Music

popular, jazz, and classical music

popular, jazz, and classical music

popular, jazz, and classical music

A New History of Jazz

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

encylopedia of jazz and its history to the present

Do we really need yet another weighty ‘history of jazz’ in what is already a crowded field? When the author (also a bass player) has already produced excellent biographies of (among others) Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller, and regularly presents ‘Jazz Profiles’ on Radio 3, the answer must be in the affirmative. In this expanded version of his award-winning study, Alyn Shipton offers an encyclopaedic account of ‘a music created mainly by black Americans in the early twentieth-century through an amalgamation of elements drawn from European-American and tribal African musics.’ Throughout, he contends that up-the-river-from-New Orleans ‘histories’ of jazz distort and oversimplify what was a complex series of accidents, interactions, borrowings and innovations.

Part One contains an extended consideration of the ‘Precursors’ of jazz – including the blues and vaudeville, the classic jazz of New Orleans and Chicago, stride and boogie woogie piano, the advent of big bands (Bennie Moten, Fletcher Henderson and early Ellington) – and bands and combos of the Swing Era. Some readers will consider that Paul Whiteman and Cab Calloway receive more than their fair share of attention. There is also a survey of developments in jazz in the UK, France and Germany up to World War II.

Part Two, ‘From Swing to Bop’ covers Dizzy Gillespie’s early orchestra, the West Coast scene and a (very good) summary of jazz on film. Among other topics treated are impresario Norman Granz and the Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) phenomenon. Granz is properly commended for presenting and recording such disparate players as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, J. J. Johnson, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins together in concert and on record (where they also backed Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald), helping to popularise jazz and ‘heal some of the more damaging aspects of the modern versus trad split of the 1940s.’

Elsewhere, Shipton discusses the early work of Miles Davis, the emergence of Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, the contributions of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis’s crossover into Jazz Rock, and ‘Jazz as World Music’ – in Latin America, India, Africa and Europe.

One of the many strengths of the book is an extensive use of oral histories and personal interviews with such luminaries as Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, Michel Petrucciani, Sam Rivers and Cassandra Wilson. Shipton discusses little-known (but pioneering) performers, and displays an enviable familiarity with the lesser-known records of Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Erroll Garner, Woody Herman, Gerald Wilson and Miles Davis.

He is particularly well informed and incisive on jazz pianists. The late Michel Petrucciani ‘overcame his lack of stature and strength to become one of the most ferociously talented pianists in jazz,’ with ‘a touch as delicately forceful as that of either [Bill] Evans or [Keith] Jarrett.’ Brad Mehldau and Martial Solal also receive honourable mention, but Jessica Williams is absent from the roster of ‘cutting edge’ pianists (a cliché Shipton overuses).

Jazz singers such as Sarah Vaughan, Helen Merrill, Betty Carter, Carmen McCrae and Abbey Lincoln receive more extended coverage than in the first edition. Lincoln is identified as ‘the most accomplished social and political commentator in the history of vocal jazz.’ Yet despite his refreshing catholicity of taste, not all jazz singers receive the Shipton seal of approval. He is underwhelmed by Nina Simone who ‘lacked the jazz improviser’s spontaneous ability to play off her musical colleagues.’ The currently ubiquitous Norah Jones is dismissed as a purveyor of ‘jazz-inflected pop, with no improvisational edge and no profound exploration of emotion or meaning.’

In a concluding section on Postmodern Jazz Shipton argues that up to the 1970s, ‘the story of jazz is a straightforward narrative.’ But thanks [sic] to advances in technology, aspiring jazz musicians no longer sit at the feet of their idols, engage in informal jam sessions or serve apprenticeships in big bands – although college orchestras in the UK and the US serve a similar function.

Jazz artists in the twenty-first-century, Shipton suggests, are either forward or backward looking. Two popular singers resident in Britain illustrate the point: Claire Martin performs mainly original compositions, while Stacey Kent sticks to ‘the standard repertoire.’ In America, Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra perpetuate the Ken Burns approach to jazz with recreations of the work of Ellington, whereas saxophonists Sam Rivers, and Joshua Redman hone and polish the ‘cutting edge’ of the jazz tradition.

A New History of Jazz is a massively detailed and well-documented interpretation of a musical form ‘inextricably bound up with the development of popular music as a whole.’ It can also be consulted as a series of discrete essays on its major (and minor) forms and practitioners. A good selection of photographs, a list of recommended CDs, and an extensive bibliography (which surprisingly does not include the late Whitney Balliett or Gary Giddins) add to the authority of a magisterial if over-weight volume. And a more attentive editor might have pruned Shipton’s always engaging but sometimes repetitive prose.

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Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz: Revised and Updated Edition, New York & London: Continuum, 2007, pp.804, ISBN: 0826417892

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Artie Shaw: his life and music

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical and illustrated biography – plus discography

As the handsome (and much-married) leader of a series of big bands and small groups in the 1930s and 1940s, clarinetist Artie Shaw achieved measures of fame and fortune that temporarily eclipsed those of his great rival, Benny Goodman. Shaw’s five top single recordings had sold over 65 million copies by 1965; by 1990 his total sales exceeded 100 million records. John White’s critical biographical study starts with an outline of Swing as a phenomenon of the 1930s and 1940s, then traces Shaw’s rise through countless small bands to fame as a leader in his own right. It takes in the jobbing years of the 1930s and the rise to stardom in the 1940s. And then at the height of his fame, suddenly feeling uncomfortable in the modernist phase of the 1950s, Shaw retired to Spain.

After five years he returned to the USA, and made a series of come-backs, then started writing fiction. It’s lucidly written account, fully annotated and referenced, and I particularly liked the fact that White puts the life of the musician into a socio-economic context – so we see what shaped the world of a professional musician. It’s a rich antidote to the romantic approach to jazz music criticism, which tends to be based on anecdotes and uncritical enthusiasm.

The narrative is punctuated by well-documented quotations from Shaw himself and other musicians. These often reinforce the precarious life of the professional jazz musician:

‘A cop in Boston arrested our Negro driver and tossed him into the can … We left our driver in jail, the truck in the police yard, and went on to our next stand by bus.’

What emerges is portrait of a complex, thoughtful man. He was obviously intellectually ambitious; he frequently dropped out of the music business altogether to pursue other interests; and he did finally achieve a moderate success as a writer. His autobiographical The Trouble with Cinderella is worth reading despite its often pretentious style.

Shaw was good on the race issue (first white band to have a black singer – Billie Holiday) not so good on the political issue (compromising with the Committee of Un-American Activities) and his personal life – well, let’s leave that to his eight ex-wives. These included women as glamorous as Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, despite the fact that he suffered from bad breath.

After the life, the book ends with two essays – an appreciation of his style and a study of his recordings. All of this made me want to hear more , and sure enough I did, when I put on a Mel Torme recording I bought recently. There, rising between choruses from The Velvet Fog, were fluid arpeggios from the master himself. He had technique, he had taste – and amazingly enough, he survived to the age of 95. In the world of jazz, that’s quite an achievement.

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John White, Artie Shaw: his life and music, London: Continuum, 2004, pp.223, ISBN: 0826469159

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Coltrane: The Story of a Sound

March 20, 2011 by Roy Johnson

biographical outline of a musical Odyssey

This is not a conventional biography but a study of the development of John Coltrane as a major figure in American musical culture in the two decades of major creativity that embraced his tragically short life. Ben Ratliff bases his study on a combination of interviews and his analyses of the recorded legacy – and he does this in a non-hagiographic manner. Indeed he seems almost over-critical of some of Coltrane’s early performances with Miles Davis, such as the Prestige sessions which were not under his control but part of the contractual obligations that Davis knocked out as quickly as possible (no planning, no rehearsals) in order to fulfil and escape his contract for the more lucrative one he had signed with Columbia.

Ratliff takes the story from the early recordings Coltrane made whilst he was still in the navy through his work in rhythm and blues bands to his seminal work with Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, and then to his own quartet which made such an impact with Giant Steps – which turns out to be in this account the ne plus ultra of harmonically-based jazz music.

Ratliff is very good at explaining just why Coltrane’s music was so exceptional – his profound sense of musical structure, his grasp of harmonic sequences, his compositional imagination, and his ability to completely transform musical sequences into something nobody had ever heard before. Think of how he re-shaped a banal show tune such as My Favourite Things into a thundering anthem of black cultural affirmation.

There’s quite a bit of musical theorizing, and the weakness of basing judgements on interviews is that asking any artists what they think they are doing is that first of all they might not know themselves, and even if they say they do, they might not be able to articulate it properly. Their claims might not even be true. Music is an abstract art form. It doesn’t actually mean anything, even though it is a very powerful emotional force.

The two common approaches to musical analysis point in opposite directions. The formal approach says ‘Eb7 modulates into C#6’ which might be accurate and true, but tells us nothing about the nature or effect of such transitions. The other essentially romantic approach says ‘the heart-stopping modulations in the final eight bars resolve themselves into a majestic finale which express a surge of joy’. One approach seems dry as dust, the other is just subjective and emotional. Ratliff bravely attempts to combine the two.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were the high point in Coltrane’s creative life – and it might be significant that this was a period when he seemed to be free of drug addiction. After that, though Ratliff tries his best to make a case for the discordant, non-harmonic and unstructured music Coltrane produced towards the end of his career, it’s rather uncomfortable reading to be reminded of the descent into chaos that this ‘development’ represents (and I speak as someone who saw some of these concerts on his European tour with Eric Dolphy).

In the second part of the book he turns from biography to an essay on Coltrane’s influence on other musicians and a study of the development of his style. Placing this very firmly in a cultural and historical context, he reminds us that many other lesser names were more popular at the time. In the same year that Coltrane released My Favourite Things (30,000 copies sold), Atlantic’s best-selling jazz albumn was Les McCann and Eddie Harris’s Swiss Movement (500,000 copies). There are some excellent gems about the economics of night clubs and how much musicians were paid for their performances.

Coltrane’s influence is traced in the work of other jazz musicians, in the music of rock and pop groups, and in the social influence drawn from his music in the writings of jazz critics – most of whom were themselves understandably baffled by the ‘developments’ of the early 1960s onwards. Ratliff doesn’t shirk the fact that Coltrane lost a big percentage of his audience when he embraced the ‘free jazz’ movement which was so obviously both then and now a dead end. It’s also sadly possible that Miles Davis’s claim that Coltrane died from taking too much LSD might be true.

In fact the loss occurred at a time when the material ground in which jazz took root began to disappear. Night clubs, jazz clubs, and dance halls closed as popular culture in America changed in the late 1960s, and most jazz musicians found themselves out of work. Superstars made occasional rock-concert-like appearances, but many regular musicians either took up teaching or went back to jobs in the factory.

What makes this study much more than a conventional biography or appreciation is that Ben Ratliff takes his subject even beyond Coltrane’s death to examine both the continuation of his influence and the state of jazz in the last few decades. The prospects are fairly bleak, but he sees a small glimmer of hope in Coltrane’s influence as a successful leader of bands. Let’s hope it turns out to be the classic quartet or quintet at most – and not the noisy conglomerates in which he finished his career.

There’s an excellent bibliography to the book, and a full range of notes on all his sources, but no discography. However, he does make reference to a work in progress which has since been issued as surely the most authoritative account of Coltrane’s recorded work – Yasuhiro Fujioka and Lewis Porter’s monumental The John Coltrane Reference Work.

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Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, London: Faber and Faber, 2007, pp.250, ISBN: 0571232744

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Escaping the Delta

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

Escaping the Delta isn’t a conventional biography of Robert Johnson, the most influential blues player ever, but a critical study of the blues itself as a social and musical phenomenon. It takes Johnson as a central, crucial figure and looks at the musical traditions out of which he sprang, looks at his recorded legacy in detail, then examines the manner in which his influence spread following his tragically early death. Elijah Wald takes the somewhat controversial view that the early blues players were simply playing what was for them popular music.

“No one involved in the blues world was calling this music art. It was working-class pop music, and its purveyors were looking for immediate sales, with no expectation that their songs would be remembered once the blues vogue had passed.” He also poses difficult questions such as why Robert Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet is now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history.

Wald is immensely well-informed on the social, historical, and musical background of his topic. All his claims about the relative popularity of musicians is backed up by statistics of the recordings they made, their record sales (where known), and even the most-played records on jukeboxes. Every page is littered with the names of blues musicians – men and women whose work he obviously knows inside out.

The book is structured in three parts – the first is a contextualisation of blues music in the USA in the years 1900-1930; the second is his account of the life of Robert Johnson and an analysis of his recorded legacy; and the third is his socio-musical account of what happened to the blues after his death.

He argues that commentators have persistently ignored the sophistication of black musicians, and failed to acknowledge that the blues might be only one of a variety of styles in which they played, depending on the occasion.

White urbanites, for obvious reasons, are fascinated by a creation myth in which genius blossomed, wild and untamed, from the delta mud, and are less interested in the unromantic picture of Muddy Waters sitting by the radio listening to Fats Waller, or a sharecropper singing Broadway show tunes as he followed his mule along the levee.

When he comes to Robert Johnson, the romantic, tempestuous life is sketched out in a single chapter; but this is followed by three devoted to a examination of Johnson’s complete oeuvre – a couple of dozen songs recorded at two sessions in 1936. He shows in fine detail where Johnson was following the blues tradition and where he was doing something new.

Following Johnson’s death in 1938, Wald then traces how the blues morphed into rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and soul music in the post war period. The torch was just about kept aflame by figures such as Muddy Waters. But by 1960 this flame was almost on the point of being extinguished when along came white English bands such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones who re-introduced the blues and its original heroes to the USA – where they had come from in the first place.

It’s a controversial claim, but as usual he backs it up with plenty of evidence – not least from figures such as Muddy Waters himself:

I thinks to myself how these white kids was sitting down and thinking and playing the blues that my black kids was bypassing. That was a hell of a thing, man, to think about.

This is a passionately and intelligently argued study which situates blues music in the social and economic world out of which it grew. But what stands clear most of all is the towering romantic figure of Robert Johnson. Reading this book makes you ache to hear his wonderful music yet again.

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Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, New York: HarperCollins, 2005, pp.342, ISBN: 0060524278

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Hallelujah Junction

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

John Adams’ personal biography and musical Odyssey

John Adams is probably the best-known American composer of classical music alive today. His operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer have played to audiences all over the world, and his orchestral sketch Short Ride in a Fast Machine is such a favourite concert opener that you hear it on the radio almost every day in some setting or other. A post-war baby of musical parents, he was raised on the east coast in New England, and after a childhood as a clarinetist of some distinction he moved to study at Harvard. There he seemed destined for a life as an academic composer. But two things seemed to have worked against this: an adventurous, rebellious spirit, and a love of popular American culture, which as he matured in the 1960s included imported English pop music, dance bands (in which his father played) and television. All of these cultural influences have been reflected in his later work.

Rejecting the conventional route to success, he took another which led him to the west coast, where after a bout of proletarian enthusiasm he gave up the 48 hour week of a warehouse worker to take up a teaching post at the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco. There he threw himself into the cultural experimentalism which was then in vogue. This included the upsurge of jazz and blues music, and the American literary cult of Jack Kerouac, the Beat poets, William Burroughs, and of course drugs of all kinds.

He stuck with the experimental music and the dafter tendencies of modernism for quite some time. I was quite surprised how respectful he is to John Cage, who always strikes me as completely bogus. But he’s very generous in his appreciation of his fellow composers and contemporaries. Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Ingram Marshall are all given warm encomiums. There are also, en passant positive sketches of artists such as Dawn Upshaw, Kent Ngano, Peter Sellers, and Conlan Nancarrow.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a work as perfect in its own genre as any that Mozart composed in his, was the product of a supremely confident twenty-four year old who got everything right in one stroke. Its signature motif, the ‘blue note’ flattened seventh, is a rendering on the piano of the keening style of singing from the Negro South. Gershwin threads that motto into a harmonic web of delicious stepwise modulations that take every advantage of the discoveries from fifty or even sixty years earlier. But here, the mood is New World, high energy, with a jubilant lyricism that gives the impression of an irresistible spontaneity. In the hands of Gershwin, the ambiguity and restlessness of those potent Romantic chords is reborn to a new life, not morbidly self-aware and shaded toward the dark end of the emotional spectrum, but full of fresh optimism, busy and brash and thoroughly at ease with itself.

But gradually he began to find his own voice and the techniques which would help him to articulate it. This development was assisted by his moment-of-truth decision to leave atonality behind and embrace tonal harmony as the rockbed for musical expression. It was also accompanied by his determination to stick by his enthusiasm for electronic musical instruments.

Anyone interested in the development of synthesisers, modulators, and multi-track recorders, right up to the computer-programmed methods of sound generation which are now possible will be delighted by the enthusiastic joy in all these gadgets and gizmos that he expresses. At times it’s like reading Popular Mechanics.

He’s also quite prepared to share the downsides of a composer’s life: productions which are badly mauled by critics and audience alike; fallow periods and creative blocks; the political controversies in which he becomes involved because of the contemporary nature of his subject matter.

The central portions of the book describe the genesis and execution of his large scale works – the Harmonielehre, Nixon in China, and The Death of Klinghoffer, yet strangely enough, when it comes to accounts of his more recent works he goes into great detail concerning the religious ideas in El Nino and the scientific and political history behind Doctor Atomic but he says very little about the musical ideas in either opera.

He’s a widely read and cultivated man with a social conscience, and he’s prepared to discuss culture and ideas at a serious level. Just occasionally he skirts dangerously close to a note of self-importance, but this is offset by his willingness to discuss his obvious artistic failures, such as the premiere of The Dharma at Big Sur and his song cycle, the clumsily titled I was Looking at the Ceiling, and Then I Saw the Sky.

Although it’s a personal record, this is an important book on contemporary American classical music – which sits as a useful companion piece to Alex Ross’s recent The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. John Adams’ official web site is at www.earbox.com

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John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, London: Faber, 2008, pp.340, ISBN: 0571231152

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How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll

August 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

an alternative history of American popular music

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll is a serious and well-informed piece of cultural criticism. I am no committed student of rock and roll, though my life to date, from about ten years onwards spans that of rock and roll and much else in the world of pop music. I’ve always enjoyed it without really knowing why, and for me popular music was never the inevitable concomitant of dancing. As a history of American music this is a solid, well researched and interesting book.

Elijah Wald has an encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject plus a shrewd understanding of the business side of the pop music industry; and this is one field of music-popular entertainment – where money is more central than any other. He fills out his narrative from Ragtime and early Jazz to the Twist and Rock- folk with a dazzling array of talent, social history and, unsurprisingly race relations.

But to get to the Beatles thread, Wald sees the Liverpool foursome as a typical late fifties group, travelling around local dance-halls playing covers of other records to young kids who wanted to dance. I was one of them as it happens – in 1963 they played at the Shrewsbury Music Hall and I was there as someone trying to dance (I never learnt).

But the Beatles were not so typical as Wald himself supposes. Far from it. They were unusual in that they did not survive on a diet of material supplied by song writers, beavering away for record companies. They dared to write their own songs and this meant they could direct their own careers more closely than others less talented. They could also introduce trends which others followed.

So, after an early focus on rock and roll – covers of Chuck Berry and some rockers of their own like She was Just Seventeen – they produced a sentimental but haunting song, Yesterday, to link up with that earlier tradition of ballads. This song was of course a worldwide hit and soon there were nearly 200 covers of it by different artists. The ability of the Beatles to influence others was clearly immense as their popularity went global in the late sixties.

Wald argues they distracted white kids from getting into black soul, causing them instead to regress to sentimental ballads, paving the way for Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Elton John and the like. Then they became more pretentious and got into meditation, clothing their music with arty mystification and letting loose the likes of The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, and yes, Led Zeppelin. Then a whole galaxy of sub sects were spawned which are still developing and mutating.

I’m sure there is something in this. Even McCartney says of Yesterday “we didn’t release Yesterday as a single in England at all because we were a little embarrassed by it; we were a rock and roll band”. Rock music is very imitative – witness how many US performers produced ‘Beatlified’ songs to jump on the new British bandwagon. Wald also points out that after 1966 the Beatles did not perform live but were closeted in their studios making more advanced, experimental pop music – as George Harrison joked: “our avant garde a clue music”.

With Sgt Pepper, moreover, they refused to issue any singles. Wald describes these albums as ‘musical novels’ or ‘art’; all this of a different order to the two to three minute thrashes of fifties rock and roll which had drawn them into the business. Soon rock and roll’ became a word to describe a historical period in popular music; a more generic ‘rock’ was what followed the post Beatles period.

Wald makes another interesting point regarding the white and black wings of the business. While both black and white artist were aiming at the same audience up to the mid to late sixties, he claims the Beatles marked a bifurcation into the more sophisticated white-appealing ‘rock folk’ and the more rhythmically complex black-appealing ‘soul’.

I hope I’ve summarised his argument sufficiently. Does it stack up? I think it does – but I have two doubts about it. First I don’t think you can attribute everything since the late sixties to the Beatles. I would reckon Bob Dylan had an equal influence on charting the new directions, along with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Eric Clapton.

Second I’m not sure there was ever such a separation between black and white audiences. I recall a universal acclaim for both Beatles music and Tamla for example. But I recommend this book for anyone wishing to gain a grasp of why rock and roll lost its rebellious snarl and its sneer, its thundering, testosterone celebration of youthful sexuality and became more serene, thoughtfully wistful and poetic.

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Elijah Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.336, ISBN: 0195341546

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How to listen to jazz

June 5, 2011 by Roy Johnson

guidance notes for beginners

Knowing how to listen to jazz isn’t easy. It’s an improvised music, but it is based upon well-defined and disciplined musical structures. Does that seem like a contradiction? Here’s how it works.

When jazz musicians play together, they often choose well-known songs. They don’t need printed musical scores, because they have all learned these songs by ear and by heart as part of their training.

The songs themselves will be based on well-rehearsed musical structures. For instance, George Gershwin’s melody I’ve got Rhythm has the typical architecture of the popular song – lasting for thirty-two bars. The parts are arranged are arranged as follows:

Eight bars of melody (A)
The same eight bars – repeated (A)
Eight bars in a different key (B)
The first eight bars played again (A)

This structure is known as AABA. (and the B part is called ‘the bridge’ or ‘the middle eight’). Thousands of songs are written in this pattern, and over time some of them have become popular with both jazz musicians and the listening public. These songs are known as ‘standards’, and jazz musicians learn them as a natural part of their own training and development.

Cole Porter’s Love for Sale
Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life
Hogy Carmichael’s Skylark

The same is true of another musical form – the twelve bar blues. This is a structure underpinning folk tunes, laments, and much of what lies at the heart of jazz performance in many styles. The architecture is similar:

Four bars of melody (A)
Four bars repeated (A)
Four bars with variation (BA)

This is grossly over-simplified, but the main point is that the jazz musicians know these patterns before they begin to play. All they need to decide between themselves is what key to play in.

They are therefore improvising, but their performance is based upon a harmonic structure known to all the musicians concerned, and they have the very advanced listening skills and musical ‘memories’ to know where they are up to in the sequence at any given time.

When they have decided what tune to play, the performance will normally have a structure or sequence of events which is determined partly by the instrumentation or make up of the group and partly by the unspoken inclinations of the musicians themselves – without requiring prior arrangement.

The ensemble will play the chosen tune
Then (often) the tune will be repeated
A ‘solo’ instrument will improvise on the tune
A second instrument might do the same
The ensemble will return to play the tune

Instrumentation

The piano has a complex, multi-functional role in a jazz ensemble. Its main purpose is to sustain the harmonic structure of the tune throughout the performance. It plays the melody, may also feature as a solo instrument, and it provides support for other instruments during their solos.

The double-bass provides a combination of harmonic and percussive support throughout any performance. It usually sustains a four beats to the bar rhythm (known as the ‘walking bass’), playing notes from the chords to the tune, and it only occasionally features as a solo instrument.

The drums provide the dominant rhythmic pulse, which is often created by a four-four pattern tapped out on cymbals, accompanied by a variety of percussive effects on drums punctuating the performance.

The saxophone is a typical ‘solo’ instrument. It plays the melody, and then is very popular with instrumentalists as a solo instrument – mainly because it is suitable for producing an individual and recognisable sound or tone. This is partly because it has an intimate connection with the propulsive force generating the music – air from the player’s lungs. The same is true of the trumpet.

The improvised solo

Basically, the soloist makes up variations on the chosen tune, which is based upon its harmonic chord sequence. Parts of the original melody may be detectable during the improvisation, but experienced jazz musicians are capable of inventing entirely new melodies which have very little in common with the original.

Indeed, some soloists are so skilful they are able to quote long passages from other familiar tunes and make them fit into the harmonic sequence of the tune being played. This is possible because they are intimately acquainted with a huge repertoire of ‘standards’ – and they do this both as a demonstration of their skills and as a homage to the tradition of this music.

The soloist is supported throughout the performance by accompanying musicians, who play a supportive role in providing the harmonic framework as a ‘reminder’, possibly whilst waiting their own turn to take a solo.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers

This video clip of a live 1958 concert in Brussels shows a classic performance of the kind described above. The ensemble plays the melody (Moanin’ by Bobby Timmons) then there are three soloists – Lee Morgan on trumpet, Benny Golson on tenor saxophone, Bobby Timmons on piano, then Jamie Merritt on bass, .

I chose this example because it is played in an unusually subdued mood and slow pace. This should make it easier to appreciate the structure and the separate parts of the performance. [It should be said that most performances by this group are performed at much faster tempos and louder volume. Art Blakey is famous for his ‘High-Energy’ groups and playing style.]

Marks of quality

All great jazz musicians tend to develop an individual, recognisable style on their instrument. They create a ‘sound’ of their own, which to an experienced listener is instantly recognisable after only a few notes. The same is true for both instrumentalists and singers.

Musicians with good taste always pay respect to the tune they are playing. If saxophonists such as Dexter Gordon or John Coltrane play a ballad (You Don’t Know What Love Is, for instance) their rendition and interpretation will be sympathetic to the original meaning of the song. They will follow the nuances of the melody and even the words of the lyrics with a performance empathetic to the original. Great singers such as Jimmy Scott, Johnnie Hartman and Billie Holiday always follow this rule. Second and third rate singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Cleo Laine do not.

Having said that, great improvisers sometimes completely re-interpret a work – either by playing the melody in a new manner, by changing its underlying chord sequence, or by inventing an entirely new melody. Good examples of this process at work include Miles Davis and Gil Evan’s version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and John Coltrane’s re-working of Rogers and Hammerstein’s rather sickly show tune My Favourite Things.

Looking ahead

Needless to say, there are exceptions to all the points made above. There are groups that play without a piano; musicians who write their own original tunes; and even performances (by big bands in particular) where everybody reads the music from written scores. But if you understand the basic principles of jazz performance as outlined here you will know the conventions from which these are deviations.

It certainly helps if you know the melody before hearing a performance, because this allows you to keep the tune in mind whilst listening to the improvisations upon it. This is something which becomes easier as you develop your listening experience. And that’s what an appreciation of jazz music is all about.

Performing at Birdland one night in 1951, Charlie Parker was in the middle of improvising on a be-bop tune when he spotted Igor Stravinsky in the audience. Without losing any connection with the tune or its chord sequence, he began to pepper his solo with brilliant interpolations from the composer’s Firebird Suite, causing Stravinsky to bang his cocktail glass on the table with delight and amusement.

That captures the essence of jazz at its best.

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Igor Stravinsky: 1882-1934

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

part one of the definitive biography

This is the currently definitive biography of Igor Stravinsky – master of European modernism whom many consider to be the greatest composer of the twentieth century. It’s a consummate and magisterial piece of work – superbly referenced and annotated; and just about every claim made within it is backed up with evidence. The notes to the text itself run to 113 pages.

Stephen Walsh begins by clearing the ground between himself and Robert Craft – the man who made himself Stravinsky’s amanuensis, secretary, helpmate, and collaborator towards the end of his life. Craft wanted to control the Stravinsky estate (including the money) as well as his critical reputation, but Walsh is having none of that. He insists on factual accuracy, backed up with hard evidence.

Yet even though it’s quite clear that he knows everything there is to know about the details of Stravinsky’s life, and can justify every claim with a fully referenced source, he has problems constructing a logical and readable narrative of the composer’s life. For instance Stravinsky’s brother Roman dies three times within as many short chapters at the start of the book, and Stravinsky is abruptly announced to be twenty years old and has completed his first piece of music on page fifty. Most of the previous forty-nine have been devoted to describing the Russian countryside.

Walsh is exceptionally good at recreating the social and historical context in which Stravinsky was raised – from the lack of sanitation in late nineteenth-century Petersburg to the fact that the composer didn’t even go to school until he was nearly eleven.

The story of Stravinsky’s life is already fairly well known, so what does Walsh offer that’s new? Well, quite apart from his claim to accuracy in interpreting textual evidence, it’s quite clear that he is an authority on Russian cultural history. Every time a friend, relative, or acquaintance enters the story, his narrative swells out for pages on end with their biographical details – to the extent that (especially in the earlier part of the book) Stravinsky himself becomes a indistinct figure, hovering indistinctly like some half-forgotten ghost.

This is a feature of Walsh’s approach which you would expect to diminish as Stravinsky becomes more successful – largely because he is endlessly on the move from one city and country to another – Petersburg, Brittany, Switzerland, Paris, Cote d’Azur. This is the material of a biographer’s dream. But Walsh is more interested in scouring correspondence to apportion exact responsibility for the plot development of the early masterpieces (Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring) The composer’s dramatic private life is left relatively unexamined – despite his meeting with such luminaries as Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Schoenberg, and Manuel de Falla.

And this avoidance of the personal has some serious repercussions. When Diaghilev throws an enormous tantrum on hearing of Nijinsky’s marriage, Walsh still can’t bring himself to mention the fact that they had been lovers. Diaghilev shunned The Rite of Spring because of its close connection with his ex-favourite – and this immediately affected Stravinsky’s ability to earn a living from its success – for a personal, not a musical reason.

But we do gain benefits from his thoroughness, as well as having to endure its longeurs. On Stravinsky’s first visit to Spain, an affair with the ballerina Lydia Lopukhova is followed up biographically to record that she later married Diaghilev’s financial manager, and then later after eloping from London with a Russian general, she eventually married John Maynard Keynes.

Another thing which emerges instructively from all the background commentary on Stravinsky’s work (and that of his collaborators) is what utter rubbish many of the so-called critics wrote about the music. Jacques Riviere on the Rite of Spring for instance:

The Rite of Spring … has no juice to dull its brilliance, no cookery to rearrange or spoil its contours. It is not a “work of art”, with all the usual palaver. Nothing blurred, nothing reduced by shadows; no veils or poetic softenings; no trace of atmosphere. The work is whole and untreated…

As he becomes more successful, the 1920s are passed in the swirl of a quasi-bohemian, quasi-aristocratic milieu. Oedipus Rex was a collaboration with opium-addicted Jean Cocteau, whose detoxification cures were paid for by Coco Chanel, with whom Stravinsky had a brief affair.

But the dominant figure in this first volume is certainly Diaghilev, with whom Stravinsky collaborated on almost all his early major works. The two men had their differences, especially over money; but they respected each other as artists, and seemed to bring out the best in each other.

The other problematic leitmotif in Stravinsky’s life is that of copyright, which had not been internationally agreed at the time of his early works. There were also very complex arrangements whereby some people ‘owned’ works because they had paid a commissioning fee, and others held the rights to performances for a limited period. This resulted in erratic income for the composer – though a man who could buy a large chauffer-driven automobile in the 1920s was not in financial difficulties.

Stravinsky also had the expense of keeping two ‘families’. For his life was divided permanently between his lover Vera Sudeykina, with whom he lived in Paris and took on concert tours, and Katya, his wife and the mother of his four children, whom he left at home and visited when required.

It’s interesting to note how fond Stravinsky was of any technical developments which would assist him in both making a record of his own work and exploring the possibilities of new sounds. He made piano rolls, bought a player-piano, learnt to play the cimbalom, and eagerly recorded his work on both mechanical and electrical equipment.

Serious musicologists will be glad to learn that Walsh puts a lot of effort into tracing the developments in Stravinsky’s musical style. This goes (in this volume) from the expressive force of the Rite to the neo-classicism of Apollo. This is done in an all-round manner by looking at the original ‘idea’ (often the result of a commission) then the musical material from which he took his inspiration, through to the actual conditions (and possible limitations) which surrounded the first performance.

Despite some of the negative effects of Walsh’s writing, I found this a fascinating account of the artist and a well-informed glimpse into a rich period of cultural history. Volume one ends in 1934 with the Nazis in the ascendant and Stravinsky sharing musical chit-chat with Mussolini, for who he had a high regard. In this climactic year Stravinsky took out French citizenship and moved his entire extended family into a fifteen-room apartment near the Place de la Concorde – in the arrondissement next to his lover Vera. Stravinsky’s main worry about this proximity was that his eighty-year-old mother should not find out about his not-so-secret other life.

See part two of this biography

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky – A Creative Spring: Russia and France 1882-1934, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp.696, ISBN: 1845952219

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Igor Stravinsky: 1934-1971

September 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

second volume of the definitive biography

The first volume of this masterly biography ends in 1934 with the death of Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky’s composition of Persephone, his adoption of French citizenship, and his no less important decision to move his extended family from the south of France to take up residence in Paris – in the next arrondissement to his lover, Vera Sudeykima.

To give some idea of the complexities of these arrangements, Stravinsky not only made it known to his wife that he paid Sudeykima an allowance, but as if this was not enough he heaped onto it the additional humiliation that in his absence she should hand over the money to her in person – which she did.

The second volume opens with the darkening years of the mid-1930s, and Stravinsky remaining as politically naive as ever in the face of rising fascism and anti-Semitism. The only thing which seemed to disturb him was a general assumption that he was Jewish – which was not the case. He continued to give his moral if not practical support to Mussolini and Franco, and he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1938 with the somewhat disingenuous excuse that he needed the money to pay his daughter’s medical bills.

As the 1930s progressed Stravinsky’s personal life seems to have become worse and worse. There were problems with his four children, all of whom had difficulties creating independent destinies for themselves, permanently overshadowed as they were by the fame and the rather dictatorial manner of their father. His wife Katya became ill and was confined to an Alpine sanatorium, run along similar lines to the Berghof in Thomas Mann‘s The Magic Mountain. Her daughter accompanied her on the journey, and was also kept there as a patient.

Then in 1938 fate struck a double blow. First Stravinsky’s daughter died, then his wife. Yet so many people rallied to help him that within a short time he had secured a teaching post at Harvard, married Sudeykima, and he ended up living in California – like Arnold Schoenberg ‘expelled into Paradise’.

This was a period in which he tried without much success to find work composing for the film industry. He knew all the right people, and Hollywood was happy to adapt his earlier works, but none of the big projects mooted came to fruition. Instead, he produced such miniatures as the Circus Polka for dancing elephants and the Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman’s band. However, he came back in full force with the composition in 1946 of the Symphony in Three Movements.

Interestingly enough the copyright issue crops up yet again (just as it did in the first volume) – but with a new twist. Stravinsky and his advisors hit upon the ruse of his revising earlier pieces of work. If they could be made sufficiently distinct from the originals, they could be re-copyrighted. Moreover, if Stravinsky took out US citizenship (which he promptly did) he would have full protection and ownership of the new versions – which could be translated into hard cash.

The war in Europe had one good effect on Stravinsky: it caused him to re-think his reactionary political views – rather as it did for his fellow-exile Thomas Mann. He became a Trueman-supporting democrat.

If Diaghilev was the presiding secondary figure in Volume One, the equivalent figure in Two is Robert Craft. He was a young American student of composition and conducting who managed to inveigle himself into the Stravinskys’ affections to such an extent that he became a combination of amanuensis, secretary, manager, advisor, and even domestic help. He also had close access to Stravinsky’s manuscripts – which was to cause a lot of trouble later.

Musically, the centrepiece of this second volume is the composition of The Rake’s Progress which took three and a half years. He worked with Auden and Chester Kallman as librettists. This was followed by Agon and the premiere of Canticum sacrum in St Mark’s, Venice. From this point on, his compositions became increasingly influenced by a Schoenbergian twelve-tone scale form of writing, even though he had kept himself at a very long arm’s length during his rival’s own lifetime.

Since Stravinsky’s personal life had settled into an almost conventional marriage with Vera, Walsh’s account now begins to focus on a concert-by-concert account of his professional life: (Stravinsky maintained that he earned his living as a conductor). Walsh records every possible detail of the choice of programme, the fee paid, the musical rehearsals, and the roles played by agents, go-betweens, and performers.

The latter part of the book traces Stravinsky’s last (and serial) compositions, but it is really a detailed examination of just how much Robert Craft controlled, contributed to, or even created works which were published under Stravinsky’s name. He also began writing letters and memoirs which were attributed to the man who was in a roundabout way his employer.

As Stravinsky declines into ill-health approaching death, the story becomes an almost nineteenth-century inheritance drama of tax lawyers, relatives, Craft, and various hangers-on vying for control of Stravinsky’s assets and archive with a view to lining their own pockets. And when he did eventually expire the conflict between warring parties became pure Jarndyce Vs Jarndyce, with the widow Vera eventually paying out $200,000 to retain control – and even that was only an interim measure. The dispute continued even after her death; the relatives died off in their turn; and even the eventual purchaser of the archive, Paul Sacher, was duped out of almost two million dollars by the lawyers.

Fortunately for us, the music lives on.

See part one of this biography

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky – The Second Exile: France and America 1934-1971, London: Pimlico, 2007, pp.709, ISBN: 0712697950

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Joey Alexander

February 22, 2018 by Roy Johnson

The name Joey Alexander was mentioned on JazzFM.com the other night, and his piano playing was so good I looked up further examples. My goodness! Not only is he very good indeed – but he’s still only thirteen years old. Check out this YouTube clip of him playing John Coltrane’s (very difficult) “Giant Steps”.

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