Jazz Is Freedom
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
My personal favorite is Keith Jarrett, clearly owing to Monk, with the Tokyo concert. His Koln concert is better known, and less avant guarde, the Tokio requires full attention from the listener.
I like the articles focus on a single person, as jazz itself grew so wide it is hard to say anything about it. The concept jazz can be better understood by learning about the individual concrete parts of it, rather than sweeping generalizations.
As Louis Armstrong said "There's only two kinds of music, good music and bad music... and we play good music".
[1] A few simple examples from artists that HN folks may not be super familiar with to prove my point:
Little Simz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxfGQ2AJHGk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh8Q2iytzns
Dave (this was live at the UK's version of the Emmys and noone knew he was going to do the verse about then Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the end so it caused a real stir).
the criticism i read most often here is that rap lacks melody as a requirement of music - two absurd ideas
There's countless examples of rappers incorporating, collaborating with and evolving every genre. One of my favs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZTYgq4EoRo
Of course Kendricks work is pushing boundaries. He has an excellent produced voice, the rap a timbre and meter that is fresh. These are musical components of his words, but mere details in all the music in this track. However, the words in his rap are not details.
Personally I have never been into words in music. I barely could hear them growing up listening to metal, and still only register a phrase or two in music today. If you see music and lyrics as different things, I see how you would give rap a bad rap, musically speaking.
My current fav (I can only understand every fifth word obviously): https://soundcloud.com/icespiceee/ice-spice-no-clarity
holy crap, where are you seeing this happen? I haven't encountered that kind of thing since literally the 1990s. possibly even the 80s.
At music school I knew a few baroque improvisors, a good one on the harpsichord is one of my favorite music, really miss that.
Last time they were active was 2021, but at this point I'm sure they'll play again.
That is, I overall enjoyed the tunes, but I think it would have been a much more interesting had there been greater variation beyond a "simple" sax as the main instrument.
However, I fully accept that it's just not for me. I enjoy music from a lot of different genres, from medieval music to goa trance to stoner and doom metal, but somehow Jazz has never clicked for me.
Each time I pick a different subcategory (e.g. "rising star trumpet") and check out the artists from the list. When I hear something I like, I add it to a playlist. I'm planning to do the same with Downbeat's readers poll[2] and, now that I've seen it, with the Jazzwise list linked by parent.
I also go to my local jazz club about once a month. The enjoyment you can get from live music is incomparable to just listening to the recordings IMHO, and it seems to me that this is especially true with regards to jazz.
I recently discovered the MusicBox app; sort of a listen later. My current playlist has 62 albums, as in December, these magazines are publishing their best of lists.
As someone close said a couple of days: "I didn't realize how much time goes into this music I might not always like to listen every day".
Just listen to his solos on "It Don't Mean a Thing," one of his recordings mentioned in the article (I hadn't heard it before):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pU-5pEpfmE
In this Ellington tune, the second half of the first phrase is a bunch of repeated b-flats. And you hear that same segment repeated three times before the tune is done. That's a lot of repeated b-flats.
Like any jazz player, Monk plays that tune at the beginning. Then it's the part of jazz where he's supposed to solo-- that is, show his prowess at improvising and creating new melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. To do so, he... just keeps hammering those fucking b-flats! I mean there are other little flourishes and ideas in there, but he always comes back to those incessant b-flats.
To top it all off, he gives both a four-bar intro and four-bar outro with... guess what? Yep, the b-flats. And he drags over them every time, giving each one plenty of time and volume. There may be other artists from the time who played slower than Monk, but Monk feels slower than any other jazz artist I know.
I think a lot of the praise his contemporaries heaped on him was revisionist. We know Miles Davis initially found his comping distracting. I'd bet there were a lot more who thought he was essentially "doing jazz wrong," but they couldn't easily dismiss him because he could obviously swing. Just listen to his surprise acceleration 19 seconds in to "Don't Mean a Thing" above. He doesn't even retain the "correct" number of measures for that part. Who else was doing stuff like that at the time? Art Tatum is the only one who comes to mind, and he was usually playing solo piano.
Edit: Oops, that's actually the record skipping! Hehe. But I also noticed that after a few choruses the repeated b-flats start to infect the other part of the phrase and take it over, so there's that. (And regardless, Art Tatum did actually do jump cuts like this in his own playing. There's even a recording of him playing a Chopin waltz where he takes that technique to an extreme.)
It's as if Monk was "wrong warping" through jazz. The only comparable thing I can think of was Debussy internalizing Wagner's mature operas and then writing What-Would-Wagner-Not-Do tone poems and character pieces. And unlike, say, a Brahms or a Coltrane-- whose styles typically featured long chains of continual development that left us with clear proof of their compositional work-- Debussy and Monk have a lot of output where there's often nearly nothing there.
It's very difficult to write like that without either falling into incoherence, or convincing your contemporaries that there's something wrong with you.
But then it's dangerous to try to point out exactly what Monk was doing wrong-- after all, one could end up accidentally revealing one's own confirmation biases and assumptions that hamper one's own creativity. Hence, the Diogenes comparison.
> the second half of the first phrase is a bunch of repeated b-flats
Monk does a ton of voicings with those repeated notes. Of the ~16 repeats, he’s playing supporting chords with different roots, augmentation, diminishes for ~25-75% of them.
> He doesn't even retain the "correct" number of measures for that part.
His timing and “dragging” and dissonance can’t be easy on bandmates. But it makes Monk a top example of knowing it’s him 10 seconds into a record you’ve never heard before. And agreed at not looking too closely at what Monk was doing wrong or right — it interferes with enjoying it.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/11/john-thomson-l...
I'm an amateur jazz musician myself (in rural England), and the people I know locally who've seen these sketches also like them. But, when I've mentioned them to Americans they do not seem to be at all amused, and are sometimes rather offended; I'm not sure why.
Belaboring the cover of the album buys into the same image-oriented discussion of Monk the writer seems to want to move away from.
Even today you can hear people like Quincy Jones (on his interview from a few years ago) bad mouth all the rock musicians like the Beatles and even Michael Jackson and say they couldn't play and their music was terrible and blah blah blah and the "if it's not jazz, IT'S CRAP" thing all over again.
For example, the rock "feel/vibe purists", for whom the peak of all possible things is David Gilmour holding a sustained note from the blues scale - anything more strenuous, or of different feel, is considered extravagant, self indulgent, or missing-the-point, man.
Each faction holds some kernels of truth, but when personal bias turns those kernels into hard prejudice, the only lesson left to be learned is that we're all doing our own slightly different versions of more-or-less the same thing - "art", as per life.
The young folks who idolise them confuse that nostalgia for capital-t Truth and I think that has led to a nucleus of purism. (I say this as a reformed purist myself.) But it’s a nucleus with the tiny scale that connotes…most of the top pros in the most straightahead jazz today have diverse musical interests and ambitions.
I'll go as far as to say that the entire modern jazz movement recognizes earlier jazz (swing/bebop/cool/funk) as seminal to the art form, but deliberately experiments and takes risks away from classical jazz forms.
musicians back in the day were limited by the technology of the day, so they played things like horns and upright basses. the thing that made their music "jazz" was the improvisation. the jazz was something they did, not an objective genre standard.
if monk or miles or coltrane were alive today, their music would be way different. they'd probably take advantage of samples, synthesizers, maybe even AI? i don't know. but the key to their genius was the intent behind their playing, the way they bent harmonic structure in service of their improvised melodic ideas. this is jazz as a verb.
as soon as jazz became "america's art form, now playing at the lincoln center and available as an honors track college major" it wasn't actually jazz. so many people are doing it wrong. welcome to america!
I really respected him for that, but when I got to college the music program was so focused on the past. It looked like the only prof who was doing contemporary stuff was the percussion guy and I played trumpet. I got booed out of the room once for suggesting it'd be cool to mix jazz and hip-hop (this was 1989).
If I'd stuck with it I probably would have discovered all kinds of new stuff going on, but I followed what Miles said and got into electronic music.
i think about this all the time. it's like a koan.
good on you for breaking with the orthodoxy. or as miles might call them "non-playing motherfuckers"
Not saying student's shouldn't experiment but teachers really are there to teach the old stuff, in case anyone's interested. Teachers don't know what the new stuff is, how could they teach it :-)
I took organ lessons from an established jazz-pianist as a teenager. I was an all time beginner but he got his job from a music store where we bought the electric organ, so he couldn't choose his students. :-)
He made me practice old pop tunes like "Moon River" I remember. I told him I'm getting tired of this crap I don't like these oldies but goldies. Why can't you teach me jazz or rock or something cool. He told me listen, maybe you don't like these songs, or maybe you don't like the way you play them. Then he played it and dropped in some cool jazz chords and syncopation. I was amazed and inspired. I realized I couldn't do what he did unless I learned to play the song the old way first.
Disclosure: I'm a performing jazz bassist. I'm at a level where I can collaborate with bands, but am not good enough to blaze my own path, except to the extent of having a playing style of my own.
The canon of tunes, and the "standard arrangement" are both a blessing and a curse, and are hardly worshipped. Those things make it easy to assemble a band and perform with no preparation, but get boring after a while.
At least one of my bands plays virtually none of that stuff. Another plays complex written arrangements. A third is mostly old tin pan alley material, but raucous and fun for the audience. It's all jazz. I've noticed that audiences respond quite well to the variety, including my long solos.
Variety is the fulcrum of all music. And there can be no variety without repetition. Then the variety itself must vary. You're proceeding on the knife's edge, on the other side too much repetition on the other too little. And the proportion of those must vary over time. https://youtu.be/XwIehM-x6kA :-)
I'd love to hear your various groups, and am always up for a long bass solo -- I switched from trumpet to bass in college. I don't know if it's possible but it'd be awesome to mix up all of those styles into a single performance!
Melody
Solo 1
Solo 2
Bass solo
Drum solo or "trading fours"
Melody
Ending
There are some good things about it, for instance, a beginner can function well enough in a band to play low profile gigs, and gain experience. I certainly owe my present skill level to getting that start, along with playing in the high school jazz band.
Unfortunately, within any given locale, the actual list of tunes that gets played can be quite small, leading to the same tunes getting played over and over again, ad nauseam. It takes some effort, and I think, respect for the audience, to break out of this local minimum, for instance writing more interesting arrangements, rehearsing the band, or just agreeing to explore a wider variety of tunes. Personally, I decided to ditch the fake books, a couple decades ago, and made the effort to either learn the repertoire, or get good at figuring things out by ear.
Unfortunately my various groups are completely un-recorded.
</rant>
Still, if you look in the right places jazz is still very much alive and evolving. I made a top ten list for 2022 if you want examples that acknowledge the tradition but don’t touch the worshipped canon and to my ears are relevant to right now. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NUGbkID4mmc
I recently discovered multi-instrumentalist Robert Stillman, who opened for The Smile (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood's side project with Tom Skinner). He played solo tenor saxophone with some kind of looping effect, along with some lo-fi sampling involving multiple lightly-synchronized cassette tapes of himself playing other instruments. Amazing stuff.
Also, I'm a huge fan of The Smile, and that was my overall favorite record from last year. I covered one of their tunes a week ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYGuqAiveQ
I'm not super familiar with Robert Stillman other than seeing him with The Smile on Tiny Desk last week. I'll have to check out his own stuff.