Jazz - Is it pop or is it art? Neither and both

Jazz has been the music of the 20th century. Like film and flight, it was formulated at the beginning of the century, and it has sped through its history in a mere 100 years. At the beginning, jazz was just starting to emerge from the primeval soup of ragtime, cakewalks and brass-band music. At the end, it has gone through such a multiplicity of form and style that it no longer knows what it is. From the metallic blasts of Buddy Bolden's cornet, which was never recorded, to the blasted metal of today's avant-garde, which is obsessively recorded, jazz has hurtled alongside everything that the century has thrown up. As the 1900s run out, many have been saying that jazz is passing away, too, a hundred-year mayfly ready to cease the frantic beating of wings.

The great dilemma, which has been central to the history of the music, is whether jazz should be counted as pop or art. If its origins are cloudy, its language was essentially formed by the black brassmen, pianists and sporting-house players who worked in New Orleans in the early 1900s. Yet it was a white group, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, that made the first acknowledged jazz (or jass) records in 1917. Their success was something that coincided with the anti-romantic tides that swept through western art in the period, and although jazz became embedded in the dance music of the 1920s, it already had its cadre of serious artists seeking to create music for music's sake as well as for a paying crowd.

The Olympian virtuosity of Louis Armstrong and the compositional acumen of Duke Ellington spoke of ambitions that burst jazz open very quickly, and when men such as Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden spent all their after-hours at jam sessions as well, it made the language of the music private as well as public, a personal, conversational art as well as entertainment.

It was at the after-hours sessions in Harlem in the forties that bebop came into being. The swing era was jazz's finest hour in commercial terms; but that was jazz, again, as dance-band music. Glenn Miller's admirers are only occasionally jazz fans as well. The beboppers were dismayed at the puerility of so much swing-era music, and their revolution made sure that, ever afterward, jazz would seldom touch on mass taste again. Charlie Parker didn't disdain popular acclaim: he wanted people to listen. But what he played - and it still sounds ferociously modern more than 50 years later - was so brazenly intense that no popular culture could accommodate him.

At least, not then. Rock'n'roll developed out of rhythm and blues, which in turn was a simpler, less demanding black alternative to bebop's intellectual precocity. As first Elvis and then the Beatles conquered the world, jazz was partly in retreat, partly out to find ever more extreme vehicles for itself. Hard bop, cool jazz and soul jazz welcomed listeners in; the New Thing either waved them away or, if you were a real diehard, ticketed you into a dark community of insiders. In the past 30 years, the stretch between jazz's opposite ends has grown so far that newcomers find the task of assimilation all but impossible. There are no longer "jazz fans", but a straggling audience that likes bits and pieces from all over a vast spectrum.

The word itself now seems ancient and modern. "All that jazz," say newspapers and copywriters to denote some gaggle of confusion. Many of the jazz masters themselves couldn't get on with the word. Ellington disliked it, perhaps because throughout his career he was criticised for drifting away from some jazz principle or other. "It's a white man's word for niggers' music," growled Miles Davis. Recently, Wynton Marsalis, the most high-profile jazz musician in America, and probably the world, has attempted to rehabilitate it. His concern has been to revitalise the sense of tradition in the music, going back not only to bebop, but to swing and original New Orleans jazz. Yet he has taken tremendous stick from those who see jazz as antithetical to the idea of repertory music: if it isn't new, spontaneous and moving forward, how can it be jazz?

Everything tells us that it is not popular music. It is said to account for no more than 3 per cent of CD sales. It exists in tiny clubs, or on small-theatre tours, heavily subsidised, usually going unremarked on arts pages and in broadcast forums. Its contemporary leaders are scarcely recognised by anyone outside the hard-core coterie of followers. The one movement perceived to be a business success, smooth jazz, makes money out of the fact that it is as unlike other jazz as it is possible to be.

Yet jazz has been this century's music. In Armstrong and Ellington, Parker and Davis, it has given us creative lights so intense that they have shaped or contributed to every kind of music that belongs to our times. It has spawned cultures of hipness, of sartorial style, of language, of dance, of mystique. It gave us "St Louis Blues", "Take the 'A' Train", "So What" and A Love Supreme. It suggested how groups of people could work indispensably together, as well as honour the creative individual. Its ability to suggest a tragic intensity is equalled only by its capacity for sheer joyous inventiveness. And I would say that it's just about ready to do all this again, and more, in the next century, too.

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