Look out: there’s a new jazz canon coming toward you. A boxed set of six discs released in the United States last month, it emanates from the Smithsonian Institution; it is called “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology.”
It surveys jazz chronologically, from its complicated beginnings to its just as complicated near-present.
It was assembled by scholars and critics and broadcasters: serious names. It begins with a solo-piano composition by a Texas-born composer whose father had been a slave (Scott Joplin) and ends with a quartet track led by a Polish trumpeter (Tomasz Stanko) who loves Miles Davis. The package is loaded with text: an essay for each of its 111 tracks.
The problem is that “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology” isn’t really a canon at all. It’s a House of Representatives. What’s missing is its desire to be any more than a list.
It does not lack for facts, this hundred- dollar collection. It does more, for instance, with free jazz and Afro- Latin music than some others have done. It represents both popular taste and scholarly consensus. It is balanced in all things, even in its split between popular choices and critics’ favorites.
So there’s Miles Davis’s “So What,” Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debby,” Getz and Gilberto’s “Girl From Ipanema,” Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Moanin ‘ ” - as well as solid to questionable choices like the Clark Terry-Bob Brookmeyer Quintet’s “Haig & Haig,” Mary Lou Williams’s “Virgo” and Cab Calloway’s “Hard Times.” Its final disc stops at 2003.
It is chronological, which of course carries its own logic . It contains a few inspired sequences, like its tour of the mid-’50s, winding through mostly nonobvious tracks from Chico Hamilton, Lucky Thompson, Sonny Rollins, Sun Ra, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong. But in general the individual tracks don’t talk to one another much, or linger on an artist to underscore his value ; and while the boxed set represents styles and eras and trends, it seldom leads you toward deeper questions.
The new anthology might make you miss “The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz,” compiled in 1973, revised in 1987 by the critic Martin Williams and out of print for a while.
The American jazz-education movement was just taking shape when Williams’s “Smithsonian Collection” appeared and became standard for jazz-appreciation classes. Stealthily, it also advanced theories.
Williams, who died in 1992, could write as if he didn’t know what fun was. But he listened with great depth and vigor, and his canon had funk in its step. It favored rhythmic innovation above all else. It had little time for singers. It acknowledged masterpieces, but not reflexively or out of obligation. It bestowed major space to a small group of creators - particularly Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman - and gave John Coltrane short shrift.
The Williams canon radiated a consciousness of itself as a creative act. It segued versions of the same song by different people; it knitted together Charlie Christian’s guitar solos from different takes of “Breakfast Feud” with the Benny Goodman Sextet into one long, five-chorus improvisation. All of that was radical.
A jazz anthology has got to have spark and tension and originality. In order for jazz to feel like an open subject, we need more challenging suppositions about it, whether they translate as pluralistic or exclusive. But perhaps this just can’t be done by committee. I’ve never heard good jazz from a 47-member band.
BEN RATLIFF
