(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.)
_____________________________________________________________________________ Sometimes, it helps being a huge jazz nerd. By sometimes, I obviously mean ‘almost never, and certainly not on dates’, but it does help with reading the people you’re on the stand with and figuring out how best to operate as part of that team. This, of course, is an extension of just being a good sideman (how do I make this group sound good, what are these other people expecting out of me?), but it’s also a side-art on its own. For example: not long ago, I was sitting in with a tenor trio—the leader of which I’d never played with before. Before I got up on stage, I spent 15-20 minutes listening intently to their playing and trying to figure out where they were coming from. Here’s some of the things I remember picking out: 1) Highly change-based player. Played off the vertical structure, even on more modal tunes. VERY little side-slipping. More or less rules out any chance of horizontal playing like Don Cherry or Ornette—and if I do, I should directly justify it afterwards. 2) Tended to call tunes from the later hard bop period, eg. Moment’s Notice. I’m sure that Inner Urge is under their fingers, but not preferred. If I call a standard those types of players would have loved to stretch out on, I’m sure they’ll go for it. (Here’s where I’m also thinking about what tune I’m going to call. What do I sound good on that won't make this band go 'oh jeez, not this tune'?) 3) Penchant for longer, logical lines. Not necessarily playing the whole chord-scale like Coltrane, but certainly a fleet player. Goes for content over flash or Aylerian energy. Perhaps a fan of Warne Marsh? 4) Thinner, crystal-clean, darker timbre and a seriously developed altissimo concept. Not out of the Hawkins school (Sonny Rollins, Branford Marsalis, et. Al). Definitely a Tristanoite. (This gets me a little excited, as I can play off of that/with that very well. It also means I can call tunes the Tristanoites used as chord sources for their contrafacts. Furthermore, my Avishai Cohen impression is going to get a little mileage tonight, as his playing with Mark Turner is probably the best way a trumpet player can complement a Tristanoite.) 5) Killer ear. Continuously incorporating drummer’s rhythmic ideas and bassist’s harmonic ideas. Cements them in the highly spontaneous tradition of Tristano, but also means we can feed each other ideas. We might be able to stretch an ending of a tune out, or blow together, or something. Here’s how it went: I stepped up, called What Is This Thing; they were into it. We played off each others' ideas for about thirty seconds at the end over a C pedal (as I suspected from #5). We moved onto the next tune—I suggested Out of Nowhere because I didn’t know Isfahan (side note: tenor players who call Isfahan tend to know their Joe Henderson, which cements the suspicion I had about Inner Urge in #2). Over Nowhere, I quote 317 E 32nd Street, a Tristano tune. They IMMEDIATELY recognize it, confirming #4. I use my Avishai Cohen impression and it works. The last tune was Donna Lee, yet another Tristanoite tune. We use the bass player’s folksy ending phrase as a signal to play an ending harmony, with the tenor player on the C above my high Gb (a blues reference, and something characteristic of Mark Turner Quartet’s writing). Overall, a streamlined and objective success! Everyone had fun and sounded great, because I was able to pinpoint what I could do to contribute best. In a perfect world, I would have known Isfahan, but that was remedied by going home and learning it as to be better prepared next time. Of course, if I’d walked in and the tenor player was playing Strasbourg St. Denis like James Carter, I would have instantly started reaching for my (admittedly limited) repertoire of straight 8th tunes (wanna play Cantaloupe Island, wanna play Mr. Clean…?) and started remembering my Freddie Hubbard impression. If they’d been playing all the tunes off Relaxin’ With The Miles Davis Quintet, I’d have started pulling from that songbook and remembering how to play like Miles. I didn’t know what I’d need to do till I started listening for what was going on. And if you’ve got regular gainful employment with a group, you can start listening for the special bits in their personal playing. Maybe they’ve got a neat harmonic concept, or a rhythmic thing they like to do! Maybe they really love playing ECM, or ballads, or funk. The point is, you can help someone sound their best even when sitting in, and that’s super neat. EDIT FROM THE FUTURE, 7/21/2020: About a year after I wrote this, the tenor player in question asked me to join his quintet. We made a record together shortly before I left to Chicago, and then after that he had me write extensively for his large ensemble. By bonding with him musically, I opened the door to bond with him personally. I think that's the real power of listening.
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(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.)
_____________________________________________________________________________ I remember hanging out with a drummer friend as a party wound down. All us stragglers laid on the floor together, it was 4 in the morning, and I was feeling pretty playful and really sleepy. I said to him, “Tell me a bedtime story.” The guy grinned for a second and began: “Once upon a time in Texas, there was a saxophonist named Ornette Coleman.” “Yay!” I said with a remarkable lack of situational awareness. “I love this story!” “I know you do, Matt,” he said soothingly as he patted my head. “Who’s Ornette?” a voice major said from across the room. I whipped around way too fast for the very early hour. “The greatest alto player of all time!” “That is not true,” the drummer piped up from behind me. This is a constant discussion between me and my friends. How good, really, is Ornette? If you measure the quality of the musician by their versatility of actions, Ornette admittedly suffers a little—there’re only two or three recordings from the late 50’s where Ornette’s holding down the alto chair in the Paul Bley Quintet where he’s playing by the rules of what 90% of musicians who deal with swing operate under (which is, of course, known in the parlance as ‘playing the changes’). But I would argue that Ornette’s internal logic is so sound and developed that we can judge his overall output as incredibly important and influential. “But Matt,” you mutter, illuminated by the pale glow of a laptop screen with a hand buried in a bag of Cheetos. “Ornette’s music is inherently stream-of-consciousness. There are no rules in free jazz.” Well, dear reader, I have to say that that’s not at all accurate on three bases. First of all, all modes or forms of art have aesthetic tenets, even abstract artforms. There’s definitely a way to not paint like Jackson Pollock, the same way there’s a way to not paint like Rembrandt. I’ve been told by some groups that they have no rules. I’d argue, though, that “We have no rules” is in fact a rule in itself, because if you wanted to impose a rule on the music you’d find yourself forbidden to do so. If I went into any given avant-garde group and said ‘Let’s play It Could Happen To You like it is off Relaxin’,” I’d better be real ready to find another gig. A truly limitless group (in terms of emotionally limitless and technically limitless) wouldn’t be unwilling or unable to do that, and so far I don’t know of a single group of players that can do any style of music from all of human history whenever they want. It simply isn’t possible—so rules, tenets, and guidelines always exist in art, no matter how much or how badly we want to liberate ourselves. This leads into the second point—that Ornette’s music certainly has a rule or a logical system. This is, as verified by a few personal investigations, 110% accurate. When I choose to play like Ornette, I keep several things in mind: 1) Ornette’s unique and multidirectional view on harmony. Yes, Ornette has a harmonic concept—he wouldn’t be able to write for large classical ensembles if he didn’t. The way it works is essentially through understanding each note’s role in a plurality of harmonies. This has been written about often, but it bears repeating. This is how it works with the note C: C could be --the root of Cmaj7 --the third of Ab7 --the ninth of Bbmin7 --the seventh of Dbmaj7 --the fourth of Gsus7 --etc etc et al Because Western music works under the implicit assumption of tonal gravity (eg. This note has happened a bunch, so we can resolve to it), many of Ornette’s pieces have a pitch that serve as a resolution point. Ornette’s concept (which he titles harmolodics—to be transparent, many people see the title as a macguffin) is how one can justify or reason with many of his melodic choices. For example, Lonely Woman’s resolution point is the note D. Through this method, we can justify having an F or an F# as the third (D being the root of Dmaj or Dmin), and if you listen to Ornette that’s EXACTLY how he treats the harmony, and how he has consistently treated that harmony throughout his career. It’s a qualifiable concept. 2) Ornette, more than any player before him save perhaps Bird, exploits the sound and registers of his instrument. There’s a Downbeat article by Cannonball Adderley where he states something to the effect of “Ornette has discovered that the alto saxophone has 32 available natural pitches”. To Ornette, high Bb is inherently much different than low Bb in terms of emotional content—the basis of which likely arises from the timbre each one has on the saxophone. This means that when Ornette has an idea, it’s one that couldn’t be executed in any other register and mean the same thing—and what a given thing means in a register depends wholly on the instrument playing it and on the sound of the player with the idea. 3) Ornette’s source material is American folk music. His work always draws on it in one way or another, no matter how hairy the harmonic situation or strange the ensemble. This means that by studying things like hymns, Delta blues singers, and early jazz musicians, one can gain a pretty decent perspective on Ornette's music. I think Pat Harbison once used the phrase “blues player but not tied to a key or tempered pitch”—and while I think there’s a little more to it, that’s a great place to start. So with all these rules, it falls to reason that Ornette’s system can be taught. Having done so with many players, I assure you that this is 100% correct—but also 100% another blog post. (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.)
_____________________________________________________________________________ So about a week ago I got a chance to see the free jazz colossus Peter Evans at Dreamland in Louisville. Of course, it was incredible. Hamid Drake and William Parker were the rhythm section. I was in the front row, very close to Hamid (who plays drumset like baguazhang masters fight) and immediately across from Peter. He played tenor for a total of 30 minutes in a 2-hour continuous set, and it was some of the most electrifying playing I've heard out of anyone. The last tune, he started with this saxophone invocation that was so loud the whole room of ~70 people startled. I could go on and on about dozens of aspects of Peter's playing--his control over timbre, his animal power--but one stood out in particular. When Peter played, it didn't sound improvised. I'm not saying he was rehashing old ideas or resting on his laurels; that would be ankle-biting and wholly inaccurate. I'm not saying it was dull or uninteresting; this was the first time in a long time I ignored a rhythm section to listen to the horn player, including an experience I had seeing Wayne Shorter. I am saying, though, that it sounded like those notes had always been there, and Peter was just tapping into them. I in no sense got the feeling that he was developing motives or ideas (where, in contrast, Drake and Parker did nothing but that), but that he was playing ideas that had been developed already, far far away. What Peter did felt more like launching a kayak into rapids and then emerging back on the bank downstream; the rider was not responsible for the water he traveled in. The parallel between notated music that SOUNDS improvised and what I heard that Friday at Dreamland has been turning over in my head ever since. Take the classical tradition of the Impromptu, for example. Typically a piano piece, it's made to capture the two strengths of improvising and composing--the intensity of energy and power that comes from immediate thought, and the enviable ability to self-edit. To this end, it should sound like a stream-of-consciousness idea. One long breath that captures the thought of the moment, and (more importantly) that cannot be divorced of the personality of the player. This is, of course, opposed to what one usually hears in a classical work, which is the presentation of the ideas of another person. There tends to be that detached aspect; if you're used to hearing a Sonny Rollins, say, with all the personal shading he puts in his playing, it's easy to tell when that personal aspect is gone from the soloist in a Mendelsohn work. I have a few examples of classical soloists who manage to make the works they play come under their personality (Hakan Hardenberger comes to mind). But never before have I heard someone who improvised like Peter, where it sounded like the music had been there all along, waiting for someone to give it voice. This is likely an idea that I'll turn over for a long time. (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.)
Like a lot of us, I came up through the music education system. Jazz in intermediate school, middle school, jazz in high school, now jazz in college. Literally tens of thousands of hours put into learning the music and the instrument. Guys referred me to Basie, Ellington, Miles, Trane, Horace, every kind of Sonny--a listening list so long, if I actually came through on my promises to check it out I'd be done with it probably right about now. So it's a little bit of a mystery to me why it took so long for me to discover the Tristano school, and why nobody guided me to it. To be clear, I'm not about to go to that time-hallowed cry of the twenty-something college blogger--this is somehow representative of the white voice being historically suppressed in jazz. That's not true at all in terms of what I receive in my education. I got taught about Sammy Nestico, Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker/Gerry Mulligan, and even a little bit about Brad Mehldau, so that hypothesis is out. And I don't really think more needs to be said about the relationship of the Tristano school to the overall atmosphere of race relations in their heyday than hasn't already been enumerated in books like "An Unsung Cat". So if it's not that, then what? Why are so few guys familiar with Warne, or Lee, or Lennie? I had the weird experience of mentioning Warne to one of the most educated students I know (smart, lovely guy, great player) and getting a blank-slate stare. Now, this did give me the pleasure of spamming him with every Warne recording on Youtube and watching his brain explode, but it got me thinking. Specifically, it got me to realize that for whatever reason, the Tristano school isn't considered 'necessary' or 'required' by the pedagogy at large. (I say at large because I know somewhere there's some ardent Lee-ite in a university position who makes his students learn Palo Alto in all 12 keys, and they hate it). Which is fascinating to me, because it ties in with the ongoing discussion in the pedagogy about balancing art and personal development with a curriculum that you can grade. And for the most part, that comes out of developing a strong basis in bebop (because it opens so many doors to so many musics and helps with the whole 'developing proficiency' side of the conservatory) and then testing the student on it the way you would test them on a subject like science. Unlike some of the cats I go to school with, I don't have a major problem with that. It suits me well, to be honest, and I've got most of a BS in Biology to prove it. Where I think the potential issue is happens when the student graduates and they don't know anything beyond what they were taught and what they like to listen to anyway--so the poor guy goes on playing 'jazz-with-Da-vid Ba-ker' for the rest of his life (and he also might not emotionally know the historical context of that lick, but that's probably another post). The end result is, of course, a legion of young cats who can play real fast but have a hard time getting their own sound to come out. And that's what the Tristano School--not the ideological concept, but the brick building Lennie taught out of--was all about! Listen to the major pianists of the school; Ronnie Ball sounds nothing like Sal Mosca, who both sound NOTHING like Connie Crothers--and none of them sound exactly like Lennie. When you read all the collected materials detailing what learning from Lennie was like, it becomes clear that it was very much emotionally and instinctively driven (learning to sing solos that you weren't required to put on the instrument, focusing on how the instrument made you feel, an intense ear training regimen). Lennie wanted you to sound like YOURSELF, not like him and not like the people you were learning with, and he did that by developing your facility and your musical instincts to a ludicrous degree. That's why there's not a collection of licks you can point to; the goal was to become so familiar with the vocabulary you could invent phrases that sounded like they'd been there all along and no longer have to refer to the things you knew. Not like I'm saying that the school was some Mount Olympus of improvisers, totally unsurpassable and unable to be improved on. There's a lot of issues in developing such an emotional connection to a mere process. A lot of guys from the Tristano school never got out from under Lennie's shadow; Warne Marsh was aiming to reform the Konitz-Tristano-Marsh axis well up until Lennie died in the 70's. It's also not very open to growth. I get the feeling that the reason that Lee was/is the guy who continues to innovate and remain vital is because he left the School relatively early, got out to check out what other people were doing, and incorporated that into his playing. I also get the feeling, though, that Lennie's way of teaching virtually guarantees each student will have a relatively strong musical identity (though maybe at the cost of personal identity, something more separate from the peers with whom you were taught). So if this is such a great way to develop an original sound, why doesn't everyone teach this way? There simply isn't enough time. A lot of the people who came back to Lennie stayed for longer than the 4 years a music school gives you, and they often came to Lennie earlier than a music school could take you (when'd Lee start studying, age 15?). To boot, the student has to be extremely dedicated to the method; take a look at the tedious ear training exercises and polyrhythm exercises associated with the school, then imagine how much more fun blowing over an F blues would be. Now you understand the struggle. In addition, how would you grade an 'original sound'? I guarantee you an undergrad jazz major at a conservative school would have a hard road uphill if they decided to adopt Connie Crothers as their primary sound model. It's also pretty difficult to teach a style you know nothing about, let alone IN a style you know nothing about. I don't know how many professors at the university level there are who know more about Tristano than 'blind white pianist, too many notes, loves Bach', let alone the intimacies/benefits of the teaching style. I'd also note that a special teacher like Lennie doesn't happen in everyone's life. Not everyone has the capacity to engage in this type of radical teaching as the leader of the class. So in regards to the subtitle--why don't I play a ton of Bird licks? Well, it kinda comes down to a quote which, ironically enough, I can't quite ascribe: "A great way to sound original is to have obscure influences." (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.)
_____________________________________________________________________________ Right what it says on the lid, kids. Nothing extra. I want the point of this blog to be an avenue for discussing WHY notes are played in jazz (and by extension, music in general) and to expand on things I'm excited about. Maybe that's a tune I'm obsessed with, maybe it's something someone at the school is doing, maybe I take a look at the cultural conditions surrounding a body of work. Maybe I take up 10 pages talking about Ives' 'Variations on America'. Strap in. I might bring a transcription in every once in a while to illustrate a point or to show something I'm working on making clearer for myself, but to be honest there are guys way better at the act of transcribing than I am and I'm not super into it as a way to understand the music beyond 'Warne Marsh played this here, whatta genius'. I'm not Ethan Iverson, so I can't imagine I'll interview too many New York heavies. I might, though, profile a fellow student's work, or reference them as someone who has an opinion I think is neat. Finally, that subtitle is no joke. I'm pushing two majors and gigging semiregularly and writing for all sizes of ensembles. The goal is update once a week, but if like a month goes by and people start grousing, remember I warned you now. I look forward to seeing what this becomes. |
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