Nick Stillman

Quick: What’s the most significant development in music over the past five years? And don’t say NYC-based retro-rock and electroclash, since both remain stubbornly mired in a half-materialistic, half-fetishistic gesture of mindlessly copping a stringently canonized notion of cool. I vote for the laptop, which has legitimately revolutionized the economics and sound of production, most obviously in hip-hop and electronica. Older, more established forms of music usually tend toward conservatism, especially when they’re as romanticized as jazz. A widely held opinion is that jazz peaked in the late ’60s, only to be “defiled” in the ’70s by fusion, which acknowledged and incorporated rock and funk. Since then, the challenges facing jazz musicians endeavoring to expand and extend the artistic breakthroughs of the ’60s have been manifold: dwindling audiences, lack of major record label support, and a reactionary jazz establishment.

Enter the Blue Series, a rapid-fire succession of new jazz albums (alternately called things such as “Nu Jazz” and “Jazztronica” by baffled critics) on the Thirsty Ear label, a project curated by veteran New York pianist Matthew Shipp, who plays on nearly every album released in the series. Admittedly, this is tough stuff to pin down—it’s not totally jazz, not exactly electronica, not really “avant-garde,” and definitely not pop (although not that far from it). And you can’t pigeonhole the Blue Series albums as having any sort of “general sound,” either. There’s some fairly straight-ahead jazz, some very out-there jazz, lush ambience, turntable action, hip-hop, and stoned-sounding weirdness. As a result, the Blue Series is one of the most exciting jazz developments in years, largely because of its manic genre-skipping, its marketability to jazz and non-jazz audiences, and its radical update of a style that has retained much of its character from roughly 35 years ago.

The electronic/experimental invasion into contemporary jazz, not just in the Blue Series but also in music by artists such as Jason Moran and Dave Douglas, has predictably rubbed some the wrong way, most famously when critic Stanley Crouch recently argued: “If people want to go out there and play electric music, it doesn’t make any difference. Twenty years from now people aren’t even going to know that they ever played anything.” Anomalously way-left-of-center ’60s jazz such as that promulgated by the Sun Ra Arkestra and Art Ensemble of Chicago notwithstanding, it’s clear that there still exists a psychology of fundamentalist protectionism for the “golden age” of jazz, especially from the generation that lived it.

Production is the Blue Series’ first real point of separation from its avant-jazz ancestors, and the reason Shipp collaborated with hip-hop artists Antipop Consortium and El-P, whose respective nuanced, maximalist laptop noodling is substantively changing the landscape of underground hip-hop. “I’m a jazz musician and they’re in the hip-hop world, but still, we’re modern artists in this time period, and there’s not that much difference between what we’re trying to do,” Shipp says. Antipop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp is a sincere effort to fuse jazz with hip-hop, and the album exists in a neither-nor netherworld—jazz or hip-hop? It’s sort of both and sort of neither, but its real success is its dissolution and dismissal of these constructed boundaries. Antipop Consortium’s Priest and Beans emcee with mind-clouding lyrical precision over angular electro production and Shipp’s alternately violent and elegant piano. Similar in spirit is El-P’s upcoming Blue Series release High Water (Mark), much of which is ambient jazz played by Thirsty Ear titans Shipp, William Parker, Guillermo Brown, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, and Steve Swell. But El-P subtly takes over, as synthesizers, effects pads, and the producer’s prominently involved sensibility transform the lush atmospherics of the horns and Shipp’s piano into something hauntingly inhuman.

Shipp’s own Blue Series albums, especially Nu Bop and Equilibrium, are probably the most seamlessly representative manifestations of New York’s new jazz. Shipp pairs driving piano heads with drums, vibes (it works, trust me), horns, Parker’s robotic bass, and FLAM’s spacey synths and drum programming. In contrast to Herbie Hancock’s fusion work—which hasn’t aged so well—Shipp’s music has a cool, hypnotic elegance, and the drum machine seems as natural an element as the more standard jazz instruments.

There’s an obvious devotion to ’60s avant-jazz in the music of Shipp and other Blue Series musicians like Parker and David S Ware, and Shipp’s playing will continue to draw endless comparisons with Cecil Taylor’s for its choppy angularity. But this investment is couched in a format that, frankly, is more accessible to the MTV generation. The reality is that television, the Internet, and the general ease of information access have reduced the national attention span to the point where younger listeners can’t connect to more traditional jazz—the songs are too long, too abstract. Moreover, jazz has become increasingly entrenched in the nostalgic canon of Americana, and so pushed even more snugly into the past, as evidenced by the sentimental and unchallenging approach to jazz history in Ken Burns’ documentary series Jazz: The Story of American Music. With the exception of just a few albums, Blue Series records have all the immediacy of pop. Solos are mostly abbreviated, and—when a drum machine isn’t used—beats are complex but straight. This rethinking of compositional duration seems elementary, but goes a long way toward explaining the crossover success and the re-engagement of younger listeners with jazz.

The idea of “crossover” doesn’t really even begin to get at the heart of the range of Shipp’s work on the Blue Series releases. For instance, GoodandEvil Sessions is slick electropopjazz and Sorcerer Sessions Featuring the Music of Matthew Shipp is “downtown”-style experimental classical that has as much to do with ambience and empty space as it does with jazz. A valid criticism is that the level of stylization—especially on albums like GoodandEvil Sessions and DJ Spooky’s Dubometry—invites zoning out. Sometimes the production is a bit too slick. But then again, the Blue Series has managed something that’s definitely a type of fusion, but doesn’t sound dated or cheesy like most of its fusion predecessors. Nor does it simply recapitulate the sound of a bygone era, which is currently the case in New York’s rock scene. Why should jazz sound like it’s still 1967?

The Blue Series bands incorporate elements from that era, but update the music to reflect a new reality and a new modernity. They challenge the human vs. machine dichotomy of most contemporary music, and in doing so, are an irritant to the defenders of the high-low culture barriers that have all but dissolved in the visual arts yet remain obstinately intact in music. Normally, “machine-made music” (electronica, hip-hop) is considered “youth” music, whereas ivory tower guardians of traditional jazz and classical music quietly maintain a separation from those influences—just look at conservatory curricula and available awards for jazz and classical musicians. Given this context, Shipp’s versatility is remarkable. But talking with him, it was clear that there’s not much difference between the ideas put forth by artists at the forefront of contemporary jazz, classical, hip-hop, and DJ music. “Duke Ellington said there are two types of music,” Shipp comments. “Good and bad.”

Nick Stillman writes regularly about art and music for a variety of publications. He is the associate editor of NYFA Quarterly.