Jazz Composition 2 - The Soloist Conundrum

I was listening recently to a recording of pieces for jazz orchestra by Jim McNeely ‘Up From the Skies’, played by the great Vanguard band. Jim is of course one of the greatest writers in this idiom, his music is imaginative, original, brilliantly orchestrated and it’s music that demands great musicianship from the orchestra. Jim has been a member of the VJO for many years and knows the playing of all the members intimately. So when writing a programme of music for the band he can – in the tradition of Duke Ellington and many other jazz composers – decide who to assign the solos to most effectively. In other words he has control over the whole piece by astutely assigning the solos – he knows that player A and player B might be most effective soloing on this piece, while player C would be more effective on another piece etc.

However, I was also recently listening to a live recording of basically the same programme this time played by the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra, with Jim at the helm. Now I should say at the outset that the SJO are also a great band, with fine soloists, and they did the music no disservice, but played it very well and with great panache and no little skill. But – on listening to these versions of the same pieces I was struck by the feeling that rather than the pieces being written for a specific soloist, we were instead listening to a ‘tenor solo’ or an ‘alto solo’ - however well played they may have been – and I got a feeling of the solos (apart from Jim’s own) being mandatory rather than being necessary for the success of the pieces. In fact some of the pieces were so complexly and sophisticatedly orchestrated, and so brilliantly structured compositionally, that the solos actually seemed like an unwelcome intrusion and a distraction from the real business of the music – Jim’s writing and compositions.

None of this the fault of Jim or the band – it is symptomatic of the problem that faces the jazz composer of more involved forms – what to do with the soloists. In another post - Jazz Composition 1 – Composition or Ditty? I wrote about the issue of short form composition and whether much of what is knows as ‘composition’ in jazz amounts to anything more than an excuse for solos. The issue on which I’m writing now is different – it relates to how, as compositional techniques expand, the jazz composer can not only include solos in his or her compositions, but how they can justify them on musical grounds.

Since improvisation is the raison d’etre of jazz, most jazz compositions’ main function is to provide a vehicle for the soloing. As a result most jazz compositions tend to be short and to the point. But of course there is also another tradition of jazz composition which can be traced back to Ellington – and arguably Jellyroll Morton before that – of more extended form compositions that function as more than just solo vehicles, and this latter tradition has become more prevalent in the past 20 years. And where before the idea of using an extended form piece was largely confined to the big band world (with a few exceptions such as Charles Mingus’ groups etc.), more recently the interest in writing more involved compositions for smaller groups has grown considerably, and the act of composition is I think taken more seriously by more people in jazz than at any previous time.

But of course the more you start to add flesh to the bones of a composition, the more shape it takes, the more structurally complex it becomes and the more specific it becomes in terms of notation and instruction to the players, the more the role of the soloist is called into question. If one writes a piece that takes 15 or twenty minutes to play without solos, then the idea of just giving the soloist a set of changes to play over a form with an indeterminate set of repeats becomes highly questionable. If the composition is sophisticated enough to stand on its own, at what point do the solos become superfluous? Or maybe more to the point how can the jazz composer of more developed pieces find a way to include solos in such a way that they are NOT superfluous?

The problem becomes more acute the more sophisticated the compositions themselves become. If the composition is good enough to stand on its own as a composition, then does it need a soloist? Or to put it another way, is it the case that the more sophisticated the composition itself becomes, the more superfluous the soloist becomes? This then begs the question, does the improviser’s art really need good compositions in themselves, or, conversely, do improvisers ultimately get in the way of the true composer’s art?

I’ve begun to hear recordings of Jazz Orchestra material (especially ones where there’s a real composer at work, like McNeely or Brookmeyer) as being akin to a collection of concerti for the best players in the respective bands. And I wonder in this situation, does it become frustrating for these composers, whose familiarity with formal compositional techniques and structures is incredibly wide-ranging, to be confined to the concerto form? Do they wish to be able to write pieces that don’t demand soloists?

Of course if one goes down the latter route as a composer then you’re into the realms of the classical composition tradition and out of the jazz field. So is it possible to write music that values true compositional techniques, admits the soloist as a vital part of the composition, but avoids the ‘concerto’ model? And if so, how can that be brought about?

I think one of the best answers to this question was demonstrated on a recording made over fifty three years ago by the great George Russell – it’s called ’Jazz Workshop’ by the George Russell Smalltet, and is in my opinion a masterpiece of writing, playing and improvising.

What Russell does is to compose a series of pieces which involve solos arising out of the ensemble writing and then becoming subsumed again by the ensemble. As you listen to the pieces it’s often very hard to figure out whether various players are improvising or playing written material. It should be noted that there are fourteen different pieces on this recording the longest of which is just over four minutes long – but all the pieces are packed with incident.

Russell’s ability to find different ways of incorporating the solos into the formal structures of these little gems is extraordinary. One particularly noteworthy feature of the pieces is the extensive use of counterpoint, (a very underused and underrated technique in jazz composition) which is very effective in creating the kind of musical milieu out of which a solo can emerge, make its presence felt and merge back with the ensemble. In general on this recording the archetypical bop soloing procedure, whereby the melody is played and then the decks are cleared for the soloist to do his stuff, is generally either avoided or circumvented.

I find this recording to be incredibly satisfying on so many levels – compositional, improvisational, creativity, originality – I’m always baffled as to how it’s not better known and recognised as the masterpiece it so undoubtedly is. As a performing musician too I can listen to it with great admiration for the sheer proficiency that is displayed by all the players (including a very young and completely burning Bill Evans – check out ‘Concerto for Billy the Kid’!) in executing these very difficult charts – this is music that was way ahead of its time and is an object lesson on some ways to solve the compositional/soloist dichotomy.

You can see a video of some of the music of Russell from this period here

And there’s a fascinating programme about this music from ‘The Subject is Jazz’ a wonderfully made US TV programme from 1958 which includes an interview with Russell and a version of ‘Concerto for Billy the Kid’ (at 6.08) - you can see that here


And finally there’s a very nice radio programme about the altoist Hal McCusick – who played on the Russell album and made a fine ‘Jazz Workshop’ recording of his own – which features some tracks from the ‘Smalltet’ recording – well worth a listen, you can hear it here

There’s much more to be said on this compositional/soloing problem, and I will return to it in a future post soon, but for now, if you haven’t already, check out ‘Jazz Workshop’ for a masterclass on how to seamlessly integrate improvised solos into complex compositions without sacrificing the quality of either element.

Where's the One!!??

This is another slightly older essay, but I think the issues raised in it are still very valid.


Where’s the 1!?

I think it's true to say that one of the biggest changes in jazz improvisation over the past 20 years has been the adoption by jazz musicians of what might be called extended rhythmic techniques – odd metre playing, the use of metric modulation, etc. The growth in what's called 'World Music' has undoubtedly had a big influence on this new development, with players taking advantage of the easy access the internet has delivered to the curious musician, allowing them to check out Balkan Music, Indian music, Arabic music etc. and to take on board the wide range of rhythmic styles, grooves, and approaches that these musics provide. The result if this is a plethora of new rhythmic styles and techniques. Jazz musicians, especially younger ones, have enthusiastically adopted this new vocabulary, particularly in the area of original composition, and a huge variety of pieces have been written involving odd metres, metric modulation and the like. In such an environment one would imagine that this new information must surely enrich the music and bring a new element to it. But while I think this is true to some extent, I also believe there is a serious problem with how this new rhythmic information is approached by soloists in particular.

In recent years, as a bassist, I've been in many situations where new music has been brought to the group by composers, involving various rhythmic devices such as those mentioned earlier. In many cases, especially where the music is brought in by horn players, we – the rhythm section – are presented with new and difficult rhythmic problems which we're expected to solve almost immediately, and without any assistance from the composer on possible ways to approach this new information. We can be presented with new difficult rhythmic music and not only do we have to play it correctly, we have to make it groove and come alive as well.

Now you might argue that this is the job of a rhythm section and if you can't stand the heat then stay out of the kitchen. But in a more conventional situation when new music is brought in there is usually a rhythmic precedent for the music – i.e. swing feel, or funk, or Brazilian, or loose straight 8's or something, and all usually in a metre of ¾ or 4/4. These are known quantities, the members of the rhythm section can apply their originality and creativity to something that has rhythmic precedent, and something which they've had a chance to develop over several years. In this new rhythmic landscape, this is not always the case.

As a bassist or drummer these days, you can be presented with a piece in 15/8 and asked to play with a Brazilian feel, or be given something with constantly changing metres and asked to do it with a reggae groove. I once saw an instruction on a piece of music that said – 'think Iranian Surf Music'!! This new rhythmic environment is very challenging for bassists and drummers in particular, and challenge is something that I believe should always be involved in an evolving music such as jazz. And of course as someone whose been heavily involved in the exploration of rhythmic possibilities for over 15 years, I'm very enthusiastic about this new rhythmic language. However the problem here as I see it is that this new rhythmic music being presented to the rhythm section by the non-rhythm section composers is often written by people who can't play it themselves, and who depend entirely on the rhythm section to make the composition musical. This not only puts an unfair stress on the rhythm section and an inordinate amount of responsibility on the bass and drums, but the musical results suffer also, since the soloists often have an inordinate dependence on the rhythm section in order to keep in the right place in the metre and form.

A typical scenario in one of these situations is that a melody instrument player brings in a new piece in an unusual meter, probably with some subdivisions specified within the meter. The horn players have the melody written out, and the rhythm section has little instruction on how to create a groove. Everyone goes to work – the horn players on playing the melody correctly, the rhythm section on trying to play both the metre correctly and finding a way to make the rhythm breathe and live. Once everyone has got the melody statement to a point where it's considered satisfactory, they move on to the solos – and this is where the real problems start in my opinion.

So often the solo form will be over one or two chords, and the soloists will just play their usual 4/4 or 3/4 stuff over the top of the rhythm with no regard for the fact that the piece is not in 4/4 or 3/4, The rhythm section are valiantly labouring to keep the metre and the form, AND make the rhythm sound good for the whole piece, while the soloists responsibility to respect the metre seems to begin and end with the melody.

There are two results arising from this. Firstly you have a situation where the horn players and the rhythm section are not playing together and there's almost no interaction. Since the soloists don't know where the '1' is and are depending on the rhythm section to provide it, they float over the top of the rhythm section playing in a world of their own, incapable of responding to information provided by the rhythm section. And since the soloists are playing almost random rhythms over this new metre, the rhythm section in turn are denied information to feed off from the soloists.

In any normal 4/4 situation in jazz of the last 50 years the interaction between rhythm section and soloist has been crucial to the development of the music as a truly collective art form. Think of any of Miles' rhythms sections, or Coltrane's classic quartet, or Bill Evans's trios – all depended on this interchange between soloist and rhythm section. But with this new situation this kind of interchange is all but eliminated. The rhythm section play together, the soloists floating on top and approximating the metre. Very often, when in this situation, I've felt like I was playing on an Aebersold Playalong recording! There being so little interaction between soloist and rhythm section we might as well have been playing in different rooms. It's almost like a throwback to the bad old fusion days of the 70s, where jazz soloists trotted out lick after lick over a pounding rock rhythm section with neither soloist or rhythm section having the slightest effect on, or interest in, what the others were playing.

The second result of this problem is that the music is BORING!! After a while it all sounds the same. Presumably the idea of playing in 7,11,15, 23 or whatever, is to introduce variety and newness into the music. But due to the constraints placed on the music by the protagonists' lack of competence in these new metres we get the opposite result. You nearly always get the same thing –

1) Complex melody

2) A series of solos over one or two basic chords with soloists floating over the top of the metre and with no interaction between rhythm section and soloists

3) Complex melody

It's dull, dull, dull! In my opinion it's pointless bringing in a piece of music that you essentially can't play. You'd be much better off sticking with 4/4 or 3/4 and playing some creative music with your colleagues than bringing in some token tune in one of these new metres where your ability to respect the measure length is restricted to the playing of the melody. Would any competent horn player, or anyone for that matter, bring in a piece based on changes they found impossible to negotiate? I don't think so. So why do it with rhythm? I would go as far as to say that bringing in a piece of music in which you completely depend on the rhythm section to make you sound competent, let alone creative, is actually dishonest. You're depending on the hard work of others in learning how to deal with this new rhythmic language to absolve you from having to do the same. No good and lasting music is ever produced in such circumstances.

I would suggest that if we're to truly explore the wealth of new musical landscapes made available to us by this new rhythmic information then we have to do the hard work necessary to be comfortable in these metres and rhythmic forms. If you like the idea of doing a tune in 15/8 then you should learn to play in 15/8 – not play your stock 4/4 stuff with ragged corrections every few bars as the rhythm section play the REAL downbeat! You should be able to play phrases that respect this metre, and the real proof of that is to use changes in the music you write in these metres and new rhythms. Get a drum machine, or sequencer, programme the rhythm in question into it, and play along with it over and over until you know where '1' is – every time. Then apply changes to the metre and use the voice leading you've learned over years of practice in that discipline.

Treat rhythm with the same respect you treated harmony and melody and make the same demands on yourself in your use of it. Don't write dull tunes with one or two chords as cover for the fact that you can't voice-lead in the new metre – learn how to voice-lead in that metre – but at home and in the practice room – not on the gig using the crutch of the rhythm section and at the expense of the music and audience. Don't bring any tunes to the rehearsal room where you demand of others something you can't do yourself. Don't try and skip the 'hard yards' - do the work, find the '1' and then rather than paying lip service to this new rhythmic vocabulary, perhaps we can hear some good, creative and new music. No more faking please!!

PS. As an example of how beautiful complex rhythms and great chords can sound when played by people who really know what they're doing have a listen to Kenny Werner's trio piece 'In Tune on the great CD 'Press Enter' (Sunnyside).

As another example of changes in odd metres with respect for voice leading you can also listen to some standards played in odd metres here This was recorded as long ago as 1993 by myself, Mike Nielsen on guitar and Conor Guilfoyle on drums. There are three pieces here - 'Night and Day played in an 11/4 swing feel, 'Love for Sale' played in an 11/8 Afro-Cuban feel and 'Summertime' played in 21/14. Notice the absence of one-chord solo forms!

Peer Group

There’s something about playing with your contemporaries that feels different to any other playing situation……… Recently the Guilfoyle/Nielsen trio – with Mike Nielsen on guitar, and my brother Conor on drums, has got back together for the first time in five years - as a trio at least, though we’ve played together as part of a rhythm section with Dave Liebman a couple of years back. But though it’s been five years since we played as a trio, we have a LONG history together. We first played as a rhythm section in 1985, as part of a group called ‘Four in One’ (with firstly Richie Buckley on saxophone, then Mike McMullen) and that group played together till about 1989. During this period we started to play as a trio for the first time, doing some gigs at the Focus Theatre – a venue which in retrospect I realise was, for Irish jazz musicians of my generation, like Minton’s was for the bebop guys in the ‘40s! Over the next fifteen years we played together on innumerable occasions, either as a trio or as a rhythm section.

As we played together two distinct strands of our work developed – our role as a trio with an intense interest in developing new rhythmic techniques, and our role as a rhythm section accompanying visiting musicians. In this latter role we played with many great musicians – Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano, Sonny Fortune, Kenny Wheeler, Richie Beirach, Kenny Werner, Larry Coryell, Conrad Herwig, Julian Arguelles, Pat LaBarbara, Steve Coleman and Simon Nabatov, and we recorded with Liebman (twice) and LaBarbara. Apart from this work with international musicians we also played with many Irish musicians in many different groupings and formats.

At the same time as we were operating as a rhythm section, we had an independent life as a trio. At the end of the ‘80s we developed an intense interest in the creative possibilities of rhythm, and luckily enough we were underemployed enough to have the time to work on these possibilities! At that time none of us was as busy as we later became, and subsequently were able to put the time at our disposal into what amounted to about two years of intense rehearsal. About three mornings a week we would go to the music school where we worked, lock ourselves into the padded cell that was the drum teaching room, and play for hours. Over this period we developed our rhythmic techniques and interest in such things as metric modulation and playing in odd metres.

We had a particular interest in playing standards in odd metres, something that was very rare at that time, though it’s still not common today. And through working on these things we developed a reputation internationally as being the ‘weird rhythm guys’, which did us no harm at all! We ended up being the first Irish musicians to be invited to teach at Berklee College of Music for example and also taught in Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Austria and India among other places. As a result of this period of work and interest in rhythm I wrote my rhythm book which featured the trio in the accompanying CD, and is now over ten years old (if you’re interested in reading more about the development of this book I posted a blog about it here).

In 1992 we managed to get a residency in The Oak - a pub in Temple Bar. A residency is a really hard thing to get these days, but it was a little easier then, and this particular one, which (incredibly) we managed to hold on to for about a year, was really helpful to us in being able to develop this odd metre standard concept, since we could try out the material every Friday night. This prepared us for going into the studio to record – which we did in Paul Ashe Browne’s studio in Annamoe in Wicklow in March 1993 – the peaceful rural setting making a suitable contrast to the rhythmic mayhem that was going on in the studio!

This recording of rearranged, (both harmonically and rhythmically), standards, which we fondly christened ‘Fucked-Up Classics Volume One’, was for all of us a landmark recording since we felt it represented a document of the work in this area that we’d done up to this point, and which we also felt was a good representation of that - the residency in the Oak having helped hone the music to a very high level. But, with the recording made, we couldn’t get it out. Few companies were interested in releasing an album of odd metre standards by relative unknowns and none of us was in a financial position to pay for the manufacture and release of the recording ourselves. So it languished in the studio for several years and then – disaster – the studio changed address and the DAT original master disappeared in the move...........

So all that remained of ‘Fucked Up Classics’ were some cassette copies that we had in our possession and it’s never been released. But last year Conor suggested that we should transfer the music to CD, and though it wouldn’t be of commercial level sound quality, get the music out there at least. So this we did through Conor’s website where you can download the music for free What we found interesting is that though the record companies wouldn’t give us the time of day when we originally sent the recording out to them, usually saying that the music was ‘too esoteric’, the CD has been downloaded over 600 times in the few short months since it’s been up there. And we feel good about that – it’s nice to get some kind positive reaction, even many years later, to something you put so much work into.

After this period we started to write original material and do freer music than previously and so the odd metre standard era (even though we usually included a couple in every performance) passed on for us. And even the trio passed on, in that, in the typical way of these things, we all developed our own careers and interests, became busier individually and began developing new projects independently of the trio. Although we would get together occasionally as a trio, and more often as a rhythm section, the days of the three times a week rehearsals and residency gigs were gone. And it was only as recently as last March, when Mike and I met for the first time in over a year at a Lionel Loueke concert, that we started talking again about taking the trio out of the mothballs and back on the road so to speak. We realised with shock that it had actually been five years since we’d played a gig as a trio, and decided then and there that something should be done about that!

And so we have – we’re playing a trio gig in the legendary JJ Smyth’s on Sunday June 7th, AND we decided to revive ‘Fucked Up Classics’ and give it its first outing in over 15 years.

And so we started rehearsing, and it’s been really great to play again! As I remarked at the beginning of this post, there’s something about playing with contemporaries that is unique. When you play with musicians of your own age and background, there’s a shared experience there, an unspoken understanding of certain concepts and philosophies that you just don’t get working with younger musicians or musicians from different backgrounds. This understanding is based on years of listening to the same music, or working on the same material – it’s almost like a form of musical cultural identity, a shared recognition of certain basic truths that are held by everybody in the group. Before you play a note there are certain things that you just KNOW, that require no discussion or preamble. It makes for a particular type of playing experience that can’t be reproduced in any other context – it’s the understanding within a peer group that has a history of shared experiences.

And when in the case of this trio you add the, literally, years of playing together, travelling together, playing with all of these great musicians together and how those experiences shaped us and affected us, and when you also add the collective passion for rhythm that kept us in the drum room for years and allowed us to work towards a shared concept of how to play collectively – it intensifies this aforementioned sense of unspoken understanding. In the rehearsals, despite the fact that we haven’t played for five years as a trio, there has been almost no discussion of musical concepts – we just know what we want to do without talking about it. In fact we’ve spent more time laughing about past incidences and experiences and talking about this musician that we played with, or that gig we did than we have talking about the music itself. Because there’s no need to talk about the music – all we need to do with that is play it. And play it we will, with perhaps even more enthusiasm than before (if that’s possible!), since we’re so happy to be back playing again. And also playing with more maturity, since the things we’ve been doing and learning and working on individually can now be fed into the collective playing of the trio. We believe that we play this music better now than we did then, and I think we’re all looking forward to this gig as a chance to both revisit old musical haunts and discover some new ones at the same time.

The 8th Note Hegemony

Recently I watched a clip on Youtube of the great contemporary jazz guitarist Adam Rogers playing ‘Have you met Miss Jones’. He was playing it as part of a masterclass and demonstrating how he uses superimposition of scales as an improvisational device. It is of course, as one would expect of Rogers, brilliantly played and executed, with a flawless technique, and real clarity of sound. However, I couldn’t help noticing something that I’ve noticed in the playing of a lot of contemporary jazz musicians – particularly those playing in the realm of the swing idiom these days – a preponderance of 8th notes and very little rhythmic variety.

It seems that the the evolution of the harmonic language of jazz has gone hand in hand with the simplification of the rhythmic language of its soloists. So much jazz soloing in recent years seems to be based on 8th notes, and 8th notes that are played in a series rather than broken up in any kind of interesting way or with any variety. Take the Rogers solo as an example – now I know I may be a little unfair to choose this as an example of his playing, because he was giving a masterclass and was demonstrating harmonic movement. No doubt he’d play a little differently if he’d been with a rhythm section. But the solo is over four minutes long and I think it’s fair to assume that the way he’s playing here is one he’s comfortable with and used to doing. And just because one is demonstrating harmonic stuff doesn’t mean that one can’t use rhythm in a creative way as well.

So, back to the solo – as I listened to it I was struck by how 8th note-driven the whole solo was and how based on divisions of two it was. Even where there were no 8th notes in couples, nearly everything else was based on divisions of two – quarter notes, half notes etc. And then I noticed that the person who had filmed the solo had also transcribed it and had given a link to the transcription, and reading this transcription (assuming it’s accurate – it seems to be, though I haven’t checked note for note), bore out the suspicion I had regarding the rhythmic uniformity of the solo. In the whole eight choruses - eight pages of transcription, over four minutes of playing – Rogers only uses a subdivision of anything other than two, four times – and this is a subdivision of three – i.e. triplets. In other words, triplets are only used four times in the whole solo. All of this sophisticated harmonic language is supported by a pretty basic rhythmic language. Technically it’s brilliant, harmonically it’s brilliant, rhythmically it’s dull.

You can check it out for yourself – You can see the performance here

And the transcription here

And I think this is pretty typical of a lot of soloing these days in this idiom. There seems to be little or no importance attached to rhythmic variety, it’s all 8th note, 8th note, 8th note. Why? It seems extraordinary to me that there is still little attention paid to the importance of rhythm in music. Jazz schools are particularly guilty of this and seem to place a huge emphasis on harmonic considerations and almost none on rhythm. Maybe this is because harmony lends itself better to academic forms of teaching than rhythm does – rhythm is a more abstract concept to teach and therefore is avoided. There is an avalanche of harmony books and technique books for jazz, but very very little on rhythm, which maybe explains why teachers are reluctant to tackle it (teachers love textbooks!), and why contemporary players seem to place so little importance on rhythm in their improvising.

And it’s particularly puzzling as to why this might be given there are so many great examples of sophisticated rhythmic invention by great jazz soloists in the history of the music. Armstrong, Parker, Miles, Coltrane, Rollins, Jim Hall, Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock etc. etc. A quick look on Youtube revealed two fantastic examples almost immediately – one from forty four years ago, the other from three years ago – both playing in the swing idiom over standard from.

The first example is an extraordinary solo from Sonny Rollins from 1965, playing ‘Oleo’ with NHOP and Alan Dawson. This is Rollins at the height of his powers, and his famous rhythmic virtuosity is clearly to the fore during this whole performance.

The other is taken from a concert from Bill Frisell in 2006 where he plays Konitz’s ‘Subconcious-lee’ which is based on ‘What is This Thing Called Love’ - and again the sheer variety of rhythmic approaches he takes is wonderful.

Both of these solos are not only harmonically sophisticated but also rhythmically interesting. Both use swinging 8th notes, but not to the exclusion of all else. Both marry a complex rhythmic language to a highly developed harmonic language, which makes for a deeper, fuller and above all, more INTERESTING experience for the listener. Let’s please have less of the machine gun 8th notes and more rhythmic intrigue – it’d be better for everybody!

Jazz Composition 1 - Composition or Ditty?

The pianist Richie Beirach once said in a workshop I attended:

“There are two kinds of jazz compositions – compositions and ditties. Most so-called jazz compositions are ditties”.

This statement, typical in its forthrightness from Richie, has stuck with me for a long time, and I’ve thought about it for a long time – was he right? Are most jazz compositions real compositions in the sense of carefully created artistic artefacts in their own right, or are they trite constructs with little or no thought given to them structurally or artistically – in short, ditties?

A lot of jazz compositions, in fact most of them, are really just excuses for blowing. They fulfil the requirement of providing the improviser with the form and chord progression over which to improvise. In the post-bebop idiom, once the melody is finished with, it is rarely if ever referred to again, it has fulfilled its function of giving the players the skeleton which they can fill out with their solos. And as such a lot of these compositions are indeed ‘ditties’ – they are short little pieces with little or no thought given to internal structure, to the relationship of the notes to each other, to motivic development, or especially to timbral and orchestration considerations. They are pragmatic jumping off points provided by improvisers for improvisers.

Does this matter? Well maybe it shouldn’t, because the history of jazz shows that the great leaps forward in the music were generated in the main by improvisers, not by composers. But then again, all of these innovators – Armstrong, Bird, Miles, Coltrane etc. – all wrote very specific kinds of pieces that were tailored to the kind of improvisational landscape they wanted to explore. So it could be argued that composition, providing as it did a forum in which these players, and others could explore and develop their art, is indeed very important in the history of jazz. As an example of how important composition can be seen to be for jazz, try to imagine Coltrane developing the concept of the Classic Quartet if his repertoire had been based on the compositions of Charlie Parker. Or can one imagine Charlie Parker powering the engine of the bebop revolution while using the repertoire of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five? Of course both of these great musicians would and could have made great music from any material, but they clearly felt the need to write new compositions which reflected their musical concerns and identity – Bird with pieces such as ‘Anthropology’ or ‘Yardbird Suite’, Coltrane with ‘Giant Steps’ or ‘Transition’.

It could also be argued that by providing these different kinds of improvisational landscapes, jazz has actually come up with a unique kind of composition – one that provides the structural constituents for the personal musical development of improvisers. On the face of it this would seem to dismiss the ‘ditty’ theory by showing how even a short form piece can form an integral and indispensable part of a much larger whole. And since the creation of this piece by the composer was a deliberate act in which he or she used the piece to fulfil this role of creating the right environment for the expression of his or her improvisational concept, it can be seen that in this context these pieces fulfil pretty much any criteria of what constitutes a ‘composition’.


So, case closed then? Is the ditty theory blown out of the water by the creation of highly personalised pieces written by great improvisers to help move their concept forward? Well no, the case is far from closed in my opinion. Because pieces that were written as true compositions, and in their original form were integral parts of an artistic whole, often become ditties in the hands of lazy unthinking musicians who completely miss the point of the original intention and context of the piece. For example the original versions of Wayne Shorter’s classic composition ‘Footprints’ - as played on the ‘Adams Apple’ and ‘Miles Smiles’ albums, is a true composition – a brooding melancholy minor blues with a lovely melody and a very specific atmosphere. It is all of a piece with the way Wayne plays and the subsequent atmosphere of the post-composition improvisations. But the ‘Footprints’ that is trotted out at a thousand jazz clubs around the world and butchered at a thousand more jam sessions is indeed a ditty, in the truest sense of the word – a trite little melody, glossed over quickly in the rush to get to the ‘real action’ - the blowing. The players in this situation are heedless of the original context of this piece and by ignoring this context, and by seeing it as merely an excuse to blow, and refusing to bring a context of their own to the piece, are, at a stroke, relegating a once lovely and unique composition to the realms of ditty-dom. ‘All Blues’ is another example of how a once exquisite composition has been cheapened and degraded by thousands of mindless performances.

So maybe the answer for the jazz musician is to write their own compositions and thereby do the kind of thing Wayne did with ‘Footprints’? Well yes, if that means that you’re going to come up with compositions that serve your overall musical concept in the way that Footprints did for Wayne. However the idea that original composition automatically equals deeper artistic expression is often not true at all. Unfortunately I believe that a lot of jazz musicians have a very poor compositional sense. They become obsessed with the the typical scale running solos of the post-bop era, and the blandness of this 8th note-soaked way of playing is reflected in the equal blandness of much of what passes for composition in jazz. An intro followed by a melody and off we go! No backgrounds, no changes of direction for different soloists, no thought given to the possibility of using different instrumental combinations within the group for different soloists, no examination of textural possibilities, no care over the creation of specific emotional atmospheres – just a parade of solos one after another followed by a brief recapitulation of the theme. In this context, despite the fact that these pieces may be ‘original compositions’ they are unquestionably ditties. And worse – they are often generic ditties – the bebop tune, the Latin tune, the rhythm changes tune, the ballad, the modal tune etc. etc.



It is amazing just how much poor and hackneyed material is accepted in jazz as being OK as far as composition goes. I do believe that in a world where so many musicians are coming out of jazz education programmes where they all learn basically the same information, that there is great scope for helping to ameliorate the danger of everyone sounding the same by making the study of composition mandatory in jazz programmes, as opposed to it being a specialisation or optional extra as it often is in many schools. The care and thought that has to be applied to true composition will and should spill over into the improvisational field of any musician who properly studies it. Any jazz musician who studies composition will quickly see that if you’re going to write a blues or rhythm changes tune you need to find something personal to do with it, not just create another ditty.

To my mind the ultimate example of a great short form, small group composer is Thelonious Monk. No matter what form he composes in, it has his personal stamp is all over it. Want to hear a Bb blues that is completely original? Try ‘Straight No Chaser’ or ‘Misterioso’. How about rhythm changes? Listen to ‘Rhythm-A-Ning’. And for great examples of through-composed pieces, try ‘Crepescule with Nellie’ or the gigantic baroque structure of ‘Brilliant Corners’. Here is someone working within the conventions of bop and post-bop form – AABA, blues, etc. - and who comes up with completely original and personal takes on these hoary old forms. And not only that, in a Monk performance, once the melody is played it is used again and again IN the solos, to inform the improvisations. He is a model for what is possible in the genre.

And he is a model for how a short form piece can avoid all the pitfalls of ditty-dom and exist as a true and uniquely jazz composition.

My Generation

Over the past several years when talking to musicians of my own age, from many different countries, I’ve been intrigued to discover how often it turns out that when we were younger we were all listening to and very influenced by a lot of the same albums. Of course we all listened to different things too, and were influenced by different music, but I’ve noticed a consistent thread of albums – or maybe groups of albums would be a more accurate description – that come up again and again as favourites and influences for musicians from a wide background, and of many nationalities.

Most of these albums were made in the 70s and 80s, which makes sense, as people of my generation would have been in their teens and early twenties when this music appeared. Of course we were all also listening to classics from earlier periods too – the usual diet of Bird, Miles, Trane, Monk and the various leading players on our respective instruments. But the recordings and music I’m talking about were being released at a time when we were all learning our trade, so it was brand new and had a profound effect on us. It was new, it was different and it was exciting.

The following list is of course not completely comprehensive, and there would be omissions to the list of influences and favourites of every musician I’ve spoken to, and indeed omissions from my own list. But I think this roster of recordings does represent a significant body of work for musicians of my generation.

The Jazz-Rock Phenomenon: Mahavishnu Orchestra, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, Weather Report.

Of course we all listened to the classic electric Miles albums, but it was the offshoots of this music, created mostly by members of those classic ‘In A Silent Way’, and ‘Bitches Brew’ recordings, which had a huge impact. The Miles albums came out when we were for the most part either just getting into jazz, or not involved in it at all. When Bitches Brew came out for example, I was only 12 years old. But the rash of albums from what was then known as Jazz-Rock (the word ‘fusion’ came much later) made a profound impact on me and many of my colleagues. And contrary to the revisionist dogma that ‘nothing was happening in the 70s’, put forward by the Crouch/Marsalis/Ken Burns orthodoxy, these recordings were not only deeply original, but very different from each other.

The Mahavishnu’s ‘Inner Mounting Flame’ and ‘Birds of Fire’ (my own favourite) married incredible virtuosity with such unheard of things as odd metres. Headhunters showed how deep funk grooves could be put at the service of sophisticated jazz improvisation. ‘Chameleon’ was the big seller, but I’ve found that most musicians, including myself, prefer ‘Thrust’ and/or the wonderful live album ‘Flood’. Weather Report produced a series of great albums that had a compositional and sonic sophistication that was unique at that time, and at its best still is. ‘Mysterious Traveller’, ‘Tale Spinnin’ and of course ‘Heavy Weather’ are three great examples of the depth of original work produced by this band.

The ECM Albums:

Again the depth of invention and breadth of music released on the ECM label in the 70s gives the lie to the ‘nothing happening’ fable put out by the jazz neo-cons. ECM has an image of quiet introspective ‘coffee table jazz’. The received wisdom is that ECM is as much about image as music, and sonically uniform featuring a kind of wistful broodiness (I once heard the Maj7+5 chord described as the ‘ECM I chord’). But that’s not true at all – for example, classic albums that many of us were listening to from the ECM label included John Abercrombie’s incendiary organ trio album ‘Timeless’, Enrico Rava’s witty and very Italian ‘The Plot’, Kenny Wheeler’s compositional and improvisational masterpieces ‘Gnu High’ and ‘Deer Wan’, Richie Beirach’s beautiful (and often burning) piano trio album ‘Elm’, the muscular Abercrombie/Holland/DeJohnette Gateway trio, and of course the classic Jarrett Scandinavian quartet albums ‘Belonging’ and ‘My Song’.

Dave Holland, Steve Coleman and the M-Base movement

At the beginning of the 80s a really new sound was coming out of New York and it centred around two people – Steve Coleman and Dave Holland. Coleman and his colleagues formed a loose collective movement they called M-Base and a stream of innovative and fascinating albums began around 1984 and continued on into the early 90s. For me I’d date the real flowering of this new music to be represented by Dave’s ‘Seeds of Time’ recording (again on ECM!) and Steve’s ‘Sine Die’ recording. Neither of these were the first recordings by their respective leaders but I think they represent a maturity of conception that embodied the virtues of this movement. Later important albums included Dave’s ‘Extensions’ recording and Steve’s ‘Rhythm People’.

The music was very innovative in its use of rhythm – which was particularly driven by the originality of Coleman in this regard. His own 5 Elements band incorporated driving odd metre funk rhythms with very dense and sometimes very chromatic music. This approach was leavened on Dave’s albums by his folky kind of tunes (‘Homecoming’) and by Kenny Wheeler’s harmonically sophisticated pieces such as ‘The Good Doctor’. I remember being blown away by these recordings - intrigued by the originality of the ideas, and how they constructed the pieces. And talking to my colleagues now I realise that they were affected in very much the same way. This music was largely responsible for creating the current fascination with all things rhythmic that we find in so much contemporary jazz. And echoes of these rhythms with the often angular melodies can be heard in the Downtown movement of a decade later. Truly important music.

As was all the music I mentioned here – not just for me, but for many musicians of my generation. Each generation of jazz musicians are moved and moved forward by the influence of a particular body of work that is particular to the era and is emerging at around the time the aforesaid musicians are making their own way into the music. For me, these recordings made up a huge part of that body of work - one that had a lasting impact on me and my generation.

It's Over!

I was in a HMV record store on a recent Saturday in Toronto – the usual three-floor superstore, with lots of floor space etc. I went up to the classical department and then the jazz department, spent some time browsing in both and eventually bought $40 worth of CDs. I spent an hour in the jazz department and in that hour I was a) one of only six people there, and b) the only person who spent any money at all. There must have been over 1000 titles in the jazz section, and one guy behind the counter looking after it.

Even someone with the most basic grasp of economics (me!) can see that this level of sales is totally unsustainable. Remember that this was a Saturday – the busiest day of the week – and the $40 I spent in the jazz department was $40 more than anyone spent in the classical department in the time I was there. If you figure that the store took $40 an hour in the jazz department, then over an eight hour day they would have taken in $320. If you then factor in the cost of rent, light, heat, wages and the cost of buying the stock, you can see that this just isn’t going to work for much longer.

But it wasn’t just the minority musics that are suffering – as an experiment, on my way out I had a quick look at the ground floor, where all the popular stuff is kept – movies, DVDs, mainstream pop music etc. This was around noon on a Saturday, in a big city, in a shop in the city centre, and there were only twenty five people on that huge shop floor. When you take a live sample like that and add to it the recent bankruptcies of large chains like Tower it demonstrates that record shops are in terminal decline, and it’s only a matter of time before they’re gone, at least in their present form.

And what will take their place? I have to say I have no idea where the recording industry is going. Record companies are going bankrupt, as are record distribution companies. In the ‘current economic climate’ (to use the current popular phrase), this will only get worse. So, if the record shops go, and the record companies go, and the record distribution companies go – how will recorded music be sold. Or more to the point, at what stage will it just become uneconomical for musicians to record music?

We’re already heading that way – and I can’t understand why people can’t see it. There’s an incredible amount of support, both overt and implied, for the free downloading of music and free file sharing. Every time a file sharing website is taken to court by record companies, or movie companies, the media always portray the file sharers as the David versus the big bad Goliath of the record/movie industry. Just today a heavy sentence was placed on organizers of a website called ‘Pirate Bay’ and the report in the Irish Times headline says – ‘Pirate Bay may be dented but its ship sails on for more battle’. The language used - ‘sails on for more battle’ is typical of the media’s way of portraying the file sharers as swashbuckling underdogs, and the language in the main article uses more of the same. There is no space given to even the possibility that the file sharers and the people who use the sites are involved in theft. No, it’s the big bad record companies denying the ordinary man in the street the right to free music.

But where does the idea that there IS a right to free music come from? Does nobody see that if music becomes something which you can access in the same way that you can access water from a tap, it will eventually lose all its commercial value? If it reaches the point – and we’re getting there already – where there is no commercial value to making a recording, and where it actually costs you to make one, then musicians will simply stop recording.

Take the economics of small scale jazz recording for example. To produce 1000 CDs costs a minimum of between €2000-€3000, depending on what kind of art work you get, what kind of insert you use etc. The actual recording/editing/mastering will cost another €2000. So on average to produce a CD will cost the artist or record company about €5000. Since the record companies are going to the wall thanks to the decline of CD purchases, why would any jazz musician put up €5000 of their own money to make a CD when the public refuses to pay for recorded music anymore?

Musicians just won’t do it – it’s hard enough to make a living as a jazz musician without paying your own money to make recordings that can be stolen by those plucky people at Pirate Bay and their ilk and passed on for free to a public who feel entitled to use your work for their own entertainment without feeling any necessity to pay for it.

The free downloading of commercially produced music is wrong – it is theft. It is morally wrong, and it will kill the very thing it is exploiting. It makes no sense on any level, except that of greed. At a time when people have more disposable income than at any previous time in history, they demand that hard-pressed musicians give them their work for free. If you posit the idea that file sharing is wrong, the apologists for downloading always answer this with the response 'but you can't stop it', or 'everyone's doing it' - but these are answers to different questions! The fact that everyone is stealing your work doesn't help the musician whose work is being stolen, or make it any less immoral. This is still theft, no matter how many people are involved, and it's still morally wrong.

Websites like Pirate Bay, Napster and Kazaa are thieves, and the people who use their services to illegally download commercially produced music are thieves. And the thieves are bankrupting the people from whom they’re stealing - the musicians. Because ultimately it's the musicians who will and are paying the price of this theft - not the record companies. There never seems to be a recognition in this 'brave file-sharer versus evil record companies' scenario portrayed in the media, that ultimately it is the musicians who are being stolen from, and who are paying the ultimate price for the theft. Unless something changes, unless mealy-mouthed journalists stop being cowardly cheerleaders for theft, unless the public stop seeing themselves as being entitled to take the work of others for free, and conveniently ignoring the immorality of what they’re doing, then in the near future it’ll be all over.

Straws in the Wind

Flicking through the TV (always an unwise thing to do on a Saturday night…), just came across one of those dire ‘talent’ shows which feature Simon Cowell on the panel. If there is anything that tells us that our civilization is probably doomed in the not too distant future it is the fact that someone like Simon Cowell is allowed to judge anything at all, never mind whether someone has talent or not. Anyway, on this occasion instead of the usual wannabe Beyonce/Robbie Williams candidate, there was a saxophone player! Yes, a soprano saxophone player of all things, on a mainstream talent show. But though I had a moment of hope when I saw that an instrumentalist was being featured on the show, it was swiftly dashed when I heard what and how he was playing.

He played ‘There’s a Place for Us’, an admittedly lovely tune from West Side Story, and played it using the hideous comb and paper tone popularised by the awful Kenny G, in a saccharine crocodile tears-laden rendition complete with over the top synth string accompaniment. The performance was undertaken accompanied by lots of soulful looking into the eyes of the audience by the performer, and the whole thing was as saccharine and schmaltzy a confection as you would ever hear from Kenny G himself. Just listening to it for a couple of seconds of it could put your blood sugar through the roof.

And what was the reaction from the panel of ‘experts’ to this trashy reworking of an already trashy genre, first mined by Kenny G from his bottomless pit of tasteless schlock over twenty years ago? ‘

'It’s rare that we hear anything as special as that on this show’

‘I’ve never been moved to tears by a saxophone before’

And, from the mighty multi-millionaire Simon Cowell?

‘This show was set up to find extraordinarily talented people who need a break’ (pause for dramatic effect), ‘I think we’ve found that person!’

Cut to audience cheers and tears…………

We’re doomed!

Drum Crazy!

I was sent an amazing clip of Fred Astaire playing drums as part of a song and dance routine from a movie, (not sure of the name of the original movie - maybe someone can enlighten me?). As usual with Astaire the sheer technical skill of the dancing is incredible - playing the drums while dancing and miming to the soundtrack. And if you look at the clip, in a four minute section there are only about four camera angle changes, so at the most there are four edits - extraordinarily few for something as technically difficult as this.

You can see the Fred Astaire clip here

The song and dance guys of this era, at the pinnacle of popular culture, had the most amazing technical skills, and it's educational to compare them to their counterparts today. I always see Robbie Williams referred to as the 'great entertainer', but even allowing for the total change in style and music in the intervening years, it's clear that Williams couldn't even get close to this level of song and dance expertise - the technique just isn't there. But lack of technique in music isn't a bar to stardom any more, the technology available today compensates for the general lack of true technical skill in performance across all the performing arts.

The ability to edit and manipulate film by computer, and the ability to edit and manipulate sound via Pro Tools and the like, has had a profound effect on the technical skills of popular artists. Whereas in the pre-computerised era it would be impossible to have a career as a singer unless you could sing, or as an instrumentalist unless you could play, that's now all changed. You can be made to sound good and look good, aided by a battery of music and image computer editors, whose technical skill ironically is usually of a far higher level than the people whose work they are editing - or enhancing would be a better word perhaps.

I always notice when listening to or watching old video footage of earlier pop and rock groups, that the people creating the music are actually playing the instruments and singing in tune. To have a music career in that era demanded an ability to be able to sing or play. That's not the case now of course - as was proven when the huge selling Milli Vanilli had their Grammy revoked in 1990 when it was shown that they didn't sing on their own records and mimed in their live performances. How shocking! But of course the reality is that much commercial pop music of recent years is so heavily manipulated by computers both in the studio and on stage that the performers' claims to being the originators of the sounds that the audience are hearing doesn't stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.

But does this matter? Only if you care about the fact that this kind of audio/visual sleight of hand allows the marketeers to burrow even deeper into the lives, pockets and subliminal psyches of millions of people. They do this by creating stars in an image they believe will sell most merchandise, (of which the actual music plays a very small part), and feeding their creations to the audience, irrespective of the performers' abilities as musicians. In this Wall Street driven, marketing-created world how you look is everything, and how you sound doesn't matter - that can be fixed by the real talent in the organisation - the producers and editors. Of course movie and record companies have always tried to do this, but the technology available now have given them the ability to create whatever kind of musical Frankenstein monster they want.

Another sad aspect of this is that genuinely talented people can be denied a career in popular music because they don't look right. If you look at Astaire in this clip, he was physically unremarkable in terms of what would be considered glamorous good looks, yet he was a huge star because of his talent. A modern day Fred Astaire, looking the way he did wouldn't have a hope as a front line star - the most he could hope for would be a part in the backing dance troupe to some company-manufactured mannequin. And of course allowing the suits to decide who should succeed in pop music and what kind of music they should play has helped to make the pop scene the sterile musical joke it has become. Brave New World!

The Music Plague Continues!

Here in Toronto last night, I was a bit short of time so went into the nearest restaurant to eat. It was called 'Milestones' and it was one of these big cavernous affairs which was full of young-ish people - i was probably the oldest person there by about twenty years. Anyway, you couldn't call what this place had 'background music' since it was seriously foreground! They were pumping out dire House music at a volume that demanded any conversation be conducted in a bellow - which exacerbated the noise caused by a lot of people being a in a high-ceilinged room with hard surface walls. The word cacophony could have been invented to describe the noise in this place.

I was kind of stuck there because I didn't have time to go anywhere else, but why anyone would voluntarily go there to eat is beyond me. It's frightening to think that people have become so inured to noise that they even want to eat in a place where they have to shout to make themselves heard. I guess if they're not bellowing at each other they don't feel they've had a night out....... Scary stuff.

As to the food - well as could be expected in such a place, the culinary arts are not a priority (I think you could safely make it an axiom that the louder the music is in a restaurant is, the worse the food will be). The best that could be said for my 'Thai Red Chicken Curry', was that it didn't taste as bad as it smelled.


(See also The Music Plague)

The Psychology of Perfection

{If you’re interested in more context on this post, have a look at
A Question of Status}


In a recent discussion about the relative status in society of jazz and classical musicians, Lindsey Horner made the following very astute observation:

“The other part of the issue is why classical artists (mere interpreters) get far more respect, (not to mention money and fame) than their comparable jazz counterparts. I think some of that is the fault of jazz artists and how we have presented ourselves and our music. I won't name names, but I have heard even some of the great jazz musicians give lackluster and even just plain lousy performances on any given gig. I have never heard, nor can I imagine ever hearing, Alfred Brendel, Izthak Perlman or the Tokyo String Quartet sounding any less than very, very good, ever”

I completely agree with Lindsey’s observation – I too have seen some great jazz players give less than their best at times. I remember seeing Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette give an extraordinarily disappointing performance at the IAJE several years ago. Nobody, with the exception of DeJohnette, seemed interested in even trying to lift the music above the ordinary and it seemed to me like an exercise in coasting on reputation alone without any apparent feeling of need on behalf of the trio to actually live up to those reputations. It was depressing. And I’ve been stung several times by equally hallowed jazz names turning up and ‘phoning it in’, so to speak.

Yet anytime I’ve seen top rank classical performers (Menuhin, Gary Karr, Jorge Bolet, Ivo Pogorelich) they’ve always given first rate performances. Of course it could be that as far as their own standards were concerned, the performances were uneven – I have no way of knowing that - but even if that were so in their own minds, the performances were never shoddy, unconcerned or flippant at all. All the music was approached and played with the utmost seriousness and application, and a clear desire to serve the music and audience as well as possible.

So if it’s true that sometimes top class performers in jazz seem lackluster and uninterested, while their colleagues in classical music never take that approach, can there be an explanation as to why that should be? Are jazz musicians just more congenitally lazy artistically? Are classical musicians congenitally more serious?

Ever since reading Lindsey’s post about this I’ve been thinking about it and while there can never be any definitive answer to a question like that, I think there are elements at play here which are interesting and pertinent to the whole jazz/classical divide in terms of approach. I believe the different environment in which both musics are learned and are played has a very strong influence on differences in approach, one by-product of which is the aforementioned lapses into apathy sometimes seen in jazz performances. I’ll come back to that in a moment, but I also believe the nature of the two musics has a part to play – as follows:

Classical music (with the exception of recently written works) is a known quantity. The huge canon of great music written in this tradition is known inside and out, by performers, critics, and the public. If one plays Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata or a Mozart concerto, or Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la Nuit’, one is dealing with something that has a performance history and, within certain parameters, an agreed approach to performance. Every note of these pieces is known intimately, sometimes over a period of hundreds of years, by everyone concerned with or interested in classical performance. The scores of these great works are like the scripts of Shakespeare’s plays – they are cultural and artistic totems, the performance of which is seen as being the pinnacle of the art form. Given such an atmosphere of past history and artistic reverence, the reputation and status of the artist can stand or fall, be enhanced or be crushed, by his or her ability to do justice to these works.

If you walk onto the stage (or ‘concert platform’ as they call it in classical music!) and play Brahms’ Piano Concert No. 1 with a good symphony orchestra, the artistic stakes are very high. Nearly everybody in that room – musicians, critics, public – knows every note of this piece. In such a milieu, there is no room for any kind of off-hand approach, any shoddiness or lack of preparation. Technical perfection is usually required at the very least, then on top of that are all the elements of interpretation which play such a big part in the perceived success or failure of a performance of one of these classic pieces. This is why classical musicians will, in learning a piece, or studying it with a teacher, endlessly discuss tiny details at length and in a way that no jazz musician would contemplate. There is a demand in this music for perfection – perfection of technique, of intepretation, or performance.

The fact that perfection – even if it can be agreed what that means – can never be achieved doesn’t alter the demands for it made by audiences and critics alike. The technical perfection of recordings, and the perfection demanded by competitions, has ratcheted up these demands even further in the past forty years or so. This adds a definite nervous edge to classical performances. If there is any failure on the part of the performer to reach the expected technical standard, everything – the silence in the hall, the spotlight on the figure of the soloist, the pre-knowledge of the piece by all in the auditorium - conspires to expose that failure. It’s merciless, and the classical soloist knows it. At the highest levels – the Brendels, Ashkenazys etc. – the pressures and expectations are even higher. A sloppy or ill-prepared performance is not an option for them, unless they want their reputations in the mud.

I’m not suggesting that the reason that such wonderful musicians give such great performances is because of fear, but I do believe that the tradition of playing incredibly well known pieces in public does concentrate the mind a lot. The rules in a classical performance are very clear – the soloist knows them, the critic knows them, and the audience knows them. In such an atmosphere the task of the soloist is clear, the preparation is geared towards that and poor technical and/or attitudinal performances are kept to an absolute minimum.

Jazz musicians operate under a very different tradition – one of improvisation. In this milieu the music performed is not known, the tasks are much less clearly defined or generally agreed, and the performer has much greater freedom both in deciding the shape of each piece and the shape of the programme in general. The player has to create the music on the spot with his or her colleagues, decide the type of music played, the length of the solos the order of the pieces etc. etc. With the responsibility of coming up with the complete musical goods laying much more heavily on the jazz performer, any tiredness or lack of inspiration will automatically have consequences for the music.

In the case of the classical performer, even if they are tired, there is a clear musical road map laid out for them in the form of the score and the performance history and traditions of the piece – the jazz musician does not have the same assistance in the event of tiredness or lack of inspiration. This is not to say that any lacklustre performance by a great jazz musician is automatically because they feel tired or uninspired – of course laziness on the night, and maybe a lack of care on the night could contribute, but I do think the fact that the jazz musician is responsible for much more of the creation of the music than his or her classical counterpart does play a part.

It’s an interesting conundrum – on the one hand it could be seen that with known repertoire and such a demanding audience, the performance stakes are higher for the classical musician. But on the other hand, with so much more responsibility for the totality of the music laying on the jazz musician, the artistic stakes could arguably be said to be higher for them.

The second thing I think can be taken into consideration when examining the sometimes differing performance outlook of classical and jazz musicians is the environment in which performances of the two musics take place. In general classical musicians play in an atmosphere of quiet and respect. The cynosure of all eyes, they perform in environment where the full focus of everyone in the room is on the performer(s). They usually play in good listening conditions too, with no competition from audience chatter, no sound of cash registers, no doors banging or people getting up and down during the performance. And never a sense of the music being in any way treated as subservient to anything else going on in the room.

Jazz musicians on the other hand – all of them, from the totally unknown to the now incredibly famous, have all at one time or another experienced this feeling of having to battle other elements in order to perform their music. The psychological effect on the performers of this can easily be underestimated in my opinion. If the audience don’t care what you’re doing, if they’re not interested in how you’re performing the music, then why should you care?

A very illuminating example of the effect of this lack of audience interest on a great classical musician, when encountering it for the first time, can be found in a fascinating article about an experiment the great Amercian violinist Joshua Bell took part in recently.

This experiment was fascinating in itself, and I would encourage anyone interested in music to read it. In fact it also relates to another post I’ve done on background music –

The Music Plague

It describes an experiment where Bell anonymously went into a Washington Metro station and did some busking, to see if anyone would pay attention to, or notice the difference between one of the world’s greatest violinists and any other busker or street entertainer. You can read the article

Here

But leaving aside the main thrust of that article and returning to the main thrust of this one, there’s a very revealing quote from Bell about one aspect of his experience of playing outside the hallowed walls of the concert hall, where he is a revered performer, playing revered repertoire. Here’s the passage:

"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."

The word doesn't come easily.

". . . ignoring me."

Bell is laughing. It's at himself.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?

"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence . . ."

It’s clear that this sudden realization of his own, what we might call musical mortality, came as a real shock to Bell. But this environment he describes where people are ignoring the performer or may even resent their presence is one that will be familiar to jazz musicians of any stripe. Herbie Hancock or Sonny Rollins may never play in environments like that these days, but they did at one time.

And I believe this experience of sometimes awful playing environments does have an effect on the jazz musician, even when their careers may have risen to the point where they don’t have to endure it any more. If you’ve spent a lot of time playing in less than ideal performance environments, it’s hard to see the performance space as being a temple to music, and the act of performance as a being a ceremonial act in that temple – in the way that classical musicians do. If you add to this the more informal milieu of jazz performance, the greater freedom to take many different approaches from night to night, the lack of audience pre-awareness of the material that will be played and the greater responsibility on the performer to provide the bulk of the musical material I think you have conditions in which an occasional sub-par performance will occur. This is less likely occur in the narrower, goal-driven, more tightly focused, tradition-obsessed world of classical music.

Of course there can be variables in all of the scenarios I’ve put forward – John Coltrane was famous for the unremitting intensity with which he played his music night after night without exception, and there are also known examples of great classical musicians occasionally deviating from the performance straight and narrow. But if we look at the differences in performance practice, history, and playing environments of the two musics, I think we can see how even the great jazz musicians would have occasional lapses in their performance standards in a way that would be rare for a great classical musician.

Music Questionnaire 1 - Ireland

I admit I lifted this idea from Ethan Iverson, but I really enjoyed reading the answers to the questionnaire he sent to musicians he knows. Naturally he did this with exclusively American players, I thought this would be an interesting thing to do with Irish or Irish based musicians too.

Sean Óg (Reed player)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:

1. Melody:

I have been studying the melodies of Hildegard von Bingen recently. A piece like Ave Generosa is facinating in the way it sustains a (strictly speaking) non-repeating melody for over 4 minutes without any lag in beauty and without the help of harmony or accompaniment of any kind.

2. Harmonic language:

Again looking back a few hundred years and enjoying the harmonic rollercoaster of Carlo Gesualdo. You can get a real sense of the excitement of what happens when you move beyond Gregorian style polyphony and an overload of rich, lush colours are weaved into the music.

3. Rhythmic feel:

Not an obvious candidate, but, Captain Beefheart and his magic band circa 1970 really had some interesting approaches to rhythm. Verging between sounding like people who have little to no musical training to tightly scored odd meter grooves, Beefheart manages some of the other-worldly time feel of Thelonious Monk.

4. Classical piece:

Kodaly's 'Nights in the Mountains' a suite for wordless female choir. Hindemith 'Das Marienleben' a song cycle of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry for soprano and piano - the 1923 version is something I listen to a lot.

5. Jazz album:

Tony Malaby 'Adobe'. Arve Henriksen 'Sakuteiki'.

6. Book on music: (No response)

7 Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:

Miles Davis 'Nefertiti'.

8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very underrated:

Rudi Mahall - bass clarinet.

Ariel Hernandez (Guitarist)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:


1. Melody:

‘Interplay’ – ‘Donna Lee’

2. Harmonic language:

Stella by Starlight - Falling Grace

3. Rhythmic feel:

One note Samba

4. Classical piece:

Bartok Quartets

5. Jazz album:

Coltrane Plays the blues - Bill Evans: You must believe in Spring

6. Book on music:

No Response


7 Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:

Jim Hall - Bill Evans: Undercurrent


8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:

Bach


9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very underrated:

No Response

David Lyttle (Drummer)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:

1. Melody:
 
Bernhard Hermann's score for Hitchcock's 'Vertigo', Stephen Sondheim's 'Sweeney Todd' musical and Danny Elfman's score for Tim Burton's 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' all come to mind for having moving and interesting melodies. 'Moon River' and 'Pure Imagination' are among my favourite jazz standards.


2. Harmony

See Question 1

3. Rhythmic feel:
 
It's difficult to answer this one as there are so many...
 
4. Classical piece:
 
Again there are so many but Bartok's 'Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta' comes to mind, as well as anything by Debussy, especially his piano works.
 
5. Jazz album:
 
Of the more recent albums I've listened to, Brian Blade's 'Perceptual', Terence Blanchard's 'A Tale of God's Will' and Eric Revis' 'Tales of the Stuttering Mime' are the most memorable to me.

6. Book on music:
 
'Bird Lives', the Ross Russell biography of Charlie Parker and 'Straight, No Chaser', the Leslie Gourse biography of Monk.

7. Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:
 
Pianist Vince Guaraldi's 'A Boy Named Charlie Brown'. Guaraldi's music from the sixties animation 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' was what got me into jazz. He may not have pushed any boundaries but he still produced some beautiful music (mostly piano trio), and got many people into jazz.

8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:
 
The composers I mentioned above (Hermann, Sondheim, Elfman) would probably be the most surprising of my influences. I'd also have to add Elmer Bernstein into this category.

9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very underrated:

No Response

Simon Jermyn (Guitarist/Bassist)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:

1. Melody:

All the melodies on Eftir Pogn (After Silence) by Oskar Gudjonsson and Skuli Sverrisson. Tommy Potts-The Liffey Banks.

2. Harmonic language:

John Dowland's lute songs. Bulgarian Womens choirs. Andrew Hill. Christian Walumrod. Tim Berne.

3. Rhythmic feel:

Q Tip (from the "The Renaissance") the songs ‘You’ and ‘Life is Better’. Charlie Haden/ Ed Blackwell on the Ornette Coleman record "Friends and Neighbours"on the tunes Lets Play and Long Time No See.Ethiopiques Vol 5 (the amazing clapping on 2 and 4 and then adding the triplet eight note before 2 and 4). Richard Davis with any drummer on an Andrew Hill record.

4. Classical piece:

Paul Hindemith-Marienleben 1. Morton Feldman Coptic Light.

5. Jazz album:

Geri Allen Trio-Etudes. Chris Cheek-Guilty. Paul Bley-Footloose

6. Book on music:

Modus Novus by Lars Edlund.

7 Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:

Reid Anderson-The Vastness of Space. Jim Black-Alas No Axis+Habyor. Chris Speed-Emit+Swell Henry.

8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:

Michael Jackson-Bad (the album). Both of Slash's guitar solos on Sweet Child O'Mine by Guns'n'Roses (especially the second one).

9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very underrated:

On electric bass-Skuli Sverrisson, Stomu Takeishi, Tarus Mateen and James Jamerson.
On guitar- Marc Ducret, Hilmar Jensson, Nels Cline, Ben Monder and Derek Bailey

Ronan Guilfoyle (Bassist)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:


1. Melody:

JS Bach - “Largo“ from Concerto for Flute and Strings in G Minor (extraordinary non-repeating melody), ‘Falling Grace’, by Steve Swallow (brilliant circular melody that feels like it has no beginning or end)

2. Harmonic language:

George Russell - ‘Jazz Workshop’, Kenny Wheeler - ‘Deer Wan’, Gyorgy Ligeti - ‘Piano Études’

3. Rhythmic feel:

Elvin Jones on Wayne Shorter’s ‘Black Nile’ - the epitome of polyrhythmic swing, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters ‘Thrust’ - savage grooves, Steve Coleman and Five Elements ‘Rhythm People’ - funk meets odd metres, meets chromaticism.

4. Classical piece:

Bartok String Quartet No.4 (though I could have chosen any of the six), Henri Dutilleux ‘Symphony No. 1, J.S. Bach ‘Brandenburg Concertos’

5. Jazz album: John Coltrane ‘Transition’, Keith Jarrett ‘My Song’, Charlie Parker ‘Complete Savoy Sessions’

6. Book on music:

‘Louis Armstrong, an Extravagant Life’ by Laurence Bergreen, ‘The Rest is Noise’ by Alex Ross, ‘History of Jazz’ by Ted Gioia, ‘From Swing to Bop’ by Ira Gitler

7. Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:

Dave Holland ‘Emerald Tears’, Miles Davis ‘At the Plugged Nickel’, Steve Coleman ‘Black Science’, New and Used ‘Souvenir’

8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:

Jack Bruce’s bass playing with Cream, and the melodies of Burt Bacharach.

9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very underrated:

George Duvivier, Tommy Williams (bassis with the Jazztet), Steve Swallow

Mark McNight (Guitarist)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:

1. Melody:

Dave Binney's Welcome to Life album, track #4 Frez. Great album, this tune contains two very different but equally amazing grooves both of which have really interesting and appealing melodies.

2. Harmonic language:

Brad Mehldau's reharms during his solos on pretty much any standard tune but especially ballads from the Art of the Trio era (Blame It On My Youth, Bewitched, etc).

3. Rhythmic feel:

Jesse Van Ruller, anything he's ever done but if I had to pick one album would probably go for Circles, some great compositions on that record. One of the bounciest swing feels I've ever heard.

4. Classical piece:

No response

5. Jazz album:

Brad Mehldau Art of the Trio Vol 1

6. Book on music:

The Advancing Guitarist by Mick Goodrick, great and thought provoking resource full of ideas which could be generalised to any instrument.

7 Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:

Brad Mehldau Art of the Trio Vol1, never get tired of this, or any of the others for that matter.

8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:

Many singer/songwriters, to keep it Irish I guess the music of people like Fionn Regan or Foy Vance would be good examples. For me when music in this genre is done well the constant primary concern of the performer/composer is the emotional impact upon the listener which is always a great reminder to me of what I want to do with music.

9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very underrated:

I probably haven't heard of him/her yet! So many great guitarists all over the place.....maybe Tim Miller, seems like not so many people know about him yet.

Michael Buckley (Saxophonist)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:

1. Melody:

One I love that is not a well known melody is UMMG (Upper Manhattan Medical Group) by Billy Strayhorn .

2. Harmonic language:

Everything by Duke Ellington and Steely Dan

3. Rhythmic feel:

I love funk – back beat grooves, so Herbie’s Headhunters is great. For swing feel, ‘Miles Smiles’ , and ‘Four’ by Joe Henderson

4. Classical piece:

Mahler's 5th Symphony

5. Jazz album:

Joe Henderson ‘Four’ and ‘Tetragon’ - 'Coltrane Crescent', 'Ballads' - Rollins ‘The Bridge’, ‘Saxophone Colossus '

6. Book on music:

In my opinion Mark Levine’s Theory Book

7 Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:

‘The Bridge’ Sonny Rollins

8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:

Woody Shaw

9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very underrated:

Craig Handy



Joe O Callaghan (Guitarist)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:

1. Melody:

`My one and only love` (Coltrane and Johnny Hartman) ; `Bye
Bye Blackbird` (Miles) ; ‘4;15 Bradford Executive` (Allan
Holdsworth - Magnificent melodic guitar solo) : `1 4 U `(John
McLaughlin, Floating Point - Great simple melody and fantastic flute solos).

2. Harmonic language:

Marilyn Crispell – plays freely with an amazing logic.

3. Rhythmic feel:

Mind Ecology (Shakti - wonderful groove and sound). Anything with Coltrane/Elvin ; ‘Thrust’-Headhunters.

4. Classical piece:

Bartok’s Violin concerto No.2 (Henryk Szeryng,violin - incredibly beautiful and intense), Villa-Lobos 5 preludes for guitar .

5. Jazz album:

Miles Davis Heard `Round The World.(It`s got everything!!), Transition-John Coltrane (Power, intensity, beauty)

6. Book on music:

Effortless Mastery-Kenny Werner (a life-changing book), Bob Dylan –‘Chronicles’, (very well written), ‘An Extravagant Life’ (Louis Armstrong story...entertaining and what a great man)

7 Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:

Out on his own - Louis Stewart, A love Supreme - Coltrane .

8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:

Jimmy Raney – great understated player, very inventive and fluid.

9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very
underrated:

Allan Holdsworth..doesn’t seem to be recognised by the jazz
community…..a very unique voice on guitar and technically
magnificent, wonderfully melodic. His playing on the Synthaxe at times is breath-taking.

Francesco Turrisi (Pianist)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:

1. Melody:

Round Midnight, Retrato em branco e preto (Jobim), Beatriz (Chico Buarque)

2. Harmonic Language:

All the music by Guinga, late 16th century music (DeMacque, Gesualdo, Luzzaschi) late Brahms piano music, Scriabin...Messiaen

3. Rhythmic Feel:

Most Monk tunes, the Atomic Basie band, Tira Poeira

4. Classical Piece:

Too much choice...Chopin Ballade n.1, Stravinsky Rite of Spring, Ligeti Atmospheres

5. Jazz Album:

Coltrane and Monk at Carnegie Hall, the early Jimmy Giuffre trios

6. Book on Music:

Rough Guide to World Music

7. Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:

Bremen and Lausanne by Keith Jarrett

8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:

John Coltrane

9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very underrated:

Dunno if he is underrated but he def. should be more recognized...Paul Bley
...and not on my instrument...John Ruocco of course...

Aoife Doyle (Vocalist)

Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:

1. Melody:

Zingaro - A.C. Jobim, Deluge - Wayne Shorter

2. Harmonic language:

No response

3. Rhythmic feel:

Balkan Gypsy music

4. Classical piece:

Flute and Harp concerto in C Major. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

5. Jazz album:

Duke Ellington and John Coltrane 'In a Sentimental Mood'

6. Book on music:

Sri Chinmoy, Man Perfection in god satisfaction. Chapter 9: Music and meditation, Sound and silence

7 Name a great recording by someone that has influenced you:

Sarah Vaughan 'At Mister Kelly's'

8. Name someone whose music has influenced you, but that people who know your music would probably be surprised by:

Elvis (Not a joke!)

9. Name a player on your instrument whom you think is very underrated:

Esperanza Spalding