The futures of jazz and creative music

Still at home. Still lucky enough that COVID-19 hasn’t attacked anyone in my immediate circle, but the recent deaths of two heroes, John Conway and Lee Konitz, make the virus feel like the Grim Reaper. It’s not clear that those two giants were going to make career leaps had the virus not swept them away, so the loss is perhaps not as tragic as the untimely deaths of younger, undiscovered geniuses. The pandemic has compressed the continuous drip of death into a nasty spike, further cementing the fact that we are entering a new era. A big question is, “will Lee Konitz’ career die with Lee Konitz?” which is a way of asking what the future of live and recorded jazz will be once the short-term crisis is ameliorated. For ~70 years, despite many signs of progress, the world has been more stagnant than perhaps was expected. Computer technology is the outlier; if you took away all the screens, how would you know it wasn’t the 1970’s? Or, where are the revolutions in medicine, ecology, psychology, transportation, energy, etc. that should have accompanied the computer revolution? And, even if it is a bit sad to say, jazz has not really gotten better since the death of John Coltrane in 1967. Few titans remain from before then, and the “middle generation” that came of age afterwards has survived on 1) institutional backing and 2) the diminishing possibility of surviving as a gigging jazz musician. Will it really be possible for someone my age to forge a career as a jazz musician the way, say, Sonny Rollins or Dave Liebman did, playing club dates, touring, and/or teaching at jazz colleges? Record deals are ridiculously scarce and maybe not so helpful in the first place; for the time being, there are zero live gigs to be played, and even before COVID, the pickings were rather slim. MSM and Berklee only have so many job openings, and to be honest, I get the sense that jazz colleges aren’t fooling kids into paying exorbitant sums as they used to… probably for the best; the emphasis on college, especially for artists, will likely decline in the coming years.

So what are these brilliant young musicians supposed to do? Many are in debt without skills that pay the bills during a pandemic. I would like to hope that people who are stuck at home are picking up new instruments and that my friends can teach them, but that seems unlikely to be a robust survival plan. Live-streamed concerts fail to capture some essential Dionysian magic, for jazz especially. Home recording is an option for some but certainly not all, and even so, then what? Bandcamp/SoundCloud release to a few dozen people? I am asking all these questions without having answers. I have predicted to friends that the next frontier in creative (American) music will be computational, at the intersection of videogames and music as we know it now. Just as American jazz picked up the torch of enjoyable yet creative/progressive tonal music from European Romanticism in the early 20th century, composers, programmers, and designers will probably take the torch from jazz as we go deeper into the 21st. Common practice European classical music became institutional museum music; it only survives as such, and its direct descendants in the classical academic world are thriving in certain sense, but at the expense of scale and accessibility. It is not hard to find the corresponding story for jazz. The “deal with the devil” that jazz made with educational institutions safeguarded it from totally languishing into obscurity, but probably also sealed its fate as eventual museum music from the 20th century. Wynton Marsalis leads this project, and though many of my peers disapprove of his work, I actually think it’s for the best, and probably necessary for the survival of jazz. My approval of this project is partly rooted in my prediction that the up-and-coming punk geniuses of music will gravitate towards aforementioned computational formats the same way that those kinds of kids gravitated towards jazz improvisation in the last handful of decades. Wynton pushes to exalt jazz because as a historical phenomenon, it has yet to fully enjoy the respect it deserves. Part of his claim is that the major arc of jazz is complete; the Bach-Mozart-Beethoven-Wagner legacy may have its jazz answer in Armstrong-Parker-Coltrane-Marsalis. Indeed, there exist significant musicians in their respective styles after both of those arcs, but the trajectories are inward rather than outward. One can argue that Wagner set in motion the impending doom of tonality and enabled the impulses towards abstraction, esotericism, and ultra-specialization, Babbitt being the ultimate flowering of that impulse. The story in jazz is of course different but comparable. The early progressive albums of Marsalis, like Black Codes, feel like mature saturations of the ideas of the mid 1960’s, suggesting that other jazz artists should find other paths, outside that dominant central culture. Herbie and Wayne had done a good job of changing with the times while others basically kept to their old scripts and rode the waves of their earlier careers. (Joe Henderson showed some reflections of the 1970s, for example, but really he was playing 60’s jazz until he died. Keith Jarrett and Paul Bley survived by putting piano improvisational genius on display without deviating too far from standard practice; Barry Harris, Kenny Barron, and others were even more conservative but the same idea applies.) Despite the successful ventures of The Bad Plus, Eric Lewis, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Logan Richardson, and other jazz artists who drew on rock and popular music from after the 1950s, it may (unfortunately, to some) be the case that jazz improvisation, at least the theoretical descendant of bebop, is best suited to the song structures of the era it came from. In other words, the arc of post-bebop is finite, and was doomed to wither in the 1970’s and beyond, not to be resuscitated by rock, hip hop, or whatever. Cuban and Brazilian musics were, then, lucky pairings. But that is not to say jazz improvisation is done forever — one can still play in the old styles, and who knows? perhaps Middle Eastern music or some other musical culture will provide new soil for jazz to till. The point is that it’s likely time for jazz to crystallize its history and start transitioning away from a punk artform toward an exalted, institutionally supported one.

I think you get the picture if you know a little classical music history and a little jazz history. Getting back to the social/economic point, I wonder if there will be a “fork” among my friends and peers: will some stick to traditions, cling to jazz and hopefully survive off of gigs and maybe some institutional backing down the road, while others move towards other formats of musicmaking that are less traditional but more cutting-edge or at least more connected to modern technology? If this split happens, both positions will be tough. The competition for traditional jazz gigs, tours, and teaching positions will surely be fierce and defeating. On the other hand, if progressive music moves towards computation, games, VR, or whatever, those of us who spent years on instrumental technique and historical listening may feel that our skills are not relevant enough, that we “missed the boat.” There will be successes and failures on both sides. We can only hope that the peaks are very high and that the valleys are not too low.

COVID-19 and Bartok

At the time of writing, late March 2020, the world is in an unignorable state. The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has reached the level of pandemic: thousands have died and probably hundreds of thousands are sick, and those numbers will exponentially increase in the near future. New York City is in pseudo-lockdown; we are encouraged to practice “social distancing” and the vast majority are either working from home or not working at all.

A major discontinuity in global society reminds us of the paradox of the size of the world. On one hand, the world feels small right now: a single virus has taken control of almost every corner of the globe and it is thus easier than ever before to empathize across vast social and geographical distances. The nature of exponential growth is such that no number is too large to conquer: unfettered, the spread of such a virus across all of humanity is just a matter of time, and not that much time, either. On the other hand, the world is still huge: efforts to “flatten the curve” will likely mean that despite the infectiousness of this virus, something like 1% of people in a given area will get it, and about 1% of those will die, meaning 9,999 of every 10,000 people will be more or less OK at the end of this. Personally, I still don’t know anyone with coronavirus, and I would not be surprised if nobody in my circle ever gets it. It is hard to mentally hold both of these size-observations at once. I hope my prediction about 9,999/10,000 being OK comes true; I try not to entertain the thought of a total global meltdown…

Focusing on musicians, I feel for those who previously went all in on playing live and especially with others. I am lucky that much of my musical energy is spent alone and that I don’t rely solely on live performance for income. For the less fortunate, I can only hope that the current restrictions breed creative solutions…I look forward to the outpouring of music at the end of this ordeal. Now is a good time to buy albums for a change, and to get back into listening to music at home, not just during commutes and exercises. I guess in such uncertain times, one might as well gamble on optimism.

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Today is one of the three days between the birthdays of two of the biggest Bs: Bach (March 21) and Bartok (March 25). I have been playing through Bartok’s second string quartet on the piano, trying to get into the details and all that. The second quartet forms a natural pairing with the first; those are the “romantic” quartets that come before the darker, harsher third and the progressive rock of the fourth and fifth. I had always preferred the first; it is easier to follow and I claim that as Bartok’s first masterpiece, it lays out a proof of concept or “abstract” for the rest of his career: a movement of post-Wagnerian heavy romanticism, a movement of uneasy musical symmetry, and a movement of raw folk energy. But now the second quartet is growing on me. It mixes those three colors rather than separates them by movement, and the romanticism/symmetry blend is particularly gorgeous. In the first movement, chord motion is so frequent and continuous that is impossible to hear a key center for more than a moment, and the keys of motives indicate large-scale architecture more than the fleeting tonalities do. Chords with symmetrical “cores” (for instance, an augmented triad plus one extra note a half step from a chord tone) are always close to their transpositions and inversions, and these structures afford Bartok much harmonic agility while also homogenizing the general sound of the sections, so that dissonant chords don’t “pop out” of a texture of simpler consonant ones. In other words, he manages to import all of the wonderful structural features of more traditionally tonal music into a mysterious world. This is different than the contemporaneous composers Schoenberg and Webern in their “free atonality” period. Those composers sought to express totally new ideas with totally new machinery, perhaps at the expense of a coherent system (12-tone music was the system that came about when Schoenberg felt too adrift in atonal freedom). That music speaks for itself; it is beautiful and important, but Bartok showed, at the same time, that one did not need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. Old structures could be wrought into new ones; romanticism and atonality could flirt with each other and compromise.

The timing of the second string quartet is noteworthy, too. It was written amidst the throes of World War I, a far more terrible tragedy than COVID-19 (unless, God forbid, things get shockingly bad in April and beyond). The War shut down Bartok’s ethnomusicological expeditions but also probably forced him to really focus and extract as much as he could from his material. That shows in the quartet, where ideas are juiced to the max and little moments appear and reappear with the subtlest variations. An inspiring message: “You have enough! Make it work!” In the score, I am impressed with the organization of the rehearsal numbers: each labeled chunk clearly features a single idea or mechanism, so that a whole movement is a well-fastened chain of little episodes. There are macro-forms on top, but I find it easiest to listen and admire one chapter at a time. Last thing I noticed: the voice crossings are brave and omnipresent! Flies in the face of the traditional wisdom…

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Stay inside and listen to music. Work with what you have and be romantic even in dark times.

Atmospheres of Charles Mingus

The jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus is one of my heroes. Mingus, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk form a triad of geniuses, arguably the best composers in jazz history. Wayne Shorter could make a strong claim to be of that echelon, but to my taste, his music doesn’t quite have the divine perfection of Duke, the infinite replayability of Monk, or the scope of Mingus. Shorter, Strayhorn, and Ornette might be the triad just beneath Ellington, Monk, and Mingus - better than everyone below but ever-so-slightly south of the tip top three. Oliver Nelson deserves a very high spot, as does Count Basie…. Duke Pearson is incredible, but…

Arbitrary categorization aside, Mingus has been on my mind and in my ears during recent weeks. I heard for the first time Let My Children Hear Music, a towering orchestral jazz album that Mingus thought of as a jewel in his crown. I also had my first experience with Changes One, which doesn’t possess quite the grandeur of Let My Children Hear Music but contains a definitive recording of “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love,” one of the absolute greatest Mingus compositions, and features beautiful playing by a smaller ensemble throughout. Ah Um is probably the most “perfect” Mingus album - it is as clean as his bluesy music can be, tightly arranged and executed from start to finish. As masterful as that album is, it is somewhat atypical for Mingus because of its perfection. In contrast with Ellington and Monk, the majority of Mingus’ recordings/compositions are not sparkling and pristine. Even Ellington’s lesser-known albums are composed flawlessly; and except for on a few early recordings with deficient band support, Monk was incapable of anything but the highest level of swing and the most brilliant tunes. But Mingus produced many flawed masterpieces. Large-ensemble orchestrations are occasionally clumsy; big, episodic song forms sometimes lose steam; some of his linear bebop writing feels a bit forced. But still, Mingus is the heaviest of the heavy, and the flaws in his music beg the question ‘why?’ or more concretely, ‘how is this still so good?’

My best answer is atmosphere, one of the most difficult qualities of music to master and compose deliberately. There are endless melodies that are good enough on their own; one could competently learn jazz harmony (from the perspective of composition, at least) in a matter of months; with enough years of practice, any musician could learn to swing. In other words, the basic theoretical/technical components of jazz are staunchly within reach for a fairly disciplined non-genius. But merely putting those components together doesn’t lift the music to that higher plane where one deeply feels a specific aesthetic. By contrast, when musical memories surface of the supreme jazz composers, I’d guess that what comes to mind is a set of emotional/spiritual atmospheres rather than specific moments.

Examples:

• Duke Ellington’s music, especially the earlier music that predates the Civil Rights movement, comes across as holy and exalted, living proof of graceful black excellence in an era all-too-rife with prejudice. The urgent blues aspects of Duke are counterbalanced with a certain lightness and restraint, almost a fanciness that comes from economical arranging. I have a mental image of the atmosphere of Duke Ellington - the musical equivalent of morning light coming through church windows; warmth hitting the back of the neck.

• Billy Strayhorn is, in general, easy to tell apart from Duke, for atmospheric reasons. To me, the essence of Strayhorn is the essence of New York City on a rainy night, perhaps being unsure exactly where to go after a drink or two and some secondhand smoke. Strayhorn’s dark-tinged ambiguity complements Duke’s bright clarity.

• One does not need to be told which tune is being played to envision the atmosphere midway through a Thelonious Monk set. All of his tunes and all of his bands swing in that jaunty, jagged way - lots of space between the notes, lots of kinetic energy.

• Wayne Shorter’s classic 60’s albums are imbued with a magical blend of fantasy and blues - subtle and impressionistic harmony underneath rather cute melodies. Swinging fairy tales. One hears big rumbly thunder and also small, ginger creatures in the woods.

But Mingus, to me, is even deeper than all of those composers when it comes to atmosphere. The above surely have diverse, wide-ranging output, but I can nail down a relatively slim set of atmospheric characteristics for each. Mingus, on the other hand, actively composed with a wide palette of distinct atmospheres. That is to say he could not only conjure up a specific ambiance underneath the melody, harmony, and rhythm of a musical moment, but he could juxtapose, layer, and blend many of them according to what he thought the music needed. Mingus possessed a higher-order version of an already rare musical skill. This facet of his genius is most proudly displayed in his biggest, dirtiest works. In fact, the multi-atmospheric abilities of Mingus are probably least pronounced in the comparatively clean Ah Um. But Let My Children Hear Music is quite the ride through subareas within classical music, small- and large-ensemble jazz, and the blues; the occasional clunkiness may indeed be unavoidable considering the points A, B, C, … on the album. Mingus Moves is relatively consistent, but Pithecanthropus Erectus and Charles Mingus and Friends in Concert go all over the place, dragging the listener as if by a high-speed time-travelling spaceship. The source of his atmospheric technique is not entirely clear (that’s part of what’s so mysterious and magical about it); one is tempted to point to orchestration, but it really is so much more than that - if anything, it’s a nose for sniffing out perfect orchestrations to complement harmony and melody, plus the cultural/historical awareness to predict how various layers of the music will be received. But that doesn’t really cover it, and probably nothing could. Atmospheric composition is certainly a skill that cannot be taught, maybe one that cannot be learned…. In any case, Mingus’ magic, to summarize, is how he paints with a deeper brush than just melody/rhythm/harmony/etc. - he conjures whole atmospheres, environments one can inhabit rather than merely hear. On top of that, he plays with more than a single atmosphere per composition or album; there are so many rich musical locations he builds, sometimes two or more right on top of each other.

The question then becomes, “how do I listen to this?” Does one try to mentally hold the individual atmospheres for comparison, or does one simply accept each moment and the transits between them, no matter how bewildering? Is it worth trying to untangle the thorny, layered moments, or is it better to let them hit with full astonishing force? Of course, there is no single answer. But if one answer is chosen at a time, it can be adjusted later! That is to say, Mingus is especially rewarding for the listener who is willing to go back for seconds and thirds. A first listening may be a “dragged along” type experience, but the second time through, one could choose to focus on just a few elements at a time, perhaps listening from the bass chair, for instance. What’s amazing is that by focusing on subgroups of the ensemble, one can be transported to vastly diverse places: perhaps bass and drums chug along swinging while the piano and saxophone yell the blues, but the big band behind them is in some bizzaro bebop version of Vienna! The giants of music all reward repeated listening, but in jazz, only Mingus hits so many atmospheric destinations. My final proof of this is that I rarely identify myself as being in a “Mingus mood,” which is not the case for other composers. Sometimes, a little Monk will hit the spot and it’s obvious that that’s the case, but choosing to listen to Mingus comes from a desire to be intrigued/challenged/amazed, rather than a subconscious hunger for a certain atmosphere.

In his ability to create, move between, and layer atmospheres, Mingus reminds me of another great Charles of American music, namely Charles Ives. Anyone who knows Ives knows what I mean: what other music has parallel substrates of marching band, Beethoven, and New England transcendentalism all at once? Someday, someone should record an album of Ives and Mingus covers!

I think the very best video games have palpable atmospheres, too. Besides controls, that’s what makes it fun to just be in the game. Atmosphere is a big difference between the masterpiece Chrono Trigger and something more generic, like one of the less-than-perfect Dragon Quest games. Music is obviously a huge part of game atmosphere. The track “Aquatic Ambiance” from Donkey Kong Country is the only thing that saves the water levels (where the controls aspect of atmosphere is ruined). I’m nearly done playing Kentucky Route Zero, a newer, highly aesthetic narrative game that’s all about atmosphere. That’s what makes it.

Three recent enjoyments: Harold Land, a Bach Prelude, Cryptovolans

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.

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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!)

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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.

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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!