"Amen" (Coltrane/Jordan)

"Amen" 

Music by John Coltrane and choreography by Michael Jordan.

Video by Ben Gerstein. 

Jackie McLean In the Big Room

“…consider abstraction as the urge to disregard the features that lie on the surface of things, in hopes of finding the kernel within that does not change and is therefore felt to be the reality.” 

Although he criticizes it as a misnomer when it comes to art and prefers its use to describe the method of science, abstraction as Barzun defines it above is perhaps the best way to think of what Jackie McLean does so masterfully to the blues in this recording, from McLean's "saxophone class" at the Hartt School in 2001: 

My transcription is below. In it I have merely indicated pitches; precise rhythm (Jackie is playing freely and without synchronizing to the pulse of the bass and drums), phrasing, and timbre---the most ephemeral but most significant elements in improvised music---are not included. As always in the case of transcription, Caveat auditor. 

Jackie McLean, In the Big Room. 2001. by danvoss

Alex LoRe Trio, "Dream House"

 "...a player playing in control, in complete control of all his faculties. There are no extraneous elements. It’s all energy going into the playing.”

Listening to Dream House, the debut recording from the Alex LoRe Trio, one is easily persuaded that the alto saxophonist fits Lee Konitz’s definition of “cool.” LoRe channels and transforms the sound of early Konitz, playing with a tremendous musicality that stands out in an era of saxophonists heavy on technique but light on taste. He is also an impressive songwriter: from the opening contrafact onward, key relations within and among the tunes imbue the album with a fascinating degree of compositional integration. Rival altoists have something big to reckon with.  

Dream House features bassist Desmond White, drummer Colin Stranahan, and tenor saxophonist Geoge Garzone. Buy it here: 

http://altmusic1.bandcamp.com/album/alex-lore-trio-dream-house

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/dream-house/id860737410


(By the way, LoRe has lately been playing on a Master Link 4**** mouthpiece. Alto players, get hip.) 

Problems of Harmonic Interpretation in Late Coltrane

The improvisations of John Coltrane in his later period present challenges to analysis, particularly when it comes to harmonic interpretation. The studio recording of "Ogunde" from 1967 serves as an example. 

I rely on Miles Okazaki's transcription for my analysis. In the musical examples below, the enharmonic spelling of pitches has occasionally been adjusted from that in Okazaki's transcription in order to illustrate my interpretation. I have also omitted consecutively repeated pitches. 

The first excerpt comes from 0:31 in the recording and lies on the third staff of the transcription. It follows directly from the melody and launches Coltrane's first improvisatory statement. Okazaki has labeled this bit "Aug.," though it contains an extra pitch not found in the hexatonic or "augmented" scale. Rather, these eight pitches represent a fragment of Messiaen's third mode of limited transposition, which can be conceptualized in Coltrane's melodic language as scale-steps 7-1-2-3 in an ascending major-third cycle. 

The music on the fourth staff of the transcription (0:38--0:41 in the recording) provides another instance of harmonic ambiguity. The phrase can be thought of as primarily "in" D-sharp minor, with some chromatic alterations; e.g., in the order that they appear: lowered-2, lowered-4 (or major-3), major-6 and -7, lowered-5, etc. But it is also clear that the phrase mostly uses an octatonic collection, interspersed with some four-note subsets of the two whole-tone collections.

As with the first example, however, we can simultaneously hear this phrase as moving through two transpositions of the major-third cycle. The notation below has been adjusted to illustrate this. 

A similar example comes from the beginning of the sixth staff of the transcription, or 0:49--0:51 in the recording. This phrase contains a segment of a whole-tone collection elided with a full octatonic collection. Yet it also outlines subsets of the diatonic collection transposed through major thirds. 

A final example, from the second half of the eighth staff of the transcription (1:02--1:06 in the recording), shows a similar multiplicity of possible interpretations. 

Like the second example, there is a sense in which this phrase is "in" D-sharp minor, with various chromatic alterations (more or less the same ones we hear in the second example, above). Also like the previous examples, this phrase is simultaneously operating both with octatonic collections and a major-third cycle. 

While each of the three different harmonic interpretations (minor tonality; synthetic-scale collections; and diatonic major-third transpositions) can be justified by the musical surface as well as by what we know about Coltrane's musical practice, this music's abstraction from predetermined harmony and the fact that Coltrane's is a monophonic instrument make it impossible to provide a precise and unambiguous harmonic analysis. 

The listener will probably notice the melodic prominence of D-sharp against E in the music cited here, dramatizing scale degrees 2 and 3 in the tonic C-sharp minor. Higher-level voice-leading by step predominates, and it is apparent that much of Coltrane's improvisation on "Ogunde" prolongs V and especially V/V in C-sharp minor. For these reasons (which deserve elaboration elsewhere) as well as the arguments above, I must dissent from Jeff Pressing's view that in "Ogunde" Coltrane "juxtapose[s] lyrical directness with eruptions of broken quasi-atonality." To the contrary, Coltrane's playing, even to the last, remains grounded in blues tonality. Where Coltrane applies the tools of early 20th-century atonality, like octatonic and whole-tone sets, his melodic sensibility is nonetheless guided by blues-based minor-key tonality, harmonic prolongation, and the nearly ubiquitous diatonic major-third cycle. 

Tritone Substitution

Like Thomas Brothers, Gerhard Kubik questions the commonly-accepted paradigm that, while its rhythm is African-derived, harmony in jazz is European-derived. In an article entitled "The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic Practices," Kubik writes: "Bebop...revived tonal-harmonic ideas transmitted through the blues and reconstructed and expanded others in a basically non-Western harmonic approach (217)." 

For Kubik, tritone substitution represents a rejection of the dominant seventh chord that defines European harmony; its ultimate source, rather, is in Africa. He writes: 

“Comparable to melodic and harmonic progressions in African music (and the blues), movement of chord sequences in bebop emphasizes resolutions in a downward direction, eliminating all memory of European leading-tone tonality… In Africa, [shifting chords downward in parallelism and semitone steps] is a familiar practice; such progressions are common in equiheptatonic tunings, often ending on a ‘raised tonic,’ as for example in the Cuambo and Khokola mambila xylophone music that I recorded in Mozambique and Malawi (207-8)."

Following are two examples of tritone substitution in jazz improvisation. First, Coleman Hawkins on "Honeysuckle Rose" (1:39): 

Bean's substitution of G-flat is jarring because it occurs right at the beginning of his solo and is completely unprepared by any melodic reference to the underlying G-7/C7 harmony of the tune. It spans an entire four bars. The melodic gesture of the first two bars obscures the G-flat major triad with lower and upper neighbor notes falling on strong beats and suggests a pentatonic sound or whole-step dyads stacked in fourths. Hawkins introduces the leading tone E in bar 4, which resolves to F in the bass in bar 5, but which Hawkins doesn't resolve melodically until bar 6. 

Charlie Parker on "Groovin' High" (35:58) is a better illustration of Kubik's argument: 

With these three-octave sixteenth-note runs---prefiguring Coltrane---Bird moves from F to E-flat via E, rather than outlining the underlying ii-V. (I have notated this as F-flat to capture its downward-resolving function as Phrygian-II.) In this example, we hear the semitone-downward-shifting parallelism, chord extensions (9ths and 13ths, which Kubik attributes to the African musical emphasis on upper harmonic partials), and lack of leading-tone resolution; all of which Kubik refers to above in his claim that harmony in bebop is ultimately derived from African, not European, sources. 

On the other hand, Dmitri Tymoczko shows that tritone substitution was used in Tristan und Isolde and Till Eulenspiegel, and he says:

"…the possibility of tritone substitution is latent in the basic voice-leading routines of traditional [Western] tonality. Over the course of its history, tonal harmony exploits this latent possibility with increasing frequency—beginning with the introduction of augmented sixths in the eighteenth century, progressing through the occassional use of tritone substitutions in the early nineteenth century and culminating in their universal acceptance in modern jazz (19).”

I suspect that the nature of syncretism in jazz music precludes the possibility of accurately discerning the genealogy of such harmonic elements. 

For his part, Bird, in an interview with John McLellan, rejected that bebop was influenced by European music and suggests rather that it was sui generis, which may offer some support to Kubik’s view: 

 JM: "How much of this change, that you were responsible for, do you feel was spontaneous experimentation with your own ideas, and how much was the adaptation of the ideas of your classical predecessors, for example as in Bartok?"

CP: "Well, it was one hundred percent spontaneous…not a bit of the music known today as progressive music was adapted or even inspired by the older composers....The thing that’s happening now known as progressive music, or by the trade name bebop, not a bit of it was inspired or adapted from our predecessors: Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, etc.”
  

Johnny "Lily Pons" Hodges

On the topic of jazz and opera, here is an interview with Leonard Feather for Metronome in 1948 in which Charlie Parker refers to Jeep as "Johnny 'Lily Pons' Hodges." 

Jazz, Variation Form, and Brothers's "Solo and Cycle"

Brad Mehldau is perhaps the most outstanding and influential voice on piano of the last two decades. His new project with magician-drummer Mark Guiliana is one of the most exciting and inspiring recent developments in music.

Mehldau’s abilities and endeavors as a writer also set him apart  from most jazz musicians. In a series of essays for his residency at Carnegie Hall, he discusses the subject of “Creativity in Beethoven and Coltrane.”  (I find the comparison apt.)

In the second essay of that series, “Who Needs a Good Melody Anyways,” Mehldau argues that jazz improvisation on standard chord changes is an example of “theme and variations.” 

I wonder however if this designation is accurate only in the very general sense that almost all music consists of the varied repetition of certain musical elements.

The view of jazz as “theme and variations” is commonly held. There is a certain plausibility to it. Lee Konitz’s 10-step approach to improvising on standard changes incorporates the principle of variation form with its progressive rhythmic diminution of the theme. This is, however, an exercise. Its last two steps call first for a “totally new theme” and then the ultimate goal of improvisation, “an act of pure inspiration.”

Compare Gershwin's Variations on "I Got Rhythm" with Charlie Parker's "variations" on "I Got Rhythm." Is it really more or less the same process at work in these pieces? 

In associating jazz improvisation with variation form, Mehldau is correct to distinguish jazz practice from the linear and teleological forms of European classical music. As van der Merwe writes, “The matrix of the pre-ordained end seems to be a fairly recent and sophisticated development. The natural musical form is the repeated cycle” (107).

Is classical variation form closer to the “repeated cycle” of folk and dance music, and even to Baroque variation forms like passacaglia and chaconne, or to the other teleological Western classical forms? Tovey’s definition of variation form may suggest the latter: “groups of progressively developed versions of a complete self-contained theme [italics mine].”

To be sure, it is not the Baroque dances but the variation forms of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven we have in mind when Mehldau says “theme and variations.” Indeed, he uses the Diabelli Variations as his example. Certainly jazz is not the kind of “embroidery on a melody” which for Tovey is denoted by classical variation form---but then neither is Diabelli, as Mehldau illustrates.

The problem is not simply that Mehldau draws an analogy between jazz improvisation and variation form. Perhaps this analogy works well enough; it might even be useful. The problem is that Mehldau claims a genealogical connection between jazz and classical variation form. He says: “The chief reason why theme and variations interest me here is because they are the most significant formal device that jazz music took from western classical music.”

While the early history of jazz may have involved the “Afro-American transformation” of certain European dance forms like the quadrille, there is no indication that such a process involved the appropriation of variation form. Now, jazz and variation form may have a common ancestor, perhaps in van der Merwe’s “natural musical form…the repeated cycle.” But if the configuration of jazz does not directly borrow the classical variation form, as Mehldau dubiously argues, where does it come from?

Thomas Brothers has an intriguing answer.

In an article entitled "Solo and Cycle in African-American Jazz," Brothers contends that, much like in West African drum music, syntactical meaning in jazz results from a soloist's variable agreement with and creative departure from a relatively fixed underlying cycle. In contrast to the popular notion that jazz inherits its rhythms from Africa and its pitches from Europe, Brothers argues that pitch organization in jazz (in the form of the harmonic cycle and melodic soloing) reflects the fixed-group/variable-group syntax of traditions like southern Ewe drumming. Jazz improvisers, then, are not "trying to be little Beethovens," as Mehldau puts it, so much as they are trying to be atsimevu master drummers. 

Since jazz is syncretic, it is difficult to pinpoint the precise origins of its practices---especially because the European and African traditions that contribute to it may often have a common ancestor. Nonetheless, I think it is safe to say that any analytical approach to jazz music that does not take some view to Africa is fundamentally flawed.