Stories about jazz are more often about dead heroes than about the future. If they do reflect on jazz's prospects, they are usually bleak. The genre has been declared dead more than once, and if jazz is not dead, it has at least moved or it smells weird.
Ten years back, British essayist Geoff Dyer published a more nuanced obituary, "Is Jazz Dead?". With a question mark indeed. If jazz is alive, according to Dyer, it is in a new capacity because, he argues, jazz as jazz is dead. In doing so, he touches on an interesting point, change is essential in jazz, but to what extent can something change and still remain recognisable as itself? Jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins sees no problem in this; according to him, jazz can mate and absorb endlessly and still remain jazz.
Someone who passionately shared this view was keyboardist Austin Peralta. On 21 November 2012, Peralta died, just short of twenty-two years old. A young, dead jazz hero, what would the future of jazz have looked like with him?
Jazz is ecstasy
A film recording of the last song of Peralta's last concert can be found on Youtube. What exactly happened after the performance is not known. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, Peralta came home, ate a plate of pasta and went to bed. In the morning, housemates still heard him snoring loudly; a little later he was dead.
It almost seems as if whoever filmed Peralta's last gig had inside information; he has very little eye for the other musicians including the nevertheless very charming singer and constantly zooms in on Peralta smiling and in a trance behind his Nord keyboard. Knowing how it will end with the keyboardist not long after this, you think you can clearly see that he is under the influence. The death certificate cites pneumonia combined with drugs and alcohol as the probable cause.
Jazz is dark
There are quite a few complaints that jazz has become too well-behaved and clean, that it lacks the dark side and soul. Equating drinking and drug use with putting a soul into music is not only dangerous, but above all nonsensical. What is not in, cannot come out, you would think.
Yet musician/producer Flying Lotus stated that for his most recent album "You're Dead", he had deliberately taken psychedelics, to loosen up certain feelings, thoughts and ideas. Flying Lotus doesn't just pop up here. He and Peralta worked together, they shared the view that jazz is music for seekers. Both were in their own way rooted in the jazz tradition, both did not intend to be constrained by it.
Not all jazz is dead
Of the two of them, Peralta was the closest to jazz as jazz is dead according to Geoff Dyer. The son of film director Stacey Peralta was an authentic child prodigy. In 2006, the year he turned 16, he recorded two albums for Sony, which included the two famous bassists Buster Williams and Ron Carter. A year earlier, he had already recorded the CD "Inta' Out" as leader of the Hour Trio.
Satisfied with those records, he was not. Among other things, it bothered him that he had not been given full artistic responsibility. Virtuosos are often also perfectionists. What you hear is an exceptionally gifted pianist, but one who does not yet have a clear story of his own. He saw that himself.
Then, in 2011, "Endless Planets" was released. That record undeniably testifies to the immense talent Peralta had, and for the first time he also shows the direction in which he intends his music to evolve. A masterpiece it is not, but that someone who was only eighteen at the time of recording was able to deliver such a mature CD is still an achievement of note. One would call it an immense promise, were it not for the fact that it can never be fulfilled.
Jazz is limitless
So in what way do the future of jazz and this unimaginable tragedy converge? The answer lies in Peralta's boundlessness. Both his latest CD and the few interviews with him that remain testify to an unbridled commitment and a rock-solid conviction that music is no less than anything else.
Peralta laid it all on the table: virtuosity, but also spirituality, goofiness and mysticism. He could steal the show and show off his dexterity, but however young he was, he knew that music is about more than that; about love and daring, about wanting to seek rather than find, about a making connections with all that is imaginable and that which can only be felt or experienced. What that is doesn't matter, it can be big or small, lofty or banal.
A swagger emerges from the titles of Peralta's songs, another one that would make you think: if only that went well, if you didn't already know it didn't go well. One of his songs is called "The Underwater Mountain Odyssey" which is such an absurd title in which he reveals himself, strange and driven, fascinating, contemporary and yet certainly not detached from the past, when you hear that piece and forget the context, nothing seems more nonsensical than not seeing a future for jazz.
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