Even since a commentator remarked that some argue that the greatest composer of the 20th century was Duke Ellington I've been listening to more jazz than I usually do. I'm asking myself, could this possibly be true? Really? So I listened to Mood Indigo a few times:
Well, ok. But then I listened to Thelonius Monk:
Uh-huh. Then I listened to Miles Davis:
And what about Sun Ra?
And I remember reading something Duke Ellington said about jazz and freedom:
Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom... In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.
I like that.
You have to understand, I have always had a difficult relationship with jazz. When I was still a teen, the only serious music magazine I could find in my local store was Downbeat, so I subscribed to it for a year or so. I didn't actually have access to jazz performances or recordings so I was mostly reading about music I hadn't heard. Later on, I did get a chance to hear some jazz recordings, but my most intense encounter was when I was hired to play rhythm guitar in a 27-piece big band for a few months. Oh, man, I was the worst jazz rhythm guitarist ever. All I knew how to play was blues and rock and suddenly I had to find an E flat, flat 5th, flat 9th chord? And they only played in horrible keys. And what the hell is a 13th chord anyway? So that was pretty intimidating. Anyway, my path led to classical music from then so I didn't have anything to do with jazz for a long time. The basic aesthetic principles just didn't make any sense to me, even though I liked a few pieces. Some Dave Brubeck, some Miles Davis. And like I said, if the music is about freedom, then it starts to make sense to me.
Plus, these are obviously very serious musicians.
But look, if I have to give an honest comment on the clips above, here is what I am going to say.
Duke Ellington, "Mood Indigo". It seems arbitrary or sketchy to me, both in concept and execution but this is probably inherent in the style.
Thelonious Monk, "Lulu's Back in Town". A stiff touch on the piano, so it must be a stylistic thing. But a bit painful to watch if you are used to classical pianists. And the sax is badly out of tune with the piano.
Miles Davis, "So What". I liked this quite a lot, but I had the feeling all the way through that the real title should be "F**k You."
Sun Ra, "Take the A Train". This guy is way out there, and I liked that insane piano introduction. Freedom, yeah.
Stravinsky's comment on jazz the first time he heard it was that the way it was played was more interesting than the music itself. Still, I think I am starting to get the point, a bit anyway. The thing is that every one of these guys are really who they are, they are strong musical personalities.
But Duke Ellington as the greatest composer of the 20th century? I dunno, I think I might vote for Sun Ra instead in the jazz field. But I think the ones really in the running are the usual suspects: Stravinsky, Bartók, Shostakovich, maybe Messiaen. Your milage may vary.
Rick Beato has done a lot of videos on various topics--I think the last one I looked at was a rant about Macs--but I am not usually tempted to watch them. He did one, nearly an hour long, on why people hate jazz, at least that was the title. Here it is:
I listened to the first five minutes and my answer is: people hate jazz because a lot of it is just as badly structured and carelessly thrown together as your talk, Rick. If you had the slightest respect for your listeners you would try wasting less of their time on pointless meanderings that have nothing to do with the topic.
One thing I find very interesting is the blanket approach to the question: why do people hate or love jazz as if "jazz" were one monolithic activity all at the same level of quality and creativity. Oh, please! If you ask me about classical music--or any music--the first thing to say is that there are all kinds of classical music, some good, some bad. Maybe you hate the bad, boring, pretentious classical music, and if so, more power to you. If you hate the good stuff, maybe it is because it is too challenging, too long, or too unfamiliar and we can talk about that. What is annoying about the way people like Rick talk about jazz is that they seem to ignore all qualitative distinctions. All jazz is good because it is jazz.
Of the nine platinum jazz records he mentions, and by the way, how does this list explain why people hate jazz? Why is it even there? But of that list, I am familiar with three records: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Bitches Brew, also Miles Davis, and Take Five, Dave Brubeck. They are all very fine recordings and it would be interesting to talk about why they are fine recordings. Another approach would be to find some examples of bad jazz recordings and talk about why they are bad. Maybe Rick does this later on, but his blatant waste of my time in the first five minutes makes me doubt it and I lost the will to listen to the rest.
It occurred to me the other day that I am not entirely ignorant when it comes to jazz. In fact, in my earlier years I had considerable exposure to jazz. In my teen years, when I became interested in music, I grew up in a small town (3,500 people) on Vancouver Island. My first interest was popular music in the form of rock music--it was the 60s! In the local newsstand the only purely musical magazine I found was Downbeat, devoted to jazz. I think I subscribed for a year or two. So I read a great deal about jazz in that journal. The local library, which was tiny, had a few books on music so I probably read a bit more about jazz there. I also bought some jazz albums which included Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain and Bitches' Brew. I might have bought more, but there wasn't much available in the local record store. No Amazon back then! I didn't have a lot of practical experience playing jazz until a few years later when I was asked to fill in as rhythm guitarist in a big band. I didn't get any chance to rehearse with them, was just handed a big part book. The first few gigs were extremely traumatic for a guitarist who had mostly, up till then, played blues, rock and a little classical. How the heck do you finger an E flat 13th flat fifth flat ninth chord? In a really fast tempo! I was a rather bad jazz rhythm guitarist! But it was an interesting experience. One night myself, the bass player and the drummer, with a little help from the trombone section, managed to save the bacon of the whole band when we found ourselves playing a street dance for drunken teenagers who did NOT want to hear Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington! So we played a couple of tunes by Chicago and fled!
So I was exposed to quite a lot of jazz in my early years. The thing is, it didn't take. I developed no long-term interest in either listening to it or playing it. The first thing anyone does if you say you don't like jazz is to assume you are just ignorant, as if it were inscribed in heaven somewhere that everyone has to like jazz. There are people who don't like chamber music, people who don't like country, people who don't like polka and people who don't like jazz.
Are there any interesting reasons why, in my case? Perhaps not. I just don't like the feel of it. It may be "cool," but I don't find "cool" appealing. I don't like the way they approach the individual note, if that makes any sense. Oddly, I like blues a lot, which is not "cool." Blues has a kind of earthy intensity to it that jazz does not. I can't give too many detailed reasons without doing the research, which I won't do because, as I say, jazz doesn't interest me. I get the feeling that jazz guys aren't very interested in classical either, which is ok with me.
So, we're good?
Here are a couple of tunes. The first from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. The title is rather ungrammatical, isn't it? If it is the brew of bitches, shouldn't it have the possessive: Bitches' Brew? The cover is kind of neat:
This is "Pharaoh's Dance," the first track from the album, which does have its possessive:
So what grabbed me instead of jazz? It was the Violin Concerto by Tchaikovsky, played for me on vinyl by a friend one day. After that I had to hear every single classical piece I could find! This is David Oistrakh, violin with the Staatskapelle Berlin, Gennadi Roshdestwenski, conductor, recorded in 1963:
I've noticed before that the Wall Street Journal likes to put up a lot of reviews of jazz artists, though they seem sometimes to have an aversion to actually calling the music "jazz." The latest is a review of a new album by Linda May Han Oh titled "Walk Against Wind." Here is a piece from YouTube titled "Ebony":
That's actually rather interesting. The very syncopated "rondo" interspersed with improvisational episodes makes for a listenable structure. But I admit I do have a problem with jazz--I'm just not receptive to the mood space of it, which to me seems to always take us on the same journey, however interestingly inflected.
Both jazz and classical seem to have the same problems attracting a mass audience, if that is even a problem. But they approach it in different ways. Jazz doesn't have the deep institutional history that classical does, but it has a coolness factor that compensates for that. I haven't checked around, but do other media, like the Wall Street Journal, fudge that it is actually jazz they are reviewing? I notice that sometimes the only indication that we are talking about jazz is the final byline:
—Mr. Johnson writes about jazz for the Journal.
Not true in this particular instance, but in a number of other reviews. A lot of the time it seems the underlying assumption is that a lot of new music is about "blurring the lines" which seems to mean jazz with some added flavorings like flamenco or world music or, in this case, string quartet. I suppose that speaks to the extent to which jazz welcomes diversity.
Here is another clip of Linda Oh, titled "Lucid Lullaby:"
She is a very good musician, isn't she? But I'm still not a jazz fan. I wonder why?
The only two newspapers I read on a daily basis are the Globe and Mail (from Toronto, which I often read to remind me why I left) and the Wall Street Journal. Oddly enough, the WSJ often has articles on the arts and culture that are worth reading. But they also have a distressingly large number of ones on music that disappoint. How it works is this: they put up an intriguing piece about some music you have never heard and, because of the way it is described you decide you just have to listen to it. Then you discover if you click on a clip of the music you are taken to Spotify where you have to sign in. I don't subscribe to Spotify so I just go to YouTube where pretty well everything is available without having to subscribe. But that is not the only disappointment.
For example, in today's WSJ there is this article: "Electronic Music Meets Post-Bop Jazz." If you are blocked by the paywall, try googling the title. Here is how they portray the credentials of the artists:
Messrs. Wendel and Darlington have long experimented in myriad genres. Kneebody’s members play funk, hip-hop and rock, and its recordings include a collection of Charles Ives compositions. Mr. Wendel has played saxophone with Prince and Snoop Dogg and released “The Seasons” (2015), a Tchaikovsky-inspired series of duets featuring contemporary jazz artists. Mr. Darlington plays both major festivals and avant-garde underground events, reworking compositions on the fly. His mastery of technology goes beyond the glitchy and hectic: Among his 30 or so albums and EPs is “The Light Brigade” (2014), in which synthetic sounds, acoustic guitars and layered voices form a moving soundscape to memorialize the Crimean War.
Ok, sounds really interesting with name-dropping of classical composers and popular genres. What could go wrong? Let's have a listen. This is the cut "Loops":
It seems that just as contemporary classical composers seem to have rediscovered the "groove" or pulse, that folks like these are determined to uglify it as much as possible. Honestly, I haven't heard anything this unpleasant and unlistenable since the last time I listened to Captain Beefheart. "Thoroughly satisfying"? Not in any aesthetic universe I can imagine. Well, I find Thai music pretty unlistenable too.
But why is it that every single time I see one of these pieces touting some new group that is supposed to be so great, the actual experience itself is so definitively disappointing?
I just ran across an essay making the attempt to show why jazz is not more popular:
Eventually, that question started to haunt me: “Why isn’t this music more popular?” Being on the air every day, it didn’t take long to start to find out one of the major reasons. I was playing Herbie Hancock’s record Head Hunters (listen below) one morning when I got a call on the listener line. I picked up and the caller said flatly, “This. Is. Not. Jazz.” Huh? It’s Herbie Hancock, how could it not be jazz? This, as it turns out, was just the tip of the iceberg—so began my experience with a community that I (and others) call the Jazz Police.
The author, Matt Fleeger, asserts that jazz, rather than being a particular musical style, is rather an interpretation of music (his phrase). Therefore:
when you try to take something as creative as jazz and fit it into a box, it becomes unattractive to people. And, you do a disservice to all of the incredible artists who pushed this great artistic invention forward. Art shouldn’t have too many rules (or any rules at all). Unfortunately, over time a conservative contingent has dominated the jazz scene and branded it with a definition that is stuck in the 1950s. To their mind, jazz died in ’68 when Miles went electric (watch below). But to mine, that was just one of jazz’s many (continuing) amazing evolutions.
There is a similar danger confronting classical music as well, though configured somewhat differently. Whereas with jazz, some aficionados try to establish the legitimacy and authenticity of it as a serious musical form by associating it with a particular variety of jazz or a particular era, in classical music there are a couple of different camps: there are a whole bunch of professional consultants that are constantly advising classical musicians to present themselves more like pop musicians. They recommend chatting up the audience, light shows, multi-media, more hip programming and costuming and so on. Another camp, and I guess I am partly with them, insists that classical music be left alone and that audiences simply be given a bit more introduction or education. The classical repertoire speaks for itself and the more you mess with it the more you dilute it. Another camp, and I am partly in this one as well, insists on the creative freedom of the artists as does Matt Fleeger. He tries to fudge the problem by saying that jazz is whatever people play who say it is jazz:
I’ve stopped trying to find a clear-cut definition for jazz and embraced the notion that it probably is undefinable. For me, it’s all about the artist’s intent. If the artist intends the creation to be jazz, then it must be!
This just escapes the issue without answering it, of course. He wants to say that jazz is not a genre, but rather an interpretation, which is kind of interesting. But he should probably add that this interpretation leads to the creation of many genres. Then at least we can talk about it. If you just say that jazz is whatever musicians say it is, then it is hard to say anything about it.
Jazz certainly seems to have a variety of genres that we can recognize: Dixieland, Be-Bop, Latin jazz, Big Band jazz, fusion and so on. Wikipedia has a list. That list is probably a bit too thorough, but I can certainly see how you could do a fair description of some of the larger categories. And that would not be prescriptive, just descriptive.
The danger that Matt is describing: the dictates of a jazz police, is feared so much by most people who write and talk about music that they prefer to avoid any kind of aesthetic judgment. This, to me, seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Here is that Herbie Hancock album he was mentioning:
It is never too hard to predict what will set off New Yorker critic Alex Ross. So this rant about the Dean of Yale School of Music being insufficiently deferential towards jazz is not too surprising. But it is rather entertaining:
Reading yesterday's New York Times, I came across an article that appeared to date from around the year 1930 — the period in which dunderheaded authorities like Daniel Gregory Mason inveighed against the vulgarity of jitterbugging. In the Times piece, Robert Blocker, the dean of the Yale School of Music, explains why jazz is not a priority for his institution. He is quoted as saying: “Our mission is real clear. We train people in the Western canon and in new music.” This is real bad. Jazz is a monumental art form, its major figures among the most original thinkers in twentieth-century music. Its links to classical composition are myriad: classical players who are not exposed to jazz will deliver poor accounts of much music of the past hundred years, from Gershwin to John Adams. It's remarkable that the leader of a music school would resort to such inane formulations when speaking to a reporter. (News flash: jazz is Western, and it is also new.) Blocker's attitude is all the more astonishing in light of the fact that a decade ago the Yale School of Music received an unprecedented hundred-million-dollar gift, one that allowed the school to end tuition. You'd think that freedom from financial pressures would have encouraged the school to widen its intellectual horizons. Instead, perhaps not too surprisingly, sudden wealth seems to have brought about an entrenched, reactionary mindset. Gunther Schuller is roaring from his grave.
By Alex' criteria I am the very model of a "dunderheaded authority" because, just as Daniel Gregory Mason (a well-known composer and critic in his day) thought that jitterbugging was vulgar, I'm fairly sure that I have said somewhere that twerking is vulgar. I'm also of the opinion that the Yale School of Music should see as their primary mission the transmission of the Western canon extending back in time and forwards to contemporary music. We have seen over the last few decades the destruction of English departments as the study of the great works of Western literature was replaced by their deconstruction. Fewer and fewer students enroll in English because reading Roland Barthes and Derrida is far less worthwhile than reading Shakespeare--who is anathema because he is dead, white and male. Of course, so are Barthes and Derrida, but that's ok because they are attacking Shakespeare. It is actually refreshing to hear a dean be so bold as to actually state his mission clearly! The job of Yale Music is not to cultivate the Miles Davises and Ornette Colemans of the future (for one thing, the era when jazz produced such giants is long gone), but to transmit the thousand year tradition of great Western art or concert music and train a new generation of performers and composers who have an idea of what it is.
Nothing against jazz, but it is not part of that tradition and not a good fit in academia. Great masters of jazz have never come from a university environment any more than punk bands, hip-hop artists or country music stars have. Why would they? A university music department is not needed to support and teach those genres. As the dean said, “Our mission is real clear. We train people in the Western canon and in new music.” Why is this controversial, or in the golden prose of Alex Ross, "real bad"? Perhaps you can make a case that jazz is a monumental art form, its major figures among the most original thinkers in twentieth-century music--I have my doubts, personally. But even if this were the case, this still does not imply that Yale should be teaching it. There are a number of schools that do specialize in jazz such as the Berklee College of Music.
Alex mentions Gunther Schuller who is not only rolling in his grave, but roaring from it! This provides us with an excellent example of why jazz and classical music (or concert music, or art music) are awkward bedfellows. Schuller, who just passed away a couple of months ago, was a formidable figure in both the jazz and classical worlds. In the 1960s and 70s he composed works that tried to synthesize the two traditions. In later years he reverted to being primarily a classical musician as Artistic Director for the Northwest Bach Festival in Spokane, Washington. I think, at this distance in time, it is possible to look back at his attempt and see that it was ultimately unsuccessful. His "third stream" compositions have made it into neither the jazz canon nor the classical canon.
But you be the judge. Here is Schuller's Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk for 13 instruments, from 1960:
I read a piece recently that I'm going to link to in my Friday miscellanea that reported that scientists did a study that showed that of the three categories of musicians, classical, jazz and popular, jazz musicians proved to be the most creative in their thought processes. Now I just ran across a piece in the Wall Street Journal about jazz pianist Vijay Iyer who is about to give a course at Harvard called "Creative Music: Critical Practice Studio". The course is described as:
"an intensive, research-oriented workshop environment for advanced improviser-composers" meant to "engage with a range of contemporary musical perspectives and practices."
I have no idea what any of that could possibly mean, but I associate that kind of prose with highly-connected and privileged positions. Last year he won a "genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation. All this makes me very curious. So let's have a bit of a listen. Here he is with his trio:
Hmm. Well. Do you hear anything even vaguely creative there? I'm afraid that I don't. It sounds just like the last one hundred modal-jazz-improv-syncopated-added-note-grooves that I have heard. My, admittedly cynical, view is that the only artistic people who get big grants and favors from big institutions like Harvard (or the Canada Council) are people who are doing something exactly like what the bureaucrats who make these decisions expect. In other words, very non-creative things.
Here is another clip where he talks about his background playing classical music on violin and his new piece for himself and string quartet. We hear some bits of it in the background and, frankly, it sounds like diluted Philip Glass.
I wish I could put up a clip of the actual piece itself, but it doesn't seem available on YouTube. The Wall Street Journal is really going all out for Vijay Iyer this week as they also have a piece up reviewing--sort of--new albums by him and Regina Carter. Here is some of what they say:
The music on "Mutations" is ruminative and compelling. The recording shifts seamlessly from austere but elegant solo-piano segments to furious moments where the strings create a swirl of sound around dark staccato keyboard figures. The dynamic diversity of the record is part of its interest. There are quiet moments that draw you in and loud propulsive ones that restore the routine distance. The suite was composed and premiered in 2005, but it has grown since. Mr. Iyer arranged this performance to give the string players considerable improvisatory leeway.
This is the kind of thing that often passes for a "review" these days, but in reality it is just a "puff piece", a bit of promotional prose with description with the sole purpose of persuading you to purchase the product. It's an advertisement, in other words. The only thing available on YouTube of the new album is another ad, a "trailer":
Again, sounds like vaguely jazzy new age with strings.
I am frankly amazed that Harvard pays big bucks for this kind of "creativity", but I suppose I shouldn't be. Books and seminars on "creativity" are the stock-in-trade of scam artists the world over and, of course, the very last thing you should expect to find in these books, seminars and Harvard courses is anything resembling actual creativity.
Am I being too hard on Vijay Iyer? Let me know in the comments.
UPDATE: I got some interesting comments and one reader recommended the Hutchison Andrew Trio from Alberta for comparison. Here they are with a tune called "What To Say":
Don't know about you, but I prefer these guys. They seem to have a bit more involvement. But I am certainly no judge of jazz trios!
Here is what I thought of uploading for comparison. The Tony Genge Trio (also Canadian) and a tune Tony wrote called "West Coast Groove". That's weird, YouTube refuses to embed it, so here is the link:
I used to know a pianist who was a hit at parties. He could do variations on a well-known tune like "Happy Birthday" in the style of different composers: Handel, Brahms, Debussy, etc. A somewhat different phenomenon is jazz arrangement of other music. Of course, a lot of jazz is based on arrangements of "standards" in jazz style. But sometimes it goes beyond that. One famous example is Miles Davis' recording of an arrangement by Gil Evans of the middle movement of Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. Here it is:
That is pretty interesting, but I think more limited musically than the original, which gets many, many performances every year.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there is an aesthetic principle involved here: as a general rule, arrangements are less substantial, aesthetically, than original versions. I have to be careful, because it is easy to overstate this. What I mean is that at the top of the aesthetic ladder, musically speaking, are certain works written for a specific instrument or instruments. The unitary aesthetic vision, in other words, includes abstract structural features but, since music is a concrete art form, also includes exact realizations in sound. Bach's music for solo violin or cello can be played on other instruments such as mandolin or guitar, but the original version takes precedence because it is the ideal realization of the idea. How do we know this? Because Bach made the choice. Even more pointedly, the piano sonatas of Beethoven are virtually never heard in any other medium because they are so perfectly written for the piano. He made one transcription of one sonata for string quartet, but the experiment was not repeated.
I said "at the top of the aesthetic ladder" and what I meant by that was that there are lots of pieces of music that are less specific. There are hoards of Renaissance pieces for any two melodic instruments that are quite nice pieces. In general, as you go back in music history, the specificity of instruments is less. A lot of Medieval music can be played by a wide variety of instruments. But more and more, from the Baroque on, instruments (and voices) are written for with great precision.
Alongside this there are always arrangements, of course, to fit the needs of special occasions. The harp player at the wedding plays the famous march by Mendelssohn even though it was written for orchestra. But as I said, at the top of the musical ladder, originals are preferred over arrangements. It is not just symbolic bowing to the composer's intentions--it is recognition that the composer's choice of instruments is very often a crucial part of the unitary aesthetic vision.
All this is prompted by the news that there is a new version of Lulu, the unfinished opera by Alban Berg, in which Lulu is a "black American freedom-fighter singing to a jazz score". Here is the link to the article in the Guardian. Responsible for this project is composer Olga Neuwirth. Here is a brief excerpt from one of her pieces, Hommage à Klaus Nomi. YouTube refused to embed for some reason, but here is the link:
Forgive me, but that sounds like Couperin being mugged, first by Pierrot Lunaire and then Miles Davis...
The Guardian has a paragraph that summarizes what is going on with this new version (arrangement?) of Lulu:
What's radical about Neuwirth's American Lulu isn't just that she has dared to finish what her countryman couldn't ('much of the orchestration and some of the composition of the third act of this luridly sensual and musically complex opera was incomplete by the time of Berg's death in 1935). It's the fact that Neuwirth sets the story of Lulu's manipulative rise and desperate fall not in the fetid European cities of Berg's original, but turns her into a freedom-fighting black woman amid the civil-rights struggle in 1950s New Orleans and 1970s Manhattan – and comes up with a new text in English to boot. She also arranges Berg's music for a glorified jazz band while compressing the opera's structure, throwing out much of Berg's score, and inserting an ending very different to what was originally envisaged.
"Throwing out much of Berg's score"? In that case, shouldn't Berg's estate or publisher be suing someone? Or at least demanding that Berg's name be taken off the publicity? After all, aren't we reading this article and aren't people attending these performances because Berg's name is up there? Please, Lulu is not a "sacred cow" as the article says, it is a justly famous 20th century opera. Famous because of the music written very specifically in a certain way for specific instruments, not for a "glorified jazz band". Therefore, we are, are we not, being sold a bill of goods here? Isn't this a kind of aesthetic fraud? Don't we need a forensic musicologist, stat?!?
Let's have a look at what is available online. Here is a French news item about the Berlin première of the "American Lulu":
Oh no, nothing exploitative there! Much more revealing is an advertisement for the production that, again, oddly, YouTube refuses to embed. Here it is:
Are we really that desperate to sell tickets to an opera? Or is it just that nothing matters except the vision of the arranger? My opinion is, if you want to do this, more power to you, just don't implicate Alban Berg.
It is a little disconcerting that the very people who should be promoting culture seem instead like barbarians, intent on stomping it into the ground.
UPDATE: It's nice to hear that my doubts about this production seem to have been quite justified. The Guardian just put up a review. This is a key sentence:
Of the sounds that linger in the memory from the Edinburgh performance, the most dominant is that of seats being upturned as members of the audience crept out.
You know, television used to be kind of fun to watch? I just ran across this clip of Dick Cavett interviewing Oscar Peterson and it is informative, funny, cool and intelligent--all things that seem to have been systematically eliminated from television in recent years.
I was lucky enough to see Oscar Peterson in concert on one occasion. It was in the late 1970s and he was on tour with guitarist Joe Pass. Here is a photo from that tour:
As a guitarist myself, I actually went to hear Joe Pass primarily. At the beginning, the concert started rather oddly. It appeared that Mr. Pass had neglected to tune his guitar to the piano so the first song was rather horribly out-of-tune. What really astounded me was that he simply didn't seem to notice! About halfway through the second or maybe the third song he seemed to twig that there was a problem and started to make some adjustments. By the end of that song, or maybe the next, he was pretty much in tune. After that things went pretty well. But it was really Oscar Peterson who impressed that night. A really great jazz pianist with total command of the instrument.
Browsing around on another blog I ran into this which, believe it or not, I had never heard before:
The Swingle Singers were originally a French group, founded in 1962, and the performance you just listened to was from 1963. The group has been in existence ever since, though now based in London and with different personnel. The current members are all either from the UK or Canada. The line-up is either seven or eight singers plus string bass and drums. They have been hugely successful in a niche they created for themselves. In addition to many awards and the use of their music in films and television shows, Luciano Berio wrote his Sinfonia with them in mind and they did the premier recording with the New York Philharmonic.
What I don't like about what they do with the Contrapunctus IX from Bach's Art of Fugue has less to do with their vocal performance than it does with the bass and drums accompaniment. True, I don't think that 'swinging' the eighth notes adds anything except superficial excitement, but that is partially offset by the nice chorale effect of the main theme in the long notes as it appears later on. This is more effective than it would be on the harpsichord, for example. But I just can't stand the bass and drums. The bass especially, as a walking jazz bass has no purpose in this kind of counterpoint and just muddies up the texture, making it harder to hear what is really going on. Also, the drums are an unnecessary added noise.
Here is a much better way to perform this Contrapunctus:
Or:
With that much going on, how could anyone think it was a good idea to add bass and drums?
A commentor recently took me severely to task for criticizing Jazz and cited "Giant Steps" by John Coltrane in particular as a great example of Jazz. So let's have a look at it. Here is a clip of the piece that shows the sax solo in notation:
Here is a discussion of Coltrane's approach to harmony in this and other pieces. The technique involves third-related harmonies which, since the relationships are symmetrical, avoids giving a sense of harmonic direction. The Wikipedia article on the Coltrane changes first describes the progression in "Giant Steps" as C, Eb7, Ab, B7, E, G7, C or, in terms of harmonic analysis: I, V of bVI, bVI, V of III, III, V7, I. Simplified a bit to show the movement down by major 3rds: I bVI, III (V7) I.
Later on in the article the chords given there are B maj 7, D7, G maj 7. Bb7, Eb maj 7, A min 7, D7 which is how they appear in the chart for "Giant Steps". The tenor sax is a transposing instrument in Bb, meaning that a written C sounds as a Bb, so if you want a C, you write a D. But that still doesn't get us to the progression in the chart. But never mind, let's just assume that in the first part of the Wikipedia article they transposed to C for simplicity. Here's another problem: the progression is described as falling major thirds or C, Ab, E, C (with an interpolated dominant). This progression is not unknown in Classical music, but usually in the form I, vi, IV, (V) I with first inversion chords interpolated. In diatonic harmony, this has a minor third and a major third. What I see in the progression given in the chart is, starting on B, up a minor 3rd, down a 5th, up a minor third, down a fifth, then a tritone, then a 4th. Also, the key seems to be G major, so the chords might be analyzed as III, V7 of I, I, V7 of bVI, bVI, ii, V7. I'm starting to see why in Jazz they don't analyze in terms of functional harmony!
So what John Coltrane has done is developed a harmonic structure with some interesting symmetries that tends to dilute the sense of tonic. I think the problems trying to analyze it start with the fact that in Jazz it seems to be the case that the idea of chord inversion is not significant. In other words, the idea of root movement is pretty weak. I say this because the bass and piano are free to play any element of the harmony as the lowest note. Similarly, so is the idea of cadence. The ends of sections are not marked with strong cadences--the closest we get seems to be a half-cadence. This suits the improvisational, open-ended character of Jazz.
But I still find it fundamentally unsatisfying because you can have open-ended music or you can have goal-directed music, but you can't really have both. So, forgive me, but what I hear when I listen to "Giant Steps" is some very cool music with a lot of character, but music that has no real direction. Intentionally has no direction, I believe, because the function of the non-functional, symmetrical harmonies is to remove that sense of real harmonic direction and movement that we find in Classical harmony. Fair enough. But when you take that away, what I hear is a jittery surface with no underpinnings...
I've been reading this morning about mob violence at the Wisconsin State Fair where bunches of "youths" were harassing, beating up and otherwise ruining the evening of people trying to enjoy the fair. Does it seem that there is more and more of this? I used to live in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and every year there was a big sailboat race over a weekend. It was also the occasion for a big party downtown. Every year, the party seemed to get more and more rowdy until, after dark, most adults would just disappear, leaving the streets to mobs of drunken teens.
Here's the musical connection: one year I had the most unlikely gig of my career as rhythm guitarist in a big band. I don't much like jazz and I had never played it before. I was in the second year of my changeover from a popular music guitarist (blues and the Beatles) to a classical guitarist. But this big band needed a rhythm guitarist and I was the only one available. Tough parts, though. I still remember the first time I played with them. The first tune was in E flat (a horrible key for guitar) and the first bar had four chords: E flat 13 flat 5 followed by three similar nightmare chords! Turns out I am the world's absolute worst jazz guitarist! Anyway, I redeemed myself to the band the night we played for the sailboat race weekend. We had been booked to play a street dance Friday night. After the first half hour the audience consisted solely of drunk 16-year-olds who, frankly, hated Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller. The trombone players, sitting in front, were afraid to extend their slides for fear of having them grabbed. Luckily I knew a couple of tunes by Chicago, the "rock and roll band with horns". Myself, the bass player and drummer got going and the horns joined in as best they could even without charts. Then we just kept playing a little rock and roll and blues until the mob quietened down, at which point we quietly disappeared.
And I think that was the very last time I performed in public as anything other than a classical musician. Interesting experience, though. Oh, the solution to the problem was that they have, ever since, canceled any street party connected with the race.
