The Jazz Futures/Live In Concert

The angry old man of the jazz avant-garde, Henry Threadgill, decries the ethic of the Young Lions on the scene. He says that for the first time in jazzstory "there are no young rebels, we don't even have a charlatan." Well, it could be that Mr. Threadgill is missing the point. These cats can blow. Maybe that's the point.

The Jazz Futures/Live in Concert (RCA NOVUS 63158-2), breath that point. Dig. You're doing the hip, jazz-textured-muzak festival thing, ready to be spoon fed some more lukewarm digital pabulum a la CD101. Then eight clean young brothers swagger onto the stage hurling nuke-tipped riffs into the middle of your fruit and cheese platter. Horns sure and shrill enough to straighten Kenny G's hair are flying at you from every direction. The scene's almost too much. Half the people grab their Charlie the Starkist Tuna sensibilities and run for cover. The rest are just awed by the collective virtuosity before them and kneel as the weak always do before the powerful. And so it goes as these Young Lions swing.

We who claim to love jazz should be happy--even if the album's not perfect. It takes a little to get past the Tonight Show gloss and patness of the Futures' ensemble openings. We also have to forgive some pretty uninspired and unfocused original works that share disc space with standards like Stardust, and Blue Moon. But when we listen to each Turk as he shows his stuff--that sweet, hot, Dizzyfied stuff, when we hear the silky ease of their interplay, and get caught up in the ENERGY of the group, those matters should seem like details. They really should. Really. So why then after a few spins of this disc do we begin to reconsider the cranky Mr. Threadgill?

Until the unfortunate Wyntonization of the music, jazz was the "sound of surprise." Now jazz seems to be the sound of virtuosity. Virtuosity certainly befits that America's classical music kind of attitude. But that classical music thing flies into the face of the historical motive of jazz, which is to search for something. And to search with both a passion for and a defiance of that which came before. In the Futures we hear a reverence for the music already created, but none of the defiance that brought it into existence--none of the sound of its rebellion. Instead, we hear the sound of reaction to a confused and mediocre jazz scene. Very likely encouraged by the record companies to follow Wynton'$ lead, the Futures seem more like sound-studs getting together to measure their trumpets, rather than earnest young jazzmen looking to take the music to the next level.

But, perhaps this is all too philosophical? Roy Hargrove is a delight to listen to. His playing is inventive, his attack ferocious. Antonio Hart's alto sax sounds nicely introspective. And while Blue Moon is very nicely treated, in it we find the rub: it would have been treated almost exactly the same way thirty years ago. In other words, there's nothing surprising on this disc. And when talking about the future of the music, that is something we really need to consider.

Consider the sound of an album released in 1960 on the Vee-Jay record label called The Young Lions featuring two promising youngbloods: Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter. Here's an all-star album made up entirely of Shorter compositions--pieces which are remarkable in their freshness and originality from a composer/player who would go on to feed one of the greatest combos in jazz history from 1964-69. But we hear something more. We hear the sound of restraint. We hear Shorter--who could serve up scrambled eggs a la Trane with the best of them--blowing his own kind of horn. All this in a landscape freshly pockmarked by Trane's giant steps. We hear in Lee Morgan a kind of tentativeness that suggests struggle, exploration, an effort to move out of the shadow of Clifford Brown. Moreover, we see that feeling has not been sacrificed to horsepower and displays of skill.

Jazz is a quirky music, a subversive music. But we don't know that by sounding the Futures' recording. We don't hear a noise that is troubling. Or intriguing. Or confusing. Or challenging. We don't hear a sound that bends our ear and makes us say what the f--- was that? Yet these cats are called the Jazz FUTURES.

Perhaps the Future's are a victim of their own marketing campaigns which position them as the saviors of "real" jazz. The problem? They run the risk of continually paying homage to the masters. The result? They sound like a Richard Estes painting where every detail in the fore-middle-background is perfectly defined and rendered, where after marveling at one hyper-real cityscape after another, you kind of have to ask, what's the point? You don't need to see the next painting, you can predict it.

The point of the Futures' live recording to this listener's ear, seems not to be the advancement of jazz through experimentation, freshness and adventure. Mark Whitfield, for all of his guitar talent, is not likely to create a new jazz tributary. But he will make a lot of pretty music that will sell very well. That seems to be the real promise of the Futures.

If you buy the Jazz Futures you'll almost definitely have some fun with it. If, however, you want something fresh, listen to twenty-four year-old Julian Joseph's The Language of Truth on the Atlantic label. If your thing is to be challenged by all-stars within the parameters of a more traditional sound, listen to Lester Bowie playing with the Leaders ensemble. (Try Out Here Like This on the Black Saint record label.) But if you want hear the sounds which according to the Futures' own liner notes have made these youngbloods "marketable attractions on the festival circuit," this is a sure thing.

Oh, those liner notes speak to another thing: they let us know that the Futures tell us "...about the relative health of jazz; about how reassuring it is to approach the music's next century with this level of talent...." [Emphasis mine.] But what they don't tell us is that for jazz to be really healthy again, and really exciting again, it needs more visionaries and fewer virtuosos. And maybe, just maybe, a charlatan or two.

Personnel: Roy Hargrove, trumpet; Marlon Jordan, trumpet; Antonio Hart, alto sax; Tim Warfield, tenor sax; Benny Green, piano; Carl Allen, drums; Christian McBride, bass; Mark Whitfield, guitar.

--Daryl N. Long

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