JAZZ 101: Bebop

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.

Blue Note Stew

This post is sure to get me in trouble.

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.

NEEDLE DROP: Dave Brubeck Quartet, It's A Raggy Waltz

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.

Talking with Wayne Horvitz about Mylab

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.


Naked City - Billy Liar [31] from SongsFromGrandGuignol on Vimeo.

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.

NEEDLE DROP: Miles Davis, All Blues

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.

Yet More On Arrangement...

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.