Smooth Jazz: Smooth Movements

Here’s a little smooth jazz family tree of sorts that I’ve been working on as a way of thinking about where smooth jazz comes from and how its bastard-stepchildness relates to its parental art form. This isn’t meant to be complete or definitive or indeed anything. But it’s clear that if you select particular musicians throughout jazz history and place them in vague relations to each other, you can perhaps see that what was happening in jazz from the ’60s to the ’80s is not unlike what rock and other pop music forms were going through: hybridization, both in terms of genres mixing, but the musical cultures of various countries and continents mixing pigments.

Some might take exception to a chart that infers any relation whatsoever between the likes of Jellyroll Morton and Dave Koz. But, let’s face it, Dave Koz is allowed to like and be influenced and inspired by musicians who grew up with the idea that Jellyroll was a god. (And the other fact is, everything that occurs in reality makes sense on a practical level, if not in the abstract.) Looking at how we got from Morton to Koz reminds me of the phenomenon most clearly seen in rock: someone or some band bursts forth with an intense, unique sound and we spend decades afterward hearing their imitators, and shut off the radio time after time, as what was once fresh and exciting becomes more revered and enshrined, and so more copied and watered down until it makes you almost hate music.

So, for some surely, John Coltrane represented a brash, tuneless and annoying riff so to speak on Lester Young. This is not to suggest that that opinion holds any water, just as those who claimed at the time that Led Zeppelin was merely a rip-off of country blues missed, er, some of the nuances of that band. The phenomenon of just what happens to a musical form in general when one artist takes the baton from one before must be related to that of hybridization.

In rock music, the ’70s were prime time for successful hybridizing of musical forms; but in the jazz family tree it was a decidedly mixed bag. The great legacy of ’70s jazz, in terms of ensembles, is fusion, which could be construed to embrace both Herbie Hancock and Spyro Gyra. In other words, Shineola and shit. But probably the level of success of any given band that could broadly be called “fusion” (and I’d put many bands in that camp just for the sake of argument) is debatable. Spyro Gyra may be shit, but they were popular.

Which leads us to one historical force that leaves nary a trace on our little family tree (save to the most trained eye, not ear), and that it is the commercial. Smooth jazz was not, like other movements, the outcome of purely musical trends and collisions. It was essentially the creation of marketers, advertisers, producers, and radio executives. Though embraced and supported by a certain segment of the populace, it may never have existed without a man named Creed Taylor.

Smooth Jazz: You Dropped a Bon-Bon on Me

The first part of a series about smooth jazz:
For about three years, starting in 2004, I made a living by housepainting. Afore that, I had a job playing a role as a 1906 ship’s captain aboard the Balclutha, one of the only surviving steel ships from the turn-of-the-century grain trade, in San Francisco. But I got tired of the overnight programs and what came to feel like the movie “Groundhog Day,” with the repetition of the same speeches over and over to what seemed like the same group of ten year olds, though it was different group every night. So I traded out-of-doors pedagogy for the mental freedom of manual labor. My friend and bandmate Garth had just begun to paint and needed a helper.

The coin of mental freedom has another side, though, and that is some occasionally powerful boredom. Housepainters have a reputation as dimwits, and once you’ve spent days breathing latex fumes and staring at flat, lightly textured surfaces all the live long day, you soon see why. For a musician, one boon is that you get to listen to a great deal of music. For some, listening to music for 8 hours is torture, and even the real heads can’t listen to just any music all day.

Garth and I formed a loose hierarchy of music genres based on how long we could stand to listen to them. Rock topped off at about 2 hours; the rap and country played on the radio is pretty awful, so maybe half an hour; college radio’s left-field eclecticism might last half a day depending on the DJ; NPR news and talk shows, if you’re in the mood for talk, were from 6 to 8 hours. Of all forms, classical turned out to be the winner. We could stand it most often for an entire day, barring general audio fatigue.

At some point we discovered another station that held strange and wondrous curiosities: KKSF “Smooth Jazz 99.7”. Now I find that each person has at least one musical form that they cannot stand to hear for even a minute, not even 60 seconds. For my dad—who is otherwise a fan of many ethno musics like Rom, Celtic, Indian, etc.—it’s Mexican popular music (I’m not sure, and maybe neither is he, exactly why). For my friend Steven, it’s most kinds of metal (due to the vocals). For my wife Lexa, and millions of others, smooth jazz is one of those things that cannot be tolerated.

Let’s just say, at the outset of what may be several pieces for this blog about this form of music, that I can see why. But for Garth—who is blessed/cursed with musical ability that encompasses many genres and extends to many instruments—and for me, who learned early on from my grandfather to be sure to order anything on a restaurant menu that I’d never had before, smooth jazz was an exotic, brightly colored, and shiny jewel of fascination.

We’d be scraping old paint or rolling on some new beige/greige/tan/flesh crayon/buff-colored wall paint, asking ourselves over and over: “Who the fuck makes this music? Who fucking listens to this music?!” So from the beginning, there were two distinct pebbles in our shoe: that musicians of various skill levels (mostly average or above) choose to play this music, and that potentially millions listened to it, and found it sweet, found it funky, found it good. Ah, it’s east enough to dismiss the hairy noise musician with the homeless smell in his basement: he leaves you alone and you’ll never meet him without making a point of seeking out his dank warren. Not so the smooth jazz folks. If you ride an elevator, if you go to store, to a certain type of restaurant, to a hotel, you might hear it.

But the accessibility of a music form is not the point here. Except that I’ve never bought the argument that the popularity of music can be false, that somehow the people in the sticks who listen to bad popular music have no control over it, that that’s all they have, etc. etc. Is it far–fetched to think that if someone can’t find anything on the radio they like, they’ll turn the radio off? I know a lot of people who do that. Now it’s true that culture phenomenons are partly the result of publicity machines, and that popularity breeds popularity, press breeds press, that the exposed become overexposed. In the case of smooth jazz, forms of music can largely be created by the power of advertisers over the content of the media in which their ads appear.

Even if the consumers of smooth jazz are written off as those who are publicized to, who are the victims of airplay and advertising and hype, who would listen to “better” music if they could, we’re still left with the producers of smooth jazz. In thousands of sessions over tens of thousands of tape hours, hundreds of musicians backed by tens of thousands of record company employees and executives recorded album after album of a music that sold millions of copies and was played over radio stations in every state. Sitting behind a mixing board, listening with a pair of $1000 headphones to a man playing soprano saxophone into a $5000 microphone over backing tracks of live or synthetic drums, slap bass guitar, and a previously recorded track of octave guitar, an engineer whispered to himself: “Oooh, this is good. Yeah. This is nice.” Can you imagine?

Or maybe that record producer merely muttered, “The public will eat this shit up.” What would become the smooth jazz genre was the product of only a few musicians and a handful of radio executives, and started with a single producer. Rather than celebrate another brilliant mind that enriches our lives and expands our horizons, let’s take an opportunity to look deep into a fluorescently-lit abyss into which a tinkling chime tree is endlessly falling.