Re: Re: [Harp-L] re: was timbre etc, now music theory
This thread got me thinking about my own limited jazz collection and led me
to two very interesting pieces of writing: the first, an article in jazz
times by jazz pianist Brad Mehldau (ultimately of value because it talks
about the theory vs. pure player debate in jazz circles, but also
interesting because its told in an anecdote about a verbal game of
who's-the-best-jazz-player that turns into too serious of a debate). See
below for entire article. This then led me to find out Brad Mehldau was
actually part of the Joshua Redman quartet (I never fail to be amazed by my
own ignorance)--Redman's "Moodswing" was one of the first jazz albums I
bought... so I dug it up, started listening to it and came across this gem
in the 1994 liner notes by Redman:
"Jazz is music. And great jazz, like all great music, attains its value not
through intellectual complexity but through emotional expressivity. True,
jazz is a particularly intricate, refined, and rigorous art form. Jazz
musicians must amass a vast body of idiomatic knowledge and cultivate an
acute artistic imagination if they wish to become accomplished, creative
improvisers. Moreover, a fmiliarity with jazz history and theory will
undoubtedly enhance the listener's appreciation of the actual aesthetics.
Yes, jazz is intelligent music. Nevertheless, extensive as they might seem,
the intelligent aspects of jazz are ultimately only means to its emotional
ends. Technique, theory, and analysis are not, and should never be
considered, ends in themselves."
When theory trumps the music it tends to turn a lot of folks off even if its
only in an e-mail discussion.
-Marc Molino
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brad Mehldau article pasted from:
http://www.bradmehldau.com/writing/articles_jazz_times.html
Jazz Times Magazine December 2003
Ideology, Burgers and Beer
When I was first living in New York in 1989, a bunch of us musicians used to
head over to the Corner Bistro in the West Village after the gig around 2:00
AM for their character-building half-pound burger and draft beer,
accompanied to music from one of the best jazz jukeboxes in Manhattan. I
think it was the drummer Joe Farnsworth who thought up a ridiculous but
irresistible kind of word game that we often played there. The idea was to
think of pairs of jazz musicians throughout history with the same first name
or last name, pit them against each other, and then pick the greater.
Around the table we would go, taking turns as one person would formulate a
pair, and then the rest of us would choose our favorite. Examples would be:
Elvin Jones or Joe Jones? Wynton Kelly or Wynton Marsalis? Paul Chambers or
Paul Gonsalves? (There was one night when this doubled as a drinking game.
The rest of the table had to go bottoms up if someone could think up an
adjacent last-name/first name two-gender pair ?Shirley Scott or Scott
Henderson?) As the night wore on and the dollar-drafts kept flowing, the
game usually degenerated into random pairings that spread out into all
realms of culture ? Greg Brady or Greg Osby? Lonnie Plexico or Lonnie
Anderson? Keith Jarrett or Keith Moon? Then it became a typical Gen-X
affair, and we got a kick out of yoking the jazz musicians and pop-culture
figures together as an end in itself.
The game had a certain purity precisely because of its inanity. How could
you choose one person over another in an arbitrary pair like that? It was
impossible! Joe was always there to remind us, though, of the simple
conditions of the game: ?You have to choose one.? Another rule that was
almost always enforced: After you make your choice, own it with no apologies
or explanations. Likewise, no one else was allowed to comment on your pick
any more than a monosyllabic groan or grunt. It was onto the next person
immediately. The effect was sublimely ridiculous ? a rapid-fire barrage of
written-in-stone value judgments against the absurd backdrop of matching
first and last names.
The subtext of the game was that making comparative value judgments always
smacks a little of the absurd. ?Player X is more important in jazz history
than Player Y,? is a ?substantive? statement, following legal and political
commentator Stanley Fish?s gloss on that word. This kind of statement
implies that further debate is redundant and worthless, although, alas, not
everyone will grasp that implication. A real-world analogous statement is,
?Every unborn child should have the right to life.? Fish?s point is that you
don?t waste your time trying to argue against this kind of belief or reach a
consensus with the person voicing it. If you disagree, your best tactic is
to put your own view forward just as unapologetically, and lobby even
stronger for its application.
How analogous are political and aesthetic substantive claims? In our game,
we were poking fun at the overblown seriousness that surrounds aesthetic
judgments. We were being contemptuous of the political tone of these ?who?s
the greatest in the history of jazz? discussions. Why all the gravity? You?d
get someone proclaiming that Wes was the end-all on guitar, everything after
him was shite, and these new players today were desecrating the legacy of
jazz guitar. It wasn?t so much the statement itself; it was the tone ?all
the tragic resignation of a Trotskyite who saw his original dream go up in
smoke. I mean, we?re not talking serious world affairs that will affect
humanity here. It?s just music! Right?
On one particular night, though, we fell into one of those dead-end ?who?s
better? discussions. Lapsing into grave, weighty tones, we became the butt
of our own joke. The pair in question was Sonny Rollins/Sonny Stitt. It was
a perfect specimen of the game - apples and oranges, completely useless and
ridiculous to pick one over the other. Regardless, the majority of the group
went with Rollins, but a few chose Stitt. This was one of the few instances
where we broke our no-explanations rule. A long, protracted discussion
followed over just what the criterion for everyone?s choice was. My camp
maintained that Rollins beat out Stitt. Undoubtedly, he?s one of the
greatest improvisers that jazz has ever had. His winning greatness for us,
though, was his double attribute: Not only are his improvisations so
inspired, but Rollins? solos often have a compositional logic that compels
you to listen in a different manner. He pioneered that approach on the
classic ?Blue Seven? from ?Saxophone Colosssus?. There?s an organic way in
which the motifs generate themselves out of each other. His opening melody
drifts seamlessly into the solo; it?s all one large idea. Rollins wasn?t
just blowing an inspired improvisation. He was building an edifice, erecting
something that would stay standing through time because of the internal
logic holding it together. To cement our argument in favor of Rollins, we
dropped the big ?P? word: Profound.
The other guys maintained that Stitt was the greater because he was just a
player ? pure, unadorned great bop. As the discussion went on, it turned out
that the whole ?compositional? approach, represented by a host of icons
including Monk himself, lacked greatness for these guys. My camp was
outraged, seething. What the heck did they mean? We had a strange feeling of
disorientation, like on a Twilight Zone episode ? were they the same
musicians we had just been gigging with? Who were they, if they couldn?t get
with Monk? Or maybe they were just trying to be provocative.
We quit the name game at that point and got all serious. The binary here was
?more compositional player? vs. ?just a blower?. Example: Monk vs. Bud?
Their answer unflinchingly: ?Bud.? Note that the word ?just? was not
pejorative for them. On the contrary, to be just a blower, albeit on an
inspired level, was what jazz was all about.
Bird personified that. Those solos on live records like ?Bird With The
Herd?, when he sat in with the Woody Herman Band, or a record like ?One
Night in Washington?, are dangerously, menacingly good. ?Just blowing? was
what made jazz more punk than any punk rock band could ever be. To be able
to blow a solo like Bird ? profound, gripping, full of urgency and beautiful
mortality ? but to do so, like him, with the casual ease of someone standing
at a bus stop ? well, now that was something that might be called ?great?.
That ease couldn?t be hindered by compositional elements, because
?composition?, was, in their line of argument, anathema to jazz. It was
everything that Bird was escaping from; it was what made his music so free
and joyous. A Bird head like ?Anthropology? was something that came more out
of his improvisations. It was pasted together almost as an afterthought from
the most inspired bits of his solos.
Building too much compositional logic into your solo was a flaw for the
Stitt camp ? an affectation that got in the way of the flow. It implied
pretentiousness and an overly apparent intellectualism that wore thin and
didn?t stand the test of repeated listening. Bop was Mecca for the Stitt
camp, and Bird was the prophet. Their favorites followed in his footsteps
through the hard-bop era: noble, unaffected players who were usually more
obscure, like Tina Brooks, Ernie Henry or Bill Hardman.
Monk?s improvisations were informed by his compositions; Bird?s compositions
were informed by his improvisations. In that assessment, they couldn?t be
more opposite, and lumping Monk in willy-nilly with a ?be-bop revolution? is
misleading to a point. He has a very different kind of genius than Bird ?
more a composer?s genius. One might put him in a lineage that includes Duke
Ellington.
That would also be limiting, though. Monk, like Sonny Rollins, was also an
incredible improviser who soloed with that same ?waiting at the bus stop?
nonchalant greatness as Bird. His solo on ?I Mean You? may refer to the
melody of the song, take it apart, and reconstruct it. But that was within
the context of an improvisation, one that had the same killer casual
profundity of Bird. Monk was certainly not getting caught in the net of his
own compositional logic; he was just being a genius.
These guys were stubborn, though, and wouldn?t back down; neither would we.
We finally sulkily ?agreed to disagree?. A distinctly ideological strain had
infected the discussion, killing our buzz.
In politics, ideology is dangerous ? from 20th Century examples down to the
present ?Washington Consensus?. Ideology pastes what appears to be a
thought-out argument onto a substantive claim that is more animalistic than
logical in nature: ?Because of facts A, B, and C, we should all band
together in a tribe and demonize those other people.? Ideology uses logic
selectively, in a sneaky, backhanded manner. Its aim is that we actually
suspend our sense of logic and, with it, our moral radar. Then we?ll be in
mute complicity with what?s to come.
Musical ideology is similar in that it asks us to suspend our aesthetic
judgments and acquiesce to its claims. It collects facts and interprets them
broadly in the same manner: ?You cannot dig this music as much as that music
because?? Why do we often identify practitioners of jazz ideology as
conservative? It?s because of the parental, Old Testament ring to their
utterances. Those utterances are analogous to the quasi-religious words of
the Bush administration, spoken to us as if we are children who still
believe in Santa Claus. Because of the specious, ideological tone, though,
we cannot trust this parent and do not look up to it. We don?t like being
told what to enjoy musically anymore than we like being told what
constitutes being patriotic.
There?s another kind of musical ideology, though, that?s more self-imposed
and private. I can identify it in myself, although it?s hidden under a
veneer of it?s-all-goodism. I think many of us carry around some kind of
ideology about jazz to varying degrees, because its marginalized status in
American music stokes our partisan fury that much more. (See: Ken Burns
documentary.) This kind of ideology bothers me because it?s intractable. It
hasn?t been imposed on me by some outside authority; it?s my own personal
dogma. Is it perhaps steering my whole aesthetic sense covertly, calling the
shots from behind a curtain in the shadows of my Id?
For instance: Is my lack of enjoyment of most of what?s called pop music
these days simply because it sucks, or is it because I?m unwittingly locked
in the grips of a musical elitist ideology? Maybe I?m missing something
vital; maybe I?ve become the proverbial old fart! Where does the ideological
baggage stop and the real pleasure begin? Is there a hard line between the
two, or are they all mixed up in each other? Perhaps they?re not entirely
severable.
I have music that I love, and ideology is a weapon that I might use to
defend and argue my love, which is tempting but absurd. After all, how do
you defend a gut level emotion? What?s more, why would you? Kierkegaard
writes wisely, ?To defend something is to disparage it.? It?s the mantra of
the high road. If you love something, you should be all quiet and spiritual
about it, not needing to justify it, right? Wrong! How could we survive
without the bitchy, bickering fun of polemics?
Maybe we get defensive over our various musical loves because they define
who we are. Love is exclusionary. You can?t love everything, all the time.
That goes for a critic or layman, and also for musicians. When you build
your identity as a player, you do so in part by excluding a bunch of other
identities, at least temporarily. That process of exclusion is determined by
the gut, not the intellect. It?s tied up in the murky morass of subjectivity
? early musical and non-musical experiences, innate personality traits, etc?
We laid that process of exclusion bare as we played the name-game. The
arbitrary humor of the game was a salve, a way of keeping our own self-irony
lest we lapse into ideology like we did that one night. At the end of the
day, we all dug Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins both. It was a name pair that
just shouldn?t have been uttered in the first place.
Whatever the case, I?ve discovered something great about listening to music
and playing it. You may necessarily exclude great chunks of music in the
process of building up your aesthetic. You can always surprise yourself
later on, though, when music that you weren?t initially ready for reveals
itself to you in all its beauty.
If only our government would surprise itself and us in the same way. At its
present course, it is opting for the exclusionary course, guarding its
belief with a desperate, violent love, full of folly. It is truly
disparaging the thing it defends.
© Brad Mehldau, September, 2003
http://
From: Pierre <plavio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Garry Hodgson <garry@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Re: [Harp-L] re: was timbre etc, now music theory
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:22:32 -0500
Garry said:
so i should spend several years listening to music i don't like, and if i
happen to pick the right people to listen to, i then will find i don't like
any of the music that i like now.
what a deal.
Well yeah, you can sell all your blues CDs and start all over again. Ummm...
Maybe I should sell mine.
I have to say I did not like jazz much up until about 5 years ago but I
slowly got sucked in, its like drinking beer at first if awful, then
eventually it starts tasting fine. Eventually it's just great. Same with
wine, people often start with sweeter wines and move up to drier wines, try
and go back to those sweet german wines, can't do.
Some jazz is pretty far out and I think we tend to remember those weird
abstract things we hated and start thinking that that is jazz, but jazz has
many styles some of them are pretty mainstream, anyways if anyone is
interested, the following CDs are very mainstream and I am sure they could
move anybody on the list, these are like the sweet wines, the list gets a
bit drier as one moves down. I used these CDs to get my wife hooked on jazz
and it worked, now she buys Jazz CDs on her own and she does not turn the
volume down on the stereo anymore; how cool is that?
Ben Webster, Soulville (Ben Webster on tenor and Oscar Peterson
on Piano, match made in heaven)
Kenny Burell, Midnight blue (SRV raved about him so I checked him out when
I got started, nice)
The Getz/Gilberto cd, (Robert Bonfiglio got me on this one, thank
you Robert, I will forever be greatful )
Stanley Turentine, Hustlin' (With Shirley Scott on B-3 organ and Kenny
Burell on guitar)
Winton Marsalis, Joe Cool's blues
Dave Brubeck, Take Five
Herbie Hancock, Gershwin's world (these are not the usual Gershwin's
overplayed standards, some classical jazz, Some Stevie W.)
Danny Gatton and Joy DeFrancesco Relentless (Blues people will love
this I think)
John McLaughlin, After the Rain with Joy DeFrancesco
Ben Webster is a "stylist", that means he's like a blues harp player, he
goes for the sound. Unless you've heard Ben, you've never heard a sax played
like like this.
Joy DeFrancesco is a great B-3 jazz organ player. Danny Gatton is an awsome
guitar player with roots in blues, rock, country, whatever. Not sure what he
is, but can he play. Kind of a child prodigy at age 12 like Stevie Wonder
but on guitar.
Note: Winton Marsalis has all the critics after him because he (they say)
did not advance jazz, but he is awesome technically on the trumpet. The band
on Joe Cool's blues is one of the best I have heard. They Swing. Joe Cool is
fun jazz and great music.
Stan Getz had 2 follow ups to the Getz/Gilberto CD, they are both classics:
- Jazz Samba,
- Jazz Samba encore
BTW I still like blues, but it has to be really good,
Pierre.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Garry Hodgson" <garry@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 1:19 PM
Subject: Re: Re: [Harp-L] re: was timbre etc, now music theory
Pierre <plavio@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Listen to jazz for a few years and you will probably get a whole new
perspective on music and you may find that most blues start sounding
boring,
same with most rock and pop. This is not snobbery, once you get used to
jazz, other music just starts to sounds too simple, too basic.
...
Listen to the top
jazz artist for a few years and you will be forever changed. Warning: It
may
take a while before you develop a taste for the music but there is no
going
back once you do. Trick is to find the right people to listen to.
so i should spend several years listening to music i don't like, and if i
happen to pick the right people to listen to, i then will find i don't like
any of the music that i like now.
what a deal.
truth be told, i like some jazz. and some classical, and some of lots of
other kinds of music. i don't see any of them as superior or inferior. it
either moves me or it doesn't.
----
Garry Hodgson, Senior Software Geek, AT&T CSO
But I'm not giving in an inch to fear
'Cause I promised myself this year
I feel like I owe it...to someone.
_______________________________________________
Harp-L is sponsored by SPAH, http://www.spah.org
Harp-L@xxxxxxxxxx
http://harp-l.org/mailman/listinfo/harp-l
_______________________________________________
Harp-L is sponsored by SPAH, http://www.spah.org
Harp-L@xxxxxxxxxx
http://harp-l.org/mailman/listinfo/harp-l
_________________________________________________________________
With tax season right around the corner, make sure to follow these few
simple tips.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/PreparationTips/PreparationTips.aspx?icid=HMFebtagline
This archive was generated by a fusion of
Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and
MHonArc 2.6.8.