The New Thing

The music suddenly slashes at the eardrums. The musicians, dressed in dashikis or undershirts, are bent into their efforts, sweating, their faces expressionless. Their sounds are warm and swirling, then frenetic, the horns bleating, the drummer flailing, the pianist pouncing intently at the keyboard. The tune is unidentifiable, the melody shattered into ravaged fragments, the rhythms complex and seemingly .beyond grasp.

That was the scene one recent evening at Slug's in Greenwich Village East. The curious and compelling cacophony was being raised by what is known in jazz as "the New Thing." Listening to it can stir confusions in the ear and mind. Is it jazz at all? Is it hate music, love music, both or neither? Or is it perhaps a deliberate attempt to antagonize the listener? The answers to those questions largely depend on what the listener's most cherished notions of jazz happen to be.

Taste and Love. Ever since Dixieland and ragtime, jazz has worked best, and spoken most eloquently for the black American, when it was most free and spontaneous. By the middle 1950s, after swing and bebop, jazz was wedded to the classics through the progressive jazz of Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet and others. It took on an increasingly formal, warmed-over character. At that moment, the need for the New Thing first stirred among future jazz movers like Alto Saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Pianist Cecil Taylor and Tenor Saxophonist John Coltrane.

Their goal was ambitious: to extend the language of jazz even farther than the progressives and, at the same time, restore its old freewheeling gut-blues intensity. Drawing on African primitivism, Mediterranean and Asian folk music, and sounding at times like Viennese atonalists, the new jazzmen vary tonal centers, when they are used at all, as often as they do moods. Basic rhythms, unavoidable before, are often merely implied or forgotten entirely now. But as Ornette Coleman says, "When it's done with taste and love, hardly anybody wouldn't like it."

Beware Pastels. The pioneers of the New Thing have become heroes to pockets of admirers all over the world. But even after a decade, the new sound is still largely unfamiliar to many listeners. Uninhibited, impolite, impatient, the New Thing often seems intended only to disturb. One reason: it is as much involved with the pain of being black in the U.S. as Dixieland was with the exhilaration of marching in New Orleans parades. "To disturb people--at least what they mean by disturb--that's the whole point," says Sunny Murray, whose dense and relentless drumming is mind-riveting. For Coleman, it has nothing to do with conscious anger. "There's anger, but the musician is not directing it at the audience. It's anger directed at himself; he's playing about his own turmoil."

It is music to encompass the total black experience, says Tenor Saxophonist Archie Shepp: "The field holler, the ring shout,* the sanctified church. That doesn't exclude white people, but if white people are to be included, they must emerge with a kind of humility," For Trumpeter Don Cherry, the music speaks most eloquently for the whole musician. "Man is a species, all human," Cherry observes. "The rest is pastels. Beware of distractions."

If ever the New Thing had a whole man, it was the late John Coltrane. An innovator, his "sheets of sound" technique and long (often 40 minutes) sonata-like solos on sax have revolutionized the jazz world. He was looked up to by other New Thing players as a friend and spiritual leader. "He seemed like a priest, the way he talked," recalls Saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, a former sideman and now leader of his own group.

That hushed tone is never far from the musical experience of Coltrane's fellow avantgardists. Their styles are wildly individual, embracing Taylor's cougar-on-the-keys frenzy, Shepp's piercing shrieks and moans and Cherry's haunting cries. But what they have in common, and have passed on to followers like Saxophonist John Carter, Trumpeter Bobby Bradford and Saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, is the sense of a total music that extends outward to the listener like an irresistible magnetic field.

God Is an Energy. At its best, the New Thing is indeed a mysterious and almost spiritual happening that occurs when the musicians are in tune with themselves and one another. "I'm an instant person," explains Trumpeter Cherry with gentle bluntness. "When something goes through me I want to be able to express it." What Cecil Taylor wants to express is often something akin to the presence of the Almighty. "In the West, God is to be bowed down to. But really, God is an energy that goes through you and lifts the performer into a higher plane than he could ordinarily achieve."

Though its leading practitioners are personally celebrated, the New Thing's future is shaky. Veteran Trumpeter Miles Davis has adapted to it successfully, but few of the men who originated it get high-paying gigs. Though they are beginning to find audiences on college campuses, they are rarely invited to the big jazz festivals. Like blues and New Orleans jazz before it, avant-garde jazz is already in the early stages of being borrowed from by commercial musicians, mainly white. In some barely recognizable form, its echoes and resonances may dominate part of tomorrow's pop-music scene.

Much of what can be said about the New Thing's expressiveness was said long ago about the birth of the old jazz. But it is essentially the music of a specific time and place--the time that of a black revolution, the place white America. To listen to it hard is to know at least something about the black man's struggle for freedom. "What does music mean?" asks Archie Shepp. "When you hear Debussy, don't you hear an era? Don't you hear an era when you listen to Stockhausen?" Is it possible to hear an era? If not, Horace Tapscott, a new-jazz pianist in Watts, has a simpler suggestion for the white world: "Think of us as people. Think of us as interpreters of a people."

* Also known as "shuffle shouts," an early dance in which church congregations linked arms in a circle and sang hymns and chants.

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