Oh, no. you don't have to be American to blow with Joe Lovano
Last week at the Barbican, the great jazz pianist McCoy Tyner played half his concert in the company of a septet comprising five Americans and two Britons, trumpeter Byron Wallen and saxophonist Jason Yarde. The week before, the British saxist Tim Garland had deputised for a missing American in a powerful outfit led by Joe Lovano and won heartfelt applause from Lovano's regular players for the fire and dynamism of his contribution. On March 15, Garland takes to the road alongside classical composer Graham Fitkin, on a mixed-genre programme that joins UK symphonic players to an American jazz supergroup including Wayne Shorter's bass star, John Patitucci.
Great news, you might say, if you lean in a jazz direction. But what's so special about Americans and Brits sharing a stage? Isn't jazz supposed to be an international language?
A younger generation of listeners - and players - now takes this for granted, but not so long ago it was a very different story. When American jazz pioneers first began to regularly visit London in the early 1960s, their godlike charisma was occasionally tarnished by cavalier or downright patronising attitudes toward their British accompanists. The late Stan Getz, who some thought delivered the closest thing to romantic poetry ever attempted on a saxophone, would sometimes launch into public criticisms of his local rhythm section on gigs, to ripostes of "bollocks" from an unimpressed Stan Tracey on the piano chair. One American trumpet legend stopped a Ronnie Scott show to ask if anyone in the audience could play drums better than the local he'd been supplied with - who happened to be Phil Seamen, an inspiration to rock-drum giant Ginger Baker and one of the most creative percussionists the UK ever spawned.
For every egotistical international star who enjoyed humiliating fellow musicians deemed to be inferiors, there was of course an illustrious majority who wouldn't have dreamed of it. Americans Zoot Sims, Sonny Rollins, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Wes Montgomery, Johnny Griffin, Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon all had fruitful relationships with British players, and there were many more. But if the public abuses were rare, they were perhaps only the explicit manifestations of an assumption that was widely shared on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1950s and 1960s: that only Americans could play jazz creatively or possess the cultural, and possibly even genetic, wiring to conjure up the subtle mysteries of blues-inflected improvisation and swing.
Hearing British trumpeter Byron Wallen's warm and ringing sound cruising on McCoy Tyner's famously percussive piano chords the other day, or the sax lines of Tim Garland or Jason Yarde zigzagging quirkily over the surge of American rhythm sections, conclusively dispatches such dusty dogmas now. The difference is that such events don't feel like the honourable exceptions to otherwise immutable laws they seemed to be when Ronnie Scott or Stan Tracey did something similar half a century back. It's been a long trip, but now jazz really is an international language. Most people sense it and a fast-growing musical community can play it, too.
