I stumbled on this amazing video called simply "Sound" from 1966. It features Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage, two sonic experimenters that I never expected to see together. Kirk, if you don't know, had a habit of playing multiple horns at once and taking the appearance of a shaman. As far out as Kirk got (and he did get out there) there's always a deep blues root.
And then John Cage! I read a bio of Cage several years back, and while I don't love everything in his work, he was an interesting Zen presence in the world of music. The Fluxus, conceptual aspect of Cage is intriguing and inspiring. I performed in a theater piece in college where I used some of his ideas for creating using random selection to inspire musical structure.
Here, Cage says:
Is it a sound? If so, is it music? Is music the word I mean? Is that a sound? If it is, is music "music"?
In the film, Cage addresses his famous piece 4:33 as non-obtusely as I've ever heard him:
Silence is not a question of a little sound or more sound. There's no such thing as no sound. It's just a question of what sounds we intend, and what sounds we don't intend.
"Cool" and "hot" are, on the surface, very simplistic descriptive terms. But in the jazz world, they take on deeper meanings. Consider this excerpt from Wikipedia, describing my latest obsession, "hard bop":
Hard bop was developed in the mid-1950s, partly in response to the vogue for cool jazz that became popular in the early 1950s. A simplistic definition states that "cool jazz", or "west coast jazz", emphasized the more European elements of the music, deriving to a great extent from the "chamber jazz" experiments of the Miles Davis nonet and Dave Brubeck's various quartets, while hard bop brought the church and gospel music back into jazz, emphasizing the African elements.
The definition of cool in this context isn't what I would expect. When you think of cool, don't you envision snapping fingers, Chet Baker's chilly vocals or Miles' muted trumpet, a sinuous bass line? Instead, this description describes cool jazz as intellectual, studied, and, well, white. The contrast between cool jazz and hard bop is one I feel strongly today. The serious jazz is either formulaic to a fault or intellectual to the point of sucking the gospel/blues spirit from the music. Or, even worse, is mired in atmospherics and borderline "new age." While I'm not calling for a rigid return to traditional jazz, I do find jazz that tosses the gospel/blues root out the window to be, well, not jazz, and less frequently what I want to listen to.
I mean, there's a lot of room to be intellectual and challenging within the framework! Such as, one of my latest finds (as always, new to me but I'm sure not new to many others):
"Hot" jazz, on the other hand, isn't the opposite of cool but a description from another era entirely. I'll save that for another post. But to sum up, I don't want to reject the "cool" entirely- an intellectual approach to music brings to fruition many great projects. But it is also too much at risk of losing the soul, the root that makes music music.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Gone too long from this record, and in the meantime have spelunked many discoveries. Number one of which: Yusef Lateef and his early experiments in melding Eastern sounds with jazz.
Blues for the Orient is an indicative track. The drums start out quiet, with a snaking rhythm with tambourine. The piano thrums in, with an aggressive drone. Then Lateef comes in, playing an oboe with mysterious long notes. A quiet tension holds the piece together, until it bursts into a swinging jazz rhythm, only to return to the East 12 bars later.
One of my favorite pieces of music has a similar sound: Duke Ellington's version of Tchiakovsky's Arabesque, which he calls Arabesque Cookie.
Spike Lee used it for a scene in Malcolm X where he enters a mosque in Africa and decides to convert to the Muslim faith. Lateef was also a Muslim convert, and I think you can hear his spirituality in his music. He's a professor of music, and he teaches his own theory of music which he calls Autophysiopsychic Music. He xplains it as music which comes from one's physical, mental, and spiritual self.
I asked my good friend, former bandmate and wicked clarinetist Chris Broderick if he'd like to do a guest post, and he was kind enough to do so:
Thanks to Tim for the opportunity to post. Here goes.
Admittedly, this is a generalization, but jazz is a music that uses composition as a framework for improvisation. In the most traditional post-bebop jazz settings, the band will play the melody of a song, AKA the head, and then instrumentalists will solo over the chord changes that are implied by or composed over the melody. In the case of many recordings, including the one above ("You're My Everything," from the album Relaxin' with The Miles Davis Quartet), the sense of arrangement often comes not in something predetermined, but on the fly, a result of impulsive choices or reactions to choices by the other musicians.
This recording is a perfect example. It begins with the musicians warming up, Miles shushing them before he cues pianist Red Garland to start the song. Garland begins with some bebop piano runs before Miles whistles and cuts him off. "Block chords," he says, and the process begins again, with Garland playing a simpler melody backed by lush block chords. And the stage is set for an elegant walk through a lovely tune, with crystalline solos by Davis and John Coltrane, backed up by bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
This record was one of a series of four (Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin') that were the product of only two days of recording, in May and October of 1956. During that time, the band played dozens of shows, at least, and had developed a pretty strong sense of mutual rapport. That sense of understanding, and knowledge of the material, allows them to take a song in a number of different directions on any given performance.
Maybe that idea is better seen in this performance, by another Miles Davis Quartet, with Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Ron Carter on bass, Herbie Hancock on piano, and Tony Williams on drums. They're performing a tune called "Agitation", composed by Miles, though there's maybe 20 seconds of composition for nearly seven minutes of improvisation.
What gives this seven minutes of music a sense of shape is the band's willingness to change the rhythmic structure of the song on the fly, jumping from blisteringly fast bebop shuffling to loping swing at the drop of a hat. Williams pays close attention to the rhythms that the soloist creates, and changes his drum patterns to reflect that. The rest of the band follows suit. That may not be precisely the order of operations as it happened on the bandstand, and in a way, what makes this ensemble truly remarkable is how quickly they collectively intuit and respond to these changes, which makes it difficult to see who is the catalyst for any given change.
Which is all to say that, yes, Tim, I agree that arrangement is an important part of jazz, but as often as not, that arrangement is not a matter of notes on paper, but is, instead, arrangement on the fly, or in other words, improvisation.
Django Reinhardt is one of my jazz idols, right up there in the pantheon with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. He's a quirky choice, being a gypsy from France and having two fingers on his fretting hand fused together in a fire. But Django was a breathtaking guitarist, playing his solos with such style and verve that I am hooked every time I listen.
More on Django later, but please enjoy "Belleville"...
In an earlier post, I talked about the tree of jazz history and its different branches. One of the more interesting moments when jazz sprouted off in different directions was the early 50s. Just as bebop was taking off, a movement spread across the country embracing Dixieland, or traditional (now "trad") jazz. Looking back, there's a strange racial aspect to it- this was music created and popularized by black musicians earlier in the century, and in the fifties it was a lily-white crew. It's a tradition that's carried on to this day, where outside of New Orleans its a very white, nostalgic style. This particular branch also seems like it's been pruned; no new Dixieland is ever written.
Nostalgic or not, the trad jazz revival of the late forties/early fifties produced some wonderful music. Edward "Kid" Ory was one of the stars of the genre- just listen to the way his trombone slides around on the outside of the melody. One of the things I love about this kind of music is how the instruments all have a raucous, solo expression of their own, but they overlap sinuously into harmonies. Listen to how the trumpet, clarinet and trombone literally tease and encourage each other. This is the heart of trad jazz.
Jazz is daunting- fans of the music tend towards the obsessive, and it is often difficult to find a way in to the music. My hopes with this blog are to explore what makes jazz so vibrant and engaging to me, and thus to hone ideas for my next band (which I'm calling 'eleventy-two'). I consider myself a fan and a dedicated listener, but by no means an expert. Let the listening begin!
