Avant-garde

There is a fascinating and well written essay by Salim Washington called “All the Things You Could Be by Now…”: Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz. It's well worth reading all the way through if you have the time or inclination, but there are a few areas of discussion I wanted to isolate and talk about.

In June of 1973, Charles Mingus wrote and published an article in Changes magazine entitled "An Open Letter to the Avant Garde."

In it, he gives an anecdote of talking to Duke Ellington about the avant garde:

I had to go to Yale recently for some kind of award they were giving away to different musicians for the Ellington Scholarship Fund, and I talked to Duke.

I said: "Duke, why don't you, me and Dizzy and Clark Terry and Thad Jones get together and make an avant-garde record?"

Duke's reply was very quick. He said: "Why should we go back that far? Let's not take music back that far, Mingus. Why not just make a modern record?"

And this to me appeared to be very funny, because he was saying just what I was thinking -- which I didn't have enough nerve to say. To hear musicians on the bandstand say: "Well they're playing in the avant-garde because they do anything they want to do" -- and most of the ones who do play avant-garde can't play a straight melody and solo on it with the approximate changes, with any approximate changes.

This is not a new critique of the avant-garde, but it's interesting to hear it coming from Mingus because he wasn't a traditionalist who entirely wrote off the contributions of free music, or the "new thing." It was just one tool in his musical language, which makes sense considering his dictum recounted in Sue Mingus' Tonight At Noon that "You don't do anything all the time" (p105, Sue Mingus).

He goes on to say:

"Music has to have some form, to come from some historical music created by a people. You can't just have guys making up different lines. If you study music you're able to do anything, to have variety in what you do. When every piece sounds just like the last one, that's no fun. I enjoy playing something where everybody's creating together and where there is some ensemble. I want to have different meters, different chord changes, or different music with no chord changes at all. But to just play free, to have no sense of where you're going or where you came from...I mean, if I'm going to have my appendix taken out, I want to be sure the doctor can retrace his steps" (ibid).

Going back to his Open Letter to the Avant Garde:

"I'm not trying to knock avant-garde. I'm just trying to say that it would be beautiful to hear -- if there were such a thing as avant-garde -- the best musicians play it. Because don't let anyone tell me that Clark Terry or Duke Ellington can't play avant-garde music, or incoherent music if they wanted to. It would be the most incoherent. It would be the most noisy. They would cut everybody playing bad. Because Duke could sit down at the piano and play a composition and it would sound like a symphony of Wrong, it would sound like he wrote it out with an introduction, interludes and recapitulations. The whole thing would be decided, if Duke was in the avant-garde. We'd all be crazy listening. If he should suddenly go avant-garde, I wouldn't know what to do except go crazy with him. I'm sure he's not, though. Mainly because he already is avant-garde in another way."

Salim Washington notes that the history of jazz is a history of avant-garde movements, from swing to the bebop revolution to the new thing of the 1960s. He also writes that the music that is identified as the avant-garde that blossomed during the 1960s has become a permanent avant-garde that is still practiced in similar ways today by many musicians. Mr. Washington also notes that what is conventionally referred to as the avant-garde is not only a reaction to the past but also a continued broadening of musical influence and perspective:

Some musicians tried to free themselves symbolically from the hegemony of Euro-America through such means as subverting the expectations of functional tonality, abandoning tempered intonation, improvising with free meter and free tonal structures, new instrumental techniques, etc. The non-Western emphasis was underscored by incorporating musical influences from various African, Latin American, and Asian cultures.

I don't have any broad sweeping conclusions or points to make right now, but I will continue this thread and line of thought in a couple more posts coming soon, with some musical examples I have in mind.

In the context of discussions about the so-called avant-garde of improvisational music, the issue of change is often at the heart of the matter without being explicitly defined or discussed. To decide who is truly avant-garde, or cutting edge, we have to quantify change, define the boundary that is being pushed, and decide how far it has been pushed. The same questions arise when we get into discussions about so-called free music, and when we refer to playing as in or out, when we applaud someone for balancing the inside/outside line, or when we denigrate a musician for being so out that our sense of it being music is lost.

If the avant-garde represents the pushing of boundaries, then all of the pivotal figures in the history of art and music can be seen as avant-garde. They forged some kind of new ground, and then many of them continued to explore that boundary area and new ground, creating an identity and unity in their work in the process that makes their art identifiable as their own. In my view there is a process of honing and essentializing that goes on, and a point is reached when the focus is less on accomplishing something new once again, but instead to do that new thing even better. Even when seemingly new areas are approached, there are often processual similarities in the work's emergence that are hidden from the consumer of art that reveal the new as consanguineous with the old.

If we accept as a basic premise that music is a communicative medium, then one way to view the renegotiation of boundaries is not as saying something new, but instead as saying the same thing in a new way. If we take this premise further and believe that music can communicate truth, and that there is a quintessence  that is distilled throughout all music of all genres when played at a high level, then the the question of how that is communicated and whether this purported boundary is being pushed seems less important than if the communication occurs.

This is of course assuming that there is an ends other than enjoyment of the means. Indulge me if you will.

If the goal is communication (no matter what the message), then should we place the means above the ends? This seems to be a fundamental flaw in the insistence placed upon innovation by some people in the audience for free, experimental, or avant-garde music. Only if we believe art is a purely aesthetic experience with no function can we possibly accept the idea that art is inherently better because it does something "new" aesthetically while ignoring whether or not its purported superiority relates to whether or not its communicative potential is realized.

In this sense, there is no progressive and no conservative. There are no boundaries to be pushed. If the process of improvisation and composition in the context of a musician's life relates to reaching towards an individualized voice, an often cited goal of musical practice, each individuals inherent uniqueness will lead to an individual expression that stands on its own, even if it shares qualities of past masters.

There's a whole group of musicians who represented the avant-garde in jazz during the late 1960s through the present, who accurately fit the description of masters who have and continue to hone their music. Some people would have you believe that since they are no longer pushing the so-called boundaries of music, they are no longer relevant to the so-called avant-garde. If anything, I would say that they are more relevant than ever: have fun pushing boundaries for the rest of your life, but you'll never reach the edge of the net, because it stretches forever in every direction.

In other words: welcome home, you've already arrived.

More later.