A
FIRESIDE CHAT WITH HOWARD MANDEL
As President of the Jazz Journalists Association, Howard Mandel sees the
future of both those who are making the music and those who are chronicling
it. Frankly, most writers don't read other writers. It could be insecurity,
who knows? But Mandel is one of the few and I mean few, writers I regularly
read. So I wanted to see what his take would be on the future of improvised
music, unedited and in his own words.
FRED JUNG: How do you see the future of jazz in terms of its artists,
when artists of the '50s are being overshadowed by the so-called "young
lions" movement? By virtue of their age, one musician is being ignored
and one being hyped.
HOWARD MANDEL: I think that jazz shouldn't be looked at in terms of marketing
fashions and fads, and that we really look at it as an art form that adheres
to our ears. The music adheres to our ears over different periods of time.
Some music takes a long time to understand. It lives with us a long time
and I think that is what's happening to musicians who are surviving from
the '50s, '60s, and '70s now. And yet, there are young artists who come
up and they do something that is flashy or catchy or is a good idea. It's
not just old guys like me who have the good ideas. Young people have good
ideas too, musically speaking. That's always been true in jazz. It's a
young person's music also. I don't think there is anything wrong with
new artists coming up. I expect that is what is going to fuel the future
of jazz.
FJ: What artists do you see as contributing readily right now?
HOWARD MANDEL: Young artists who are really exciting to me right now is
this guitarist named David Fiuczynski, who I just heard an album he did
called Jazz Punk. Ethan Iverson is a very interesting piano player.
I've been a proponent of Myra Melford for quite some time. I don't know
if she counts as young, but she is. She's eternally hearted. That is for
sure. Gonzalo Rubalcaba, who is under forty. I think I enjoy Wynton Marsalis.
He certainly has something to contribute to the future of jazz. We shouldn't
downplay his efforts completely, although I think it's wise to keep him
in perspective. I hear a saxophonist named Micah Gough. I never heard
him before, but he was playing with John Zorn and Mark Ribot at the Knitting
Factory. That was a young feeling band. This guy, Micah Gough had a different
take on tenor saxophone, which I am always excited to hear.
FJ: You mentioned Wynton Marsalis, who has made a tremendous impact last
year, both with his Lincoln Center work and his extensive CD output.
HOWARD MANDEL: Yeah, well, he's a real institutionalizer. Wynton has institutionalized
jazz as no one has ever been able to do before. Wynton has brought quite
a bit of institutional credibility to it, not just by performing, although
he is a superb performer. When he plays trumpet, he is certainly our best
technical trumpet player. And it's not just technique, he really puts
himself into what he is playing. I heard his concert with symphony orchestra
on December 30 of last year, '99, playing with the New York Philharmonic,
the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and the Oregon State University Choir.
And it was a monumental work. Now, a lot of the monument could have been
paired way down for my taste and in smaller doses. It wasn't all equally
brilliant for a hundred minutes, but when he stood up and played, he played
some great horn. It was great and fantastic to hear. So that is exciting
and by that stretch, I think he's quite valuable. He's often does great
things to turn philanthropists onto jazz, to do jazz education in a real
sweeping way. He's tireless. He's a good representative of certain ideals
in jazz. Although, I find that his music sometimes doesn't represent all
those ideals, but whose does? How can you realize all the great hopes
you have?
FJ: Apart from New York's downtown scene, there is a budding avant scene
in Chicago and Los Angeles.
HOWARD MANDEL: Well, I've seen it in Europe a lot and I've seen it in
Canada. I was in Victoriaville, a little town between Toronto and Quebec.
I was there last spring for a five-day festival where there is international
avant-garde and some semi-classical, avant-rock works, Sonic Youth members,
plus the Peter Brotzmann Tentet. That was the closest avant-jazz. You
hear a lot of saxophonists, Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson. This is
where jazz, this avant-garde is international. It happens out in Los Angeles
too. I thinking of the Cline brothers. Nels Cline and Gregg Bendian made
a great record last year (Interstellar Space Revisited: The Music of John
Coltrane). I know Alex has also been active, Vinny Golia, those guys.
I haven't heard what Vinny's been up to this year, but he's always been
interesting. And also the contemporary classical world, that's all over
the country. It's not just in New York or Chicago. They also avant-garde
music coming out of Philly. We don't hear much about it, but Bobby Zankel
is a superior alto saxophone player, who has really got something that
hasn't been heard widely. In Austin, where you've got Tina Marsh leading
a band called Creative Orchestra, which is kind of left of Carla Bley.
It's quite interesting. But I also feel, it *is* right at home. My wife,
Kitty Brazelton -- I hear what she's doing, confounding genres with three
four differnt kinds of projects at once, and I meet other composers on
her scene, they might be from Boston, or Minneapolis, or L.A. -- anyway,
it's all over, and all over a stylistic spectrum: a large, impassioned
avant garde.
FJ: With the passing of Lester Bowie last year, is there a clear spokesperson
or persona for avant-jazz?
HOWARD MANDEL: I think there is some great personalities in the music
and I think that people are sad about Lester, that's for sure. It's a
great loss. People like Don Pullen or Don Cherry. I still think of Don
Cherry and what he added to the music, Rahsaan. These guys live on in
certain ways. I do hope that someone is going to be able to take the mantel
for speaking to alternatives. I find James Newton is a very articulate
guy and he's a great player and he has a real sense of history. Also,
he likes to live in the present. His music has excited me. I don't know
if he's going to put himself in a position to be quite as public as Lester.
Lester had that unique performance style. He was really out there. He
was fun.
FJ: What has been the impact of John Zorn?
HOWARD MANDEL: I think John Zorn is a very serious musician. He's a prodigious
player. He's somebody who can really reach a lot of people. I saw him
at the Chicago Jazz Festival with Masada. Now, this is a large, outdoor,
mainstream, but interesting jazz festival that is free. Everybody was
into it. Masada was just a great quartet performance, very lyrical and
exciting music and it sounded fresh. Zorn didn't hold anything back. His
live vocabulary as a saxophone player has become quite powerful and he
was working with Dave Douglas, Joey Baron, and Greg Cohen, a superb unit,
really, really well balanced. Zorn can do that and he is also writing
serious music for chamber ensembles, mixed instrumentations. He seems
to be activating a lot of people in the area that I live in, specifically,
to do a lot of great work that is being recorded and presented in places
like Tonic. I think John is really on the right track.
FJ: You spoke of the future of jazz in your new book Future Jazz,
how do you see the future of jazz? Obviously, there has to be a concern
in the retail market with the overall trend in the past ten years being
shrinking numbers. Will it still be healthy in the next ten years?
HOWARD MANDEL: I think jazz is a culture and I think it's a very strong
one, but I don't think it's a particularly widely dissimilated one. I
think it bears a lot of practices and standards and expectations like
a culture does. It has mythology. It has certain procedures. But the particular
representations and the particular unique individuals expressions within
that greater culture are what make jazz so interesting and that they are
so closely tied to the media, artistic rendering of what's happening in
our society. That's jazz's greatest value. To the extent that that's being
done today, jazz is really healthy. It's great that there is an active
smooth jazz scene. Although, I don't care much for the music of smooth
jazz. Retail, the fact that there is a lot of people employed in it, that's
swell. Also, that there are people who devote themselves to the music
as an art and struggle with it and that they are continuing to do that,
William Parker in the East Village or the guys in Chicago. This stuff
is going to live. People want to devote themselves to it because they
believe in the culture itself. They believe in its standards and they
like the music. It speaks to them. I think it is healthy that way. I don't
see it going away.
FJ: Do you find, particularly here in the States, that jazz is a secondary
art form in the minds of the mainstream?
HOWARD MANDEL: No, I think it's absolutely a primary. It's bedrock.
FJ: Does the music get that kind of respect it should have as a culture
from those who fuel its pocketbook?
HOWARD MANDEL: It does not get money. It doesn't get money. It is not
an exchange system where that's going to happen. The musicians themselves
play something, which they spend years and years developing and simply
learning how to do. It touches something very deeply within themselves.
It's really not about making money for anybody. This music is not easy.
It doesn't go down easy. It's really direct. A lot of people don't like
that. Most people don't know how to listen to music. They just have it
on in the background. They're not listening to it. They don't know what's
there. They're listening to what their friends think they should like.
Those who really listen to music, who really listen to jazz, get quite
a bit more from it than that. They end up passing along something, which
is quite a bit more valuable.
FJ: As the President of the Jazz Journalists Association, what should
the primary goals be for writers, historians, and critics of this music?
HOWARD MANDEL: I'm flattered that you think of me as a historian, Fred.
I think of myself as a journalist. To me, journalism is history in a hurry.
I like to write about the things that are going on around me. And it is
necessary for me to remind myself that there is a lot of music going on
around me. It's a big tank that I can splash around in, full of fish.
The responsibilities of a jazz journalist is to be curious and to be open
to music and to find it interesting and to try and make it interesting
to people who are at the other end of their journalism. We have a lot
of connections to make here and a lot of really great music to unearth.
That is something that jazz journalism can do, point people to things
they haven't heard before. And then sort of understand some of these illusive
aspects of music. Talk about the spiritual aspect of music. Talk about
the practical aspect of it in a consumer society. Understand how our cultures
work. That's what I like to read about and I guess that is what I end
up writing. I'd like to see that happening in jazz journalism. This music
is just unique in world history as far as I know. It is unlike anything
that was done in the course of the seventeenth century in Europe, completely
more sophisticated than any so called folk music, the way we think of
that. Jazz is just incredibly unique like this. It's a little engine of
the future. It's always spinning forward. It's amazing. That's what I
like to think is my subject and that's what I wish other jazz journalists
would do too.
FJ: How has the IAJE (International Association of Jazz Educators) Convention's
(which being held in New Orleans this year) growth aided in the development
of the outreach of the music?
HOWARD MANDEL: I'm going next week. I think it's going to be fun. I enjoy
seeing the people there. It's heartening to see that people can work together
around jazz issues, just get together. I really think that getting together
actually makes us work better together. I think there is no replacement
for face-to-face contact. I think that this particular convention growing
has demonstrated that, yes, we need this. We don't need it the way that
it is necessarily coming down from the jazz industry. The so-called jazz
industry is the record company. They are not doing a great job for us.
I don't think that is what we should be looking at as the model for the
way that the jazz business is going to grow and the way that jazz culture
is going to disseminate. If the record company can only sell three percent
or two percent of their total market, and you can go to a convention that
has 70,000 people that go out all over the United States and teach high
school music, I mean, that is an effective sales force. That's not the
ineffective sales force that the record company is.
FJ: I have spoken with Michael Dorf of the Knitting Factory and he had
alluded to the fact that he and Knit Media were no longer going to be
active participants in the Jazz Awards. Where does that leave the JJA,
which nominated the musicians for the award's categories?
HOWARD MANDEL: That is something we are going to take up at the IAJE Convention
next week. I've talked to the BET (BET is broadcasting the Jazz Awards)
people and I have not heard what kind of plans they have for us. I need
to know more about the situation and I need to talk to my members about
that too. I'm not in a position to just say this is how we do it.
FJ: Simply, what prompted you to listen to this music?
HOWARD MANDEL: The music itself.
FJ: What was it about the music?
HOWARD MANDEL: It's so wondrous to me, the sense of interaction, the range,
the spaces it leads me to, the kind of thinking that it represents, an
elegance, an excellence, all that stuff. It's a lyrical, immediate, vocal,
American, and yet, universal language in instrumental jazz. It can be
something as simple as rhythmic swing that is in the pocket even though
there is this feeling of momentum that you are getting from it, or it
can be something so subtle as the juxtaposition of Miles Davis, Coltrane,
and Cannonball Adderley in Kind of Blue. It was just right. They
sounded not foreign to me, not someone else's culture, not someone else's
way of making sounds, but the way that I wanted to make my own. That's
what drew me to jazz and that's what draws me to it, and also it's endless
possibilities. It is very optimistic music.
Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and Interview Specialist. Comments?
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Fred.