I'm reviving this old thread because in my discussions with other musicians of what constitutes swing, there is no consensus. I also have to revise some of my own statements. I had said that what characterizes jazz is swing but this isn't always true. I've been listening to a lot of Ornette, Mingus, Coltrane and stuff like that and much of this stuff does not swing at all and yet it is still undoubtedly jazz. If we refuse to call it jazz then what do we call it?

The more interviews I read with Wynton Marsalis, the more I find myself in disagreement with his whole approach to jazz. He has an emphasis on tradition that seems to me to be dooming any new innovation in jazz because he is the jazz ambassador. On the one hand, I understand and agree that kids today should learn about the great past jazz masters. They should be familiar with early Louis, Duke, Basie, Jelly Roll and people like that. I agree with that. But it seems to me that Marsalis takes them back to that period and drops them off there--as though nothing that has happened in jazz since the 30s means anything.

He also puts great emphasis on black musicians (and while I wouldn't call Jelly Roll black, I wouldn't call him white either). He seems to be doing this at the expense of great white jazz masters. He schools young pianists in Duke, for example, but not Bill Evans. Why not? I would say Evans is more relevant because he picked up at a later point when Duke's style, as great as it was, had become dated, had become "classic" jazz. Evans's style was inevitable because we can't keep producing new Dukes year after year--except it seems to me to be exactly what Marsalis is doing. Wasn't the original Duke enough? Would Duke want to see himself carbon-copy cloned a millions times over a century or two after his death? I'm going to go out on a limb and say no.

And it all seems to go back this notion that Marsalis has of what constitutes "swing." He does not appear to have considered bop to have swing and his faith in jazz seems to end at that point. In the Marsalis jazz universe, jazz stopped at the advent of bop.

So I realize that I also have revise my idea of what swing is because I was contradicting myself. I can't maintain that the prime characteristic of jazz is swing and yet consider something like Ornette's "European Echoes" to be jazz when entire sections of it lack any swing element as I was defining swing.

I was listening to something on the XM jazz station (channel 67) on my way to work one morning last week. May have been McCoy Tyner, maybe Dexter Gordon--forgot who it was--but it had a sax, piano, maybe a vibe and drums kind of weaving in and out of each other's lines. What caught my attention was that the bass wasn't walking as one might expect in such music. It played the same simple riff over and over, keeping rigid time. The thing was, it was 3/4 time. That's unusual enough but the 3/4 time was not waltz time--ONE two three ONE two three--it was absolutely unnaccented 3/4 time. I realized it because the bass line was so odd in its repetition that I began counting trying to figure out what it was and it was 3/4 time but I knew that only because nothing else fit--but it didn't sound like 3/4 time. I realized without the bass, I would have had no idea what time this piece was in. Yet swing is time-oriented and that time is virtually always 4/4. This piece had no swing at all but it was definitely jazz because it could not have been anything else.

So I find myself unable to really define swing or even jazz for that matter.