Four Jazz Lives

Introduction to the Original Edition

INTRODUCTION TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Herbie Nichols, and Jackie McLean-four profoundly different but closely related lives in the bebop business, that peculiar cross-poEination of show business and serious modern jazz that has developed since the bebop revolution of the Forties. In their collective biographies is a microcosm of the contemporary scene for the black American jazz musician. Ornette Coleman, the self-taught poor boy from Texas, struggling to find a means of self-expression in the deep South, in California, in New York and in Europe, fired from a carnival band in Natchez, Mississippi, for trying to teach bebop licks to a fellow band member, whipped for a tenor saxophone solo in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, scornfully rejected for his music and manner in Los Angeles, became one of America's most talkedabout serious musicians in the 1960's. Cecil Taylor's route to controversy was entirely different. He was born in the black bourgeoisie (note in his storythat even a black servant can be a member of the black bourgeoisie if he [ xviii] Introduction to the Original Edition can get up the trimmings) in a comfortable Long Island suburb and trained in one of the best musical conservatories on the East Coast; his main musical struggle was to find a method of improvisation that would achieve the proper balance between his training and his roots. Herbie Nichols and Jackie McLean, on the other hand, began their careers at the opposite ends of the bebop revolution , one discouraged from participating in that revolution, because he refused to become a hipster in the age ofhip, the other a teen-age prodigy who became too hip for his own good. Many currents cross in these pages, the most sinister of which is the gross indifference with which America receives those aspects of Afro-American culture that are not "entertaining .'" Jazz's entertainment value has decreased as black artists have conscientiously moved out ofthe realm offolk art and into the realm of high art; and I maintain that much of the jazz music of the last twenty years and some of the jazz of the previous thirty years is high art and should be treated with all the dignity that high art deserves. I am not suggesting that alienation, frustration , humiliation, and deprivation are the exclusive property of the jazz musician; certainly the great majority of artists in America are poor and outcast people. But literature, classical music, and the plastic arts are taught from both the appreciative and creative viewpoints in all colleges and many ofthe high schools of the United States in a blind adulation of European culture, while there is little academic effort at fostering the one art form unique and indigenous to the United States. Furthermore , fortunes can be raised to sponsor prestigious symphonic and operatic societies in any sizable American city: it is of utmost importance that the rich convince themselves that they are "cultured." But serious jazz is left almost exclusively to a few out-of-the-way bars, and is given very little time on the radio and a negligible amount of time on television, so that there is Introduction to the Original Edition [ xix] nothing in the average American's life to reorient him toward this most highly developed aspect ofAfro-American culture. Reviewing the experiences of the people this book deals with, it is difficult to understand how they survived at all as artists. How does Cecil Taylor face those half-upright pianos to which he is forced to accommodate his difficult and complex music? How did Jackie McLean keep his mind open to growth in those years when he used heroin to blot out the demons who inhabit those days and nights ofthe black jazz artist? Why didn't Omette Coleman go back to Texas and become a rhythmand -blues tenor saxophonist after receiving only scorn and hatred from a community of modem musicians, to become a part of which he had struggled through the length and breadth of the deep South? And poor, disillusioned Herbie Nichols, a great pianist and composer ofwhom very few ofeven the most ardent jazz enthusiasts have heard, died without recognition despite years of trying to achieve a breakthrough. Here, in Herbie Nichols' life, is exemplified another theme of this book: the capriciousness of the jazz industry. No pianist as obviously beautiful and original as Herbie Nichols could be as absolutely...