Brenda Hopkins Miranda

“El arte sin tradición es un rebaño de ovejas sin pastor. Sin innovación, es un cadáver.” ~ Winston Churchill

ADVERTENCIA: Debido al tema este blog es larguito.

¿Qué es el Jazz? Así se llamaba una clase de maestría que tomé en New England Conservatory, conservatorio que en 1969 tuvo el primer programa de Jazz Studies acreditado. Estuvimos todo un semestre leyendo, investigando y discutiendo. Cuando terminó el semestre no habíamos llegado a ninguna conclusión. Para empezar, tratar de definir en palabras el jazz, la música o cualquier cosa que tenga que ver con el arte es sumamente complicado. Como dijeron Thelonious Monk: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” y Bill Evans: “You can’t explain jazz to anyone without losing the experience because it’s feeling, not words.” 

¿Qué es el jazz? Pues depende a quién le preguntes. Algunos le llaman “la música clásica de Estados Unidos”. Si le preguntas a Wynton Marsalis te va a decir que es música que tiene swing. Si le preguntas a Pat Metheny dirá que no es Kenny G. Si le preguntas al diccionario Webster dirá que es música polifónica tocada en grupo caracterizada por una propulsión de ritmos sincopados, varios grados de improvisación y frecuentes distorsiones deliberadas de tono y timbre. Lo cierto es que el jazz tiene una diversidad de estilos y expresión tan extrema y su origen social es tan complejo que es difícil buscar una definición.

Por cierto, los músicos y expertos están de acuerdo en que el swing no tiene una dimensión cuantificable, sino que es una percepción o respuesta emocional que depende de factores que incluyen la idiosincrasia y sentimientos del oyente. Por ejemplo, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Sonny Stitt, Bill Evans, Ornette Coleman y John Coltrane tienen swings muy diferentes. Dijo el mismo Count Basie: “I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can’t define it beyond that.”

Entre las primeras influencias que dieron forma al jazz están: spirituals, blues, ragtime, canciones minstrel, folclóricas y de trabajo, himnos religiosos, arias operáticas francesas e italianas, bailes populares y marchas militares españoles y europeos. Durante los años 1920’s a casi toda la música popular alegre y bailable le llamaban jazz. Decir que existe una esencia del jazz es casi un acto de fe debido a las dramáticas transformaciones que ha tenido en tan poco tiempo (poco más de 100 años) y la gran cantidad de subgéneros que ha generado:

Acid blues, Acid jazz, Afro-jazz, Afrocuban-jazz, Afrocaribbean-jazz, Avant-garde jazz, Bebop, Bossa nova, Calypso jazz, Chamber jazz, Contemporary jazz, Continental Jazz, Cool jazz, Creative jazz, Crossover jazz, Cubop, Dixieland, Dixieland revival, Ethno jazz, European free jazz, Free funk, Free improvisation, Free jazz, Groove jazz, Gypsy jazz, Hard bop, Jazz blues, Jazz-funk, Jazz fusion, Jazz rap, Jazz rock, Jungle Bop, Kansas City blues, Kansas City jazz, Latin jazz, Livetronica, M-Base, Mainstream jazz, Mini-jazz, Modal jazz, Modern Creative, M-Base, Neo-bop jazz, Neo-swing, Novelty ragtime, Nu jazz, Orchestral jazz, Pop-jazz, Post-bop, Postmodern fusion, Progressive jazz, Punk jazz, Ragtime, Ska jazz, Smooth jazz, Soul jazz, Stride jazz, Straight-ahead jazz, Swing, Third stream, Trad jazz, Urban jazz, Vocal jazz, West Coast jazz

Su éxito a nivel mundial precisamente se debe a su apertura y disposición para la evolución. Es esto lo que le ha llevado de ser una música regional a ser una universal. Hoy podríamos decir que cada lugar en el mundo tiene su jazz. ¿Qué es el jazz? En aquella clase aprendimos que hay cuatro aproximaciones para definirlo:

1. La definición estricta (la historia oficial): El jazz requiere que haya improvisación y swing (la primera corchea es más larga que la segunda a una proporción de 60:40 tocadas sobre un tiempo fijo y estable), ciertos patrones rítmicos sincopados peculiares, interpretación grupal polifónica, blue notes, etnicidad, tensión, cierta instrumentación, timbre, tono, cromatismo, etc. Esta definición (con tendencia a la simplificación y generalización) es la que usualmente ofrecen musicólogos, historiadores, diccionarios y libros de texto. La misma dejaría fuera la música de la película The Jazz Singer (1927), Rhapsody in Blue de George Gershwin, el grupo Peter, Paul and Mary ganador del primer lugar en la categoría de jazz vocal de la revista Playboy (1964, 1965 y 1966), mucha de la música bailable “big band” y los discos más vendidos de los 1930’s y 1940’s, piezas de Ted Lewis, Glenn Miller, Rudy Vallee, Paul Whiteman, Duke Ellington y Stan Kenton que no incluyen o tienen muy poca improvisación, el solo de saxofón de Johnny Hodges en “Come Sunday” en el disco de Ellington Black, Brown & Beige, interpretaciones del Arte Ensemble of Chicago, Manhattan Transfer y Cecil Taylor. Por otro lado, esta definición incluye la música de Kenny G.

2. La definición abierta: Jazz es lo que sea que la persona piensa que es. No es una forma sino un método para procesar la música. Se puede “jazzear” cualquier canción. Se distingue por su espíritu y no por la mecánica de su marco o las características de su estructura. Es un sentimiento, una expresión o manera original de tocar. El gusto personal dicta la mezcla de elementos, por ejemplo: Jelly Roll Morton incorporó ritmos de la música bailable francesa y española en los 1920’s, Dizzy Gillespie incorporó ritmos latinos y afro-caribeños en los 1940’s, las inflexiones vocales de Roberta Baum provienen del canto de las mujeres del Medio Oriente, Miles Davis incorporó el rock en los 1970’s y en los 1990’s Don Pullen incorporó influencias de los indios norteamericanos y Jan Garbarek incorporó influencias de la música de la India, entre otros.

3. La definición relativa o el jazz como dimensión (jazzness): El jazz es lo que es porque es una culminación de todo lo que ha venido antes y tiene similitudes con otros eventos que anteriormente fueron llamados jazz. Mientras más elementos que están previamente asociados al jazz estén presentes y más claramente se puedan escuchar, mejor se puede calificar como jazz. Los oyentes son los que le asignan diferente valor y peso a cada elemento.

4. La definición de los músicos:

Neo-clasicismo –Para los neo-clasicistas la prioridad es la tradición, entiéndase swing y bebop (era dorada del jazz 1930-1960) y la innovación es irrelevante pues se trata de tocar apropiadamente, siguiendo códigos y reglas previamente establecidos. Los neo-clasicistas piensan que todo lo que pasó después del bebop no tiene valor: cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, free jazz, third stream, new thing, fusión, etc. Quizás por eso escucho tantos grupos y proyectos “nuevos” de jóvenes que me suenan a 1940. Este pensamiento conservador y tradicionalista no es nuevo. En los años 30 se reprocharon las innovaciones que trajo el swing, en los 40 se atacó al bebop como cuando Louis Armstrong dijo que el bebop era música china, en los 60 al free jazz y en los 70 a la fusión… Significa que todo lo que le queda por hacer a la nueva generación es preservar y revivir momentos gloriosos del pasado.

Vanguardismo – Esta visión propone que el jazz sin innovación es un arte muerto. La esencia es el mismo cambio. La tradición no se utiliza con el propósito de volver al pasado, sino para encontrar nuevas maneras de moverse hacia el futuro. El reto consiste en crear una expresión que sea el fiel reflejo del aquí y ahora. Para los vanguardistas el jazz no es un estilo, sino una manera de procesar la música, una estética o actitud en la que la innovación, y sobre todo la improvisación, juegan un rol esencial.

En la década de 1980 surgió una candente controversia entre la visión neo-clasicista liderada por el trompetista Wynton Marsalis y los vanguardistas como Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarret y otros. Por un lado, Wynton Marsalis se adjudicó la potestad de definir qué es jazz y qué no lo es: “Jazz is not just ‘Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.’ It’s a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.” “If things don’t have an identity they can’t be taught. That’s my problem with the non-identity school. You can’t teach somebody something that’s nothing. In order to speak about it or to teach it, you have to be able to identify it.” “So we can look back on the decade of the ’70s and look at what it culminated; in the decisions Weather Report made, the decisions Herbie Hancock made, the decisions Miles Davis made when he came back from retirement. They weren’t playing jazz-fusion then; they were playing instrumental pop music.” “People think I’m trying to say jazz is greater than pop music. I don’t have to say that, that’s obvious.”

Mientras, otros han alzado su voz en contra de la visión neo-clasicista (hay citas mucho más fuertes que estas, pero al menos con ellas tienes una idea). Si te interesa conocer más sobre las controversias y discusiones puedes leer por ejemplo: “Wynton vs. Herbie; the Purist and the Crossbreader Duke it Out” Musician Magazine, Marzo 1985 pp. 52-64, “Keith Jarret: Order and Ordeal” JazzTimes, Mayo 1999 o “The Playboy Pannel: Jazz – Today and Tomorrow”, Playboy, Febrero 1964.

David Murray: “I call ’em neo con artists. They’re conning the public into thinking that nothin’ happened in jazz since the 1950s…. They’re conning the public into thinking they’re the guys who actually created this stuff, when actually they’re just playing a tired version of some music that had some real fire to it.”

Keith Jarret: “You hear Wynton Marsalis, saying this is this, and this is something else.” “It’s completely meaningless. I don’t know what possible good comes from it, other than going into a museum. I’d rather have all the music I ever heard disappear rather than have it canonized.” “There’s very little individual music happening now. I’m hearing information when I hear those guys play. They’re well informed about styles, but they’re so close they’re far away. It’s the idea that the way to get jazz is to investigate the styles, and now that we know all that, what do we know? Nothing.” “[Some of the young guys] are playing the way a guy might speak doing a lecture on Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. When you focus on the past in that particular way, you forget that when he is improvising, the jazz artist is using all the elements. It’s a heart thing, a particular American heart state. Words don’t do it justice. The great improvisers did not think in terms of doctrine.”

Miles Davis: “I didn’t even go to listen to most jazz groups anymore, because they were playing the same musical licks that we played way back with Bird, over and over again… It was boring to hear that shit.” “When I hear jazz musicians today playing all those same licks we used to play so long ago, I feel sad for them. I mean it’s like going to bed with a real old person who even smells real old.” “Jazz today is closer to classical music than it is to folklore music, and I’d rather stay closer to folklore music.”

Steve Lacy: “Jazz got so that it wasn’t improvised any more. A lot of the music that was going on was really not improvised. It got so that everybody knew what was going to happen and, sure enough, that’s what happened.” “People became obsessed with not just maintaining a tradition but with perfecting it.”

Derek Bailey: “The tendency to derivativeness and the prevalence of imitative playing in all idiomatic improvisation seems to have produced in jazz a situation where increasingly the music became identified with the playing style of a handful of musicians. Strangely enough, the number of acceptable models appears to get smaller as times goes on.” “In fact, it is common in jazz to find exact, identical in every detail, replicas of well-known stylists.” “In jazz, to say that someone ‘sounds just like’ a well-known somebody is usually meant as a compliment. So the pressure to conform, to be no more than a very good imitator is considerable.”

Entonces al final todo tiene que ver con el cristal con que se mira. Para algunos el jazz es una música de repertorio con un enfoque restrictivo que rechaza la innovación y la fusión. Para otros el jazz siempre se ha distinguido por ser un sistema en constante evolución que sirve como expresión de la vida moderna y continúa dejándose influir por sonidos de todo el mundo sin sacrificar su identidad.

Aunque se me cataloga como pianista de jazz, durante un tiempo rechacé esta clasificación. Me preguntaba si mi música era jazz. Honestamente no comparto la misma pasión que sienten algunos por el jazz de la “era dorada” (1930-1960). El bebop no representa quien soy ni tampoco es el mejor vehículo para expresarme y contar las cosas que he vivido. No toco las corcheas en swing, no he sentido afición por interpretar standards ni tengo el deseo de devorarme cada nota que tocó Charlie Parker.

Si me pidieran que clasificara mi música lo primero que diría es que es un autorretrato musical. Según la definición que tienen algunas personas mi música no es jazz. No obstante, un buen día recordé aquella clase y me puse a investigar la definición de los artistas que admiro. Fue una agradable sorpresa descubrir que no estoy sola y que si me dejo llevar por ellos en el jazz hay espacio para alguien como yo. Quizás la pregunta que debemos hacernos es ¿qué es el jazz para mí? Creo que estas citas son la mejor contestación:

Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941): “Jazz is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in jazz if one has the knowledge.” “Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.”

Louis Armstrong (1901-1971): “What we play is life.” “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”

Billie Holiday (1915-1959): “No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.” “If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.”

Albert Murray (1916-2013): “When you see a jazz musician playing, you’re looking at a pioneer, you’re looking at an explorer, you’re looking at an experimenter, you’re looking at a scientist, you’re looking at all those things because it’s the creative process incarnate!”

Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996): “I sing like I feel.” “A lot of singers think all they have to do is exercise their tonsils to get ahead. They refuse to look for new ideas and new outlets, so they fall.”

Thelonious Monk (1917-1982): “Jazz is freedom. You think about that.”  “Jazz is my adventure. I’m after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That’s it. Just using notes differently.”

Dave Brubeck (19120-2012): “Jazz stands for freedom. It’s supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don’t be a perfectionist – leave that to the classical musicians.”

Charles Mingus (1922-1979): “Jazz is the language of the emotions.”

Dexter Gordon (1923-1990): “You’re out there, you are in front of people and you are creating of the moment. And there’s no net; there is no safety valve at all. You are out there for all to see, to fail or to succeed, or to just get by.”

Max Roach (1924-2007): “It is something to do with the ‘edge’. Always being on the brink of the unknown and being prepared for the leap.”

Miles Davis (1926-1991): “Because I never thought that the music called “jazz” was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all other dead things that were once considered artistic. I always thought it should reach as many people as it could, like so-called popular music, and why not? I never was one of those people who thought less was better; the fewer who hear you, the better you are, because what you’re doing is just too complex for a lot of people to understand. A lot of jazz musicians say in public that they feel this way, that they would have to compromise their art to reach as many people as they can too… But I always thought that music had no boundaries, no limits to where it could grow and go, no restrictions on its creativity. Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is. And I always hated categories. Always. Never thought it had any place in music.” “All I ever wanted to do was blow my horn and create music and art, communicate what I felt through music.”

Horace Silver (1928-2014): “We all have to open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to try and arrive at something new and different.”

Bill Evans (1929-1980): “Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise… but a way of life.” “Jazz is not a what, it is a how.” “Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I’m concerned with retaining that process.” “…it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.”

Sonny Rollins (1930-): “Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.”

Wayne Shorter (1933-): “To hell with the rules. I’m going for the unknown.”

Nina Simone (1933-2003): “Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking… the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.”

Steve Lacy (1934-2004): “Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.”  “For me that’s where the music always has to be – on the edge – in between the known and the unknown and you have to keep pushing it towards the unknown otherwise it and you die.”

Charlie Haden (1937-2014): “As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that’s never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.”

Booker Little (1938-1961): “My own feelings about the direction in which jazz should go are that there should be much less stress on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content, on what might be termed humanity in music and the freedom to say all that you want.”

Herbie Hancock (1940-): “What’s music supposed to be about anyway? Is it a means for a musician to masturbate, or is it for people to listen to?” “Jazz is about being in the moment.” “One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.” “The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.” “It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.” “Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.”

Jack DeJohnette (1942-): “Always be prepared to play what you don’t know!”

Pat Martino (1944-): “Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.”

Keith Jarret (1945-): “Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.” “It’s meaning what you say. It’s the internal burning.” “Jazz started with someone needing to express himself.” “You can’t want to mean it. You have to need it.” “Jazz is so personal in its essence. From that first voice in the fields, it’s not meant for anyone else. The singer does it out of need, that’s it. The tools, the chords and stuff, have never been the primary problem. Is there something in you that absolutely needs to get out? I feel I can hear that when I listen to players.” “I also think of it as Universal Folk Music.”

Kenny Werner (1951-): “Innovation is the tradition.”

Pat Metheny (1954-): “Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.” “It is Jazz’s very nature to change, to develop & adapt to the circumstances of its environment.” “For me, let’s keep jazz as folk music. Let’s not make jazz classical music. Let’s keep it as street music, as people’s everyday-life music. Let’s see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they’re living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.” “I don’t worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about jazz.” “Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.” “The beauty of jazz is that it’s malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.” “I have to admit that more and more lately, the whole idea of jazz as an idiom is one that I’ve completely rejected. I just don’t see it as an idiomatic thing any more…To me, if jazz is anything, it’s a process, and maybe a verb, but it’s not a thing. It’s a form that demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you. That, for me, is a pretty serious distinction that doesn’t have anything to do with blues, or swing, or any of these other things that tend to be listed as essentials in order for music to be jazz with a capital J.” “It’s a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It’s becoming quantized, diced and defined. It’s becoming an idiom. To me if it’s anything, jazz is a verb. It’s more like a process than it is a thing.”

Y ahora te toca contestar: ¿qué es el jazz para ti?