So What is Arrangement, Anyway?

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. 

Covers and Arrangements

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...

NEEDLE DROP: Wynton Marsalis, First Kiss

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.

Skalpel, Sculpture

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.

On the Fringe of the Jungle, Duke Ellington

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!