Rethinking Jazz Through the 1970s

The 1970s has been a vexed and vexing decade in the field of jazz studies, as it has been in other areas of historical and cultural analysis. As a relatively proximate “time of great uncertainty,” as Beth Bailey and David Farber note, we still struggle to make sense of it. The decade suffers as well from its comparison to the 1960s, as we often assume it lacks the “passion, grandeur, and tragedy” of its temporal predecessor. ¹ Yet the 1970s still carry the weight of many of the unresolved issues that came to the fore during the 1960s. In other words, even as the 1970s remain somewhat marginal in the historical imagination (if not in popular music and visual culture at the present moment), the interpretations that do exist are often saturated with strong feelings, pro and con, about the 1960s. The relationship is made ever more complicated by the fact that social transformations do not adhere neatly to decadal transitions. One can argue, for example, that the 1960s, if defined by its more radical social and cultural movements, ran from about 1965 to 1975; with the 1970s, as an uncertain period marked by reaction to that which preceded it, following for the next five, ten, or even fifteen years.

Musicians, critics, and fans affiliated with jazz had their share of uncertainty during the 1970s, as phenomena that had emerged or been exacerbated during the previous decade continued. Declining record sales, club closures, and racial tensions were among the many issues that caused hand wringing about the state of the art form and its future. The variety of musical fusions and experiments that emerged at the end of the 1960s or during the 1970s caused much consternation as well, inspiring Duke Ellington in 1973 to put a somewhat different spin on his long‐standing suspicion of the term “jazz”: “I don't know how such great extremes as now exist can be contained under the one heading.” ²

The 1970s often fare poorly in this century's jazz histories. The decade is sometimes viewed as a period defined more by its aesthetic failures than by its successes or simply as a moment when “nothing was happening” in the music. This is evident, among other places, in Ken Burns's much‐celebrated and much‐pilloried 2001 film, Jazz, which proclaims the music dying along with Ellington and Louis Armstrong in the early part of the decade, and then the film's audience hears that the music is officially pronounced dead by Miles Davis in 1975. According to this documentary's narrative arc, the jazz tradition is subsequently resurrected both by Dexter Gordon's triumphant return from Europe in 1976, and then by Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis joining Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1980 and 1981, respectively. The asymmetrical weight that the 1970s bears as a moment of failure in jazz history is made clear in the irony of the Burns narrative pronouncing jazz dead in 1975 and reborn in 1976. ³

Yet CD reissues, online testimony by artists, fans, and producers, and a growing body of scholarship demonstrates that despite the uncertainty experienced in real‐time three to four decades ago, and despite instances of historiographical erasure and marginalization, there was a lot of interesting jazz‐related music created during the decade. And this music, and the extra‐musical activities that accompanied it, continue to influence the music world. Among other things, the decade witnessed the political, self‐help, and pedagogical projects of African American and multiracial jazz collectives; the influence of the women's movement on the music of, modes of presentation of, and attitudes toward female jazz musicians; the loft jazz scene; the institutionalization of jazz education; the important role jazz‐trained musicians played in the development of other popular musics; the proliferation of independent record companies; and, yes, the birth of jazz neoclassicism.

This special issue of Jazz Perspectives seeks to contribute to the analytical reconsideration of the 1970s in jazz studies. At the most fundamental level, these essays and reviews illuminate and contextualize important and, in some cases, understudied musicians active during the decade as well as the musical trends of which they were part. Andrew Dewar's essay on trumpeter Bill Dixon's composition/performance Webern examines the development of solo improvisation on single‐line instruments during the decade while addressing provocative ontological questions concerning “post‐songform jazz.” Kevin Fellezs's analysis of Toshiko Akiyoshi's weaving of Japanese influences into her big band compositions and arrangements from the 1970s documents important developments in big band music during the 1970s, while also addressing complicated questions about racial and gendered meanings that have been projected onto jazz by critics and musicians alike. Jeremy Smith examines the work of one of jazz's most prominent figures (Miles Davis) and one of the most visible sub‐genres (fusion jazz) from the decade, while bringing the influential actions of record companies (Columbia Records, in this case) into the story.

The media and book reviews of this issue offer complementary observations. John Wriggle's review of Bill Evans, Gil Evans, and Bernie Maupin recordings demonstrates the influence of Miles Davis while also making it clear that the terrain of fusion jazz and its future impact cannot be reduced to Davis's particular aesthetic vision nor to those of his sidemen (Hancock, Shorter, Zawinul, McLaughlin, etc.) who were more typically associated with the genre. Jason Robinson's review of the film Inside Out in the Open reminds us of the continuing influence of major “free jazz” players active during the decade and of those influential careers of a second wave of players who came onto the scene during the decade. Herman Gray's review essay of George Lewis's A Power Stronger Than Itself further reinforces such views, but Gray also insists that we maintain attention to the powerful collective experimentalist and political legacies that these musicians have left. And, finally, Bradley Sroka's review of the website Destination: Out illustrates the resonance that the 1970s continues to have with a dedicated community of fans, critics, and musicians who share music and virtual dialogue.

Taken together, the essays and reviews of this issue also suggest how serious analyses of artists active during the 1970s may enable new approaches to jazz studies subjects across the decades. In particular, the essays accomplish this by engaging head on some of the musical and extra‐musical elements—commodity status, experimentalism, a surplus of identity, etc.—that have often been emphasized by critics of the era. By engaging in balanced and careful analysis of sometimes controversial subjects, and by providing insight into artists' implicit and explicit theorizing, the essays raise issues and suggest modes of inquiry that can be directed to other decades.

All three essays show that economic and institutional relationships tend to emerge quite easily when talking about the 1970s. There is, after all, a sense among many that jazz during the 1970s was either corrupted by the intrusion of the market or by its declining marketability, depending on one's perspective, and by its institutionalization in the academy. Yet, rather than playing into normative narratives of market‐based ascension or declension, these pieces demonstrate the complicated imbrications of musicians and their creative projects in multiple, intersecting economic and institutional forces. Smith's attention to the congruence and incongruence of Columbia's and Davis's motivations for selling records, for example, disrupts the tendency to view fusion as overly influenced by the market while simultaneously asserting that the counter‐move of avoiding mention of the market altogether is equally dissatisfying. But it also points the way toward a jazz studies that is more attuned to political economy and more cognizant of the ways that the desire to get paid—by musicians, club owners, booking agents, record company owners and producers, journalists, and others—has always been a critical element of the story of jazz in its many shapes and forms. Commerce, of course, has often constrained creative projects, but it has been both a negatively and positively generative influence. It is a multidimensional process, and, as Smith also reminds us, “the diverse motives of all parties involved in music and commerce rarely result in a single or uniform perspective on the relationship between music and marketing.”

Rethinking jazz studies via the 1970s also promises to extend the project of writing women, gender, and sexuality into jazz studies. This was, after all, a decade when women were making some inroads into the jazz world and when their activities were being interpreted in light of shifting gender dynamics, more visible sexual politics, and the consciousness raising and consternation that accompanied second‐wave feminist movements. The 1970s also witnessed the growing visibility of musicians born outside of the United States in both that country's jazz scene and on the international recording and festival circuit. Also with increasing influence were record labels based outside of the United States, such as ECM. As such, a reconsideration of the 1970s strongly suggests that jazz studies as a whole should continue both to look outside of the United States and to pay attention to transnational circuits as it identifies its objects of study. Moreover, the insights of the contributions to this issue, should compell us to look at the fusions of other eras as products of human movement and to consider their constitutive cultural exchanges not simply as examples of the integration of new elements into established jazz genres but as emergent kinds of musical expression that said something particular about the epochs in which they were made.

These scholarly perspectives are suggested most notably in Fellezs's account of Akiyoshi's big band work. And there, as well as in the other essays, we get glimpses into how we might build from the lessons of the 1970s as we write about the relationship between music and identities. After all, the 1970s were a period when there was much debate—and often more nuanced debate than has been commonly recognized—about the promise of social identities as modalities for self‐ and collective‐realization but also about the array of constraints that they presented. The essays herein show how identities mattered and were marketed in the jazz business during the 1970s; such transactions in turn created both a set of constraints for musicians and also a palette for creativity. By paying attention to these sorts of musical projects, we should be encouraged to think more carefully about the complex ways across the span of jazz history that human identities have been grafted onto musical projects. Rather than musicians merely performing identities, the following essays ask us to consider identities (racial, gendered, sexual, ethnic, generational, socially classed, regional, national, transnational, etc.) as categories that have informed what artists think is permissible to express musically, that have been mapped onto the music in order to sell it, and that have structured relations within the jazz world. In other words, identities have constituted a field in which musicians—at times affirmatively and at times ambivalently—have created meanings for themselves and for others.

And, finally, Dewar's discussion of Dixon's attempt to redefine the musical object from recording or score to an “open work” (which may be reinvented in successive iterations) suggests, on the one hand, that we can continually interrogate our own assumptions of what constitutes the object of jazz studies. We can question this at the level of musical ontology, as discussed in the piece, but we may also want to ask where to direct our attention as we consider the chain of musical meaning making from idea to sound to reception. On the other hand, we might also build upon the ethos of radical experimentalism—evident at various periods in jazz history, but percolating in particular ways during the 1970s—as we study jazz phenomena from different eras. This ethos seems especially relevant as we consider the extent to which analytical orthodoxies prevent us from fully understanding the interface of sound and society. In this spirit of innovation, we might develop a broader palette of analytical tools with which to help us answer the questions before us—the multidisciplinary approaches of the essays here are all impressive steps in that direction—and we might also consider “new expressive possibilities” as we seek to most effectively and affectively document musical experience in prose.

I hope you enjoy the issue.

  Eric Porter

   University of California, Santa Cruz

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank all of the contributors for their excellent work and John Howland for his extraordinary organizational and copyediting skills.

Notes

¹ America in the 1970s, eds. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, KS: The University of Kansas Press, 2004), 1.

² Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1973; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1976), 453.

³ Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns, DVD boxed set, directed by Ken Burns (n.p.: PBS Home Video, 2001). For a critical engagement with Burns's Jazz that raises the issue of how the narrative gives short shrift to music produced during the 1970s, see Geoffrey Jacques, moderator, with Scott DeVeaux, Krin Gabbard, Bernard Gendron, and Sherrie Tucker, “A Roundtable on Ken Burns's Jazz,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 13 (September 1, 2001): 207–225.