Investigating the imaginary schism between “inside” and “outside” creative music

By Peter Breslin

For the past two years, I’ve produced and hosted a radio show on a small, community-supported, public radio station in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The show, called “Inside Out,” was part of the station’s 24 hours of jazz programming a week, an unusual format not widely adopted in the US radio market, public or commercial. What’s more unusual, the program was scheduled during an afternoon time slot, from 1-3 pm. Heightening even further the unusual situation: I had complete freedom in programming decisions and often featured recordings by so-called avant garde musicians and composers: the dreaded “free jazz.”

Inside Out was based on a very simple musicological premise: creative composed and improvised music is a vast continuum, not a schizoid “us versus them” art form. There’s no need to draw battle lines between so-called “inside jazz,” traditional and mainstream, and “outside jazz,” revolutionary and obscure. Programming decisions were intended to highlight the creative risks in the best of the entire spectrum of the music, from Fletcher Henderson to Anthony Braxton. Several artists provided ample crossover credentials, swinging just as easily and just as hard across categories. Just a few of these artists include Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Don Cherry, Elvin Jones, Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, David Murray, The World Saxophone Quartet, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and John Coltrane.

Some readers may be wondering what the big deal is. Jazz, after all, is risky business. The latest record industry stats give it a measly 2% market share, and the bulk of that is represented by the bland, sugary likes of Chris Botti and Candy Dulfer. For many, the music is an historical artifact, an archive of a particular time in American musical history, a movement that briefly gained the world stage and then just as quickly vanished into near total obscurity with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, way back in the ‘50s.

Part of the big deal has to do also with why I am tempted to employ scare quotes around the word “jazz” itself. The word conjures many different musical forms for different people, everything from ragged New Orleans funeral marches to Louis Armstrong, from swing to slick, saccharine “smooth jazz,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Norah Jones. The problem with the word “jazz:” it rarely evokes the full scope of the vast range of composed and improvised music created between roughly 1960 and right now.

The imaginary schism between “mainstream” and “outside” creative music supposedly happened circa 1959-1965, coinciding with the rise of Ornette Coleman to critical prominence, the quantum changes in the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane and the emergence of Cecil Taylor. But this is just the contemporary mythology. As early as the ‘40s, trad jazz aficionados were slighting Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington for “not playing jazz.” A whole new wave of innovators arose among the Be Bop artists, who in turn were accused of “not playing jazz.” Ironically, in spite of being characterized as cacophonous and anti-social during its own time, be bop is now considered the capstone of the music, with its harmonic and melodic strategies dominating jazz education programs at high schools and universities across the country. Then came “Modern Jazz,” interrogated yet again as “not jazz.” By 1959, in other words, “jazz” had already been through at least 3 major stylistic revolutions, each of which supposedly heralded the end of jazz, and each of which subsequently went on to become firmly established as “the real thing,” or at least welcomed into the commercial and cultural lexicon.

Free jazz, avant garde jazz, outside jazz, whatever you want to call it, caused the same hand-wringing and outrage as earlier innovations, but never went on to be widely accepted as just plain “jazz.” This marked a departure from previous patterns. Instead, the battle lines between “traditional jazz,” (which suddenly could refer to anything from King Oliver to Dizzy Gillespie to Miles Davis’ late ‘50s/early ‘60s recordings), and “free jazz” remained firmly drawn in the US for nearly 20 years, at least until the late ‘70s. In the minds of many traditionalists, such as Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray and Wynton Marsalis, the lines are still drawn, though perhaps softening somewhat.

The mythology posits that a bunch of untutored renegades who couldn’t play their instruments, who didn’t know the history of the music and who didn’t swing invaded the civilized worlds of jazz and attempted a noisy coup, burning the Jazz Palace to the ground and generally frightening the populace. This mythology reinforces “free jazz” as an aberrant form, an anomaly largely made possible by the general foment of the late ‘60s. When everyone in jazz returned to their senses by the late ‘70s, the stage was set for the “neo-traditionalists,” led by Wynton Marsalis and his pride of Young Lions. Their mission: to restore jazz to its rightful place as a respectable, friendly, sensible music, based in the blues and the 32-bar song. This mythology proved so powerful that it still sticks today.

Inside Out was dedicated to exploding the myth, revealing several aesthetic strands that make it an impossible story. One strand is the urgency and inventiveness of earlier forms at their best, often unthinkingly labeled as “traditional,” but actually radical and laden with creative risk. Another strand is the deep reverence for and influence of the entire history of the music connecting all of the many artists in so-called “free jazz.” Yet another strand is the multifaceted scene that was unfolding in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, clearly indicating that jazz needed no saving, no restoring and no rescuing. There are several other perspectives on the music, each of which shows the organic development of so-called “free jazz” out of the roots and branches of previously embraced forms.

I moved from Santa Fe , and for a year recorded Inside Out in my living room. The show was recently canceled, due to the desire of the station to have a live host in the studio, not a canned one. But over its two years, Inside Out may have provided the only opportunity in the US to hear Anthony Braxton on the radio at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, or what’s more, to hear Duke Ellington and company setting fire to the stage at Newport in 1956, followed by The Cecil Taylor Unit tearing up Yugoslavia in 1976, for example. The point was not lost on many listeners, who gained an appreciation for certain forms of music they had previously dismissed as “just too out there.” The music continues to live and breathe, a miracle in the face of commercial neglect and widespread misconceptions. Give a listen and look for connections, not differences. To paraphrase Ornette Coleman, beauty might not be such a rare thing, after all.