Double Bass McBride Interview for Open Studio

His exposition on the Wynton/Branford vortex explains so much about that 80s-early 90s era of Jazz. The refusal to embrace anything Jazz or Jazz-oriented that wasn’t straight-ahead at that time period and the fact that such snobbishness was rampant in that Marsalis bunch really harmed the music of that time IMO.

Their influence is undeniable during this era. Even the historians defer to them, which leads me to my biggest gripe about the Ken Burns Jazz Documentary that Wynton basically coordinated. First of all it stops at 1964 — like there wasn’t any significant jazz music after this point up until 2000 or so. The documentary barely mentions free music and it acts as if there is no such thing as jazz fusion outside of Miles. No RTF; and barely a mention of Jaco. No ECM or any mention about how the European and Japanese jazz cats helped to move the music into another direction that continued to honor the tradition that is jazz while still allowing it to move forward. Another missing element from the documentary is smooth jazz. As much as people hate it, the emergence of smooth jazz on the popular music charts was also worth mentioning because Jazz hadn’t topped the pop charts for decades until this genre crossed over. The Marsalis family obviously hated these types of music and decided to leave them all out of the Ken Burns documentary — and don’t get me started on the whole playing unamplified thing that they pushed for. They completely ignore the contributions of NHOP, George Mraz and even post-Miles Ron Carter for developing an amplified sound that allowed the DB to cut through the mix like never before; while still allowing their amazing talents to shine through and work within the framework of the music they were playing at that time.
 
I find the "revivalist" mentality of the 1980s to now somewhat troubling. Because the kind of music being presented as "the last highest real jazz" - basically what we'd call today the straightahead jazz of say 1945-1960ish - is my very favorite form/style of the music. But I can't agree that the music needs to be considered as a closed system that basically stopped in 1964 and nothing after that can qualify as part of the music. And yet certainly some of the "clink and squeak" experiments of the 70s and beyond fail to have any appeal to me and honestly I have trouble accepting some of them as part of the great stream of African-American improvised music. So I'm conflicted - but I'm going to come firmly down on the side of the big tent and accepting as part of the jazz stream some music that the players themselves call "jazz" - even if I personally hate it.

We've seen this in the past - certainly amongst the New Orleans style guys from the 20s were many who derided "swing" as "not jazz, just dumbed-down dance music" - everyone knows about the "boppers vs. moldy figs" fight in the mid to late 40s - but I don't think any of those anti-progress groups had anyone as articulate, appealing, talented, and influential as Wynton standing out there as a spokesman.

I'm going to vote in favor of letting time decide, not a couple influential people who believe jazz stopped in 1964. For example, in 1980 it seemed that Spyrogyra and the Jeff Lorber Fusion were very important groups. Today I think the general consensus amongst "open system" jazz people (those who do NOT believe jazz stopped in 1964) would be that Spyrogyra and Jeff Lorber Fusion were NOT particularly important groups; the style they were early versions of has spent itself in the rather uninteresting "smooth jazz" genre. Time has spoken.