BEN RATLIFF ESSAY


Jazz is metal.

Well, of course it isn’t, really. They don’t sound alike on their outer layers. And their audiences don’t overlap.

Currently, making it in jazz means playing a circuit of sit-down supper clubs and comfortable midsize theaters booked by nonprofit arts presenters, and, in summer, at European festivals. If you make it in metal, you play a circuit of decentto- horrible stand-up clubs. (And, in summer, at European festivals.) The aesthetic ideals couldn’t be more different: jazz is about subtlety and, one wants to say, beauty; metal is about intimidation, alienation and assault.

Then again, over the last decade jazz and metal have become harder to reduce and easier to like, in a sum-total kind of way. And in the process they’ve generated more and more points of comparison.

Jazz stages and metal stages are places where a certain kind of experimentation happens: brainy and cabalistic, with a hint of a smile. Both increasingly depend on educated virtuosos. In both genres you can develop curious harmonic worlds, warp the tempos, brush against folkloric or conservatory music, play many notes very speedily and engage sturdy American grooves or a more studied system of fitting odd-number beats into even-number meters. Pat Metheny, jazz guitarist, meet Paul Masvidal of Cynic; Jeff (Tain) Watts, jazz drummer, meet Tomas Haake of Meshuggah. Both forms seem to have a neatly divided audience: maybe two-thirds respectfully fixated on the music’s past, onethird concerned about building paradigms for the future.

Both have become increasingly local and international at the same time; they depend on the scenes of certain communities - whether Brooklyn; Chicago; or Savannah, Georgia - but their audiences are everywhere. As of the late ‘00s both have been the subject of serious academic conferences. And aside from a few tanklike, old-favorite examples - Metallica and Keith Jarrett, say - if you want to keep up with either, you have to listen to cuts on MySpace pages and attend live performances .

Jazz and metal are both diversifying at a fantastic rate, feeding on their old modes and languages, combining them and breaking them down. (In both, the fans have become more suspicious of genre heresy than the musicians.) An album by a typically ambitious ‘00s metal group - like Baroness, Isis, Krallice or Nachtmystium - might put a dozen kinds of metal in a supercollider, spewing them all out in complicated, episodic song structures. So too with some of the better current jazz groups .

Traditionally, jazz and metal were vernacular arts in which working-class players could make their mark, but, for better or worse, that’s changing. It really does matter, in jazz, where you went to high school and college, which summer workshops you attended as a teenager. Likewise, I’ve got the names of five prominent, and totally ferocious, young New York metal musicians who attended elite private schools. I won’t release them.


RAFA RIVAS/AFP — GETTY IMAGES


RAHAV SEGEV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, top, and Blake Judd of metal band Nachtmystium.