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
