Rafiq Bhatia - Strata EP - Pt. 1 (in which nothing is said about the actual album)

(apologies if you tried to read this before it got proofread... it is proofread now)

A Really Long Preface

People don't really listen to jazz. That is, a lot of people who should listen to jazz, don't listen to jazz. Oh sure, everyone has their brief flings with Miles Davis and John Coltrane or whatever; and lots of people even go further and actually continue to learn about and listen to all that stuff, but I'm talking current jazz--the fucking shit that is happening right now. And Rafiq Bhatia's "Strata" EP, released earlier this week, is a blazing spacecraft, pointing the way though hyperspace to what the thing called "jazz" can be in 2012 and beyond. Or maybe already is.

What the hell is jazz anyway? Peeps toss around words like and "improvised" and "saxophone" as if that would define. Sorry but no. If you're interested you can read some really angry yet often on point shit by Nicholas Payton on the history of the word "jazz", and the not little controversy that followed, but right now I'd rather just get some kind of operational definition that encompasses its unique ethos and explains the connection between a large and sometimes disparate group of musicians.

When most people think of "jazz" today, they are thinking of the creatively, African-American based-musics of the 50's and 60's, and maybe the various strains that branched off from them the 70's, but that is pretty much as far as they go, though it does go much further.

We got this kind of jazz--which is, for all intents in purposes, Jazz, so let's dispense with the qualifyingyness--when Bebop, with its emphasis on instrumental mastery, first splintered off from the rest of the jazz world. And while it might be an oversimplification to say that the goal of Bebop was to play some shit that white people couldn't play, I think that ethos has been and continues to be the defining factor of jazz to this day.


Jazz is:

A. Rooted in African-American culture, and,
B. Emphasizes the players' mastery of their instruments

And then maybe a more ambiguous corollary stemming from those two of: 

C. Striving to move forward.

From Bebop, we moved to Cool Jazz, which on the surface would seem to be the antithesis of the former's lighting fast, fiery, competitive nature. But, after all, its pioneer, Miles Motherfucking Davis, was there for Bebop, and while he may not have drawn explicitly on its vocabulary, did draw heavily on its meaning, as did most of the jazz that followed. 

But mastery of the instrument. Before we can discuss this, lets just get it out of the way that mastery of the instrument does not mean playing really fast. I would just use the word virtuosity, which should mean the same thing, but unfortunately it's been pretty much hijacked to mean stupid shit like child prodigies, guitar speed record holders, and/or Yngwie Fucking Malmsteen, or as he is known in some circles, the most coolest motherfucker in the entire world.

What constitutes actual mastery of the instrument is a little harder to define, and technical facility is definitely a part of it, but only in its ability to facilitate instrumental exploration.  And when multiple people are making those explorations together, you get what I think is the ultimate part of or maybe goal of playing jazz: to be simultaneously creating and communicating in a new and unique musical language.

While every genre (and form of art) consists of this kind of language forming/communicating thing, in jazz it is especially emphasized; its very form is set up to encourage and maybe even require it. Because of the unpredictable nature of the music, its song structures that are generally meant to facilitate variation and improvisation over plain recital, and the prevailing lack of lyrics from which to derive a song's meaning, the players of jazz are and must be constantly striving to find ways to create and convey feeling.

You could say that the drama of jazz comes from the constantly morphing and evolving structure of the melody, harmony, and rhythm of the song itself.

Aaaaaanyway, this language, the kind of shared though still differing schools of Jazz, reached kind of critical mass in the mid-to-late 60's (as did like everything else) with the electric experiments of Miles, the swirling mixture of dissonance and spirituality of John Coltrane, and the sui generis free jazz of Ornette Coleman, before splintering off in the 70's into stuff like post-Bitches Brew fusion, post-Trane Black Saint/Soul Note, a whole bunch of crazy and sometimes European free jazz, and eventually *shudder* smooth jazz.

And then it got a lot less popular.

I mean, look, This band opened for fucking Neil Young at the Filmore. The Byrds' Roger McGuinn drew inspiration from John Coltrane for this guitar solo; Chester Thompson could drum with Weather Report and Frank Zappa and even fucking Genesis; Rashaan Roland Roland Kirk would jam with Jimi Hendrix (and if I could take a time machine to any jam session in history this would no question be it).

So what happened?

Well, TO BE CONTINUED IN PT 2!