Chasing the moment

by Jack Shepherd
Arcola Theatre, Arcola St, London E8

Review by Chris Parker

Playwright/actor Jack Shepherd cites a 1970s conversation with a mature jazz musician, in which the latter was bemoaning the fact that his generation of players had been muscled out of the limelight by a new generation, as the seed that developed into Chasing the Moment, a play centring on a quartet gig in a basement jazz club.

Performed by four actors who can actually play their instruments (indeed they do a perfectly passable short set including material by Thelonious Monk in the play's interval), Shepherd's drama is straightforward in form – in the first half, the musicians set up, then play during the interval and pack up and go home in the second half – and its themes emerge uncontrivedly from this situation, so it inevitably explores a number of contentious issues surrounding (some might say bedevilling) the music.

The first (and most sensitive) of these is race. Shepherd himself plays Les, an ageing (white) piano player who hero-worships Bill Evans, looks back fondly to a time when jazz musicians (he cites Ben Webster and Lester Young in particular) were immediately identifiable by their sound (nowadays, he claims, every young saxophonist wants to sound like David expletive deleted Sanborn with a hint of blues stridency taken from Earl Bostic), and is driven to despair by the idea that he can never be fully accepted as an 'authentic' jazz musician because his skin's the wrong colour.

This last anxiety bursts forth in a bitter argument with the band's (black) drummer, Tony, played by Clifford Samuel. Having pussyfooted round the whole subject in the play's first half, these two suddenly find themselves screaming at each other in the second half; Tony, nettled by Les's increasingly paranoid remarks on the subject, suddenly catalogues all the reasons he considers responsible for what he sees as black musicians' special adeptness in the field. Chief among these is resentment of white racism, both historical (slavery and lynching) and contemporary (his own experiences in hotels etc.).

Sidestepping the essentialist argument upon which he has already poured scorn in the play's first half (he satirically accuses Les of thinking that all black people have an inborn sense of rhythm), he instead subscribes to the idea that his race's musical skill is rooted in its particular history and culture rather than in genetics.

Appealed to as a referee in this contest, the band's saxophonist, Joe (a young white man who hitherto has been the butt of various jibes concerning his personifying the yuppification of jazz), is clearly uncomfortable with the whole subject, murmuring merely that he has always supposed that, nowadays, jazz is regarded solely as an international artform, the special province of no particular race or nationality.

It is difficult not to agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, pace Stanley Crouch; it is, arguably, a pity that the play undercuts this opinion by placing it in the mouth of an overtly flawed character, a man callow and insensitive enough to be unwilling to face the fact that he has thoughtlessly impregnated Tony's sister; how much more subtle and powerfully nuanced it would have been to have placed it in Tony's mouth in an argument with Joe, who might have made a much more convincing 'essentialist', given his superficiality.

Surely the last word in this highly controversial area might reasonably be given to Duke Ellington, who, asked by a (white) interviewer about 'his [Ellington's] people', fixed his interlocutor with a steely, unwavering eye and proceeded to ask what 'people' he meant, people who loved jazz? people who liked fine wines? etc. etc. On another occasion, asked if he resented his 'people's' treatment in the USA, he replied that he 'thought about the energy required to pout and then wrote a blues'.

The point being, of course, that skin colour (like eye colour or relative curliness of hair) is among the least interesting or significant features of any human being, certainly not the meaningful primary characteristic of division so beloved of racists.

The second contentious jazz-related theme explored in this play springs from the aforementioned alleged lack of distinctiveness of contemporary players, compared with the instant recognisability of the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, John Coltrane et al. If there is any truth in this claim (and it's by no means proven; one only has to think of the difference in every conceivable respect between, say, Mark Turner and Tim Berne, or between – to take other instruments – Bill Frisell and Mike Stern or Robert Mitchell and Gwilym Simcock to see that the range of available tones and overall approaches is as wide as ever), it is likely that it's attributable not to a lack of individuality per se, but to the lack of the one major factor in creating the musical stylistic equivalent of Nature's chance mutations, isolation.

These days, everything recorded is instantly available to whoever wishes to listen to/download it; music colleges also inevitably 'homogenise' pupils in respect of (to take an obvious example) technical details such as embouchure (it's impossible to imagine a modern Lester Young being allowed to stick the saxophone in the corner of his mouth like he did); and jazz is no longer learned on the stand, from a limited range of idiosyncratic individuals, as it used to be. Given these constraints, it's surely remarkable that the music today accommodates as many highly original and instantly identifiable players as it does.

A related point (springing as it does, like the above, largely from what might be termed kneejerk nostalgia) also comes up in the play: the idea that great (or 'authentic') jazz springs most readily from suffering and extremes of life-experience, rather as a pearl is produced by constant irritation; the corollary being that well-adjusted, hard-working, technically proficient musicians (like Joe, whose artistic superficiality is symbolised by his smart jacket) inevitably produce glib, unaffecting music.

'Real' jazz musicians, on the other hand, are either drug-raddled amateur philosophers such as the quartet's bassist, Harry (played by Jim Bywater), or hopelessly unprofessional enthusiasts such as Les (who is in a bad mood all through the first half of the action because he's been deemed incapable, earlier in the day, of providing 'happy breakfast-eating music' for a cereal commercial) – as if technical prowess and reasonable biddability are inherently inimical to the production of meaningful jazz.

This veers dangerously close to the 'doomed genius' view of the music encapsulated in such books as Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful; it's a world where Chet Baker's or Charlie Parker's addiction to heroin is seen as a vital ingredient of, rather than a regrettable handicap to, their genius, and where the singing of late-period Billie Holiday, say, is seen as more affecting, more genuinely artistic, drawing more directly on the 'spirit of jazz', than the work she produced in her Teddy Wilson period.

Where the play does score heavily, though, is in its intelligent utilisation of the conventions of jazz – chief among them the solo interpretation of particular themes, and what Shepherd himself refers to as 'the high-wire act, without a safety net', improvisation – to air its concerns. It's also engagingly performed and intelligently written, and as such provides two and a quarter hours of absorbing theatrical entertainment.

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by Jack Shepherd
Arcola Theatre, Arcola St, London E8

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Coming soon...

How to find the club

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Ochre Works

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Chasing the moment

by Jack Shepherd Arcola Theatre, Arcola St, London E8

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by Jack Shepherd
Arcola Theatre, Arcola St, London E8

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