In the tradition of my inimitable friend, Brennan Johns, I thought it would be wise to do a 2018 retrospective.

I wanna say everything was stellar throughout. Certainly, my resume got thicker and richer. 

I got a chance to play with Adam Shead's Adiaphora Orchestra at the Empty Bottle, and a new trio named Boomerang (Carroll/Steussi/Riggen) did a full night at The Whistler. At Slate Arts, there was a night of improvisers I curated named 'Ouija Board' that went off exactly as I thought it would--that is to say, well. In the spring and late winter, I was able to present my big band material in public through the Sean Imboden Large Ensemble, a call I am always happy to receive. There was an Easter gig I didn't anticipate happening (being as new as I am), and Tommy Carroll's Calculated Discomfort project that I'm a part of released a record in the fall.

​Speaking of Tommy Carroll, it's been my pleasure to turn his tunes into well-engraved lead sheets. To my estimation it's really helped us out as we play together, and I've been able to engrave a few other friends' tunes as well. I really like being able to put other people's ideas into a cogent page or two of written notation, so they can then more readily have the people they want play their music.

I've been learning more about composition myself at the BMI Workshop in NYC. This will be my second consecutive year attending and it's always been helpful to suss out my ideas in a room full of peers. I anticipate that by the time we're done in May, I'll have generated a second set of large ensemble material to compliment the first from last year. Now all I need to do is become independently wealthy and resurrect the general public interest in big bands, and I can conduct full time. Easy enough.

Composition takes a different turn with Chervony|Riggen. Our loose, AACM-writ-in-motion style has been drawing a lot of attention to itself as we barrel through the Chicago circus scene. We completed the first suite of our work ('Buried Reflexes') in August, but frankly have been too busy with one-offs and short commissioned shows to sit down and watch it through. The video document should be released in 2019. No promises.

My position at Marquette Park continues to surprise me. Through the summer and into the winter, we were able to rehearse a small group of children that quite recently performed 'Freddie Freeloader' and 'Flamenco Sketches' to the rapturous applause of their families.  I'm happy to report that they will be taking my gigs in 20 years if they keep growing and developing at this rate--we've been able to even add another group to the band program. In the spring, I plan on one group doing Monk's music and the other doing J Dilla's. In the summer, I anticipate being more ready to work with the kids who come in, most of whom don't know exactly what I do and so fail to be excited about it. Probably the first thing I will do is try to get them excited about what it's possible to do in music, most readily through my personal perspective.

Despite trying to get the kids excited--I must confess to a certain feeling of melancholy.

Besides sobering and saddening waves being sent through the small corner of the Chicago jazz scene I occupy most often, alongside similar waves reaching me through news from friends at home and abroad, there was a certain lack of energy or feeling of a 'grind' that tended to characterize the year. Despite making more than enough money through gigging, teaching, and directing, there was always a grim feeling to the day. Taking a cat into my care (Cousteau) certainly helped, but the tenor of the emotion was deeper than even cuddling a chunky house panther could ameliorate.

However, it naturally came up that I was able to share my prior work as a leader with some friends, including some albums I made in 2016 but was too ill to release at the time. Boomerang does some of those old groups' tunes, a new duo I'm in will explore others. That made me feel better, and kind of put in my mind that perhaps I'd done enough waiting on allowing my roots to spread here before adventuring out as a leader again.

I have a spreadsheet--I always have a spreadsheet, now--of groups of musicians I've met who I think will sound good playing my music. Some groups will sound good playing some material, while other compositions will play best with other people, each according to their interests and abilities. With the connections I've made as a sideman in the city, I'd like to reach out and figure where to present this work again. And with the connections I have at the park, I should have more than enough physical space to rehearse these groups.

I'm even releasing some of the music I made when I was too sick to promote it back in 2016. Think of it as new old stock. The recordings certainly hold up.

Thinking of being able to play my work out in public more makes me happy, especially if I can also keep my practice going at the park. One will feed the other, as it always has. And perhaps I can move through 2019 not only surviving, but thriving.

I think one of the real shames of art is that you can be rewarded for living IN something negative and not living WITH something negative.

Some artists use their unresolved angst to fuel incredible work, so what does their audience do? Praise them for their compelling drama and the narrative that arises (in conjunction, of course with the quality of their work). The person then, like a rat in a cage being given a pellet treat, learns to never get over their trauma so they can keep receiving the positive feelings associated with the accolades.

Speaking as someone who lives WITH many things but IN none of them, that path is one that does not receive as much attention from one's peer group, even as it fuels my greatest art. ​I do believe, however, that it is healthiest.

I will continue to think more on this and formulate a stronger opinion, as well an idea of what to do next with the information I glean.

I got a tárogató maybe 2 or 3 months ago. It's a good horn; a Hungarian folk instrument with a timbre somewhere between a soprano saxophone and a clarinet with a chest cold.

There's not a lot of english-language info on it, and I intend to write some more since it is desperately needed. I don't know that much about it yet, though. What I do know is this:

Don't swab it out, especially with a clarinet swab! It's conical bore and impossibly narrow in the top joint! You'll get it stuck!

It took me a sweaty 45 minutes to carefully work the packed swab back out the way it came with soft hammer taps on a cleaning rod I requisitioned from my valve trombone case placed up against the jammed cloth, then completing the job with needle-nose pliers to fully take it out. I could've really damaged a valuable antique. 

Clean the pads some other way, English-reading audience! Not worth it. Keep your swabs out of the tárogató's narrow body.

So I'm back in Indy for a little bit!

Sean Imboden's large ensemble (who I've helped direct and contribute to before) is on the move again.
Two dates are planned,  one at the Jazz Kitchen, which is a venue with a national and international draw for performers of this music,
and the other one outside, for Eagle Creek Park's Jazz on the Point series.
 
Since I've continued to perennially generate material as part of the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop, Sean shot me a message again asking if
I wanna bring in some of the new work to the orchestra--and some of the 'greatest hits' we've done well in the past, naturally--and of course I agreed.
I like Sean a lot, I like his playing and writing a lot, and he really gives me a lot of latitude in terms of what I can bring in to his orchestra,
so it was a no-brainer.

As I write, I'm in my childhood bedroom typing away at midnight.

My parents still live here, though they've been insinuating a move for 4 or 5 years now, so I've chosen to spend some time with them. They're also taking care of my business partner's two cats, since their living situation in Chicago doesn't let them keep animals (especially a high-strung orange male and a nervous eccentric tortiseshell female). These were two animals I saw every day when living in Bloomington, and it's good to see them and hang out. The tortiseshell female is no exaggeration one of my favorite cats--impossible to read, has a single expression (penetrative stare), total sweet-pea.

Likewise, I suppose, with my parents and my whole childhood. They're still getting used to me firing on all cylinders and having my life pretty under control, but that's just a growing pain. 

I will say, though, that coming back really feels very comfortable, and I'm a little suspicious of that.

I know how things work here, what to expect, how these performances with SILE will play out, the kind of people who will be around.
I know the jokes and the references to make, and I fit this place hand-in-glove without really trying. 
I feel quite relaxed in my own private Land of the Lotus-Eaters, and that there is what I sometimes call the 'kiss of death' to students--
the small beginning signs of a chain of events that will lead to an overall stagnation or deficiency in your technique or art.

In one of my last chances to speak at length with David Baker, he related: "If you feel like you're getting comfortable--GIT!" I take that pretty seriously.

I've heard it said that you can't go home again. For me right now, I think, I totally can. But that's something to keep an eye on.

Very recently (as in, not even 30 minutes ago as of this writing), I was at a jam session in Chicago. It doesn't necessarily matter where, and in fact naming the venue and the people might distract from the point I have here, so I'm gonna try to make it nebulous.

For whatever reason, people felt like I was playing well. Lots of 'you sound great bro' from throughout the room, things of that nature. If you've played at a jam session full of professionals, you know how that is and how it feels--admittedly good but in a pretty insubstantial way, like a big boll of cotton candy or a silk pair of underwear.

There was one small comment which went against the grain. After I held in there (more or less) against a tune the leader of the jam session called, in a split-second spare moment he said to me in an offhand, quiet, but directly worded way: "You need to learn how to deal with the changes more".

Here's the thing: the guy was right.

I know, at least subconsciously, that I've been slipping in terms of really exploiting and engaging with basic V7-I relationships in a consistently creative way. I have the skillset to avoid that weakness (through a small library of substitutions and superimpositions I've been accumulating over the past decade-ish), but my strictly diatonic, functional-harmony material lags behind.

Out of everyone at that jam session, the leader was the only one to see through that particular avoidance mechanism (along with any technical pyrotechnics that I may be able to do) to the problem behind it, and then let me know the problem was something that deserved attention. Furthermore, he let me know in a personal and quiet way that would ensure I heard it, as opposed to just listening to it, and in a direct way, so I couldn't mistake cause and effect between behavior and commentary.

That's unique and more than worth the price of admission (of course, the session was free, but I digress).

I think that people who are capable of doing that, both in terms of perceiving the problem and in terms of letting someone know immediately and gently without ego, are few and far between. I think it'd be silly to not only start really dealing with the vertical structures of the tune I'm playing more, but to start considering how to express my criticisms in that way.

That is, to make them wanna put in the effort to make themselves better. I think I'm gonna revisit Warne Marsh for a while. And learn more tunes. But I could always stand to do that.

(This, and everything marked before May 2018, was originally written as part of "Matt Riggen's Jazz Blog", a blog which I kept on-and-off as a college student. Some of it is edited for style, namely the presence of gendered language and for clarity in the writing.)
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Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re not in Europe.

You live in a specific place that has had and is currently having its own history—a history characterized by immigration, extinction, culture clash, and immediacy. Exploration and risk-taking is something inherent to human history in the New World; tribes stomped across the dry Bering Strait in pursuit of mammoth herds the same way Europeans would sail across the Atlantic in pursuit of more ephemeral things millennia later. A new government was founded on lofty ideals, the execution of which is still flawed, over the course of a short rebellion. 

In the same way that Europe is characterized by length of history, America is characterized by distance and space—our history is closer to us, our cities farther away. In the same way that Europe is characterized by division, America is characterized by the blending of cultures. 

America isn’t Europe. So why do we sometimes try to be?

Why do we have to have a jazz canon—why do we judge ensembles on their performances of Duke and Count Basie, and why do we judge players on their resemblance to Parker and Miles? That music is wonderful, but imitation or the desire to replicate is not why those works were written. The classical canon is an objective fact in Europe, but we don’t need to imitate Europe to be legitimate. 

Why do we use forms and ensembles invented in Europe to describe European experiences? Can we honestly get our ideas out with structures invented by people who don’t know what it’s like to be us? Is it possible to shed the connotations of those ensembles for long enough to get an experience that represents what we are across? (Maybe--ask Aaron Copland.)

Why don’t American conservatories teach every one of their students how to swing? Why don’t we make knowing how to play a blues—or at least who to listen to to understand what that is—absolutely mandatory? Why are educators more able to direct and conduct essentially European ensembles, when they’ll have no idea what to tell a drummer in a high school jazz band? 

European art music is great, but it’s also not where we’re coming from as a country, and it’s wrong to pretend so. What needs to happen is that we take their composers’ reasons for doing what they did, and apply it to our situation and our contexts to really truly make art like they did. 

The heritage of art isn't imitation, but assimilation.

And if you are American, write and play to that.

Maybe write about how, if you're around the age of 20, your country has been in a state of military activity for over half your life. Write about how you just saw the long arc of the moral universe bend toward justice on the 26th. Write about Tuskegee Airmen and Tuskegee Test Subjects, write about kids playing pretend in a Baptist Church parking lot, write about the Great Depression, write about hymns, write about laws made in fear, write about West Coast permaculture, write about road trips, write about people who were born an ocean away naturalizing here and finding a home, write about whistleblowers, write about Ferguson, write about landing on the moon 60 years ago, write about no longer being able to land on the moon because there's no more military use for it, write about falling for someone who doesn't look like you who grew up next to you and talks like you do, write about Bird, write about ANYTHING so long as it's something that you can and should write about because you're the only person who sees it like you who can express it like you will.

Write now, right now, because nobody will do it for you.

Happy Fourth of July.

(This, and everything marked before May 2018, was originally written as part of "Matt Riggen's Jazz Blog", a blog which I kept on-and-off as a college student. Some of it is edited for style, namely the presence of gendered language and for clarity in the writing.)
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​Say someone calls you up and asks you to play over chords/chord changes. I feel like there’re kind of two approaches to use. You can mix and match ideas, or have one that’s pretty predominant across your playing—I certainly know I’ve got one—but they’re essentially completely different philosophical positions.

The first is seeing harmonies as being derived from melodies (vertical thought being compressed horizontal thought), and the second is seeing melodies as being derived from harmonies (horizontal thought being elongated vertical thought).

Let me explain.

The first way is where people like Miles or maybe Woody Shaw are coming from. You get this idea from their playing of diatonicism, of playing to the tune rather than the harmony that’s occurring at the moment. For Miles, this diatonicism is (almost always) that of the tune he’s playing (a whole bunch of F Ionian over If I Were A Bell off Relaxin’, tons of G Dorian over Milestones), and for Woody, the diatonicism is related to the key of the tune (eg. the rising passage in G Major that opens up his solo on If I Were A Bell off a live bootleg).  This comes across pretty strongly in the tunes that they write and choose to play, too—So What, Milestones, In Case You Haven’t Heard, and The Moontrane are all kind of characterized by protracted key areas. (Ornette also tends to play this approach, obviously—his horizontal thought by necessity dictates the vertical harmony, and if Ornette plays a flattened third or a natural third, then that changes the harmonic sound at that moment.) Coltrane also does this but at a super-speed that means that the ear perceives the scale as a harmony (check out the cadenza on Russian Lullaby off Soultrane for a solid example).

To play like this, it makes more sense to think of tunes in terms of the natural guide tones that propagate themselves through the tune, and in terms of the horizontal scales each harmony represents. I’m definitely more of a horizontal kind of thinker—when I’m presented with vertical harmony (eg. a dominant 7th chord), I think of all the scales that could fit over that harmony—whole-tone, HW dim, Mixolydian—and not necessarily of the chord tones I can alter.

The second way is the way Bird thinks. Bird is almost always playing a realization of a harmonic structure instead of a chord-scale, and when he makes an alteration or harmonic decision it’s built on the tones of the chord or explicitly on its extensions. The Biddy Fleet story (wherein Bird discovers that by playing on the upper structure of harmonies, he can create a more personal sound) belies a mind that’s already thinking of melodies as being inherently and inextricably linked to chord tones. The contrafacts he writes also use melodic lines that emphasize the harmonic qualities of the chords beneath them (eg. the last two bars of Ornithology, the opening to Confirmation, et.al). In fact, even when presented with relatively horizontal tunes (eg. the blues), Bird finds ways to alter them so they become far more harmonically rich (Blues for Alice being an excellent example).

To play like this, it becomes necessary to realize the harmonic content of each chord as an arpeggio or a series of leaps. When altering the chord, only the notes one wishes to alter will become evident and not the implied chord scale (C7#5 as opposed to C whole tone). Coltrane also does this as well, but at a speed where the arpeggiated line is perceived as a moving harmony.

(As an aside, I feel like this is one of the reasons a free jazz group I play with named OGC works so well. Matt Babineaux, the alto player, has a bunch of Charlie Parker vocabulary completely under control, and I have spent much time with the First Quintet-era Miles Davis, and with Science Fiction-era Ornette. When I’m playing free, I’m thinking of scale collections and horizontally—I am not trying to generate a harmonic structure. When Matt plays free, to me it sometimes feels like he is improvising chord changes that he can fit a melodic structure to. This sort of yin-yang approach strengthens the ensemble overall and lets both of us cover what we like to do.)

(This, and everything marked before May 2018, was originally written as part of "Matt Riggen's Jazz Blog", a blog which I kept on-and-off as a college student. Some of it is edited for style, namely the presence of gendered language and for clarity in the writing.)
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PART I

          America has an aptitude for breeding iconoclasts. In its overall geography  —not only in terms of land but culture—many weird little eddies may form, developing new procedures and ideas in tight, one-man whirlpools. Two among their number include Charles Ives, the proto-ultramodernist, and Ornette Coleman, the free jazz giant. Though they are considered frequently as separate entities, they are almost certainly cut from the same cloth—not only in terms of their music, but in terms of the cultural conditions that conspired to create their unique approaches and aesthetics. To expose and examine their aesthetic principles, we must provide as level a playing ground as we can. Fortunately, each composer enjoys composing and arranging for similar formats—both have published songs (Ornette’s What Reason Could I Give, Ives’ The Cage), compositions that are essentially strata of noise (Ornette’s Science Fiction, Ives’ Housatonic At Stockbridge), and made an effort to join the tradition of Western music by re-examining existing material (Ornette’s treatment of Embraceable You, Ives’ organ transcription of America The Beautiful).

          Overall, too, each man possesses similar career characters. Ives’ particular idiom, for example, came about ten to twenty years after the height of late Romanticism—a highly structured, ordered music. Ives’ response was to synthesize that basic language (harmonic and melodic) into a new, non-tonal context that frequently sounded chaotic and ‘inexcusable’(Burkholder: Ideas 61) He was willing to present chaos and dissonance in a way that not even the Second Viennese School was willing to do—Ives has no system to his atonality and fully relied on intuition (Burkholder: World 130), while the Second School is of course famous for developing the twelve-tone method. As a result, Ives had nothing to point to in order to answer questions from critics, which may have contributed to his extreme isolation from other composers and musicians (Burkholder: Ideas 92).

         Compare this to Ornette! Ornette’s particular idiom came about ten to twenty years after the height of bebop—a highly ordered, structured music. Ornette’s response was to synthesize that basic language (melodic and harmonic—see Jayne, Chronology, and Chippie, which are all written over chord changes which were familiar to beboppers for evidence of the latter) into a new, non-tonal context which frequently incited other musicians to throw him off the bandstand (Litweiler 59). He was willing to present chaos—in this context, unprepared frameworks for improvisation—in ways that not even the Lenox School for Jazz was (Litweiler 69). Ornette, though there is evidence for a later, after-the-fact Harmolodic Method (Litweiler 147), fully relied on intuition at the time and had no method, which may have contributed to his extreme isolation from musicians who were not working with him.

         Furthermore, each idiom has similar characters. Both composers place a very high value on virtuosity, to the point where the melodies they write are sometimes garbled in performance. Compare Ornette’s Civilization Day with some of Ives’ abstracted melodies in Movement II of Concord Sonata—the demands on the performers are extraordinary and require great control over the instruments written for. Both of their usages of virtuosity are tied in with the teenage occupations and interests of both men. Ives’ athleticism is well written about (Magee 47), and his excitement with the physical may have encouraged the composition of these difficult, physically engaging melodies—likely strengthened through church work (Burkholder: Ideas 55). Ornette’s facility on saxophone was attenuated through constant work in Fort Worth rhythm and blues groups (Wilson 10-11). It was also encouraged through a preoccupation with bebop, specifically Charlie Parker (Wilson 11}. One must only look at several titles of Ornette’s to verify this—The Legend of Bebop, Bird Food, et. Al.

         The fact that both men were active in their geographical areas’ centers of culture (Ives in the New England church, Ornette in the Texan dance band) during their formative years likely provides the reason for their shared preoccupation with folk forms and melodies. Ives compulsively quotes from folk melodies and hymns in his works (most overtly in the vocal line of The Things Our Fathers Loved). Ornette shared a similar compulsion for the blues and with its associated gestures. To number the compositions in and the ways in which Ornette makes an overture to the blues would be impossible.

        Furthermore, Ornette’s choice in sidemen can also serve as an indicator of his allegiance toward his folk music—the bassist Charlie Haden, with whom Ornette shared a very important working relationship for decades, started out at the age of two as a singer with the Haden Family Band (Litweiler 59). Their repertoire included country music and American folk music, and Haden’s connection with that music was lifelong (his Old Joe Clark quote on Ramblin’, his albums of spirituals with Hank Jones, and so on). It is not hard to realize that even though Ornette may not have specifically chosen Haden due to his tenure with the Haden Family Band, he certainly did choose to work with Haden due to Haden’s audible familiarity with folk idioms and gestures. In this way, Ornette consciously strengthened the American qualities in his music.

        Given these extreme similarities, it is difficult to consider these two entities as having separate aesthetics and separate visions for the future of their music. Furthermore, both composers have made overtures to place themselves in the tradition of American music—not just Western music, but specifically inside the set of cultural sigils that spell ‘America’ to the listener.

PART II

       As prolific composers, both men have more than enough material to only perform their own work. Therefore, the decision to perform pre-existing material represents a choice to explicitly participate in an existing tradition. However, each man has his own traditions to claim links to and reasons for doing so—but occasionally demonstrate similar veins of thinking in terms of their statements.

       Ives’ Variations on ‘America’ for organ represents Ives placing himself in the virtuoso soloist tradition, as well as a comment on tonality and the traditional solemnity of ‘America’. Done at the age of 17 in 1891, it is in the overall form of a theme and variations, but is in a radically extroverted and brash manner. The variations, while clearly along rhythmic lines (as is typical in such compositions), display a clear line of timbral thinking made possible by skillful use of the stops on the organ. This is striking, because it is not just an exploration of the sounds the organ can make but integrated into the harmony of the piece as well—the more distorted and guttural the timbre Ives pulls out of the organ, the more dissonant and abrasive the harmonies presented. Tonality is also treated freely—before Variation 5, there is a moment where the right hand is in Ab and the left is in F. This is not to say, however, that Ives meant this as a novelty of harmony to not be taken seriously. The pedal part in the final variation is a massive technical challenge. There is, therefore, a showmanship aspect to this piece. It is an invitation to revel at physical prowess, not a poem meant to capture patriotic pride—but also a way for Ives to demonstrate his superior control of the keyboard, and his membership among its masters.

         Ornette uses Embraceable You to make similar comments about his place in the tradition. Ornette is clearly channeling the prototypical bebop legend, Charlie Parker, who made a famous recording of the same composition. The statement is clear—like Ives putting himself among the virtuosi, here Ornette is making a case for his place in his idiom among its top practitioners. But even as he makes his case, he modifies expected parameters. A complete statement of Embraceable You’s melody is never made, but the theme is still used as the basis for Ornette’s gestures and as the basis for new material serving as an introduction/conclusion. The texture is immediately different as well—not only is there an absence of any chordal instrument, Ed Blackwell is using a different kind of beater on the drumset for much of the tune (not brushes, but mallets—a clear timbral change). Ornette uses timbre as an integral part of his commentary like Ives—when Ornette modifies his timbre, he also modifies his intonation. In his conception, a grating timbre should be associated with an out-of-tune pitch, and Ornette improvises accordingly. Ethnic gestures like Ives’ Polonaise Variation also are integral to Ornette’s conception. In this case it is the presence of the blues—while Ornette’s playing is generally saturated with its elements, several gestures as overt as Ives’ naked polonaise rhythm can be heard (most audibly at 1:31 and 1:45 in the This is our Music recording).

           Both composers also tend to compose for instrumental ensembles, but when they do compose for voice it is as a rule with their own lyric. Their treatment of song shares another, more integral similarity—their shared use of procedures to organize the composition. Both composers set out rules and then pursue them for the rest of the composition. In these two examples, this is evidenced by the organization of the ensemble into units that share no material and the strict transposition of a harmony. This focuses one’s attention on the least systematically treated aspect of the music—the words. It seems that both Ives and Ornette want their lyric to come across as strongly as possible, to the point of reducing the amount of musical material actually present.

            Ornette may have a piercing timbre and attack, but when he writes for voice the alto sax takes a background role, as do most other instruments, to the vocalist.  In What Reason Could I Give, there is a clear focus on the voice and a subsequent instrumental division of role into two units. Furthermore, the composition as a whole has all the parameters set in place before performance occurs; while the specifics of performance are indeterminate, they cannot violate the rules. Unit One, comprised of Charlie Haden’s bass and Billy Higgins’ drumset, serves to create a web of nonmetered time and to generate a general pulse. Haden continually alternates between harmonically supporting and undermining the melody presented by the second unit, a wind quartet presenting a harmonization of the melody in diatonic fourths in support of vocalist Asha Pulthi. The melodic line itself is very strong and rhythmically varied, with a logical arc and logical use of register. This is par for the course for slow Ornette melodies—as a rule they are highly intuitive and easy to audiate. The procedural aspect makes the two units of the ensembles act according to totally different rules—but also makes the compositions as a whole easy to understand.

            Ives’ treatment of The Cage shares some striking similarities. While there are superficial aspects at the beginning (the constant pulse, the quartal harmony) the real resemblance occurs in Ives’ systematic treatment of the material outlined there. Like Reason, the piano and voice of The Cage are treated as separate entities with musical material that is developed separately and does not necessarily align. However, Ives takes it one step further and includes his systematic mindset in the compositional process—the vocal line is a very untuneful pair of whole-tone collections, and the quartal chords at the beginning are simply transposed up a fourth to form an accompaniment. This is much more mechanical and much less intuitive than Ornette’s approach but seems to come from an identical impulse—to create an unchanging web of material so the focal point can be on the words of the voice. Ives takes his text painting to a compositional degree—using varied rhythms to accentuate certain words and so forth—not something Ornette was clearly thinking about. Also unlike Ornette, rhythm is hardly considered (especially in how the piano accompaniment interacts with the vocal line and how the vocal line’s monorhythmy is hardly ever broken up).

           However, as much as both composers can write well for exposed elements, their true arranging skill comes out in their respective stratifications of chaos.  For effective presentation of chaotic music to occur, one must not only have a good grasp on instrumentation and orchestration but on the human attention span—when perhaps dozens of things are simultaneously occurring, how do you get a listener to pay attention to a desired element? Both composers, when confronted with the same problem, concoct different solutions.

             Ives chooses to use our own memories to his ends in The Housatonic At Stockbridge, which is meant to be a musical depiction of moving through a specific physical place. To capture that, he uses different elements of the orchestra to depict non-interacting parts of the landscape (undulating strings to depict a river and so on)—but without bothering to make sure they are consonant with each other. With no mutually-agreed upon tonality or rhythm, Ives draws attention with blatantly diatonic/pentatonic folk melody quotations in instruments whose timbre is likely to cut through the haze (specifically the horns)—and furthermore, organizes the listener’s ‘journey through the landscape’ by skillfully manipulating the textures sounding in the piece.

           Ornette also directs attention via timbre, but demonstrates far less thought toward orchestration. In Science Fiction, the two strata are a whole-group collective improvisation and a spoken word piece. The attention is supposed to be placed on the spoken word—and that is accomplished via studio manipulation. The musicians in the group improvisation are constantly being panned left to right and buried under layers of themselves, while the voice itself is placed ‘on top’ and outfitted with an ominous reverb effect. The overall effect is that the improvisation never takes precedence over the poem. Compared with Ives’ constant reshuffling of textures and timbres, it is easier for the listener to recognize what they should be paying attention to and when, but is also far less artful and subtle when doing so.

          Even with creative heydays separated by fully 50 years, totally different levels of education, and hailing from geographically isolated different areas of the country, Ives and Ornette managed to generate highly personal idioms with very similar aesthetic principles—the primacy of folk music, the artful direction of attention in chaotic music, the conflation of timbre with other elements like harmony and intonation, and the use of guiding ideas or rulesets to structure a song-form. Their legacies are also similar—their aesthetics and idioms were not necessarily for their peers but for the following generation of musicians. Ives’ main following would be among the Pan-American Association of Composers and his place in the performing tradition is still largely limited to his patriotic music; Ornette’s legacy would become clear first among his own sidemen (with groups like Old and New Dreams) and then become crystallized in the last twenty years as a true part of the jazz tradition, but its acceptability in performance is largely limited to his earliest work. For all their roots in pure American folk idioms, their abstractions of those idioms mean that these two men tend to not receive their deserved credit as true iconoclasts.

                                                                                             BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burkholder, J. Peter. Charles Ives and His World. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. ML410.I95 C33.

Burkholder, J. Peter. Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind The Music. 1st ed. Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, Inc, 1985. ML 410 .I95 B87.

“Chronology”. The Shape of Jazz To Come. Atlantic Records. May 22, 1959. Web. 7/16/2014. Transcription by Loren Pickford.

Frink, Nathan. An Analysis of the Compositional Practices of Ornette Coleman as Demonstrated in his Small Group Recordings During the 1970s. University of Pittsburgh, 2012.

Litweiler, John. Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life. 1st Da Capo Press ed. New York: Da Capo Press,  1994. ML 419 .C63 L6.

Magee, Gayle Sherwood. Charles Ives Reconsidered. 1st ed. University of Illinois Press, 2008. ML 410 .I94 M34

Wilson, Peter. Ornette Coleman: His Life And Music. 1st ed. Berkeley : Berkeley Hills Books, 1999.
                ML419 .C63 W513

​Ornette’s dead.

What do you say?

When I came to IU, I was very quiet and a biologist. Things weren’t going well. The only thing I could do was stake out in a practice room and shed little what I could, because it let me escape a bad situation for an hour at a time. I tried to get into the school where I could do more and failed pretty spectacularly. I had a pretty solid reputation as a guy who had no idea what he was doing.

I felt like the things I wanted to do weren’t quite good enough—like I had to be more complex, much quicker, play higher, play denser. I had to be smarter than the other person, had to have all the changes memorized deeper than they did, had to outdo them before they outdid me. Cut or be cut. I had to be a thing that I wasn’t, you know? I come from a bunch of people from the most country places you can imagine. Nobody on either side of my family has lived in a big city for at least 3 or 4 generations. My extend family maybe has 7 years total of postgraduate study.  I come to IU and I have to play this super-urban, highly stylized bebop to fit in and be included? Is that what all jazz is like?

What do you say when someone you wanted to grow up to be like dies? 

The whole time, though, I was continually captivated by this guy Ornette Coleman. He was saying that it was okay to be kind of a hick, he was saying that it was okay to not have to do math in your head while you played, he was saying that it was okay to not know every tune, he was saying it was okay to do your own thing even if nobody around you bought into it at the moment. And he’d fought for what he wanted, too; he’d fought through WAY worse than the things that I was experiencing and it worked out for him. Maybe the places I was coming from were legitimate.

And that sound! You could say anything with it, and all of it sounded like it was for me, like Ornette was playing just for me and nobody else. This kind of private reassurance, like ‘I get where you are, and they were wrong about me, so maybe they’re not right about you either and you can do a thing or two.’ Or maybe, ‘I get what it’s like to be way more excited about something than everyone else around you, even when it doesn’t make sense and kind of tends to turn on you and make things harder, and I know what it’s like to say ‘today’s not the day you get to me’’.

What do you say when someone you want to grow up to be like dies while you’re exploring his work?

I more or less bludgeoned my way into a degree program, but still wasn’t doing the things I wanted to. I knew I wanted to explore this music that was making me feel so strongly, so I founded a group to do it with. I studied for months to get ready, I read two or three biographies, I pulled a bunch of tunes from his records. We went through a few personnel iterations and settled on a particularly strong one. And I watched something really wonderful happen to these three other people; I got to see this music change them too. I got to see them become more open and to stop questioning themselves so much. I saw people play things they’d never thought of playing before, almost every rehearsal. That’s so cool to see.

 Then I started to write for other groups, and all of them had some kind of relationship back to Ornette’s concepts. There was just no escaping him for me—every project I had would eventually come back to something Ornette had done, it just worked out like that. It was what I wanted to do, it was the way to get my ideas out, it was a perfect vehicle. There is a way, using Ornette’s rules, to get everything I want to get across emotionally to the world out. 

And things have started to work out. Things are working out. And I’m doing it more or less according to what I hear, what I really truly hear.

What do you say when a hero dies who helped you hear yourself?

You say enough.

(This, and everything marked before May 2018, was originally written as part of "Matt Riggen's Jazz Blog", a blog which I kept on-and-off as a college student. Some of it is edited for style, namely the presence of gendered language and for clarity in the writing.)
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There’s something unique about writing performance art that I don’t really think has a corollary in other art forms. If you make a painting, that’s your expression from beginning to end; same as with writing a book. But if you’re writing for an ensemble, your idea has to go through someone else’s brain and then out through their body for it to be complete. So, if you’re writing a play or a violin concerto, your lines will be given interpretation by someone who’s not you—at the end of the day, it’s a collaboration between composer and performer as to what a piece will sound like.

This is either a super great thing or something to be tightly managed, depending on your personality and what you want your art to be. I can certainly understand micromanaging a performer, or at least giving them extensive notes as to what you want their execution to be, but I tend to not to do that. One, because my ideas aren’t always The Best Idea and I want everyone in the group to feel comfortable with speaking up—which increases the odds of a Best Idea coming out. Two, because I want the groups I’m leading to sound as good as possible, which generally occur when everyone sounds like themselves. This can only happen when I’m not trying to make them sound like something else (I can direct them to the goal, but not just tell them where it is and expect them to know).

The difficulty of writing for a group of musicians is only compounded when the group is a bunch of improvisers—and made even more interesting when the group is populated by free improvisers, or people who can operate with the total absence of precomposed structures. Sure, writing for hard bop quintet technically counts as ‘a bunch of improvisers’, but the composer can still control the situation pretty tightly/everyone in the group knows what’s going to happen next.
If you want to write for a situation that will be mostly improvised, how do you do it?
There are several strategies I like. I often mix-and-match inside a given piece, because when I’m writing for that kind of group, I’m seeing myself less as ‘I have written this idea’ and more of ‘I have arranged this situation’. Really, all these strategies do is get the right people in the right spot to make something happen.

 
   1) Use Your Words

This can take many different avenues:
       -  Writing on the part directions to a texture/timbre (guitar: switch between very high and very low tessitura; piano: palm mute throughout; trumpet: only play harmonic series)
        - Talking it through with your bandmates ("So this one is about when you really love someone how you can find a whole bunch of ways to be really excited about them", et.al)
        - Writing a story out and playing down the page with your bandmates

Doing this allows you to organize the piece by what texture happens when, but also in a way that allows the musicians pretty broad autonomy.

  2) Precomposed Areas

This one can look like:
       - Melodic/harmonic/rhythmic cues that signal a change to a different textural area
    - A short precomposed section/set of chords that is repeated over and over again and allowed to change drastically from the written page
      -  A preconsidered form (eg sonata form, an abstracted AABA, et.al)
     -  A theme that everyone plays together that serves as emotional/motific prelude to free improvising (note: this is by FAR the dominant method in free jazz)

Strategies from this category are the most familiar way to many musicians to get into free improvising, so they frequently get the best results (unless you’re dealing with HEAVY, high-level free improvisers, who tend to sound great no matter what the situation)


  3) Playing with Ensemble Subunits

This one can be:
       -  One subunit plays in a tempo, the other does not/plays in a different tempo
       -  One subunit plays in a key, the other does not/plays in another key
       -  One subunit plays in a specific emotional context, the other plays in a very different emotional context
       -  One subunit plays off one motif, the other plays off a different motif
      -  One subunit plays, the other rests

These are great for denouments or finales—you can play two of the parts of the piece off against each other at the same time, the audience gets that they’re hearing the end, huge crash, curtain falls.

4)      Use of Chronological Time

This one generally takes the specific form of:

      - Play with your given motif/emotional context for a set length of seconds/minutes, then change (to a transition period, also measured in seconds, or to another motific area)

These situations can be written out in notation as well (eg. Ives, Ferneyhough, Penderecki), but I’m an improviser first and I personally either know very little or nothing about the techniques they used—or I actively work to create the same situations with improvisers in mind. Part of that’s selfish (I don’t know how to really make the things they wrote sound good without really thinking hard about it), but I’m also more interested in other people’s take on the situation than my own.

If I write it all out for you, how will I know what you think about it?