By Peter Rüedi
Cultural journalist, was head dramaturg at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, has been writing the legendary jazz columns in Weltwoche for 21 years.
Cultural journalist, was head dramaturg at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, has been writing the legendary jazz columns in Weltwoche for 21 years.
Dear Mr. President of the City,
Dear Sponsors,
Dear Beat Kennel,
Dear Friends
On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Berlin JazzFest the following sentence was written in the "Tagesspiegel": "A big problem of jazz is its audience. It is too old." In plain language this means that jazz is young, but its lovers are old, and that is always, not only in the case of Nabokov's famous novel, a disreputable matter: old lovers of young attractions. I get a bit puzzled when I am asked to speak like this. It is a well-known fact that there is a considerable gap between external perception and self-assessment, and the remark that the number of young old people is always equal to the number of dynamite grandfathers is usually made by the latter.
Seriously, there is something to this not unoriginal sentence, even if criteria such as old and young are more relevant in the realm of fashions than in that of art. Generally, "jazz" is simply written off as old, passé or even dead. But if a music is younger than its audience, things get more complicated. Something, it can be said, is wrong.
"Jazz," others say, has, after all, long since become respectable, part of a culture of affirmation, an unquestionably safe value. A classical music. It has lost its protest potential, its outsider habitus, the smell that came from sweaty artistry and the unobjectionable handling of the perfumes of the trivial. Jazz is an established affair: teachable and learnable, quotable, suitable for advertisements and inauguration ceremonies of American presidents, though perhaps not the most recent. Or maybe it is: there is also a kind of George W. Bush jazz. Is that true?
It's also true. "Jazz," never a precise term, has long meant everything or nothing, including all of the above. But also the opposite. Just as it's true what Jan Garbarek says: that you only have to put a drum & bass beat under a piece by Nordheim (he's the Henze of Norway, so to speak) and it becomes suitable for the media highway, it's also true that the bright-eyed among the young sooner or later get tired of the extremely conventional rock stereotypes and either discover where they come from, or what "jazz", the lively and mobile and immensely versatile jazz, has to offer in the way of exciting alternatives. A music that, in spite of all fixation on recordings, is not, but becomes, again and again, and which also always passes away. As many deaths jazz has died, as many resurrections it has experienced. Transience is part of its innermost essence. It is a music ad hoc.
Which brings me at last to the club for which we are gathered here.
The history of jazz, not only but especially of modern jazz, is also the history of "clubs". The usually small, smoky, noisy venues, populated by an audience, about whose carelessness everyone who played in them has already cursed and yet did not want to miss, even if he had long been accustomed to larger stages; these mostly underground, shabby, miserable by day caves, cellars, garages and barracks were altogether the biotope in which this music was born and flourished. Improvised music, which jazz of whatever kind has always been and still is, depends on an ambience that allows for the unexpected. I would like to say: on a certain casualness. It may seem grotesque to you, but there is indeed art that is better perceived with one ear than with two. Concentration is not the only appropriate attitude, neither in the production nor in the perception of art, especially not of spontaneous, improvised art, that is, art that flows and flows in time. Music that does not present a product that has already been invented, formed, fixed, thought out, but that arises here and now and ad hoc. It needs the resonance space of a simultaneously relaxed and attentive audience.
Of course, jazz can be taught and learned, and who would object to the many jazz schools that sprang up in Switzerland alone after the founding of the Swiss Jazz School Bern. There are more young musicians in this country who are better educated technically, theoretically, in every respect than ever before, who can bend through the changes of Coltrane's Giant Steps better than he can. At the same time, let's say it, there have never been so many young musicians who have so little to say with such enormous resources, an almost perfect set of instruments. Jazz is undoubtedly in a phase of "academization". In the process, it threatens to lose qualities that cannot be learned, but only experienced: in only loosely planned formations, surprising, irritating, occasionally shocking new encounters and formations, in front of a curious, open, sometimes indifferent, in any case relaxed audience. Max Roach, one of the founders of modern jazz drumming and certainly one of its greatest masters, once lamented in a long conversation the collapse of the club scene not so much for economic reasons as for fundamentally artistic ones: the clubs as a whole had been something like "the academy of the streets" and as such were irreplaceable. The field of experimentation where, with luck, things could emerge that had not yet been thought of or invented. Only those who did not take risks were out of place.
Now no one in his right mind will believe that conditions like those in Kansas City, New York or Chicago in the thirties to sixties could be recreated in Zurich, as a jazz experience park, so to speak. It's all over now, even in the USA, leisure habits have changed. Nevertheless, the opening of this club is more than a nostalgic anachronism.
I refrain from tracing the long history of the "Bacillus", the Sisyphean efforts of its initiators, the tides of hopes ventured and buried and revived, or the emergence of the idea from the vacuum left by the legendary former "Africana". I limit myself to a simple statement: the first modest beginning, the idea of creating a free space not so much for bands, but for workshops (from which bands may emerge), a meeting place for active and passive musicians, the attempt to help many young artists to become themselves, without pressure, a, well, "message", a personality, to help them to have a story or even just the ability to tell their own story, is an indispensable complementary effort to all institutional training. This is the only way to relativize the absurd idea that the old is only old and the new only new. It is not the old people's pandering to a youthfulness of any kind that is to be encouraged, nor the young people's rigidly fearful worship of styles whose preconditions they have never been able to experience: both are equally embarrassing. What is being attempted here again, however modest it may seem, how few guarantees are to be given, concerns nothing less than the core of the matter, whether we call it jazz or not.
I think, Mr. City President, ladies and gentlemen sponsors, you will have heard the objection more than once in connection with this initiative: Zurich already has a jazz club, there is the "Moods". True, and that is not enough to praise, and the inspired programming of its managers as well.
In view of that, someone who is used to the event calendar of a metropolis like, say: Milan, can only turn green with envy. Once, forgive me, this objection seems to me like the sentence: "What should I give him a book for, he already has one". Seriously, "Moods" is a podium for exciting music, a place for concerts and renowned attractions. It needs that and it's wonderful. The Bacillus, on the other hand, doesn't even have a podium, and that's good and necessary too: "workshops" rather than concerts. Enabling one and not preventing the other: there can be no question of competition, I mean, seriously.
Michael Cuscuna, one of the great producers of jazz, for Atlantic, Blue Note, Columbia and finally the re-issue company "Mosaic", recently asked: "What makes a great jazz club? Basically, a number of seemingly unrelated factors that add up to an ambience that is enjoyable for musicians and listeners alike. Good service is nice, but not essential, as long as the drinks are not too expensive and too long." Let's hope so. The most important thing, however, is that whoever runs the club must share the passion with the musicians and the audience. In Beat Kennel's case, we are more than confident. He is a musician.