Songs like "Mean" and "Our Song" were a lot closer to traditional country than 70s fusion was to traditional jazz. Obviously, she's recently changed her sound to the point where I wouldn't argue that "Shake It Off" is country. Of course, the ideal of "progression" in the musical sense isn't embedded in the DNA of country as it is in the DNA of jazz: even if country's production values have changed over the decades, its backbone of storytelling lyrics set to skeletal harmonic musical backing has remained relatively constant compared to the radical change that jazz has undergone over the decades. Taylor Swift's "Teardrops on My Guitar" could be a Hank Williams song title, and its musical backing isn't a million miles away from The Carter Family in the same way that something like Coltrane's Meditations or Miles's Live/Evil is a million miles away from Louis Armstrong's early music.
How much jazz truly features collective improvisation, as opposed to a series of soloists improvising over pre-planned, structured changes? One of the interesting things about the bonus tracks on various jazz reissue CDs is how little the various takes truly vary from one another. Certainly improvisation is an important part of jazz, but I'm not sure I'd say it's the central defining quality of the music.
Lots, even if it's little moment to moment interactions between the members of the rhythm section in support. But I do suspect you hear a lot less of it in any given studio recording -- never to me the best or most characteristic way to hear jazz; one of the reasons live recordings and live performance are where jazz lives. The essence of the art is spontaneous intuitive creation and interaction. It's absolutely the defining characteristic of the music and the thing that sets it apart from other popular music traditions and most other classical music traditions, and improvisation and the jazz approach to improvisation is the thing that links it all from Armstrong to the present.
I guess I bought into Marsalis's worldview, but I'd say the defining characteristic of the music is the marriage of the blues with the Great American Songbook/Western harmony, played with swing rhythm. In its heyday, classical music and opera featured massive improvisation that we don't often hear on modern recordings or performances, where the written cadenzas that survive for certain piano concertos have often become the "official" notation of sections that would have been improvised in, say, Mozart's day. For huge chunks of the Italian operatic tradition, I believe the written aria in the score was just a jumping-off point for the prima donna to improvise off of, and the audience would have expected her to improvise. According to this source, Beethoven participated in the equivalent of the "cutting contests" that are part of jazz lore: http://www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/guides/daniel-steibelt/ If this account is accurate, especially the bolded section, improvisation is not the unique defining characteristic of jazz that sets it apart from all other musics, and that's not even getting into other improvisatory traditions, such as Indian ragas, which you did mention. I also hear at least as much collective improvisation in most Led Zeppelin concerts as I do most live jazz recordings.
Well, I guess in the end what this thread shows is the reason folks don't agree about what fits it jazz history is because folks don't agree about what jazz is. When jazz was a verb -- as Jelly Roll Morton used it do discuss his point that you could jazz anything, his example being a them from Verdi -- the idea was that you could apply jazz as a performance process or mode. It wasn't -- and I maintain still isn't -- about any particular form or any specific content -- it's a process for approaching performance and performing any content by jazzing it -- a particular method of improvising and applying a kind of rhythmic shape to it. Of course any and all improvisation isn't jazz. But the process of jazzing music, fundamentally involves a certain language for improvisation and aesthetic of improvisation which I think it jazz's one irreducible element. Certainly Cole Porter songs or flatted sevenths or 16-bar I-IV-V's aren't irreducible elements of jazz. It's the jazz improvisatorial process that makes it jazz otherwise even the blues would still be blues and "It's No Business Like Show Business" would still be a show tune.
One other point about this issue of spontaneous creation and improvisation and the blues as it pertains to the roots and essence of jazz. I was sitting Wednesday morning with Bill Cole, the great "avant garde" for want of a better word double reed player who's played with Sam Rivers and Billy Bang and William Parker, Julius Hemphill, etc, because I'm on the board of a nascent foundation of which he's creative director; and I was trying to help him with the language he wanted to use in his artistic mission statement -- because although he's written two books on Miles Davis and taught at Amherst and Dartmouth, verbalizing the aesthetics of what he does and what jazz and creative improvised music is was proving a bit of a struggle. And Bill brought up the blues as the roots of this music, and of course, Bill's music and the music of his compatriots often sounds nothing like the blues and it's certainly not the aesthetic of, say, Chicago electric blues that's the aesthetic of the music his foundation was interested in supporting. So I tried to help him step back from the idea of the blues -- since that connotes a specific form -- and get to the underlying sensibility and aesthetic thing about the blues he was talking about, beyond form, with respect to his music in specific, and jazz in general (since it obviously wasn't the blues as form). And what he finally worked his way to describing was a value system involving finding what is new in a familiar form and spontaneity and intuition in creation and performance. I think that kind of performance aesthetic -- together with, certainly in historic example, that swinging rhythm and syncopated figuration -- is really at the heart of jazz -- not blues per se and certainly not Broadway songs of the '30s that hadn't even been written when jazz was forming. As jazz evolved it relied less exclusively on those specific rhythmic ideas -- sometimes importing rhythmic ideas from other musics, just as rock and roll moved from the rockabilly shuffle to other rhythmic feels -- but it continued to maintain its focus on that spontaneity and intuition in creation and performance. That kind of jazz improvisation is the glue of the tradition.
I like they way you put it in these two posts. I think what it comes down to is a particular way of relating to time. It's not that important exactly what the underlying pulse is (it can even be the uneven pulsing of free improvisation), its the way the player relates to the pulse, how he or she divides it, dancing in, on and around it, cutting in and out, leaving space or filling it up, cutting characteristic melodic shapes in the timing of the improvisation as a structure or series of also improvised events take place. Certain timbers and harmonies and certain conventional structures are also characteristic, but I think you're right that there's an approach to rhythm in improvisation that's more central, more at the core of what makes the things we call "jazz" jazz. That forms the most important well of gravity around which the various types of music we call jazz all orbit. L.
Watched the 10th episode last night and, I guess, can understand those that thought Cecil Taylor, in particular, was ridiculed (?...I forget what was said upthread! Sorry). B. Marsalis' baseball analogy (re: audience having to prepare for Taylor's performance) seemed silly to me...because I seriously doubt Taylor was suggesting that audience members sit down at a piano for x number of hours and plunk away. I guess the take away could be that it was dismissive...but, in my opinion, the episode sure did give him (and Roach) some film time. My own take away? I was most appalled by Max Roach! And was unaware Coltrane was so controversial. I've always liked Coltrane...thought I was just a mainstreamer!
Well in particular I think late Coltrane, like from Ascension, was kind of controversial in the sense that he went headlong into more of an extended playing outside traditional song form kind of bag and became more of a sonic improviser (vs strictly the strongly harmonic one he had been with those tumbling triads), with more reliance on techniques like mulitphonics, and more and more of a spiritual kind of bag to the music, as he fell in more with Albert Ayler, who really inspired Coltrane. But I'm not sure the controversy much outlived Trane himself.
My whole way of thinking about these issues of what is jazz and what is consistent in jazz that connects it across its multi-stylistic permutations is to look at the whole history of jazz from Armstrong through Cecil and fusion and European stuff like Brotzmann and look for the commonalities. Not to say in advance: jazz is X; or to rely entirely on a kind of original intent theory and go back to Morton and Armstrong and say jazz was X then therefore it must always be. Instead I presume all these musicians who came up in the jazz tradition and played what they considered music from and of that tradition, however new any given change might appear, are playing jazz. Therefore, what connects it? And I think most fundamentally what connects it all is a certain approach to improvisation, a primacy of place given to improvisation, and a constant tension or argument, to use a Wynton description, between the composed and the improvised, between individual expression in the form and collective expression in the form.
I play with two jazz players in an ensemble that does not play jazz, but there are a few Yiddish and Romani tunes we play that use a rhythm pretty close to swing. When I'm singing the songs themselves it is absolutely not jazz, however. There's something about my phrasing that marks them as irreducibly eastern European in feel, even when I'm improvising new melodies or when I'm "scatting," as I do sometimes, but not in a jazz manner. However, when the clarinet player solos, he comes at the relationship between the melody and the harmonic and rhythmic structure of the tunes very differently, and when he improvises very often the music suddenly just becomes jazz. He and the bass-player (the other guy in the band with a strong jazz background) just sort of lock together into a slightly different understanding of the time, and it draws us all into a kind of jazz episode. Everything for a time changes just so, only to shift back when I open my mouth again to sing. It's more than just "he plays a jazzy solo." Something more fundamental shifts in the whole mode of expression, and it's primarily because he's got that jazz feel for time (how you improvise your way through a structure as it passes) so powerfully internalized that it affects us all, and the audience can feel it, too. I'm not making claims for the artistic greatness of what we play, just noting something about the way the gravity well of this central aspect of "jazzness" can operate in practice. It's more than merely decorative or incidental. I should add that it doesn't happen on tunes where he's asked to improvise melodically in eastern fashion with no changes, but I don't think it's the lack of changes alone that makes that the case. I think it's just that in the absence of changes, his jazz improvisational feel doesn't take over, and he improvises differently. L.
Interesting piece to go with the thread: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/31/how-ken-burns-murdered-jazz/
It's been estimated that 95% of the people who have an opinion of Lance Armstrong never watched him race. Not surprising, if you get the drift of the analogy. Happy listening.
Asked two random people at work yesterday, who the first jazz musician they could think of, and got two very interesting answers... Eubie Blake and Dizzy Gillespie. First respondent was in his early 50's (I think), the second in his late 30's? Both African-American. Was surprised a bit by both responses, but especially Eubie Blake.
People often get their jazz "knowledge" through other artistic channels -- Broadway, commercials, articles they happen to graze over in the Arts & Leisure sections of their favorite tabloids, etc. It's sad that the music is reduced to a sort of "happy" accident.
A paint-by-numbers example of the typical indictment of the series — the guy who wrote it clearly loves snotty polemics more than jazz. And the headline is deeply stupid in an Onion-worthy kind of way.
Yup. I don't know when that piece was actually written (it's part of a new collection, so it might be from back in the day), but yawn in any case. L.
Great thread! With chervokas and Rooster_Ties so eloquently articulating my thoughts, I have little to contribute to this topic. I'm just laying back and digging what you cats are riffing on. One good thing has happened as a result of this thread though, I've now started building my Cecil Taylor collection.
As long as you're relying on others to guide your musical direction, I'd suggest seeking this out. He was an important and close associate of Cecil's for several years. This music will help give you an idea about where the conception for the early/initial years of the Cecil Taylor Unit came from: http://www.amazon.com/Box-Set-Jimmy-Lyons/dp/B00012NZUE http://www.jazzmessengers.com/en/1742/jimmy-lyons/the-box-set
Well, the jazz I listen to is the jazz that has the collective improvisation, but you've got to take the rough with the smooth when you listen to that sort of jazz. I've always felt that if you're not confident to say 'yep, it's daring, without-a-net music, but I dislike it' then you're better off with the sort of jazz where everyone gets sixteen bars over the chord structure. Otherwise it gets very 'Emperor's New Clothes' very quickly.
Except he did the same thing with "Baseball". Armstrong/Ellington = Yankees/Dodgers to Burns. He needs to stick to topics that have a definite time frame.
Somehow I managed to wait fourteen years to watch this series. It's been for the better, as I've read reviews and can enjoy the program for what it is. I watched Episode 6 last night...and we're still not in 1940. I know there are plenty of other resources out there for current (1970-present) jazz, so I'll look into those when I finish this. I have tired quickly of Marsalis and Crouch, although I just read Crouch's bio on Charlie Parker and will probably read the second volume when it comes out (assuming there will be a second volume).
I respect your deep knowledge of music and am interested to know: What, in your view, distinguishes non-jazz collective improvisation from jazz collective improvisation, given that you seem to be excluding harmonic principles (e.g., "It wasn't -- and I maintain still isn't -- about any particular form or any specific content -- it's a process for approaching performance and performing any content by jazzing it") and even, ultimately, rhythmic elements (e.g., "As jazz evolved it relied less exclusively on those specific rhythmic ideas -- sometimes importing rhythmic ideas from other musics") from consideration?
