The Brooklyn Rail

In post-2024 election America, there is a certain poignant and painful ambivalence to experiencing any of the power, depth, and beauty of home-grown American culture. The Brookings Institution, the Atlantic, the Washington Post op-ed page, and MSNBC will never, ever get this, but the exceptionalism of America and its influence on the world hasn’t been a business and military might story but a cultural one. The next four years may transform this country into some form of Hungary, or Chile in the 1970s, but as long as America remains polyglot and multicultural—as it has been since Spanish was the first European language spoken here—(which is of course an open question), our musical, graphic, and narrative culture may pull us through and keep its place in the world. Don’t underestimate that what brought down the Berlin Wall was the desire for people to wear Levi’s, drink Coca-Cola, and dance to Michael Jackson.

But there certainly was a valedictory edge to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra concerts at Rose Hall the first weekend after the election. The band, with trombonist Vincent Gardner as music director with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, featuring guest vocalist Ashley Pezzotti and percussionists Bobby Allende and Isaiah Bravo, played a concert titled “Bebop Revolution,” a celebration of both the music and the bebop inspired art of the great Jean-Michel Basquiat.

As an evening when one sits and witnesses a band packed with fantastic musicians playing transcriptions and arrangements of some of the great bebop themes—and a stylish new bebop suite from Gardner, “Everything Changes”—this was unsurprisingly fun as hell, reviving, with some brilliant and ultra-hip solo statements from tenor saxophonist Chris Lewis, baritone saxophonist Paul Nedzela, pianist Dan Nimmer, and Marsalis. Fleshed out with the larger instrumentation, and away from the archival pleasures of old records, hearing the incredible harmonic and melodic inventiveness in pieces like “Klact-Oveeseds-Tene” and “Boperation” was revelatory. Gardner and trombonist Chris Crenshaw handled the vocals and some excellent scat-singing on Babs Gonzales’s “Oop-Pop-A-Da,” and Pezzotti starred in Gardner’s extended piece. It wrapped up with a weighty, punchy, exciting performance of the revolutionary Dizzy Gillespie/Chano Pozo piece “Guarachi Guaro.”

There’s no substitute for the experience of live music, and a key part of that is hearing musicians add that extra little oomph on a fraction of a second here and there, and those tiny flashes open up universes of meaning and possibility. And what fun it was! Bebop is full of bounding spirit. The music leaps from note to note, near bursting through the constraints of form and structure, and also personality. It’s like Beethoven that way—music from times before music videos, social media, and meme culture explodes with personal expression and idiosyncrasies; it’s about the soul translated through notes, not about references to things others have hashtagged.

Part of the poignancy, a part where there’s a bitterness that creeps in and lingers after all the rest has been swallowed, is how inaccessible this American greatness—a greatness of aesthetics, intellect, social values, and just plain pleasure—is to all but a niche in this country. Where can you hear bebop? Where can you hear the Gillespie Big Band recordings? (If you stream your music you’re shit out of luck there.) It’s all but disappeared from the radio waves—with Phil Schaap’s death, WKCR has gradually reduced the amount of time they give to his archived Bird Flight programs, and not even those appear on a dependable schedule.

As an institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center is a museum of jazz. That’s good in that jazz is one of America’s greatest cultural achievements, and one of the great balances of intellectual, technical sophistication and sheer physical joy that civilization has ever created. It’s bad in that it’s fallen so far out of mainstream culture that we need museums to preserve and revive it. And in the way these things go, keeping it in a museum restricts who can experience it. Even for the few who love jazz, the cost is often out of reach—it may surprise that rush ticket seats at JALC are more expensive, and often worse, than those at the Metropolitan Opera.

Another thing we’ve lost is not just Basquiat but his, and art’s, connection with the music. Bebop and Basquiat were two of the greatest parts of American modernism, in the way of taking older methods and rewriting them with contemporary ideas—what could be more American? Bebop musicians took popular songs and swing tunes, erased the melodies and wrote new lines on top that made the harmonies more complex, and inside created a new idea of rhythm (Charlie Parker’s “Donna Lee” is built out of “(Back Home Again In) Indiana”). They made a new language that reflected contemporary life, that had enormous musical depth and sophistication, that could express every human experience, and, as Gardner pointed out, you could dance to it.

Basquiat did the same with the representational image and even the narrative idea of genre painting—the figures that seemed to incorporate centuries of ideas about painting and reassemble them in new forms and styles, the logos and signs and words that make a story out of the fragments of the surrounding world. And there was Parker, running through the paintings like an avatar: Bird on Money (1981), Horn Players (1983) (with Dizzy too), Bird of Paradise (1985). Basquiat painted bebop, and in the longer view he painted out of a love for and involvement with innovation in American music. Innovation is key—bebop had been established for decades when he was painting, no longer new. But music that is innovative is always so, even if imitative music that comes after is more recent.

The painter comes at the end of the line of artists who integrated innovative music into their work. The list includes James McNeill Whistler, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, and Philip Guston—who had an important friendship with Morton Feldman (who was Dean of the New York Studio School for two years). This is part of a general falling away from American art music by artists and writers and dancers (with the general exception of Philip Glass and Steve Reich). On the other side, the musicians have always been, and remain, avidly interested in painting and photography, poetry and fiction, choreography. They showed that in the Rose Theater, and deserve the same attention returned. Because the only way through is through, the more together the better.