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| Authentic? Just relax, sit back and listen
to the vibe But, following this year's London Jazz Festival, there have been dark mutterings about how 'jazz' some acts actually were. Phil Johnson presents the case for a wider definition Independent on Sunday - 19 November 2000 The Racing Green London Jazz Festival, which ends tonight with Lewis Taylor and Omar at the Royal Festival Hall, has been receiving more than its fair share of critical flak for presenting performers who may not – shock! horror! – be card-carrying jazz acts at all. Although this has equally been the case ever since the festival's inception, the purists have protested more loudly this year and it's therefore worth a few words in reply. On the one hand, the unashamedly catholic policy of Serious, the promoters, simply reflects the state of jazz itself: with limited possibilities for vertical progression since modernism reached the virtual cul-de-sac of free improvisation in the late 1960s, contemporary jazz – in parallel with most other arts – has responded by expanding horizontally, reaching out to related forms such as pop, classical, and world music, as well as reappraising its own, already widely disparate, traditions. From a historical perspective, too, there is nothing necessarily inauthentic about putting different strains of musical expression on the same, broad-based platform. A typical Forties' bill at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem might have mixed Coleman Hawkins playing "Body and Soul" (a notable jukebox hit) with a calypso band, a pop vocalist, and the African-American equivalent of a rude, Wheeltappers and Shunter's Club-style comedian. Also, at around the same time, it was the popular rhythm and blues of Louis Jordan that encouraged both John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins to take up the saxophone. To therefore insist upon some idealist notion of jazz purity smacks of musical eugenics, or aesthetic cleansing, especially when the purists' alternative tends to be dodgy female vocalists who pretend that the last half-century hasn't happened. And so to last Wednesday's festival performance by the Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca at the QEH. In purist jazz terms, Baca – to paraphrase quiz show host Roy Walker on Catchphrase – may not be right, but she's good. Just how good, however, was a revelation, especially when it came to her amazing quartet. There was one percussionist whose instrument proved to be the stool he was sitting on, and another who began by playing what looked like a fun-size coal scuttle. Together with a stand-up bassist and an authentically jazzy guitarist whose long, arabesque lines suggested a dream-team amalgam of Jerry Garcia, Bill Frisell and Robbie Robertson (only with added taste and subtlety), this was a band to die for. And if it wasn't quite jazz, it was certainly very close to skiffle, whether Lonnie Donegan is big in Peru or not. Singing what she described, in a rare foray into English, as songs of black Peru, the diminutive, fortysomething Baca captivated the audience immediately with both her tremulous, delicate voice and her self-deprecating but utterly commanding stage presence. The latter heated up the hall within seconds, so that you could almost reach out your hands and feel the warmth. One particularly pliant ballad even produced a genuine tear (which she wiped away decorously on her sleeve), before she ended the first set with a beautiful, trance-like dance, swaying across the stage in slow, sinuous movements that acted as the perfect visual equivalent to the band's stately shimmer of sound. In an age when even the most appalling female vocalists are compared, quite routinely, to Billie Holiday, Susana Baca provided a rare glimpse of what Holiday's gift might once have meant, had we but world enough and time to have been there. Just as well, then, that she didn't do a runner when she saw she was playing a jazz festival, for fear she might not fit the bill. Arguments about whether various artists are really jazz or not may, in any case, be irrelevant. What about how music actually sounds? The current tour by the Tommy Smith Group, who played a festival gig at Blackheath Concert Halls last week, although I saw them the following night at the Albert in Bristol, is a case in point. Funded by the Arts Council to play acoustically – which means no microphones and therefore no cheesy reverb – the band was impeccably authentic, but ironically this made you realise just how little depends on what is being played, as opposed to how. Deprived of extra oomph, the musicians listened carefully to each other and responded accordingly; the sound of each instrument came from where it should have done, and even a humble cymbal proved incredibly expressive, with as many gradations of sound as there were rings in the brass. Smith on tenor sax sounded like a true master, with each sustained solo as full of meaning as one of those impossibly elongated sentences by William Faulkner. It was proper jazz all right, but what made it so good was something to do with the very soul of music. And that doesn't discriminate between genres at all. |
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