It’s early 2020 and I am in a relatively calm period after a dynamic one. I recently returned from Korea and Japan, I just started renting a piano, and I’ve been spending time teaching and learning about mathematics.
///
I visited a woodwind store in Japan and picked up the new 100th-anniversary Florida Super Tone Master Otto Link mouthpiece. Slight frustrations with my old mouthpiece led me to try new ones in the first place, but once I started began to replacing my equipment, I got to thinking about my favorite saxophone sounds and what they possess that I lack. The tenor saxophonist Harold Land has always occupied a special place for me; he is vastly underrated and underrepresented, but this makes him a ripe influence for the picking. The slight tragedy of his career is that once John Coltrane ascended, his impact on Land was so great that some part of Land’s natural style'/personality got swallowed up. Land’s genius came to be in 1950’s bebop, and the subtlety and flexibility he brought to that style didn’t fit the same with the modal style of the 1960’s and beyond. A similar trajectory holds for his tone: in the 50’s, with Clifford Brown, the bluesy, textured core of his sound was tempered by a certain coolness; he rarely pushed past mezzo-forte, his tonguing is light but consistent, he ghosts notes at the beginnings and ends of phrases so that his lines are like slick fish popping out from the surface of the water but then sliding back under without a splash. But once Coltrane’s influence took over, Land’s tone often came across as over-exerted or uncontrolled at higher dynamics. He replaced his bluesy swagger for a bluesy screaming urgency, but others did the latter better. Virtually no one could touch him on the former, though! My biggest hope in purchasing a dark metal mouthpiece was to emulate Land’s multidimensional tone from the 50s: a semi-roughened center that sits comfortably in medium dynamics, plus some softly singing overtones that surround the dark core with a halo.
One of my favorite recordings featuring Harold Land is Study in Brown from 1955. The track Jacqui is a personal favorite that features the best of Land’s bebop style. The A sections are standard B-flat major bebop fare, but the bridge is a blues in B major, a key so rarely heard in bebop. Land takes a perfect mini-solo over the end of the first bridge; the foreign key poses no challenge. Notice how his dynamics mirror the contour of his lines and how both of his phrases finish with the most delicious cherry-on-top notes. The soft notes still pop and swing; the loud notes flirt with pathos without going overboard. It’s incredibly tasteful.
Land’s chorus after Clifford Brown’s solo is similarly perfect. He has the best turns in the game; rather than using a triplet turn to correct the parity of a bebop line or to cheaply signify bebop authenticity, Land plays turns to highlight a beat, to intensify an inflection point within a line. I love how each phrase of the first 16 bars inches up his range. Track the highest note of each line until the bridge, and you’ll hear Land turning up the heat a single notch at a time. Lastly, the variance in rhythmic position of the beginnings and ends of lines is perfectly balanced. I classify (4/4 swing) phrases as beginning or ending on the odd downbeat, odd upbeat, even downbeat, or even upbeat, so that there are 16 possible combination of start and end. All too often I hear the same pairs over and over: beginning players almost always start phrases on odd downbeats; these days, I hear many players my age repeatedly ending phrases on odd upbeats, which is really only swinging in moderation. Land mixes it up, and that variation imbues his playing with the supremely important element of bebop surprise. (Good rappers know this well!)
///
When my new piano was delivered, I made a beeline for Bach. I instantly discovered my piano-playing fingers had atrophied to basically nothing! The only benefit: when one sucks, one must play Bach very slowly, so every moment really sinks in. I rekindled my love affair with the A major prelude from WTC Book I. To me, this short piece exemplifies one of Bach’s great miracles: the thematic material strongly keeps its identity throughout yet seems infinitely mutable as it moves through keys and voices. In contrast to many fugues and other contrapuntally dense/imitative Bach pieces, this prelude always has the spotlight on one voice and one voice only. The way the other two move out of the way for this is flawless. The balance of steps and leaps is similarly flawless. I find that both staccato and legato renditions of this piece work; usually I gravitate towards bouncier, pluckier Bach, but these lines have a certain passionate liquidity when played connected. The best moment of the piece is probably the appearance of the theme in the relative minor, almost exactly halfway though. The chromatic notes are so good, and the way one voice launches another is totally engrossing.
///
I have plunged deeply into SoundCloud at various times, and perhaps my most prized discovery is Cryptovolans, who can only be described as a MIDI genius. CV’s magisterial album Global Understanding is an excellent place to start. The music lives somewhere between an obscure JRPG aoundtrack, advanced prog rock, and music by a hyper-complex composer like Ferneyhough, except that in stark contrast to the latter two categories, this music sounds good. It is no less bewildering, though! Half of the fun of this album is mentally gripping an individual moment of beauty, like finding a shell on the shore; the other half of the fun is being unpredictably punched over and over again until you are forced to submit and let the music steamroll.
I have endless admiration and respect for Cryptovolans and other similar composers. I have nowhere close to this level of MIDI skill, and the difference is really one of kind, not just degree. That is, I cannot even imagine how one undertakes a composition project like this, and that mystery draws me in even deeper. Are algorithms at play? Randomness? Intuition? “Typing” versus “performing?” I couldn’t tell you, but if I could, I wouldn’t. This music is proof of the power of computers and numbers for classical composition! It is moreover proof that the musical/aesthetic soil that fed my generation is sprouting some beautiful, novel, astounding artists. Children who spent hours and hours interfacing with computers through videogames and other programs have their own kind of classical training!