Branford Marsalis, McCoy Mrubata, Greg Georgiades and Paul Hanmer may not have planned things this way. But as sometimes happens in the Republic of Bohemia, they find themselves firmly the focus of debate at dinner tables, where conversation revolves around the question: What is jazz?
Marsalis took Sunday Times journalist Bongani Madondo to task for daring to question whether jazz was dead and if the current cadre of players were merely regurgitating old stuff.
Around the time Mrubata and Georgiades (who is South African, in case you wondered) released Vivid Afrika, Hanmer added Accused No 1: Nelson Mandela to the jazz catalogue.
At the heart of Madondo’s and Marsalis’s near blow-up was Marsalis’s objection to the easiness with which the ‘jazz” label is attached to musical styles aspiring to the genre. Marsalis defended jazz as an essentially black American idiom, with anything failing to meet those standards, a pretender.
If one is as legalistic in definition as Marsalis is quoted as being, then Vivid Afrika and indeed Accused No 1 would not satisfy the muster, which would be a great pity because they meet other jazz hallmarks of innovation, creativity and a free spiritedness, within a disciplined structure.
Which is not to say Marsalis’s concerns should be thrown out for being hypersensitive. He is correct in saying that the standards should not be dispensed with in the name of innovation. Nobody accuses classic music of stagnation because it keeps to the form and structure made famous by the Bachs and Beethovens. There is no reason for jazz to lower its standards to attract younger, hipper fans. Jazz is jazz and for those who don’t get it, tough.
What Mrubata, Georgiades and Hanmer bring to the table is jazz interpreted from their surroundings that manages to maintain the structures that make jazz jazz. The unpretentiously Mediterranean sounds fused with Southern African rhythms enrich the idiom, rather than take away from it.
Rasta of the Burning Sands is by definition a reggae-based sound, but there would be flimsy grounds for disqualifying it as a jazz sound simply because its roots are found elsewhere.
Tracks such as Extra Chilli, Painted Skies, and Tunisia speak to jazz as a universal art form able to accommodate geographical influences.
Few jazz fans, if honest, would deny having prejudice when approaching tracks named Voortrekker Sokkie or Bobbejaanland. Thanks to Hanmer’s continuing innovation, however, such names have come to be associated with the kind of jazz that any reasonable fan can appreciate.
What inspires a person or where they come from are not determinants of ability. After all, no serious jazz fan would dismiss Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain merely because it is inspired by Joaquin Rodrigo’s early baroque/classical music rather than the plantations of the United States. Where would that type of thinking put George and Ira Gershwin?
Marsalis need not worry. That he played in one of Davis’s least respected bands need not make him overcompensate and suffer quixotic images of people trying to destroy jazz. Similarly, those who offer to donate nails (for jazz’s imagined coffin) should find a different hobby. Jazz is not dead.