Mentorship and oral tradition are essential parts of jazz’s lasting vitality.
I recently had the pleasure of hearing Jazz Is Dead at the Newport Jazz Festival. Led by bassist Ali Shaheed Muhammed (A Tribe Called Quest) and composer/producer Adrian Younge, the band was formed to draw inspiration from such greats as Gary Bartz, Henry Franklin, Doug Carn, Roy Ayers, Jean Carne, Lonnie Liston Smith, and others in creating new compositions and fresh arrangements of their work. The irony behind the name and ethos of this band, though, is that jazz is certainly not dead!
The Newport Jazz Festival, founded in 1954 by jazz philanthropist Elaine Lorillard and artistic director George Wein, is one of the world’s oldest jazz festivals. Its stages have been graced by many, from John Coltrane to the Allman Brothers. Since 2016, Philadelphia bass luminary Christian McBride has served as the festival’s artistic director.
Anybody who has recently attended Newport or any other major jazz festival, such as the North Sea or Montreal Jazz fest, would probably agree that the rumors of jazz’s untimely demise are greatly exaggerated. But the music is changing. If that sounds contradictory, it’s just because the very nature of jazz—or “creative music,” as I prefer to call it—is change. Some of this music’s greatest exponents—Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Nina Simone—were responsible for bringing about some of its most significant shifts. They not only changed the music from what it was when they arrived, but, as in the cases of Coltrane, Miles, and others, also completely changed their own sounds every few years, to the point of being unrecognizable to their earlier fans.
Much of the meat is not in what is written or said but in what is experienced. We must put the next generation in front of the real elders and actual players as much as possible.
The big change in jazz is an overall change in culture that affects the way this music is learned, enjoyed, and passed on. For the vast majority of its existence, jazz has been a community-based music that arose primarily from African Americans. It was a music central to Black culture, which informed art, writings, philosophy, fashion, clubs, dance, etc. for decades. And like many Black musical traditions, jazz persisted as an oral tradition, where the next generation learned from the last in close proximity, and then, in turn, taught the next generation in the same way. This is not to say that some Black jazz musicians did not study formally. But even in these cases, the real jazz education took place through mentorship outside of the classroom. Young musicians often got their start by listening to recordings of the masters, following them around to clubs, and finally spending years playing in their bands before getting the opportunity to lead their own, where the cycle began anew.
In the case of musicians such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk, their bands were the universities. They all formed part of a thread that ran from Louis Armstrong to Wynton Marsalis, Elvin Jones to Marcus Gilmore, or Jimmy Smith to Joey DeFrancesco. But that thread has been frayed as mentorship was displaced by formal education.
University education, with its regimented methodology, standardized curriculums, statistics, rules, entrance requirements, privilege, certification, and, of course, associated tuition costs, quite literally changed the face of jazz, much like the gentrification of Harlem, Philadelphia, and Chicago now pushes inhabitants out of their own communities. Young children growing up in historically Black neighborhoods in the U.S. today, for the most part, feel very little connection to jazz and may never experience it live or even ever hold a musical instrument! So, maybe more primary-to-high-school jazz education would be a good thing.
But at the higher-education level, what can be done? Formal education has its place and excels when the goal is to distribute standardized information to a large group of people at one time. In the case of creative music, where the goal is to express oneself in a unique and recognizable way that is imbued with one’s personality, the mentorship approach once typical of the jazz community is vital. Much of the meat is not in what is written or said but in what is experienced. We must put the next generation in front of the real elders and actual players as much as possible. Let the younger generation see the elders play, tell stories, interact … and maybe some of the young musicians will even get to sit in. Foster the development of real relationships and exchange.
The jazz community has sadly lost many very important players—most recently guitarist Monnette Sudler and organist Joey DeFrancesco. But these players’ legacies live on through those they mentored, like a torch being carried forward. In the post-lockdown era, the scene may not be at its most vibrant, but it is coming back and there are plenty of players who are doing some really interesting things. Jazz is not dead.
This scarred 2001 keeper is low on ROI but high on playability and tone.
I'm primarily a Tele player, but I have to profess my love for non-Fender-type guitars as well. I've owned probably a dozen or so Gibson SGs, for example, including some first-year models. Sadly, I let them all slip through my fingers over the years.
Note the rough and gouged wood along the upper contour of this instrument's body—signs of abuse from an attempt to strip off its original finish.
About five years ago, I was at a yard sale here in Asheville, North Carolina, when I came across this month's guitar. It's a Gibson SG Special that some knucklehead had started sanding before realizing it was more of a project than he or she wanted to undertake, so quit part-way through. Of course, they picked the worst place on a guitar to experiment on: the face. It was right along the beveled upper bout of the instrument.
Bottom Feeder Tip # 779: Never experiment on the front of a guitar. Always start on the back, just in case you change your mind part way through. That way it might still look okay when you're playing it onstage—or selling it.
Nothing like a Will Ray signature Hipshot B-Bender bridge to make this yard-sale find just right for Will Ray. He added it after the purchase, of course.
I wasn't sure I even wanted the guitar, since it looked kinda ugly, with the front partially sanded, but I decided to go over and play it. Wow! It played really nice! The seller also pointed out that it had a headstock repair from when it had fallen over a few years earlier. It wasn't done professionally and looked a little ragged. Strike two! Now I was even more leery, but then I played it some more and strangely started bonding with the poor thing. The asking price was $175 with a nice Gibson gig bag. After some haggling, I ended up paying $135 for it.
These Gibson Deluxe tuners have the same vibe as the Kluson Deluxe pegs that would have been found on first-year models of this guitar, from 1961.
When I got it home, I did some research on it and to my dismay I saw that this model was not going for around $1,200 like I'd originally hoped, but instead was only going for $300 to $400 used. And those were in better shape than mine. I decided to write it off as a hard lesson learned—just eat it and move on. I picked it up later and was reminded of why I bought it in the first place: It's a great playing guitar! It has that unmistakable Gibson feel. I plugged it in, and instead of hearing that typical darker humbucker sound, this guitar sounded much brighter and P-90-like than I expected. Then I looked at the stop-bar tailpiece and went, “hummm ... I wonder what would happen if I slapped a Hipshot bender on it?" So I did, and it works great on this 6-string. Next, I painted over the sanded-off area with some gold paint, and instead of looking ugly, it looks ... kinda interesting.
So, is it a keeper? For now it is. Visit this story online to listen to my sound sample. You can hear it sing like a songbird, but also roar like a bear. I also dig how high up the fretboard you can play.
The Tale of the Hamer DuoTone—an Innovative Model That Satisfied Zero Demand
How—despite being embraced by Jeff Tweedy, Stone Gossard, Ty Tabor, Dweezil Zappa, and other luminaries—this acoustic-electric hybrid was somehow DOA.
It’s not often you get the kind of idea that wakes you up in the middle of a dream and makes you sit upright, but that’s exactly what happened to me in December 1991. It’s also the only time it’s ever happened to me.
I’d been approached by guitarist Tommy Shaw about the possibility of constructing a doubleneck instrument that was half-acoustic/half-electric. It was the era of the “power ballad,” when a song would begin with an acoustic-tinged intro and verse, which would then lead to the inevitable power-chord riffage that was engineered to saddle up the tune and ride it home. Most bands used acoustic guitars—often held on stands—before switching to electric. Tommy wanted to dispense with the switchover by building a single guitar that performed both tasks. He’d tried a piezo bridge on an electric, but the results were dismal, so the doubleneck concept was his solution.
At the time, I was working on a project for Ovation Guitars, called the Viper, that was basically a response to Gibson’s Chet Atkins solidbody acoustic. This guitar was a semi-hollow, Les Paul-sized guitar with a spruce top and an acoustic bridge fitted with the requisite piezo saddle. My first thought was to just graft a Viper together with a humbucker-loaded solid half to create a doubleneck.
I had been struggling with the design for a few days when I had my epiphany: “I could just put humbuckers on the Viper and control the output with a simple switch.” It seemed so perfect I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. I went back to sleep, and in the morning I called Tommy to tell him about the “dual” guitar idea. At first, he wasn’t so sure. I think that the doubleneck visual might have been as important as the sound, but eventually Tommy gave me the green light. Of course, dreams can be simpler than reality.
The Ovation piezo sound was acceptable by 1980s standards, but putting that bridge onto a semi-solid guitar wasn’t helping the cause, so I enlisted the help of EMG’s electronics wiz Rob Turner to create a preamp/EQ that dialed back the quack. We spent several days in his workshop in Petaluma, California, tweaking the curves until I had what I wanted: a softer attack that gave the guitar a more natural sound without sacrificing too much presence. After all, it did have to cut through the mix onstage.
Back home in Chicago, the guys in the shop produced the guitar from my drawings and I assembled the electronics. After the setup guys put the strings on and tuned it up, we held our breath as the first notes were played. The humbuckers were routed to one output and the acoustic sound to another. The idea was to use two discreet transmitters (or cords), with the magnetic pickups going to the guitar amps and the bridge output to a DI and into the FOH board. The onboard 3-band EQ could be trimmed by Tommy’s tech to suit the stage, using a small screwdriver. I was pretty happy with the result and so was Tommy. Incidentally, I kept three small sound holes clustered in the upper bout as a nod to the Ovation project that spawned it.
After the successful run with the guitar, we decided to offer it as a model. Christened as the DuoTone, it went into production and became quite popular with a number of guitarists, including Ty Tabor, Stone Gossard, Dweezil Zappa, Jeff Tweedy, and many others. I figured we had a hit on our hands—a workable hybrid that actually sounded great. After a few years, the second version replaced the round holes with a proper f-hole, and the flat, spruce top gave way to a carved one. The electronics were upgraded as well, with the use of a Kynar cable transducer beneath a bone saddle, and Rob Turner created the version 2.0 electronics to match. A subtle change was the use of a TRS jack in addition to the acoustic output, which allows the use of a stereo cable to carry both signals. It just kept getting better.
In the end, the DuoTone didn’t capture the imagination of guitarists the way we thought it might. Despite some of the best musicians in the business using them, and a fairly substantial ad campaign, the average guitarist wasn’t smitten with the idea. Maybe it was viewed as an empty promise, like so many gimmicky guitar products—like the Guitarorgan or the EBow. Or maybe, in true guitarist fashion, players just wanted to play real acoustics for the actual sound. Still, there’s a soft spot in my heart for the DuoTone project, which I think of every time someone comes out with their own version.