Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert by Peter Elsdon, and: People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! ed. by Ajay Heble, Rob Wallace, and: Beyond a Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album by Tony Whyton (review)

What is the future of jazz? It is folly to try to speculate about the artistic directions that may be taken in any style of music. But in the case of jazz, people have wondered about its future since at least the 1940s and 1950s. During those decades, there was good reason for their worries. During the “swing era” (late 1920s through the 1940s), jazz was part of mainstream American popular music. Although the bebop style of the 1940s provoked some opposition and derision from critics, it was eventually affirmed in the 1950s by historians as “modern jazz.” Whether swing or modern, much jazz through 1960 consisted of soloists taking turns in front of a pulse-playing rhythm section. Starting in the late 1950s, a few daring musicians freed the rhythm section from the meters and allowed them to play as equal soloists alongside the other instrumentalists. The result came to be called “free jazz,” two of its monuments being Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (Atlantic SD 1364, recorded in 1960, released in 1961) and John Coltrane’s Ascension (Impulse A-95, recorded in 1965, released in 1966). For the most part, though, free jazz was as commercially unviable as it was daring, because its liberation of the rhythm section disposed of the very component—the pulse—that had held the attentions of many mainstream listeners. But at least free jazz, through its practitioners, had links to previous styles of jazz. The kinds of jazz appearing since 1968—jazz fusion, world jazz, acid jazz, jazzcore, etc.—seem to have broken away from traditional jazz. A chain of evolution can be traced from free jazz through modern jazz, bebop, swing, and early jazz to the New Orleans brothels. But jazz after 1968 may be glibly traced back to colleges. To believe that jazz can be traced back to the brothels or to the campuses means to have a simple, narrow view of its history. The irony is that the short semesters at college often permit only these simple, narrow presentations of jazz history to students.

In truth, jazz history is not merely diverse, but downright messy; many of its records were made by the most unlikely musicians, now barely remembered. Allen Lowe’s That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History, 1900–1950 (Berkeley, CA: Music and Arts Programs of America, 2001) tried to restore that sense of messiness by reopening every historical can of worms. At the end of his study, Lowe wrote “. . . [bebop master] Charlie Parker left some tantalizing hints of not just what the future would bring, but what the future was ” (italics Lowe’s, p. 257). He was asking not what jazz would become, but where jazz seemed to be heading. How jazz would evolve was mostly unforeseen. No one, or a very few people, could have predicted at the time of Parker’s 1955 death, the reintroduction of modes, the jettisoning of blues and popular songs as bases of improvisation, the processes of free jazz, and the adoption of style and instrumental techniques from rock and roll, which at the time was only beginning to appear on records. For many years, the “new” jazz since the 1960s...