Don't Call Jazz America's Classical Music

Jon Pareles

9-11 minutes

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HERE'S one you may have heard before: Jazz is America's classical music. It's a declaration that is always intoned with great seriousness and a touch of argumentative pride; the intent is to grant jazz the respect it undeniably deserves. But that formulation has always left me skeptical, and I've come to think that it does current jazz more harm than good.

In bygone decades, conflating jazz and classical music had some remedial effect; it helped non-musicians understand that jazz is a serious discipline, and helped jazz make headway in institutions, with its media image and among arts donors. Now, the equation of jazz and classical music only interferes with drawing new listeners and helping them understand what they hear.

It's easy to see why people linked jazz and classical music. Both are music for music's sake, in a separate commercial realm from the windfalls of pop, rock and hip-hop. Both styles are primarily instrumental and wordless, without the easy signposts of pop verses and choruses. They both reward knowledgeable listeners, though they can easily be enjoyed without a music degree. And both call for their performers and listeners to be mature, emotionally if not chronologically: to have long attention spans, to understand depth and nuance.

Simply to enter either field as a performer is to make a huge commitment, because only virtuosos need apply. Musicians must be willing to practice until their hands ache, to absorb a long and rigorous tradition, and only then, after years of work, to find out whether they have the mysterious inspiration that will make them worthy soloists.

Classical music and jazz also share a recording esthetic: both are centered on real-time group performances, not recording-studio assemblages (though editing and retakes are common). Compared to pop albums, jazz and classical music are relatively inexpensive to record: days of studio time compared to months or years. At recording companies, classical music and jazz are often in the same corporate division, as the two specialized styles that connote prestige.

Yet the similarities end when it comes to the music itself. In almost every way except the high standards they impose on musicians, jazz and classical music are diametrically opposed. Every esthetic criterion is different: the smoothness of instrumental and vocal delivery in most classical music versus the smears and growls of jazz, well-tempered classical intonation versus the blues inflections of jazz, the central role of rhythm in jazz versus the peripheral one of rhythm in classical music, and, most important, the fixed classical composition versus the improvisatory disciplines of jazz. Classical performances are almost entirely premeditated, resuscitating scores from the distant or near past; jazz insists on surprises and lives in an eternal present tense.

In classical music since the Baroque era, the composer has been exalted above all. Performers are expected to be distinctive, but only because they have different ideas on how best to realize the grand formal architecture and fine details of a composer's work. They are, with more or less humility, interpreters. And despite the efforts of living composers, most of what classical musicians interpret is from the repertory, not new work.

In jazz, the performer trumps the composer. Jazz musicians do treat some material with reverence, but they can also bring to it irony, bemusement, savage wit, irreverence or elaborate one-upmanship. Compositions are still important; whether it's Ellington or Monk or Wayne Shorter or Tin Pan Alley standards, jazz musicians prize the combination of musicianly intricacy and indelible melody. But for jazz musicians, the underlying structure is less important than what happens to it on the bandstand. To a form-minded classical listener, the typical jazz structure of theme-solos-theme may be banal. But just as Bach and Beethoven built monumental sets of variations on modest material, a great jazz improviser can turn a trivial pop ditty or a rudimentary blues into an unforgettable performance.

While classical music works toward a finished whole, jazz is about process and interaction: about the thought and reflexes involved when the saxophonist suddenly switches into double time and the drummer answers with an approving flurry of cymbal taps. Classical chamber groups, like jazz quintets, are cooperatives, but they know what notes they'll play before they step on a stage. A jazz group doesn't.

Of course, there's a significant exception in the jazz tradition: big-band music, jazz's orchestral side. Section players, like classical musicians, are expected to play the notes on the page. Big-band composers and arrangers have nearly the same unquestioned authority as classical composers, and they use big bands to explore concepts involving precise orchestral sonorities and large-scale forms. But jazz composers like Ellington always acknowledged that they wrote for performers, not for posterity; they built their pieces around the musicians who would bring them to life, hearing the individual voices in the ensemble work. As they wrote, they kept the music participatory rather than entirely autocratic.

As the ''America's classical music'' line has settled in, jazz repertory groups have established themselves at institutions like Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. They treat important jazz compositions with due admiration and work on some of the same issues -- like historical authenticity versus present-day needs -- that have also engrossed the classical world. That's a worthwhile development; it keeps jazz in touch with its history, gives musicians a stylistic education and makes sure that important American music is heard not as an unyielding recording but with live musicians taking chances. Major works like Wynton Marsalis's ''Blood on the Fields'' and the reconstruction of Charles Mingus's ''Epitaph'' would not be possible without jazz repertory groups. Yet no one pretends that jazz repertory is all of jazz.

Meanwhile, classical music's fascination with form has also been filtering through to young mainstream jazz musicians who are exploring musical structure in small ensembles. Unlike classical composers, they keep their forms volatile, improvising with the shape of a piece as well as with the solos and interplay. But they're not trying to bring back ''third stream'' music, the largely stillborn attempts to unite contemporary classical music and jazz; they're just trying to spur some new improvisational responses. And they don't aspire to the repeatability of classical performances.

As a marketing slogan, the jazz-equals-classical formula is like handing an anchor to a drowning man. It's not as if jazz covets classical music's popularity. Jazz and classical music each account for less than three percent of sales of recorded music in any given year (and less if Kenny G. and the ''Titanic'' soundtrack are factored out). Luckily, both can count on dedicated audiences for live performances.

Still, many potential listeners are put off by the solemnity of classical music. The ritual of classical concert-going -- with a silent audience contemplating a certified masterpiece by (usually) a dead composer -- carries an aura of European elitism, which may well be inseparable from music that long depended on the European elite. Listeners who do give themselves over to silent absorption of classical music find how gratifying it can be; the music thrives in its formal setting.

But jazz has always been a more informal, more participatory medium, true to the call-and-response of its African ancestry and its roots in parade music and dance tunes. Fans whoop or applaud for a great solo, or laugh at a clever allusion; toes tap, heads bob. Jazz musicians shouldn't have to perform amid conversation -- the best jazz audiences are serious listeners -- but concert-hall decorum can inhibit musicians as well as fans. Positioning jazz as ''America's classical music'' could keep people away from jazz's earthiness and exaltation.

Putting the ''classical'' stamp on jazz is a way of insisting on the music's discipline and significance. Yet jazz is already important without getting all high-toned. One of jazz's all-American advantages is that, like important popular idioms around the world, it rose up from under: out of bordellos and speak-easies, dance halls and rent parties came genius after genius. Jazz legends weren't commissioned by churches or counts; they had more colorful patrons. And in upstart America, an outlaw heritage confers a touch of glamour that jazz should use. Jazz is as complex, intelligent, passionate and profound as classical music; we know that now. Far from having to borrow status from classical music, it should get respect on its own very different terms.