I just ran across an interesting appreciation of Dizzy Gillespie (on what would have been his 90th birthday) by Doug Levine in Contacto magazine. I encountered it serendipitously: I was doing a news search for articles on the Middle East, including Tunisia, and this article popped up because of its mention of the Gillespie song “A Night in Tunisia.”
For what it’s worth, I’d like to add my own appreciation of Gillespie. He’s certainly not a forgotten or unappreciated figure in the history of jazz or western music in general – with his chipmunk cheeks and distinctive 45 degree trumpet bell, his is one of the most recognizable images in jazz history.
Still, I think an argument could be made that his significance has been underappreciated, and that he’s been taken a bit less seriously than some of his contemporaries.
He was an important jazz innovator, particularly for his contributions to the creation of bebop in the 1940s and Afro-Cuban jazz in the 1950s, though here his reputation is often overshadowed by that of bebop co-creator Charlie Parker or later innovators like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He was important in maintaining the vitality of the jazz big band in the 1950s, though here he’s often overshadowed by Duke Ellington, who continued to be the biggest name in big band, or the collaborations between Davis and Gil Evans. He was an important jazz songwriter, though here often overshadowed again by Ellington, but also Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and others. Where he’s gotten the most due credit is with regard to his individual virtuosity on the trumpet (other names may be mentioned as equals here, but rarely have I encountered arguments to the effect that so-and-so was a more virtuosic talent than Gillespie) and as a popularizer and ambassador for the music.
What’s most amazing about Gillespie is that he was all these things at once and at the height of his career – an important innovator, band leader, songwriter, virtuosic soloist, and popularizer and good will ambassador for jazz.
What his career lacked was a touch of the legendary or a heavy dose of pathos – and it does seem that jazz legends are supposed to be tragic figures. While the quality of their music speaks for itself and is in little need of elaboration, Parker, Davis, or Coltrane are jazz legends in large part because of the narratives associated with them, the personal battles of each with drug addiction, the too early deaths of Parker and Coltrane, the at-times prickly personality of Davis, etc. Gillespie was, as far as I can tell, a universally loved figure, but given a general lack of pathos and the tragic in his public personal narrative, alongside his stage persona as affable (and admittedly at times corny) entertainer, he’s treated less seriously by many jazz fans than Parker, Davis, Coltrane, and others.
Showing posts with label Charlie Parker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlie Parker. Show all posts
Friday, November 2, 2007
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Max Roach, 1924 - 2007
It’s a sad fact that those jazz greats from the period of the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s who did not die tragically young for any number of reasons (such as Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, and John Coltrane each did) are now aging, with most in their 80s. As a result, over the past few years we have seen several legendary figures pass away one by one. Max Roach, one of the greatest drummers of all time, is the latest.
Roach is most associated with that period of jazz music history from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. It’s hard to say this was the golden era of jazz, for there was certainly great, wonderful jazz both before and after, but it was definitely a golden era for the music, a period associated with performers worthy of their legendary status. There were a variety of jazz styles during the period, “bebop,” “cool jazz,” “hard bop,” “free jazz,” etc., but there was a loose unity of style as well (cool and hard bop styles were direct and clear developments from bebop, and even with free jazz, there is continuity both in the senses that most free players were well grounded in bebop related styles and the freeing up of the parameters for individual improvisation begun with bebop was magnified in the free style). I would say that this period was the golden era for the small acoustic jazz combo (as opposed to the earlier dominance of big band swing or later experiments with electric instruments and fusion and even acoustic groups directly or indirectly influenced by those experiments).
Max Roach was an integral part of jazz music and history during that two decade period (I don’t intend to slight anything he did later, but it is the case that he was a driving force in the mainstream of jazz mainly during the two decade period under discussion).
Among the highlights of his career:
In the mid- to late 1940s, as part of the bebop scene he was as responsible as any drummer for introducing complex polyrhythm on top of straightahead 4/4 time, transforming the drumkit from a time keeper into simultaneously a time keeper and a frontline instrument. He was part of many classic bebop recordings alongside other legends like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, including “Disorder at the Border,” “Ko-Ko,” “Anthropology,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” and “Now’s the Time.”
In 1949 and 1950, he was a major part of the creation of the “cool jazz” sound, participating in the Miles Davis nonet recording sessions, first released on 78 rpm records, that were ultimately collected as the famous Birth of the Cool album a few years later.
In 1953, he participated in one of the most famous jazz concert recordings of all time as a member of “The Quintet” in Jazz at Massey Hall, alongside Gillespie on trumpet, Parker on alto sax, Bud Powell on piano, and Charles Mingus on bass. I wouldn’t claim this as one of the most important jazz concerts of all time – this wasn’t one of those moments that changed music, no radically new innovation was introduced, or anything of that sort – instead it’s five established and very accomplished musicians playing some damn fine music.
In the mid-1950s, Roach played in one of the best hard bop combos, Brown and Roach, Inc. The “Brown” was the talented trumpeter Clifford Brown, who died far too young in a car accident in 1956. Given Brown’s untimely death, the group didn’t record much, but what they left behind is well worth a listen, especially the Roach original “Mildama” and their version of the standard “I get a kick out of you.”
In 1962, he participated in a piano trio recording with Duke Ellington and Mingus, producing the Duke Ellington Money Jungle album. (15 tracks were recorded in a single day – I’m continuously amazed when reading jazz album liner notes with how quickly massive numbers of tracks would be recorded by jazz musicians in the 1950s and 1960s. By the way, this album was part of one of the busiest months in the career of Ellington. Within a span of about a month, he recorded this album with Roach and Mingus, and the Duke Ellington meets Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane albums.) Money Jungle could be described as the closest Ellington ever got to free jazz – and on some tracks that’s actually pretty close.
Just a bit earlier, in 1960, Roach had already forayed into free jazz territory with his important album We Insist!: Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (an album featuring, among others Booker Little, Coleman Hawkins, Olatunji, and Abbey Lincoln). This recording attempted to unify the emphases on freedom in jazz improvisation and in the demands of the civil rights movement.
An obituary of Roach can be accessed here.
Roach is most associated with that period of jazz music history from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. It’s hard to say this was the golden era of jazz, for there was certainly great, wonderful jazz both before and after, but it was definitely a golden era for the music, a period associated with performers worthy of their legendary status. There were a variety of jazz styles during the period, “bebop,” “cool jazz,” “hard bop,” “free jazz,” etc., but there was a loose unity of style as well (cool and hard bop styles were direct and clear developments from bebop, and even with free jazz, there is continuity both in the senses that most free players were well grounded in bebop related styles and the freeing up of the parameters for individual improvisation begun with bebop was magnified in the free style). I would say that this period was the golden era for the small acoustic jazz combo (as opposed to the earlier dominance of big band swing or later experiments with electric instruments and fusion and even acoustic groups directly or indirectly influenced by those experiments).
Max Roach was an integral part of jazz music and history during that two decade period (I don’t intend to slight anything he did later, but it is the case that he was a driving force in the mainstream of jazz mainly during the two decade period under discussion).
Among the highlights of his career:
In the mid- to late 1940s, as part of the bebop scene he was as responsible as any drummer for introducing complex polyrhythm on top of straightahead 4/4 time, transforming the drumkit from a time keeper into simultaneously a time keeper and a frontline instrument. He was part of many classic bebop recordings alongside other legends like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, including “Disorder at the Border,” “Ko-Ko,” “Anthropology,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” and “Now’s the Time.”
In 1949 and 1950, he was a major part of the creation of the “cool jazz” sound, participating in the Miles Davis nonet recording sessions, first released on 78 rpm records, that were ultimately collected as the famous Birth of the Cool album a few years later.
In 1953, he participated in one of the most famous jazz concert recordings of all time as a member of “The Quintet” in Jazz at Massey Hall, alongside Gillespie on trumpet, Parker on alto sax, Bud Powell on piano, and Charles Mingus on bass. I wouldn’t claim this as one of the most important jazz concerts of all time – this wasn’t one of those moments that changed music, no radically new innovation was introduced, or anything of that sort – instead it’s five established and very accomplished musicians playing some damn fine music.
In the mid-1950s, Roach played in one of the best hard bop combos, Brown and Roach, Inc. The “Brown” was the talented trumpeter Clifford Brown, who died far too young in a car accident in 1956. Given Brown’s untimely death, the group didn’t record much, but what they left behind is well worth a listen, especially the Roach original “Mildama” and their version of the standard “I get a kick out of you.”
In 1962, he participated in a piano trio recording with Duke Ellington and Mingus, producing the Duke Ellington Money Jungle album. (15 tracks were recorded in a single day – I’m continuously amazed when reading jazz album liner notes with how quickly massive numbers of tracks would be recorded by jazz musicians in the 1950s and 1960s. By the way, this album was part of one of the busiest months in the career of Ellington. Within a span of about a month, he recorded this album with Roach and Mingus, and the Duke Ellington meets Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane albums.) Money Jungle could be described as the closest Ellington ever got to free jazz – and on some tracks that’s actually pretty close.
Just a bit earlier, in 1960, Roach had already forayed into free jazz territory with his important album We Insist!: Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (an album featuring, among others Booker Little, Coleman Hawkins, Olatunji, and Abbey Lincoln). This recording attempted to unify the emphases on freedom in jazz improvisation and in the demands of the civil rights movement.
An obituary of Roach can be accessed here.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
John Coltrane's "Alabama"
John Coltrane’s “Alabama” is music that I’m passionate about. For starters, it’s a beautiful song beautifully played in 1963 by the John Coltrane Quartet of Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. If you’re not familiar with the performance, seek it out for a listen – it can be found on the John Coltrane, Live at Birdland album (though “Alabama” is not actually live at Birdland – the album contained three songs that were recorded live at the Birdland club, and originally two studio recordings [with now a third studio track added to the CD issue], one of which is “Alabama”). I also find the song interesting to think about sociologically and historically (in relation to the state of Alabama and the Civil Rights movement and events) as well as in terms of the relationship between music and “content” or between art and world.
Jazz and Civil Rights
In the 1950s and 60s, and into the early 1970s, many jazz musicians used their music to speak to civil rights issues in a variety of ways. There was a natural reason for this. As I discussed in a previous post, “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop,” while in one sense jazz has no color (because it’s music comprised of sound), in another, jazz was music produced largely (though never completely) by black men and was certainly perceived by many as “black music.” Many jazz musicians were concerned to produce simultaneously music that was legitimate art and black art. Also, it’s clearly not insignificant that at the time there was a huge region of the country with a very large black population where black jazz musicians, as anyone black, were not treated legally as the social equals of whites.
Some jazz musicians dealt with events related to the civil rights era or made claims for freedom and full civil rights quite explicitly. I have in mind here Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” or Max Roach’s “We Insist: The Freedom Now Suite” or Nina Simone’s “Old Jim Crow” or “Mississippi Goddam” or Charles Mingus’ “Original Fables of Faubus” (“dedicated” to Arkansas governor and integration opponent Orville Faubus) or perhaps most famously, and earlier, Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit.”
Others dealt with civil rights more implicitly. A number of Duke Ellington’s compositions celebrate pride in black people generally, e.g. the extended suite “Black, Brown, and Beige.” (We can also see Ellington in the 1960s as an early proponent of “multi-culturalism” with his incorporations of a variety of non-European musical traditions into his big band jazz, e.g. “The Latin American Suite” or “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” or “The Far East Suite” [which frankly would be better called the Near East or Middle East Suite].) Miles Davis’ album A Tribute to Jack Johnson paid homage to the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. The Free Jazz of musicians like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, or the later work of Coltrane technically didn’t refer to anything in the world outside of music, but it certainly fit with the ethos of (at least some factions of) the civil rights movement and the emphasis upon freedom. A number of other works by Coltrane could be considered to implicitly refer to race relations and the civil rights context of the time, e.g. compositions like “Africa,” “Liberia,” “Song of the Underground Railroad,” or “Spiritual.”
“Alabama” is simultaneously explicit and implicit in its relation to the events in Alabama of the early 1960s. By its title and its recording date of November 18, 1963, just two months after the September 15, 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls and injured several other people, the song stakes out an explicit reference to the horrific events on the ground in that southern state. But beyond the title, given the piece’s existence as pure sound without words, any evocation of content is implicit.
Art and Content / Art and World
There are two slightly different though related questions here. What is the relation between art and content, and what is the relation between art and the world?
In an earlier post, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture,” I addressed the relationship between artist’s biography and the meaning of art. Here is a three paragraph selection from that earlier post:
“On the 1946 recording of the song “Lover Man,” Charlie Parker plays one of the most searing, mournful, and heart-rending saxophone solos (or any kind of solo) in the history of recorded music. As is often the case, there is a further story behind the music. Parker had accompanied Dizzy Gillespie to California (where “Lover Man” was recorded) on a tour of the west coast, and had stayed behind to play jazz clubs in Los Angeles when Gillespie returned to New York. Parker had also turned to heroin again, and while he was playing those sad, searing tones immortalized on the “Lover Man” recording, he was in fact experiencing heroin withdrawal. In fact, later that same day, he was arrested in relation to a fire that broke out in his hotel room, ultimately ending up at Camarillo state mental hospital for a stay of some months. (“Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” recorded in early 1947 after that stay, is one of Parker’s jauntiest, happiest sounding recordings.) How much difference do, or should, such biographical tidbits make in our appreciation of the recording?
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.”
I made three further points about the relationship between artists’ biographies and their art. First, art does not depend on the artist’s biography. You don’t need to know anything about Parker or Shostakovich to appreciate and enjoy “Lover man” or the viola sonata – it might add to your appreciation in an extra-musical sense, but it’s unnecessary.
Second, art is not sustained by the artist’s biography. The fact that Parker was experiencing withdrawal while recording “Lover Man” might be interesting in its own right, but if the music wasn’t good – if it sounded like someone going through heroin withdrawal – it wouldn’t be good art.
Finally, art is not determined by the artist’s biography. Certainly the cultural context into which any individual is socialized has a profound effect on them, but it never determines what individuals do in detail. David Nice (in the liner notes to Annette Bartholdy’s recording of the viola sonata, Naxos records, 8.556231) writes (parenthetical note added):
“Shostakovich is never afraid of saying it (i.e. dealing with death), though in the most refined form possible, in the Viola Sonata of 1975, last of a harrowing line including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, the last three string quartets and the song-cycle settings of Michelangelo poems which examine death from every conceivable angle. None is a conclusive last word – ‘maybe I’ll still manage to write something else’ was always the composer’s response – and that could even be said of the present work which turned out to be his swan-song, completed just before his death on 9th August 1975.”
It might be natural for an artist clearly approaching death to explore death as a theme, but nothing determined the way he went about it, not the anguished sounds we hear in some movements, nor the playful approach to death in others, nor especially the combination of the two, for example in the last symphony’s musical quotations from Rossini’s William Tell Overture (the theme known to most Americans as the “Lone Ranger” theme) alongside motifs quoted from Wagner’s operas Die Valkyrie and Tristan und Isolde associated with fate or longing and suffering.
I’d like here to make similar arguments with regard to Coltrane’s “Alabama,” though in this case my arguments concern the relationship between a work of art and its content or reference (in this case the Birmingham bombing and other events in Alabama). Art does not depend on its content. Content does not sustain the work of art. Content does not determine the work of art.
Art does not depend on its content
Art cannot depend on its content for its worth as aesthetic object – much art, abstract painting or pure music, has no content at all. “Alabama” can be appreciated as a beautiful, lyrical, mournful piece of music without any knowledge of the context of its production or the events of Alabama 1963. Just as I had loved Parker’s recording of “Lover Man” before knowing anything about Parker’s biography (to a large extent, loving the music was what made me want to find out more about the artist), I had come to love “Alabama” (and not just Coltrane’s performance, but Kenny Garrett’s much more recent recording of the song as well) before being spurred by my passion for the music to find out more about its context. Given the title, I did of course immediately wonder whether it had any reference to the civil rights movement, but I didn’t have to know anything about the song’s “content” to appreciate it.
Content does not sustain the work of art
The Birmingham bombing is one of the more tragic events in 20th century American history. Alabama in general in 1963 was a tragedy. Knowing the referent of the song heightens an already profound appreciation for it, but an inferior work of art would not be made into good art just by having content that is profoundly meaningful. A lesser evocation of the bombing or other events associated with the civil rights movement in the south might touch us, but only by indexing events that in themselves move us, not by creating a work of art that is moving in its own right.
Content does not determine the work of art
For art with content, there ideally should be a relationship between content and form, a certain degree of iconicity or systematic relatedness between referent and the work. I mentioned earlier Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I’m fond of this work (I’m one of those people who have not only the album but who also bought the 5 CD box set “The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions” – so yeah, I like the music), and I think it works quite well as pure music. I don’t think it works so well as a tribute to Jack Johnson – there’s no real iconicity or systematic fit between the music and Jack Johnson the boxer or Jack Johnson the flamboyant, no-apologies public persona (there is a certain fit between Davis’ public persona and Johnson’s, but not so much between the music and Johnson).
So, when I say that content doesn’t determine the work of art, I don’t mean there’s no relationship there. It’s more that given the plethora of qualities that any object or event in the world has, there are any number of ways to go about creating a work that fits its content. “Alabama” creates a musical correspondence to the events that’s compelling and iconic (and “iconic” in both the vernacular and technical semiotic senses). The two most apparent elements of the music are Coltrane’s horn and Jones’ drumming (though I think that Tyner’s and Garrison’s contributions are crucial as well, especially in creating a sense of foreboding at the beginning of the song with the throbbing rhythm they lay down – just not as prominently apparent to a casual listen). The combination of Coltrane’s haunting saxophone, creating mournful lyrical passages that at times seem hopeless and others hopeful, with Jones’ always intense drumming, that is at times notably restrained and other times bursting out in intense explosions of energy, creates an icon for 1963 Alabama: simultaneously hopeless and hopeful, restraint and repression with the hope of freedom, but also the possibility, very real at the time, that everything would end in an immense explosion of violence.
I’ll close with a quotation from Leroi Jones’ original liner notes for the Live at Birdland album (parenthetical note added):
“If you have heard “Slow Dance” or “After the Rain,” then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that “Alabama” carries. I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly. And that’s what Trane does. Bob Thiele (the session producer) asked Trane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems.” I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” Which is to say, Listen. And what we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature…a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, of these musicians’ feelings. If the “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.”
Jazz and Civil Rights
In the 1950s and 60s, and into the early 1970s, many jazz musicians used their music to speak to civil rights issues in a variety of ways. There was a natural reason for this. As I discussed in a previous post, “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop,” while in one sense jazz has no color (because it’s music comprised of sound), in another, jazz was music produced largely (though never completely) by black men and was certainly perceived by many as “black music.” Many jazz musicians were concerned to produce simultaneously music that was legitimate art and black art. Also, it’s clearly not insignificant that at the time there was a huge region of the country with a very large black population where black jazz musicians, as anyone black, were not treated legally as the social equals of whites.
Some jazz musicians dealt with events related to the civil rights era or made claims for freedom and full civil rights quite explicitly. I have in mind here Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” or Max Roach’s “We Insist: The Freedom Now Suite” or Nina Simone’s “Old Jim Crow” or “Mississippi Goddam” or Charles Mingus’ “Original Fables of Faubus” (“dedicated” to Arkansas governor and integration opponent Orville Faubus) or perhaps most famously, and earlier, Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit.”
Others dealt with civil rights more implicitly. A number of Duke Ellington’s compositions celebrate pride in black people generally, e.g. the extended suite “Black, Brown, and Beige.” (We can also see Ellington in the 1960s as an early proponent of “multi-culturalism” with his incorporations of a variety of non-European musical traditions into his big band jazz, e.g. “The Latin American Suite” or “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” or “The Far East Suite” [which frankly would be better called the Near East or Middle East Suite].) Miles Davis’ album A Tribute to Jack Johnson paid homage to the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. The Free Jazz of musicians like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, or the later work of Coltrane technically didn’t refer to anything in the world outside of music, but it certainly fit with the ethos of (at least some factions of) the civil rights movement and the emphasis upon freedom. A number of other works by Coltrane could be considered to implicitly refer to race relations and the civil rights context of the time, e.g. compositions like “Africa,” “Liberia,” “Song of the Underground Railroad,” or “Spiritual.”
“Alabama” is simultaneously explicit and implicit in its relation to the events in Alabama of the early 1960s. By its title and its recording date of November 18, 1963, just two months after the September 15, 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls and injured several other people, the song stakes out an explicit reference to the horrific events on the ground in that southern state. But beyond the title, given the piece’s existence as pure sound without words, any evocation of content is implicit.
Art and Content / Art and World
There are two slightly different though related questions here. What is the relation between art and content, and what is the relation between art and the world?
In an earlier post, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture,” I addressed the relationship between artist’s biography and the meaning of art. Here is a three paragraph selection from that earlier post:
“On the 1946 recording of the song “Lover Man,” Charlie Parker plays one of the most searing, mournful, and heart-rending saxophone solos (or any kind of solo) in the history of recorded music. As is often the case, there is a further story behind the music. Parker had accompanied Dizzy Gillespie to California (where “Lover Man” was recorded) on a tour of the west coast, and had stayed behind to play jazz clubs in Los Angeles when Gillespie returned to New York. Parker had also turned to heroin again, and while he was playing those sad, searing tones immortalized on the “Lover Man” recording, he was in fact experiencing heroin withdrawal. In fact, later that same day, he was arrested in relation to a fire that broke out in his hotel room, ultimately ending up at Camarillo state mental hospital for a stay of some months. (“Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” recorded in early 1947 after that stay, is one of Parker’s jauntiest, happiest sounding recordings.) How much difference do, or should, such biographical tidbits make in our appreciation of the recording?
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.”
I made three further points about the relationship between artists’ biographies and their art. First, art does not depend on the artist’s biography. You don’t need to know anything about Parker or Shostakovich to appreciate and enjoy “Lover man” or the viola sonata – it might add to your appreciation in an extra-musical sense, but it’s unnecessary.
Second, art is not sustained by the artist’s biography. The fact that Parker was experiencing withdrawal while recording “Lover Man” might be interesting in its own right, but if the music wasn’t good – if it sounded like someone going through heroin withdrawal – it wouldn’t be good art.
Finally, art is not determined by the artist’s biography. Certainly the cultural context into which any individual is socialized has a profound effect on them, but it never determines what individuals do in detail. David Nice (in the liner notes to Annette Bartholdy’s recording of the viola sonata, Naxos records, 8.556231) writes (parenthetical note added):
“Shostakovich is never afraid of saying it (i.e. dealing with death), though in the most refined form possible, in the Viola Sonata of 1975, last of a harrowing line including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, the last three string quartets and the song-cycle settings of Michelangelo poems which examine death from every conceivable angle. None is a conclusive last word – ‘maybe I’ll still manage to write something else’ was always the composer’s response – and that could even be said of the present work which turned out to be his swan-song, completed just before his death on 9th August 1975.”
It might be natural for an artist clearly approaching death to explore death as a theme, but nothing determined the way he went about it, not the anguished sounds we hear in some movements, nor the playful approach to death in others, nor especially the combination of the two, for example in the last symphony’s musical quotations from Rossini’s William Tell Overture (the theme known to most Americans as the “Lone Ranger” theme) alongside motifs quoted from Wagner’s operas Die Valkyrie and Tristan und Isolde associated with fate or longing and suffering.
I’d like here to make similar arguments with regard to Coltrane’s “Alabama,” though in this case my arguments concern the relationship between a work of art and its content or reference (in this case the Birmingham bombing and other events in Alabama). Art does not depend on its content. Content does not sustain the work of art. Content does not determine the work of art.
Art does not depend on its content
Art cannot depend on its content for its worth as aesthetic object – much art, abstract painting or pure music, has no content at all. “Alabama” can be appreciated as a beautiful, lyrical, mournful piece of music without any knowledge of the context of its production or the events of Alabama 1963. Just as I had loved Parker’s recording of “Lover Man” before knowing anything about Parker’s biography (to a large extent, loving the music was what made me want to find out more about the artist), I had come to love “Alabama” (and not just Coltrane’s performance, but Kenny Garrett’s much more recent recording of the song as well) before being spurred by my passion for the music to find out more about its context. Given the title, I did of course immediately wonder whether it had any reference to the civil rights movement, but I didn’t have to know anything about the song’s “content” to appreciate it.
Content does not sustain the work of art
The Birmingham bombing is one of the more tragic events in 20th century American history. Alabama in general in 1963 was a tragedy. Knowing the referent of the song heightens an already profound appreciation for it, but an inferior work of art would not be made into good art just by having content that is profoundly meaningful. A lesser evocation of the bombing or other events associated with the civil rights movement in the south might touch us, but only by indexing events that in themselves move us, not by creating a work of art that is moving in its own right.
Content does not determine the work of art
For art with content, there ideally should be a relationship between content and form, a certain degree of iconicity or systematic relatedness between referent and the work. I mentioned earlier Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I’m fond of this work (I’m one of those people who have not only the album but who also bought the 5 CD box set “The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions” – so yeah, I like the music), and I think it works quite well as pure music. I don’t think it works so well as a tribute to Jack Johnson – there’s no real iconicity or systematic fit between the music and Jack Johnson the boxer or Jack Johnson the flamboyant, no-apologies public persona (there is a certain fit between Davis’ public persona and Johnson’s, but not so much between the music and Johnson).
So, when I say that content doesn’t determine the work of art, I don’t mean there’s no relationship there. It’s more that given the plethora of qualities that any object or event in the world has, there are any number of ways to go about creating a work that fits its content. “Alabama” creates a musical correspondence to the events that’s compelling and iconic (and “iconic” in both the vernacular and technical semiotic senses). The two most apparent elements of the music are Coltrane’s horn and Jones’ drumming (though I think that Tyner’s and Garrison’s contributions are crucial as well, especially in creating a sense of foreboding at the beginning of the song with the throbbing rhythm they lay down – just not as prominently apparent to a casual listen). The combination of Coltrane’s haunting saxophone, creating mournful lyrical passages that at times seem hopeless and others hopeful, with Jones’ always intense drumming, that is at times notably restrained and other times bursting out in intense explosions of energy, creates an icon for 1963 Alabama: simultaneously hopeless and hopeful, restraint and repression with the hope of freedom, but also the possibility, very real at the time, that everything would end in an immense explosion of violence.
I’ll close with a quotation from Leroi Jones’ original liner notes for the Live at Birdland album (parenthetical note added):
“If you have heard “Slow Dance” or “After the Rain,” then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that “Alabama” carries. I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly. And that’s what Trane does. Bob Thiele (the session producer) asked Trane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems.” I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” Which is to say, Listen. And what we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature…a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, of these musicians’ feelings. If the “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.”
Monday, June 11, 2007
Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop
In my previous post ("Vitriol and Jazz"), I addressed among other things what I see as inaccurate characterizations of bebop and later jazz in Clive James’ recent book Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts.
At the same time, James does have some interesting arguments about the motivations behind the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other bebop musicians during the 1940s.
James rightly points out that these musicians were concerned with producing music that could be taken seriously as art. Also, given the realities of race in America at the time, and given the perception at the time and now of jazz as “black music,” they were also concerned to produce a legitimate black art. James sees all of this as important, good, and laudable.
James deals adeptly with something that requires a certain sensitivity and care. On the one hand, jazz is black music in the sense that historically the vast majority of prominent jazz musicians have been black, and the individuals who most profoundly shaped and transformed the music have been almost exclusively black. My own highly partial (in both senses of the word) list would include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman. There have been prominent and important white jazzmen (and it has been mostly men’s music) – Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and Jaco Pastorius just to get started – but the names on the second list don’t carry quite the same historic weight as those on the first. On the other hand, jazz has no color. After all, it’s comprised of sound. As James points out, Armstrong recognized Beiderbecke not as a good white trumpet player, but simply as a good trumpet player. There’s nothing inherently racial about the music itself – and to go that route leads to a reduction of art to racial essentialism and stereotype.
So, jazz has been simultaneously black music in a sociological or historical sense and without essential or inherent basis in race in an ontological sense. It’s easy to over- or under-emphasize either point.
To get back to an earlier point, James rightly points out that among the concerns of Parker, Gillespie, et al. was to produce music that was art and music that was black art. James is ambivalent about the results. He sees the price of legitimacy as art being a seriousness to the music, with a loss of joy and spontaneity.
I have two reactions to this. The first was a major topic of my previous post. I don’t think this accurately characterizes bebop. While Parker, Gillespie, and others were clearly serious about making music, this doesn’t mean they did so without a sense of humor and that their music is all work and no play. Again, song titles like “Scrapple from the Apple” or “Disorder at the Border” should tip us off, and if that’s not enough, listen to the music. As I’ve written about before (see "Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz" and "The End of the History of Music"), one of the qualities of bebop, especially embodied in a soloist the caliber of Parker, is that the individual soloist, by improvising using the notes of the chord changes rather than embellishing and varying a more structured melody, is even more freed in improvisation than in previous forms of jazz – and joy and spontaneity were a big part of this in the hands of Gillespie and Parker.
Second, while the characterization of the beboppers as concerned to produced art is accurate, it does beg the question why jazz musicians would suddenly be concerned with producing art. The unstated implication is that Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington weren’t trying to make art – they were just making entertaining dance music. Well, they were concerned with making entertaining dance music, but they were also concerned with artistry – and it’s for their superior artistry that they’re important in the history of jazz and art. (Just think how many swing band leaders made entertaining dance music that is barely remembered if at all now.) Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were interested in making art, but they were also interested in making entertaining music (albeit not so much dance music). There are clear and important differences in the music of Armstrong and Ellington and the beboppers, but their motivations as artists and entertainers doesn’t seem so distinct to me.
Which brings us to another point James argues. James sees bebop as the beginning of the erosion of the popularity of jazz – again because they became such serious artists. However, if earlier musicians were also seriously interested in artistry (and I think it’s clear they were), and if the beboppers weren’t actually so stern and serious (and they clearly weren’t), then this starts to seem not so convincing.
I’d say that James is here confusing correlation and causation. The bebop period of the mid-1940s into the 1950s is associated with a period of waning popularity for jazz (even though it remained a fairly popular genre).
Part of the wane in popularity may have stemmed from the new sound and “difficulty” of bebop (I've written before about the topic of "difficulty," though with regard to ethnographic writing. See "Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing." In that post, I was largely drawing upon "Defining Difficulty in Poetry" on "Reginald Shepherd's Blog."). Certainly more difficult music will tend to appeal less broadly. The music of Harry Partch or Karlheinz Stockhausen will probably never have a very large audience. During the 1960s, the more accessible music of Cannonball Adderley had a much larger audience than that of the more difficult Cecil Taylor.
But there are other, more important, causes for the ultimate decline in jazz’s popularity. Swing jazz had been the music of youth throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. By the mid-1940s, swing was identified by youth as the music of the previous generation. It was no longer hip and young and was giving way to newer genres, such as rhythm and blues, and ultimately rock and roll.
At the same time, James does have some interesting arguments about the motivations behind the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other bebop musicians during the 1940s.
James rightly points out that these musicians were concerned with producing music that could be taken seriously as art. Also, given the realities of race in America at the time, and given the perception at the time and now of jazz as “black music,” they were also concerned to produce a legitimate black art. James sees all of this as important, good, and laudable.
James deals adeptly with something that requires a certain sensitivity and care. On the one hand, jazz is black music in the sense that historically the vast majority of prominent jazz musicians have been black, and the individuals who most profoundly shaped and transformed the music have been almost exclusively black. My own highly partial (in both senses of the word) list would include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman. There have been prominent and important white jazzmen (and it has been mostly men’s music) – Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and Jaco Pastorius just to get started – but the names on the second list don’t carry quite the same historic weight as those on the first. On the other hand, jazz has no color. After all, it’s comprised of sound. As James points out, Armstrong recognized Beiderbecke not as a good white trumpet player, but simply as a good trumpet player. There’s nothing inherently racial about the music itself – and to go that route leads to a reduction of art to racial essentialism and stereotype.
So, jazz has been simultaneously black music in a sociological or historical sense and without essential or inherent basis in race in an ontological sense. It’s easy to over- or under-emphasize either point.
To get back to an earlier point, James rightly points out that among the concerns of Parker, Gillespie, et al. was to produce music that was art and music that was black art. James is ambivalent about the results. He sees the price of legitimacy as art being a seriousness to the music, with a loss of joy and spontaneity.
I have two reactions to this. The first was a major topic of my previous post. I don’t think this accurately characterizes bebop. While Parker, Gillespie, and others were clearly serious about making music, this doesn’t mean they did so without a sense of humor and that their music is all work and no play. Again, song titles like “Scrapple from the Apple” or “Disorder at the Border” should tip us off, and if that’s not enough, listen to the music. As I’ve written about before (see "Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz" and "The End of the History of Music"), one of the qualities of bebop, especially embodied in a soloist the caliber of Parker, is that the individual soloist, by improvising using the notes of the chord changes rather than embellishing and varying a more structured melody, is even more freed in improvisation than in previous forms of jazz – and joy and spontaneity were a big part of this in the hands of Gillespie and Parker.
Second, while the characterization of the beboppers as concerned to produced art is accurate, it does beg the question why jazz musicians would suddenly be concerned with producing art. The unstated implication is that Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington weren’t trying to make art – they were just making entertaining dance music. Well, they were concerned with making entertaining dance music, but they were also concerned with artistry – and it’s for their superior artistry that they’re important in the history of jazz and art. (Just think how many swing band leaders made entertaining dance music that is barely remembered if at all now.) Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were interested in making art, but they were also interested in making entertaining music (albeit not so much dance music). There are clear and important differences in the music of Armstrong and Ellington and the beboppers, but their motivations as artists and entertainers doesn’t seem so distinct to me.
Which brings us to another point James argues. James sees bebop as the beginning of the erosion of the popularity of jazz – again because they became such serious artists. However, if earlier musicians were also seriously interested in artistry (and I think it’s clear they were), and if the beboppers weren’t actually so stern and serious (and they clearly weren’t), then this starts to seem not so convincing.
I’d say that James is here confusing correlation and causation. The bebop period of the mid-1940s into the 1950s is associated with a period of waning popularity for jazz (even though it remained a fairly popular genre).
Part of the wane in popularity may have stemmed from the new sound and “difficulty” of bebop (I've written before about the topic of "difficulty," though with regard to ethnographic writing. See "Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing." In that post, I was largely drawing upon "Defining Difficulty in Poetry" on "Reginald Shepherd's Blog."). Certainly more difficult music will tend to appeal less broadly. The music of Harry Partch or Karlheinz Stockhausen will probably never have a very large audience. During the 1960s, the more accessible music of Cannonball Adderley had a much larger audience than that of the more difficult Cecil Taylor.
But there are other, more important, causes for the ultimate decline in jazz’s popularity. Swing jazz had been the music of youth throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. By the mid-1940s, swing was identified by youth as the music of the previous generation. It was no longer hip and young and was giving way to newer genres, such as rhythm and blues, and ultimately rock and roll.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Vitriol and Jazz
I recently discussed Clive James’ book Cultural Amnesia . It’s a book I admire for its pithy and engaging discussions of many important cultural figures in all areas of human activity. There is one part of the book, though, that’s been bugging me, and that’s his occasional discussions of music, jazz especially.
I don’t take issue with James’ taste in jazz, though they differ from mine. James has a clear preference for 1930s and early 1940s swing, with an especial fondness for the Duke Ellington band of 1940-41. He’s ambivalent about mid-1940s bebop, in some ways expressing fondness for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and in other ways taking issue with them. He clearly loathes what came after, Miles Davis and John Coltrane especially. I, too, like the early stuff – the Ellington crew of the early 1940s is one of the best, swingingest bands of all time, but for me the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s was the golden era of jazz, and the following decade up through the mid-1970s was great, too. For that matter, there’s a boatload of current jazz I’m quite fond of. But I figure, to each their own.
What I take issue with in James’ discussion of the beboppers and of Davis and Coltrane is not his preferences but some of his claims about them and the vitriol with which he rejects Davis and Coltrane.
Parker and Gillespie stand accused of taking the spontaneous joy out of jazz and of producing music without clearly discernible rhythm. The rhythm question first – sometimes James clarifies that they didn’t play danceable rhythms. That’s true to some extent. Certainly bebop wasn’t dance music in the way that swing was. I’m not sure how that devalues bebop, though – that’s a bit like claiming that Mozart and Beethoven produced inferior music as they moved away from the tradition of courtly dance music. Other times, though, James claims that bebop was characterized by rhythm sections that didn’t keep the time, being freed up instead for melodic improvisation. It was the case that some rhythm instruments, e.g. the bass, were more freed up for improvisation than in earlier forms of jazz. But listen to a recording like the May, 1945 recording of “Salt Peanuts” by Dizzy Gillespie and His All Star Quintet (Gillespie: trumpet; Parker: alto sax; Al Haig: piano; Curly Russell: bass; Sid Catlett: drums). Curly Russell’s bass lays down a rhythm that’s loud and clear and can’t be missed.
The notion that Parker, Gillespie and the other beboppers took the joy and spontaneity out of music is simply baffling to me. These were musicians who played and recorded songs with titles like “Salt Peanuts,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” “Pickin’ the Cabbage,” “Disorder at the Border,” and “He Beeped when he Shoulda Bopped.” They took their musicianship seriously, but they also had a sense of humor. The expression of joy and spontaneity might have been different than in swing, but it was there – and not so subtly there either.
James seems to see no merit at all in the work of Davis or Coltrane. He is most vitriolic in his discussion of Coltane (located in his essay on Ellington). Again there is the charge of lack of discernible rhythm. There is also a claim for Coltrane’s having committed ritual murder on helpless standards – which is really a bit much, even while James’ writing is always engaging.
There are many instances when Coltrane’s playing was loud or gruff or not pretty (though it was usually beautiful in its own way). At the same time, there was much that was lyrical and tender in Coltrane’s music. “In a Sentimental Mood” (on the Duke Ellington and John Coltrane album) and “Lush Life” (on the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman album) are two of the most lyrical and conventionally beautiful versions of jazz standards ever recorded. The 1963 recording of “Alabama” (on the Live at Birdland album – even though “Alabama” was actually a studio recording added to the mostly live album) does more to evoke the simultaneous melancholy, tragedy, and hopefulness of the Civil Rights era South than any other music I’ve heard through the at times strong, at times fragile and quavering tone of Coltrane’s horn.
I would disagree with the claim that Coltrane’s music lacked rhythm as strongly as I disagree with the same claim for the beboppers. The claim is simply not true. Much of Coltrane’s music is largely about rhythmic exploration. In his later music (say 1965-1967), the rhythm is often highly complex and diffuse. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea to be sure, but there’s a definite propulsion to recordings like “Sun Ship.” Or take the example of “Ascension.” “Ascension” is an album length free improvisation for eleven musicians – think of it as a big band where everyone’s freely improvising. It’s not easy or background listening. It’s definitely not dance music. It really doesn’t have any easily discernible rhythm. Still, the first time I ever listened to this recording I was riveted. By the time it was half way through, I was possessed, unable to restrain myself from jumping up and down and yelling. This music literally moved me, and any music that can do that is powerfully communicating. It won’t communicate to everyone, or even many people perhaps, but then simple popularity is no good way to weigh the worth of a work of art.
James’ sometimes vitriolic reaction to Coltrane reminds me of the similarly strong reactions and rejections that are common with regard to Miles Davis’ “electric period” of the late 1960s through mid-1970s (when Davis’ band included multiple electric instruments, often including electronic modification of his trumpet’s sound), as well as to other developments in jazz in the 1960s and 1970s, such as free jazz and/or jazz-rock fusion.
A few examples:
1. On the DVD Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, about half of which is documentary footage of Davis’ band’s performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival (which alone is more than worth watching the video for), and about half of which is a documentary about Davis’ electric period, one of the interviewees is Stanley Crouch, who is almost always insightful and always entertaining. He likens his attempts to listen to the album Bitches Brew as a young man to being hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer over and over and over. It’s a quite amusing bit, but it’s also a bit much.
2. In Episode Ten (the final episode) of Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary, cultural critic Gerald Early (who I had found one of the most insightful commentators throughout the ten part series up until that point) makes a number of problematic comments, again about Miles Davis’ electric bands. As with James, I don’t take issue with Early’s taste. If he, or Crouch for that matter, don’t care for Davis’ electric period, that’s fine. However, like James (but actually not like Crouch), some of Early’s characterization is simply inaccurate. He claims that the music of the Davis electric bands tended to “fall apart” musically. I would direct anyone interested again to the Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue video, specifically to the performance footage from the Isle of Wight Festival. The rhythm section of Dave Holland on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drum kit, and Airto Moreira on percussion present one of the tightest performances I’ve seen. No one has to like Davis’ music from this period, but he always insisted on musicianship of highest caliber. Early’s other claim that the music was like “tennis without a net,” i.e. Davis had set his standards lower than before, seems to me similarly groundless.
3. Episode Ten of Ken Burns' Jazz in general represents one big slap at avant-garde or electric jazz in general. Many others have critiqued this episode. One particularly insightful commentary is that of David R. Adler on the All About Jazz website.The episode left a bad taste in my mouth after the highly enjoyable first nine episodes.
Fusion is written off as if it didn’t exist at all, but Cecil Taylor, the avant-garde pianist, takes a mauling. As Adler points out, he’s the only artist in the entire ten episode arc who is systematically attacked with no balance. Most egregiously, Branford Marsalis accuses him of engaging in “self-indulgent bullshit.”
I understand that not everyone likes the same music. As I’ve written before (See my earlier posts: "Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and the Experience of Art" and "Reading, Looking, Listening"), I also understand that when people encounter music they don’t like, they often have a visceral reaction against it. Music affects us bodily in a way that other art doesn’t tend to do, and if it’s music you don’t like, it can be a highly unpleasant experience.
Still, there’s something more at play. Jazz is a musical genre that’s also highly invested with identity. There are not only many people who are highly passionate about jazz (count me in that category, obviously) but whose identity is wrapped up in jazz. For some, when jazz musicians begin to play in ways that don’t fit a certain notion of jazz (and arguments about what jazz is can be as engaging and endless as arguments about what barbecue is), beyond not liking the music, they clearly feel betrayed – and that seems to be a big part of the sometimes vitriolic reactions to Coltrane, Davis, Taylor, Ornette Coleman or others.
Even so, I’m unable to understand the continuing extreme reactions now to music that was performed or recorded thirty or forty years ago. I can understand the visceral rejection of Ornette Coleman in 1959 or of Miles Davis’ electric music in 1969. But at this point, if listening to Bitches Brew is like being hit in the head with a hammer, turn it off. It’s not like we’re bombarded with constant John Coltrane or Cecil Taylor recordings everywhere we go these days (and it wasn’t the case in 1965 either).
I’d like to close by calling attention to a post on Reginald Shepherd’s blog calling for more civility and less vitriol in public and online discourse generally. He’s addressing this issue with regard to online poetry discourse, but his general points apply to discussions of jazz, arts and culture in general, and a variety of other topics. Here I’ll quote his final paragraph:
“The situation I discuss is but a minor and marginal example of the general degradation of discourse in contemporary American culture (what Al Gore calls the assault on reason), a process seemingly designed to disengage people from sociality. In this case, however, I would like to point out that the enemy, if an enemy is required (as it seems to be), is not other poets, however different their aesthetic dispositions (I am opposed to John Barr, for example, not as a poet but as a polemicist with, as he put it in The New Yorker, a bully pulpit), but a culture and an economy of scarcity—of money, of resources, of attention, of recognition professional and personal—that pits people in the society as a whole and in any given social subset against one another in a zero-sum competition for crumbs of a shrinking economic and social pie precisely in order to prevent them from cooperating in changing the reward/withhold/punish system some profit from, some rail against (some of these are actually suffering and some just don’t want to admit that they’re profiting too), and most are actively harmed by. Those engaged in the constant turf wars with which the online poetry world in particular is rife might do well to recognize that their mock battles in tempestuous teapots are the direct result, indeed can accurately be described as symptoms of, this economy of scarcity. The energy expended in these toy gladiator contests might be put to more productive uses .”
I don’t take issue with James’ taste in jazz, though they differ from mine. James has a clear preference for 1930s and early 1940s swing, with an especial fondness for the Duke Ellington band of 1940-41. He’s ambivalent about mid-1940s bebop, in some ways expressing fondness for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and in other ways taking issue with them. He clearly loathes what came after, Miles Davis and John Coltrane especially. I, too, like the early stuff – the Ellington crew of the early 1940s is one of the best, swingingest bands of all time, but for me the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s was the golden era of jazz, and the following decade up through the mid-1970s was great, too. For that matter, there’s a boatload of current jazz I’m quite fond of. But I figure, to each their own.
What I take issue with in James’ discussion of the beboppers and of Davis and Coltrane is not his preferences but some of his claims about them and the vitriol with which he rejects Davis and Coltrane.
Parker and Gillespie stand accused of taking the spontaneous joy out of jazz and of producing music without clearly discernible rhythm. The rhythm question first – sometimes James clarifies that they didn’t play danceable rhythms. That’s true to some extent. Certainly bebop wasn’t dance music in the way that swing was. I’m not sure how that devalues bebop, though – that’s a bit like claiming that Mozart and Beethoven produced inferior music as they moved away from the tradition of courtly dance music. Other times, though, James claims that bebop was characterized by rhythm sections that didn’t keep the time, being freed up instead for melodic improvisation. It was the case that some rhythm instruments, e.g. the bass, were more freed up for improvisation than in earlier forms of jazz. But listen to a recording like the May, 1945 recording of “Salt Peanuts” by Dizzy Gillespie and His All Star Quintet (Gillespie: trumpet; Parker: alto sax; Al Haig: piano; Curly Russell: bass; Sid Catlett: drums). Curly Russell’s bass lays down a rhythm that’s loud and clear and can’t be missed.
The notion that Parker, Gillespie and the other beboppers took the joy and spontaneity out of music is simply baffling to me. These were musicians who played and recorded songs with titles like “Salt Peanuts,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” “Pickin’ the Cabbage,” “Disorder at the Border,” and “He Beeped when he Shoulda Bopped.” They took their musicianship seriously, but they also had a sense of humor. The expression of joy and spontaneity might have been different than in swing, but it was there – and not so subtly there either.
James seems to see no merit at all in the work of Davis or Coltrane. He is most vitriolic in his discussion of Coltane (located in his essay on Ellington). Again there is the charge of lack of discernible rhythm. There is also a claim for Coltrane’s having committed ritual murder on helpless standards – which is really a bit much, even while James’ writing is always engaging.
There are many instances when Coltrane’s playing was loud or gruff or not pretty (though it was usually beautiful in its own way). At the same time, there was much that was lyrical and tender in Coltrane’s music. “In a Sentimental Mood” (on the Duke Ellington and John Coltrane album) and “Lush Life” (on the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman album) are two of the most lyrical and conventionally beautiful versions of jazz standards ever recorded. The 1963 recording of “Alabama” (on the Live at Birdland album – even though “Alabama” was actually a studio recording added to the mostly live album) does more to evoke the simultaneous melancholy, tragedy, and hopefulness of the Civil Rights era South than any other music I’ve heard through the at times strong, at times fragile and quavering tone of Coltrane’s horn.
I would disagree with the claim that Coltrane’s music lacked rhythm as strongly as I disagree with the same claim for the beboppers. The claim is simply not true. Much of Coltrane’s music is largely about rhythmic exploration. In his later music (say 1965-1967), the rhythm is often highly complex and diffuse. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea to be sure, but there’s a definite propulsion to recordings like “Sun Ship.” Or take the example of “Ascension.” “Ascension” is an album length free improvisation for eleven musicians – think of it as a big band where everyone’s freely improvising. It’s not easy or background listening. It’s definitely not dance music. It really doesn’t have any easily discernible rhythm. Still, the first time I ever listened to this recording I was riveted. By the time it was half way through, I was possessed, unable to restrain myself from jumping up and down and yelling. This music literally moved me, and any music that can do that is powerfully communicating. It won’t communicate to everyone, or even many people perhaps, but then simple popularity is no good way to weigh the worth of a work of art.
James’ sometimes vitriolic reaction to Coltrane reminds me of the similarly strong reactions and rejections that are common with regard to Miles Davis’ “electric period” of the late 1960s through mid-1970s (when Davis’ band included multiple electric instruments, often including electronic modification of his trumpet’s sound), as well as to other developments in jazz in the 1960s and 1970s, such as free jazz and/or jazz-rock fusion.
A few examples:
1. On the DVD Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, about half of which is documentary footage of Davis’ band’s performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival (which alone is more than worth watching the video for), and about half of which is a documentary about Davis’ electric period, one of the interviewees is Stanley Crouch, who is almost always insightful and always entertaining. He likens his attempts to listen to the album Bitches Brew as a young man to being hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer over and over and over. It’s a quite amusing bit, but it’s also a bit much.
2. In Episode Ten (the final episode) of Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary, cultural critic Gerald Early (who I had found one of the most insightful commentators throughout the ten part series up until that point) makes a number of problematic comments, again about Miles Davis’ electric bands. As with James, I don’t take issue with Early’s taste. If he, or Crouch for that matter, don’t care for Davis’ electric period, that’s fine. However, like James (but actually not like Crouch), some of Early’s characterization is simply inaccurate. He claims that the music of the Davis electric bands tended to “fall apart” musically. I would direct anyone interested again to the Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue video, specifically to the performance footage from the Isle of Wight Festival. The rhythm section of Dave Holland on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drum kit, and Airto Moreira on percussion present one of the tightest performances I’ve seen. No one has to like Davis’ music from this period, but he always insisted on musicianship of highest caliber. Early’s other claim that the music was like “tennis without a net,” i.e. Davis had set his standards lower than before, seems to me similarly groundless.
3. Episode Ten of Ken Burns' Jazz in general represents one big slap at avant-garde or electric jazz in general. Many others have critiqued this episode. One particularly insightful commentary is that of David R. Adler on the All About Jazz website.The episode left a bad taste in my mouth after the highly enjoyable first nine episodes.
Fusion is written off as if it didn’t exist at all, but Cecil Taylor, the avant-garde pianist, takes a mauling. As Adler points out, he’s the only artist in the entire ten episode arc who is systematically attacked with no balance. Most egregiously, Branford Marsalis accuses him of engaging in “self-indulgent bullshit.”
I understand that not everyone likes the same music. As I’ve written before (See my earlier posts: "Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and the Experience of Art" and "Reading, Looking, Listening"), I also understand that when people encounter music they don’t like, they often have a visceral reaction against it. Music affects us bodily in a way that other art doesn’t tend to do, and if it’s music you don’t like, it can be a highly unpleasant experience.
Still, there’s something more at play. Jazz is a musical genre that’s also highly invested with identity. There are not only many people who are highly passionate about jazz (count me in that category, obviously) but whose identity is wrapped up in jazz. For some, when jazz musicians begin to play in ways that don’t fit a certain notion of jazz (and arguments about what jazz is can be as engaging and endless as arguments about what barbecue is), beyond not liking the music, they clearly feel betrayed – and that seems to be a big part of the sometimes vitriolic reactions to Coltrane, Davis, Taylor, Ornette Coleman or others.
Even so, I’m unable to understand the continuing extreme reactions now to music that was performed or recorded thirty or forty years ago. I can understand the visceral rejection of Ornette Coleman in 1959 or of Miles Davis’ electric music in 1969. But at this point, if listening to Bitches Brew is like being hit in the head with a hammer, turn it off. It’s not like we’re bombarded with constant John Coltrane or Cecil Taylor recordings everywhere we go these days (and it wasn’t the case in 1965 either).
I’d like to close by calling attention to a post on Reginald Shepherd’s blog calling for more civility and less vitriol in public and online discourse generally. He’s addressing this issue with regard to online poetry discourse, but his general points apply to discussions of jazz, arts and culture in general, and a variety of other topics. Here I’ll quote his final paragraph:
“The situation I discuss is but a minor and marginal example of the general degradation of discourse in contemporary American culture (what Al Gore calls the assault on reason), a process seemingly designed to disengage people from sociality. In this case, however, I would like to point out that the enemy, if an enemy is required (as it seems to be), is not other poets, however different their aesthetic dispositions (I am opposed to John Barr, for example, not as a poet but as a polemicist with, as he put it in The New Yorker, a bully pulpit), but a culture and an economy of scarcity—of money, of resources, of attention, of recognition professional and personal—that pits people in the society as a whole and in any given social subset against one another in a zero-sum competition for crumbs of a shrinking economic and social pie precisely in order to prevent them from cooperating in changing the reward/withhold/punish system some profit from, some rail against (some of these are actually suffering and some just don’t want to admit that they’re profiting too), and most are actively harmed by. Those engaged in the constant turf wars with which the online poetry world in particular is rife might do well to recognize that their mock battles in tempestuous teapots are the direct result, indeed can accurately be described as symptoms of, this economy of scarcity. The energy expended in these toy gladiator contests might be put to more productive uses .”
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Longfellow, George Will, Poetry, and the Individual Artist or Thinker
George Will is a conservative I respect. Of the widely published op-ed columnists in American newspapers and newsmagazines, Will is one of the few of any political persuasion, and virtually the only conservative, I consistently respect and find insightful, even while I disagree with much he has to say.
I respect two main things about Will’s thinking and writing. First, he is a careful, logical thinker. He doesn’t play around with or distort facts, nor does he reduce complex matters to sound bites that could potentially be shouted at someone during a guest appearance on one of the many “talk” news programs. Second, I admire his wide ranging interests and passions. He cares about and writes about the important news items of the day, of course, but he also cares deeply about the arts, baseball, and other phenomena that don’t habitually clog the headlines. He’s probably the only syndicated columnist willing (or able?) to dedicate an entire column to poetry.
About a month ago in a column published in Newsweek (March 12, 2007, p. 68), Will did just that, with a column dedicated to the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In addition to simply being dedicated to this important bicentennial of a poet of national importance in the U.S. (important for such familiar poems as “The Song of Hiawatha” or “Paul Revere’s Ride” which were once the staples of American public education), Will’s column also comments on the sad fact that this bicentennial went so unremarked in general. While I must admit that Longfellow is far from my favorite sort of poet, his poems are a part of an American tradition of thought as much as the works of Thoreau or Emerson, or even the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, or the Declaration of Independence, so it is a bit sad to see such an anniversary go largely uncelebrated. I’d like here to quote an extended passage from Will’s column, specifically a section exploring possible reasons for the lack of attention paid nowadays to poetry in general and poets like Longfellow in specific:
“Longfellow intended his narrative and lyric poems – genres disdained by modernists – as inspiriting guides to the nation’s honorable past and challenging future. Yeats ascribed Longfellow’s popularity to his accessibility – ‘he tells his story or idea so that one need nothing but his verses to understand it.’ This angers today’s academic clerisy. What use is it to readers who need no intermediary between them and the author? And what use is Longfellow to academics who ‘interrogate’ authors’ ‘texts’ to illuminate the authors’ psyches, ideologies and social situations – the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.? This reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to ideological assertion, demotes literature to mere raw material for literary theory, making today’s professoriate, rather than yesterday’s writers, the center of attention.”
I agree with Will’s arguments and implications – with three big qualifications. (This is often my reaction to reading a piece by Will – I completely agree with what he has said, except for the huge qualifications.)
First, he implies that the lowered status (he mentions elsewhere in the column the past existence of celebrity poets – a phenomenon clearly not existing today, except in the sense that some celebrities, such as Jewel or T-Boz, have published books of poetry after becoming celebrities in other capacities) of poetry in general, and of accessible, narrative and lyric poetry in particular, is the fault of an “academic clerisy.” There is a large grain of truth to this, both in the sense that literary theory thrives on literature that needs theorists’ mediation, and in the sense that many genres of poetry enjoying prestige in some academic contexts (and thus absorbing the energies of many poets seeking that prestige) has moved in non-popular directions. But there is much more going on as well. Poetry over the past several decades has had to compete with many other genres of content, not least the movies, television, and the internet. These have as much to do with today’s lack of celebrity poets as an academic clerisy. Publishing practices have also played a role. Big publishers are more and more concerned not just with profitable titles, but titles with huge profit potential, with the result being huge sales of small numbers of titles, with poetry generally losing out. Change in income tax laws in the 1980s to make unsold inventory taxable didn’t help matters for slower selling genres like poetry, either. At the same time, I would actually contest that things are so bad for poetry nowadays. There are actually hundreds of small presses today publishing poetry, and lots of people reading poetry and other literature. There are no longer celebrity poets or poets known to virtually everyone, but poetry in general, in myriad forms is actually thriving.
Second, while he does not say this explicitly, Will seems to imply that accessibility in poetry is a good thing and that difficulty is a bad thing. I would disagree in that in art or scholarship neither accessibility nor difficulty is inherently good or bad. It is problematic that often in academia, accessible art or scholarship are almost automatically seen as lacking in sophistication or seen as otherwise unworthy or déclassé, while at the same time, the difficult or obscure piece of art or thought is often elevated largely on that basis alone. I do think somewhat different rules apply here to scholarship or art. With scholarly writing, I would argue that things should not be more difficultly or obscurely put than necessary, but when presenting complex ideas, such as in discussions of quantum mechanics, the structural study of Australian kinship systems, or the intricacies of modern art music, a certain amount of complexity in the text is inescapable in writing for a professional, scholarly audience. With art, it is not so much about presenting things as accessibly as possible as much as form matching content and artistic intent. Take the John Coltrane recording Ascension compared to his Giant Steps album. Ascension is much less accessible to most listeners – it certainly requires more patience and careful listening to achieve pleasure from it, though it also rewards that patience and careful listening – though on those grounds alone, I wouldn’t consider Ascension less, or more, worthy as art than Giant Steps. (See also my earlier post on the topic of difficulty, “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing,” March 5, 2007).
Finally, like Will, I object to reducing the significance of an artist or thinker and their work to a symptom of their individual biography or sociological category. For example, in my earlier blog entry, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture” (February 13, 2007), I remarked that while knowing that Charlie Parker was experiencing heroin withdrawal during his class 1947 recording of “Lover Man” might heighten or inform one’s appreciation of the track, the significance or aesthetic quality of the recording is by no means determined by this biographic tidbit. Likewise, knowing that the viola sonata was the last piece of music written by Shostakovich, and knowing that he knew he was dying, might inform one’s listening, but such facts do not determine the structure or quality of the piece in itself, nor is the piece reducible to such biography. Will specifically targets tendencies to theorize poetry and other literature in terms of “the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.” In doing so, Will is aiming more specifically at brands of identity politics that explain phenomena, including art, as symptoms or reflections of race/ethnicity, gender, and/or class as identity categories. As an anthropologist, I recognize the extreme importance of race/ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping people’s social realities, but also like most anthropologists, I reject straightforward cultural determinisms as well. So, while I cannot disagree with Will on this point, my main point of agreement with him is in finding problematic any form of reductionism of art or thought to personal biography or social factors, and I do find myself wishing Will had cast this point in somewhat broader terms.
I respect two main things about Will’s thinking and writing. First, he is a careful, logical thinker. He doesn’t play around with or distort facts, nor does he reduce complex matters to sound bites that could potentially be shouted at someone during a guest appearance on one of the many “talk” news programs. Second, I admire his wide ranging interests and passions. He cares about and writes about the important news items of the day, of course, but he also cares deeply about the arts, baseball, and other phenomena that don’t habitually clog the headlines. He’s probably the only syndicated columnist willing (or able?) to dedicate an entire column to poetry.
About a month ago in a column published in Newsweek (March 12, 2007, p. 68), Will did just that, with a column dedicated to the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In addition to simply being dedicated to this important bicentennial of a poet of national importance in the U.S. (important for such familiar poems as “The Song of Hiawatha” or “Paul Revere’s Ride” which were once the staples of American public education), Will’s column also comments on the sad fact that this bicentennial went so unremarked in general. While I must admit that Longfellow is far from my favorite sort of poet, his poems are a part of an American tradition of thought as much as the works of Thoreau or Emerson, or even the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, or the Declaration of Independence, so it is a bit sad to see such an anniversary go largely uncelebrated. I’d like here to quote an extended passage from Will’s column, specifically a section exploring possible reasons for the lack of attention paid nowadays to poetry in general and poets like Longfellow in specific:
“Longfellow intended his narrative and lyric poems – genres disdained by modernists – as inspiriting guides to the nation’s honorable past and challenging future. Yeats ascribed Longfellow’s popularity to his accessibility – ‘he tells his story or idea so that one need nothing but his verses to understand it.’ This angers today’s academic clerisy. What use is it to readers who need no intermediary between them and the author? And what use is Longfellow to academics who ‘interrogate’ authors’ ‘texts’ to illuminate the authors’ psyches, ideologies and social situations – the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.? This reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to ideological assertion, demotes literature to mere raw material for literary theory, making today’s professoriate, rather than yesterday’s writers, the center of attention.”
I agree with Will’s arguments and implications – with three big qualifications. (This is often my reaction to reading a piece by Will – I completely agree with what he has said, except for the huge qualifications.)
First, he implies that the lowered status (he mentions elsewhere in the column the past existence of celebrity poets – a phenomenon clearly not existing today, except in the sense that some celebrities, such as Jewel or T-Boz, have published books of poetry after becoming celebrities in other capacities) of poetry in general, and of accessible, narrative and lyric poetry in particular, is the fault of an “academic clerisy.” There is a large grain of truth to this, both in the sense that literary theory thrives on literature that needs theorists’ mediation, and in the sense that many genres of poetry enjoying prestige in some academic contexts (and thus absorbing the energies of many poets seeking that prestige) has moved in non-popular directions. But there is much more going on as well. Poetry over the past several decades has had to compete with many other genres of content, not least the movies, television, and the internet. These have as much to do with today’s lack of celebrity poets as an academic clerisy. Publishing practices have also played a role. Big publishers are more and more concerned not just with profitable titles, but titles with huge profit potential, with the result being huge sales of small numbers of titles, with poetry generally losing out. Change in income tax laws in the 1980s to make unsold inventory taxable didn’t help matters for slower selling genres like poetry, either. At the same time, I would actually contest that things are so bad for poetry nowadays. There are actually hundreds of small presses today publishing poetry, and lots of people reading poetry and other literature. There are no longer celebrity poets or poets known to virtually everyone, but poetry in general, in myriad forms is actually thriving.
Second, while he does not say this explicitly, Will seems to imply that accessibility in poetry is a good thing and that difficulty is a bad thing. I would disagree in that in art or scholarship neither accessibility nor difficulty is inherently good or bad. It is problematic that often in academia, accessible art or scholarship are almost automatically seen as lacking in sophistication or seen as otherwise unworthy or déclassé, while at the same time, the difficult or obscure piece of art or thought is often elevated largely on that basis alone. I do think somewhat different rules apply here to scholarship or art. With scholarly writing, I would argue that things should not be more difficultly or obscurely put than necessary, but when presenting complex ideas, such as in discussions of quantum mechanics, the structural study of Australian kinship systems, or the intricacies of modern art music, a certain amount of complexity in the text is inescapable in writing for a professional, scholarly audience. With art, it is not so much about presenting things as accessibly as possible as much as form matching content and artistic intent. Take the John Coltrane recording Ascension compared to his Giant Steps album. Ascension is much less accessible to most listeners – it certainly requires more patience and careful listening to achieve pleasure from it, though it also rewards that patience and careful listening – though on those grounds alone, I wouldn’t consider Ascension less, or more, worthy as art than Giant Steps. (See also my earlier post on the topic of difficulty, “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing,” March 5, 2007).
Finally, like Will, I object to reducing the significance of an artist or thinker and their work to a symptom of their individual biography or sociological category. For example, in my earlier blog entry, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture” (February 13, 2007), I remarked that while knowing that Charlie Parker was experiencing heroin withdrawal during his class 1947 recording of “Lover Man” might heighten or inform one’s appreciation of the track, the significance or aesthetic quality of the recording is by no means determined by this biographic tidbit. Likewise, knowing that the viola sonata was the last piece of music written by Shostakovich, and knowing that he knew he was dying, might inform one’s listening, but such facts do not determine the structure or quality of the piece in itself, nor is the piece reducible to such biography. Will specifically targets tendencies to theorize poetry and other literature in terms of “the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.” In doing so, Will is aiming more specifically at brands of identity politics that explain phenomena, including art, as symptoms or reflections of race/ethnicity, gender, and/or class as identity categories. As an anthropologist, I recognize the extreme importance of race/ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping people’s social realities, but also like most anthropologists, I reject straightforward cultural determinisms as well. So, while I cannot disagree with Will on this point, my main point of agreement with him is in finding problematic any form of reductionism of art or thought to personal biography or social factors, and I do find myself wishing Will had cast this point in somewhat broader terms.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz
Clement Greenberg and Arthur C. Danto share in common Neo-Hegelian perspectives on art criticism, though at least with regard to visual art, the details of their arguments are incompatible.
For Greenberg, progress in art or the trajectory of the history of art centers around the development of that which is essential and unique to a form and the simultaneous winnowing away of that which is extraneous. With regard to painting, Greenberg saw the play of color on the flat plane as the essential and unique element of the form, while the removal of the extraneous meant the elimination of the illusion of three dimensionality, including pictorial or representational qualities. In the mid-twentieth century, he was an important champion of abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock and color field painters like Mark Rothko.
Danto conceptualizes the history of art as the movement towards a zero degree of difference between art world and real world, between objects created as art objects and other objects in the world. One could argue that this was achieved with Duchamp’s urinal and other early 20th century “ready mades,” though by simply taking an already existing object and calling it art, Duchamp and others are doing something subtly different than what Danto is speaking of. Danto claims the history of art ended, reaching this zero degree of difference, with Warhol’s Brillo boxes, which were created as art objects but also as indistinguishable from the “real things.” (The only problem with this is that Warhol’s Brillo boxes aren’t indistinguishable from industrially manufactured Brillo boxes, and so, they don’t represent the end of the history of art in Danto’s terms, though they do indicate the sort of thing that would represent that – an object created as art which so indistinguishably resembles an object already existing that there is essentially zero difference between them.)
With regard to visual art, Greenberg and Danto are not compatible. The trajectory of the history of visual art for Danto must necessarily move beyond painting to create objects that are indistinguishable from objects already in the world, whereas for Greenberg, the trajectory of the history of visual art entails the development of painting into art objects that are as far from other sorts of objects in the world as possible. The details of their respective Neo-Hegelian perspectives are opposed in their implications – for visual art.
If we shift our attention to music, and specifically to jazz as a distinct form or mode of making music, their arguments are compatible for that medium. If we start with Greenberg’s emphasis on the development of that which is essential and unique to a form and the removal of that which is extraneous, we see a clear trajectory in the history of jazz that ultimately produces a zero degree of difference between art world and real world, a zero degree of difference between musical sound and noise.
The essential element in the history of jazz as a distinct musical form is free improvisation. (Some, like Wynton Marsalis, would argue that an essential quality of jazz is also that it’s based on the blues. Early jazz certainly was based on the blues, and the blues has been an important source of material throughout the history of jazz, but at the same time, jazz was from the very beginning a musical form with a mixture of sources, i.e. it was always blues mixed with other things, and as more and more things have been added to the mix [ragtime and military marches early on, later classical music, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, Indian ragga, reggae, hip hop, etc.], jazz has been freed from having to be blues based, even while blues based playing remains a possibility.)
The first great jazz improviser to be well recorded was Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. His improvisations generally took the form of embellishments and variations on the melodic material of the particular song. In so doing, he set the basic template for jazz improvisational playing for at least the next two decades, clearly establishing the precedent allowing soloists to improvise on the material of the song, while at the same time doing so with fairly restricted freedom – Armstrong’s solos, as brilliant as they often are, typically have very clear relationship to the melodic material for even first time listeners. (I want to make quite clear that this is no criticism of Armstrong’s early work, nor is it to imply a lower degree of sophistication than those who moved the music forward at a later point. Instead, it’s simply a description of his work as jazz improviser in the 1920s and of his primary place in the history of the development of jazz. Those who came later could not have done what they did without Armstrong or someone else like him.)
In the 1940s, Charlie Parker and his bebop contemporaries began to do something a bit different. Parker in particular, while capable of playing beautiful melodic lines, did not restrict himself to embellishing or varying the melody of the song when soloing. Instead, he engaged in a freer improvisation based on the notes of the chords associated with the melody. So, while there was still a relationship to the basic melody of the song, improvisation was less restricted, and often as a result less clearly related to the song’s melody. This element of bebop made it one of the first examples of “difficult” jazz music – it was not as easy to listen to and enjoy for many casual listeners as most earlier, dance and melody focused swing jazz. Not coincidently, the 1940s and 1950s were associated with a gradual dwindling of the jazz audience, partly because bebop alienated some. At the same time, though, the fact that the jazz audience was already shrinking with competition from rhythm and blues in the 1940s and rock and roll in the 1950s, meant that jazz fans who remained were often more “hard core,” often more willing to take the time to learn to listen to difficult music, something in turn facilitating the continued development of freer jazz improvisation.
In the late 1950s, Miles Davis and others, notably John Coltrane, were associated with the development of modal jazz, something which created still greater freedom in improvising. The melodic material of new songs, while not unimportant, was often paired down, with instead a song usually strongly associated with a particular key and mode, which freed up soloists to improvise with a greater degree of freedom, using the notes available in the key and mode with less structural restriction, i.e. as the essential element (free improvisation) was developed, other elements of structure were reduced.
Free Jazz, particularly associated with Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, represents the next and final step in the history of jazz via the development of free improvisation. Celebrated recordings, like Coleman’s Free Jazz or Coltrane’s Ascension don’t quite reach the point of completely unrestricted improvisation, e.g. Ascension involves structured intervals of semi-structured ensemble playing, interspersed with soloists freely improvising with other musicians freely accompanying them, with accompaniment improvised in relation to soloists’ improvisations, but they do come close, certainly getting closer to total freedom (and chaos) than many if not most listeners care to hear, and as close to total freedom/chaos as I can honestly claim to enjoy. It’s debatable whether anyone truly achieved totally free improvisation, but by the late 1960s, plenty had come close enough that for all practical purposes, a zero degree of difference between music and noise, between intentional sound production and random chaos, had been achieved, and with it, the history of jazz, in Hegel’s or Danto’s sense of “history” with a definite trajectory, ended.
This might sound bad for jazz, but it wasn’t. Danto has written that the end of the history of art isn’t the end of art. It just means that there’s no longer a grand trajectory that needs to be invested in any longer. Artists are freed form artistic necessity or destiny to do what they want to do. Likewise with jazz – once the history of the development of free improvisation in jazz is over, jazz isn’t over, but musicians can simply get on with making good music in any number of ways – Wynton Marsalis can make what some call “museum jazz,” though what I’d consider artfully juxtaposed and highly enjoyable elements from various points in the history of jazz; Josh Roseman can mix reggae and jazz or do jazz versions of rock “standards” like “Don’t Be Cruel” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit;” Hiromi can engage in amazing finger gymnastics on the piano; I can’t quite say of contemporary jazz that “It’s all good,” but there are a goodly number of ways for musicians to play good jazz today, and unlike much of the 20th century, no real reason to see any musician as out of step with the overall trajectory of jazz, because there is no longer any main stream or overarching trajectory for the music.
For Greenberg, progress in art or the trajectory of the history of art centers around the development of that which is essential and unique to a form and the simultaneous winnowing away of that which is extraneous. With regard to painting, Greenberg saw the play of color on the flat plane as the essential and unique element of the form, while the removal of the extraneous meant the elimination of the illusion of three dimensionality, including pictorial or representational qualities. In the mid-twentieth century, he was an important champion of abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock and color field painters like Mark Rothko.
Danto conceptualizes the history of art as the movement towards a zero degree of difference between art world and real world, between objects created as art objects and other objects in the world. One could argue that this was achieved with Duchamp’s urinal and other early 20th century “ready mades,” though by simply taking an already existing object and calling it art, Duchamp and others are doing something subtly different than what Danto is speaking of. Danto claims the history of art ended, reaching this zero degree of difference, with Warhol’s Brillo boxes, which were created as art objects but also as indistinguishable from the “real things.” (The only problem with this is that Warhol’s Brillo boxes aren’t indistinguishable from industrially manufactured Brillo boxes, and so, they don’t represent the end of the history of art in Danto’s terms, though they do indicate the sort of thing that would represent that – an object created as art which so indistinguishably resembles an object already existing that there is essentially zero difference between them.)
With regard to visual art, Greenberg and Danto are not compatible. The trajectory of the history of visual art for Danto must necessarily move beyond painting to create objects that are indistinguishable from objects already in the world, whereas for Greenberg, the trajectory of the history of visual art entails the development of painting into art objects that are as far from other sorts of objects in the world as possible. The details of their respective Neo-Hegelian perspectives are opposed in their implications – for visual art.
If we shift our attention to music, and specifically to jazz as a distinct form or mode of making music, their arguments are compatible for that medium. If we start with Greenberg’s emphasis on the development of that which is essential and unique to a form and the removal of that which is extraneous, we see a clear trajectory in the history of jazz that ultimately produces a zero degree of difference between art world and real world, a zero degree of difference between musical sound and noise.
The essential element in the history of jazz as a distinct musical form is free improvisation. (Some, like Wynton Marsalis, would argue that an essential quality of jazz is also that it’s based on the blues. Early jazz certainly was based on the blues, and the blues has been an important source of material throughout the history of jazz, but at the same time, jazz was from the very beginning a musical form with a mixture of sources, i.e. it was always blues mixed with other things, and as more and more things have been added to the mix [ragtime and military marches early on, later classical music, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, Indian ragga, reggae, hip hop, etc.], jazz has been freed from having to be blues based, even while blues based playing remains a possibility.)
The first great jazz improviser to be well recorded was Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. His improvisations generally took the form of embellishments and variations on the melodic material of the particular song. In so doing, he set the basic template for jazz improvisational playing for at least the next two decades, clearly establishing the precedent allowing soloists to improvise on the material of the song, while at the same time doing so with fairly restricted freedom – Armstrong’s solos, as brilliant as they often are, typically have very clear relationship to the melodic material for even first time listeners. (I want to make quite clear that this is no criticism of Armstrong’s early work, nor is it to imply a lower degree of sophistication than those who moved the music forward at a later point. Instead, it’s simply a description of his work as jazz improviser in the 1920s and of his primary place in the history of the development of jazz. Those who came later could not have done what they did without Armstrong or someone else like him.)
In the 1940s, Charlie Parker and his bebop contemporaries began to do something a bit different. Parker in particular, while capable of playing beautiful melodic lines, did not restrict himself to embellishing or varying the melody of the song when soloing. Instead, he engaged in a freer improvisation based on the notes of the chords associated with the melody. So, while there was still a relationship to the basic melody of the song, improvisation was less restricted, and often as a result less clearly related to the song’s melody. This element of bebop made it one of the first examples of “difficult” jazz music – it was not as easy to listen to and enjoy for many casual listeners as most earlier, dance and melody focused swing jazz. Not coincidently, the 1940s and 1950s were associated with a gradual dwindling of the jazz audience, partly because bebop alienated some. At the same time, though, the fact that the jazz audience was already shrinking with competition from rhythm and blues in the 1940s and rock and roll in the 1950s, meant that jazz fans who remained were often more “hard core,” often more willing to take the time to learn to listen to difficult music, something in turn facilitating the continued development of freer jazz improvisation.
In the late 1950s, Miles Davis and others, notably John Coltrane, were associated with the development of modal jazz, something which created still greater freedom in improvising. The melodic material of new songs, while not unimportant, was often paired down, with instead a song usually strongly associated with a particular key and mode, which freed up soloists to improvise with a greater degree of freedom, using the notes available in the key and mode with less structural restriction, i.e. as the essential element (free improvisation) was developed, other elements of structure were reduced.
Free Jazz, particularly associated with Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, represents the next and final step in the history of jazz via the development of free improvisation. Celebrated recordings, like Coleman’s Free Jazz or Coltrane’s Ascension don’t quite reach the point of completely unrestricted improvisation, e.g. Ascension involves structured intervals of semi-structured ensemble playing, interspersed with soloists freely improvising with other musicians freely accompanying them, with accompaniment improvised in relation to soloists’ improvisations, but they do come close, certainly getting closer to total freedom (and chaos) than many if not most listeners care to hear, and as close to total freedom/chaos as I can honestly claim to enjoy. It’s debatable whether anyone truly achieved totally free improvisation, but by the late 1960s, plenty had come close enough that for all practical purposes, a zero degree of difference between music and noise, between intentional sound production and random chaos, had been achieved, and with it, the history of jazz, in Hegel’s or Danto’s sense of “history” with a definite trajectory, ended.
This might sound bad for jazz, but it wasn’t. Danto has written that the end of the history of art isn’t the end of art. It just means that there’s no longer a grand trajectory that needs to be invested in any longer. Artists are freed form artistic necessity or destiny to do what they want to do. Likewise with jazz – once the history of the development of free improvisation in jazz is over, jazz isn’t over, but musicians can simply get on with making good music in any number of ways – Wynton Marsalis can make what some call “museum jazz,” though what I’d consider artfully juxtaposed and highly enjoyable elements from various points in the history of jazz; Josh Roseman can mix reggae and jazz or do jazz versions of rock “standards” like “Don’t Be Cruel” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit;” Hiromi can engage in amazing finger gymnastics on the piano; I can’t quite say of contemporary jazz that “It’s all good,” but there are a goodly number of ways for musicians to play good jazz today, and unlike much of the 20th century, no real reason to see any musician as out of step with the overall trajectory of jazz, because there is no longer any main stream or overarching trajectory for the music.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture
On the 1946 recording of the song “Lover Man,” Charlie Parker plays one of the most searing, mournful, and heart-rending saxophone solos (or any kind of solo) in the history of recorded music. As is often the case, there is a further story behind the music. Parker had accompanied Dizzy Gillespie to California (where “Lover Man” was recorded) on a tour of the west coast, and had stayed behind to play jazz clubs in Los Angeles when Gillespie returned to New York. Parker had also turned to heroin again, and while he was playing those sad, searing tones immortalized on the “Lover Man” recording, he was in fact experiencing heroin withdrawal. In fact, later that same day, he was arrested in relation to a fire that broke out in his hotel room, ultimately ending up at Camarillo state mental hospital for a stay of some months. (“Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” recorded in early 1947 after that stay, is one of Parker’s jauntiest, happiest sounding recordings.) How much difference do, or should, such biographical tidbits make in our appreciation of the recording?
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.
Art does not depend on the artist’s biography
This is a fairly simple point. If you know that Charlie Parker was experiencing the physical pain of heroin withdrawal symptoms and mentally cracking up while playing “Lover Man” in the recording studio, it may enhance your appreciation of the true beauty of the music in relation to Parker’s pain. But you don’t need to know anything about the background of the music to appreciate it for wonderful art. I had heard the recording many times and grown to love it before subsequently reading about the backdrop for the song in several different places. Or as Iannucci writes (the emphasis may be reversed, but he’s making essentially the same points): “It’s not an essential knowledge; the piece doesn’t fall apart without it. But it adds something indefinable, a resonance, as we listen.”
Art is not sustained by the artist’s biography
The production of art involves the creation of a sensual object to be experienced and appreciated for the aesthetic pleasures and/or sensations it gives. Further, the work of art exists independently of the artist: the recording of “Lover Man” still exists and mesmerizes some fifty-odd years after Parker’s death in the early 1950s. The viola sonata, Four Last Songs, and the requiem persist and amaze long after the deaths of Shostakovich, Strauss, and Mozart. Appreciation of the independent existence of the work of art need not take the form of a fetishization of art as having no function other than aesthetic experience. Art can have many functions, including crass, materialistic ones like selling records or tickets to the theater. But if something is art, at least one of its functions is its existence as independent object of aesthetic experience. The biography of the artist and details of the production of the particular work, no matter how interesting, cannot sustain the work’s value as art. If “Lover Man” sounded as if it were being played by someone going through the pain of withdrawal and going a bit crazy, it would be a curiosity at best, something perhaps for jazz completists to pass around with shades of guilt, “Hey, here’s that recording where Charlie Parker’s having a breakdown.” Instead, the details of the recording might add to our appreciation mainly because they stand in contrast to the art, because the art represents Parker overcoming pain, or better, channeling pain into something of truly lasting worth. Likewise, if Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s requiem were hackneyed works of previously great masters on their deathbeds, their value would again be mainly that of historical curiosity. In the context of the greatness of the art in itself, the details of their production can enhance our appreciation of these works as last triumphs over death (temporarily for the artist, but with the work persisting).
Art is not determined by the artist’s biography
Art is produced by individuals – sometimes individuals alone or often working in groups, influencing one another. All individuals, of course, are highly influenced by their historical and cultural surroundings (I wouldn’t be much of an anthropologist if I thought otherwise). At the same time, no individual (and no individual work of art) is determined by such contexts. Certainly Parker was influenced by his background, with his upbringing as a black man in Kansas City helping to channel his creative impulses into jazz, but that context alone cannot determine his particular body of work, especially given his instrumental and unique role in producing bebop alongside Gillespie, nor can his biography, even in the particular moment, determine what he played on “Lover Man,” nor fully explain his overall interest in a variety of musical forms. One of the most delightful anecdotes about Parker concerns his interest in Classical Music. Apparently one night while he was playing in a New York jazz club in the 1940s, Igor Stravinsky, having heard about Parker and the new form of jazz, arrived to hear the show. Upon recognizing the composer in the audience, Parker proceeded to drop the main theme from The Firebird into one of his solos, much to the delight Stravinsky.
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.
Art does not depend on the artist’s biography
This is a fairly simple point. If you know that Charlie Parker was experiencing the physical pain of heroin withdrawal symptoms and mentally cracking up while playing “Lover Man” in the recording studio, it may enhance your appreciation of the true beauty of the music in relation to Parker’s pain. But you don’t need to know anything about the background of the music to appreciate it for wonderful art. I had heard the recording many times and grown to love it before subsequently reading about the backdrop for the song in several different places. Or as Iannucci writes (the emphasis may be reversed, but he’s making essentially the same points): “It’s not an essential knowledge; the piece doesn’t fall apart without it. But it adds something indefinable, a resonance, as we listen.”
Art is not sustained by the artist’s biography
The production of art involves the creation of a sensual object to be experienced and appreciated for the aesthetic pleasures and/or sensations it gives. Further, the work of art exists independently of the artist: the recording of “Lover Man” still exists and mesmerizes some fifty-odd years after Parker’s death in the early 1950s. The viola sonata, Four Last Songs, and the requiem persist and amaze long after the deaths of Shostakovich, Strauss, and Mozart. Appreciation of the independent existence of the work of art need not take the form of a fetishization of art as having no function other than aesthetic experience. Art can have many functions, including crass, materialistic ones like selling records or tickets to the theater. But if something is art, at least one of its functions is its existence as independent object of aesthetic experience. The biography of the artist and details of the production of the particular work, no matter how interesting, cannot sustain the work’s value as art. If “Lover Man” sounded as if it were being played by someone going through the pain of withdrawal and going a bit crazy, it would be a curiosity at best, something perhaps for jazz completists to pass around with shades of guilt, “Hey, here’s that recording where Charlie Parker’s having a breakdown.” Instead, the details of the recording might add to our appreciation mainly because they stand in contrast to the art, because the art represents Parker overcoming pain, or better, channeling pain into something of truly lasting worth. Likewise, if Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s requiem were hackneyed works of previously great masters on their deathbeds, their value would again be mainly that of historical curiosity. In the context of the greatness of the art in itself, the details of their production can enhance our appreciation of these works as last triumphs over death (temporarily for the artist, but with the work persisting).
Art is not determined by the artist’s biography
Art is produced by individuals – sometimes individuals alone or often working in groups, influencing one another. All individuals, of course, are highly influenced by their historical and cultural surroundings (I wouldn’t be much of an anthropologist if I thought otherwise). At the same time, no individual (and no individual work of art) is determined by such contexts. Certainly Parker was influenced by his background, with his upbringing as a black man in Kansas City helping to channel his creative impulses into jazz, but that context alone cannot determine his particular body of work, especially given his instrumental and unique role in producing bebop alongside Gillespie, nor can his biography, even in the particular moment, determine what he played on “Lover Man,” nor fully explain his overall interest in a variety of musical forms. One of the most delightful anecdotes about Parker concerns his interest in Classical Music. Apparently one night while he was playing in a New York jazz club in the 1940s, Igor Stravinsky, having heard about Parker and the new form of jazz, arrived to hear the show. Upon recognizing the composer in the audience, Parker proceeded to drop the main theme from The Firebird into one of his solos, much to the delight Stravinsky.
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