An Interview with Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum

As part of our InsideMilwaukee blog, The State of Jazz To Come, Milwaukee Jazz Vision sought an interview with Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum, senior lecturer in UW-Milwaukee’s Music History & Literature department. As an artist and educator, he is someone who’s lived through nearly every important cultural moment in America for the last five decades.  Given his extensive resume and personal interest in jazz, we asked him a few questions about it – both as a cultural experience and as part of Milwaukee’s history. 

“Rock isn’t dead; its medium is.  Jazz isn’t dead; its audience is.” — MJR

Graham Marlowe: That quote of yours has guided a lot of my thinking about jazz music and how it’s defined in our society (as well as that of other countries’). How would you explain that quote to a class of college freshmen?

MJR: Unfortunately, the mass-culture definition of what jazz is has fallen into the category of entertainment, of common territory, and that’s a dangerous place to be for music like this.  There is something to keep in mind, though.

A defining element of jazz has been that a performance is serious listeners listening to serious players.  In Milwaukee and elsewhere, there’s always been a connectedness with other people at performances, a sense of “What borders will be pushed tonight?” as an audience. No matter who it was, it seemed everyone had the recordings years ago; everyone knew the pieces. A better example would be Bob Dylan going completely electric with Highway 61 Revisited.  Upon the release of this album, some skipped that day of high school, reacting as if they were receiving a signal from Mars.  This was only magnified by 1967’s John Wesley Harding, the content of which introduced an entirely new rock and roll altogether.  

GM: It’s interesting that you use the satellite metaphor.  There’s another time-stopping element to this discussion, though.  Quite naturally, jazz plays with our sense of time, particularly our response to the passage of time.  On what level has this…special something…been lost to the iPod, that feeling of intimacy as an involved listener?

MJR: What’s so important about jazz is that a recording is a moment in time and a performance will experiment with what’s already been done. During Milwaukee’s artistic golden age – to which I would count the late 60’s through the early 80’s — clubs like the Jazz Gallery were overflowing with people, even on weeknights.  Folks like John Abercrombie, David Hazeltine, Sun Ra…you really went on journeys with these players.  The idea was not entertainment; the idea was exploration using music.  Jazz has gone into a category of entertainment and therefore has really fallen back on a lot of standards.  It’s fallen into an idiom that needs to be recognizable to an audience now.

Large audiences want to hear standards; this has nothing to do with castigating standards. (How can we live without them?)  The idea is to push forward – that’s what jazz is all about.  To me, that’s what jazz should be.  It should be playing vertically, not horizontally.  And the problem is they’re playing to audiences horizontally because that’s what they want.  Why this has gone on is complicated, but there are more than a few local musicians – Jack Grassel, Steve Nelson-Raney, et al – that certainly go beyond the call of duty and are still playing.  It’s all about preserving artistic intention.

GM: Steve Peplin and I recently spoke on the genreless quality of modern music, as well as cultural perceptions of jazz amongst young people.  He said something to the effect of, “When promoting yourself as a jazz musician, you might as well call [your music] something else and tell people  it’s jazz later.”  Perhaps people are a bit jazz-prejudicial, since the more cerebral music gets the more it feels like work for non-serious listeners.

MJR: It sounds like stereotyping or gross generalization, but I don’t think many people understand what jazz is supposed to do.  It’s nearly impossible to be a pure jazz artist today as a result of the factors we’ve mentioned.

Ezra Pound once said, “Give me three people and let me restart civilization.”  Another thing he said is that all publishing should cease for one decade [and see what happens.] I agree: all music should stop streaming .wav files for ten years.  I mean that philosophically; obviously it can’t happen.  There’s just too much coming from everywhere, and so we have nothing that’s truly being heard.

GM: While it’s obvious to someone like you, who’s lived the history of jazz, how have cultural perceptions of jazz changed – locally? Nationally?

Jazz appears small in Milwaukee, relative to its local music, despite the fact that it encompasses a large network of well-educated musicians.  This puts jazz in a lonely place.  But then again, doesn’t certain music romanticize “the loneliness of the long-distance musician”?  My criticism is rooted in an optimism that needs to be imparted on the role of the listener.  Thanks to the Googleability of anyone doing synth-pop in their parents’ basement, those who persevere as artists will create their own means of expression.  Some start their own venues.

This speaks to the importance of the – albeit slow – jazz revitalization process occurring in Milwaukee, particularly in the Music Department at UW-M and the Conservatory.  Jazz grows there.  I’ve seen it; I’ve been there.  So for that alone I’m optimistic.  There really is a respectable following for jazz in this area.  It’s just that no one knows where to find it.

Do you feel Milwaukee has the tools it needs to resuscitate jazz to its previous levels?

Life is too complicated for me to get out and about like I used to, though it’s certainly possible.  Either way, it’s something that can be felt – whether something is happening or not, that is.  The return of the Jazz Gallery series next week is key, but there needs to be more.  I’m also told Eddie Gomez is bringing his trio to UW-M in September.  Although the dominoes that created the original scene are set up differently now, they can always be reset. From what I’ve seen and heard, I’m optimistic about that as a Milwaukeean.

[A much longer, audio-included version of this interview will appear on MJV’s blog early next week.]