A Silver Newport

With all that wonderful, mixed-up jazz

There was jazz in Carnegie Hall: Sonny Rollins, one of the alltime great tenor saxophonists, was sparking fire off the bluesy beat of his quintet. Bending low over his sax, Rollins, 48, would pause for a fraction of a second and then come up swinging: weaving countermelodies inside and outside the harmonies, loosing flying clusters of arpeggios that left his sax all but smoking, ending with a comic bebop flourish, head thrown back and sax brandished triumphantly in the air.

There was jazz in Lincoln Center, where Singer Betty Carter--a vamp of a figure in black lace with a husky, sweet-toned voice that recalls Billie Holiday --was singing a tribute to the blues. "I must have music, music," Carter, 48, half crooned, half spoke, swaying to the beat of her trio with eyes closed. Throttling down to slow, slow low notes that seemed to float in the air forever--the crowd hanging on breathlessly--she would suddenly take off, sliding up the scale as fast as any sax to land on a sultry, slightly off-center note. With consummate skill, she flecked moody ballads with flirtatious spoken asides and highly rhythmic scat passages: "Do-be-do-be-bop." She never missed a beat, or a wave of applause.

So it went on one of the best nights of this year's Newport Jazz Festival. The greatest of all such festivals, Newport celebrated its 25th anniversary last week with more than 100 performers in an all-star salute to the history of jazz. From out of the Dixieland past stomped "Kid" Thomas, 82, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Transplanted for an evening from New Orleans' French Quarter, the group played engagingly oldfashioned, banjo-accented favorites and clowned between the numbers.

At Manhattan's historic Roseland, a gaudy dance palace right out of the '20s, Count Basie, 73, held up the swing end of things with butter-smooth melodies and brassy punctuation. The crowd, decked out in its spikiest heels and slinkiest skirts, danced beneath a huge electric American flag, which blinked red, white and blue to Basie's beat. Meanwhile, Dizzy Gillespie, 60, was on hand at Avery Fisher Hall, with his mischievously cherubic grin, his horn angled rakishly at the sky to let fly with Manteca, one of his Latin favorites.

It was Dizzy at his best.

There was a style for everyone: the cool sound of Pianist Bill Evans, 48, with his sophisticated classical harmonies; the loosely structured, rather chaotic-sounding "free" jazz of such revolutionaries as Ornette Coleman, 48, Cecil Taylor, 45, and Sam Rivers, 47. Master Pianists Chick Corea, 37, and Herbie Hancock, 38, were into "fusion" music, a blending of jazz with rock's electronic sound. A tribute to the Latin influence on jazz starred the formidable massed bands of Tito Puente and Machito. There was even a special last-minute entry: Irakere, a jazz-rock Cuban group whose members had been granted visas just in time to perform.

It was not quite as soulful a gathering as in the old days, when the festival was held in Newport, R.I.--out in the fields, where a wailing sax could carry a mile.

Transported to the elegance of Carnegie Hall, jazz's cry seemed a little incongruous. But there was still some outdoor music at Stanhope, N.J., and at a final, big-band bash at Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

George Wein, 52, the jazz pianist turned promoter who has seen his Newport creation through slack times and flush, estimated overall festival attendance this year at about 250,000, double what it was last year.

Newport '78's success follows an ebb in the early '70s, when hordes of rock-headed teen-agers overran Dionne Warwick's act and forced the festival out of Newport. Now jazz is back, brassy as ever.

It never really disappeared, of course. But as great rock chords pounded out in the '60s, jazz went on the lam: to Europe, underground, anywhere but to American clubs and record stores. In 1971 the then president of Columbia Records dropped musicians of the stature of Keith Jarrett, Charles Mingus and Bill Evans because they were not selling enough albums.

The acid-rockers have grown up since then and become a whole new market for jazz. Says Arthur Moorhead, a jazz trombonist and buyer for a record store in San Francisco: "People who have been listening to rock 'n' roll for as long as they can remember are bored, so a lot of them turn to jazz." One result is that jazz artists are once more in demand. Dexter Gordon, 55, for one, a tenor-sax giant who rode out the rock storm in Copenhagen, returned to the U.S. in 1976 to triumphant concerts.

New clubs are blossoming from Boston to Los Angeles. "I can't handle all of the commercials that the jazz places want, and I raised my rates three times in the last year and a half," says Gordon Potter, station manager of Los Angeles' KBCA (FM) jazz station. In New Orleans, black marching bands are as popular as ever. The listening audience for New York's WRVR (FM) jazz station is up 121% in the past 18 months; jazz offerings range from thriving clubs in Greenwich Village to several festivals in downtown SoHo to Jazzmobile, a nonprofit outfit that offers free concerts in the poorer sections of town. And in Detroit, where Motown bumped jazz for a while, young horn and reed players line up once again on weekends at RAPA, an all-night cafe where they can jam with the house rhythm section.

With all that activity, can the record companies be far behind? They are right there, reissuing old jazz classics by the hundreds. RCA has reactivated its Bluebird label with 27 albums to date (among them Benny Goodman, Fats Waller and Lionel Hampton). Columbia has re-released some Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Tenor Saxman Lester Young albums.

But the real gold dust is not in the oldies but in fusion, which is essentially watered-down jazz, with simpler chords and harmonies, traces of rhythm-and-blues and Latin music, and rock's heavy electronic sound and beat. Miles Davis, 52, who created the "cool" bop sound back in the late '40s, with its relaxed delivery and complex harmonies, also fashioned the first fusion in 1970 with his revolutionary Bitches Brew album. It retained jazz soloing but incorporated electric bass and guitar and a Rhodes electric piano. The result sounded mellow, upbeat and had a heavier rhythm than jazz, and it proved a phenomenal bestseller (600,000, compared with sales of 25,000-30,000 for a popular, mainstream jazz album).

Pianist Hancock, a Davis protege, followed the leader in 1973 with Head Hunters, another hit that was less jazz and more rock: it had fewer solos, a funky disco beat and the lusher sounds of a synthesizer. Weather Report, a well-respected group that includes Wayne Shorter on sax, has continued to work in the jazz-rock field; its latest album, Heavy Weather, which rides sophisticated solos over rock rhythms, has sold half a million copies. But fusion, as Davis' original album title foretold, is a dangerous brew. It was a short step to what many traditional jazzmen bitterly refer to as crossover music:

leaving jazz behind and going for the big money. George Benson, 35, once a straight-ahead jazz guitarist, tops both the jazz and pop charts with his easy-listening sound. (Weekend in L.A., his latest album, has already sold close to 2 million copies.) Chuck Mangione, 37, who plays flugelhorn and trumpet, is right up there with him.

Each new current in jazz has, of course, always faced opposition. The '30s swing music swung at the '40s bop; bop booed the experimental movements of the '50s and '60s. But many jazzmen feel that fusion is not true jazz--and they are right.

Says Avant-Garde Musician Rivers: "It's not really in the tradition because the tradition is the solo voice. Fusion never goes anywhere." West Coast Jazz Pianist Paul Potyen thinks that most fusion albums have lost the sense of jazz's uniquely personal sounds and interactions. "The 'in' cuts are really slick; they're turning out musical TV dinners," he says.

The good news, however, is that many new fans have reached jazz through fusion. They began by listening to such groups as Blood Sweat and Tears and Chicago, which moved toward jazz in the '60s as some jazz began moving toward rock.

Once that audience got as far as fusion, it often went still further back in time and finally arrived at "pure" jazz. Says Producer Orrin Keepnews, whose Fantasy/Prestige/Milestone label has put out major rereleases: "If we narrow the gap with fusion, we will have accomplished something large."

Pianists Hancock and Corea defend their fusion music as a logical extension of the jazz musician's fascination with sound. In 1973, when jazz was suffering the financial blues, Hancock had the idea of using the synthesizer's weird, spacey sound not with the complex experimental music that he was then making but with funk and rhythm-and-blues. It turned into Head Hunters, made up of more conventional music that "a lot of people liked." Corea went roughly the same route. His recent Mad Hatter album, a lush blend of strings that borders on background music, has already sold 160,000 copies. "I used to hear rock 'n' roll and go 'Yech!' " says Corea. "But now I really dig Stevie Wonder and how he uses rhythm."

Not all jazz musicians, of course, are abandoning their convictions for crossover record profits. A number, like Taylor and Coleman, have headed in the opposite direction: into free-form experimental jazz, which seems to flaunt its abrasive sound, hitting you like a kick in the ear. Free jazz dispenses with the chord progressions and set rhythm that traditionally have ordered jazz, leaving each member of a group free to improvise both notes and tempo. It is intense sounding and often looks to the emotional power of African music for its antecedents. Says Taylor: "One of the things I had to divorce myself from was the constraint or control that European music imposes, that we will do this or that. No, no, no, I say to myself. I must like my music. It must sound good."

At its worst, free jazz borders on bedlam. At its best--as in the Newport concerts of Taylor and Coleman--the music has internal rhythms and themes that give it direction. For 50 minutes, Taylor--hallmark shades and knit cap in place--and his sidemen wrapped Carnegie Hall in a solid sheet of sound, each member of the group swapping and developing ideas from the others. A frenzied, virtuoso performer, Taylor roiled tempests on the bass of the piano, then modulated into short phrases and lyrical passages that contained echoes of Bartok and Debussy.

Coleman's group, in contrast, produced a dense texture of counterrhythms and melodies, above which Coleman soared in his solos on tenor saxophone, trumpet and violin.

Free-form jazz tends to cluster in downtown Manhattan's SoHo. One of its angels is Rivers, who runs Studio Rivbea, a nonprofit, partially subsidized loft, complete with stage for performing, and directors' chairs and rugs for the audience.

Out of Rivbea sounds Rivers' own extended free-form music: "Spontaneous on-the-spot creation and improvisation." Perhaps the most vital avant-garde spawning ground of all is Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a collective that was created in 1965. It encompasses all styles from straight African rhythms to bebop to the avant-garde's specialty: grunts and wails and bizarre instrumental effects that were ignored during bebop's preoccupation with fluency and speed. A.A.C.M.'s alumni include two emerging jazz stars: Saxophonist Anthony Braxton, 33, and Pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, 47, its founder.

Most Americans have never heard the free sounds of progressive jazz. The reason is simple: major record companies tend to produce old reliables and lucrative fusion music; they are unwilling to promote the experimental edge. A few of the best progressive practitioners, among them Jarrett and Trumpeter Don Cherry, 41, record in Europe. One of the few outfits supporting this hard-to-absorb music is New York's nonprofit New Music Distribution Service. Says Drummer Beaver Harris, one of the artists who uses the service: "What the major record companies produce isn't always what's happening. Music must be heard to live."

U.S. avant-garde jazz is more accepted overseas than at home. Kahil El-Zabar, 25, percussionist and composer with A.A.C.M., recently played to bigger audiences in Rome than in Chicago. And when Rivers toured Europe, audiences numbered 10,000 to 15,000, compared with around 2,000 in America. Says he:

"New York is where we are least known."

But then, Europe has always been more generous to jazz; Americans have never quite forgiven jazz its bastard birth in the bordellos of New Orleans' Storyville. "Man, these cats know their stuff," Louis Armstrong once said admiringly of an audience in Geneva. Every year there seem to be more European jazz festivals.

Germany alone has some 24. Montreux, Europe's Newport, is expected to draw over 80,000 people this year.

Meanwhile, like Old Man River, mainstream jazz just keeps rolling along.

Says Dan Morgenstern, keeper of Rutgers University's jazz museum: "We have the living representatives of every style we know--ranging from Ragtime Pianist Eubie Blake, 95, to the great musicians of the swing era and beyond--and you can see all the different music as belonging to the same stream of things." The venerables are revered by young musicians, and a surprising number of the young are choosing to go into the older forms of jazz. The young turks in the trumpet section of Puente's Orchestra are all dying to rip off a brilliant solo and bring down the house.

The mainstream itself is changing, pulling in new elements as it goes. On some of his funkier tunes at Newport, Rollins' group used an electric piano and Caribbean conga-drum rhythms. Pianist McCoy Tyner, 39, worked over the keyboard with his great John Coltrane-inspired chords. But backing him up was a new, lush sound provided by a chorus from his latest recording group and a genie of a percussionist who appeared and disappeared, armed with a startling array of gourds and mallet-like instruments.

Nobody is quite sure what lies around the next bend. There will probably be an ever greater use of Caribbean and Latin rhythms, which Gillespie introduced in the 1940s, along with the Eastern influence passed on from Coltrane. But the past 20 years have been a time of consolidation from the days of the jazz greats --Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Miles Davis--and not creation. There is no new force on the scene now, and everyone is waiting. Says Rivers: "The cycle is getting ready to go into another violent period, in a sparks-flying sense." Gillespie, for one, is ready. "When our bebop music came along, there was a lot of opposition to our phrasing," he recalls. "But jazz has always had room for all kinds.

Let's get on with it."

Perhaps Betty Carter put it best at Newport. She began her set with / Must Have Music and ended with Movin' On, a song whose relentless one-two rhythm propelled it forward like a speeding train.

Carter rode the rails for all they were worth. Her voice drove effortlessly over octave jumps and lightning arpeggios, dropping into racing scat syllables that taxed its entire range and timbre. She finally chugged home on a slow, low, unresolved chord, leaving the song unfinished until the cheers silenced it for good.

Movin' On: that is where Betty Carter, and jazz, are going. -

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