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jerry
The American Rag
Presents
Don Mopsick's
Jazz Orthodoxy
I first wrote about the Jazz Orthodoxy on the16th of February 1998. During that period, my time during the day was taken up with researching my Jewish genealogy and the history of the Jewish community of my ancestral town, Bobruisk, Belarus. For the previous sixth months, I head been learning the Yiddish language in order to complete the first English translation of a history of Bobruisk contained in the Memorial Book of that town.
The subject of Orthodoxy has been much in the news lately with the candidacy of Senator Joe Lieberman. Many Americans are learning for the first time what it means to be an Orthodox Jew. Being a rather assimilated Jew myself, I had no clear picture of the place of Orthodoxy in Judaism until I began my study over two years ago. A very helpful reference book in this regard was Life Is With People: The Jewish Little-Town of Eastern Europe by Mark Zborowski, Elizabeth Herzog (available from: http://www.amazon.com).
I learned that for about six hundred years, there was a vibrant Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe. Jews had their own culture, languages (Yiddish, which began evolving around 1000 AD; and of course Hebrew), cuisine, music, legal system, schools, and most of all, religion. Orthodoxy was by far the majority sect in the eastern part of the European Jewish world.
In short, there was a Jewish Nation in fact if not in real political terms. The Tsar even created geographic boundaries with the Pale of Settlement in the late 1700's, intended to keep most of the newly Russian Jews from infiltrating eastward into the interior of Russia.
In Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Poland, Jewish civilization and culture had evaporated until very recently. The Tsars' repression propelled many of us, my grandparents included, to America. For the Jews who remained, the Soviets successfully suppressed their religion and culture, the Nazis slaughtered 6 million of them, and the result was that after WWII, the Soviet Jewish remnant became almost completely assimilated into Russian culture. Beginning in the 70's and continuing to the present, Jews have abandoned Russia and the countries of the former Pale of Settlement, emigrating to America and Israel. Today there are very few Jews left in Bobruisk, from a peak of about 70,000 in the 1970's. Some have returned to Poland, and a large, vibrant community has remained in Hungary.
During the course of my genealogy research, I came across quite a few of my cousins who were born in Bobruisk. I was astounded at how little the former Soviet Jews I met knew about their Jewish heritage. Only the elderly spoke Yiddish. Of course, a similar outcome happened in America, but American Jews assimilated voluntarily, not through edicts of the state. A small minority of American Jews chose to adhere to the classic Orthodoxy to varying degrees, and thankfully have had the Liberty to do so. The rest of us are largely cut off from a long past that is rapidly receding from memory.
During the period between the two world wars, there arose in America a vibrant classical popular culture with jazz music and dance at its creative center. Swinging jazz rhythms could be heard on phonograph records, radio programs, Broadway musicals, and movie soundtracks. The inspiration of Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and others could be heard in scores of pop dance orchestras and their recordings. James Lincoln Collier ("Art vs. Commerce") has compared American pop music to a mountain with jazz as its springhead, trickling down and informing all other styles "below" it.
Pop music has long since moved on to other realms: Folk, Metal, Delta Blues derivatives, Mowtown, Punk, Hip-hop, Techno, Disco, etc. The current audience for jazz has been estimated at about two percent of the entire American budget spent on entertainment. What is sold these days as "jazz" by the record companies is very different in style and form from that of the classic period. Unrecognizably so, according to the Jazz Orthodoxy.
The essential defining element of hot jazz in its classic period was the swinging or stomping rhythmic feel. By the time the Smooth Jazz movement took over, that feel had been totally abandoned in favor of the rhythms of Urban Soul and Hip-hop. Along the way, other traditional elements of the old jazz were gradually discarded: improvised ensemble playing, the natural sounds of the instruments, sliding blue notes, etc. The cult of Bop clichés became pre-eminent, stylizing and limiting the melodic and rhythmic vocabulary. Other cults followed: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea.
The songs of the Golden Age of popular songwriting are still performed by some contemporary jazz artists, although in a diluted form. One can still hear a limited number of evergreen songs by Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Kern, and others. The harmonies (and in some cases the melodies) are often altered to fit the newer, limited style. Modern jazz singers and instrumentalists are interested in performing only a small subset of the vast American Songbook, usually those that were recorded by the major Gods of the Post Bop Pantheon.
The Orthodox Jazz canon has been suppressed in the schools, stripped of its political respectability, Soviet-style. Jazz History educators tend to use the originators of Bop, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, as their starting points. The result is that young saxophonists (not clarinetists) are weaned on "Giant Steps" and "Milestones," and not "King Porter Stomp," "Stardust," or even "A String of Pearls." The words "hip" and "unhip" are used as weapons to keep the young acolytes in line. As a result, several new generations have grown up knowing nothing of Orthodoxy, lacking the essential qualities of self-restraint, taste and swing. They are today's jazz fans and musicians, buying the Kenny G records in mega-quantities and tuning into "Yanni at the Acropolis" on Public Television. Tiny subset of these jazz fans consider themselves among the "avant-garde," extolling the virtues of "free jazz" as exemplified by Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, and Albert Ayler.
Jews have a word for heretics: "apikoyres," derived from the Greek for "epicure," or one who lives for the moment. From the point of view of the Orthodox, the Jewish world is today mostly heresy, and a small kernel of the Orthodox keep the flame alive in insular communities in Brooklyn, LA, and Israel. Similarly, the tiny world of the Classic Jazz Orthodoxy preserves its own values, keeps its own counsel, and yet quixotically hopes for "discovery" and redemption by the masses.
In both the Jewish and Jazz worlds, the Modernists and Traditionalists have not been particularly interested in a dialog with each other, but some of the more enlightened Modernists are awakening to their true heritage, finally seeking it out and trying to come to terms and thereby connect with it. In jazz, this process is only just beginning.
Like all orthodoxies, the Jazz Orthodoxy is about tradition. Sometimes, just knowing about it can be enough.
© 2000 by Don Mopsick
(NOTE: Don Mopsick is currently the bassist in the Jim Cullum Jazz Band with additional responsibility for the bands web page, Jim Cullum’s Landing: http://www.landing.com/, and the Riverwalk website: http://www.riverwalk.org/. This story appeared in the October issue of The American Rag.)
