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.
When I was a little kid, my mom had both the "Hooked on Classics" and "Hooked on Swing" records. If you weren't a child of the 1970s, you might not be aware of this strange phenomenon. Basically, someone took a disco beat, stole only the hooks from any classical melody you probably learned from watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, and set them to a disco beat. Unfortunately for you, I was able to find it on YouTube (see above.)
I bring it up because of the Jacques Loussier Trio, a jazz group that I happen to enjoy but it could be argued are doing a similar thing. Put crudely, they're "jazzing up the classics," and Johann Sebastian Bach in particular. The difference here is, I think, in the loving treatment of the source material (Loussier seems to play the whole piece and always namechecks the original) and the specific character of Bach. Bach was a highly mathematical composer- his pieces are a study of harmony and precision, almost like a statement on music theory more than a musical expression. And yet somehow, they are so, so beautiful. I think Loussier manages to capture that beauty while still riffing with jazz rhythms and techniques. What do you think?
As I admitted early on, I'm not a jazz expert. Part of the fun of this blog for me is that it pushes me to learn, to experiment, and challenge myself to go farther. Jazz history, like art history, has a timeline of eras and movements that has been set in stone, so there are markers along the way. But as we know, those markers don't tell the whole story- there are always outliers, branches that veer off in different directions.
I'm working now on the "Bop" branch of the jazz tree. This may be old news for some of you (Don Byrd, I'm looking at you) but here's a quick synopsis pieced together from Wikipedia:
"In the 1940s, the younger generation of jazz musicians forged a new style out of the swing music of the 1930s."
"Swing improvisers commonly emphasized the first and third beats of a measure. But in a bebop composition such as Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts", the rhythmic emphasis switches to the second and fourth beats of the measure. Such new rhythmic phrasing techniques give the typical bop solo a feeling of floating free over the underlying song form, rather than being tied into the song form."
Okay, so listen to Salt Peanuts above. The big band sound is still clearly there, and even if you can't count the 2nd and 4th beat emphasis, it is easy to feel that sense of floating, particularly in comparison to swing music of the era with its persistent, danceable beat. You can feel from this clip how groundbreaking it must have been.
Earlier this week, I spent some time cruising iTunes looking for more great jazz. If you've ever browsed iTunes, you know that whenever you look up an artist you get a handful of albums that listeners also bought. I believe I started listening to some Hank Mobley, then I skimmed around listening to a handful of other artists from the same early 60s period like Sonny Stitt, Kenny Dorham, Grant Green, Lou Donaldson, etc., etc. And you know what?
I couldn't tell the difference between any of them.
Obviously there are limitations to what you can get from a 30sec. sound sample, and I'm exaggerating for effect. In particular, Grant Green's grooves are pretty fun listening. But in general, the music of this period has nothing for me to hook into. Melody is tossed aside in favor of improvisation. Everyone seems to be striving for the exact same sound.
And I think this is partly why jazz is where it's at today. This is the era when today's jazz was codified, and while it was probably highly exciting at the time today it is stagnant and deflated.
I used to own a 6-CD Blue Note box set of music from the height of their popularity. Art Blakely's Moanin' jumps out from that collection for me, particularly for a really sweet harmony with the horns at :36, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you who else was on those six CDs or the name of a single tune. Jazz today has to overcome the ego of this era in order to create new tunes and a sound that doesn't disappear into the miasma of jazz history.
A quick dose of music to keep the week rolling, this time a fun bit of film I've never seen of Dave Brubeck and band playing one of the great tunes from his series of rhythmic experiments. I love about this tune that it plays homage to the roots of jazz (ragtime), plays with rhythm (by updating a 2/3 waltz beat to swing), and manages to be just great listening at the same time.
Over on BoingBoing, William Gibson summarizes the creative process nicely. He writes;
Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. "It sprang whole and perfect from my brow" as opposed to "I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me."
I've been saying for years that creativity is misunderstood as a dreamy, unadulterated thing that comes out of the blue, but I often chalk up 2/3rds of the true source to craft. Gibson is correct though- at least half of inspiration is that something strikes you as unique, beautiful or strange.
Which brings me to Mylab, a unique band/collaboration/project from Wayne Horvitz. Wayne has been a force in the New York jazz and new music scene since the 80's, with an impressive discography including Naked City, a brutal jazz ensemble led by John Zornand one of my favorites when I want to jar my senses.
For Mylab, Horvitz collaborated with producer Tucker Martine using an interesting process. They started with folk recordings from the early 1900s in the public domain as inspiration. In an interview, Martine said, "We used those samples as the catalyst for starting a composition, then we'd start messing around and go, 'Shit, Frisell would sound great over that, and what about Skerik over this?" Those old folk recordings were like Gibson's mauve Krylon, the inspiration for a unique collaboration that I really dig.
Horvitz was nice enough to answer a couple of questions via email for me about the composition process. I was particularly interested in finding out how they avoided what I call "the groove factor"; that is, when you're composing electronically, it's easy to build a repeating loop with an interesting sound/texture, but it can be hard to make that into a true song with a song structure and multiple parts.
Horvitz replied, "It was a nice working relationship because Tucker and I both started together with loops and samples but even within that I tend towards 'song structure' so I think I brought a lot of that to the table, and of course tucker brought his awesome sonic and rhythmic vibe to everything."
The album is very lush sonically, and bends around a lot of different genres, including some African vocals, a twangy fiddle, and a skittering house beat. I asked Horvitz if the album turned out in the way that he had envisioned it.
"To be honest, we didn't start with a vision, we started with a process." wrote Horvitz. "So basically Tucker was a big fan of some solo recordings I had made years earlier, with drum machines, sequencers but also a lot of live players. He kept saying I should do another, and I basically said I don't feel like doing it myself lets do it together. But the process really was 'improvised' - start with a little idea, flesh it out, invite some friends, flesh it out some more, even the mix was a continual process of re-invention, more than just trying to get the 'right mix'."
The whole album is highly recommended, but my favorites include "Earthbound", "Pop Client" (see embedded video), "Land Trust Picnic", and "Fancy Party Cakes." You can hear sound samples of the full album on Amazon.
All Blues is a tune that I used to play in a band. That bass groove is hypnotic, but somehow I never got tired of it. The "cool" era is clearly a favorite of mine, this early sixties crispness. There's a sharp clarity to tunes like All Blues, from the simple blues structure to, of course, Miles' "pinched" trumpet tone.
I'm going to be hitting arrangement pretty hard here- for me, it's the key to making jazz fun and great to listen to, and it can so easily go by the wayside. Last post, we learned that technically arrangement is taking an already written tune and laying out how the instruments are going to play it. The best arrangers use the whole palette of sounds available to them from their band or group, structuring the music so that each instrument harmonizes with the others and has its own niche to explore.
Here's a better illustration, musically. The tune is "Sentimental Journey," by Les Paul. This was a big hit when soldiers were returning from WWII, and you can hear in this early big band version the soothing, soporific strains of the original:
Fast-forward to the early 1960s. "Hi-fi" stereo has just been invented, and a handful of arrangers go crazy for the new stereo field. Spurred on by the need to sell record players and illustrate what stereo can achieve, musicians like Juan Garcia Esquivel (Latin beats were also de rigeur at this time) took tunes like Sentimental Journey and arranged them with a style that today seems outrageous:
Esquivel uses his instruments like special effects to hit the whole tonal range, from those punctuating clangs to the low notes on the trombone that open the piece. He uses lots of mallets, on xylophones and vibraphones and who-knows-what-aphones. Esquivel's arrangement takes the tune out of sleepy-time and onto the dance floor.
A reader commented that in talking about "arrangement," I didn't really define what that means. I'm glad for the comment, because it gave me an opportunity to do some interesting spelunking. Here's a quick primer:
The American Federation of Musicians defines arranging as "the art of preparing and adapting an already written composition for presentation in other than its original form." Sounds like a cover, or a standard, doesn't it? The key word here is preparing: there is deliberate thought and structure put into place, as opposed to the informal act of playing together with each player following their instincts.
As Wikipedia notes, "In general, the larger the ensemble, the greater the need for a formal arrangement." It's common sense; the more people you have playing together, the more need there is for some sort of guidelines and agreement about who will play what when. When you're a musician working out a new tune with your bandmates, often you'll give some general instruction but otherwise they're determining what to play by listening to the other musicians and finding where they fit.
So there is a difference between composing a tune and arranging how an ensemble will play it. I always think of Steve Bartek, who was in Oingo Boingo with Danny Elfman and did many arrangements for his early scores. Danny had the ideas and tunes, but Bartek orchestrated and arranged them for instruments. Listening to this sample from Elfman's score from Pee Wee's Big Adventure, where would you say composition ends and arranging begins?
Wikipedia says that "Jelly Roll Morton is considered the earliest jazz arranger, writing down the parts when he was touring about 1912-1915 so that pick-up bands could play his compositions." Arranging, in my book, is essential to interesting music.
In the pop/rock world, musicians are constantly debating the art of the cover song. The act of performing someone else's song is widely disdained, except an occasional tribute to a musician you respect. But no more than one per album or set! The covers album is seen as the mark of a musician who is bankrupt of ideas, and the covers band? A true musician shudders at the thought - unless of course you are a hipster party band wearing outrageous costumes and playing music that is itself not respected, like disco or metal.
In jazz, the opposite is true- it is expected that you will play the music of the musicians who came before you, particularly from the pantheon of tunes known as "standards." Go over to the iTunes Store and type "Caravan" (a Duke Ellington tune) into the search bar. There are at least 300 versions available, including this one from Chet Atkins and Les Paul:
Interestingly, if you go back to the 50s and 60s, pop/rock bands were covering each other like crazy. It was expected that other people wrote your music, and when something was a big hit, you'd suddenly find 5 different versions of the song on the airwaves performed by the hitmakers of the day. It's unimaginable today to think of hearing Beyonce, Lil' Wayne, and Taylor Swift all on the radio performing the Black Eyed Peas "I've Got A Feeling" at once! The story goes that Bob Dylan killed this practice single-handedly, bringing on the era of the singer-songwriter. Of course, history has a way of enshrining simple stories at the expense of complex ones, but it's a persuasive argument nonetheless.
But back to covers. In jazz as in rock, the success or failure of a cover lies in the arrangement.
I read an interview recently with Wynton Marsalis where he talked about the beauty of jazz in that you could get together with musicians you'd never met, call out one of the standards, and you'd instantly have music. I get it- it is a great experience as a musician to latch in to a group you've never played with and navigating the individual quirks and expressions of each person's playing. But as a listener, I often find myself bored to tears. Yes, the individual expression of a talented player can be magical, but it's not enough. I want to hear a carefully-crafted melody, thoughtful attention paid to tonal harmony and color, not just what one person can come up with off the top of their head. No other music except maybe bluegrass worships the soloist at the expense of musical structure and melody.
Much, much more on arrangement in upcoming posts...
This is a quickie, for your listening enjoyment. Since we were discussing Wynton in the last post, I offer this sample of his most recent work. Given the big debate about tradition vs. the avant garde, where does this sit for you? Myself, I think it's a happy balance between the two. I hear the blues, I hear the large ensemble sound of Duke Ellington's orchestra, but I also hear touches of dissonance and humor and originality. And it's blissfully short! So much jazz of the last 40 years suffers from bloat and bombast. Cheers to you, Wynton, you're no roadblock to the advancement of jazz.
Jazz, if you talk to the high-level musicians and critics, is mired in a debate between the Traditionalists and the Avantgarde, or 'free jazz'. The third spoke of this triumvirate is commercial, or smooth jazz, but we're not even going to go there: that target is too easy.
This so-called debate is poorly framed, in my book; both sides are right, as usual. The traditionalists rightly celebrate the blues and gospel roots of jazz, which many modernists have disposed of; the avantgarde is interested in moving music forward, and rightly so, but the music often becomes difficult listening in the process.
Meanwhile, there's another growing category, which I won't attempt to name myself because it has been unfortunately dubbed "nu jazz." Us3 is I think the most well known pop culture reference for nu jazz, with their hit Cantaloop, which pretty much just sets Herbie Hancock's tune "Cantaloupe Island" to a hip-hop beat.
But since the 1990s, the djs/producers that create this music have gotten much more sophisticated than Us3, becoming true experimenters and visionaries. These musicians get lumped into electronica, but the sounds that they cut up and layer are resolutely acoustic, usually vinyl, and serve as a champion for musicians and sounds left to the dustbin of history.
I chose Skalpel for this blog post because they're so reverent to their source, while still avantguarde in their treatment. Marcin Cichy and Igor Pudło are Polish, and they take their samples exclusively from Polish jazz records from the 1960s and 70s. This tune has an almost Cypress Hill-like bass groove holding down the background, but it slides in and out of tune in a way that challenges the ear. And that weird rattle! I have no idea where that is coming from, and I love it. Meanwhile, it's still jazz- that cool feel is there that we associate with jazz, probably because of the drum sticks swinging on the cymbals, which you never really hear in other types of music.
There's also something I just love about how the cuts become rhythmic in and of themselves, the sharp intake of breath on the ins and outs of an audio sample.If we go back to song structure though, there is a limitation, of course; this tune is really just the same 4 bars repeated over and over again, with layers of sound added and subtracted.
Hi! Thanks for dropping by. Rather than starting with a lengthy manifesto, I'm going to jump right in with a kind of post that I'm intending to be the bread and butter of this blog: a song, some history, and a smattering of my own thoughts. In general, I intend this this blog to be fun, great listening, and a way for readers to crack through the sometimes impenetrable crust that encases jazz music. That crust is made up of a lot different ingredients, which we'll talk about over time. But first, some music, and a quote:
"Not the autocracy of a single stubborn melody on the on hand, nor the anarchy of unchecked noise on the other. No, a delicate balance between the two; an enlightened freedom." -Johann Sebastian Bach
If any statement is a manifesto for me for music, this is it. On the one hand, there is dissonance, a chaos of tones that don't relate in a harmonious way to our ears. When used well, dissonance creates a frisson in the brain that challenges it to make new connections. When used poorly, it is cacophonous, painful and annoying.
On the other hand, pure melody can be just as annoying. A cloying melody can feel insulting, like someone is trying to lull you into a compliant stupor. The Theme for Titanic comes to mind. Melody can be infantilizing- think of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," which is the purest distillation of melody. Hear it in your head. You don't hear anything besides a piano banging out one note at a time, do you? Twinkle, Twinkle defies accompaniment; it doesn't swing, or call out for harmony, or anything. What it is is memorable, and easy to digest.
So music gets interesting to me when it explores the middle ground, challenging the listener to make new connections while simultaneously soothing the brain with a catchy tune or a groovy beat, like a vitamin covered in peanut butter.
It appears I couldn't help myself on the manifesto front, but the balance of dissonance and melody are going to be essential to what I'm exploring here in the caverns of jazz. So, ahem, back to Duke Ellington and "On the Fringe of the Jungle."
I picked this tune to kick things off because of the bare simplicity of the arrangement: piano, bass and an unseen, subtle drummer. Duke is a big hero of mine, and a great place to start if you're interested in going deeper into jazz. You can't go wrong with the Duke. His reign stretched from the early era of Harlem "jass" up to his death in 1974. What I love about hearing him play in this era (and I'll certainly be playing some of his collaboration with Charles Mingus and Max Roach later) is the way he takes a simple blues/gospel song structure and pushes it out into something playful and intellectual. Duke was a very percussive player- you can hear that in the that almost Middle Eastern sounding "Brrnnnp" he does throughout, a jarring reminder that hey, you're listening to some real music! It punctuates the pretty, tripping melody that comes in alongside it. The two approaches bump into each other and marry into a new thought, melody and dissonance. Meanwhile, the drums backpedal, playing no bass-y thumps until much later in the piece, tickling the edges of the snare and the rims of the whole set.
The other thing I love here is that while each instrumentalist does take a turn with a solo, they don't feel like, "Hey, look over here! Pay attention to me now!" I get so turned off by the standard jazz formula, where the whole band plays a melody together almost like it's a formality, then the song disappears completely and the instrumentation falls into a hole while the sax player gets to express their supreme wankery. More on solos later, I'm just getting warmed up on this one.
SO, this is the deal. The Jazz Spelunker. As it turns out, according to Wikipedia, Duke Ellington didn't like to call his music "jazz": he called it "American music." That's fitting- I'm going to be playing a much greater range of music than will fit in the category of jazz, even though that's a pretty broad definition on its own. But there's a lot in jazz that I truly dig, and still a lot that I don't know, so this blog will be a forum for learning and listening and esoteric ruminations.
C'mon by again, and let's hear your own thoughts and comments!
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!
