Creative Artistic Tribute or Greatest Hits?

'A Tribute to.......', 'A Celebration of....', 'The Music of.....'

If you're a jazz listener you'll definitely have been at a concert dedicated to the work of a musician or composer, and if you're a jazz player you'll definitely have taken part in one. These kinds of projects are very popular both with performers and audiences, for various reasons. When you do a concert of the music associated with a well known figure, you're dealing with a known quantity - it's music that has usually already been acclaimed in the public arena.  So for an audience, to see a concert labeled as, (for example), 'The Music of Miles Davis', they already have an idea, at least in their own minds, of what to expect. If they are fans of Miles they'll possibly be more interested in going to see that concert than they might be if the concert was one comprised of original compositions by the leader or band members. By evoking the name of Miles, the leader is to some extent using the popularity and name recognition of Miles to encourage people to attend. And therein lies the problem - at least as far as the aesthetics of the music go.

If you are a creative musician, in the true spirit of what that means, in my opinion it's not really good enough to present an evening of the music of someone else, or music associated with someone else, and present it in such a way that a) you don't do anything other than try and copy the original, and b) imply in your publicity that you had something to do with the creation of that music. To use the artistic credentials of someone else to get gigs or present yourself as having some connection to the artist in question, simply by playing their music, is artistically bereft of merit. I don't mean to say that you shouldn't play anyone's music other than your own, but I do think on an artistic level, that if you're going to play someone's music, and evoke their name, the very least you can do is to create some personalisation of that music, in such a way that the audience coming to the concert will hear this music in a very different way to that of the original.

Jazz is a music in which the work done by musicians of previous generations laid the foundations for future musicians to create their music. By taking the music of somebody and slavishly trying to reproduce what's on the recordings, you are flying in the face of that tradition. Not that there's anything wrong with playing music that people love, for people, in a way they will recognise. But it must be seen for what it is - if you've put together a 'project' that tries to reproduce known music in the style in which it was recorded, then you are essentially leading a covers band, no different in its own way to 'Abba-esque', or 'Iron Maidens' or any one of a multitude of similar covers bands. You are, in a way, creating a live jukebox. Very often I've seen musicians refer to their 'Miles Tribute', or 'Miles Project' in a way that implies that they have some ownership of the music. Yet when they perform, it becomes clear that they're simply trying to reproduce what Miles did (impossible in itself), and there is not one iota of originality in the project at all.

I'm also wary of using a photograph of the musician who is the subject of the tribute as part of the publicity. Again, by using his or her photo, there is the suspicion of the leader of the project using this imagery to draw the crowds, almost as if the famous artist themselves were going to have some part in the performance. Of course if you play the music of someone else, it's impossible not to mention that fact in the publicity, but if your publicity comprises a large image of the composer/performer whose music you are playing, and contains no photo of you, then from my point of view this very problematic - at least as far as presenting the show as being something in which you have had a creative input. Using a photo of yourself alongside the dedicatee of the evening can also be problematic, as it can imply a certain collegiality between you and the artist that doesn't exist. There was a particularly shameless and notorious incident of this nature here in Ireland some years ago when a saxophonist who was touring a John Coltrane project, Photoshopped an image of himself and Trane so that it looked like they were on stage side by side. Toe-curlingly awful and an extreme example of the exploitation of an iconic image for personal gain and under a cloak of a 'tribute'

Of course learning repertoire is part of the process of learning to play this music, and all jazz musicians do it and need to do it. But there's a difference between learning a canon of work in order to develop as an artist, and presenting it by-rote as if you have some part in the creation of it. If you're serious about creating a body of work that both reflects the music of a great musician and contains some creative input from yourself you need to do something other than simply try and copy the music from the recordings.

(Dave Douglas)


The trumpeter Dave Douglas has always been very imaginative in this regard, producing homages to Wayne Shorter, Booker Little and Mary Lou Williams, while at the same time creating a body of work that is clearly his own. As an example of this approach, have a listen to the original recording of 'Mary's Idea'




And now listen to Douglas' interpretation of that - it both clearly shows the source material yet makes the a piece, that was written by somebody else in 1930, sound both personal and contemporary





When I was starting out as a player I began putting on concerts of the music of particular composers - Monk, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, at the wonderful Focus Theatre, and I admit that they were not the most original things I've ever done, and would be guilty of many of the sins outlined above. I was in my early 20s then, and hadn't really thought this stuff through. As I matured and became more experienced both in music and in life, I changed my approach to these kinds of projects completely. One of the first projects I did as a mature musician was a recording (and tour) of a project called 'Bird', dedicated to the music of Charlie Parker. My criteria for choosing the music was that it would be comprised of music either written by, dedicated to (by other composers), or made famous by Parker. Once I'd chosen the music I set about personalising the pieces in my own way. I looked at each piece and examined them structurally, rhythmically and harmonically to see if I could find new approaches to what was extremely familiar material. Here's an example - the Dizzy Gillespie classic 'Blue N' Boogie', played here by Miles Davis.






The re-arrangement I did of this classic blues pieces was very simple, I changed the groove from swing to a quasi-reggae feel, thereby preserving the triplet vibe of the piece while having a different groove. I wrote a bass line, slowed the tempo, added an intro, and changed the rhythm of the melody, stretching some of the phrases. The blues form, and key were preserved, but the atmosphere is very different to the original.

 

After one of the performances of this project an audience member approached me and said he was very disappointed by the concert because he was hoping to hear the music played the way it was on the records. While sympathising with him, I did make the point that nothing could better the way the music was played on the original recordings, and to try and reproduce it live would just produce something vastly inferior to the original. Nobody can play like Charlie Parker better than Charlie Parker....

Here's a live recording of another of the 'Bird' project tunes, (with Julian Arguelles, Rick Peckham and Tom Rainey), this time Parker's 'Ah-Leu-Cha', where I've used canonic devices in the melody, added a bass line and used a New Orleans groove. Again I was trying to be respectful to the source material while being personal.





I think ultimately the point is this - from an artistic point of view, are you using whatever great music you've chosen as a springboard to creativity of your own, or are you being a 'greatest hits' artist? We definitely need more of the former than the latter.

Interview - Then and Now

Just came across an interview that I did about 10 years ago. Sometimes on reading things you've said or written in the past, you wince because your views have changed so much. But this interview still holds together as far as a lot of what I think about composition and improvisation is concerned. Michael Dungan interviewed me for the Contemporary Music Centre - a resource for Irish contemporary music composition that houses a lot of my compositions - and did a very good job. Would that all interviewers were as thorough………

If you you're interested in reading my ramblings on various subjects, you can read it HERE

Working with James Joyce

This Saturday, (March 2nd - details below), I'll be premiering a new piece based on the writing of James Joyce. In doing it I'm very fortunate to have three of France's finest jazz musicians - Dominique Pifarely (violin), Stéphane Payen (alto), and Christophe Lavergne (drums), and the great Irish saxophonist Michael Buckley, playing with me. The mix of irish and French musicians isn't accidental, since the piece is called 'Counterparts - Joyce in Paris and Dublin', and is based around work he did when living in those two cities.

Music was very important to Joyce and his works are filled with descriptions of music, songs and singers. He himself was reputedly a fine singer, and he even competed in the Feis Ceol, (a venerable Irish amateur music competition, which is over a hundred years old and still going), entering the competition as a tenor. Joyce’s language is also very musical both in terms of rhythm and alliteration. The cities of Dublin and Paris are similarly very important to Joyce’s work – born and raised in Dublin but spending over twenty years of his adult life in Paris, both cities played crucial roles in his life and work.

The first impetus for writing the piece was my rereading of ‘Dubliners’, and being made aware again of Joyce’s musicality. The idea of Dublin and Paris came from my passing ‘Shakespeare and Company’  - the famous Parisian bookshop which had such an association with Joyce – on a recent trip to Paris. Since I’ve also had a close association with several French musicians in recent years, it was a short jump from the reading of Dubliners and thinking about Joyce’s life in the artistic hotbed that was Paris of the 1920s, to coming up with the idea of writing a piece for French and Irish musicians, based on writing undertaken by Joyce in both cities.

We also rehearsed the music in Paris and in Ireland  - before Christmas Michael and I went to Paris and rehearsed with Dominique, Stéphane and Christophe, and now we're at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, a beautiful artist's retreat here in Ireland, working on the piece and putting the finishing touches to the shape of it.

‘Counterparts’ is partly written and partly improvised, and uses audio taken from street sounds recorded in markets in Dublin and Paris - it's always fun and a different kind of challenge to work with audio. The piece also uses text from various works both as a generator for the music, and in spoken word format as an integral part of the piece. Sometimes I’ve used direct material from the music in Joyce’s work, including ‘Say Goodbye To Girlish Days’, Joyce’s only known musical composition. In other parts of the piece I’ve used ideas from the works he wrote in Paris or in Dublin as generators of musical ideas. 

In Counterparts I’ve tried to create a unique environment for improvising musicians to explore the work of Joyce through musical means, and through that to reveal to the listener the sheer musicality of Joyce’s prose.

For  anyone in Dublin this Saturday March 2nd is interested in seeing the finished result of this work, you can come to the National Concert Hall at 1.05pm where the piece will be premiered as part of the New Music Dublin festival. Full details here

And here is a video clip of some of the rehearsals from Paris last year.

The Boys In The Band

On the face of it the history of jazz seems to be a history of individualists and soloists. When people speak of the history of jazz they name names – Miles, Monk, Trane, Ellington, Armstrong etc On the other hand when people speak of the history of pop music or rock music they name bands –Rolling Stones, The Beatles, U2, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Nirvana etc But if you look a little deeper into rock music history, you can see that there are a lot of important individuals as well – Hendrix, Clapton, Bowie etc. And similarly, if you look at the history of jazz, you can not only see that it is a music that featured a lot of out-and-out bands, but also that a lot of the innovations of the great individualists would not have been possible if they hadn't created those innovations within the vehicle of a great band, specifically designed to support those same innovations.

Of course the concept of a band is one that is well recognised in jazz, but I'm not sure if it's given its due in terms of its importance in the development of the music. And, for musicians, I'm not sure that the possibilities for developing your music that having a real band affords you is fully appreciated.

At various points in its history, without the input of great bands, the history of the music would have been much different. Take two of the icons of jazz - Miles and Coltrane. Both Miles and Coltrane did influential work outside the ambit of their regular bands - Miles with Gil Evans for example, and Coltrane recording Giant Steps etc. But the vast majority of their most influential music was created from within vehicles that they consciously created in order to best express their overarching musical ideas - their bands.



The importance of bands can be seen if we compare another great trumpeter with Miles - Freddie Hubbard. Hubbard was undoubtedly one of the greatest trumpet players in the history of jazz - brilliantly virtuosic, swinging, a great improviser who played on many great and historical recordings. And at various times he fronted bands that also consisted of great players. But with Hubbard you never really get a sense of a concept that requires more than the virtuosity of the individual players to bring the music into being. You never get the feeling that Hubbard absolutely needed this drummer and that pianist and this saxophonist to achieve the vision of the overall music.

Hubbard's bands were vehicles for the playing of Freddie Hubbard. Yes his phenomenal playing required collaborators who were strong enough to stay the course with him, but his sidemen could easily be thought of as being interchangeable. Herbie, McCoy or Billy Childs - Elvin, Tony Williams, Al Foster - Hubbard played great with all of them, but you never get the sense that he absolutely needed any particular one of those pianists or drummers to realise his overall musical vision, he played great with all of them - but not differently. There is a monumental Hubbard trumpet legacy, but not a Hubbard band legacy. There is no concept of a Hubbard band approach to a piece of music in the way that there would be a Miles band approach.

And to compare Miles to Hubbard in this regard, while Miles was technically not the trumpeter that Hubbard was (although he was stronger technically than he's usually given credit for - such as his playing here which is killing!), he had a band concept that was second to none. The members of his bands, (at least up to the very latest years), were chosen not only for their great individual playing, but for their ability to realize the overall vision of the music that Miles had. As a result, it wasn't just the playing of Miles that was influential, in fact the music of Miles' bands, and the way they played that music was probably even more influential than his playing. It is impossible to imagine the current development of modern mainstream jazz without the input of the classic Miles bands of the 50s, 60s and 70s.


The same is true for Coltrane - his Classic Quartet was both a vehicle for his saxophone playing and a vehicle for the transmission of his overall musical concept. Again, like Miles, it is impossible to imagine the current development of mainstream contemporary jazz without the input of the Coltrane Quartet. Elvin and McCoy were themselves innovators and huge influences on players of their respective instruments, but the sound that the Coltrane Quartet made, and their approach to playing the music was at least as influential as the playing of the individuals within that quartet.

The same could be said for the Bill Evans Trio and the Ornette Coleman Quartet - both revealed a new way of playing in a group, of interacting, of creating music that was greater than the sum of its parts. Each group had a clear identity that was more than the identity of any one individual player. The same could be said for groups from both before this period (The Basie and Ellington bands) and after (Weather Report, Jarrett's American quartet, Dave Holland's quintet, Steve Coleman's Five Elements) and the band tradition continues into the present day with groups such as Jason Moran's Bandwagon, The Bad Plus, Tim Berne's Big Satan etc. All of these groups have a sound that is unique to the band, rather than being a showcase for any one member of the band.


There are different kinds of bands in jazz, (leaving aside the soloist with pick-up rhythm section genre, which is not really a band at all– it’s more like a marriage of convenience), but usually they fall into one of three categories

A collective

An out-and-out dictatorship

A benevolent dictatorship















The Collective

In the first example – the collective - there is no leader. Each member of the band has, (in theory anyway), an equal input into the material and the approach. A contemporary example of this would be the Bad Plus or James Farm. The advantage of this way of working is that, assuming everyone has a broadly similar aesthetic regarding the music, a group of people can shape the music collectively and through discussion and teamwork develop music that is unique to that collective.

The disadvantage can be that it becomes music by committee, with everything ending up in the middle because nobody wants to make a decision, or every decision becomes a tortuous thing with endless discussions over tempos, tune order, solo order and everyone having an opinion on everything. In my experience this is by far the most common format for young bands coming out of jazz schools – there is no leader per se, and the music often lacks a unifying identity or directional thrust. In order for a collective to work you need people who a) believe in each other completely, and b) are prepared to lead if necessary and be lead if necessary.


The Out-and-Out Dictator

The out-and-out dictatorship model is well known in jazz and harks back to the ‘bandleader as star’ idea. In this model the band is principally formed around the leader and it’s clear that the leader of the band is supposed to be the cynosure of all eyes. These bands are primarily a vehicle for the playing of the leader and even though others may have opportunities to solo and play extensively, their input is required primarily to support the leader and not to detract attention away from him or her. There are so many examples of this in the music, it’s hard to know where to start in giving examples. But I think a good example would be Oscar Peterson’s various trios. Even the greatest of them, the trio that featured Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen, is formed around Oscar’s playing and though Brown and Thigpen get lots of solo space the music clearly revolves around Oscar and inevitably everything leads back to him. I would think of Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio as being in the same mold – great as his sidemen are, and they make such a contribution to the group sound, ultimately the trio is all about Keith. I think he went from the benevolent dictatorship (see below) of his 1970s quartets, to the out-and-out dictatorship model of his current trio.

These bands can be great or terrible, everything depends on the leader, his or her leadership abilities and how good the sidemen are. Believe it or not, some leaders were known for deliberately hiring sidemen who were not very strong in order to make themselves look even better. That kind of thinking is all about the star system and not about the music. Having said that, much great music was played by bands in which the music was really all about one guy – Errol Garner for example, and the aforementioned Jarrett trio would be another.


The Benevolent Dictatorship

In this model the bandleader doesn’t just hire people to make him or her sound good, the sidemen are hired to do justice to the overall musical vision of the bandleader and are hired for their ability to be able to understand and enhance the bandleader’s vision. In this type of group the bandleader encourages the sidemen to be themselves and allows them the freedom within the music to do what they do.

The ultimate model of this type of bandleader is of course Miles. His ability to pick the right guys for his music over a period of more than 30 years was extraordinary. Although he was a guy who was very conscious of his image and his status in the jazz community, he was never happy to simply feature himself in his bands, he always wanted to play the MUSIC he thought should be presented to the listeners. And that meant getting the right saxophonist, the right pianist, bassist and drummer. He would choose the guys he wanted and then he would give them the freedom to develop the music – he would hire them for what they could do and then let them do it. He famously gave almost no verbal instructions, he would just allow the players to do what they felt was right in the moment.

It wasn’t a democracy – Miles chose the tune order on a gig, nearly always took the first solo and would think nothing of cutting off a player if he felt the music should finish or didn’t like what he was hearing. In all his bands it was very clear who was the leader, but at the same time the players in the band really got to express themselves because of Miles’ overarching concern about his music rather than merely his trumpet playing.

Coltrane’s Quartet was similar – Trane hired McCoy, Elvin and Jimmy Garrison and then gave them the freedom to do what they do. Again he was concerned about the music rather than just his own playing. He was clearly the leader, but the sidemen were hired because of what they could contribute to Coltrane’s musical vision, not because they simply made Trane sound good as a player, or were bit part players to his featuring act. Again, Coltrane was clearly the leader and they played only his compositions but he hired these guys for their ability to realize his musical concept, not just to make him sound good. A modern version of this type of band would be Wayne Shorter’s great quartet of recent years – they definitely play with a band concept, but Wayne is also clearly the leader. Here they are playing a phenomenal version of Wayne’s ‘Joy Rider’




Of the various models I’m probably fondest of the benevolent dictator mode, since it gives such a great scope to create ensemble music as a single entity, but at the same time it can accommodate the vision of one person. When I’m in bandleader mode myself, this is definitely the route I take – I get the guys who can best realize the ideas I have for the music, and then I let them get on with it, with minimum interference from myself. If you pick your guys well you can usually get results that are even beyond your expectations and the music can go places that you didn’t anticipate – true serendipity.

Having said that, I’ve also had fun in a few collective situations, including recently in a band called Métier, where we had the good fortune to be funded by our local town council as Ensemble in Residence and could devote time to rehearse and develop the music. This band was really fun to work with and we played many good concerts, and made one album that I’m very fond of. Here’s a track from that – a piece I wrote called ‘Cascade’



And while I wouldn’t recommend going the route of complete dictator to anyone contemplating putting a band together, it can be educational for a young musician to get into the band of one of these older dictator types - providing they’re really good musicians of course – and be told what to do by a more experienced musician for a while. You can learn a lot this way, so sometimes even these out-and-out dictator type bands can be good.

But whatever mode you choose, I do think it’s very important for people to think in terms of bands rather than of just being interested in being an individual soloist. By developing a band you’re not just developing yourself, you’re also developing something that goes beyond your individual playing and gets into the whole area of developing a musical concept. Think collective identity rather than individual showcasing, think music rather than instrument. See the big picture – develop a band!

Noel Kelehan

(Left to right - Jim Doherty, Martin Walsh, John Wadham, Louis Stewart, Noel Kelehan - late 1960s)

It's been a grim few months for jazz recently, with the departure of such giants as Bob Brookmeyer, Paul Motian, and Sam Rivers. Here in Ireland, we've just had a serious loss of our own with the passing of the pianist, arranger, conductor and composer Noel Kelehan.

Any non-Irish readers of this blog, and indeed possibly even some Irish readers, may not know who Noel Kelehan was. That's because, outside Ireland he was only well-known in the commercial music world, having the distinction of conducting more Eurovision Song Contest winners than anybody else in the history of the competition. He was also well-known as an arranger, and wrote orchestral arrangements for many commercial recordings, including U2's “Unforgettable Fire” album. In Ireland, he was very well-known, but again in the world of television and radio - as an arranger and MD of some of Ireland's best known TV shows. But though I knew Noel's work as an arranger and conductor, my relationship with him and admiration of him was related to his position as one of the finest jazz musicians this country has ever produced.

Noel was the staff arranger for RTE, the national radio and television company in Ireland, and having to produce arrangements to order for anyone, (mostly singers, both good and terrible), who might come within the orbit of RTE, kept him predictably busy. His busyness with his arranging day job, and his success and fame in the commercial music world, kept him from working as much as he should have, and would love to have done, in the jazz world. And it's been interesting reading all the tributes that have been paid to him recently here in Ireland, and how his jazz work usually just gets an honourable mention.

But jazz was his first love, and he was one of the first jazz musicians in Ireland to reach the kind of playing standard that would allow him to comfortably perform with people of the calibre of of Zoot Sims, Kenny Wheeler, and Art Farmer. To those of us on the Irish jazz scene, Noel was much more than solely a TV arranger, he was a great hard bop swinging pianist, an important bandleader, and someone from whom everyone of my generation learned a huge amount.

When I started playing on the Irish jazz scene over 30 years ago, there were very few players on the scene, and certainly very few really good players. But at least there were some players around the scene to look up to and learn from. And Noel was one of these. But when he and a few others began playing in Dublin at the end of the 1950s, they really had to invent the entire scene for themselves. Without pioneers such as Noel - who somehow in the conservative Ireland of the time, recognised the value of, and fell in love with jazz - the great strides that have been made in the music in this country over the past three decades would never have happened. I can't imagine what it must have been like to try and learn to play this difficult and virtually unknown music in the Ireland of those days, with no access to material, no access to a scene, no possibilities of hearing great players on regular basis, and probably no appreciation by the public of the music that they were practising like maniacs to be able to play.

















(The Jazz Heralds, 1960)

But somehow they managed to figure stuff out by listening and copying as best they could, by organising sessions, and by doing all the things that players in a small, and at that time, isolated city, far from the jazz mainstream, had to do in order to learn the music. Most were never able to align their abilities with their aspirations, but Noel was one the exceptions that prove the rule. He was classically trained as a pianist, but self-taught as a composer, arranger and jazz pianist. I remember him telling me about hearing a George Shearing recording in the 50s when he was a teenager, and being blown away by it and trying to transcribe Shearing's solo from an EP - a process that involved much leaping up and down from the piano, and much replacing the needle, something that was wearing for the recording which evenutally got completely worn out. Noel told me he destroyed three copies of the recording before he was able to get what he wanted!

In 1963 he went to New York for a year but, thankfully for us, he returned a year later bringing with him even more knowledge about how the music should be played and the standard that needed to be aspired to, and he also became immediately involved in the commercial music world, writing for TV and radio. Jazz and commercial music were much more closely entwined in those days – jazz training would prepare you for work in the commercial world in a way that would be impossible now, so far have the two worlds diverged. Noel played jazz at every opportunity, organising big bands for which he wrote adventurous charts, writing pieces that involved string quartets and chamber groups playing alongside jazz musicians, playing in the bands of others and accompanying visiting international artists.

























(left to right - Keith Donald, Noel, Mike Nolan, John Wadham, Johnny Griffin, Ronnie Matthews, Frank Hess)

He also lead several small groups, one of which, The Noel Kelehan Quintet, became hugely influential on me around the time I got really serious about jazz in the late 70s. Noel’s quintet played in a hotel every Sunday night for over two years, and going to see them was like a pilgrimage for me. The music was hard bop and post hard bop (music by Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Miles etc. As well as Noel’s originals), and the band were great, with the rhythm section in particular, (which featured another international standard musician, the drummer John Wadham) being outstanding. This was for me the first chance to hear jazz being played live, week after week, at a very high standard, and it made a huge impression on me.

I don’t have any recordings of those gigs (unfortunately.....), but here is a trio version of "Gone With The Wind' recorded by me around that time, on one of the first recording Walkmans (remember those!?) which shows how Noel sounded in those days. On this gig he was battling with a cottage piano (even smaller than a normal upright), and playing in a bar, complete with casual conversations going on in the background. The music is compressed by the Walkman’s built-in mic, and the version you’ll be hearing has been transferred three times – but despite all this, you can still hear what a great swinging pianist Noel was, with a tremendous vocabulary. There are shades of Red Garland, Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans in there, but I would recognise Noel’s playing anywhere.......... He is accompanied by two stalwarts of the Irish scene of those days, the bassist Jimmy McKay and the drummer Peter Ainscough.

Gone With The Wind

It was around this time that I first began playing with Noel, and it was an education. It was an education trying to keep up with him. He was a very busy player – lots of notes and lots of chord substitutions, which would appear out of nowhere. Speaking as a bassist, unless you really paid attention, he could leave you for dead in a split second. But with Noel it wasn’t just teaching by musical example, he was also one of the few players of that era who would actually sit down and show you stuff if you asked him. Some of the other players took a delight in playing tunes you didn’t know and making you look foolish, but Noel never did anything malicious. He was always positive and supportive to me despite being light years ahead of me in knowledge and experience.

This musical and personal generosity was something he was renowned for, both in jazz and in his dealings with everyone. Here’s an example of it, and an hilarious moment of Irish musical history. The event is a ‘talent’ competition from 1961, in which the talent was so bad that the engineer in the studio decided to capture it for posterity. Noel was leading the backing trio, and in this track has to deal with the most incredible rendition of a maudlin Irish ballad in which ‘Mrs. Daly’ wanders through numerous keys, with the band in hot pursuit. It’s hilarious, but notice both how brilliant Noel is in following her harmonic trail, and how generous he is to the singer, trying to accompany and help her out as best he can.

Doonaree

And the generosity he displayed here is a recurring theme whenever musicians discuss Noel. When I was starting out trying to do some writing, Noel gave me several invaluable arranging lessons for which he refused to take any payment, a typical gesture on his part. And I also remember when I got my first orchestral music commission, the first thing I did was call Noel, plaintively asking for help. I’d taken the commission without having any experience of writing for an orchestra, and the euphoria having worn off, was faced with the reality of my situation. Noel, as always, helped enormously and I can still remember him saying “Number 1, don’t panic, and number 2, get a copy of ‘Orchestration’, by Gordon Jacob” - both great pieces of advice, the second of which undoubtedly saved my bacon, and I’ve used and recommended the Jacob book ever since.

Noel was a great musician, a pioneer for jazz in Ireland, a musical and personal example to younger musicians and when he became ill a few years ago it was a real blow to the scene here to have one of its real heavyweights sidelined like this. About a year ago he came to a gig I was playing with my group Trilogue – I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye and felt the usual mixture of delight and nervousness that his presence at any of my gigs always brought on. We chatted afterwards and he was his usual generous and witty self, complimenting Izumi and Sarah and saying how much he enjoyed the music. As far as I know, it was the last gig he went to and I feel both sad about that, and privileged............

I remember seeing Noel play with Art Farmer and play an exquisite solo on ‘Blame It On My Youth’. At the end of the piece Art took the microphone and said ‘As it turned out, that tune featured Noel Kelehan on piano’, a generous and honest acknowledgement of a great musician by a great musician.

Here is Noel, as most of us here will remember him, burning through ‘This I Dig of You’ with Michael Buckley, Michael Coady on bass, and Peter Ainscough on drums. Michael’s solo is pretty savage too.... Yeah guys!

This I Dig Of You





'Hands', Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra - Premiere and Video Diary

Rick Peckham


Next week sees the culmination of a year’s work – the premiere of ’Hands’ my new concerto for electric guitar and orchestra which will be performed by the RTE National Symphony Orchestra with the great American guitarist Rick Peckham This will be the fifth piece I’ve written for symphony orchestra and the third concerto, (the other two were for violin and piano respectively), and hopefully I’m getting better at it!

I remember the first piece I wrote for the orchestra in 1994 and the incredibly gauche orchestration gaffes I made (what, string players need to have bowings written in!?) and how I sat up all night after the first rehearsal adding in hundreds of dynamic markings and slurs and bowings in an effort to a) not be as humiliated as I was the day before, and b) to get closer to what I was hearing in my head. I’ve never had any formal training in orchestral writing or composition and I’ve learned on the job, in the same way as I did in the jazz world. But discovering things by trial and error is often a deeper experience than having someone show you something – the act of discovery seems to deepen the experience, one is actively learning rather than passively receiving. Having said that I wouldn’t have minded receiving some basic orchestration lessons and being spared the agony of that first orchestral rehearsal!

In music, (by necessity rather than desire), I’ve always been an autodidact and have had to figure out different ways to get to where I wanted to go in terms of musical knowledge, technique etc. In the case of orchestral music, courtesy of my father who raised us all in an environment of great music, I am very familiar with the classical tradition and how an orchestra should sound, but I had no idea how to achieve those sounds. So I read some orchestration books, including the wonderful ’Orchestral Technique’, by Gordon Jacob, a crash course in orchestration in less than 100 pages recommended to me by Noel Kelehan, a great Irish jazz pianist and arranger, in response to my cry for help upon receiving my first orchestral commission and realising that if I was to keep the money I’d actually have to write some orchestral music...... I also checked out some orchestral scores, studying them closely while listening to the recordings, and making notes in a little book in which I would reference things that particularly caught my ear, and note the place they occurred in the score so that I could access this information later.

Over the years my orchestral writing has become more confident and competent and I don’t worry so much about orchestration any more, but relish the opportunity to work with that Rolls Royce of the musical world - the symphony orchestra. On setting out to write this new piece I decided to keep a series of video diaries of the process and make them available to anyone who might be interested.

Here is the first episode in which I describe my way of working and my plans (and hopes) for the piece



My first step of the actual writing of the piece took place in March last at the beautiful Tyrone Guthrie Centre, an artist’s retreat in Ireland where I was able to work for a week, undisturbed by everyday life. As you can see from this episode of the video diary, I met with both success and difficulties...........

One skill I've never aquired is conducting, and even if I had, I don’t think I would have got it to the level of being able to conduct a symphony orchestra. And of course the conductor is such a vital part of the interpretation of a symphonic piece and speaking as a composer, a conductor can make or break you when it comes to having your orchestral piece performed. With my pieces, rhythm and feel are vitally important, and getting 90 musicians to play together with a particular rhythmic feel, or even cohesiveness, are among the hardest things to achieve with an orchestra. To have any chance, you definitely need the right guy on the conductor’s podium.

So I was lucky to have the wonderful Scott Stroman to conduct the piece. Scott is adept in both jazz and classical idioms and is vastly experienced as both a conductor and composer. I know Scott very well too, so I was able to look forward to the performance of the piece without the necessity of that first meeting with an unknown conductor where you find out if the he (or she) ‘gets’ what you’re trying to do. In June I was working with Scott in London and took the opportunity to meet him and have a chat about the piece.

Later in the same month, I did an interview with the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin and talked in a more general way about composition. You can see the interview here

In August I was in Boston and met the soloist Rick Peckham at his home, and we talked pedals and general guitaristic stuff.

As the final interview in the series, I met some of the orchestral players who would be playing the piece. Oftentimes in classical composition, the orchestra is seen by the composers as some kind of impersonal machine whose job it is to reproduce what the composer hears, but of course an orchestra is comprised of individuals too and it makes sense to talk to them about what they like or don’t like when playing new music. We had a really great chat and I hope we can do it again soon.

The piece itself comes in at around 20 minutes, is in three movements, and has an improvised cadenza that will connect the first and second movements, as well as some spaces for improvisation for the guitar in the first movement. I know Rick's been experimenting with different sounds for the piece, so I'm really looking forward to hear what he comes up with.

We have two performances of it next week - an incredible luxury - a kind of workshop/preview on Tuesday (17th) at lunchtime at the National Concert Hall in Dublin and the official world premiere on the following Friday as part of the full symphony concert, alongside music by John Adams and Shostakovitch - no pressure then!

Here's the final segment of the video diary - I hope some of you who are in Dublin can make it to one of the performances

Listening Again (2) - Mahavishnu Orchestra - Birds of Fire

I have included several sound clips from the subject of this post - all are very short and are intended as a taster for the music on the album, and to illustrate various points. If you're interested in this music please go and buy the album, support the musicians and enjoy its full sonic beauty - don't settle for some crappy compressed version on Youtube!

I can remember where I was when I first heard ‘Birds of Fire’ – I was fourteen years old, and I was in a friend’s house, in the kitchen (where they had a record player for some now unfathomable reason). We were all prog-rock guys – King Crimson, Gentle Giant etc. and considered ourselves to be very sophisticated (no Black Sabbath for us!) in the superior way that only teenage boys can. I had been raised on classical and jazz music and had been exposed to pop music for the first time only the year before (seriously!). I had a brief flirtation with pop music, an even briefer one with Heavy Metal and then discovered King Crimson, which probably appealed subconsciously to my need for and experience of listening to structurally more complex music. And subconscious rather than conscious would have been an accurate description of my musical knowledge or expertise at that time.

So, back to my friend’s kitchen - he produced the album, (which had a very satisfyingly intriguing cover featuring soaring birds), put the record on the turntable, lowered the needle and…….. And basically my musical life changed from the moment I first heard the gong being struck and shimmering through some kind of phaser effect, followed by a dense and dark arpeggiated guitar figure, in what is one of the most dramatic opening moments of any album in my opinion. I sat there transfixed and almost shocked – I really had never heard anything like this. In retrospect I realize that I had in fact heard some of the elements of this music in other contexts – both classical and jazz – but at the time it just sounded like music coming from another planet.



And to cut a long story short, it set me off on a journey that returned me to jazz, and planted the seed of being a jazz musician inside me.

What’s interesting to me, almost forty years later, is that the music on ‘Birds of Fire’ not only has a function in my own personal history, but objectively, listening to it now, it more than stands up to the scrutiny of the decades. It’s still great music, on any level, and looking at it now, knowing what I know now and having the experiences I’ve had in the intervening years since I first heard it, I realize what a unique musical document it is – something that had never been done before, and has never really been done again – even by the protagonists involved in my opinion.



The Mahavishnu Orchestra was an interesting band for many reasons, one of which is the fact that it was probably the most multi-national major group in the history of jazz. There was only one American in it (Jerry Goodman), a Czech (Jan Hammer), a Panamanian (Billy Cobham), an Englishman (McLaughlin), and an Irish man – the bassist Rick Laird - someone we were very proud of around here because he came from my home town of Dun Laoghaire. Laird had left Dublin many years before Mahavishnu and gone to Australia and later London where he became the house bassist in Ronnie Scott’s club and accompanied an endless stream of American jazz legends including Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Ben Webster, Clark Terry etc etc. This was where McLaughlin, (who went to New York at the behest of Tony Williams who wanted him for the seminal ‘Lifetime’ band) had met Laird. London had an amazing scene in those days with future giants such as John Surman, John Taylor and Dave Holland all playing on the scene.

All of the Mahavishnu group had a jazz pedigree with the exception of Goodman who came from more of a rock background. Mclaughlin had played with Miles and Williams, Jan Hammer with Sarah Vaughan and Elvin Jones, Billy Cobham with Miles and Horace Silver, and Laird with just about everyone (He's almost certainly the only bassist to have played with both Wes Montgomery and John McLaughlin). Yet the music they produced was not a ‘jazz’ sound. This is the early 70s, post-Bitches Brew, post-Lifetime, all the instruments except the drums are electric, there are no swing feel pieces and odd metres abound. Both McLaughlin and Cobham played with Miles (together on Jack Johnson) and were among the Miles diaspora who created the genre that is now known as Fusion, but was known then as Jazz-Rock. And apart from Goodman, McLaughlin had connections with the rock scene, jamming with Jimi Hendrix, and playing in the same London rock/blues scene that produced Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page.

The group had been around for a while and ‘Birds of Fire’ was its second album. The first, ‘The Inner Mounting Flame’ caused a bit of a sensation on its release, its combination of instrumental virtuosity, complex time signatures, electric instruments and rock energy proved hugely popular and the band became an overnight sensation, selling a phenomenal amount of albums for an instrumental group. This album has always had its advocates as THE Mavishnu album, but for me it’s more like a prototype for what was to come rather than a definitive statement. I don’t think the compositions are as interesting or the sound as developed as on ‘Birds of Fire’ and I think at times it lapses into the solo-histrionics-over-static-rhythm-section-groove that was to so blight the Jazz-Rock movement as a whole, and which was to even become apparent on the Mahavishnu’s later live album between ‘Nothingness and Eternity’ - a blitzkrieg of duelling soloists and impossible tempos delivered with great virtuosity to an audibly ecstatic audience in Central Park. But between the bookends of these two albums the band delivered what was to be a seminal recording, both vastly influential on musicians of my generation and beyond, and also featuring music that has more than stood the test of time.




So what’s so special about this recording? It’s a combination of things - first of all there’s a cohesiveness about the entire album, it feels like something that was conceived as a whole rather than as a series of tracks that were put together to make an album. In the manner of ‘A Love Supreme’, ‘Kind of Blue’ and ‘Blues and The Abstract Truth’, a consistent atmosphere hovers over the whole album – the music feels all of a piece and not episodic in any way. It’s a much better recorded album than the previous one and this helps to create the feeling of an over-arching musical intelligence at work.

Then there is the sound of the music, much of which is due to the unusual instrumentation. Guitar, violin and keyboards combine together to give the music a lightness that is unexpected considering the gnarliness, chromaticism, and dense rhythmic tangle of much of the music. Jan Hammer featured the Moog extensively in the music, and these early monophonic synths didn’t have a a very wide sonic range, so Hammer favours the higher register which blends very well with the electric violin and guitar. The sonic spectrum of the front line instruments favours the upper register and they
create so homogenous a sound that sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s soloing where........



At the time I first listened to this music I was just blown away by it in its entirety, and it sounded to me like something that had come out of nowhere. But looking at it from many years later, and with thousands of musician’s flying hours under my belt, I can see the many influences that are in this music. The influence of Hendrix and the electric guitar culture of the 60s is easy to discern, what’s perhaps not so immediately apparent is the influence of Coltrane of the ‘Love Supreme’ period – but it’s there in McLaughlin’s playing – listen to the Coltrane-like way he soars chromatically over the shifting odd metre groove of the title track.




Another interesting thing to my ears now, having spent a lot of time over the past 20 years studying the rhythmic aspects of South Indian music, is just how much Carnatic music influenced McLaughlin’s writing in this period. Later of course he went on to form Shakti, (and presage the jazz meets world music movement by about twenty years), but he made a serious study of the Veena and this clearly be heard both in the sound of some of the melodies he composed and in the rhythmic structures of the odd metres he used which are clearly related to the tala structures of Carnatic music, while the structure of the melody, in a typical McLaughlin-ism, is clearly related to both Indian music and the blues



But I think McLaughlin not only used Indian music in his own writing, he very probably influenced other members of the group in this respect. On ‘One Word’ - which Cobham famously opens with a snare drum roll that has left generations of drummers in open mouthed disbelief – the drum groove that Cobham uses has no real precedent in jazz, yet is very common in Mridangam grooves of South India. Here is a percussion group from South India



And here is Cobham on ‘One Word’



Was Cobham checking out Indian percussion at the behest of McLaughlin? It certainly sounds like it!

But not all the pieces were either lightning fast, or odd metre workouts, the group could also get in the pocket with the best of them - ‘Miles Ahead’ is almost Headhunter-esque



But Headhunters would never have done anything as radical with this groove as Cobham and McLaughlin do later in the piece



Or how about this haunting Moog solo on ‘Sanctuary’, played over the shifting metre of the rhythm section, evoking an atmosphere worthy of the quieter passages of ‘The Rite of Spring’..............



There is just so much great music on this album – so many different ideas and approaches yet all contained within a very unique and immediately identifiable sound. The virtuosity of the players, even at a distance of forty years, is amazing (has there ever been a greater guitar right hand technique in jazz than McLaughlin’s? How can he play at that speed, with such rhythmic accuracy yet never slur anything!?), yet the virtuosity is put at the service of the music and is never subservient to it. Unfortunately the success of the Mahavishnu unleashed a slew of poor imitations all vying with each other to be the fastest, loudest highest.......

And unfortunately the Mahavishnu itself imploded not long afterwards, with the other members of the band wanting a share of the composing duties (McLaughlin had previously been the sole composer)– which wasn’t a great idea as evidenced by the release years later of ‘The Lost Trident Sessions’ which featured compositions by Hammer, Laird and Goodman, none of which rises to the heights of the earlier McLaughlin compositions. Internal disagreements ensured the the disintegration of the band, but by the time they split up they had already fallen from the heights of ‘Birds of Fire’ and had allowed their virtuosity to take precedent over the other elements of their music. But for a while their flame really did burn brightly, inventing a whole genre, influencing and inspiring countless musicians and creating one of the greatest albums of the modern jazz era.

Here they are in their prime playing in London in 1972 – chops and ideas to go, and notice the quote of the 'Jack Johnson' riff, which McLaughlin almost certainly wrote despite Miles being credited with it.............

Give the Drummer Some!

I originally wrote this post over a year ago, and also posted it on my website, but having recently listened to yet another multitude of drum solos over vamps, I thought it might be useful to re-publish it in the hope of putting some ideas out there that might be helpful for musicians who want to feature the drums as a solo instrument and are interested in putting a different wrinkle on it.....


For one reason or another, I’ve been listening to a lot of concerts and performances in recent weeks. And one thing I've heard SO many times in all kinds of contexts, is the drum solo over a vamp. Time was when the drummer’s soloing opportunities were limited to trades with the horns, or maybe a solo at the end of the night or on the obligatory burner at the end of the set or performance. This came to be seen as a cliché and other ways were sought to include the drums as a solo instrument without going to the obvious trades/solo option. Enter the solo over the vamp.

I'm not sure when this entered the vocabulary of jazz musicians -- I can think of Billy Cobham soloing over complex vamps with the Mahavishnu Orchestra back in the early 70s, but it was probably done before that, no doubt an enlightened reader can fill in the gaps for us. But only in the last 20 years or so that this become really ubiquitous, and is a stock in trade of most bands in contemporary jazz. And it’s only when you listen to as many performances back to back as I have in recent weeks that you realise that the solo-over-vamp thing has become as big a cliché in itself as the drum breaks/big solo was before it.

This is not to say that the drum solo over a vamp is not an effective device – it is and, like the drum break/big solo before it, it’s precisely because it is so effective that it’s become so ubiquitous and now somewhat tired. So is there a way to incorporate the drummer as a soloist in a piece without resorting to either of these rather overused devices? Here are a few suggestions:

1) Drum Breaks.

As usual it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel in order to come up with something fresh to do – just a bit of finessing of what’s already there can often yield interesting results. Take the ubiquitous drum break for example – drum breaks are still a cool idea, it’s just that they’re always done in the same way – i.e after all the other solos are finished. But here’s a suggestion: Let’s say you’re playing a changes/form kind of piece, (could be swing or not) why not have each soloist begin their solos with a chorus of exchanges with the drums? So each soloist will start with 8s (or whatever) with the drums for a chorus (or two depending on the form length), then continue with their own solo, the next soloist in turn will do exchanges with the drums and then continue on with their solo and so forth. In this way the drummer gets to both play and interact with the soloists yet the breaks are more incorporated into the structure of the piece than in the traditional way.

2) Drum Solo

Again this is just a variation on what’s already done. So if we imagine again it’s a traditional form piece, why not have the drummer play a solo chorus in between each soloist rather than a big solo at the end? Once again this will make the drum solo into a more holistic element of the overall piece and give the drummer a lot of material to work with since he/she will be soloing after more than one soloist. Each soloist in turn will be given a lift into their own solos by the preceding drum solo.

If the piece is less conventional, then other ways to incorporate this drum solo as interlude idea can be brought into place. So if the piece is multi-tempo’d for example, the drums could set up the new tempos with some solo improvised passages, or announce the different sections with a small solo section.

3) Solo Over Vamp!

The very cliché that started this train of thought can also be used in a fresh way – like so: Let’s imagine that you’re playing a piece at a brisk tempo – 200 or above – and you want to give the drummer a solo over a rhythmic vamp....... Well instead of playing the vamp over and over again while the drummer plays over the top of it, why not have a few members of the band (3 at most – any more than that and it can get messy), come in and out, and play any section of the vamp at any time? In this way it becomes a very playful thing with nobody knowing which part of the vamp will be played by any one of the players. It’s more challenging too for the players since everyone has to keep the vamp in mind at all times in order not to get lost!

4) Duets

Have the drummer solo with somebody instead of on his/her own, a series of duets (or at least one), probably (though not necessarily), without bass can be both stimulating for drummer and other soloist alike and also create a fresh texture for the ears of the audience.



5) Write longer sections for the drummer to solo over

Instead of writing a bare vamp for the drummer to play over, why not write something a bit more involved? This can be particularly nice in a slower tempo piece where drum solos are rarely heard. If you have a good creative drummer there’s no reason why they should only be given a chance to solo over ‘wham-bam-thank you ma’am’ kind of tunes. A slower piece with some nicely written passages for the drummer to interpret as a soloist rather than an accompanist can make a welcome change for everybody and freshen things up.

There are many more possibilities for using the drums, (or any instrument), as a solo instrument - like so much, it’s just a matter of having a think about the various possibilities available to us instead of always going for the default position. As we know, jazz has a fantastic tradition of drum soloists, and this continues to the present day - there are so many great drummers out there. So let’s try and take advantage of that by using our imagination on how best to incorporate solo drums into our music as an organic constituent rather than always as a flag-waving rabble rouser. Let’s give the drummer some

To finish - here's a piece by John Zorn's Masada where the drum solo is not only incorporated into the piece but almost IS the piece! This is quite an old-fashioned 'drum feature' in a way, but still great nevertheless - especially since it features one of the great contemporary drum soloists - Joey Baron

Music for Soprano Sax and String Quartet

It's a a pleasant surprise to accidentally stumble across a performance of your work that you didn't know had been done. In this case it was on Youtube and was a performance by a Polish group of the first movement of my 'Music for Soprano Sax and String Quartet', which I wrote for Dave Liebman in 1998. I think this piece is a good companion to the blog post I wrote about string writing in jazz, involving as it does a lot of the issues I discussed in that article.

The performers here are Andrzej Olejniczak & Apertus String Quartet. I knew Andrzej via email and I knew he'd performed the piece in Spain, but I didn't know about this performance or recording. They play the piece very well too and so it was a nice piece of Serendipity for a Sunday morning................

The String Problem

I’ve just been listening to Alan Ferber’s new recording ’Chamber Songs’, which features his nonet with the addition of a string group. I always keep an eye out for new jazz recordings that feature strings, because I have a particular interest in string writing, and am very curious as to how strings can be better integrated into a jazz context. I enjoyed Ferber’s recording, it has some very nice writing and playing on it and it’s really well recorded. He definitely knows what he’s doing, particularly with the nonet. Some of the writing had a tone poem quality to it that is quite attractively elegaic. But, for my own taste, I could have used a bit more counterpoint and polyphony from the strings and in the string writing in general.

This tends to be quite a bugbear for me – I love writing for strings and have done a lot of it both in my capacity as a jazz composer and also while writing for classical musicians. So far I’ve written two violin and piano sonatas, a violin concerto, a string quartet, a sonata for solo violin, a sonata for solo viola, a sonata for viola and piano, (for Tanya Kalmanovitch), a piece for string orchestra, music for string trio and clarinet, music for jazz guitar trio and string quartet (for John Abercrombie), and music for soprano saxophone and string quartet (for Dave Liebman) , as well as using strings in various orchestral pieces. As a bassist I am of course a string player myself, so I’m perhaps biased towards them and therefore fussier than the normal jazz musician when it comes to writing for strings..

Strings have proven to be problematic in jazz, in the sense that even in the 21st century a violin soloist, (or even rarer, a cello soloist, or viola soloist) in a jazz group is the exception rather than the rule. However in this post, I’m interested in discussing the integration of a string group as part of a composed piece, rather than discussing the paucity of string soloists in jazz, (perhaps that’s for another time).

String writing in jazz tends to be rather hit and miss – and perhaps more miss than hit. In general jazz writers tend to go for one of two options when writing for strings–they either use the strings as surrogate horns, or go for the dreaded “string pad” effect. “String Pad” is the term I’ve heard string players use to describe, in a less than complimentary way, the type of writing they often encounter from composers outside the classical world when dealing with strings. In this String Pad genre the composer goes for slow-moving chordal, lush backgrounds over which the jazz soloist does his or her thing. You can hear a lot of this string pad affect on “Bird With Strings”, where the lush backgrounds support Parker’s fantastic soloing. In this kind of writing the composer uses a string ensemble as a kind of block effect - slow moving chords that display the richness of the string sound. I can understand the temptation to use this kind of effect – after all the natural sound of a string group playing a chord is one of the richest sounds you can ever experience in music. And since we don’t normally deal with strings in jazz, when we get the opportunity to do so it’s very hard to resist the novelty of having this rich sound at your disposal. But it really is a kind of one-size-fits-all unimaginative way to use strings, and whenever I hear that kind of sound I always think to myself that the writer is being, at the very least, a bit lazy.

in reality string ensemble writing is all about counterpoint. From the baroque period onwards, (and even before this), counterpoint is the major feature of all string writing. They lend themselves so well to polyphony, and of course extend across the full range from deepest bass to highest treble. And strings not only cover the full range of the human voice, they also are able use as many expressive devices as the human voice. So with their ability to cover a very wide pitch range, and the huge range of techniques and devices that are available when writing for strings, it really is a cop-out to mainly use the strings as a kind of harmonic blotting paper filling up all the available space with their woody richness.



As I said, in string writing counterpoint is, to use the technical term, the shit. But in jazz we don’t tend to use counterpoint a whole lot – at least not in mainstream jazz writing. Have a listen to any post-bop recordings, then try and identify any use of counterpoint in the tunes. There’s usually not a lot there - any small bits of counterpoint tend to be used as small fillers to the main melody rather than any truly independent line. Like anything of course, there are exceptions to this – Mulligan’s piano-less quartet being a famous example, then George Russell’s masterpiece ’Jazz Workshop’ is another. But these are exceptions, counterpoint is rare in post-bop mainstream jazz.

And when we do use counterpoint, we tend to use a very “top–down” kind of writing, where the melody is played mostly in the higher pitched instruments and any counterpoint that’s going on is really just engaged with filling out the chords of the harmony underneath the melody - they’re often really just glorified guide-tone melodies. When I hear this kind of thing, I always get a sense that the composer conceived the music at the piano – you get that sense of the melody being played in the right hand while being supported by left hand chordal action. But examining compositions for string quartet by great composers reveals a whole other world of counterpoint. In this genre all four instruments are equal - the violins, the viola, or the cello can have the lead at any time, and themes, sub-themes, melody, and accompaniment are constantly flipped around through the ensemble. Rather than have the violin play the melody all the time supported by the lower instruments as in so much jazz string writing, in this world all the instruments are equal and are fully engaged in the cut and thrust of the musical dialogue.

There’s probably a reason why we jazz composers tend not to do this when writing for strings – this shit is hard! Counterpoint is hard. When you have four voices moving independently, their horizontal forward motion creates a vertical harmony. The writer needs to be aware at all times of the function of every note in all four instruments, how they relate to each other, and how they relate to the underlying harmony of the piece. Classical composers train for years to be able to do this, we get little or no instruction in this area–naturally enough, since we have other fish to fry, fish that take years in themselves to fry properly. But that’s no reason to succumb to the lazy string pad syndrome. I think if you have the luxury of working with a good string group you should try and write something worthy of the possibilities that this kind of ensemble can bring to your music.

My most recent piece that involved a string group is a recording that will be coming out in the not too distant future of a piece that I composed called “Renaissance Man”. This is a a large-scale piece for a jazz guitar trio and string quartet, with John Abercrombie as the guitar soloist. In this six movement work, I tried at all times to use the strings in the way that I believe they should be used, as contrapuntal protagonists in the musical dialogue, as well as occasionally using them for their beautiful colouristic tendencies. Here’s a sneak preview of one of the movements – the only one that is completely written, and features the string quartet alone - its called “And This Was Odd Because”, and features the group in very rhythmic groove oriented playing, as well as the aforementioned counterpoint.



If one has ever attempted to write string music, the best advice I can possibly give to anyone who wants to write for strings, but maybe hasn’t had much training in the genre, is to check out Bela Bartok’s six string quartets. Everything you need to know about string writing is contained somewhere in these quartets. The whole history of string writing to that point, is contained here - Everything you need is here with the possible exception of extended techniques, but really if you’re not an experienced string writer you is shouldn’t be worrying too much about extended techniques anyway. And Bartok puts plenty of different techniques into the string writing anyway – more than enough for all but the most experienced of string writers. Check out the amazing movement no. 2 from Quartet No. 4, where he uses the mutes to create a creepy rustling effect as the music hurtles around the four instruments.



Now THAT’S string writing! And of course great music. I still keep my ears and eyes open for great jazz string writing, but I’ve not had a huge amount of luck so far. Any suggestions as to good stuff to check out will be gratefully accepted and acted upon.

In the meantime here’s a little video clip from the making of the aforementioned ‘Renaissance Man’ recording – the CD should be out in early 2011.

Give the Drummer Some!

Too often in jazz and improvised music we just take the cheap and cheerful route regarding using the drummer as a soloist in our compositions and with our bands. But there's so much more that can be done other than the usual default drum solo options. I've made a few suggestions in an article on my website. You can see it Here


Coming soon - an extensive interview with Steve Coleman on the subject of rhythm. Watch this space...................

Why!?

I read this (admiring) description by Kyle Gann of a piece of contemporary music recently - a string quartet written in 1984 by Ben Johnston, which has never been played due to the almost insurmountable difficulties of performing it - here's a description of it:

If you know much about Ben's Third Quartet, you know it works its way measure by measure through a 53-note microtonal scale. The finale of the Seventh is built on a similar plan, but the structural tone row consists of 176 pitches - all different, 176 pitches within one octave, heard in the viola on each successive downbeat. Many other notes are heard in the other instruments whose harmonies link each note to the next, and Tim tells me that altogether there are more than 1200 discrete pitches in the movement - more than one per cent, five times as many as most people can perceive.

Mr. Gann goes on to describe how one Timothy Ernest Johnson of Roosevelt U. (the Tim referred to in the previous quote), had written his doctoral thesis on this quartet and delivered a paper on the subject to a Microtonal Conference. Here's a description of part of the paper:

Tim demonstrated how the players are supposed to proceed from the opening C to the subsequent D7bv-, a pitch ratio of 896/891. The violist is tasked to move upward from this C and come back down on a pitch 9.7 cents higher - just under one tenth of a half-step - than she started on. At the downbeat of the next measure, the violist lands on Dbb--, pitch ratio 2048/2025 - another ten cents higher. And so on for another 175 measures until the viola ends up traversing the octave and ends at C again. A good half of Tim's paper was spent talking us through the performance challenges of the first two measures.

So, a piece that can't be played, and even if it could be played most people couldn't perceive the pitches. Sounds like a great night out doesn't it? Yet despite the fact that it can't be played and most people can't hear it, guys do doctoral theses on it and deliver papers to others similarly interested. What is the point of this music? It certainly isn't written for the same reason most music is written - to be performed and listened to, by people who don't have a PhD..................

Contemporary composed music has long been accused of this kind of thing - composers writing music for each other and in order to fulfill some kind self-perpetuating composing/academic paper delivering world - for a long time. I'm very wary of this kind of accusation until I've heard the music, but in this case since it's not possible to hear the music I have to ask - WHY!? These guys really are writing for each other and nobody else