Ellis Marsalis, 85, a singular New Orleans jazz pianist and father of musicians Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason Marsalis.
Lee Konitz, 92, a Chicago-born-and-raised jazz artist who changed the way the alto saxophone is played and heard.
Wallace Roney, 59, a herculean jazz trumpeter and Miles Davis protégé who famously backed the legend during the troubled “Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux” concert in 1991.
All are jazz masters who died in recent weeks due to the coronavirus. The frightfully expanding list also includes beloved guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, 94; versatile pianist Mike Longo, a longtime musical director for Dizzy Gillespie, 83; and avant-garde bassist Henry Grimes, who in the early 2000s enjoyed a surprising comeback after decades of obscurity, 84.
Plus, of course, uncounted others not famous enough to have made headlines.
But why such a heavy toll in jazz? Why have so many artists in this realm succumbed? Or does it just seem that way?
It will be a while before we can accurately assess whether jazz indeed has suffered more losses, proportionately, than other art forms. Yet the tragedy of so many major figures dying of the disease in such short order says a great deal about the jazz world’s perils and vulnerabilities.
For starters, jazz – unlike today’s commercial musical forms – reveres its elders. The hot young stars, Top 40 songs, viral hits, Grammy telecasts and other facets of the pop, rock and rap industries are practically alien to the rather insular domain of jazz. So while the music that most of America listens to has an increasingly brief shelf life (notwithstanding the Rolling Stones), jazz musicians lead careers that often gather momentum when they’re in their 70s, 80s and even 90s.
As many medical articles have pointed out, seniors are more susceptible to the coronavirus than others. Which means that, by definition, the most celebrated and honored musicians in jazz – its distinguished veterans – are the most likely to die.
The coronavirus also threatens another group: those with underlying medical conditions. Here, too, jazz musicians are disproportionately exposed. For apart from jazz stars with busy touring schedules and excellent health insurance to match, most jazz musicians have lived gig to gig and spent years – often decades – without decent medical care. Health conditions ignored in youth take their toll in old age.
Even when they’re old and admired, most jazz musicians lack benefits associated with many 9-5 jobs. Beyond the aforementioned health insurance, the luxury of paid sick days and vacations, overtime, pensions, 401(k)s and other perks that soften life’s hard blows are virtually nonexistent in jazz. The gig economy may be expanding in America today, but jazz musicians have been living it, suffering from it and dying from it since the dawn of the music, more than a century ago.
What we have in the coronavirus death toll, then, is the embodiment of the way America long has regarded the music it created, and for which it is admired around the world (far more widely than at home). Jazz often is called America’s original art form, a music that could only have been invented in a polyglot nation where African roots and European traditions intertwined, where slavery and subsequent racial oppression yielded a music that celebrates freedom and liberation. But the marginal existence that most American jazz musicians endure does not position them well to face a virulent new virus.
And that brings us to the consequences of all this death in jazz. To date, we’ve lost more than Marsalis’ crystalline touch, Konitz’s liquidity of phrase and Roney’s brash exhortations. We’ll miss more than Pizzarelli’s extraordinary lyric sense, Longo’s ingenious voicings and Grimes’ fearless experiments.
We’re also losing the hard-won knowledge, experience and wisdom that these masters, and others, otherwise would be passing along to subsequent generations. For any jazz player will tell you that lessons learned in the classroom – how to build a chord or analyze a solo, how to structure rhythm or deconstruct a melodic line – tell only half the story. The rest is absorbed viscerally, on the bandstand, in the heat of the moment, before a listening public, when expectations are highest and the pressure greatest.
A young jazz instrumentalist once told me of the first time he sat in with Chicago jazz giant and tenor saxophone virtuoso Von Freeman, who died in 2012 at age 88. After the fellow’s first solo, Freeman signaled him to play another, and another, and another. Though the emerging artist was practically out of ideas, Freeman pushed him to play more and more and more.
Why did he put the kid through this ordeal?
“Because you have to play everything you know, before you can get to what you don’t know,” Freeman told him.
No one again will experience that kind of crucible with the likes of Marsalis, Konitz, Roney or the others. Multiply that times all the jazz deaths we haven’t read about and all those yet to come, and you have a loss of still incalculable dimension.
What happens when so many elders of a single art form vanish all at once?
What happens to generations of musicians who would have learned from playing alongside them, from asking questions and from listening in the audience?
What happens when the greatest jazz musicians suddenly disappear?
We’re about to find out.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@chicagotribune.com
