The elements for greatness were all in place, but also all a little out of kilter, when Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet played International House last Saturday in the Ars Nova Workshop’s ongoing tribute series to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). In part, the I-House room, which had worked effectively enough for the Anthony Braxton Sextet a month earlier, swallowed aspects of Smith’s quartet. When he spoke, Smith himself was inaudible from the fifth row without the aid of the mic, which he resorted to only once. In part, the amplification of instruments was to blame, as John Linberg’s bass disappeared whenever the volume of the quartet rose. And in part, Nasheed Waits, sitting in on drums for the ailing Ronald Shannon Jackson, didn’t quite gel with the rest of the quartet. As astonishingly good a drummer as Waits is – and you have to be to keep up with this superstar ensemble – he ignored hand signals from Smith at least a half dozen times during the course of the 80-minute concert, mostly to lower his volume or even come to silence. Waits played blithely on as Smith glowered & Lindberg & keyboard player Vijay Iyer waited patiently. One sensed the degree to which any ensemble playing is inevitably a collaboration, even in a group with a strong, directing leader like Smith, by the ways in which the seams showed, not so much a cohesion as a handing off one player to the other.

This version of the Golden Quartet differs from Smith’s earlier group of the same name, composed as that was of his contemporaries Malachi Favors Magoustous, Anthony Davis & Jack Dejohnette. In addition to Waits, whom I was told was the son of drum great Freddy Waits, Iyer & Linberg are a generation removed from Smith, one of the great trumpet players of the past half century. The influences in such a circumstance are inevitably different. Smith is a peer of bassist Dave Holland, who had Lindberg as a private student in the 1970s. Lindberg’s own website focuses as much on his own career as a commissioned composer as it does his performances & recordings. Smith is part of that first generation that began to join jazz, world music, “contemporary classical,” and even pop into a hybrid of intellectual & compositional resources. Like Braxton, Smith now teaches for a living, in Smith’s case at Cal Arts. Lindberg, Iyer & Waits are all beneficiaries of this pioneering work.

Where someone like Braxton – who recorded with Smith during the heyday of the AACM as part of the Creative Construction Company – relates to his sextet almost as tho he were the conductor, Smith’s Golden Quartet has much more the old-style jazz feel to it, with Smith decidedly the front man, the remaining musicians there to support the overall structure. Braxton records & performs jazz standards, but segments it from the rest of his music. Smith is more apt to quote the music in the middle of a larger improvisation – the result is more open ended & I might even prefer Smith’s approach on a night when it all came together.

Other differences between the events of the two groups are instructive, even perhaps worrisome. It is not just that this space – a large auditorium one block from Penn – was 90 percent full for Braxton’s group, at best two-thirds full for Smith’s, but that whereas Braxton’s audience was at least 30 percent female, women in the audience for the Golden Quartet made up less than ten percent of the crowd, which was evenly divided between whites & blacks. In such a strangely gendered environment, it also quickly became visible just how old this crowd was as well – the average age had to be around 40, maybe higher. How much, if any, of this could be accounted for by the fact that this was Smith’s very first performance ever in Philadelphia? If anything, I would have expected the crowd to have been enlarged by a first opportunity to hear the legend here. As it was, there were poets who drove up from as far as Washington, DC, to attend the event.

Jazz was the most popular music in the United States up through the Second World War, but has seen its audience both decline & age since then. Where a militant conservative like Wynton Marsalis seems to blame this on the increasingly intellectual nature of jazz improvisation from bebop to the present, one can make the argument that jazz itself never grew up until Charlie Parker & John Coltrane & their peers came along to demonstrate what a serious art form was. It’s hardly any accident that the great younger musicians opt consistently for the cognitive rigor of pomo music, but it’s distressing to see a scene evolve in which only John Zorn gets to be a star. Frankly, musicians like Iyer, Lindberg, Taylor Ho Bynum or Jay Rozen ought themselves to be able to film a room the size of I-House. They have the music, the presence, even the CDs - Lindberg has played on over 60. In addition to the New York String Trio, which he co-founded, his own John Lindberg Ensemble includes Smith as a sideman, along with ROVA’s Larry Ochs on sax & Andrew Cyrille on drums.

The situation for poetry over these same generations has not been so terribly dissimilar. Indeed, one hears with some regularity from the likes of Lawrence Ferlinghetti & others of his generation that it has fallen on hard times in spite of the fact that there are more good poets now than at any previous time certainly in the history of this country. But in the late 1940s, there were only some 8,000 titles of all kinds published in the U.S., of which the number of volumes of verse was at most a couple of hundred. Yet today Poets House can gather over 2,000 titles of poetry alone that were published in 2004 – the book industry as a whole published over 150,000 titles. Look at it this way – the U.S. population has roughly doubled since the forties, but the number of book titles has risen at nearly ten times that rate. Correspondingly, the audience for any given book has declined¹, and reading audiences have followed suit. Yet the audiences for poetry are still predominantly young. The idea of, say, a Michael McClure reading to a crowd as old as the one that showed up for Smith on Saturday is unthinkable.

Expectations & the definitions of “success” change when art forms relate to audiences in different configurations from one generation to the next. Today, any reading with an audience of 30 is an unqualified success. Wadada Leo Smith & the Golden Quartet easily had ten times that crowd last Saturday, and yet this genre’s future may be considerably more in doubt.

 

¹ The situation is even worse than I’m making out, since one consequence of the increase in titles & concentration of bookselling into the hands of a relatively few large chains is that “best-seller” culture has tipped heavily in one direction. Book sellers no longer speak of the 80-20 rule in which 20 percent of the stock generates 80 percent of their sales, but of a 90-10 rule or worse.