Jazz Off the Record
January 16, 2025 at 12:15AMOn a night in 1966, at a Lower East Side club called Slugs’ Saloon, a sound engineer recorded an 86-minute set by a jazz quartet whose members had supported modern jazz’s best-known players, including John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Pianist and writer Ethan Iverson uses that recording, recently released under the title Forces of Nature, to re-open the doors of Slugs’ and explore the ways in which free jazz and fusion continued to evolve, long after most listeners had moved on. Throughout, Iverson is a studious listener, identifying the giant steps as well as the subtler ones that make the short-lived, intimate scene at Slugs’ worthy of preservation.
The idioms of free jazz and fusion are perpetually controversial. The Ken Burns PBS documentary Jazz, which codified a certain narrative of jazz history in the public imagination, did what it could to ignore both. The story Burns tells suggests that jazz was in hibernation between the death of Coltrane and the eventual emergence of new traditionalists like Wynton Marsalis. The music played at Slugs’ and clubs like it goes all but unmentioned.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/15/jazz-off-the-record/
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