IT DON'T MEAN A THING IF IT AIN'T GOT THAT 15/16 BEAT DISPLACEMENT

 [Spike Wells writes: this week we have a guest “musing” by bassist and writer EDDIE MYER who starts by describing the origins and development of jazz bass playing and ends by questioning the future of the general musical “arms race”, wondering whether there is ultimately a future for, or indeed much point in, the search for ever more instrumental virtuosity and complexity. It’s a challenging and stimulating piece typical of Eddie. Enjoy, and think about it!]

Our Eddie, ruminating……………………………………..

In the beginning, there was Bill Johnson, who claimed to have invented slap bass when his bow broke on a gig while he was out on the road in Louisiana in the early years of the late lamented 20th century, playing something that had only just turned into Jazz as we’d recognise it today.

Bill seems to have been allowed by erstwhile boss “Baby” Dodds to create the first ever bass solo in recorded history (“Bull Fiddle Blues” ,1928), and survived the experience to see his 100th birthday in 1972, by which time slap bass ( and Jazz) had come to mean something quite different.

Then we meet Wellman Braud, entered in the records as the fastest slap technician of the 1930s, who left the band of Wilbur Sweatman and the travelling burlesque shows,  barging aside the tuba-playing Henry Edwards to hold down the bottom end in the Ellington Orchestra with a groove you could hang your hat on before retiring to Sheepshead bay in Brooklyn.

Let’s not forget Milt Hinton and “Pops” Foster as well - both of their careers spanned almost the entire history of Jazz. If only Jimmy Blanton had been as fortunate - like his coeval Charlie Christian, he had only a couple of short years to revolutionise the expressive possibilities of his instrument before tuberculosis came calling. If Walter Page taught the bass to walk, Blanton taught it to talk.

All the above have been variously credited with liberating the bass from its role as a basic accompanying thud, usually in a metaphor involving shackles. The playing of Wellman and his peers reaches us across the gulfs of history, so strong and sure that not even the clouds of sonic interruption on those hissing, crackly 78s can totally obscure their surefooted, propulsive groove.

The values of good timekeeping and that elusive but essential component, rhythmic ‘feel’, are as important today as they were in those early days, but while you’d still be impressed by Milt’s nifty slap intro to Cab Calloway’s ‘Reefer Man”, both the sound and technique of those godfathers seem utterly primitive today.

Listen to Blanton’s duets with Ellington and you can’t fault his style, his feel, his note choice and his effortless summation of what Jazz was all about at the time. Yet by the standards of the time, sustaining a four-bar run of mid-tempo, mid-register quavers on the bass was enough to put you in the forefront of technical achievers.

 From Blanton onwards, each successive generation put their forebears in the shade.

Within 15 years, Oscar Pettiford and Paul Chambers were matching the horn players for speed and fluency  and George Duvivier was spending as much time in the highest registers as Dragonetti.

New technology in amps and strings accelerated the process; Scott LaFaro and Eddie Gomez heralded the era of the super-bassist who could compete with guitarists for seemingly endless flights of semiquavers.

Today even those guys seem limited compared to uber-beings like John Pattitucci who can achieve the arco facility of a cellist with sprays of 32nd notes, all with perfect intonation.

And this ever-increasing facility has been equalled on every other instrument in Jazz. Pianists, drummers, guitarists, saxophonists and trumpeters are expected, as a matter of basic competence, to be able to perform feats way beyond the technical abilities of the founding generations of the music. It’s definitely reminiscent of an artistic arms race.

While the more egregious excesses of the “super-player” have been toned down since the days of Stanley Clarke, you can’t help but notice that even his playing  now seems rather quaint and ‘old school’ compared to, say, Hadrien Ferraud.

Players like drummer Mark Giuliana have retreated from the Billy Cobham challenge of playing everything louder and faster than everything else, but carved out their own equally competitive arena of ever more complex rhythmic subdivisions. Progress in the music has become inextricably linked with ever greater harmonic and rhythmic complexity, ever higher standards of technical virtuosity - in fact, it’s become part of the USP of Jazz.

This is admirable and perhaps inevitable but it does beg certain questions. The limits of human musical achievement are up for redefinition by each successive generation, but there must also be a point of diminishing returns. The evolution of Jazz’s technical vocabulary has been staggeringly swift - how much faster, more offbeat, more darkly harmonic, more rhythmically fractured, can everyone play? Are we reaching the end of the possibilities for virtuosic innovation, and if so, what comes next?

And , of course, what about the audience?

It’s surely no coincidence that the more technically accomplished Jazz became, the more it’s audience has shrunk. Music can challenge and it can reassure, and each of us will respond to a different blend of those two qualities. Pyrotechnical virtuosity can simultaneously attract and repel - without a message to communicate, it can degenerate into circus tricks.

One of jazz’s great survivors, Ahmad Jamal continues to tour and record into his ninth decade. Despite his impressively comprehensive technique, Jamal’s style has always had space and simplicity at its heart - famously catching Miles’ ear at a time when the likes of Peterson and Newborn did not. He adheres to the classic Jazz Piano Trio line-up and standards repertoire, yet his simplicity (and his relative success) have led to questions as to his Jazz credentials. Yet his concerts retain the values of ‘art music’ rather than smooth jazz or easy listening, and appreciation for his instantly recognisable approach has only grown as the years have passed.

Or, if Ahmad is still too smooth for your tastes, consider Horace Parlan, who turned a disability into an asset and removed extraneous notes from his playing to allow the swing to shine all the stronger. Whatever your stand on this, or your own tastes, this deliberate preservation of simplicity is an indication of a possible direction away from the musical arms race - as history has taught us, the best you can expect from an arms race is a stalemate.