Monday,
January 14, 2002
From
the Outside Looking In: A Review of Alan Roth's documentary
film, Inside Out in the Open
By
John Stevenson
LONDON
- Among the many heads peeping cautiously from beneath parapets
in 2002, is the head of this reviewer. After all, 2001 was quite
a tempestuous year for jazz. Even the eternal optimists amongst
us would admit that the storms weren't taking place in fine china
teacups.
Perhaps the most dust was stirred up from the release -- on both
sides of the pond -- of Ken Burns' acclaimed masterpiece, Jazz .
With its slick commercial guise, glaringly obvious shortcomings,
and motives of its well-known co-conspirators apart, Burns' groundbreaking
production nevertheless drew millions of viewers into the enigmatic
musical saga and tapestry of that quintessentially American cultural
legacy (and prime aesthetic export) known as jazz music, recalling
the tortured social conditions that have attended the defining
decades of its life.
2001
also threw up Clevelander-turned-New Yorker Alan Roth's equally
compelling jazz documentary, Inside Out in The Open, which also
marked his impressive directorial debut. A project which began
in 1997, the documentary attempts to address the gross error
of historical judgement made in Burns' Jazz, in which scant attention
was paid to the development of free jazz.
Inside
Out in The Open runs for a riveting 59 minutes and is all about
free improvised (or free form) music as recounted by the likes
of Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai, Joseph Jarman and Marion Brown
(among others) who helped to midwife the birth of the "New
Thing" in the socially turbulent 1960s. The movement's
younger progeny such as pianist Matthew Shipp and drummer Susie
Ibarra are thrown under the spotlight as well.
The
documentary begins with an unidentified image -- blurred, dreamy,
and seemingly diaphanous -- suffused by the layered voices of
Rudd, et al attempting to answer the question
"what is sound? "
In
a series of alternating, and sometimes brisk sequences, we are
carried from the pithy insights of Alan Silva, Susie Ibarra and
Baikida Caroll (again, among others) describing their experiences
with free jazz, to frenzied and intense performances of the New
Music. Particularly spectacular is the live session featuring
the William Parker-led In Order to Survive, with Cooper-Moore
(like a young Cecil Taylor) percussively pummelling the piano
with fisticuffs, energetically sculpting his own brand of creative
dissonance into the architecture of the collective improvisation
at work.
The
big plus for Inside Out in the Open is that the music and musicians
tell the story of improvised free jazz; there is no overbearing
politically or ideologically oriented narrative voice to influence
the viewer. It is the first of two documentaries; the next one
will focus on the New York Art Quartet which, although it functioned
for a very brief period, nonetheless impacted very significantly
on the free jazz movement.
The
recurrent themes of freedom, originality, breaking-free, and
aesthetic convergence emerge in the rap sessions in which the
flow of consciousness is abruptly stemmed by the interruption
of a ringing telephone when Carroll and Jarman are in mid-sentence.
Marion
Brown (of Three for Shepp fame) and Jarman share interesting
contrasts between the rich artistic ferment in New York City
during the 60s, and the wintry remove of Chicago where daring
and considerably less competitive experimentation was going on
in the context of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Muhal Richards
Abrams-led Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
Because
of their tremendous artistic integrity, the featured musicians
calmly and articulately speak about their chosen vocations in
America. For it takes integrity to cut against the grain of "accepted
and acceptable" musical form in such an advanced capitalist
society.
Indeed,
the Afro-Dane, John Tchicai, with characteristic Zen-like composure
says "most people cannot cope with polyrhythms, polytonality,
and sounds that are different . " A
point well understood by folks like Ornette Coleman whose orthodoxy-defying
stylings were viewed with such apprehension in the jazz community
of the 60s that he was sometimes paid not to perform.
If
jazz conjured up vulgarity at the turn of the 20th century, free
improvised jazz was the polite term for a thing considered even
more repulsive in the musical community. In a 1988 interview
with Ben Sidran (in Sidran's Talking Jazz, An Oral History) tenor
saxophonist Johnny Griffin said: "I was in total disagreement
with the major disc-jockeys of [the 1960s], the so-called jazz
critics of the day, who were proclaiming a new noise that they
called music, which turned out to be avant garde and free jazz,
and I thought it was all rubbish, which it has proved to have
been, all rubbish, a bad joke on music, which I think really
helped to destroy the jazz scene as such here in America in the
early 60s and 70s, almost completely..."
It
is little wonder, then, that Ken Burns' major omission should
in fact be the avant garde and its development in the 1960's
and 70's with such worthy exponents as Keith Jarrett whose solo
improvisational concerts (Koln, Sun Bear, etc) helped to significantly
reshape the contours of the genre. Indeed, the balm of free jazz
was to be found in the Gilead-like jazz community of the 70s,
long before the momentous return of Dexter Gordon to the Big
Apple!
However,
what emerges here is the notion of a consistent interrogation
into what are the very properties of jazz "an interrogation
which didn't begin with Kenny G versus the Young Lions.
Though
the views on Roth's documentary featuring Roswell Rudd, John
Tchicai and Alan Silva, for example, are valuable, the film is
akin to a partially lit room in which some corners remain darkened.
The
visionary locutions of a Cecil Taylor, an Ornette Coleman, an
Anthony Braxton, or an Archie Shepp could have invested the documentary
with even more context and perspective. Outside of Chicago and
New York, California has also had its share of the New Thing
with folks such as Vinny Golia. In Texas, Dennis Garcia carried
the torch inspired by Ornette Coleman many years before. These
could have provided interested geographical contrasts.
In
the end these may all turn out to be minor quibbles. Inside Out
in The Open, however, provides us with a wonderful opportunity
to pursue a more revisionistic approach to jazz criticism, scholarship
and historiography in 2002 and beyond -- now that the air is
beginning to clear and the parapet is torn down, of course.
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