Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century
by Philip Freeman

Far from dead, jazz is more vital than it's been in decades. These are some of the artists keeping it alive in the twenty-first century.

What does jazz “mean” 20 years into the 21st century? Has streaming culture rendered music literally meaningless, thanks to the removal of all context beyond the playlist? Are there any traditions left to explore? Has the destruction of the apprenticeship model (young musicians learning from their elders) changed the music irrevocably? Are any sounds off limits? How far out can you go and still call it “jazz”? Or should the term be retired?

These questions, and many more, are answered in Ugly Beauty, as Phil Freeman digs through his own experiences and conversations with present-day players. Jazz has never seemed as vital as it does right now, and has a genuine role to play in 21st-century culture, particularly in the US and the UK.

Reviews:
"Ugly Beauty... provides a number of well-constructed signposts to understanding the complexities of jazz in the twenty-first century, sheds light on several dozen of its chief protagonists and provides listening guides that will serve as reference points for anyone coming to any of the music for the first time." ~ Ian Patterson, All About Jazz

As I began writing this review, I was about half-way through Phil Freeman's Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century. I had been picking it up and putting it down for a week or so, which is no fault of the author, rather I blame my computer-mediated attention deficit disorder. The thing is, Ugly Beauty is perfect for this approach to reading. The stories, anecdotes and encounters with musicians, choice quotes woven in from longer interviews, and smartly detailed tangents linking the musicians, the gigs, and the music are served well in short richly detailed chapters.

It is clear from the start that Freeman has listened to a wide and varied assortment of music and has done a painstaking job of keeping the details of the recordings, encounters, and concert dates straight. A sampling of artists are profiled in each chapter, but the subjects of the chapter are embedded in various networks. The enumerations of who has played with who, releasing this or that album, paints a picture of artistic development of both the artists and the scene they come from. Each artist/scene is treated to a similar presentation and by the end of each neatly structured chapter, you may, like me, find yourself popping off immediately to search your collection or check Spotify for one or more of the recordings you've just read about.

Freeman begins with the mainstream musicians, capturing several in the mid-point of their careers, including JD Allen, Ethan Iverson, Wayne Escoffery, Jason Moran and Orrin Evans. In Part II, he moves into the somewhat more experimental players, the ones who are reshaping 'jazz' and blending genres, like pianist Vijay Iyer, whose music straddles mainstream and avant-garde, as well as other fan favorites like Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid, Linda May Han Oh, Nicole Mitchell and Tyshawn Sorey. Throughout, the writing is crisp and smart. For example, an anecdote leads to Iyer through a concert from the Art Ensemble of Chicago and various offshoots. These connections, be they through people, places, or events, serve as path markers.

That is what this book does best, connecting the dots, giving shape to what jazz is today, though what it actually looks like, is fuzzier than ever before. Freeman starts with his nodes, offering a somewhat solid taxonomy, with each "part" of the book exploring a branch of the jazz family tree. To improve on that metaphor, I would recommend thinking of a giant Mangrove tree. In addition to what is on the page, the more the reader fills in the interconnections, the more this slim book fills in. Hell, this is the type of stuff we used to do teasing every piece of possible information out of LP liner notes.

In addition to the aforementioned topics, Freeman dedicates a chapter to spiritual jazz, rooting the work of Shabaka Hutchings, Yazz Ahmed, Makaya McCravan, Kamasi Washington, and Darius Jones (among others) loosely to the forebears: Albert Ayler, John and Alice Coltrane, and the general spiritual movement in the 60s and 70s. Then, he moves on to a set players of a specific instrument, the trumpet. He also notes that each player in this part, Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Kenyon Harold, Theo Crocker and Marquis Hill also incorporate hip-hop into their music. In the final part, and maybe what it was all leading up to anyway, the work of Jamie Branch, James Brandon Lewis, Matana Roberts, Kassa Overall, Moor Mother and Luke Stewart is connected through its raw and uncompromising genre-bending urgency.

This book will likely sit near to the Penguin Guide to Jazz by Brian Morton and Richard Cook on my shelf, whose thin pages of tiny font I once poured over religiously, seeking connections, trying to understand what I needed to know to 'know Jazz.' Here we follow Freeman doing the same. Ugly Beauty is less of a reference and more of a living history, where he's putting what these musicians are doing right now, into the context of, well, jazz in the 21st century.

~ Paul Acquaro, The Free Jazz Collective

Phil Freeman Knows His Jazz.

The acclaimed music critic and impresario delivers the only book on jazz in the 21st Century that matters.

~ Todd Manning, Rock and Roll Globe

Insightful, intelligent and thought provoking. Freeman makes a compelling and convincing case for the ongoing importance and vitality of jazz in the 21st century. ~ Ian Mann, The Jazz Mann

Read Ugly Beauty twice: once quickly to view the landscape; once slowly, sampling the music as you go. ~ Jon Turney | London Jazz News

Freeman’s portrayals of musicians are personal. He remembers the rush of the first time he saw them live, and what the weather was like. He remembers what they were wearing when he interviewed them. There is a risk in first-person criticism: The critic can become the story. Freeman never crosses that line.

Writing about music has famously been compared to dancing about architecture. The only hope is metaphor. Freeman has a poet’s instinct for it. Here’s just one example, describing Shabaka Hutchings’ collaboration with musicians from Cape Town: “… a pulsing, shuffling vamp that feels like dancing barefoot in the dust as the stars whirl above you.” ~ Thomas Conrad, Jazz Times

Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century will introduce the reader to dozens of artists making genuinely new music in what is undeniably one of the strongest eras in jazz history. It will change the way you listen, and the way you hear. ~ Bass Magazine

For the past 10+ years, Phil Freeman’s journal, Burning Ambulance, has planted a flag for thoughtful, ear-first, socially attuned music criticism — at a time when this kind of writing is far too rare. By documenting his devotion to creative music, Freeman has given a platform to some of today’s most badly under-recognized artists, while inviting readers to fall in love with the work on their own terms. With Ugly Beauty, Freeman gamely wrestles with some hard but important questions: What does it mean to be an improvising musician today? Where does this music come from, and where will it lead? Drawn from his own rich experiences on the noisy, knotty landscape of 21st-century jazz, Freeman's travelogue becomes a guide. ~ Giovanni Russonello, critic, New York Times, email

Phil Freeman has always been a free-thinking jazz critic, wary of majority opinion and allergic to conventional wisdom. In Ugly Beauty he applies that sensibility to a series of dispatches from a fast-moving scene, portraying some of the most vibrant artists of our time. A welcome addition to the growing literature around 21st century improvised music, with a crucial awareness of its relationship to a broader culture. ~ Nate Chinen, author of Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century

Phil Freeman composes a much-needed text pointing towards the futures of an important art form while making connections to its origins and histories over a century. He doesn’t only touch on the telling of a jazz story in the 21st century, but also prescribes a soundtrack within which to situate a time in history. His register of writing flows with rhythm, and this is a definite must get!

~ Nduduzo Makhathini, improviser, healer and scholar from South Africa