to discourage listeners from sampling this music. Clarinetist Don Byron summed up what these critics are doing in an interview published in the fall 1999 issue of Colorlines:
They are telling you that the cats can't play jazz. And they are also giving people that have had bad experiences with the avant-garde a signal that they are not going to like this music and they shouldn't even bother to check it out. That is dangerous.
It is dangerous because it lowers the discourse on avant-garde jazz to the level of falsehoods and misunderstandings.
Before going forward, the term "avant-garde" deserves a definition as it relates to jazz. Strictly speaking, all styles of jazz were avant-garde in their beginning in so far as they were the combination of new sounds in unconventional arrangements. As these combinations gained greater numbers of adherents and in popularity, they generally lost the avant-garde label. The avant-garde label has only stuck to the music with roots in the explorations of sound that Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor began creating in the late 1950s. Since countless musicians have created in this genre and created many new templates, you can imagine that this is widely disparate body of work. There are thus no characteristics that accurately describe all avant-garde music. Some common attributes, however, are atonality, collective improvisation, Asian and African influences, free rhythms, and rapid shifts in the music.
Critics of avant-garde jazz make a number of arguments. The underlying current behind them is that avant-garde jazz does not share some essential feature of jazz that is found in other styles such bebop and swing. There are many variations on these themes but the two primary forms are that the avant-garde lacks a respect for tradition and consists of music that is both repetitive and generally displeasing to listen to.
There is just a smidgen of merit to the first argument. Or more precisely, there are musicians generally labeled as avant-garde jazz performers who are not as steeped in blues and swings influences as say Wynton Marsalis. Instead the works of musicians like Evan Parker have a more classical feel. Stanley Crouch is one of many critics to seize on this in order to argue that avant-garde is not really jazz. There are two problems with this critique. One, there have been many clearly avant-garde performers and groups such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Archie Shepp who do explicitly place their music in the blues and swing traditions. Secondly it falsely positions and limits jazz. Jazz musicians have always soaked up influences from non-jazz sources such as classical and Latin music. If musicians were to stop doing this, then the music would quickly stagnate.
A similar fallacy exists in the idea that the avant-garde does the same displeasing thing over and over again. There are many avant-garde performers who were not or are not very original but this could be said just as easily about bop, swing, or the blues. Critics should not judge any type of music based on its worst performances but rather on either the best or the bulk of performances. A look at the full bodies of work by people like Roscoe Mitchell and Matthew Shipp would show that musicians in the avant-garde can develop and change significantly. And yes a good deal of avant-garde jazz is displeasing to the ears. Critics of this element incorrectly assume that abrasive sounds are a bad thing. In many cases, the intention is express emotions outside of happiness or a state of calm. Life is full of unexpected and unpleasant moments. The emotions that these moments cause has always been a subject for jazz. Many in the avant-garde keep up this tradition in ways that hit too close to home for some listeners.
You can not really argue with a person who says that they just do not like avant-garde jazz. You can only like what you like and every person should be allowed to express their reasons for their own opinions. Yet honesty needs to be part of this debate. As it stands now, the detractors of avant-garde jazz want to remove the debate from the area of preferences through falsehoods and appeals to convention.
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