A Power Intact

Did jazz die in the eighties? Maybe it died years earlier, with Ornette Coleman, Gill Evans, Charlie Parker, or even, simply, the minute it left New Orleans. All this is surely debatable. But the only fact that matters is this: the explosion of black American music at the beginning of the century has turned the history of music upside down.

Randy Brecker

 The immense musical river that set off from New Orleans has spawned numerous tributaries and today has arrived at its delta. Some of its large streams have got lost. In this decompartmentalized, cosmopolitan and multicoloured space, the standard-bearers of jazz have disappeared. They have left room for a permissiveness and a wild variety of individual styles, all carried by the impulse that was called swing in the thirties, which, in diversifying, has lost  none of its power.

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European Jazz Develops Differently Than The American Model

Though an American form, jazz, of course, does have practitioners outside the United States. France, especially, has embraced jazz since its earliest days; it can  be said that it all began there with Django Reinhardt in the thirties. Ending France's isolation during World War II, the American troops arrived in 1944, and the first bebop records were not long in following. For more than fifteen years there was no safe haven outside of bebop or New Orleans orthodoxy. Such rare exceptions as Martial Solal or Andre Hodeir only proved the rule.

Django Reinhardt

With the explosion of free jazz, however, everything suddenly became possible. In Europe it became fashionable to reject the criteria of' 'old-fashioned jazz' at the same time that 'bourgeois' art was being decried.

Mike Westbrook

Throughout Europe, those rare big bands that were still active abandoned formal dress for blue jeans and left their platforms to mix with each other in an informal alignment that sometimes moved into a fanfare to the audience.

Willem Breuker

The roles inside the band were also called into question, and some small groups went so far as to do without a rhythm section altogether, others reduced themselves to a duo. If such changes were a response to the economic difficulties free jazz - which was not very marketable - encountered, they were also one way of exploring special affinities on a more intimate dramatic scale. With such musicians as Mike Westbrook and Willem Breuker, these 'stagings' sometimes took on true dramatic form.

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