The Bad Plus, whose piano player Ethan Iverson, left, helped spark behearer.com.
Last week, New York Times writer Nate Chinen picked up on the emergence of the new site behearer.com, an interactive database devoted to jazz made between 1970 and 1989.
"What jazz?" some say. Received wisdom usually dismisses the period as a bad time for the music; many good players were believed to have either taken the money and run toward the burgeoning jazz-funk scene or turned it down and retired into abstract experimentation - and that was assumed to be pretty much it until Wynton Marsalis and neo-classicism arrived.
But behearer.com (appropriately named after an album by a fine jazz creator of that era, the late saxophonist Dewey Redman) proves that account wrong in the most direct way possible - by listing hundreds of fascinating records made in the period, and inviting enthusiasts to contribute their own favourites. It's mostly an unembroidered discography at the moment, but - given the remarkable way it was born - that's unlikely to be the case for long.
Trumpeter Dave Douglas, one of the most creative player/composers on the international scene, seems to have unintentionally sparked the Behearer phenomenon - in the process reflecting the jazz-like collective spontaneity of the web. Inspired by historian Philip Jenkins's book Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, Douglas claimed that the conservative political backlash against 1960s idealism had a spin-off in "demonisation of musicians who pushed the boundaries", and the rewriting of jazz history involving them. Douglas then challenged jazz writers to "take on the project of an unbiased overview of music since the end of the Vietnam War".
Nobody went for that one, but pianist Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus had an answer of his own. ("We're the crazy ones, aren't we?" Iverson the indefatigable record collector said to me in The Guardian in June: "We always want to slake that thirst for the stuff most people don't know exists.") Offering the opposite of Douglas's "unbiased overview", Iverson posted 5000 enthusiastic words and a catalogue of hundreds of albums on his blog. Within two days, he was swamped with feedback from all over the globe. Time Out New York's classical music editor Steve Smith soon did the same.
The outcome has been Behearer.com, kicked off by Boston-based saxophonist Pat Donaher with a starting list of 500-odd albums (at ), and now administered as an interactive site by volunteers, like many projects in the most inventive corners of jazz.
Though its emphasis is inevitably American, the cutting-edge Europeans of the period do get a look in. Guitarist Derek Bailey is there, exiled South African composer Chris McGregor, Dutch improv artists Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink, the emerging Evan Parker and Jan Garbarek, the re-emerging Stan Tracey, the late John Stevens's Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and more. All fearlessly creative figures, they were mostly known only to a handful of inquisitive buffs in the period Behearer deals with. Now they're legends, whose early work is venerated, and whose pioneering records change hands for big money, too.
In his original blog, Douglas made a plea for "the generation of multiplicity" finally to get its due.
"Multiplicity" is the key word, and it may help explain why the 70s was such a black hole for informed jazz commentary about all the fascinating stuff that was really going on. Taking their lead from the American free-jazz movement of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and others, jazz musicians around the world realised they could make their own music, with their own local materials, without necessarily having to copy the licks off a Blue Note hard-bop album - or off a John Coltrane album, for that matter.
The result was an explosion of new music, but one that many established jazz commentators didn't recognise as jazz at all or consider it part of their brief to cover. Lucky enough to learn from the few that did, that was where I, and a growing band of like-minded writer-fans (including the Guardian's Richard Williams, former Wire editor Richard Cook, journalist/broadcaster Brian Morton and others) came in. Now, liberated by the internet, the story finally begins to take its proper place in the cultural history of the late 20th century. Not for the first time, Dave Douglas has made a big difference.
