in the ken burns jazz series, they keep pointing to moments when "the music became art." it's interesting to think about why people would think that armstrong's hot 5s is art, but not, say, even armstrong's own work with king oliver, for example. or maybe ellington but not, say, joe johnson. the blues is pictured as underlying jazz, but as not quite being art like jazz.

i think fundamentally it has to do with the way art was understood in the twentieth century: "modernism." the picture was of transcendent geniuses, radical innovations, avant-gardes: movements succeeding one another in an ever-faster progression of the liberation of the human spirit. well the blues or country music are traditional, not avant-garde, forms. your authenticity is established by your connection to the tradition, even as you may push that tradition. too far, though, and it's not blues or country or gospel or soul or funk or rock: these are traditional musics of our culture.

but jazz can be written in part as a history of radical geniuses. by the time you get to nyc in the forties, the two worlds really are closely coincident, and charlie parker and diz and miles flow right into the avant-garde downtown painters: they're wearing the same glass frames and speaking the same lingo. now the idea that someone like armstrong on the streets of new orleans in the early years of the century was really connected to picasso and matisse by a zeitgeist or something is not necessarily insane, but i think the coincidence had to do basically with something else: from very early on jazz was a competitive sport, an arena of machismo rivalry - perhaps among men who couldn't have done as well in a series of knife fights - encapsulated in the "cutting contest" or more recently the rap battle. read these histories and you soon realize that that is everywhere: benny goodman gettin cut by chick webb, art tatum cutting willie the lion smith: coleman hawkins would come to town and issue an challenge to all sax players etc. competition is collaboration.

now that will drive you to virtuosity, and to originality: you're constantly trying to find that thing that no one else can do or even conceive. in the ken burns series, the extremely good albert murray kind of twinkles as he says that what drove bird and diz is that they wanted to have something none of the older guys could do. and that's one of the differences between jazz and avant-garde visual arts: by the time you get to the abstract expressionists or the beats in lit, craft has long since stopped signifying, or even has to be concealed: the painters are not virtuosos; they're forces of nature. but to the modernists, the jazz masters are also forces of nature, perhaps in virtue of their blackness: one reason we can't let louis practice.

all the real serious jazzheads in the burns series are just a bit uncomfortable with swing, and the film raises the question of whether swing is jazz. well it has to be. but that is the moment when jazz is an absolutely mass art, and also when the individual expression of radical differentness is least expressed, at least in the poppest versions. that's why adorno, say, doesn't recognize jazz as his kind of avant-garde, because it was the pop music of his era: you can't be avant-garde and mass: avant-garde arts are understood only by a few (like free jazz, say). commercial popular arts are exactly not art in the modernist conception, because they can be understood by everybody and they actively discourage radical innovation. a lot of the swing players - especially the actually best - are pictured as profoundly dissatisfied with swing, with just playing the same dance tunes the same way every night.

they want original expression: they want their music to be an embodiment of themselves, and each self is radically unique, especially the selves of radical artists: they are our most unique people. i do think that's something shared in jazz and modernism: art as an intensification of the self, as not only or even primarily an collaborative activity (though that too), but a way to crystallize or make audible the self of a coltrane or an ornette coleman. the intensity of the selfhood and the profound originality of such figures is very much in keeping with a the modernist conception of the great artist, and the fact that the material is improvisational makes it authentic. pollock's paintings were improvised in a similar way. and of course the dark side connects the jazz great to the avant-garde visual artist: buddy bolden, billie holiday, charlie parker, vincent van gogh and jackson pollock (and hemingay and kerouac) declining into madness and addiction that is actually supposed to be connected to their art. (one thing i can say: if you have experienced these things, you're less likely to romanticize them. it's hard not to realize how damaged the history of jazz has been by the artists lost to addiction.)

anyway, i think that jazz and modernism dovetailed very nicely in many ways (though not in all) but that was more or less a coincidence up until bops and beats. but it was central to the reception of jazz: one reason you got a much more serious critical response to jazz, which in turn helped drive some innovations.

i do, though, want to emphasize that in my view the blues and country music, for example, are just as much art as jazz is. they're just different kinds of art. my love for these things, believe it or not, was my original motivation for hopping off the entire modernist conception of art when i was but a wee lad. one thing about jazz, though: it is more in touch with its sources overall; it doesn't quite negate what came before like high modernism. well it still rests on the blues.