Wayne Shorter Lives!
Tomo Muscionico
An interview with Mike Smith about his new book In With The In Crowd: Popular Jazz In 1960s Black America. Plus: a Wayne Shorter-heavy selection of jazz's best new releases of the month.
The avant-garde has won the battle for jazz history. The performers who were seen as existing on the farthest fringes of the music in the 1960s and 1970s are now lionized by critics and institutions as its greatest heroes. Ornette Coleman and Henry Threadgill won Pulitzer Prizes. Cecil Taylor was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, a Guggenheim grant, and the Kyoto Prize. Anthony Braxton has also received MacArthur and Guggenheim recognition. These men, along with Roscoe Mitchell, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Sun Ra, among many others, have all been named NEA Jazz Masters. And when you read histories of jazz, their names are featured prominently.
I’m not suggesting that this is in any way a problem. (If it is, of course, I’m part of it: my book In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music Of Cecil Taylor was published last month.) But it does indicate a somewhat skewed perspective among critics and jazz scholars as a group. To start with, these guys were simply not popular when they were doing their most critically acclaimed work. To use the crudest but most obvious metric, their records didn’t sell. And before you argue, “Well, jazz has never sold a ton of records,” know that you’re wrong.
Jazz was popular music in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and well into the 1960s. But with a few exceptions, like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, the artists whose work was most popular are not the same artists who are most revered and written about today. That’s why the new book In With The In Crowd: Popular Jazz In 1960s Black America is such a vital contribution to jazz history and critical discourse.
Author Mike Smith is a musician himself — a drummer who’s played with Phil Cohran and Hugh Ragin, among others — and a professor, currently teaching and leading ensembles at Ohio State University. “I am from Chicago,” he told me by phone a few weeks ago, “and my dad was a huge, huge jazz fan, a jazz record collector; he was an early club DJ in the ’60s, before that was a thing, the whole idea of a club DJ, he was a DJ that would play jazz in different taverns, clubs, and bars in Chicago. And as a consequence, I’ve always had this music around me.”
In With The In Crowd takes its title from the Dobie Gray song “The ‘In’ Crowd,” released in 1964. The following year, Chicago pianist Ramsey Lewis recorded a live album at the Washington, DC club the Bohemian Caverns that opened with his version of the song. When that was released as a single, it hit #2 on the Billboard R&B chart and #5 on the Hot 100; the album topped the R&B chart and hit #2 on the top 200, and Lewis won a Grammy in 1966 for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance.
Between 1965 and 1966, Lewis had three singles sell over a million copies each; he was indisputably one of the most popular artists in jazz. And his artistic legacy grew deeper as the ’60s became the ’70s — drummer Maurice White left the Ramsey Lewis Trio in 1970 to form Earth, Wind & Fire, and four years later Lewis and EW&F collaborated on the 1974 album Sun Goddess, which hit #1 on both the R&B and jazz charts, and #12 on the pop chart.
Lewis is just one of the artists Smith covers, alongside alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, pianist Horace Silver, trumpeter Lee Morgan and others. But one of the artists that truly proves his thesis is featured prominently in the book’s introduction: vocalist Nancy Wilson. She was one of the most popular artists of the ’60s — Smith quotes an article in Jet which claims that “during most of her twenty years with Capitol [Records] she was second in sales only to the Beatles, surpassing even Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee,” and quotes jazz historian Will Friedwald saying, “What’s amazing but not in the least surprising is the respect that Wilson commands in the Black community. She has become a role model, and not only to singers, but to the entire community, and as a symbol of class and achievement second only to Lena Horne.” And yet, Smith demonstrates that Wilson is almost entirely overlooked in most major histories of jazz. He doesn’t come right out and say that all the books he cites were written by white critics, but it’s pretty easy to put the pieces together.
It’s not quite that simple, though. Because Grover Sales, who wrote a 1984 book called Jazz: America’s Classical Music, was white, but pianist Billy Taylor, who picked up that descriptor and ran with it, was Black. And according to Smith, that idea, which is a kind of musical version of “respectability politics,” has done more harm than good. “These guys were brilliant people, and this is no disrespect to them, but to a certain degree, they did a disservice because one of the challenges with jazz is that it’s seen as highbrow music, and in America, anything that’s seen as highbrow, you know, people are not going to want anything to do with it… ‘This is good music. This is not that stuff that everybody likes. This is not music for the masses.’ The challenge is that when you say something like that, that makes people not want to listen. ‘This is for your own good, you know, you gotta really listen to this. It’s for your own good.’ People are going to run the hell away from that, you know?”
The dominant critical narrative of jazz in the ’60s is about the Miles Davis Quintet, John Coltrane’s quartet, and the “New Thing” artists like Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, and Pharoah Sanders. But as Smith told me, “I was alive. I was listening to jazz at that time. I understood that this music [covered in In With The In Crowd] is critical to understanding the ’60s. Just like when you listen to rock ‘n’ roll music in the ’60s, you don’t only listen to the rock ‘n’ roll from Woodstock. You got to take the entirety of the ’60s, including the Beach Boys and the Beatles. And then if you want to talk about soul music, you can’t just talk about Sly And The Family Stone. You got to talk about the Isley Brothers, the Temptations, you got to talk about all those girl groups. If you’re going to really talk about this music, you gotta look at the entirety of the experience and go, what music back in that day proved really important to the people who were listening to it? And that’s what I really based this book on… a recasting of this narrative of jazz in the ’60s.”
The music that Black audiences often preferred to listen to, whether it was the Ramsey Lewis Trio; the organ groups led by Jimmy Smith, Brother Jack McDuff and others; Cannonball Adderley’s funky jams; or Horace Silver’s melodic, finger-snapping tunes, was never regarded as “America’s classical music.” But it sold, not just as albums but as singles that people played on jukeboxes and on the radio. What makes In With The In Crowd such a valuable book is that Smith goes beyond artists’ biographies and discographical minutiae. He’s not just recasting the narrative of what jazz was important; he’s also revealing what an important role jazz played in Black life at the time.
Smith describes an entire social ecosystem, devoting chapters to nightclubs in Black neighborhoods, radio stations and the DJs who developed deep relationships with their audiences, and album covers, which beginning in the mid-’60s, began to feature Black models, including models with natural hair, for the first time. He also points out that in many ways, jazz artists took a leading role in changing the image of Blackness, writing that “when soul musicians were glamming it up with gowns and tuxedoes… the jazz world was dressing in hip dashikis; when ‘processed’ hair was in vogue with soul musicians, jazz musicians would wear afros; when soul musicians were (successfully) reaching out to the white market, the jazz world promoted what was happening in the neighborhood.”
“One of the things I want to illustrate with the book was the fact that there was an infrastructure for jazz which shows that jazz was a viable form of music in the ’60s,” Smith tells me. “You had jazz record stores all over the place, you had clubs, you had bars dedicated solely to jazz. You had jazz radio, where you had all-jazz formats, you had jazz-on-the-weekend formats, you had jazz mixed in with soul music in Black communities, and even on some rock stations you had some jazz occasionally. But you had that infrastructure… And that’s one of the things that you can look at and you can go, ‘Well, there must have been something about jazz.’ Jazz must have been going great guns, because you had all of these different people who realized they could make money by providing an avenue for these jazz musicians to work, to play, record, play live, publish music, all of those kinds of things.”
The conventional narrative about the link between jazz and the Civil Rights movement is also revisited in In With The In Crowd. We typically read about explicit protest jazz, as heard on albums like Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, or Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues or Poem For Malcolm. But Smith reminds the reader of jazz’s role as an aspirational vehicle for Black pride, which was just as much a part of the Civil Rights struggle. At times, this focus on Blackness became somewhat exploitive, as labels began marketing popular jazz groups as “soul jazz,” a term Cannonball Adderley and others rebelled against. But the number of mid-’60s albums with “soul” in their titles proves that it was an extremely popular hook for a while, and many artists used the genre as a Trojan horse to send messages to their community. For example, Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers called one 1964 album The Freedom Rider, and 1965’s Free For All included a tune called “The Core,” a tribute to the Congress Of Racial Equality.
Smith focuses one important section of his book on the song “Compared To What,” a powerful anthem of disaffection recorded by saxophonist Eddie Harris, with vocals by keyboardist Les McCann, at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival. The song was a major hit on radio, selling more than a million singles, and the album from which it came, Swiss Movement, topped the jazz chart and hit the top 30 on the pop chart. And yet, Eddie Harris, who led successful bands for many years and had numerous hits cross over to the R&B market, has been largely omitted from jazz history books. Smith places “Compared To What” alongside Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew as crucial recordings that both expanded the boundaries of jazz in 1969/70, and yet one is consistently written about and evaluated to this day, while the other is forgotten… except by all the people who loved the record and bought it. As Smith puts it, “With all those records being sold as well as all of the folks going out to hear live jazz, one has to ask, why does the jazz world refuse to acknowledge all of this success? Who’s afraid of Eddie Harris?”
Once a narrative takes hold, it’s very difficult to change it. And over the last 40 years or so, one story of jazz in the ’60s has been told over and over. (Let’s not even get into the dominant narrative about jazz in the ’70s, which insists that nothing was happening except for fusion acts playing arenas and avant-gardists staging tiny concerts in New York City lofts.) Mike Smith’s In With The In Crowd: Popular Jazz In 1960s Black America is a really important book. It will make you think differently about the music and its history, and it’ll send you in search of a whole bunch of amazing records that don’t get nearly the love they deserve.
TAKE 10
Milton Nascimento & esperanza spalding - "Outubro"
Milton Nascimento is a legend of Brazilian music, with more than 40 albums to his credit, including a collaboration with saxophonist Wayne Shorter on his 1975 album Native Dancer. Last year, bassist and composer esperanza spalding traveled to Brazil to record this album at Nascimento’s home. It features new versions of songs from his back catalog, covers of Beatles and Michael Jackson songs, and new material by spalding. It ends with a version of Shorter’s “When You Dream” sung by his widow, Carolina.
“Outubro” (“October”) was originally a gentle, string-laden ballad from Nascimento’s 1969 album Courage, released on the CTI label. He and spalding transform it with a thumping beat, some stark and striking flute, piano, synth and upright bass, and beautiful vocal harmonies. It’s amazing to think that this record was made in someone’s house; it has the lushness of a fully locked-in studio production, but it’s intimate, too. (From Milton + Esperanza, out now via Concord Jazz.)
Meshell Ndegeocello - "Trouble"
Meshell Ndegeocello has undergone a startling career renaissance since signing with Blue Note. Her 2023 album The Omnichord Real Book was a major critical success and featured a band including saxophonist Josh Johnson, guitarist Chris Bruce, keyboardist Jebin Bruni, drummer Abe Rounds, and vocalists Justin Hicks and Kenita Miller, all of whom return for No More Water, which is inspired by the writing of James Baldwin but is also a journey through multiple aspects of the American Black experience. There are love songs, songs about suicide, raging poems about state-sponsored murder, and all kinds of music, from acoustic almost-blues to West African funk to the psychedelic, dubby post-soul of “Trouble.” In some ways, this album — and “Trouble” in particular — reminds me of the late Greg Tate’s improvising jazz-funk-rock ensemble, Burnt Sugar, who treated the whole history of Black music like an endlessly flowing river, dipping in and out at will. (From No More Water: The Gospel Of James Baldwin, out now via Blue Note.)
Luther Allison - "Knocks Me Off My Feet"
North Carolina native Luther Allison plays both piano and drums, and has recorded and/or performed with trombonist Michael Dease, saxophonist Diego Rivera, drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. and singers Jazzmeia Horn and Samara Joy. I Owe It All To You is his debut as a leader, a straight trio disc on which he’s backed by bassist Boris Kozlov and drummer Zach Adleman. The press material mentions him growing up in the Black church, and being into Stevie Wonder, Sly And The Family Stone, and Earth, Wind & Fire, and that’s fine, but it’s likely to make you expect something grittier and funkier than you’ll get on this record. Honestly, the surprising influence I hear all over this album, particularly on “Knocks Me Off My Feet,” is Ahmad Jamal. Allison’s way of combining tasteful melody, solid chords, and absolutely dead solid perfect timing is astonishing, and straight from the Jamal style manual. (From I Owe It All To You, out now via Posi-Tone.)
Louis Hayes - "Dewey Square"
For about a decade, drummer Louis Hayes — who played with Cannonball Adderley, Horace Silver, Joe Henderson, Dexter Gordon and many more — has been leading a band that features a unique front line of Abraham Burton on tenor sax and Steve Nelson on vibraphone. When they started, on 2014’s Return Of The Jazz Communicators and 2017’s Serenade For Horace (which also featured trumpeter Josh Evans), he had David Bryant on piano and Dezron Douglas on bass, but on his last three albums, beginning with 2021’s Crisis, and continuing on 2023’s Exactly Right! and this record, David Hazeltine has taken over on piano. The repertoire on Artform Revisited consists mostly of standards, and despite the meme at the end of this column, I will occasionally put up with that. They do a great job with the bebop classic “Dewey Square,” taking it at a loping, bluesy tempo, rather than a headlong sprint. (From Artform Revisited, out now via Savant.)
Daniel Casimir - "I'll Take My Chances"
Bassist Daniel Casimir, longtime member of Nubya Garcia’s band, has also worked with Binker Golding, Camilla George, and Makaya McCraven, among others. On his 2021 album, the ironically titled Boxed In, he combined a jazz quintet with a string quartet and seven brass and/or woodwind players, to paint on a panoramic canvas. This time out, he’s gone even bigger, combining a 15-member big band and an eight-member string section from the London Contemporary Orchestra, plus vocalists Ria Moran and Zola Marcelle. The result is 40 minutes of music that blossoms like an entire garden filmed in time-lapse. Drummer Jamie Murray lays down beats that owe as much to hip-hop and neo-soul as old-school swing, and the strings and horns swoon, giving the arrangements genuine beauty and grace. On “I’ll Take My Chances,” the singers’ voices entwine as the band journeys into a Philly soul zone, gradually rising to an ecstatic crescendo. (From Balance, out now via Jazz Re:freshed.)
Orrin Evans & Captain Black Big Band - "All That I Am" (Feat. Bilal)
Pianist Orrin Evans’ big band isn’t that big: two trumpets, two saxophones, two trumpets. But there’s a lot of bottom end — in addition to two bassists and two drummers switching out, there’s a bumping electric bassist on the opening “Dislocation Blues.” The repertoire includes tunes by Marvin Gaye (“Save The Children”) and Stevie Wonder (“Overjoyed”) along with the standard “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and the early ’70s soft-rock ballad “If,” transformed into a simmering torch song with a self-consciously retro jazz feel. There’s some new music, too, though. “All That I Am,” which features guest vocals from Bilal and trumpet from Nicholas Payton, is an uptempo, funky theater piece that blurs the lines between neo-soul and poetry slam while showcasing both Bilal’s fierce lyrics and Payton’s equally biting horn, eventually letting the band break it down, Evans’ delicate piano melody shadowed by Jesse Fischer’s organ. (From Walk A Mile In My Shoe, out now via Imani.)
Warren Wolf -"Spring High"
Warren Wolf is a genuine multi-instrumentalist, playing piano and drums while being best known as a vibraphonist. He’s played with trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, alto saxophonist Tia Fuller, pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Christian McBride, and many others, and has recorded a string of albums under his own name. His debut for the Cellar Live label, after multiple releases on Mack Avenue, is a collection of pieces by notable vibraphonists, performed with saxophonist Tim Green, pianist Alex Brown, bassist Vicente Archer, and drummer Carroll “CV” Dashiell III. “Spring High” is a version of a composition by Dave Samuels, who was a member of pop-fusion group Spyro Gyra. The original recording, from Samuels’ 1991 album Natural Selection, was so smooth it was like pouring movie theater butter over your head. Wolf and his band give it more whomp, wiping away the gooey exterior to reveal the metallic skeleton beneath. It’s a solid tune. (From History Of The Vibraphone, out now via Cellar Live.)
Asher Gamedze - "Find Each Other"
Drummer, composer, and musical catalyst Asher Gamedze follows up his 2023 album Turbulence And Pulse with this amazing double LP. It’s also the first effort featuring a 10-piece band called the Black Lungs featuring four horns, two vocalists — one of them prize-winning poet and critic Fred Moten — piano, bass, drums and percussion. The album’s centerpiece is its nearly 40-minute title track, which of course has to be split across two sides of vinyl. But “Find Each Other” is the opener, setting the tone for everything that’s to come. Moten speaks about percussion, rhythm, dance and accompaniment, and the process of being part of music. Behind him, Gamedze and percussionist Ru Slayen lay down a complex pattern as alto saxophonist Garth Erasmus offers encouragement. Eventually, everyone else comes in, one by one, and suddenly we’re in a Max Roach/Abbey Lincoln space, ready to settle in for a long but rewarding journey. (From Constitution, out August 30 via International Anthem.)
Marquis Hill - "I Promise To Listen" (Feat. Manasseh)
Chicago-based trumpeter Marquis Hill is one of those artists who blends jazz, R&B, and whatever else suits him, but he’s less overtly influenced by hip-hop than peers Chief Adjuah, Keyon Harrold, or Theo Croker. On his latest album, he decided to invite friends and colleagues he admires to give him compositions to record, thus expanding the modern jazz repertoire beyond the same old standards, and the results are great. It helps that the core band is absolutely stacked, featuring Joel Ross on vibes and marimba, Michael King on piano, Junius Paul on bass, and Corey Fonville on drums; guests on various tracks include drummer Makaya McCraven, saxophonists Josh Johnson and Caroline Davis (on whose latest album Hill appears), guitarist Jeff Parker, and vocalists Manasseh, Samora Pinderhughes, and Christie Dashiell. “I Promise To Listen” starts off with an odd sound like glass bottles clinking, and interpolates the Stylistics’ “You Are Everything.” It’s fantastic. (From Composers Collective: Beyond The Jukebox, out now via Black Unlimited Music Group.)
Wayne Shorter - "Edge Of The World (End Title)"
Wayne Shorter was a hero to jazz musicians from about 1964 until his death in 2023 at 89. But in the year since his passing, he seems to have ascended to sainthood. His music is interpreted on the Milton Nascimento/esperanza spalding album featured at the beginning of this column, and the Marquis Hill record just above begins with a track featuring his thoughts on “the road not taken” and the courage required to live a life of creativity and individualism. Now, Shorter was a very smart guy with a wide range of interests, a great jazz composer and a brilliant player, and the four-hour, three-part documentary about him, Zero Gravity, is absolutely worth watching. But it’s all getting to be a bit much.
Wayne Shorter’s catalog is pretty deep, and while a lot of his music is brilliant, like his compositions for Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers and his tenure in the Miles Davis Quintet and many of his albums as a leader for Blue Note and even his work in the first four or five years with Weather Report, a lot of his other stuff… doesn’t scale the same heights. I have never really gotten much out of any Weather Report album with Jaco Pastorius; Shorter’s 1990s releases High Life and 1+1 (a live duo with Herbie Hancock) didn’t really do it for me; and the music he made with the quartet featuring pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade that was his primary unit from 2000 until the end of his life could definitely be a mixed bag.
I saw them live once in 2011, and the “without a net” quality that was the primary selling point (there’s a reason Shorter called his 2013 live album that) meant that there were just as many meandering passages as moments of startling brilliance. And most of the latter came from Perez or Blade, rather than from the group’s nominal leader, who frequently seemed to be holding back, waiting to see what his bandmates came up with.
That’s definitely true on Celebration Vol. 1, the new posthumous double live disc recorded in Stockholm in 2014. Like the show I saw, it’s more or less a seamless medley of themes, the group transitioning from one piece to the next without any pause, and some definitely feel like spontaneous creations given titles after the fact (the five that begin with the term “Zero Gravity…”). One of the compositions performed at this concert, though, along with several of Shorter’s own pieces, was “Edge Of The World (End Title),” from Arthur Rubinstein’s score to the 1980s movie WarGames, and that’s the one captured in the live video above. It’s really quite beautiful, but it stands apart from the rest of the concert in that it shows Shorter fixing on a melody and really exploring it in depth, rather than murmuring into his horn and waiting for the other three players to take the music somewhere. (From Celebration Vol. 1, out now via Blue Note.)
OUTWARD BOUND
