Harold Battiste is a warm, knowledgeable human being, with extensive recording, playing, producing and teaching experience. He was perfectly suited to guide a small interested audience through the vagaries of the New Orleans/West Coast music business.
Battiste’s receptiveness to new music, his openness, and his upbeat attitudes are welcome in a field where one typically hears criticisms about the “state of jazz.” But here is a happy, comfortable man.
Battiste delivered a pleasant talk to an audience which was largely unfamiliar with the material. He described how “outsiders and foreigners” had steadily lured away New Orleans’ best because of a lack of musical infrastructure. He specifically noted the paucity of career management and CD pressing facilities. The theory was that, if we had this “infrastructure,” everyone would stay here and play the new music, and this would in turn open the ears of the children in the New Orleans school system, thereby creating a new generation of players.
It was in the innocence of question time, when Battiste loyally tried to defend his contemporaries, that the real anomalies that plague the jazz community began to emerge. The subject of new music prompted the inevitable question as to why young people like Wynton and Harry were not playing any. After all, in the jazz aesthetic, originality of voice, individuality of style, concept and delivery have always been prime, far and apart from technique and virtuosity. We think of Monk, Holiday, Allison, Miles, Garner. Simple, but instantly recognizable.
The tendency for young players all to learn from and sound like acknowledged masters is a tradition. Emulation is a normal stage in acquiring mastery. But who is to blame for trotting out young artists before they have found their own voices? Is this the work of labels, agents, or the marketplace?
In answer to these questions, Battiste generously thought that this was the work of the “outsiders and foreigners” pressuring these artists into low commercialism. This prompted the question as to why, in the absence of commercial pressure, the university staff and students record or produce little or no “new style” music, and even more questionably, teach or are taught in a similar stylized, period-related vein.
Wasn’t this feeding the very problem that Battiste was complaining about at the beginning of his talk: that new music could not breathe because of commercial pressure?
And what of the role of the university and its tradition of new thought and horizons and expansion of the art form? Battiste thought the role of the university was to prepare people for jobs.
A number of things came to mind at this point. I thought of the great American composer Charles Ives who sold insurance all his life to be free at night to compose unrestrained music. I thought of Wes Montgomery working in a radio parts factory nearly all his life to practice and play at night what he wished.
I think Battiste produces some fine, interesting music and that traditional New Orleans music, be it jazz or R&B, is a wonderful resource, but he is on unsure ground in trying to explain the slick, sixties, button-down-collar-sounding Michael J. Fox/Arsenio Hall imaging material currently in abundance. It’s “nice.” It doesn’t offend or challenge an audience. It’s designed to do the opposite of art: to reassure rather than excite.
