Whose Tube: Jazz Appreciation
the beat goes on
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
By VeTalle Fusilier
April is Jazz Appreciation Month. Jazz, as in our country’s national treasure, passed into law 11 years ago. Jazz, that music of the intellectual savages: There was Chet Baker, and there still is Kurt Elling, Paquito D’ Rivera. Dave Brubek is still playing, but we all concede jazz to be the blackest art, in origin. And jazz played years ago still is jazzy, still sounds so next week. The Miles Davis Quintet played the future yesterday.
America’s treasure. Let’s follow one jazz influence on music in the last four decades. Miles Davis, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams. They all spread their wings to fly over, under, and inside music. If you were a fusion kid in the 70’s, you heard all the next phase: the jazz influenced mash of rock, rhythm, and classical. All featured in Tony William’s Lifetime. Gave first light to John Mahavishnu, and Larry Young, whose Let’s Get to the Point, Baby is a classic trip soundtrack. See, before acid jazz, there was acid and jazz. Some of us know that. Some of us can’t remember.
Global, made-available culture was delivered by one of the first world music ensembles, Weather Report. Jazz, the world American ambassador. Gibraltar, Barbary Coast, Herandu. Havona, Palladium, Manolete, Madagascar, American Tango, Rumba Mama, Birdland.
Black Market. How many of us could only hear those places on that album, never having left the United States? A must hear, a re-visit priority. A download quest. We programmed this nightly on our college fm station. Even today, it’s outstanding office productivity music worthy of many late night dance floors, featuring Wayne Shorter on sax.
Symba Sample and the lion kings of hip hop mined jazz for poetic license and looped phrases -- even child rearing, with Olu Dara fathering an Illmatic son. The Quintet contributor that put the bottom in the game was Ron Carter. Dan, who played bass on the Jay-Z thing, still studies with him. His resume in addition to Miles: Eric Dolphy, Lena Horne, James Brown, and Tribe Called Quest, who got the jazz from him.
Miles ahead Miles. Any one who was ever in a room with Miles Davis will readily attest to his influence. After inventing so much of what we know, he dropped it DC style with go-go drummer Ricky Wellman.
And Marcus Miller on bass. Marcus, obviously learned his lessons well, he wrote “Doin the Butt” for EU to perform in Spike Lee’s School Daze. Marcus keeps the torch. It’s hotter than traditional, and a lot funkier, but it’s jazzy still.
And now the jazz musician legacy is familial, as in the Marsalis clan, discovery as in Wynton finding and pushing Roy Hargrove, and worldbeat as Roy plays with everyone, everywhere. America’s treasure and its influence, heard globally, felt locally.
And finally, our national treasure at the Grammy top of the heap. Album of the Year. Rockit Chameleon Herbie Hancock. Harvard Cultural Artist of the Year, Headhunters Herbie Hancock wins for the Joni Mitchell redux. 2007 Album of the Year, the victorious jazz fans rejoice in the future now. Freedom to be appreciated. Jazz it up, every day.
VeTalle Fusilier is a producer and writer based in Washington, DC. It's pronounced VEE-tal few-suh-LEER.
