This is not a book
Opening Up the Jazz Ensemble: A brief history of Graham Collier
Discussion
Jazz happens
in real time, once
A reminder: Discussions are not finished artefacts but 'works in progress' which roam around a specific topic. New material can be inserted and will be marked with a credit and date in the body of the article and in the index. References to Footnotes (x) will be found at the end.
Chapter One of Interaction
discusses What is Jazz? at some length and the subject
was revisited in an article for Jazz Changes. See details
below. Here is another attempt.
In a recent web spat we had Kenny G on the one hand, and, on
the other, Pat Metheny. Not surprisingly my vote went to Metheny,
but there is a problem. Kenny G is massively popular with the
general public and is, in many eyes, a jazz musician. But I know
he doesn't play jazz: no soul, no emotion, except empty posturing,
no individuality. Pat Metheny is massively popular in jazz circles
and I know he does play jazz. He has soul, passion, individuality
and all that. The trouble is, I don't like what he does. I have
tried. In New York, two winters ago, I stood in line in the cold
for almost two hours to see him and came away confirmed in my
prejudices (although I loved the work of his drummer Bill Stewart).
Saying why I don't like Pat Metheny is difficult. Too many notes,
possibly. A tone colour that grates on me, perhaps. Those and
more I am sure, but what it comes down to is personal likes and
dislikes: he just doesn't communicate with me. In this case I
acknowledge that the problem is in me. He's a great jazz musician
who I simply don't like. As for Kenny G, I hate what he does.
I can't see any jazz in it except on a very very low level. Because
I have many years experience of playing and listening to jazz
of all kinds, my opinion should have some validity. More, anyway,
than the airheads who, because they think it's hip, buy an album
by Kenny G, or one by the distressing number of so-called artists
producing similar pap.
If I call myself a jazz musician and a fan of the music, almost
by definition I have to have strong opinions about who I like
and dislike. I don't have to like Metheny. I certainly don't
have to like Kenny G. If a jazz musician is attempting to express
himself as an individual (a big 'if' today, I admit, but let
that pass for a moment) then the only way I can appreciate this
is on an individual one-to-one level. This leads to developing
my own sense of quality, and how I exercise quality-control in
what I buy and listen to.
This is how I choose musicians for my bands, how I choose CDs
to listen to and, in a way, how I chose musicians for the jazz
course at the Royal Academy of Music in London, which I ran successfully
for ten years before leaving to concentrate again on my own career.
That was a small course and we were usually overwhelmed with
applicants. One could dismiss some applicants in a few minutes
(seconds?) as having no technical ability or not having sufficient
jazz language. But with others there was a sense of personal
communication. They were recognisably saying something, even
at that early stage of their development, and getting that something
across to the members of the (almost always unanimous) panel.
Can we say, then, that jazz is a matter of personal communication?
I guess we can and, although that doesn't answer the question
'What is Jazz?', it goes some way to explaining why we can like
some players and styles and not others, no matter how acclaimed
they may be. Jazz is an expression of a person's individuality,
whether as a player or as a listener.
***
'Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.' - Keith Jarrett, interviewed in Jazz Times, May 1999
The Composer as Participant or Bystander argument (1)
Composers like Thomas Ades (2)
create their textures in 'contemplation'. Similar textures could
happen 'by accident' within an improvised piece. In both cases
there should be a connection to what has happened and what will
happen. The essential difference is that the improvised textures
are not meant to be recreated. They are meant to happen in real
time. That is the strength of jazz that most people forget.
Obviously, preparation has to be done: practise, planning a piece
and so on, but if too much is prepared - too much practising
of licks, too much writing - then not enough will happen in real
time because too much has been pre-arranged. If absolutely nothing
is prepared, then, as the free school showed, jazz (or, as they
seem to prefer to call it, 'improvised music') can happen, but
for me there usually needs to be more control.
Could one add: 'Jazz happens in real time, once'?
When it has happened it can be re-heard on recordings, and the
recording can be an adequate substitute for the experience. Nowadays,
recording technology and subsequent record production are so
cheap and available that there is a welcome trend for CDs to
be used as documentation. This is particularly useful in 'real
jazz' - and 'improvised music' - where the aim is to produce
something that differs from performance to performance and the
changes, in the band, in individual musicians, in different performances
of the same composition, can be appreciated through the various
recordings. (A recently-finished project analysed three different
performances of 'Bread & Circuses', a recent work of mine.
College bands in London and Mannheim, as well as a professional
band in Perth, Australia, all performed the piece. Extracts from
this will appear here later.)
As well as CD recordings, once a performance has 'happened' it
can be replayed in a similar way on other gigs and present a
perhaps satisfactory substitute. But the real excitement comes
when it is happening before your eyes. It is not always a better
performance, though often it is, but it is one that won't happen
again with these musicians and in that space (musical and physical)
(3). Not that it's all good, nor that
everyone will appreciate the difference, but to at least some
of the people concerned (including the audience) something happened.
Lives were changed. (After a May 2001 concert with George Haslam's
Meltdown in Oxford, the drummer Steve Harris wrote to me saying
'The way you work connects with me. I found it very inspiring.
Perhaps jazz is not dead after all. If the opportunity arose
I'd love to work with you again - though this is not a pitch
for work - simply just a chance to acknowledge that something
special happened!!')
****
Branford Marsalis's description
of Cecil Taylor's statement that people need to prepare to listen
to his music as 'self-indulgent bullshit' has a strong connection
with something I recently read by Greenberg. (4)
In his essay 'Avant garde and kitsch', Clement Greenberg says
'... the rude uncomfortable circumstances in which (the Russian
peasant) lives do not allow him leisure, energy and comfort to
train for the enjoyment of Picasso. This needs after all a considerable
amount of 'conditioning' ... In the end the peasant will go back
to kitsch when he feels like looking at paintings, for he can
enjoy kitsch without effort.'
There is a definite parallel here with the current state of jazz
- and indeed any art, and this has always been Greenberg's argument.
You have to work at appreciating art: 'Too many people simply
refuse to make the effort of humility - as well as patience -
that is required to learn how to experience, or appreciate, art
relevantly. Such people do not have the right to pronounce on
any kind of art.'
So, if 'jazz happens in real time', how can one prepare for it?
Informed listening, open-ness while listening... Francis Davis
(5) said something about people nowadays
being told what jazz is and then going out to look for that kind
of jazz - like Branford plays, one guesses - without needing
to prepare, or indeed look any further!
It's the instant appreciation argument: 'If I enjoy this without
making any effort, then why should I bother to try something
I don't enjoy instantly and be told I have to work at it in order
to enjoy it?' This is why art is for the minority, and even among
that minority there are degrees of ... 'correctness'? This is
the wrong word in that it implies superiority, but, assuming
one accepts that good art needs some preparation but does it?
Greenberg says the first impression is what matters. 'Taste is
involuntary and intuitive in nature, and thus is incorrigible
and objective - a faculty that can be developed or cultivated
through increasing exposure to art - both through a broadening
of the range of experience and through repeated encounters with
the same works - and through reflection on what was seen (or
heard, or read). In their very involuntariness, judgements of
taste are thus revealing of the degree of 'cultivation' of the
individual's taste.'
And: '... a consensus of taste over time has settled on the defining
high points of an artistic tradition. In this durability of taste
lies the proof of its objectivity.' Though many might disagree,
there is no doubt in my mind that Cecil Taylor has achieved that
consensus, and, although Branford may not agree that the listener
has to 'work at it', it seems more than likely that it's the
music he doesn't like and is attacking the message to get at
the messenger.
Speaking of Branford, I can't resist airing something I read
recently. It was a spoof blindfold test where his name is deliberately
spelt wrong, possibly to avoid litigation.
'Brandford Marsalis. 'Shopping Mall Blues'.
"Hey, that's Brandford - you can't fool me with that. I
picked up on that immediately he played that ascending fourths
figure - also the sound of his horn. Yep, they all sound like
that. Actually it could have been any one of about 100,000 tenor
saxophone players with a college education and a mid-period Coltrane
aesthetic. How did I know it was him? Because this is Downbeat
which is mainly just advertising for Columbia, and Marsalis records
for Columbia, and Columbia are giving him maximum hype at the
moment. Quite simple really. And I see you got my cheque there,
so I'll give it 5 stars."' (6)
What of Joshua Redman and
Branford himself, not to mention Michael Brecker? All technique
over taste? Style over substance? They're not to my taste. They
are very popular. It could be too early to judge ... Interesting!
Greenberg says: 'the sole issue is value, quality', but that
puts one up against a great weight of critical and audience favour.
But, we're back to one's immediate intuitive response ... And
mine is for more guts, more space, more recognisable individuality.
Francis Davis again: '(James) Carter might erupt in screams even
on a ballad or a medium tempo groove tune, his rhythm section
suspending the beat as it pummels its instruments into cacophony.
This lends an element of unpredictability to Carter's solos,
but the problem is that his solos are always unpredictable in
exactly the same way. I suspect that even those listeners who
shun what used to be called free jazz for fear of just such episodes
willingly go along with Carter because they know his paroxysms
will be short-lived. Minus the thematic development that is possible
in free improvisation, his farrago-like solos reduce thirty years
of sonic exploration to a handy vocabulary of stock effects not
much different from the honks and screams of the average rhythm-and-blues
saxophonist of the 1950s.' (7)
Or, as Greenberg says: 'an avant-gardism adopted as an attitude
rather than a necessity', and 'When no verdict of taste is there,
then art isn't there either.'
The author of the 'Introduction' to Greenberg's Esthetics
said: 'without the exercise of a critical and self-critical taste
on the part of the artist, there is no art worth the imaginative
exertion. It is art's indispensable function to stimulate such
exertion, both in the lives of individuals and in the critique
of culture as a whole.'
****
One of the problems associated
with the 'jazz happens in real time, once' argument is that unless
it was recorded, it's lost. We all know of gigs we've been to
or participated in where one feels that something happened that
can never be heard again. But as Charles Hartman says: 'The great
preponderance of jazz made every day goes unrecorded lost the
moment it is made. Why do people devote their lives to such an
art? And how can we (listen) without succumbing to overwhelming
sadness? The answer of course is that music appears as continuously
as it disappears. The constant loss is only the inverse, logically
entailed, of constant plenitude.
'... the sense remains that we are being allowed to participate
in something irreplaceable ... the fundamental point is not improvisation
but presence. Spontaneity and authenticity must finally be referred
to the dialogic engagement of the musical performance. This is
the legitimate root of the worry about analytical criticism of
jazz, and the emphasis on recording that follows from analysis.'
(8)
'Jazz happens in real time' is a way of defining what it is that
makes the music different. It is much more than language, although
the jazz inflections are what helps us distinguish it from classical
music or, say, Indian or rock improvising. It's a philosophy
of what I think jazz, good jazz, should be.
On a broader level: I believe in jazz as a creative music within
a tradition, a continuum between the past and the present. If
people want to dwell in the past in their playing and listening
(as I do in some of my listening) then that's their prerogative.
If some people want to be involved as listeners or players in
uncreative music and call it jazz, there isn't much I can do
to stop it, and again it's their prerogative. All I can do in
my music and the associated writing projects, is to point out
how much of the potential of the music is being ignored. It's
not so much a definition game but one of saying: 'Hey, do what
you like with it, but there's a lot you are ignoring, both in
terms of what people are actually doing with the music, and the
vast potential which is hardly being looked at.' (Which again
stresses the importance of John Shand's point about assimilating
Coleman and Coltrane as well as Basie and Kenton (9)). If I'm confident about what I am
doing, then I can state what I think (pace Greenberg) and put
down Brecker and Fedchuck.
Like Greenberg, I have strong
views of what is right and what is wrong: What is right is that
there should be quality, it should 'feel good', be well played,
and 'breathe the right air'. This is an informed subjective opinion
but one has to be strong in one's beliefs;
That there is excitement, something happening (artistically high
standards as in the interpretation of a melody or sheer energy)
expectation of something happening (as in burbling pedals);
That it should feel different, that chances are being taken;
What is wrong is formulaic thinking, running scales inside a
tired tune with a tired form with the rhythm section playing
at the same dynamic and textural level throughout.
My considered definition for
'What is Jazz?' in Interaction was that it 'Uses various
degrees of improvisation - around a given content - which has
within it the potential for change - which is realised in performance.'
If you take the last phrase 'which is realised in performance'
as a summation, this is not so far removed from 'jazz happens
in real time'.
As a student once said to me: 'The trouble with your pieces is
that they only work in performance.' This is exactly as it should
be.
Footnotes
1 The Participant/Bystander
argument is a reference to a Jazz Changes article. Go
to jazz changes
2 Thomas Ades is a brilliant young British classical composer.
Recommended CD: Asyla (EMI Classics)
3 Space, musical and otherwise, is a concept that will occur
throughout this project.
4 Clement Greenberg, American art critic and early champion of
Jackson Pollock. His books, including Homemade Esthetics,
Observations on Art and Taste and, to date, four collections
of collected criticism, are worth reading for their insights
into painting and sculpture and art in general. They have been
very influential in my thinking.
5 Francis Davis, trenchant jazz critic of The Atlantic Monthly,
whose work has been collected in various volumes including Outcats
and In the Moment (both Oxford University Press).
6 From Rose and Linz's The Pink Violin, A Portrait of an Australian
Musical Dynasty (NMA Publications, Melbourne), discovered
in Improvisation, Hypermedia and the Arts since 1945
(Harwood Academic Publishers) by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean.
7 from Francis Davis's article on the young jazz lions found
at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96jul/young/young.htm
8 From Charles O. Hartman's interesting book Jazz Text, Voice
and Improvising in Poetry, Jazz and Song (Princeton University
Press).
9 A comment on my work by Australian critic John Shand who said:
'it was a pleasure to encounter a big-band director who has assimilated
Coleman and Coltrane as thoroughly as Basie and Kenton'. I know
what he means but as far as I am concerned that should be a given!
Contributions to this discussion
are welcomed. Please email
graham@jazzcontinuum.com