At the beginning of the eighties, a colleague at the city newspaper who preferred to listen to rock music made fun of my precocious enthusiasm for jazz by asking why jazz musicians always wear a fine thread and tie. Subculture, it was felt at the time, had to oppose bourgeois norms. Back then, the answer had to be enough that they could sweep away a 19-year-old who didn’t know what to do with the rock and pop of his time. Today it would be easy to explain. At that time, jazz musicians did not submit to philistine constraints, but created their own bourgeois norms. This also included a rediscovery of “straight jazz” as classical music of black America. Craftsmanship, virtuosity and a sure sense of style were in demand, and the latter also showed itself in the fine thread. Today, however, between all the young savages and old revolutionaries, one sometimes wonders where the chic craftsmen of yesteryear have gone.
Many have gone to teaching, which in the USA is the only way for most cultural workers to earn a bourgeois livelihood. Which doesn’t have to keep them from playing. The Cookers is, for example, a septet that brings together musicians who used to be omnipresent as sidemen, such as the drummer Billy Hart, the pianist George Cables or the saxophonists Donald Harrison and Billy Harper. The band has been around for 14 years. On their new, sixth album “Look Out!” (Gearbox) they play exactly the kind of hard bop (post, neo or whatever for a prefix bop) with clear bass lines, brass themes and changes in harmony that many perceive as true jazz. Swing and walking bass are the red lines. It has nothing to do with routine. The Cookers only play their own compositions. One hears, The skill with which the veterans composeto push yourself to the limits of virtuosity again and again. You actually want to hear that live right away. In a concert hall.
In New York it is mainly the one with lights Jazz and Supper Club Smokewho cultivates this type of straight jazz. He also runs a label. Bobby Watson, Harold Mabern and George Coleman publish there, as does the pianist Renee Rosnes. The Canadian is a notoriously underrated musician, although she played for Freddie Hubbard as a teenager and long for Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter. Above all, it is her own compositions that should secure her place on all the lists that cement the canon. Extremely virtuoso and with a high-speed intellect, she challenges pretty much every formation to maximum performance. She is a triathlete at the piano, so don’t be fooled by the honest photos on her albums, which you would expect to see a coloratura soprano. On their new album “Kinds of Love“ she torches, for example, a fireworks display of tempos, acts of strength and ideas. The fantastic Chris Potter plays the saxophone, which adds tinder to the album. Anyone who can keep up with them belongs to the top musically anyway.
Rosnes is with the pianist Bill Charlap married. In terms of temperament, he is her opposite pole, a grandmaster of the sensitive newcomers to tried and tested standards. His new album “Street of Dreams” (Blue Note) isn’t just its own best, it’s a pinnacle of what a piano trio out of standards like Dave Brubeck’s “The Duke” or Billy Strayhorn’s “Day Dream”. No breakouts. No rollover. Finest straight jazz. In order to stick to the unfulfilled longing for live, one would like to hear it in one of the finest New York hotel bars like the Café Carlyle or the Oak Bar in the Plaza, where they know how to shake a proper cocktail and when to be silent and where a gentleman without a jacket won’t let you in. Hey – civil values. Avant-garde is tomorrow again.
Whereby you can certainly go high with such a straight jazz rhythm group. Pharoah Sanders has demonstrated this again and again, the Coltrane companion, who can transform the tenor saxophone from the state of the tender breath into an instrument of primal scream therapy. The music-on-vinyl label has just released its album “Africa” from 1987 brought out in a splendid new edition. The pianist John Hicks, the bassist Curtis Lundy and the supergroove drummer Idris Muhammad stick to the straight guardrails with grandeur, which gives Sanders’ outbursts a very large stage on which he can move from ballads to hyperaggressive “You’ve.” Got to Have Freedom “unloads through all the registers. By the way, according to the cover, he wasn’t wearing thread, but dashiki. Don’t be fooled. For Afro-Americans, however, this is not a hippie garb, but rather, with all the fighting spirit conveyed by the textile gesture, an educated bourgeois awareness of tradition.