Jazz: A Way Out of the Muddle

Jazz, which every few years is pronounced dead and then somehow revives, has really begun to develop fatal symptoms lately. Its traditional styles are suffering from hardening of the arteries, its avant-garde is in the grip of a frenzied obscurity, and its fever chart at the box office is down, down, down. But now, just as the mourning is starting in earnest, jazz is getting a vital transfusion from the people who seemed to be helping to dig its grave—the rock 'n' rollers.

Rock music, like jazz, derives in part from the blues, and this common heritage provides the basis on which rock is injecting itself into the jazz idiom (at the same time, of course, absorbing elements of jazz into its own idiom). Recent recordings by Ramsey Lewis, Cannonball Adderley and Gabor Szabo demonstrate how successfully—and sometimes how superficially—jazz can be superimposed on a rock foundation. More significantly, several jazzmen young enough to be in the rock generation are emerging to show what can be done when the two strains are thoroughly fused. Two of the most original: — Jeremy Steig, 24, a wildly lyrical flutist and the leader of an electrified jazz-rock group called the Satyrs, which occasionally accompanies its pulsing din with such tape-recorded sounds as those of a thunderstorm or a subway train. Classically trained, Steig (son of Cartoonist William Steig) hums into as well as plays his amplified flute, mixes shimmering, bluesy cascades of notes with jabbing, rhythmic interjections, sometimes bending tones into piercing dissonances, sometimes dissolving into trills or fluttery tremolos. Jazz Critic Whitney Balliett describes Steig's musical message as "messianic, for it suggests the way out of the gloomy muddle that jazz has fallen into." > Larry Coryell, 24, guitarist in the Gary Burton Quartet. Coryell builds exciting, unpredictable solos with clusters of freshly turned chords, tantalizing silences, sudden vaulting runs leading into intense twangings, and the carefully manipulated drone of feedback from his amplifier. Through it all run echoes of the blues and country music he learned as a boy in Texas, the rock he played with a group called the Free Spirits, even the gypsy airs of the late Django Reinhardt. A dropout from the University of Washington (where he was studying journalism), Coryell believes in embracing all musical styles: "If music has something to say to you —whether it's jazz, country blues, Western or hillbilly, Indian or any other folk music—take it. Never restrict yourself."

Under the lively ministrations of such newcomers as Steig and Coryell, jazz's death rattle may turn out to be only the hoarse herald of another revival.

"Too many jazz musicians got to playing for cults," says Bandleader Stan Kenton. "That's not what the kids want. Rock has pumped life back into jazz."