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Summary
Summary
One of jazz's leading critics gives us an invigorating, richly detailed portrait of the artists and events that have shaped the music of our time. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, Playing Changes is the first book to take the measure of this exhilarating moment: it is a compelling argument for the resiliency of the art form and a rejoinder to any claims about its calcification or demise.
"Playing changes," in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser's resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes--ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical--that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music. He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music.
Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters--from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding--who have exerted an important influence on the scene. This is an adaptive new music for a complex new reality, and Playing Changes is the definitive guide.
Author Notes
NATE CHINEN has been writing about jazz for more than twenty years. He spent a dozen of them working as a critic for The New York Times and helmed a long-running column for Jazz Times . As the director of editorial content at WBGO, he works with the multiplatform program Jazz Night in America and contributes a range of coverage to NPR Music. An eleven-time winner of the Helen Dance--Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in writing presented by the Jazz Journalists Association, Chinen is also coauthor of Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, the autobiography of impresario George Wein. He lives in Beacon, New York, with his wife and two daughters.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former New York Times jazz critic Chinen charts a brilliant and wide-ranging new history of jazz. Tracing the evolution of the genre over the past 50 years, he demonstrates that no strict definition of jazz exists; it's a volatile and generative music without fixed boundaries or rules. Chinen demonstrates the creative multiplicity of jazz by profiling diverse jazz artists and their contributions to and permutations of the art form. Saxophonist Kamasi Washington, for example, on his most recent album, The Epic, "crashes through an Afrocentric range of styles: surging hard-bop, steroidal jazz-funk, viscous soul." Chinen explains how pianist Vishay Iyer focuses on a body-based way of playing piano, contending that the rhythmic domains of music are the same that our bodies use-breathing, walking, talking; bandleader and saxophonist Wayne Shorter leads his quartet so that tempos and tonal centers are endlessly subject to flux; and saxophonist Steve Coleman incorporates non-Western musical influences, such as the music of Ghana, India, and Brazil, as well as hip-hop styles. Chinen also points to developing jazz ecologies around the world-in Benin, China, Iraq, South Korea-that illustrate the ways that the music continues to grow and develop. Chinen's virtuoso jazz history will drive readers to listen to the music anew, or for the first time. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This cleverly titled narrative closes out the first century of jazz music and brings jazz criticism not only to a new period of history but also to a fascinating era of musical exploration and discovery. Chinen is an outspoken advocate for this new wave of innovation, post-bop in a new dialect, and he has positioned himself on the ground floor. He is open to the mixing of other forms of music rock, rhythm and blues, hip-hop into what should be accepted as jazz. It is clear that he stands with the explorers rather than the conservationists, with Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, and Mary Halvorson more than with Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center. It is not an easy book to evaluate because it is so up-to-the-minute, and Chinen is setting a new standard. His chapter on jazz education, consistent with this stance, is informative and welcome, as is his expansion of his coverage to include an international focus. Jazz, he believes, is more than an American music. Informative reading for anyone open to exploring new horizons in music.--Mark Levine Copyright 2018 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A music critic assesses the current state of jazz.By the end of the 20th century, some observers of the jazz scene had concluded that "jazz was enshrined in the popular imagination as a historical practice, a set of codes to be reenacted endlessly." What possible surprises could be mined from an art form that "had already completed a full life cycle of creation, maturation, obsolescence, and revival"? A lot, it turns out, as Chinen (co-author, with George Wein: Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, 2003), the current NPR contributor and former jazz critic for the New York Times, demonstrates in this analysis of the state of jazz in the 21st century. No fan of "an overintellectualized, preciously ennobled, eat-your-vegetables idea of great American music," the author focuses on artists who are pushing jazz in new directions. These include saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who, with "The Epic," his 2015 debut album, "emerged as jazz's most persuasive embodiment of new black pride at a moment when few forces in American culture felt more pressing"; pianist Brad Mehldau, whose solo in one particular track so impressed guitarist Pat Metheny when he heard it while driving "that he pulled the car over to give it his full concentration"; drummer Tyshawn Sorey, composer of the "unclassifiable suite" The Inner Spectrum of Variables; bassist Esperanza Spalding; and more. Chinen gets bogged down with repeated references to the awards many of the cited artists have won, but jazz fans will find much to enjoy. Anyone looking to start a jazz collection will be happy to know that each chapter concludes with five recommended recordings. The author has a gift for memorable lines, as when he writes about D'Angelo's 2000 album "Voodoo": "There's an odd sensation that you often encounter listening to the album, not unlike absentmindedly reaching the top of a staircase and being startled when there isn't another step."As this illuminating book shows, jazz still has a lot to say about the worldand a lot of eloquent artists ready to say it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Music writers need big ears, openness, enthusiasm, sound critical sense, and knowledge of their subject. Former New York Times jazz critic Chinen (coauthor, Myself Among Other) deploys these attributes with grace in this fascinating survey of the state of jazz in the new century. Contrary to earlier gloomsayers, he describes not a dying music but one that's growing and adapting, finding new ways to express itself. He discusses figures such as Brad Mehldau, Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Esperanza Spalding, and Kamasi Washington. An illuminating chapter explores how the spread of instruction and the availability of online performances have raised the entry bar for new players. (You can play along with Coltrane online without ever having owned a record by him.) Chinen also covers legendary sampler-mixer J Dilla and the attempts to merge neo soul, hip-hop, and jazz. The book is a veritable shopping list of recordings for jazzophiles not fortunate enough to have heard these performers live. Verdict A very attractive volume that will appeal not just to jazz lovers but all interested in the current music scene.-David Keymer, Cleveland © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Foreword "A secret, a secret, I've got a little secret." Cécile McLorin Salvant flashes a grin as she sings this playful taunt, the preamble to an old show tune, "If This Isn't Love." She's at the Village Vanguard, which has entered its ninth decade with an indisputable reputation as the most hallowed jazz club in the world. In a couple of days Salvant would release a double album largely recorded in this room. But she doesn't so much as mention it during the set. Her only partner onstage is the pianist Sullivan Fortner, and she seems determined to meet him in an elegant free fall, making adjustments and testing out methods on the fly. The burden of jazz history lies in wait for a moment like this. Headlining the Vanguard to a sold-out crowd without a proven set list is a recipe for all manner of anxiety, not least the anxiety of influence. But over the course of her casually stunning performance, on a late-September evening in 2017, Salvant shows that she's neither wrestling with ghosts nor shouldering a weight of obligation. Instead, she carries herself like the beneficiary of a trust: she's got a little secret, and she's letting her audience in on the action. She knows better than anyone in the club that "If This Isn't Love" was a calling card for the sublime jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, who recorded her definitive version in the 1950s. There's a hint of Vaughan in Salvant's bell-like tone and swooping inflection, but also abundant creative liberties in her phrasing. Rather than evoke the past from a stance of decorum or deference, Salvant is bent on stirring it up with sly intellectual rigor. Given how much effort has gone into the canonization of the jazz tradition, she's a stealth subversive, working within a recognizable framework in ways that feel ecstatic and unbound. The emergence of a jazz artist as audacious, unconflicted, and grounded as Salvant, at this stage in the game, suggests both the fulfillment of a promise and the rejection of an idea. During the waning phase of the last century, jazz was enshrined in the popular imagination as a historical practice, a set of codes to be reenacted endlessly. Market forces--primed by a relentless campaign of reissues and compilations, tributes and emulations--had fed a common perception that the music reached its peak in a distant golden age. What could Salvant possibly be if not a throwback? The art form had already completed a full life cycle of creation, maturation, obsolescence, and revival. Gary Giddins, the astute jazz critic, once delineated that trajectory in an essay with a cheeky title, "How Come Jazz Isn't Dead?" In it, he argues that the development of any musical form can be divided into four stages. The first is Native, followed by Sovereign. Then comes Recessionary. Finally, we arrive at Classical--when "Even the most adventurous young musicians are weighed down by the massive accomplishments of the past." Most mainstream narratives of jazz over the last several decades followed the general contour of this model. Critics and historians, planting their surveying equipment on Classical bedrock, took their measure of the music along a timeline. So it was no surprise that the conventional framework suggested an inexorable march of progress. And it made sense that jazz, especially for those outside its orbit, meant something openly retrograde. When Giddins updated his four-stage paradigm in 2009 for Jazz, a sprawling history coauthored with the scholar Scott DeVeaux, he suggested that it might help to envision the music in a "post-historical" mode. That notion seems almost custom-fitted to Salvant, with her refusal to be typecast by precedent. But she's just one figure in a vast new complex, the dimensions of which make the four-stage paradigm feel reductive. What the most recent jazz surveys and histories tend to ignore is an explosion of new techniques, accents, and protocols that define the state of the art in our time. Some of this happened in response to widespread upheaval. As the art form began to settle into its second century, its practitioners faced tougher conditions than any previous generation: a broken infrastructure, an uncertain course, a distracted, if not alienated, consumer base. But more than one wave of improvising artists has confronted this tumult, seizing license to create freer and more self-reliant forms of art. Raised with unprecedented access to information, they scour jazz history not for a linear narrative but a network of possibilities. Their frame of reference is broad enough to encourage every form of hybridism. They understand jazz as something other than a stable category. And their work has evolved the music--insofar as harmonic color, dynamic flow, group interaction, and a complex yet streamlined expression of rhythm are concerned. Jazz has always been a frontier of inquiry, with experimentation in multiple registers. That's as true now as it has ever been. But to a striking degree, avant-garde practice and formal invention have now insinuated themselves into the mainstream, shifting the music's aesthetic center. Not even a resurgent strain of hot-jazz antiquarianism--the province of out-and-proud nostalgists--can stem the current trend toward polyglot hypermodernism, toward unexpected composites and convergences. This book begins with a reflection on the crisis of confidence that distorted jazz's ecology during the late phases of the twentieth century. Tracing a historicist agenda that actualized in the 1970s, mobilized in the 1980s, and all but tyrannized the 1990s, this narrative sets an important context for our present moment of abundance. As the music transitioned out of the last century, it became increasingly clear that a conscientious foothold in tradition could work in peaceful tandem with many approaches that fall outside a strict definition of jazz. The whole idea of a definition, in fact, was beginning to feel outmoded. Whatever you choose to call the music, "jazz" is as volatile and generative now as at any time since its beginnings. Instead of stark binaries and opposing factions, we face a blur of contingent alignments. Instead of a push for definition and one prevailing style, we have boundless permutations without fixed parameters. That multiplicity lies precisely at the heart of the new aesthetic--and is the engine of its greatest promise. Excerpted from Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century by Nate Chinen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Foreword | p. ix |
1 Change of the Guard | p. 3 |
2 From This Moment On | p. 31 |
3 Uptown Downtown | p. 49 |
4 Play the Mountain | p. 72 |
5 The New Elders | p. 86 |
6 Gangsterism on a Loop | p. 101 |
7 Learning Jazz | p. 119 |
8 Infiltrate and Ambush | p. 137 |
9 Changing Sames | p. 156 |
10 Exposures | p. 183 |
11 The Crossroads | p. 200 |
12 Style Against Style | p. 224 |
Afterword | p. 238 |
The 129 Essential Albums of the Twenty-First Century (So Far) | p. 243 |
Acknowledgments | p. 249 |
Notes | p. 251 |
Index | p. 259 |