<i>Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense</i>. Michael Rivoira, Lars Larson and Peter J. Vogt, directors. John W. Comerford and Theo N. Ianuly, producers. Lars Larson, director of photography. Paradigm Studio. 2009. DVD B002RNO1BW

Abstract

Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense. Michael Rivoira, Lars Larson and Peter J. Vogt, directors. John W. Comerford and Theo N. Ianuly, producers. Lars Larson, director of photography. Paradigm Studio. 2009. DVD B002RNO1BW.The documentary Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense makes a case for jazz as a living culture and growing art form in North America and Europe. Jazz artists, including Nicholas Payton, Terence Blanchard, Ravi Coltrane, Bill Frisell, Donald Harrison, Wynton Marsalis and Esperanza Spalding, provide the film's primary voices; these musicians, along with others, address how they reconcile the demands of tradition with the realities of changing audiences and markets. This is no small task because, as the documentary demonstrates, jazz is comprised of a fractured and contested set of overlapping and often conflicting values and practices. Because of this approach, Icons provides an alternative narrative to Ken Burns's Jazz (2000), which has drawn criticism for portraying jazz as a uniform expression of American democratic ideals rather than a multiplicity of stories struggling to be told.1This 93-minute documentary is presented in a traditional style with talking heads interspersed with performances and other B-roll material. This format allows the viewer to connect the featured musicians' personalities to their live performances while not getting mired in extended concert footage or thirdparty pontifications. We see the jazz musician as a working artist, struggling with their craft while negotiating shifting economic and social worlds. We are also taken into the contemporary contexts of jazz, from grimy college bars, to concert halls; from outdoor festivals to street corners and intimate clubs. Few viewers will miss the stark contrast of saxophonist Skerik's (Eric Walton) punk-laced mosh-inducing performance in a cramped and sweaty bar with clarinetist Anat Cohen's delicately crafted interpretations of American songbook standards for reserved Manhattan listeners.The central theme of the documentary emerges from a survey of musicians' attitudes towards the idea of change, a long-contested concept in jazz. The viewer quickly realizes that while the various musicians interviewed in Icons draw from a common tradition of music-making, they interpret that tradition in widely varied ways. The documentary opens with trumpeter Nicholas Payton's enigmatic statement, 'The truth never remains the same and to me a lie is anything that has nothing to do with now'. While setting a revisionist tone, this statement does little to clarify what the boundaries of change are or should be in jazz. For guitarist Bill Frisell, the boundaries of change are theoretically limitless:I just don't like it when the name of something has the effect of exclud - ing. If you say it's one thing then it can't be something else. That doesn't work for me because the words are always smaller than whatever it is you're trying to describe. For me jazz is infinite.Jazz, in Frisell's world, is a means to joyfully deconstruct the world and test cultural boundaries. His brooding interpretation of Bob Dylan's 'Masters of War' in Icons is a case in point.Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and scholar Paul de Barros counter Frisell's utopian art-scape realization of jazz with essentialist readings of the music's history. Marsalis states, 'In jazz, it's interesting in America, that we are one of the only people in the world that created an art form then tried to figure out how to make it not have a definition.' Fundamental to this statement is the idea that jazz's identity hinges on one definition rather than many overlapping and contested definitions. While Marsalis focuses on the aesthetic choices of musicians, de Barros points to contemporary musicians' lack of social engagement as the source of jazz's current disenfranchisement from audiences and markets. As he states,If you ask Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins what their music was saying they would say, 'I'm a black person in a white society where I have something to say and I need it to be heard. …