"A Space Which Cannot Be Owned"

"It's a great tragedy for painting that paintings can be owned. Composers and novelists and poets don't have this problem. Nobody can walk out of the symphony hall with the symphony in his pocket, even if he pays $500 million for it, because the symphony exists in another space---a space which cannot be owned."

Roger Scruton, The Representational Art Conference 2014 Keynote Speech

Who is a Jazz Musician?

"…a person is a jazz musician if accepted by other jazz musicians. Admittedly, this is fundamentally circular but does embody something of great importance: namely, that one of the characteristics of jazz has been that it is under the control of those who play it more than it is of agents, record companies, club owners, audiences. My guess---I underline 'guess'---is that this has been true since the ‘teens at least, perhaps even before. This may mean, by the way, that jazz is such a small segment of the market for music that it can be ignored as a major source of income by the music business.”

 Lawrence Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band 

"From a genealogical standpoint, it becomes very clear to a knowledgable [sic] listener whose music has been informed by the Black tradition and whose hasn’t ... It’s very clear who is a master drummer in the tribe and who is not."

Nicholas Payton 

Improvisation Is...

"Improvisation is not an introspective art, nor is it a vague one. It is designed for an audience, and its starting-point is that audience’s expectations, which include the current conventions of musical form.”

 Nicholas Temperley on Chopin

"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.