Rock vs. jazz

For just the second time in 50 years, the top award at the Grammys went to a jazz album. Do the two genres have anything to say to each other?

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Jazz, Music, Rock 'n' Roll, Music Industry, Joni Mitchell, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Miles Davis

AP Photo / Jim Cooper

Joni Mitchell and Herbie Hancock in New York on Sept. 26, 2007.

Feb. 19, 2008 | I rarely pay much attention to the Grammys. But this year I noticed that something unusual happened: The album of the year award went to a jazz album, only the second time this has happened in 50 years (if you don't count Frank Sinatra). The legendary jazz pianist Herbie Hancock won for his album "River," a tribute to the equally legendary singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (who has also never won the top award). As the New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff pointed out, the choice could be seen as "a celebration of the academy's more high-minded pop impulses," a kind of makeup call to atone for all those Celine Dions and Whitney Houstons. But the Grammy for Hancock's fine album doesn't change the painful reality that it sold only 55,000 copies, or that jazz sales make up only 3 percent of all music bought in the United States.

Choosing a career as a jazz musician is a little like choosing a career as a painter, poet or dancer -- you'd better get ready to wipe off table four. My cousin and best friend is an instructive example. He's a top-notch jazz and salsa pianist in the Bay Area. He's been playing music much longer than I've been writing, and I can't help but compare our respective careers. I know it's apples and oranges, but there is no doubt in my mind that he's at least as good at what he does as I am at what I do, and probably much better. Certainly if artistic achievement is measured by discipline, he's exponentially better. I didn't start learning Latin and Greek at age 6 (the equivalent of studying classical piano for ten years, as he did), and then take up calculus for a couple more years (the equivalent of learning the jazz vocabulary, with its harmonic complexities and technical challenges) and then have to master organic chemistry (not really a good equivalent of learning the salsa clave, but there isn't one -- suffice it to say that it's really, really hard). He plays with great musicians, occasionally heads his own group at big-name clubs, writes great tunes, is widely respected on the scene -- and has been working at the post office for 25 years. Like 99 percent of jazz musicians, he simply can't make a living at what he does.

It's bizarre, going to some of his gigs. The band is smoking, playing what you just know is the hottest, most advanced, interesting, intense music being performed anywhere in the city that night, and there will be 20 people in the audience. And there's no reason to believe this will ever change. Yes, there are some signs of life -- a sleek new San Francisco version of the longtime Oakland jazz club Yoshi's just opened in the city's revitalized historic Fillmore Jazz District, featuring top artists like Chick Corea, Roy Haynes, Mike Stern, Cedar Walton and Pat Metheny, and it has been drawing good audiences. But when you drop below the big-club, big-name level, times are hard. Most local jazz musicians I know bitch that it's harder than ever to get gigs.

I don't want to write yet another jeremiad about America's cultural illiteracy. They're boring and they don't do any good. For non-jazz fans, being told you should listen to jazz is the equivalent of the bourgeois philistine of yesteryear being dragged to the opera by his "cultured" wife -- it ain't going to make you love the music. Besides, jazz in all its magnificent variety is going to survive. It'll never be as popular as pop music, true, but while that may not be good for my cousin's bank account, it's not the end of the world.

What interests me is the relationship between jazz and the music that helped push it permanently to the margins -- rock. And the strengths and weaknesses, virtues and blind spots, of each genre.

The first album I ever bought was "Meet the Beatles." My first experience of the mysteries of the opposite sex, at age 16, was accompanied by Miles Davis' "All Blues," which happened to come on KJAZ that long-vanished Berkeley night. I sometimes wonder if that bittersweet, half-buried memory is the reason that Miles has been the soundtrack for most of my adult life.

But rock was my first love. Growing up in Berkeley in the late '60s, I had a front-row seat for the amazing electric explosion of those years, Jimi and the Stones and Cream and all the rest. I probably took 20 years off my hearing at a Who concert at the Berkeley Community Theater, sitting near the stage as Pete Townshend windmilled those monstrous suspended chords from "Underture" through a giant stack of Marshall 200-watt amps. A new Beatles or Hendrix album was a major event, to be immediately listened to and endlessly torn apart: I can mark my high school years by the "White Album" and "Electric Ladyland" and "After Bathing at Baxter's" and "Blind Faith."

The jazz A-train took longer to arrive. In high school I had a few Miles and Coltrane albums, and as a budding guitar player I listened a little to the great Grant Green and the ridiculous Wes Montgomery, using his supersonic thumb to play octave lines faster than most guitarists could play single notes. The little I knew, I liked, but as I flipped through the LPs in Moe's Books and Records on Telegraph Avenue, the jazz universe seemed daunting and enormous. I didn't know where to start. Unlike rock, enjoying jazz didn't come naturally to me: I had to learn how to listen to it.

And I wasn't always sure I wanted to. Part of me secretly thought that jazz was a little, well, square. At its worst, it just seemed to be a bunch of technically proficient middle-aged men taking turns soloing on schmaltzy old tunes. Where was the drama, the storytelling, the creative compression, I was used to in rock? It could seem rambling, indulgent, a mere vehicle for an expertise whose sophistication had a faintly musty air. Compared to the supernova Rimbaud rush of Hendrix, the nasty sneering lust of the Stones or the miraculously protean Beatles, jazz felt like yesterday's drug, one that might be able to get me high if I knew the password, but whose shelf life might have permanently expired.

Next page: The jazz I truly love has a certain odd kinship with rock...