Volume 27 Issue 5 | March 4 - April 15, 2022

Rudder
There is no way that anyone can be
a great jazz musician playing along
to funk or rock rhythms. It just ain’t
gonna happen.
Wynton Marsalis
basic premise of these two musical styles as discrete genres is somewhat
reductive, but for our purposes, we’ll maintain the distinction.)
The fusion of jazz and funk begins in the late 1960s and early 1970s:
albums such as Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way (1969), Bitches Brew
(1970), On the Corner (1972), and Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters
(1973), stand out as foundational recordings of the genre.
The canonization of swing
From the beginning, however, there was also a sense that with funk
the chamber-music ethos of bebop-based jazz had been abandoned in
favour of blatant commercialism. While the popularity of fusion only
grew throughout the 1970s and 80s, coincidentally or not, this period
also marked the beginning of the proliferation of jazz studies programs
in post-secondary institutions. As jazz education became formalized,
canonization followed. At the centre of canonization is a simple question
with a complex answer: what is jazz? To this day, the core skills
that most jazz programs teach tend to be derived from bebop, and
roughly adhere to the period of 1945 to 1965. Swing is prioritized over
backbeat, the melodic minor scale is prioritized over the pentatonic
minor and standards are prioritized over vamp-based originals.
“What I object to is the abandonment of the swing rhythm that is
essential to jazz,” opines Wynton Marsalis, a musician whose principal
position at Jazz at Lincoln Center has conferred on him the
mantle of pedagogical authority. “There is no way that anyone can be a
great jazz musician playing along to funk or rock rhythms. It just ain’t
gonna happen.” Marsalis, certainly, has the credentials to stand behind
his claims, but, for many musicians in jazz programs – certainly for
those who were born well after the mainstream breakthrough of rock,
funk and hip-hop – fusion often represents an honest concatenation
of their genuine musical interests. While the sounds of Charlie Parker,
John Coltrane and Miles Davis transcriptions abound from individual
jazz program practice rooms, it is often, trust me, the sounds of fusion
that can be heard through the doors to group rehearsal rooms, especially
late at night.
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