Review Roundup: If It Ain't Got That Swing

Jazz, in a more or less consistently recognizable form, sprang into being in the 1920s, a joyous trumpet boil from the simmering pot of musical ingredients being stirred together in New Orleans, New York, and Chicago, via Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe. From that time to approximately 1965, jazz was dominated - for all its shifting complexities of rhythm and harmony over the decades - by swing, a feeling that no other music replicates in exactly the same way. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, Jaki Byard, and Tony Williams are all deeply individual players, yet their swing is the connective tissue that holds them all together. Duke Ellington's Cotton Club orchestra and Miles Davis's quintet with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock play music that is worlds apart, yet their sense of swing unites them. 

Since 1965, with the explorations of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and their respective schools of avant-garde music, with the forays into fusion of Miles Davis's alumni Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams, and with the deaths and rebirths of jazz necessitated by the social injustices and economic realities of America, swing has become a debated topic in jazz. Some saw it as retrograde. Some saw it as reactionary. Some saw it as simply irrelevant. With the rise of Wynton Marsalis - a reactionary if ever there was one, though he has admittedly been reduced over time by conventional wisdom into a 2D cutout of a more complex figure - swing become politically charged. Wynton used Ken Burns's 2001 documentary Jazz to advance an argument he is still making today - that jazz is "a Metaphor for Democracy," where musicians put the American concepts of "individual freedom" and "the momentum of the group" in conversation with each other. When Marsalis says "jazz," he means jazz that swings. So swing, in Marsalis's conception, is America and its values. 

In my opinion, Marsalis is a deeply problematic figure, one who should be held to account much more than he is, not just about his role in sidelining an entire generation or more of avant-garde musicians from lucrative record contracts when the money was flowing in the 1980s and 1990s and from a prominent place in popular culture's definition of jazz when he had the opportunity in Burns's documentary, but about his masculine conception of the music, from the historical figures he chooses to champion to the makeup of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (overwhelmingly male for its entire existence). And, of course, many in jazz have decided that the kind of grooving, swinging jazz tradition that Wynton champions is not the way to get anything done - whether that be growing the music's audience in general, connecting specifically to black audiences instead of white ones, or addressing pressing political and social concerns. Many of the new albums I get from labels to review feature extended suites addressing topics such as immigration or policy; when they do feature standards, these tunes are usually de- and re-constructed to fit into jazz's new language of odd meters and straight eighths, a kind of ironic distance. All of this is positive and useful - I welcome any way that jazz can address the important issues of 2020, to connect in a real way with audiences, and to critically examine its own canon and tradition. 

However. In my review of Ethan Iverson's 2019 record Common Practice, I wrote that 

Iverson identifies a central piece of jazz playing: an "emotional connection" to a "real form of American music".... the African diasporic tradition. The new record features drummer Eric McPherson. When asked about the choice of McPherson in an email, Iverson quickly shifted the emphasis from himself to his bandmates, saying that Ben Street requested McPherson and that "Tom loved the rhythm section." But he also told me that McPherson has "something really 'old' and swinging" in his playing. McPherson (who is named after Eric Dolphy) grew up surrounded by musicians like Richard Davis (his godfather), Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Charles Moffett, and Freddie Waits.

Iverson is right to emphasize this African tradition at his blog, Do The Math, and in his music. Iverson places the drums at the center of this tradition, and while he is no Wynton Marsalis when it comes to gatekeeping jazz, he views swing as an essential element of the jazz language. When Iverson notes that Eric McPherson's playing has something "old" about it, he speaks to the way that that swing vocabulary connects the music to its roots - roots which are deeply buried in Black identity and heritage, the pain of slavery in America, and the space Black Americans have had to fight for in this country since before its founding.

While jazz has been wrestling with the role of swing for about half a century now, the great records of the prior five decades of jazz tradition are still usually the foundational texts for any person looking for a doorway into jazz. They were mine - my iTunes playlist that keeps track of my first jazz albums is full of names like Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Red Garland, Art Blakey, Ben Webster, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Cannonball Adderley, and Charles Mingus. Few of the albums were recorded after 1966, and of those several are looks back (in various ways) at the jazz tradition - Keith Jarrett's Standards, Volume 2, standards by The Great Jazz Trio with Hank and Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes's Love Letters, Wynton Marsalis at the Village Vanguard.

I've written all of this to recommend to albums which were released yesterday. The first, drummer Jeff Hamilton's Catch Me If You Can, from Capri, features Tamir Hendelman on piano and Jon Hamar on bass. The album is a swinging romp, with standards ("Moon Ray" and "Bijou" are standouts) and deeper cuts (the opening "Make Me Rainbows" is fantastic) complimented by original compositions. Some records tail off as they reach the end of their running time, but Catch Me If You Can closes with a one-two punch - "Big Dipper," a meaty Thad Jones composition from the Mel Lewis/Thad Jones Orchestra days, and that "Moon Ray," made famous by Artie Shaw but inseparable in my mind from Roy Haynes and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. This is a group full of life and invention, but also a clear reverence for the foundational voices that lend weight and meaning to that exuberant, swinging sound. The second record I want to recommend is John Fedchock's Into the Shadows, from Summit, featuring trombonist Fedchock with trumpeter Scott Wendholt, tenor saxophonist Walt Weiskopf, pianist Allen Farnham, bassist David Finck, and drummer Eric Halvorson. There is more emphasis on originals here (the three standards are chestnuts, though: "I Should Care," "Nature Boy," and "Star Eyes") but the same feeling of exuberance and swing pervades this record as it does on Hamilton's. Listening to this album directly after Catch Me If You Can made me appreciate anew the complex textures of a larger group, especially the multilayered trombone/tenor/trumpet line Art Blakey used so effectively in the 1960s. These albums are not perfect: they each have slower moments, and each is an all-white group, which in my opinion adds a bar of responsibility to the traditions and innovations of jazz that (while it may be unfair of me to hold them to) I feel these records do not always quite rise to meet.

What I experience when I hear an album that swings, though, is not simple. On one hand, it is music I can "pat my foot" to, as Art Blakey would say, and learn and sing the tastiest licks from, and put on repeat. It carries me along on its current, reminding me of the excitement of my first discoveries in this music, and it fills me with joy. On the other hand, though, it reminds me of the meaning of swing, of its connection to the blues, of the Black voice and Black identity that is foundational to any jazz that contributes meaningfully to the conversation. While swing can be derided as old hat or conservative, it can also be celebrated as revolutionary and uncompromising, a forceful statement of identity in a society and culture dominated by whiteness. It is both comfort food and discomfort food. Both, in the America of 2020, are nourishing.