“Tradition and the Individual Talent”

In his famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”  poet and critic T.S. Eliot famously stated, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.  His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.  You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”  I listened recently to three albums that seem to me to seek to place the individual artist in the tradition, while simultaneously moving beyond that tradition, an act both necessary and presumptive.  An act that says, “I am here now, I am alive and new, and, by implication, “That was then, the past, which I am replacing.”  Yet at the same time, all three albums also acknowledge the importance of the past, of the tradition.   The three albums I want to consider are:  “Ellington & Coltrane (1962);” Archie Shepp’s “Four for Trane” (1964); and, Marion Brown’s “Three for Shepp” (1966), all on Impulse Records.   

Undoubtedly, this 1962 meeting between the Duke and Trane was cooked up by producer Bob Thiele, to make Coltrane more “acceptable” to mainstream jazz fans who were growing disenchanted with Trane’s increasing radicalization of his art.   The cover shot is of Duke and Trane playing together; a duet between giants, but also two faces of jazz, the Past and the Present (and Future too, it seemed).  The intended message was that Trane was “in the tradition,” and perhaps, that Duke was still relevant to the contemporary scene.  While the Duke plays beautifully on “In a Sentimental Mood,” and “My Little Brown Book,” this record clearly belongs to Trane.  I particularly find fascinating a tune credited to Elllington, “Take the Coltrane,” which allows Trane to stretch out in his inimitable mode.  It’s as if Duke, in an act of both creation and concession, has handed the musical baton to Trane.  The King is Dead, Long Live the King.

Two years after the Ellington album, Trane found himself in the same position as Ellington had been placed.  Already, there was a new artist, Archie Shepp, who both claimed the “New Thing” tradition that Coltrane helped spawn, while also  proclaiming supersession of that tradition.   Where Ellington and Coltrane were pictured playing together on their album, Coltrane and Shepp are pictured on the cover of “Four for Trane.”  In a bit of perhaps significant iconography, Trane is in the background, amongst the shadows, while Shepp, holding his saxophone and cavalierly smoking a pipe, sits confidently in the foreground, a position of prominence, if not implied authority.   Shepp with avante-garde compatriots John Tchicai, Alan Shorter, Roswell Rudd, Reggie Workman play four Trane tunes, and one  by Shepp himself (the last on the album, maybe as if to say ‘goodbye to all that’).  Shepp and colleagues take Trane’s compositions and thoroughly  deconstruct them, particularly by abstracting the individual messianic quality exhibited in Coltrane’s work.  By repossessing Trane’s work, Shepp effectively performed both an act of homage and an audacious usurpation. 

In 1966’s “Three for Shepp,” it was now Shepp who found himself playing foil to the newest New Thing, in the form of alto saxophonist, Marion Brown.”  The cover iconography is again suggestive.  In this image, the saxophone lies between the two artists, perhaps suggesting the shared tradition of the music (sheets of which lay on the table, partly under the saxophone), but it is Brown who dominates the center of the composition, staring intently  into the camera’s eye, while Shepp is turned partly away from the camera, in a secondary position.  Brown and his band, consisting of Grachan Moncur III, Dave  Burrell and Stanely Cowell (splitting piano duties), Norris Jones, and Bobby Capp and Beaver Harris (splitting drum duties), perform three Shepp pieces, and three Brown pieces.   Brown goes beyond  Shepp in the  degree of abstraction that he imposes on the compositions.  Once again, I think, we have an act of both homage and usurpation. 

I think these three albums consciously attempt to work out a solution between the individual talent and the jazz tradition, between the Present and the New, and the Pat and the greater Tradition in which al of these artists worked.  As Eliot noted:  “In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past.  I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead….It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other.”    And further:  “And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value…”

P.S. This week I will be attending the Vision Festival in New York City.  On the way back, I plan to stop at Princeton Record Exchange, where I will undoubtedly spend a couple of hours and drop a couple hundred (happens all the time).  If I can restrain myself at PREX, I might be able to get home in time to fill you in on the Festival next Sunday.