Donny
McCaslin describes his collaboration with the late and great rock
composer David Bowie (1947-2016) as one of the great privileges
of his life. Whether that translates into the same for his decades-long,
dedicated followers remains an open question. The wildly enthusiastic
response to his just concluded Montreal
International Jazz Festival concert
doesn’t necessarily settle the matter.
Since
the collaboration, McCaslin, in unchecked adoration mode, has
been incorporating Bowie favourites as staples of his repertoire.
The association has lent to his name significant cachet; he’s
playing in significantly larger venues, and rather suddenly a
somewhat known saxophonist (albeit highly respected by his peers),
has become someone “not to be missed.”
Unapologetically
basking in the long-time-coming adulation, McCaslin has arrived
at a critical junction in his career where he should begin asking
himself if it is in his long-term interest to be playing down
to audience expectations (lap-dogging the rock concert applause)
or up to the exigencies of posterity. I’m hopeful
that he’ll decide that Bowie is a phase that he will soon
raze.
When
I first heard McCaslin at Montreal’s Jazz en Rafale (2014)
festival, his at once remarkable and challenging soloing suggested
that here is a serious musician who has staked out a position
that asks the largest questions of jazz. By analogy, in the visual
arts, the painter Paul Cezanne, looking into his crystal ball,
feared that cubism and abstraction where going to peripheralize
figurative painting. He saw it as his mission to preserve the
latter while acknowledging the inevitability of the former. What
resulted was a style of painting that used the geometry and wedges
we associate with cubism, but brilliantly applied to figurative
(recognizable) landscapes, still-lifes and portraits. With the
weight of the future of painting on his back, Paul Cezanne became
the founding father of modern painting (Post-Impressionism).
I propose
that Donny McCaslin, in retrospect (anachronistically), finds
(or found) himself in a similar situation as it concerns the evolution
of jazz, which, beginning with Coltrane (expressionism) and Ornette
Coleman (free jazz) took a major turn toward the abstract (conceptual)
at the expense of melody. Like Cezanne in the visual arts, McCaslin,
in the spirit of preserving the song in the solo, makes concessions
to the near outer limits of modern jazz while never losing site
of melody, no matter how far out a particular piece or solo might
sound to the ear. It’s not just the sequences of notes we
hear, but the mission underlying the notes that distinguishes
his remarkable improvisations, of which there were only hints
of in his 2017, Bowie-buoyed, Montreal Jazz festival concert.
Jazzing
up Bowie is like jazzing up Bach: for many, it just doesn’t
work once the novelty wears off. When McCaslin is on his game,
his solos seem to bend and twist and squirm like living tissue
fighting for its life, with the antibodies arriving in the disguise
of melody, which grounds and unites both the musician and audience
in the single task of preserving melody in the context of post-modern
jazz. Along with David Binney, I can’t think of another
player who so passionately and presciently represents that epic
struggle, one which has not been adequately articulated by jazz's
finest writers, many of whom are musicians in their own right.
Looking
ahead, code for looking into the mirror, McCaslin has to decide
(1) if it is in his best interest to wean himself from the tit
of David Bowie, and (2) what will be his role in determining the
future of jazz. It speaks to his extraordinary gifts that he is
one of the very few musicians for whom this kind of momentous
choice is an option.
