Category Archives: Jazz and blues

by | August 15, 2015 · 6:00 am

Oscar Peterson’s aesthetics

 

In an interview, Oscar Peterson discussed his aesthetics and teaching.

“I’m an admirer of the beautiful long line that starts out and then reaches a point of definition. If you reach a point of definition, it validates all the other aspects of the line.”

“One thing I try to convey to my students when I’m teaching is the relativity of notes. From a melodic standpoint there are wrong notes. But from a creative standpoint there are no wrong notes because every note can be related to a chord. Every note can be made part of your line, depending on how fast you can integrate it into your schematic arrangement.”

“It’s not a matter of technique; it’s time….You have an idea, and it’s confined to a certain period in a piece on an overlay of harmonic carpeting. You have to get from here to there in whatever time you’re allotted with whatever ideas you have.”

Quoted in “Oscar Peterson” by Leonard Lyons, an interview included in The great jazz pianists: Speaking of their lives and music (New York: Thomas Morrow, 1983, pp. 130–43).

Today would have been Peterson’s 90th birthday! Below, the pianist as jazz encyclopedia.

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by | August 7, 2015 · 6:00 am

Rahsaan Roland Kirk and “Rip, rig, and panic”

Roland Kirk 1966

 

Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Rip, rig, and panic provides a rich example of irony in jazz, not least for its good-natured sendup of Edgard Varèse.

The work’s multipart form is punctuated by breaking glass, a siren, and Kirk’s multi-instrumental imitations of electronic sounds. Flanked by nonmetric improvisations, its two swing sections are counted down by Kirk on castanets.

In the album’s liner notes Kirk explained the title: “Rip means Rip Van Winkle (or Rest in Peace?). It’s the way people, even musicians are. They’re asleep. Rig means like rigor mortis. That’s where a lot of people’s minds are. When they hear me doing things they didn’t think I could do they panic in their minds.”

This according to “Doubleness and jazz improvisation: Irony, parody, and ethnomusicology” by Ingrid Monson (Critical inquiry XX/2 [winter 1994] pp. 283–313).

Today would have been Kirk’s 80th birthday! Above, performing at Ronnie Scott’s ca. 1969 or 70 (photo © Del de la Haye); below, the 1965 recording.

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by | July 1, 2015 · 6:00 am

Willie Dixon, blues innovator

 

Using conventional musical devices for blues compositions as a basis, Willie Dixon expanded the possibilities for blues songwriting by introducing elements from pop song forms, using a quatrain refrain text form with longer musical structures than a 12-bar form, and amalgamating the 12-bar/a-a-b form with the 16-bar/quatrain refrain form in different sections of a composition.

Dixon also helped artists such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Koko Taylor to intensify their public images; his development of their performing personae is relevant to the tradition of the blues as a secular religion, and Dixon’s casting of them originated in traditional black badman tales circulated in the postbellum South.

This according to Willie Dixon’s work on the blues: From the early recordings through the Chess and Cobra years, 1940–1971 by Mitsutoshi Inaba, a dissertation accepted by the University of Oregon in 2005.

Today is Dixon’s 100th birthday! Below, he sings his own Back door man, first recorded by Howlin’ Wolf in 1960; the song is a classic example of Dixon’s innovations in blues song forms.

BONUS: The inimitable Howlin’ Wolf recording:

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by | June 11, 2015 · 6:00 am

Jazz and early cartoons

mickey jazz fool

Jazz and animation enjoyed an organic relationship in the developmental period for both forms.

From the 1920s to the early 1930s jazz provided frequent animation soundtracks. For the most popular and enduring cartoon characters, it was their music of choice. Two forms with clear structural similarities of syncopation and rhythm temporarily merged.

Together they created a timescape or representational space that critically challenged taken-for-granted relationships with the modern(ist) world. In an anti-realist attack on modernism, animated characters asked critical questions of their audience in a similar way to Brecht’s epic theater. In an alliance with jazz, they unmasked hidden aspects of society and its technological marvels in a questioning, revealing, and confrontational manner.

The comparatively marginalized position of two improvised forms allowed for the development of a critical artistic movement identified by the Frankfurt School—in particular, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno recognized that popular art was not merely a reflection of economic life but constituted a conscious, active force for change. The subterranean and often subversive values of the animation–jazz alliance were quickly recuperated, but for a limited period they offered a resistance that ran counter to established taste and the bourgeois appropriation of high art.

This according to “Of mice and music: Image, soundtrack, and historical possibility” by Coinneach Shanks (The soundtrack VI/1–2 [2004] pp. 67–81).

Above, publicity for Disney’s The jazz fool (1929); below, Betty Boop stars in Sally Swing (1938).

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by | June 4, 2015 · 6:00 am

Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music

Braxton Composition no. 228

In a 2011 interview, Anthony Braxton described his recent work as “a trans-temporal music state that connects past, present, and future as one thought component. This idea is the product of the use of holistic generative template propositions that allow for 300 or 400 compositions to be written in that generative state.”

“The Ghost trance musics would be an example of the first of the holistic, generative logic template musics. The Ghost trance music is concerned with telemetry and cartography, and area space measurements.”

Quoted in “Anthony Braxton: Music as spiritual commitment” by Josef Woodard (DownBeat LXXIX/3 [March 2010] pp. 32–37).

Today is Braxton’s 70th birthday! Above, Composition no. 228 from the Ghost trance series; below, a performance and discussion of more works from the series.

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by | May 27, 2015 · 6:00 am

Ramsey Lewis and “The in crowd”

The_In_Crowd_(Ramsey_Lewis_album)

Ramsey Lewis’s 1965 album The in crowd was recorded over three days (13–15 May 1965) at the Bohemian Caverns nightclub in Washington, D.C. In an interview earlier this year, the pianist recalled the experience.

“I remember when they said that I was going to play the Bohemian Caverns, I remarked ‘Isn’t this the place where the hard-boppers are playing? And John Coltrane, Roland Kirk and other go-get- ’em guys? They want us?’ And they did.”

“We were at the club trying to come up with one more song. A waitress came over and asked if we’d heard Dobie Gray’s The in crowd. Eldee had heard it, and it was on the jukebox in the club. We listened to it, learned it, and at the end of the first set, Redd whispered to me ‘Don’t forget to play The in crowd.’”

“We started doing the song, and all of a sudden the guys in the club are moving their shoulders, and the women are standing up and clapping and dancing. We just looked at each other—it was such a pleasant surprise. When they put the single out, we got a call from Phil Chess telling us he thought we had a hit record. In those days, did jazzers have hit records? What? Are you kidding? Soon enough, it was a bona fide hit that just kept selling.”

Quoted in “Lewis keeps reaching out” by Thomas Staudter (DownBeat LXXXII/4 [April 2015] p. 15).

Today is Lewis’s 80th birthday! Below, Lewis performs The in crowd in 1990.

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by | May 8, 2015 · 6:00 am

Keith Jarrett’s solo concerts

 

Keith Jarrett began playing improvised solo concerts in 1973, establishing himself as a major figure in the jazz piano tradition.

The performances drew on a new conception of form suggested by free jazz, one which posited a new kind of relationship between a performer and the musical constraints suggested by a composition. This new approach to performance allowed musicians to reconfigure formal conception in the moment, rather than being tied to an invariant set of constraints.

Jarrett’s solo concerts also drew on an aesthetic view of performance that emerged from free jazz, which saw music making as tapping into a divine source of inspiration. The context in which he performed promoted this conception by giving such dramatic weight to the process of improvisation.

This according to Keith Jarrett’s solo concerts and the aesthetics of free improvisation, 1960–1973 by Peter Stanley Elsdon, a dissertation accepted by the University of Southampton in 2001.

Today is Jarrett’s 70th birthday! Below, part of the 1973 Lausanne concert, a performance analyzed in Elsdon’s dissertation.

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by | April 7, 2015 · 6:00 am

Billie Holiday’s first session

 

In a 1956 interview, Billie Holiday recalled her first recording session, with Benny Goodman’s band in 1933:

“I got there, and I was afraid to sing in the mike…I was scared to death of it.”

The pianist, Buck Washington, leveraged the fact that the two of them were black, while most of the band members were white: “You’re not going to let these people think you’re a square, are you? Come on, sing it!”

When asked what she thinks of that recording now, she replied “I get a big bang out of Your mother’s son-in-law. It sounds like I’m doing comedy—my voice sounds so high and funny!”

This radio interview is transcribed as “The Willis Conover interview” in The Billie Holiday companion: Seven decades of commentary (New York: G. Schirmer. 1997, pp. 62–70).

Today is Holiday’s 100th birthday! Below, that first recording.

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by | March 31, 2015 · 6:00 am

Alpert and altruism

alpert-obama

The Herb Alpert Foundation has made major grants to the UCLA School of Music and California Institute of the Arts.

In a 2010 interview, Alpert discussed his philanthropic goals, especially that of supporting educational programs that move beyond a focused concentration on the technical aspects of the musical art.

“There’s two ways to approach jazz,” he said, “you can approach it from the outside point of view where you have chords that are a little remote from the actual melody, or you can stay within the context of the song and play it from that angle. I don’t try to force any notes or rely on techniques that I’ve learned through the years. I try to just let it happen as it happens—which is the only way to approach jazz.”

This according to  “In the name of imagination” by Don Heckman (Jazz education guide 2009–2010, pp. 20–26).

Today is Herb Alpert’s 80th birthday! Above, receiving the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2013; below, back in the day.

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by | December 9, 2014 · 6:00 am

Junior Wells and Buddy Guy

 

Junior Wells began working as a street musician when he was 7 years old, and when he was 18 he replaced Little Walter as Muddy Waters’s harmonica player.

In 1958 he started performing with the guitarist Buddy Guy, and their band became a fixture on the blues circuit until they went separate ways in 1978.

Some of Wells’s best recorded work came during this time, on tight, exciting records made for Delmark, like the 1965 Hoodoo man blues. The band became a favorite of rock musicians, and during that period Wells and Guy played to rock audiences at the Fillmore West and made a State Department tour of East Africa; in 1970 they toured with Canned Heat and The Rolling Stones.

This according to “Junior Wells, central player in Chicago blues, is dead at 63” by Ben Ratliff (The New York times CXLVII/51,040 [17 January 1998] p. A11).

Today would have been Wells’s 80th birthday! Below, Wells and Guy at the Montreaux Jazz Festival in the band’s heyday.

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