Appendix to Section Two, Part Four:

The Third Colour

Until now this project has followed the structure of Interaction, and each section has included a précis of the relevant chapter of that book. The précis of the remaining chapters of Interaction, Chapter Four: 'Under the Pier, Structural Improvising on the Blues'; Chapter Five: 'Ryoanji, Textural Improvising in a Japanese Garden'; Chapter Six: 'One by One the Cow Goes By, Possible Pictures'; and 'The Final Page', are more appropriately included in Section Three, Techniques and Approaches.

Included here are quotations and recommended books relevant to The Third Colour, my philosophy of jazz composition.

Quotes
Those marked * have been used in Interaction

Malcolm Cowley:
'The real capital of an author is his or her ability to state "when I say something I mean it. I don't want you to accept what I say, but I want you to understand it and give me credit for being honest about it."'

Witold Lutoslawski:
'One should always write music for oneself, because you are the only audience you know really well.'

Malcolm Cowley:
'A few commandments that persist today deep in the artist's mind.
First, he must believe in the importance of art as well as the all-importance in his own life of the particular art to which he is devoted...
Second, he must believe in his own talent, something deep in himself, yet having a universal validity...
Third he must express his own vision of the world and his own personality, including his derelictions...
Fourth, the true artist must produce grandly to the limit of his powers...
Fifth - the work of art should be so fashioned as to have an organic shape and a life of its own, derived from but apart from the life of its maker and capable of outlasting it...'

Adolph Gottlieb:
'When I was a boy studying art I became aware of and accepted the difficulties of the modern artist. By the age of 18 I clearly understood that the artist in our society cannot expect to make a living from art; must live in the midst of a hostile environment; cannot communicate through his art with more than a few people; and if his work is significant, cannot achieve recognition until the end of his life (if he is lucky), and more likely posthumously.'

unknown:
'(Clyfford Still) possesses in unmistakable terms many of the things that art should have: energy, a total idea, clarity, open-ness, authenticity - but most of all it is alive.'

John Cheever:
'this is my usefulness... you've made sense of your life.'

Whitney Balliett*:
'Improvisation, the seat of jazz, is a remorseless art that demands of the performer no less than this: that night after night he spontaneously invent original music by balancing, with the speed of light - emotion and intelligence, form and content and tone and attack, all of which must both charge and entertain the spirit of the listener.'

Georgia O'Keeffe*:
'I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see - and I don't.'

Recommendations
Books

Further background material about my life and work can be found in the full biography, updated regularly, in the News section of this site: news
Relevant material will also be found in New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music Since 1960, Roger Dean (Open University Press 1992), particularly Chapter Nine, 'Composing for Improvisers' and Chapter 10 'A composer-improviser dialogue with Graham Collier'. John Wickes's Innovations in British Jazz, Volume One, 1960-1980 (Soundworld Publishers), contains much coverage of my work during that important period of the development of British jazz.

As mentioned elsewhere I have learnt a lot from reading books about literature and art. The Malcolm Cowley quotes above come from his fascinating memoir -And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (Viking Press, New York, 1978). The Adolph Gottlieb quote above and the Robert Motherwell and Camille Pissaro quotes in the 'Introduction' were found in Painting Outside the Lines, Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, David W. Galenson (Harvard University Press, 2001).

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