The "Best of 2012" lists are out. Rather than recommend studio albums, I would like to underscore the ephemeral nature of the medium and highlight some great, live saxophone performances from the past year that can be heard on the web. Ben Solomon. QED.
Noah Preminger. Noah reminds us that saxophone playing should be musical, and he shows how.
Mike DiRubbo. The alto saxophone is tricky. In the tradition of Charlie Parker and Jackie McLean, DiRubbo plays it with tenor-like toughness.
Antoine Roney. Can't get further from the studio than this.
Ray McMorrin. Listen to a few gripping moments of intense musical feeling here.
Bassist Dezron Douglas discusses some of his formative musical experiences in this recent interview by The Revivalist. Douglas underscores the influence of Jackie McLean, whom he can be heard playing with as a student at the Hartt School in the video below.
Roger Scruton's writing on music is always illuminating. In this review of Dmitri Tymoczko's A Geometry of Music, he discusses the problems with a generative grammar of music, issues regarding the modeling of music in geometric space, why musicology is not a science, and his reservations about The Pixies.
Guitarist Etan Haziza has shared with me the following video, in which pianist Brad Mehldau suggests some parallels between Charlie Parker and Mozart, and between John Coltrane and Beethoven (4:05ff.). (Mehldau has also written some interesting essays at his website under the heading, "Creativity in Beethoven and Coltrane.")
It is sometimes pointed out that the history of jazz mirrors that of European art music, only in microcosm, and so these kinds of comparisons are irresistible. I have occasionally thought that an additional parallel between Coltrane and Beethoven has to do with the unexpected importation of voices into typically instrumental forms. Coltrane's non-normative introduction of the voice into the ostensibly instrumental format of A Love Supreme (both through actual singing on "Acknowledgment" as well as the text-based melody of "Psalm," as Lewis Porter argues) at least superficially resembles Beethoven's revolutionary use of vocal soloists and choir in the final movement of his 9th Symphony. Coltrane would revisit this unusual addition of voices with the recitation on "Om" and his wordless singing in live performances like "Leo" from Temple University. This comparison is not entirely precise, of course.
Although Beethoven's use of voices in a symphonic setting was not wholly without precursors, its impact was as if it had been. This was not the case with Coltrane's A Love Supreme, since instrumental jazz groups had already used vocalizations and singing in a number of different ways. Just one example is "Original Faubus Fables" from Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, recorded in 1960, with its satirical lyrics. More importantly, the traditional instrumentation requirements for jazz are obviously not as strict as those for classical-era forms: "vocal jazz" is ubiquitous throughout the history, whereas the symphony in the early 19th century was unmistakably an instrumental form. Nonetheless, someone listening to a jazz quartet led by a saxophonist generally does not expect to hear singing or chanting. Furthermore, both A Love Supreme and the 9th Symphony represent career-culminating works, both are perhaps the most popular and influential works of their respective authors, etc.
"As for spotting general characteristics [of the Modernist arts], the task is difficult too. A critical term first used about Modernism tells us why: its arts have been promoted and accepted as 'experimental.' The word stand for endless efforts to be different; it is one of the many misnomers of our time. An experiment is conducted under rigorous conditions; it follows a method, relies on others' most recent research, and is subject to review by peers. The artist's effort is entirely individual and uncontrolled. It is barely trial and error, since there exist no standards by which error can be gauged and a better trial made. What Modernism achieved is no less worthy for the lack of an honorific drawn from the laboratory. It would be better described---and this for more than one reason---as suggestive art. (The French slang phrase 'launching a balloon' springs to mind.) Suggestive would cover the part that was pastiche and parody, the part that appealed by scandal, the part that embodied the obscure hints of the unconscious, and---perhaps clearest of all---the combination of parts that detach emotion from past art. Still, the word experimental proved a great convenience as a mind-opener. It made the public, inured to science, take the improbable with composure; it kept the lid down on the coffin of the philistine."
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present.
Last week's celebration of Thelonious Monk's birthday led me, among other places, to Ethan Iverson's blog post concerning the bridge on the Monk composition "Well You Needn't." In it he discusses the prevalence of interpretations of the tune in which the first chord of the bridge is played as G7, which he attributes to the influence of Miles Davis's performances of the piece, although Monk himself played Db. Iverson goes on to discuss the particular voicing of that Db chord and other issues. Iverson's post raises the question of whether a voice-leading analysis can shed any additional light regarding these two divergent bridge strategies. Below are voice-leading reductions for the Monk and Davis versions of "Well You Needn't" per Iverson. Monk version
Davis version
In beginning his bridge with the flat submediant, Monk moves toward the subdominant key area, a common harmonic strategy for the bridges of song-form jazz pieces. Davis's bridge starts on V/V, which in moving to the sharp-key side is a less common though not entirely unusual approach. Additionally, the Davis version exhibits parallel fifths, posing a sharp contrast to Monk's (much hipper) parallel ninths. More importantly, the flat submediant of Monk's bridge continues the Phrygian mode-mixture initiated by the tonic-flat supertonic oscillation in the tune's A-section. The structural tones of the soprano voice (Db-F-Eb-Db) are also borrowed from the Phrygian mode. Davis's version lacks this particular connection between bridge and A-section. In Monk's bridge, the top voice has has intimations of a stepwise 8-7-6-(5) descent, whereas Davis's version does not as clearly relate to a possible linear progression or fundamental line. An additional unifying element found in Monk's version is the transfer of the bass Db in the first bar of the bridge to the soprano voice Db (C#) in the last bar of the bridge. Perhaps most significantly, Monk's bridge features a step up-two steps down motive in the bass, marked x' on the graph above. This motive (Db-Eb-Db-B) reflects a similar bass movement in the A-section, labelled x on the graph. As Iverson points out in his post, the F-Gb-F-Eb bass pattern is unique to Monk's performances and is missing from "G7 bridge" versions of the tune. Such a tight motivic connection between phrases surely represents the kind of musical architecture that makes Monk stand out as a composer. Some additional points: the melody note Eb in the second measure of the tune represents the sixth scale degree of the chord in that bar, Gb7. As we have seen, Monk's bridge also begins with the (flat) sixth scale step in the bass, and Eb is the first structural soprano pitch of the bridge. Finally, the voicing that Iverson hears Monk using for the Db chord beginning the bridge is a stark, three-voice collection containing the pitches Db, Eb, and F. This voicing is therefore a simultaneity of the structural soprano tones heard during the bridge. Such integration of horizontal and vertical is another sign of Monk's compositional profundity. Thus, while the Miles Davis performances of "Well You Needn't" are of course brilliant, Monk's own conception of the tune exhibits a degree of compositional integration at abstracted voice-leading levels that the former lack.
The current issue of Music Theory Online is a Festschrift in honor of Steve Larson, whose pioneering work in applying the tools of Schenkerian analysis to jazz music is revelatory and inspiring. http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.12.18.3/toc.18.3.html
Bill Kirchner describes lessons with Lee Konitz, from an interview with Ethan Iverson:
For the first lesson I took with Lee, he pulled out the Sinatra album Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! from ’56. That’s one of the great Sinatra/Nelson Riddle records, with “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Lee said, “Here – take this home. Learn one of these tunes, exactly the way Sinatra sings it.” I learned to sing along with the record with all the time feel and inflections and everything. It’s a really musical and emotional experience that I still use with students, because it gets you away from the instrument. It gets you thinking like a singer, but also it just gets you totally away from the mechanical and just into the emotional and just purely musical.
After my first lesson he gave me the changes to “Stella by Starlight” and we worked on that for two months. Lee said, “Alright, for this week, you’re gonna improvise on ‘Stella’ but only using the chord tones and only using whole notes.” The next week, “Okay, now you can use half notes”; following week – “now you can use quarter notes…now eighth notes…now eighth-note triplets, now sixteenth notes…alright, now you can mix it up….now –go back and start doing the whole thing over again with one rhythmic unit at a time, but this time you can use the scalar tones.” You really learned the tune! And you learned the idea of improvising as composition, getting away from dumb licks and stock shit of any kind, which of course is Lee Konitz exemplified.
Coltrane's interest in astrology and astronomy surely manifested itself in his music, but how exactly? With song titles like "Mars" and "Leo," Coltrane's last studio recording, released as Interstellar Space,provides an example of the programmatic influence of astrology. But can we find concrete musical examples?
"Venus," another track from that duo recording, displays roughly the same melodic material as a piece recorded by the quartet a few days earlier entitled "Stellar Regions."
Whereas the pieces on the posthumous quartet album Stellar Regions were given their titles by Alice Coltrane, it is not clear whether "Venus" (also released posthumously) was so titled by John Coltrane himself or by someone else. The question of the title is relevant because of the (admittedly tenuous) connection between the melody of "Venus" and the Harmonices Mundiof Johannes Kepler.
In his discussion of the harmonic proportions he claims to have discovered in planetary motion, Kepler asserts that the orbit of the planet Venus can be said to produce the sound of the pitch (E).
Interestingly, the melody of Coltrane's "Venus" emphasizes the pitch (E), as in the manner of a primary tone. As the third degree of an apparent C major tonal center, (E) starts the melodic phrase, and it is privileged above other notes in the number of repetitions it receives (including in the form of a trill with its lower neighbor tone, [D]). A transcription is available in Lewis Porter's book, John Coltrane: His Life and Music, and the voice-leading of the opening phrase can be illustrated thusly:
The phrase in question suggests a polyphonic melody, with a 3-2 stepwise descent in the upper voice accompanied by an inner voice moving by step from the dominant to the leading tone and back. The primary tone (E) returns, and seven additional variations of this thematic material are heard before Coltrane departs into wider-ranging improvisations.
None of the other planet-titled pieces on Interstellar Space ("Mars," "Jupiter," "Saturn") evince any obvious relation to Kepler's speculative notion, and the connection between the (E) of Coltrane's "Venus" and that of Kepler's Harmonices Mundi might well be coincidental. Nevertheless, given Coltrane's astrological interests it is at least possible that he had encountered Kepler's work.
Jelly Roll Morton, whose birthday was recently celebrated, said,
"Without breaks and without clean breaks, without beautiful ideas in breaks, you don’t need to even think about doin’ anything else. If you can’t have a decent break, you haven’t got a jazz band, or you can’t even play jazz."
One of the interesting, albeit obvious, changes to occur in the history of jazz has been the evolution of the approach to phrase articulation: namely, from the clear articulation of discrete phrases typical of popular dance music to an esoteric ambiguity and intricately homogeneous opacity of phrase, even down to the level of measure and beat.
"I think of culture as a form of practical knowledge: something which gives you a sense of what to do, what to feel, how to be towards other people in a community in ways which will enhance your own social and emotional competence. I think this is what you learn from literature, and I think in particular you learn it from music...The greatest achievement of our civilization, if you leave religion and science to one side, has been music: a continuous tradition of reflection through the articulate sound on what it is to be human, and a constant attempt to take that reflection further, to build abstract structures in which nevertheless we see mirrored our own emotional nature as rational and social beings. This great achievement is something which I think can be imparted to the young, and it changes their lives. It changes their way not only of thinking about the world, but of seeing each other."
All of Scruton's writing on music is worth reading, particularly his books on musical aesthetics, his monograph on Wagner's Tristan, and his forthcoming review of Dmitri Tymoczko's new book, a draft of which is available at Scruton's website.
Often attributed to John Coltrane,"Miles' Mode" is probably the best known jazz composition making use of dodecaphonic technique. Vladimir Simosko and Dave Wild have made a compelling argument, however, that it was Eric Dolphy, doubtlessly well-acquainted with the work of Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote the piece and titled it "The Red Planet."
"The Red Planet" contains a brilliant, microcosmic application of some basic tools of twelve-tone technique. (In registering the obvious semantic objection, I will also point out below that Dolphy's musical purposes are clearly non-Schoenbergian.) It is widely understood that the melody of the piece consists of a prime statement of the tone row followed by its retrograde, creating a musical palindrome: B D E C# F# G# A G C Bb F Eb " Eb F Bb C G A G# F# C# E D B The modal arrangement of the tone row lends a distinct antecedent/consequent sound to these phrases. In miniature, the melodic contour of the antecedent suggests the statement of a basic idea (B D E C#), a repetition of the basic idea in the form of a response transposed up a fifth (F# G# A G), and a liquidation of the motive in approach of the caesura (C Bb F Eb). (This terminology is borrowed, however inappropriately, from William E. Caplin's Classical Form.) The first seven tones of the row outline B Dorian, and the remaining five comprise a C minor pentatonic collection. Thus, we hear the antecedent establish B minor, which is then destabilized by a shift to the tension-heightening C minor; the consequent phrase returns us to the initial B minor. As a member of both B Dorian and C Dorian, pitch-class (A) serves as the pivot between the two. The B minor modality is ultimately affirmed by the subsequent four-measure "coda" containing only the pitch-classes (B D E F#). The T1 transposition heard here is a device commonly referred to as "side-slipping," and it also defines the harmonic relation between the A- and B-sections of the modal jazz classics "So What" and "Impressions." Exclusively deploying ordered interval-classes 2, 3, and 5, the tone row operative here does not pursue the typical Second Viennese School tonality-avoidant aesthetic, often characterized by the prevalence of interval-classes 1 and 6. Therefore, we can show the voice-leading of "The Red Planet" thusly:
Notice in the foreground graph how the primary tones seem to reference a chromatically altered 1-2-3 stepwise ascent (B-C-D#). Also note in the background graph how the C and Eb smoothly resolve down by half steps, in the appropriate registers, to the terminal D and B. It is significant that the antecedent phrase "cadences" on Eb/D#: nothing subverts the minor sound more deeply than the interposition of the major third scale degree. Of course, the major third relation is integral to John Coltrane's harmonic conception generally. In his improvised bridge phrases (both in and out) on "Miles' Mode," Coltrane departs from B minor to tonicize Eb major as well as B major before returning to B minor:
Incidentally, Coltrane's sense of symmetry---even over wide swaths of time---is profound: on the in bridge he first transforms B minor to Eb major by a T4 transposition of the root; on the out bridge, complementarily, he transposes first at T8 to map root B onto G. The relative relationship between Eb major and C minor connects Coltrane's tonicizing improvisations to the "side-slipping" transposition of Dolphy's composition. In fact, that connection already exists in Dolphy's melody, as (G C Bb F Eb) could be heard as either an Eb major pentatonic or a C minor pentatonic collection given the absence of any harmonic corroboration. Interestingly, the inversion that maps Eb onto C (namely, I3, or inversion at index number 3) also functions within the tone row of "The Red Planet" to provide cohesiveness in pitch-class space. Each set of four consecutive pitch-classes in the row consists of two initial pitch-classes inverted about I3 to generate the following two. That is: I3(B D)=(E C#); I3(F# G#)=(A G); I3(C Bb)=(F Eb). In just eight measures, then, Dolphy's composition uses basic dodecaphonic technique to create a sense of harmonic movement even within a modal context and living, soulful, well-balanced phrases as well as consistent inversional symmetry within subsets of the row. All of which provides a fertile basis for improvisational elaboration by a master like Coltrane.
Historians of the 19th century origins of jazz occasionally remark on the influence of opera in addition to that of popular
dances like the schottische and quadrille, as well as numerous other influences. Interestingly, there is even a certain (loose) similarity between the social atmospheres in which jazz and opera emerged: much
like the singers of early 18th century opera seria, early jazz
players needed to project their sounds over the din of a drinking, eating, cavorting
audience.
Growing up in Creole New Orleans at the turn of the 19th
century, jazz pioneer Sidney Bechet was exposed to opera at a young age. “He
always retained fond memories of visiting the Opera House with his mother, and
from childhood loved the sound of the tenor voice. Some of the first gramophone
recordings that he ever heard were of Enrico Caruso; the dramatic vibrato and
the panache of the great singer made their mark on the youngster’s imagination.”
Bechet’s soprano saxophone playing exhibits an undeniably operatic
sensibility, and he even incorporated quotes from opera into his compositions.
As a commenter points out here, the minor key phrase of Bechet’s “Blues in the
Air” quotes from the overture to “Raymond,” written in 1851 by Ambroise Thomas. (The phrase in question is heard at 0:45 and 1:27 in the following videos, respectively).
John Coltrane’s connection to
Bechet is usually cited with regard to the former's revival of the instrument pioneered by the latter, the soprano saxophone.
Indeed, Coltrane said in an interview that “the sound of that soprano...was actually so much closer to me in my
ear... there's something about the presence - of that sound, you know? ...that,
that to me, I didn't want to admit it but to me it seemed like it was better -
than the tenor - I liked it more, see?” Lewis Porter suggests that the link
between Coltrane and Bechet was in fact mediated by Johnny Hodges, a hero of
Coltrane’s who was inspired and encouraged by Bechet early in his career. (“‘I ask
myself if, today, I only play the soprano saxophone to stay in the lineage of
Johnny Hodges—unconsciously, of course.’”)
Regardless, the empirical relationship between Bechet’s sound
and Coltrane’s “late period” sound is obvious, even when Coltrane plays tenor. Listen
to the first few seconds of Bechet's "Dear Old Southland" and Coltrane's "Ogunde," in which both artists begin
with an ascending fourth interval. Similar is the dramatic intensity, wide vibrato,
and bravura.
“I
recall a feeling I had the first time I heard [“One Down, One Up”] from the
Half Note [1965]—at the B section in John’s first chorus. He plays a seemingly
simple, understated, and beautiful line using his vibrato in just the right
spots with weight and operatic beauty…”
Indeed, Coltrane’s playing in his last period reintroduces an
operatic sense of drama and Dionysian ecstasy that was prevalent in early jazz but
had been mostly quelled by classicizing forces in the 1940s and 50s. UPDATE: Trumpeter, composer, and scholar SteveLampert reminds me that the Brazilian folksong "Ogundê uarerê," a version of which Coltrane recorded for the album Expression in addition to the Olatunji Concert above, had been recorded in the late 1940s by Brazilian soprano and Metropolitan Opera artist Bidú Sayão.
By this account, the solos by McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane
on this version of “I Want to Talk About You,” recorded live at the Half Note
in 1965, represent two substantive achievements in improvisational coherence.
In measure 4 of his second solo chorus (at 4:02), Tyner plays a
two-beat phrase whose 6-note variant follows in measure 5. This 6-note motive is
repeated with variation for a total of nine bars, spanning across the two A-sections
of the form.
Then, from 4:30, the motive is fragmented into a varied repetition
of its triplet component and finally liquidated in a flurry of runs, comprising
an additional four measures.
These thirteen bars of motivic variation and ultimate
liquidation help to provide even further-reaching coherence to Tyner’s solo
insofar as the constituent 6-note motive is foreshadowed (at 3:40) and later reiterated
(once at 5:35, once at 5:50, and twice at 6:35). Thus the solo manifests an astonishing degree of global hearing.
Perhaps spurred by Tyner’s display of motivic cohesion and
long-range architecture, Coltrane launches his own seamless and organic
development of a basic motive, beginning in measure 7 of his first solo chorus
and extending through the next three sections of the form and into the second
chorus.
The 4-note core (step down, third skip up, fourth down)
introduced at 0:19---having been adumbrated by the ascending third intervals of the previous measures---is then extended by attaching a transposition of the motive at
the fourth below (at 0:29):
Starting at 0:45 the motive is varied by diminution, then
augmented and interrupted by longer, drama-intensifying rests; by 1:50 the motive has become
heavily embellished. Finally, at 1:55 Coltrane begins a phrase that starts with
a shape related to the original motive but is ultimately liquidated and superseded
by an increasingly complex flow of musical ideas. At ballad tempo, such a chain
of rigorous motivic connection over an entire chorus and more surely represents
coherent improvisation at a global, rather than merely local, level.
Jazz improvisation is often described as a type of “theme
and variations,” where the original written song is the theme and successive improvised
solo choruses on the harmonic form of the song are the variations. In this case,
however, we hear something perhaps more akin to Schoenberg’s concept of "developing variation." Here Coltrane’s development of a repeated motive creates
a situation in which the melodic material seems to spiral out of its own
accord, growing increasingly complex over an ever-larger span of time and yet somehow
always traceable back to the original motive. The deft application of this kind of "developing variation" concept, especially by Coltrane, results in a level of musical drama and sense of "endless melody" not frequently encountered in jazz improvisation.
Jackie McLean advocated a thorough appreciation of the long
history of jazz and the many players that comprise that history. He once urged
me to familiarize myself with Rudy Williams, for instance. Williams (1909–1954)
was a featured soloist on alto saxophone with Al Cooper’s Savoy Sultans in the
late 30s and early 40s and one of the precursors of bop who nonetheless managed to
incorporate several of bop's developments into his own style. According to
McLean, Williams was one of the most respected alto players on the New York scene before Charlie Parker arrived. Some of what impressed McLean about
Williams can perhaps be heard in this recording from the Royal Roost in 1948 of
Tadd Dameron’s “Our Delight,” also featuring Dameron, Fats Navarro, Allen Eager,
Curley Russell, and Kenny Clarke:
Notice Williams’s non-normative use of melodic descending
fourths in measure 23, the penultimate bar of the B-section of this 32-bar form
(at 2’28”). Over a G-sharp minor 7th–C-sharp dominant 7th
harmony (alto saxophone key) we hear a prolongation through descending register
transfer of F-sharp, the chromatic lower neighbor to the G achieved in measure
24. The particular division of that octave descent into intervals of a fourth
is unusual and noteworthy.
The G-sharp is interesting because it completes an uncommon successive-fourths descent. It is logical because it is both the upper neighbor to the prolonged F-sharp, as well as the chromatic upper neighbor to the target G. Jackie McLean was later to become known for his own frequent
and innovative use of melodic fourth relations (his “systems.”) Interestingly,
McLean uses a gesture very similar to the one by Williams in his
composition, “Mr. E” (notably also in measure 23!):
Over chromatically descending ii-V chords (D minor 7th–G dominant 7th/C-sharp minor 7th–F-sharp dominant 7th
[alto key]), McLean overlays the same pattern of descending fourths, starting
however on the 11th rather than the 7th degree of the
minor chord. A rhythmically altered version of that melody is repeated and transposed down a semitone in measure
24, following the chromatic descent in the harmony and resolving to the third of the chord on beat 3:
Whereas the Williams example consists of a prolonged chromatic
lower neighbor tone resolving up, McLean’s polyphonic voice-leading resolves
through contrary motion. This can be shown by representing the melody of
measures 23 and 24 vertically:
All of this is not to suggest that McLean was directly borrowing
Williams’s technique. Rather, I mean to show one way in which Williams was
ahead of his time and to underscore McLean’s emphasis on the importance of
looking for historical precedents.
In this letter published in 1973 (h/t Tyshawn Sorey), Charles
Mingus questions the musical abilities of the musicians associated with what was
known at the time as the “New Thing.” At the beginning of the letter, he wonders
“what would happen if some musicians who could really play the chord changes,
who could really play a tune and not get lost, were to improvise and play free.”
To solve this mystery, he could have started simply by
listening to Lennie Tristano’s quintet recordings of “Intuition” and “Digression,”
which were almost a quarter of a century old when his letter was published.
Anyway, is Mingus right to make a distinction here between musicians
who can really play and those who can’t? When it comes to free-improvised
music, is there an objective way to differentiate between well-crafted and
poorly-crafted? Would we admit that Charles Mingus is qualified to make such an
evaluation? Is anyone?
I would answer in the affirmative and assert that we have at
our disposal the tools of musical analysis to help us make these evaluations.
In this paper, I analyze four free improvisations by trombonist Ben Gerstein
and attempt to point toward the sense and beauty that can emerge in this type
of music through set class manipulations, motivic development, and hierarchical voice-leading.
Of course, the usual caveat regarding transcription applies here. This one is not prescriptive nor exhaustively descriptive. It is my interpretation of the sound on the recording and merely points in the general direction of the two most easily notated musical components: pitch and rhythm. Timbre, articulation, dynamics, and phrasing, which likely contain the bulk of the musical information, do not appear in the transcription.
Conventional wisdom has it that the Meyer-style mouthpiece, with its medium-sized chamber and S-shaped baffle, is ideally suited for playing jazz on the alto saxophone. With the discovery of the video below, we can add Gary Bartz to the list of preeminent alto saxophonists who instead chose to play large-chambered Otto Link mouthpieces at some point in their careers. That list includes Benny Carter, Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, Gigi Gryce, Dave Schildkraut, Jackie McLean, Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz, Charlie Mariano, and now Bartz. Contemporary saxophonists currently using Otto Link mouthpieces on alto are Joe Lovano (apparently) and Loren Stillman. All of these players have distinctive and highly personal sounds and arguably constitute a significant portion of the best altoists of all time. Will the Meyer mouthpiece orthodoxy continue to stand?
Here is my translation of a new article about saxophonist Jacam Manricks from the German magazine, Sonic: “Sound-Forms Frozen in Time”
Jacam Manricks
Jacam Manricks arrived in New York from Down Under shortly
before the turmoil of September 11. It was there that his worldview quickly
changed, and the music of this saxophonist, clarinetist, flautist, and composer
made a quantum leap.
By Ssirus W. Pakzad
Translated by Dan Voss
Jacam Manricks is the master of a great art: he makes the
complicated sound accessible, and through rhythmic finesse he instills his music
with an unobstructed flow. Another of Manricks’ talents: his music is embraced
both by those with an ear for the traditional as well as those for whom the
term “jazz” means constant progress.
In the isolation of his practice room, this doctor of music concocts
new systems and concepts, experimenting with the metrical division of time. As
the title of his third and current album, “Trigonometry,” suggests, the
Australian likes to use mathematics for emphasis and accent. It would be wrong,
however, to think this means his music is coldly intellectual. “The appeal of jazz
is in the interaction. Intuition and spontaneity are what makes this music
exciting,” says the thirty-five year old, who lectures, teaches, and gives master
classes and clinics worldwide. “Composition and improvisation are essentially
the same. Composition is improvisation that’s frozen in time. The nice thing
about writing is that you can throw something out if it doesn’t work. I often
experiment with polyrhythms and hemiola and constantly shift the pulse around.
But all of these considerations are worthless if the music that results isn’t
able to create a vibe and excite the audience.”
Manricks doesn’t just write music for various jazz
instrumentations, but for symphony orchestra as well. Since he has studied
orchestration, he even writes out all the parts himself. Do his small-group
pieces benefit from his work for large ensembles? “Definitely. You learn how to
build to a climax, how to create drama from the nuances of the dynamic spectrum,
and how to handle the different registers.”
In addition to all of his hard-earned skill as a composer,
one shouldn’t forget that Jacam Manricks is a terrific saxophonist. Indeed, he
is a master of the soprano and tenor saxophones---as well as various flutes and
clarinets---though his main instrument is the alto saxophone. He plays it with
a brilliant and pliant tone that he often bends and stretches, a tone which transforms
in the heat of battle and seems to encompass the entire range of human
emotions. Whoever hears Manricks live can witness how thoughtfully he builds
his solos. He takes striking pauses between longer phrases, then shortens his
rests with unmistakable flair until finally they have disappeared entirely, and
the saxophonist can whoosh unrestrained through the tonal systems of his own
devising. He compares his playing to grammar, with syntax and punctuation being
thought of exactly the same way.
Jacam Manricks is originally from Brisbaine, Queensland,
where his parents make a living playing together in the state symphony. His birth
name, by the way, is derived from the first names of his mother and father
together: Ja-net and Cám-ilio. They listened to a lot of jazz as well as
classical music at home, and the young boy quickly internalized both styles.
Jacam began playing the piano at five years of age and the saxophone at nine. His
father, who has Sri Lankan, Portuguese, and Dutch roots, was rather strict when
it came to practicing and urged the boy to take on a demanding daily workload.
Jacam complied and developed magnificently as a musician, later studying for a
degree and then working with a theater orchestra in Sydney. He received a grant
and travelled to New York at the end of August 2011 where he was soon playing
with some of the most important creative musicians. He had barely gotten over his
initial culture shock when those airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center.
“At home in Australia I had led a carefree, innocent, naïve life, and then all
of a sudden the world fell apart. The events of September 11 changed my whole
attitude towards life and my way of seeing things.” When like many others Jacam
tried to channel his tumultuous feelings into music, it suddenly manifested unfamiliar
dissonances, and thus he gained an insight: “Music is essential for human
existence. It’s a way to bring out what engages and occupies us inside our
hearts, and it allows us to document and comment on life and the events of
history.”
Making the rounds at the moment is this version of a Downbeat Magazine "Blindfold Test" with Miles Davis from 1964. His remarks are typically caustic.
Another "Blindfold Test" from four years later finds Miles being similarly harsh, but some of Leonard Feather's accompanying comments are worth highlighting:
"Recently, visiting Miles in his Hollywood hotel suite, I found strewn around the room records or tape cartridges by James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett, the Byrds, Aretha Franklin, and the Fifth Dimension. Not a single jazz instrumental.
Why? There are several explanations, but the simplest and most logical, it seems to me, is that when you have reached the aesthetic mountaintop, there is no place to look but down...
Finding nothing that measures up to the standards he has set and met, Miles turns to other idioms. He relies on pop music for entertainment and classical music for serious listening.
There is nothing unprecedented about this. Walking into Charlie Parker's apartment, you were more likely to find him listening to Bartok than to some contemporary saxophonist. Similarly, there was nothing Art Tatum could learn from other pianists."
While perhaps reserved at the time only for a Titan like Miles, this reliance "on pop music for entertainment and classical music for serious listening" is undoubtedly shared more widely today.
This recent article discusses the dubiousness of lay as well as expert judgement when it comes to wine-tasting. "The perceptual ambiguity of wine helps to explain why contextual influences---say, the look of a label, or the price tag on the bottle---can profoundly influence expert judgement."
Although wine-tasting and aesthetic evaluation are not directly analogous (I would argue that music is less "perceptually ambiguous" than wine), one must wonder about the extent to which a similar phenomenon is at work in the appreciation of jazz, for example. Could it be that musical taste is not disinterested and unbiased, even among the soi-disant "experts," but is heavily burdened by such "contextual influences" as marketing, image, and hype?
In light of the viral response to this question-begging article which condemns music copying and file sharing, I want to suggest to fellow musicians and others that there is no such thing as "intellectual property."
