The development in style, technique, and meaning in jazz's first century stands as one of the great examples of achievement in music. The century of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane — wow! — and all of those men were born before 1930. The basic pattern that brings us to day is an alternation between technical development and reward-reaping: sowing and harvesting. The 50s and 60s, easy to point to as the two golden pillars rising high in the middle of the historical curve, each grew their own fruit which hung low and ripe. Bird blows open the door; we all walk through. It would be harder not to! It is as if a vacuum sucks us into the world of bebop. So too with modal jazz; the theory is too easy not to learn and you are expected to know how to rip chord scales even as an 18-year-old entering jazz school today.
But as always happens with low-hanging fruit, the pickings get real slim real fast. The old vectors of progress have dried up and I am both surprised and disappointed that new ones haven't been picked up with as much fury as I'd've hoped. What do I mean? Well, for one, jazz harmony has not gotten any better in a long time. The list of viable time signatures is finite as heck. We are still playing more or less the same instruments in the same ways. All of this is OK — I still want to produce a beautiful tenor saxophone sound and play 9ths and 13ths over romantic chord progressions, swinging in 4/4. I hope that never goes away. But that is not all we are here to do.
Jazz relies on both conservative and progressive spirits. The most exciting musicians intertwine both. Mingus as multi-dimensional psychedelic Duke Ellington, or Monk as Duke in a hall of shattering mirrors. We inherit this tension and are duty-bound to confront it, to pull on it and intensify its components. But it is far from obvious how to proceed 100 years into the story. It's not hard to come up with new harmony, but to get jazz musicians to digest that new harmony enough to improvise with it — that's a ton of work. As for rhythm — what a tricky puzzle to attempt to deepen the idea of swing! You can, of course, stack tuplets and odd times into a house of cards, but once again the improvisation challenge rears its head. It is hard to convince even an open-minded band to forget everything they know and rebuild jazz improvisation from the ground up, especially considering the economic conditions of jazz in the 2020s.
Let's take stock. Quick, back-of-the-envelope:
- Harmony leaves not much room for development, for a number of reasons.
- Rhythm is the same; the difficulty of new ideas diminishes their worth so that they pale in comparison to the exuberant swinging past.
- Composition struggles to transcend the formula of head-solo-head, or more generally, alternating two modes: written melody supported by semi-improvised accompaniment; and group improvisation with focus on a soloist. And the truth is that most listeners do not perceive or care about large-scale compositional decisions.
- Instruments have hardly changed at all. The electric guitar has enjoyed some development, and the Fender Rhodes eked out a place in the uncontroversial roster. But jazz is still more or less a game of saxophones, trumpets, acoustic piano, upright bass, and the drumset as it existed in the 1950s.
I can come up with counterexamples to all of the above, and I'm sure you can too, but they are exceptions to the status quo.
Zooming out:
- Jazz musicians play ~50 minute sets, likely two a night, of about 7 tunes each.
- They record albums that represent one such set. Recordings take place in fancy studios with expensive microphones, and the mixing engineers make sure they are as undetectable as possible. You are supposed to be able to pretend you are in a club, hearing every detail exactly as it would happen.
- Nobody buys the albums, but young students seek out hot, fast solos on standards they recognize. You gain notoriety if someone can excise a YouTube clip from a larger performance and bless it with a violent verb: "destroy," "kill," "obliterate," ...
This status quo will spiral itself into the dust if we allow it. But that is sad. It will make me sad and I am already sad enough.
I wish I could answer questions like:
- Where are all the synthesizers and other new instruments?
- Where are all the computers?
- Where are all the records that don't sound "like that?" (You probably know what I mean!)
Or, asked in another way:
Where is the new low-hanging fruit? Where are the areas of (jazz) music where technology and culture have ripened new vectors of progress, so that our progressive wing gains some ammunition in its fight against the embalming forces of jazz schools and boomer-dominated audiences?
Before your answer, remember not to neglect the conservative restoring force. The new music still has to sound like jazz, at least to the people who like jazz.
I have an answer. The fruit I picked didn't hang so low and I ain't got the saxophone talent to complete the package I envisioned. But now that I am out of New York and in a state of negative relevance, I don't even feel bad about my complaints and misgivings. My goal is to crack open a door that has been shut long enough. My answer is not the only answer. But it got me out of bed enough times in a row to dump my bank account into a tar pit and to birth not one, but two new links on Bandcamp dot com.
In a word: dismantle the illusion of realism. Get wild with editing. Pull your imagination out of your head.
~ ~ ~
These recent two records, _High Firmament_ and _Ferment Below_, took a lot more time and energy than the last one, _Connectedness_. Click around for four seconds and you'll hear why. What is going on? Why? How? For the sake of posterity if nothing else, I'll walk through the process.
-1.
A few months go by after _Connectedness_ comes out. I take some saxophone lessons. As a result, I rethink my embouchure and start using the softest reeds. I hatch an idea of being a "Lester Young dissident"/"Coleman Hawkins zealot." Sibelius files keep popping up on my desktop (that used to happen a lot — now, not so much). I play with some new people and a saxophone player a million times better than me utters the magic phrase: "sounds great, man." I believe him in that moment — I *had* just played really loud.
These are the conditions under which new-album-projects are undertaken. I am especially motivated because my wife and I have come to realize our time in New York would come to a close sooner than later. The usual pursuits ensue: compile and edit the tunes, find the band, work out a budget. Rehearse, book the studio, then show up and turn on the mics. Straightforward enough.
0.
But the little devil on my shoulder asks — no, *begs* — for *more*. "You will feel like such a hypocrite if you record *just* an album." I call Lee. We work out details pertaining to reality — set up two versions of every microphone so that we can play with two mixes for two albums — and dream past reality.
"What if you, like, changed train tracks from one take to the other? And you feel all the sparking, grinding friction on the way there."
"You won't know til you try."
We chat intermittently.
"I don't want to throw away anything good from any take. I want it all to be there."
"I get that."
1.
We record thirteen tunes over two days. One comes out so bad I put it on its own hard drive, delete it from all others, and then drive over that one with a hippopotamus. Twelve is way more divisible by two than thirteen is, anyway. As for the rest, we played the way we played. Honest accounts, live, one room, few takes of each. Casual. No need to reveal my schemes when I don't know what they are yet or if there will be schemes at all...
And yet, in the back of my mind... _we're rippin' *all* the meat off these bones._
2.
First things first: make it sound good. Make it sound like jazz. More work than usual: two mixes for two albums. One brighter and crisper, the other smokier and boozier. Nothin' but minor hiccups along the way; Lee and I have done this before, together. A few weeks of work and it sounds good indeed. Like jazz indeed.
3.
The little shoulder devil raises his voice. "More...more!...Not enough!"
OK, OK. Let's get serious.
~ digression ~
One of my main theses is that jazz musicians underuse the studio. There is so much you can do, so much money we leave on the table, over and over. The whole point of these albums is to take a big wobbly step into that frontier. But that's not all. I've been lucky enough to stick with music into an age where everyone still playing is pretty good, where the trials of professionalism can melt into afterthoughts. But skill in the fundaments of music doesn't translate to *managerial* skill. It feels like bile coming out of my mouth, but I have to admit that jazz musicians have something to learn from (some small part of) the corporate world. Every jazz record is on a shoestring budget of both time and money; that is where a...*puke*...startup manager thrives. I'm not saying you should plan a trip to Patagonia's vest wing. Not at all. We are all so much cooler than that, I agree. But there is art and science behind managing people, managing time, managing money. **It will make your records better.** Do not fear the spreadsheet. Call people on the phone. Talk *for real*. Timelines, budgets, itemized rehearsal schedules... please, believe me! I ain't the man, man; it's not about turning jazz Silicon-Valley; but when you are piloting that big ship into these choppy, unforgiving waters, you need to be sure you have the right crew and the right resources. You are a manager _whether you like it or not._
~ back to story-time ~
Lee is on board. I allude, to the rest of the band, to the idea of "crazy editing" but don't get much response. My impression is that they are not proud of the session or otherwise not proud to be involved. The people I hire are used to playing with *really* good saxophone players who play both gigs and fast. An Instagram-account-sized hole in my resume further shields me from impressing anyone.
So the band doesn't care. No problem — I paid them to play, not to care. My secret weapon Lee is locked and loaded. But the wild empty space in front of us sends a shiver. We stand at the edge of a cliff on the side of the mountain of a century of jazz recordings. An Ornette-gust whips by. We see, in the distance, the great river Charles and its tributaries: Mingus, Parker, Ives.
But what the **heck** do we, uh, actually do? Talk is cheap! Open ProTools and get to work!
4.
The cheapness of talk means we can afford lots of it. I spray metaphor after metaphor at Lee on the phone. Not enough — gotta get the hands dirty.
A strategy from mathematics: solve an easier version of the problem first. Compress it down to a lower dimension then build it back up if you must.
First up in the lab, _Hot Rain Dance_. It is the perfect choice because it is:
Repetitive and self-similar — only 8 bars of melodic content;
Energetic — hard to imagine "too much drums" on that one;
"Over-recorded" — we got five takes, none of which is a complete dud.
In the language of information theory, _Hot Rain Dance_ builds in a lot of redundancy so that it can support a lot of entropy.
But studio-recorded music (especially how we did it, with twice the mics we needed) can get unwieldy on account of all the separate tracks, effects, automation curves. Plus, Lee is a big ProTools boy and I am a little Ableton baby. We ain't about to figure out that translation process.
I will hew it rough and Lee will grind it smooth. Or something like that.
5 rows in Ableton: each one rough mix of _Hot Rain Dance_. Start stupid: line up the first notes and press play. *gulp.*
Whoa!
The lightning bolt hits Frankenstein's monster. My built-up doubt bursts and melts away. **It's going to work.**
5.
But of course it sounds like garbage. What did you expect? No click track. Open form. And, duh, each take is not aware of the others. But if there's anything I'm good at, it's fishing babies out of bathwater.
~ advice ~
If you are hired to be an editor, a critic, a cleaner-upper — yeah, be a dick. Critique without remorse. Without any ruth whatsoever. You can and should do this to your own music, too, of course, but only _after_ you have tried on the opposite hat. The hat of curiosity, forgiving, wonderment. Find the best moments, the diamonds in the rough, and expand outward from those. The generator and the editor play dual roles and they *need* each other despite their rivalry and personality-mismatch.
~ sorry ~
*Five* _Hot Rain Dances_. What sounds good? Four are close to the same tempo and one's a bit faster. The composite sounds good in two ways: the muscular, choir-like almost-unison of the four beefs up the ritualistic sound of the composition. The fast black sheep #5 phases against the others. That sounds good too! When your entire tune is E-flat minor 7 to A-flat 7, over and over, everything sounds good on everything. The phasing hypnotizes — "I could hang out here forever." The [B] section shatters the mellow: driving swing, clever changes, not starting even remotely together. Not going to work. But that's alright. One win already: the hypnotic phasing vamp — put it in your pocket.
Line up all the [B] sections to start together. Cacophony. Disgusting. How about just two?
*Hey, this ain't half bad. There's something here.*
Jazz + Jazz = Jazz. That formula is true only if Jazz is zero or represents a kind of infinity. I will leave that call to you.
6.
I hack together a composite _Hot Rain Dance_ with big, rough, ugly cuts. The result is covered all over with blemishes but to my ears, the gems speak for themselves.
"Lee, check this out."
I sympathize with him in advance. It's one thing to butcher up a few rough mixes to highlight a moment or two of novelty; it's another to be responsible for scrubbing out the nasty bits and to hone the promising parts into confident, gleaming statements. But Lee is the man for the job, and boy does he understand the assignment.
The job gets so much easier with "one on the board." I unleash Lee and offer a few guidances:
Don't leave any good music on the cutting-room-floor.
This time, less is *not* more. More is more.
Use the "main" take — i.e. the best one — as the timeline, replacing the sterile absolute-time ruler of the DAW.
And most of all, **trust your ears.** And so the process unfolds, two tunes at a time (so that we never slam too hard into one wall). I send a hypothesis, in words, of how to tackle a tune. Lee sends back an audio file, a first pass. More often than not, the main idea works: the approximate proportions and mix of the layers strike something resembling balance. Lucky, but not unearned — you have no idea how many times I listen, imagine, re-listen, re-imagine, ...
7.
We work, slowly but steadily. Our confidence compounds as we knock 'em out. Patterns — I won't go so far as to say *theorems* — emerge:
The free-time stuff is the easiest. The "rhythm section rumble" texture sits on itself happily. Rumble-on-rumble is just more rumble. Lining up beginnings or endings of melodies gives enough togetherness to convince you that it's still real music. Then the problem becomes one of mixing: sound rather than content.
You can get a lot out of playing with the axis of focus. If a single stream is mixed loud and in the center, it will come through as such even if there's a lot going on behind it. Spread the focus across two or three streams so that none dominates: totally different effect, much blurrier and dreamier. In the end, something like two-thirds of the project adopts the first style (singular focus plus support), and the other third skews blurry, in the second style.
You ain't as creative as you might think. We all ended up playing a lot of the same stuff. "Pure" improvisation is a total myth. In the multi-layering game, you can leverage this "as coincidence" or to create semi-imitative counterpoint. In the final version of _Plucky_, for instance, the tenor solo begins with two takes at once, and in both, the very first phrase starts *and* ends in the same place. No planning — I promise — but it sounds great as a twisty stack. Own it — that's your style, not a weakness of imagination.
Panning really matters. Much more than I realized.
Short-transient sounds like cymbal hits can be dangerous. Two saxophone notes, with all their weirdnesses of envelope, can sit next to each other and sound great, but two ride cymbal pings that are a little off: not great. They compete and interfere. Pushing the "second drummer" way into the back of the mix helps — sounds more like delay than sloppy flams. A strategy we liked: stretch secondary takes in 1/2/4 bar chunks so that their downbeats line up with the main take's. Nip and tuck, readjust as you go. It still swings even with the micro-phasing that happens in the middle of phrases.
Don't fear the bleed. We recorded everything live in one room. This was so that we could have fun and feel good (important!) in the session, but it also pre-inoculated my mind against the temptation to get too surgical with this whole layering game. Music is so much more than a sum of individual instruments playing things. Timing, tuning, drama: these are all *relative* phenomena, meaningless without context. That context comes from the other players. Yeah, bass is tricky. But most people mix bass way too loud and way too clear anyway. As an example, the final product of _Short Way Around the Hill_ used zero of the many instrument mics we set up. We used only the room mics. Two takes, side-by-side the whole way through, continually adjusted so that they don't get _too_ far off.
Don't die by your own principles. We came up with all sorts of heuristics and high-level plans for each tune, and those got us about 75% of the way there. But we broke every rule we came up with too. This boils back down to *trust your ears.* Your ear will tell you what to do. It may be faint and diffident at first but the answer is there. The pride of sticking-to-a-plan simply ain't worth it.
~ ~ ~
Lee can comment on the details of the technical and organizational work that made this possible at all. Maybe I can even persuade him to write his own account of the process. I won't pretend to know how he did what he did, how he balanced the boldness of the editing with the watchmakerly touch of a mixing engineer. But he did it.
After seven months of continual work, we finished off two albums, one "bright" and one "dark." Twelve tunes, none of which was merely a single take as it happened. We felt that just about everything good we recorded was in there. Maybe not up-front and in-focus, but in there somewhere.
The whole story, start-to-finish, took a bit under a year. The idea to record something at all grabbed me in the summer of 2022. Unlike with my last record, I didn't compose specifically for this project — just picked out tunes that I had been playing and workshopping and arranged them, rather loosely, into a couple sets. We rehearsed like four times, late summer-early fall. We recorded October 16-17. The first stage of mixing took around a month and then all the wild editing was another six. Printed the record May 2023. A lot of work (which means money too), but that's how it is — this project emboldened my faith in some kind of "conservation of energy" that applies to musical work. There is no magic bullet...not even the computer!
I bring up the timeline only to exhort others to work more on their records in more ambituous ways. You can do so much, in not that long, dropping a coin of work into the jar every day. I dream of a continual stream of "I've never heard anything like this before" releases. It bugs me to no end that all the creativity and progressivism of jazz musicians seems to wilt away the second they step foot in a recording studio, as if they are ignoring the hyper-multi-dimensional world of possibilities that opens in those holy spaces.
Be warned, though: once you acquire a taste for studio-rat behavior, it won't leave your lips without a fight. _High Firmament_ and _Ferment Below_ could have been put together by a strange elf with scissors and tape; _Leavin' Town_ won't be — no, not at all! of course not — "normal"; the big box of many dice — the **COMPUTER** — enters the fray.