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What has jazz become today? Yes, because, in the end, this is what we are talking about, more than the pleasantness of a single record.
Enrico Rava, whose honesty cannot be doubted since the day when (at the height of the "free" period) he found himself in the middle of a flock for a concert for "sheep and trumpet," realizing that nonsense was starting to be done, has today denounced the stagnation, the immobility, if not the beginning of jazz's decline.
Fundamentally, the discussion is the one we've had hundreds of times, among friends at dinner, on blogs, and on specialized sites... and I think it can be summarized and simplified as follows: if everything in the realm of knowledge (including us) has a beginning, a development, and an end, why shouldn't musical genres suffer the same fate?
Usually, we talk about this concerning (so-called) pop music, which is the one that - more than any other - is driven by the market, a market that today is struggling to carry on even itself, battered by downloads, fatigue, and disinterest. The discussion about jazz is similar yet different. It is, we could say, a middle ground between what happens to (so-called) pop music and what happens to Blues, the supreme god of perpetual immobility.
It is known: jazz is contamination, but if we must find it a father, it is undoubtedly the Blues. And it is the Blues that "moves" immobile forever, from when it wasn't even recorded, to when they started recording it, up to our days.
Jazz had a hybrid, beautiful, very American, unrepeatable birth. It is the child of many mothers and many fathers, of a society the most lively and vibrant.
It had a grand, lofty development. It reached unattainable heights (we think of Duke, of Miles, of Trane...). It climbed so high that it could only come down. With style, slowness, beautifully paced and refined as only it knows how, but descend.
You can go downhill gracefully: the worn face of Faber, the wrinkles of Cohen, the glance of the last Fellini demonstrate it perfectly. And today jazz is descending, not from the throne (which it will never leave, having earned it in the field and will always be its own), but it is walking well, on a slope only slightly descending, and its walking is always beautiful to watch.
And it is here that we come to this record by Fresu, so beautiful and so devoid of anything new, which can even make you think that Jazz, feminized (or has it always been a woman?) has now settled on the sofa of the gods next to Daddy Blues.
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