Part II: The Music, the Scene

In some circles, the incident was the stuff of legend. During a multi-day concert in Vancouver, BC in 1986, Wynton Marsalis, trumpet in hand, joined Miles Davis onstage without advance warning. Davis relates the incident in his own words in his autobiography Miles (Simon & Schuster, 1989):

"We were playing at this outdoor amphitheater that was jam-packed. Wynton was scheduled to play the next night. So here I was playing and getting off on what I was doing. All of a sudden I feel this presence coming up on me, this body movement, and I see that the crowd is kind of wanting to cheer or gasp or something. Then Wynton whispers in my ear--and I'm still trying to play--'They told me to come up here.'

"I was so mad at him for doing that shit like that, I just said, 'Man, get the fuck off the stage.' He looked a little shocked when I said it to him like that. After I said that, I said, 'Man, what the fuck are you doing up here on stage? Get the fuck off the stage!' And then I stopped the band. Because we were playing some set pieces and when he came up like that I was trying to give the band some cues. He wouldn't have fit in. Wynton can't play the kind of shit we were playing. He's not into that kind of style and so we would have had to make adjustments to the way he was going to be playing.

Taken at face value it's an amusing anecdote. On another level it's also unsettling, because it illustrates the rift that emerged between the older jazz generation and the new school in the mid-Eighties. Jam sessions, no matter what the genre, operate on the principle that all are welcome. As far as jazz goes, the spontaneity and camaraderie are what drove the scene and earned many individual musicians their respect and reputation. Nevertheless, the Miles Davis-Wynton Marsalis episode is something different.

"That's like the Jedi knight trying to upstage the master," says Futureman, seated next to fellow Flecktone Jeff Coffin on the edge of the Fabrik stage. In other words, Davis was a great; and only the arrogant or foolish would think that they, too, merited a place on stage alongside him.

According to Futureman and Coffin, Marsalis' bravado can't all be chalked up to his own attitude. Other forces are at work here, otherwise known as the market. There is an audience hungry for more than the steady diet of pop tunes and radio-friendly hip-hop. Punk broke into the mainstream years ago for this reason. And now record companies, eager to create and satisfy a new demand, have suddenly decided to exhume jazz and concentrate a part of their energy on the cash cow of wannabe sophisticates that has yet to be milked. But sales will hover in the bottom percentile without media assistance. So Marsalis--handsome, articulate, promising--has been appointed by his sponsors, the folks hidden behind the curtain, to be the one to give a face to jazz.

But Marsalis, by all informed accounts, is not ready for the honor. "He's in a leadership position but he's still got things to learn," says Futureman. "We give you two Grammys, the Pulitzer Prize and the Wizard of Oz Award... It gets in the way of the real development. People get hung up in words and the music exists somewhere else."

Coffin adds, "It's like the green banana saying, 'This is how all other bananas should taste.'"

Marsalis, however, seems to shoulder a lot of the blame for the current state of jazz music. But it goes with the territory. As his genre's spokesperson, he has also come to personify the darker side of jazz, and the Pulitzer Prize serves as a good illustration. In 1965, the Pulitzer committee passed over Duke Ellington for two reasons: lingering racism, and the view that jazz was not a legitimate music. Looking to right these past wrongs, in 1997 Marsalis was the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Many people spoke out to argue that the award was presented out of guilt and market kowtowing, not genuine achievement. The larger issue is that the entertainment industry is manufacturing its own celebrities and then rewarding them with credibility--an enviable strategy of self-perpetuation. In the realm of Hollywood blockbusters, boy-bands and television sitcoms, it can be tolerable. But when jazz is pulled into the mire, there is bound to be more outcry.

"You can't just jump up and be Duke Ellington," asserts Futureman. "When you make the music, you don't have to preach."

The most recent sign of the industry blitz came in late 2000, when PBS aired Ken Burns' myopic and opportunistic special called, brilliantly enough, Jazz, and followed up with two books: Jazz: An Illustrated History, and Jazz: A History of America's Music--as well as the ultra-hyped 24-CD compilation accompaniment on Sony/Columbia. To add insult to injury, the special was narrated by Marsalis himself. While it inexplicably ignored milestones like Bill Evans' controversial overdubs on Conversations with Myself (1963), it is no wonder that Davis, in spite of all his contributions to the shape of modern jazz, went under-recognized throughout all ten episodes.

"You see Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Bob Marley," adds Futureman, "that's a whole 'nother soul. Shit, they sent Miles' music into space!"

Coffin gesticulates for emphasis. "He would push himself..."

"He got it," interrupts Futureman, nodding assuredly. "Whatever the times had, he got it." Which makes it an inexcusable error for a supposed authority such as Ken Burns to discount someone who was at the innovative forefront with each passing decade: the late-swing be-bop of Birth of the Cool (1949), the Salsa/Flamenco influence on Sketches of Spain, and the melancholic musings of Kind of Blue (both 1959), the jazz-rock fusion of In a Silent Way (1969), up to and including the space-age swing of Doo-Bop (1991).

As their actions prove, Futureman and Coffin are not too busy theorizing to put their ideas into practice. Coffin, a lucky beneficiary of our elementary school music programs, picked up the saxophone in the fifth grade. Now, in addition to his output with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, he has two solo albums on Compass Records: Go 'Round, and the recently released Commonality.

In late March, Futureman hosted a five-day Drum and Percussion Camp at Camp Garner Creek in Dickson, Tennessee. At the same time, he was finishing up work on the score for the Sonjé Mayo production Évolution Danse, which played at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center (TPAC) at the end of May. And his independent solo work is ambitious in scope. Seamless Script, the first album of a seven-volume series that will culminate in Evolution D'Amour, was just issued earlier this year.

Recording projects aside, Futureman is also known for an invention called the drumitar, which allows him to reproduce the sound of a full drum set by using his fingers on a guitar-type instrument. And his newest innovation, the RoyEl, unites the piano, the drum set, and, curiously enough, the Periodic Table of the Elements, to create "impressionistic" music that is "closer to nature." It marks his personal shift into the electronic world that fuses the traditional hand and stick drumming with the technology of our digital era.

"We live in a different age, and there's so much more to assimilate. It's overwhelming. Then you see a lot of people who are still just imitating." For the media-courted jazz celebs, he continues, "It's the age of the traditional, where they're wearing the suits and looking back to the past. That shit's about to radically change."

"Steve Coleman. Perfect example," says Coffin. "There's a cat who's integrating all different styles--amazing stuff." This is an important analytical gauge because jazz has always been the forerunner of pan-genre incorporation. "The Indian influence on 'Trane predates anything the Beatles did," he explains.

According to Futureman and Coffin, popular jazz has come full-circle. Once regarded as an ephemeral genre, the growing publicity has led to institutionalization, hindering its natural development.

"The urgency of the times calls for something more than the Lincoln Jazz Center," says Futureman. (Marsalis occupies several positions in the Jazz at Lincoln Center program.) Therefore the real jazz scene of today is the one that continues outside of the general public's limited range of vision

Citing NYC-based and international talents like Chris Potter, Dave Pietro, David Sanchez and Trilok Gurtu, Coffin and Futureman assert that the heart of jazz is not lost. Some of these newer, lesser-known musicians have strong ties to Ornette Coleman and Booker Little, which signals a new direction in the course that has thus far been dominated by Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker. And the evidence even appears locally--HipSync Records in Seattle is an example of the independent, innovational jazz vanguard.

It remains to be seen who will emerge as the true jazz frontman (or frontwoman) in place of the spurious label puppets. Maybe there will be no single person, but rather a cohesive underground scene that shapes the music from the inside out. In the meantime, music enthusiasts may rest easier knowing that a fresh, passionate spirit of jazz persists--far away from the media microphones, corporate board rooms and television cameras.