“Jazz and Its Discontents: The Francis Davis Reader”
By Francis Davis
DaCapo, 352 pages, $18

If one measures a player’s influence solely by the number of instrumentalists who adopt aspects of his style (the standard yardstick in jazz), Coleman finishes a distant third among his contemporaries to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Yet his accomplishment seems somehow greater than theirs, for they merely showed which elements of free form the jazz mainstream could absorb… Coleman’s revolution will never wholly succeed or fail. It is going to be a permanent revolution, its skirmishes marking the emergence of jazz as a full-fledged modern art, with all of modernism’s dualities and contradictions.

This is preposterous nonsense. Coleman’s achievement was substantial (though not a patch on that of Davis), but his legacy was mainly that of elevating the tics of personality above the rigors of art. It is sad and embarrassing that his legacy is now so all-encompassing that so astute a critic as Mr. Davis gives him the credit for turning jazz into a modern art, a task accomplished by Jelly Roll Morton a good forty years before anyone had ever heard of Coleman.

It would not be going too far to say that Mr Davis, a longtime contributor to such magazines as the Atlantic and the New Yorker, is more enthralled with the idea of a permanent revolution than with the revolution itself. This marks his position as considerably more nuanced than the ideologues that have plagued jazz criticism for forty years now, whose judgments on the success of Coleman and his descendants are based not on what they hear but on what they believe politically; but his desire to believe in the revolution is at the core of his new book.

The collection is an odd and inappropriately named one: this is not really an anthology of Mr Davis’ writing, but rather a selection from three out of print books with various previously uncollected pieces on popular culture thrown in. The subjects of these profiles and reviews have little in common: Mr Davis’ range encompasses everything from Miles Davis to Jerry Seinfeld to John Zorn to forgotten and relatively obscure jazzmen like Bobby Short, Ran Blake and Roswell Rudd, the last of whom is a once highly-regarded trombonist he finds playing at a second-rate Catskills resort. What unites them is the writer’s peculiar preoccupation. Most cultural critics are interested in the relation of the present to the past, which is to say with culture; Mr. Davis is interested in his subjects’ attitudes towards the relation of the present to the past. That is psychology.

This preoccupation shows itself in several ways. One is Mr. Davis’ fascination with eccentrics, often forgotten ones, who in some way stand outside the mainstream: Zorn, Rudd, Sun Ra, Anthony Davis and Charles Gayle, a homeless free-jazzer. It seems Mr. Davis wants to like them more than he does. He can’t help but note that Zorn is “one of those New Yorkers who gives the impression of being as proud of that city’s murder rate as Iowans are of their corn,” but despite his just appreciation of how this ignoble trait shows itself in Zorn’s ignoble music, Mr. Davis wants the revolution to go on.

It also shows itself in his ambiguous portrayals of such giants as Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey and Lester Young, as well as in his devotion to such idiosyncratic singers as Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, Susannah McCorkle and Abbey Lincoln. What Mr. Davis seems to value in all of them is the precise thing he would prefer not to: their devotion to technique and American song. He can barely contain his disdain for the neoconservatism of Wynton Marsalis; but then he can barely contain his disdain for late Miles Davis, of whom he asks, “Is there something pathetic about the sight of a sixty-three-year-old man in clogs, parachute pants, and jheri curls shaking his fanny to a younger generation’s beat?” To ask the question is to answer it. What’s strange is Mr. Davis’ apparent inabililty to see that the same question applies to sixty-three-year-old men who have spent their entire careers honking and hollering on horns they barely know how to play, avoiding the responsibilities of disciplining themselves to tradition and craft, preferring instead the prison of “free expression.”

I find it telling that there is nothing in this book about the entire generation of musicians who found a point between the ritualized provocations made fashionable by Coleman and the sterile, routinized banality of much hard bop. There is nothing on Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Andrew Hill, Steve Lacy or Mal Waldron, just as there is nothing on earlier figures who bridged chasms in the music similar to that which occurred in 1959: Coleman Hawkins, Earl Hines and Art Tatum, to take three obvious examples.

This is probably because Mr. Davis’ politics demand a kind of aesthetic Manicheism depressingly common in critics of his generation. A good leftist, he identifies experimentalism with progressivism, and traditionalism with conservatism. If he removed the politics from his judgment and trusted more to the substantial strengths of his perceptions, he would allow that the neoconservatism of Jazz at Lincoln Center has nothing to do with, and does not imply, that of the Project for the New American Century.

That said, any jazz lover will find much to love in this book. Mr. Davis’ affection for eccentricity leads to questionable musical judgment but wonderful journalism. He is a greatly gifted interviewer, a tough questioner who gives people who rarely get the opportunity to expatiate on themselves and their art a chance to define themselves. This book is also rich with short, devastating riffs of dismissal (“Amiri Baraka and countless other black poets in the contemporary oral tradition echo Kerouac’s rhythms more than they do those of Charlie Parker or John Coltrane, the forebears they’d claim.”) and observation (“Our is a trickle-up culture.”).

What stays with me most, though, is a tale told by the alto saxophonist Frank Morgan, who lost his career to prison and petty crime only to be resurrected in the 1980s. After telling of how Charlie Parker preached the evils of drugs to him before shooting up an ounce of cocaine and heroin with him, Morgan tells of how he and other participants at a jam session mourned when they learned of Bird’s death: they shot up and played “Don’t Blame Me.” This is just the bitter parallel of someone who would rather hear the least of Coleman Hawkin’s tossed-off riffs a thousand times than a second of free-form nonsense at the Knitting Factory, but it seems to me that sometime in the 1960s, when they learned that the avant-garde had died, half the jazz world did the musical equivalent of shooting up, and are still nodding off. I wish Francis Davis could see that.