New Dreams, New Masters

During the last decade of the 20th Century, jazz music seemed to many people to have simply disappeared altogether.  That was certainly the conclusion of documentarian Ken Burns in his mammoth series Jazz - people just stopped playing the music sometime around the early 90s, at least until (in Burns' opinion, not ours) Wynton Marsalis came along and rescued it.

In our opinion, Marsalis didn't rescue jazz but instead stuffed and embalmed it.  He's a skilled player - no question there - but he didn't articulate a new voice or define a new direction like the Masters celebrated in this series, but instead codified it and archived it, and now forums like Jazz At Lincoln Center treat jazz music like museum pieces that have to be played in a very precise and particular way in order for the tradition to survive. This is ironic for an iconoclastic musical tradition that had always thrived on innovation and change.

What Burns missed was that jazz and morphed in the 90s from a music dominated by the saxophone to something that, like most other all popular music at the time, was dominated by the electric guitar. Guitarists like John McLaughlin and Pat Metheny and Al DiMeola and Larry Coryell and Stanley Jordan and Sonny Sharrock had become the dominant voices in jazz (outside of a semi-ironic downtown NYC art scene led by the Lounge Lizards and the Microscopic Septet).  Burns couldn't connect the dots between the old-time swings bands of the 40s and 50s with the modern crop of musicians, and therefore simply declared "jazz is dead" or rather "jazz was dead until Wynton Marsalis."

For the record, we're now almost 30 years past the heyday of the jazz guitarist and the music has moved on since those times, but there are still some guitarists out there doing the jazz thing, such as Marc Ribot and John Scofield and Mike Stern, as well as, until recently, John Abercrombie and Allan Holdsworth, who both passed away in 2017 along with Mr. Coryell.

And Bill Frisell survives.  Another non-traditional musician, Frisell fearlessly incorporates anything from rock to showtunes to folk to world music to noise, and even some occasional schmaltz, into his own unique brand of jazz.  You literally never know what to expect from the next Bill Frisell record. It could be 55 minutes of feedback with power tools as accompaniment, or a maudlin version of When You Wish Upon A Star, played solo and acoustic. 

Frisell has been recording prodigiously since at least the mid 80s and yet we've never seen him perform live.  Fortunately, he'll be one of the performers this year (next week!) at Big Ears, so that may change.