All That Jazz ... Is Jazz All That? JAZZ IS ALIVE AT U.VA. THANKS TO JOHN D'EARTH AND THE JAZZ ENSEMBLE by Mike Cardman photo by Mark Stehle In a sole concession to the jazz mystique, John D'Earth shows up to the U.Va. Jazz Ensemble rehearsal ten minutes late. "Sorry I'm late: my car was illegally parked," the band leader, resident musical sage, and trumpeter extraordinaire explains, amicably adding, "but you don't want to hear about that anyway." For a second, I'm a little disappointed that this local legend wasn't late because he was shooting up some horse backstage. Or that he didn't spring out of a black-and-white photo, festooned with a fedora and dangling cigarette. But that feeling quickly disappears after trumpeter Shyam Kannan snaps out a count of four on his fingers, prompting the band to launch into the Duke Ellington standard "Rockin' In Rhythm." It instantly becomes clear that while the myth and romance of jazz may be dead, the music itself is most certainly not. But this is U.Va., and this is the 90s -- a cultural locus that many jazz purists would claim just ain't that ... jazzy. Jazz is, after all, probably the last word anyone would free-associate with Wahoo. The members of the Ensemble are as typical a cross section of the student population as you could ask for. So, deep in the bowels of Old Cabell Hall on a balmy evening near the turn of the millennium, the fact that a bunch of familiar faces are summoning the dormant spirit of an ailing musical form prompts an interesting question: Why is it that Bush strikes me as doleful limey rip-off artists, while Wilco strike me as real artists who happen to work within a tradition, when both bands are derivative to the same degree? Really, the question is more relevant and less stupid than it seems. Jazz has been suffering from the same perceived redundancy and lack of genius that rock and roll has. The last undisputed jazz giant, saxophonist John Coltrane, died in 1967. Since then, the genre's consistent and radical forward progress has floundered without a recognizable voice, let alone a revolutionary savior. As D'Earth explains it, "Jazz music is getting very homogenized; it's going through a period of retrospection. But you can't go back. That energy that came out of these people maybe is in a different place right now. Max Roach, the great drummer who played with [revolutionary saxophonist] Charlie Parker said, 'the next Charlie Parker will come out of rap music.'" Sounds familiar, right? As much as the symptoms are the same, though, jazz's post-modernity is rooted in something deeper than rock and roll's simple lack of pure talent and vision. In its infancy, jazz was the musical equivalent of an oral tradition -- learned by ear and passed along in alleyways and juke joints. As it evolved away from dance music and through be-bop, however, the music reached a complexity that could no longer be intuitively assimilated. Today, jazz is no longer taught in after-hours jam sessions, but rather in conservatories and academies. The jam sessions produced countless geniuses. The conservatories are producing countless Wynton Marsalises -- technically brilliant, but uncompelling disciples of jazz. What makes the U.Va. Jazz Ensemble such a singular pocket of modern jazz education is an attempt to preserve the spirit of those early jam sessions. The students who comprise the group are, with few exceptions, not aspiring professionals. Rather, they are devotees who are very eager to learn. They raise their own funds and work long hours in poor facilities, purely for the love of the music. As D'Earth describes it, "It's just done more in the way that jazz was always taught: You wanna do this, kid? Then you have to sit down and give me some work! And these students work!" The Ensemble, unlike typical music programs, has no arbitrary expectations of professional standards. And unlike most conservatories, it does not codify jazz, or approach it theoretically. Instead, the group concentrates primarily on fostering the kind of creativity and flux that made older jazz so exciting. D'Earth encourages everyone in the band to contribute, nurturing their individual talents as performers, soloists, and composers within a group context. "Maybe we don't play a [Count] Basie chart exactly perfect, but we write our own music, we do group improvisations, we do head arrangements," D'Earth says. "What we hope for is that the music swings, that it's cohesive. We play together, we learn to listen to each other. We teach these things because it's all about listening, about forgetting to be totally self-conscious, and relating to what other people are doing." This doesn't simply make the U.Va. Jazz Ensemble special. More important, it makes them more Wilco than Bush. As sexy bassist Lisa Mezzacappa explains, "Interaction is the one thread that runs through all of jazz. You can have that no matter how avant-garde or traditional you are; you just have to hold on to it and mean it. And if you're doing your thing, how can that be bad?" Elaborately, D'Earth likens the Ensemble to the '70s duo Joe Henderson and Kenny Dorham, who "had this thing together. When they made these records, these were not records that changed the whole face of jazz like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane, but they were truly a voice that is unique. Without really changing anything in that style that they inherited, they made something completely fresh." So, maybe you can't go back and recreate the lightning cultural moment that jazz sprang from, but you can channel some of its force. The U.Va. Jazz Ensemble does, and then uses it to tell their own story. D'Earth says, "We're standing up and saying, 'This is our music!'," boldly claiming their art not only for his band, but also for anyone with the ears to listen.

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