St. Germain
Solid Ether
By Kevin Whitehead
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The America Nicholson describes sounds stuck in 1990, when Wynton Marsalis was riding high and major labels were signing as many retro bop bands as they had pens to go around. But the bottom fell out of the neoconservative boom by mid-decade, and overnight sensations got bumped from major labels to minors. And those young suits were never the whole story, even then. Wesseltoft had better stop getting his CDs from Columbia House: he apparently missed out on John Carter, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis, John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Uri Caine, the Chicago Underground, and anyone else whose sense of line, rhythm, or ensemble organization provided an original or personal alternative to Wyntonian nostalgia.
Three artists Nicholson endorses–Parisian club stars St. Germain, Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, and a Swedish trio unfortunately named E.S.T.–have recent or new American releases. “Rose Rouge,” the first and best track on St. Germain’s first album for Blue Note, Tourist, makes its bold break with America by looping a swinging ride-cymbal vamp apparently sampled from some hard-bop classic, and floating snippets of a Marlena Shaw vocal over the top–the sort of jazz ‘n’ loops thing Guru’s Jazzmatazz or British acid-jazz acts like US3 were doing by the early ’90s. The groove is poppin’, but by track two, it’s just disco with a new mirror ball. Jazz rhythm lives in the myriad small variations the musicians work on a basic pattern. With inflexible loops underneath, even the live horn and keyboard players are stuck going around in circles. St. Germain’s concept backs rhythm into the same dead end where one-chord modal jazz pushed harmony: there’s nowhere to go but the fade-out.
Nicholson goes wrong the same way many critics do: by treating what he knows as the sum total of available knowledge and using it to support unsupportable generalizations. All of us read these all the time: how so-and-so is the world’s best player of some instrument or style, how whozis was the first to do such and such, how cats over on that other scene (across town or an ocean) don’t do what our guys do. But no matter how diligently you study any scene from afar, it’s teeming with more varied music than you can know. Records never tell the whole story–not that anyone hears every record. Nicholson’s made the common error of confusing something he recently noticed with a new trend.
The North American and European jazz scenes may never have been closer than now, and the flow is not all in one direction. Chicagoans like Josh Abrams, Jeb Bishop, Hamid Drake, or Ken Vandermark are glad to play with Sean Bergin, Tobias Delius, Paul Lytton, or Peter Brötzmann, maybe because they can learn something, if only about how easy interaction can be. The old divisions apply less and less. That’s why Dave Douglas likes playing with Han Bennink as well as the other way around–both like mixing standards and free play, swingtime and floating phrases. Or why Mengelberg can make a record called Two Days in Chicago (Hatology, 1999); he liked playing with Drake and Vandermark enough to request their company on a return gig last March.
