The Jazz.com Blog
June 26, 2009 · 14 comments
Michael Jackson (1958-2009): A View from the Jazz Camp
Michael Jackson, for all his considerable talents, never enjoyed a large following among jazz devotees. His songs are rarely covered by jazz bands (although with one very famous exception), and if you raise his name in a discussion with serious jazzistas, they will usually change the topic to his former producer Quincy Jones, whose artistry is more closely aligned with jazz values.
Yet jazz fans are not immune to the appeal of pop. They will embrace a great songwriter like Joni Mitchell; or a pop star who fills his band with jazz players like Sting; or a hitmaker who shows some impressive instrumental chops like Stevie Wonder. But Michael Jackson did not fit easily into any of these categories.
Yet Jackson had a better sense of the changes transforming the entertainment world during the late 20th century than any of these figures. Jazz fans not only should mourn his passing, but perhaps learn from his example, Then as now, formulas were changing, technologies were evolving, and Michael Jackson was the perfect talent to seize the opportunities of this new era.
In particular, the concept of the singer-songwriterso powerful during the 1970s (and whose individualism was very congruent with the jazz sensibility)would collapse as a platform for popular music during the 1980s. The intimacy and nuanced effects of this approach were not well suited to a multimedia age, which wanted something larger and more spectacular. Michael Jackson provided this panem et circenses spectacle, although in his case it was a spectacle that sometimes continued offstage and in private life.
The arrival of music videos and cable television was almost like a second coming of talking movies. Just as during that earlier age, audiences were attracted to stars who could exploit the full potential of the new medium. A half-century before, movie releases had been marketed for their all singing, all talking, all dancing grandeur. The screen might be smaller at the home entertainment center during the 1980s, but the appetite for powerful visual effects was much the same. A Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell, for all their musical talentno doubt deeper than Jacksons when measured in mere sharps and flatswere not capable of operating on this level.
In truth, no musical performer of his generation had a more powerful visual impact on the screen than Michael Jackson. He was so dynamic in front of the camera, that the Disney corporation even built a 3D film for its theme parks around himand got Francis Ford Coppola to direct it and George Lucas to serve as executive producer. What a strange turn of events: after all, 3D films had always focused on massive effects, scary or scenic, something on a Grand Canyon type of scale. Now a 3D film was built around a personality?
But Michael Jackson was not just another personalityhe also operated on a Grand Canyon kind of scale. And I can assure you from the lines I encountered when I went to see Captain EO at Disneyland, that this was a hugely popular attraction. How many films do you know that enjoy a decade-long run? In fact, I wouldnt be surprised if the movie has a return engagement in the near future.
But it was in the more downsized and compact format of the music video where Michael Jackson crystallized his artistry and built his enormous audience. Here is the core of his legacy, one that you will not be able to appreciate if you simply listen to the compact disks or study the lead sheets.
This is not to dismiss his purely musical talentsJacksons genuine skills as a singer had been clear from his earliest years. And through some strange biological flukeperhaps aided by who-knows-whatJackson retained the childlike quality of his voice even after he reached adulthood. To some degree, he reminded me of Ella Fitzgerald, who also managed to convey a sweet innocence, almost the exact opposite of the sassiness and sultriness around her, and put its stamp on everything she sang. Jackson was the same, and in the midst of a music scene that featured some of the most brazen and push-the-envelope acts in the history of musicthe Sex Pistols were formed at almost the same moment that the Jackson 5 left Motownhe always held on to the ingenuous aura of the child star.
But it was as a dancer that Michael Jackson parlayed his talents into superstardom. It was the moonwalk that killed the singer-songwriters, who stayed hidden behind their pianos and guitars while Jackson strutted the big stage. Youngsters everywhere imitated his steps, not his voice, and even today, his footwork is admired and emulated by countless stars and wannabe stars. (See some example here.)
All of this is foreign to the jazz sensibility. Jazz once had a close relationship with popular dancenot coincidentally during its period of greatest financial success. But in the 1980s, jazz had lost this connection. Jazz bands might be able to cover Jackson's tunes (not often, as I noted aboveI still remember working in a combo where the sidemen rebelled after the leader wanted to play Beat It; he gave up and called another tune); but they could not assimilate the full effect of Michael Jackson, which started with his toes and only gradually arrived at the vocal chords and cerebellum.
Jazz fans did know about Quincy Jones, however. They had known about Jones long before Jackson and the mass audience had discovered him. They would give him much of the credit for Jacksons hits, and certainly he played a key part in the elevation of this pop superstar. Yet Jones's brilliance lay in adapting his techniques to Jackson's inherent strengths and potent charismaand not merely applying some formula he had learned from his jazz days.
The production tricks Jones brought to these hit tracks are fascinating to study. And sometimes daring in bizarre ways. How did Jones ever get the idea of taking little snippets of Jackson squeaking out high notes, and use them as background effectsalmost like birds chirping on the trees? Then Jones would mix this amalgamation of quasi-ambient sounds with a lead vocal, hypnotic bassline and a very 80s-style rhythmic sensibility. All this was a far cry from what Jones had done with Sinatra and jazz players, but give this manborn in 1933his due for understanding the new sensibility in a a way that no one of his generation could approach.
If you had any doubts that this was the right formula, you merely needed to look at the Billboard charts. The Jackson-Jones collaborations sold around 200 million albums. The duo eventually parted ways, and Jackson was focused on producing his own music. Yet he never came close to matching the sales of his work with QJ.
Jazz fans might think that this success was driven more by technology (videos, cable TV) than by musical factors. But a close examination of the history of jazz shows that the same marriage of music and technology has driven its own success. The possibility of jazz as an improvised art form with large scale distribution depended on the invention of sound recordings. Benny Goodmans immense successand indeed the whole phenomenon of the Swing Erawould not have been possible without the widespread adoption of radios in American households. Without long-playing records there would have been no Kind of Blue or A Love Supreme.
Music and technology have always been interlinked, ever since the first cave dweller figured out how make a bone into a flute, the hide of an animal into a drum. If the jazz world didnt embrace Jackson, it was due to the fact that the technologies he parlayed into fame were those which jazz players were either unable or unwilling to assimilate into their own creative endeavors.
Yet its clear to me that, two decades after Jacksons biggest hits, the jazz world can still learn from his example. Only nowadays, the stakes from comprehending the symbiotic relationship of music, technology and media are even higher.
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
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One other jazz connection to Jackson: Jimmy Smith's organ solo on "Bad."
there's a strong world music vibe in some of the tunes...the constant 16th notes in the background on "thriller' sound almost like javanese gamelan grooves...
Another conection is the writer of many Jackson's song, Rod Temperton, who's also the composer of some hits for jazz guitar star George Benson, who was produced by the marvellous Mr. Q. immediately before. Another one is the "thriller" version by Lester Bowie Brass Fantasy, in a CD for the Virgin record company, "Twilight Dreams".
Timely article! Two tunes come to mind, as Jackson jazz covers: "Never Can Say Goodbye," which enjoyed some popularity as a light jam tune back in the '70s. The other I had discovered a few months ago, played on a Selmer-style acoustic petite bouche guitar by an relatively unknown Gypsy from Berlin- a surprisingly refreshing version of "The Girl is Mine," that strange McCartney/Jackson collaboration.
I played "Never Can Say Goodbye" with a trio back in the late 1970s. The chord changes in the vamp are the same as the opening bars of "Green Dolphin Street."
Ted, thanks for a terrific piece of just-in-time music journalism. I confess I had to look up panem et circenses, which I learned is Latin for "bread and circuses" and was used by the poet Juvenal to express contempt towards his fellow Roman citizens who willingly traded their "birthright of political involvement" (quoting Wikipedia) in exchange for spectacular entertainments. I take it that associating Michael Jackson with such debasement is meant as a scathing commentary of your ownnot directed so much at MJ, but more towards the rest of us, who purchased an estimated 1.7 units of Thriller for every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth, at the very moment that we abdicated our political responsibilities by electing the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Mea culpa, Ted; mea maxima culpa.
Anyhow, I am especially struck by your observation, "The arrival of music videos and cable television was almost like a second coming of talking movies." If so, that makes Michael Jackson the second coming of Al Jolson. And, indeed, the parallels are uncanny. Neither Jolie nor Jacko was the finest singer of his generation; but each was recognized as his era's foremost Entertainer. Each was the breakthrough star of his respective new medium. And each was racially ambiguous: Jolson, a white man famous for applying blackface; and Jackson, an African American who via plastic surgery and depigmentation turned white. There's a profundity here somewhere, but it's mid-afternoon on the West Coast and I'm still not drunk enough to figure it out.
You're undoubtedly right, though, that MJ's core legacy resides in the "downsized and compact format of the music video," of which he was the first true master. And in this regard, I propose a linkage between one of the leading jazz stars of the 1930s and the King of Pop. Check out this clip of Cab Calloway's "Kickin' The Gong Around":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnt6zCDO73M&feature=related
It's from The Big Broadcast (1932), in which Cab sings about the recreational pleasures of illicit drugs. At 2:20, he begins a spatially contained dance break that has Michael Jackson written all over ita quarter century before MJ was born. In particular, note Cab's proto-moonwalk. Perhaps we jazz lovers can take solace that, even though Michael Jackson's music was not part of jazz tradition, his showmanship was. As you point out, popular dance was not always foreign to the jazz sensibility. The fact that it is now, and has been since the bebop revolution, probably explains more about jazz's current economic doldrums than many musicians would care to admit.
Great piece, very thoughtful. Love your placement of MJ in his sociological and technological context. As I hinted at on Facebook, he also came to personify some of the key contradictions, social and psychic tensions, and resulting estrangement that we are grappling to resolve in this post-modern age: white/black, male/female, child/abused(er), human/alien, hero/lost soul, etc. There's no other pop figure I can think of who so sweepingly dramatized all these dichotomies. What's more, he embodied them both in a can't-look-away-from-the-car-accident way AND a transporting music-and-dance way. I wonder how much awareneness he had about any of this and what he was portraying.
This sums up Jackson's relevance from a jazz perspective beautifully. Well played. My sextet in college turned "Thriller" into a trombone feature that was always the biggest hit at the dorm parties ... and I still remember seeing Captain EO at Disneyland when I was about six years old. I'm glad that you give him the credit that he deserves for his role in the collaborations with Jones. I actually didn't really get into his music until well after my infatuation with jazz (missed out on the whole MTV thing), and yet I still find it captivating. There's something to be said for making people dance.
I'm trying to digest this business about Cab Calloway, Disneyland, technology, distribution, media, racial ambiguity, Al Jolson, et al. Where's Sammy Davis Jr? How do we go from these pointillistic references to real connections? Answer: the entertainment industry vacuums up this dust and packages it, surely as Quincy Jones packaged everything he touched (or touched him-- or happened to be going on during the studio time he booked, while he went out for coffee). It's quite incidental that at various "jazz" gigs any of us may or may not have been called upon to play an MJ tune. When Elvis started holding a guitar instead of playing it, the MTV age began, long before MTV the technology and distribution phenomenon. Michael Jackson's connection with jazz is simple: dance.
Brilliant piece, Ted. I have to say,though, that even if jazz never felt much connection to Michael Jackson, Jackson's connection to jazz runs much deeper than just dance, or just Quincy Jones. Because Jackson is intimately connected to Motown, where the jazz waters run deep. Think of the players on those Jackson 5 records: Joe Sample, Tommy Tedesco, Earl Palmer, Wilton Felder...and that's not even taking into account the Motown legacy that built up to it, with the Funk Brothers and their certifiable jazz pedigree. And the Motown tours traveled the "chitlin circuit," the theater network that was built by the traveling swing bands. We can remove MJ or so from that, but how fair is that, really? No Motown, no Michael Jackson; no jazz, no Motown. When it's that easy to find ties that bind Jackson to jazz, there's surely an ability however hidden to find ties that bind jazz to Michael Jackson.
"Michael Jackson, for all his considerable talents, never enjoyed a large following among jazz devotees." This honestly probably has to do more with age than anything else. I honestly don't know a single jazz musician under 40 who doesn't love MJ. You all saw what Christian McBride wrote, yes? http://www.christianmcbride.com/scrolls/scroll_mythang_output.html?id=128
Actually,Mal Waldron should have been mentioned. He recorded Michael Jackson's "Beat It". With Reggie Workman and the great Ed Blackwell in 1983. In my interview with Waldron he said: "I like Michael Jackson"... and he went on... I believe its more valid when someone like a Mal Waldron records a very popular song,than Miles Davis during the 1980s period of music. Miles was not the Miles of earlier times!
I came across this while I was googling for MJ jazz covers. I promote a live jazz night in Pittsburgh and spin jazz records in between the trio's sets. Two MJ covers that I play pretty often are: "I Want You Back" by Shirley Scott and I'll Be There" by Ray Bryant. I was hoping to find a few more for this evening.
In addition to the suggestions above, you might want to check out Morgana King's album I Just Can't Stop Loving You." She does cover versions of three Michael Jackson songs on this disk. Also, you might want to track down Rahsaan Roland Kirk's unusual but interesting version of "Never Can Say Goodbye."