At every moment in history there were artists moving the boundaries of what was considered music. Every so often, a near past style was frozen and called a genre, you could call it a major version. Once the jazz as most people know it was part of a movement pushing those boundaries, but so was debussy, chopin, or almost any other composer. Now, this jazz has little freedom and has more in common with classical music, as most boundaries of the genre are fixed. Of course other jazz is still pushing, and because of that it is a less clear defined part of the genre.
My personal favorite is Keith Jarrett, clearly owing to Monk, with the Tokyo concert. His Koln concert is better known, and less avant guarde, the Tokio requires full attention from the listener.
I like the articles focus on a single person, as jazz itself grew so wide it is hard to say anything about it. The concept jazz can be better understood by learning about the individual concrete parts of it, rather than sweeping generalizations.
Classical musicians (Chopin, etc) were noted for their improvisational capabilities, and there were many famous jam sessions throughout their respective time periods. Unfortunately, the technology didn’t exist to capture those moments, so we can only imagine what may have transpired.
Baroque was a particularly strong time for improvisation - Bach was more well known as an improvisor in his life time than a composer (or for his educational pieces which is what he was known for right after his death).
At music school I knew a few baroque improvisors, a good one on the harpsichord is one of my favorite music, really miss that.
Chopin really played with time, and his enclosures and chromatic trills are heard later in musicians like Django Reinhardt. No doubt of influence in Jazz for my ear, as music is a continuum of evolution, even if some artists like Monk bring a new oblique perspective.
It's why I have tremendous respect for bands like King Crimson. You could tell their 1969 debut album has very heavy jazz influences. They've disbanded and re-birthed themselves about a dozen times since then, each time with a new line-up and both a fresh take on new compositions, and re-imagining of the old stuff.
Last time they were active was 2021, but at this point I'm sure they'll play again.
I've seen acceptance of all kinds of avant-garde music here but the one genre that repeatedly gets called out as perhaps not fitting the requirements for qualifying as music is rap. Couldn't help think of that with your description. It's too bad because even with endless repetition and copying it's a genre that continues to innovate every year, eg Playboi Carti who is among the most popular yet works in the realm of the a-g.
Speaking as an ex-professional Jazz Musician and someone who loves 20th and 21st C music in the Western "Classical" tradition, I can categorically say that there is hiphop that qualifies as great music.[1] Like all popular genres of music there is plenty of junk though.
As Louis Armstrong said "There's only two kinds of music, good music and bad music... and we play good music".
[1] A few simple examples from artists that HN folks may not be super familiar with to prove my point:
Dave (this was live at the UK's version of the Emmys and noone knew he was going to do the verse about then Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the end so it caused a real stir).
Yes and how people talk about hip hop in our era is how people talked about jazz in an earlier one. Mainstream audiences and white critics hated it for a long time, dismissed it as unserious or unmusical. A lot of that dynamic is paved over by its later prestige and unmistakable role as a cultural force. But a lot of the people who hate hip hop would have hated jazz too, if they had lived contemporaneous with its rise.
Where current popular music (I would call it EDM) is pushing the sound more than the song, rap is obviously about the words. Maybe hence the schism in the value of rap in music.
Every month, I comb through previous month Downbeat, JazzTimes, and Jazzwise magazines putting together a list of albums. The trick? I do this with past years magazine though.
I recently discovered the MusicBox app; sort of a listen later. My current playlist has 62 albums, as in December, these magazines are publishing their best of lists.
As someone close said a couple of days: "I didn't realize how much time goes into this music I might not always like to listen every day".
One way to discover new artists that I've been enjoying, is going through the "rising stars" section in the Downbeat critics poll[1].
Each time I pick a different subcategory (e.g. "rising star trumpet") and check out the artists from the list. When I hear something I like, I add it to a playlist. I'm planning to do the same with Downbeat's readers poll[2] and, now that I've seen it, with the Jazzwise list linked by parent.
I also go to my local jazz club about once a month. The enjoyment you can get from live music is incomparable to just listening to the recordings IMHO, and it seems to me that this is especially true with regards to jazz.
I don't know why, but as with so many other things Jazz-y, but the sax feels like "more cowbells" to me.
That is, I overall enjoyed the tunes, but I think it would have been a much more interesting had there been greater variation beyond a "simple" sax as the main instrument.
However, I fully accept that it's just not for me. I enjoy music from a lot of different genres, from medieval music to goa trance to stoner and doom metal, but somehow Jazz has never clicked for me.
I highly recommend this Vox explainer on John Coltrane's "Giant Steps", for anyone interested in learning about the math behind one of Jazz' greatest innovations.
In this Ellington tune, the second half of the first phrase is a bunch of repeated b-flats. And you hear that same segment repeated three times before the tune is done. That's a lot of repeated b-flats.
Like any jazz player, Monk plays that tune at the beginning. Then it's the part of jazz where he's supposed to solo-- that is, show his prowess at improvising and creating new melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. To do so, he... just keeps hammering those fucking b-flats! I mean there are other little flourishes and ideas in there, but he always comes back to those incessant b-flats.
To top it all off, he gives both a four-bar intro and four-bar outro with... guess what? Yep, the b-flats. And he drags over them every time, giving each one plenty of time and volume. There may be other artists from the time who played slower than Monk, but Monk feels slower than any other jazz artist I know.
I think a lot of the praise his contemporaries heaped on him was revisionist. We know Miles Davis initially found his comping distracting. I'd bet there were a lot more who thought he was essentially "doing jazz wrong," but they couldn't easily dismiss him because he could obviously swing. Just listen to his surprise acceleration 19 seconds in to "Don't Mean a Thing" above. He doesn't even retain the "correct" number of measures for that part. Who else was doing stuff like that at the time? Art Tatum is the only one who comes to mind, and he was usually playing solo piano.
Edit: Oops, that's actually the record skipping! Hehe. But I also noticed that after a few choruses the repeated b-flats start to infect the other part of the phrase and take it over, so there's that. (And regardless, Art Tatum did actually do jump cuts like this in his own playing. There's even a recording of him playing a Chopin waltz where he takes that technique to an extreme.)
It's as if Monk was "wrong warping" through jazz. The only comparable thing I can think of was Debussy internalizing Wagner's mature operas and then writing What-Would-Wagner-Not-Do tone poems and character pieces. And unlike, say, a Brahms or a Coltrane-- whose styles typically featured long chains of continual development that left us with clear proof of their compositional work-- Debussy and Monk have a lot of output where there's often nearly nothing there.
It's very difficult to write like that without either falling into incoherence, or convincing your contemporaries that there's something wrong with you.
But then it's dangerous to try to point out exactly what Monk was doing wrong-- after all, one could end up accidentally revealing one's own confirmation biases and assumptions that hamper one's own creativity. Hence, the Diogenes comparison.
Thanks for this response and "It Don't Mean a Thing” link.
> the second half of the first phrase is a bunch of repeated b-flats
Monk does a ton of voicings with those repeated notes. Of the ~16 repeats, he’s playing supporting chords with different roots, augmentation, diminishes for ~25-75% of them.
> He doesn't even retain the "correct" number of measures for that part.
His timing and “dragging” and dissonance can’t be easy on bandmates. But it makes Monk a top example of knowing it’s him 10 seconds into a record you’ve never heard before. And agreed at not looking too closely at what Monk was doing wrong or right — it interferes with enjoying it.
The liner notes on 'Bag's Groove' notes that Miles asked Monk to 'lay out' on one take, and Monk took some offense at that. But whether that was everybody or just Davis is unclear. Davis had his own ego issues with being the new wunderkind and all.
I'm an amateur jazz musician myself (in rural England), and the people I know locally who've seen these sketches also like them. But, when I've mentioned them to Americans they do not seem to be at all amused, and are sometimes rather offended; I'm not sure why.
It's a shame that any time anyone talks about Underground, they only talk about the cover art and not the music. I think it's one of his best albums, the last by his longest-running quartet, and with a few excellent late tunes — Ugly Beauty, Boo Boo's Birthday, and Green Chimneys — that you won't hear anywhere else. The only thing misguided about it is the last track, a version of In Walked Bud with vocals, that if I remember correctly is from a different recording session.
Belaboring the cover of the album buys into the same image-oriented discussion of Monk the writer seems to want to move away from.
I suspect it's because everyone wants to talk about Jazz but almost nobody sits and listens to it long enough to have an ear be able to enjoy listening to it. Like 95% of the people who talk about Jazz never listen to it, but anyone can blather on about some visual piece. They have probably spent 100x more time looking at the album they have prominently displayed than they have spent with it out of it's sleeve.
I love jazz. I love Monk. What I don't care for is the jazz musicians and "purists" who, in essence, is like "if it's not jazz, IT'S CRAP" attitude. Especially when they compare jazz to rock. Listen to the "Wrecking Crew" backing musicians from the 60s complain about the rock music they "had" to play on and how simplistic it was...yet were frustrated by how popular it was. They would say how they could play circles around rock musicians...that is until someone like Hendrix and EVH came along. They basically shut up after that because some said "okay, then listen to EVH and replicate THAT for me on my record" and of course, they couldn't.
Even today you can hear people like Quincy Jones (on his interview from a few years ago) bad mouth all the rock musicians like the Beatles and even Michael Jackson and say they couldn't play and their music was terrible and blah blah blah and the "if it's not jazz, IT'S CRAP" thing all over again.
It may be fair also to say that musical intolerance comes in many flavours. Jazz elitism may be rife in certain circles, while in others, strident purism of other types dominates equally gallingly.
For example, the rock "feel/vibe purists", for whom the peak of all possible things is David Gilmour holding a sustained note from the blues scale - anything more strenuous, or of different feel, is considered extravagant, self indulgent, or missing-the-point, man.
Each faction holds some kernels of truth, but when personal bias turns those kernels into hard prejudice, the only lesson left to be learned is that we're all doing our own slightly different versions of more-or-less the same thing - "art", as per life.
You see the same odd and ironic relationship between some classical musicians and more popular musicians. I’ve known people who are real into techno who thought classical music lacked any creativity because it was all written down, and then I know exquisite classical musicians who think rock and electronic music is a bunch of garbage.
Old men pine for their glory days. Miles Davis confessed a bittersweet nostalgia for hard bop even as he pushed himself and his collaborators into a then-uncertain jazz-rock.
The young folks who idolise them confuse that nostalgia for capital-t Truth and I think that has led to a nucleus of purism. (I say this as a reformed purist myself.) But it’s a nucleus with the tiny scale that connotes…most of the top pros in the most straightahead jazz today have diverse musical interests and ambitions.
In one sense jazz is all about freedom - you can play "whatever you want!"- but in many other senses it's as incredibly traditional and formulaic.as classical. There is a canon of songs that is worshipped, and song structures and instrument combos are mostly frozen in amber, and there are lines you just cannot cross. Every genre gets like that after awhile I guess.
Yes, that's the inherent tension within jazz. It's pure freedom, but it's also inseparable from its history, the people who play it today, and even the audience.
Disclosure: I'm a performing jazz bassist. I'm at a level where I can collaborate with bands, but am not good enough to blaze my own path, except to the extent of having a playing style of my own.
The canon of tunes, and the "standard arrangement" are both a blessing and a curse, and are hardly worshipped. Those things make it easy to assemble a band and perform with no preparation, but get boring after a while.
At least one of my bands plays virtually none of that stuff. Another plays complex written arrangements. A third is mostly old tin pan alley material, but raucous and fun for the audience. It's all jazz. I've noticed that audiences respond quite well to the variety, including my long solos.
Variety is the fulcrum of all music. And there can be no variety without repetition. Then the variety itself must vary. You're proceeding on the knife's edge, on the other side too much repetition on the other too little. And the proportion of those must vary over time. https://youtu.be/XwIehM-x6kA :-)
The standard arrangement -- it enables you to put together a group of players who've never worked together to play tunes nobody has even heard before, but then it just sounds like every other jazz band.
I'd love to hear your various groups, and am always up for a long bass solo -- I switched from trumpet to bass in college. I don't know if it's possible but it'd be awesome to mix up all of those styles into a single performance!
Jazz education is a blessing and a curse. Most high level high school programs are focused on the Essentially Ellington competition, meaning that they learn to swing, to play with humanity and emotion, and to blend together. All good things, and I do believe that Ellington is the greatest American composer period. But it appears learning an 80+ year old style usually is not a gateway to discovering the modern day equivalent.
Still, if you look in the right places jazz is still very much alive and evolving. I made a top ten list for 2022 if you want examples that acknowledge the tradition but don’t touch the worshipped canon and to my ears are relevant to right now. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NUGbkID4mmc
Thanks for those recommendations! Yep, I didn't make it past early college music classes, which just weren't doing it for me. I got booed out of the room once for suggesting it'd be cool to mix jazz and hip-hop (in 1989). Probably should have gone some place like Berklee but I didn't see that path at the time.
I recently discovered multi-instrumentalist Robert Stillman, who opened for The Smile (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood's side project with Tom Skinner). He played solo tenor saxophone with some kind of looping effect, along with some lo-fi sampling involving multiple lightly-synchronized cassette tapes of himself playing other instruments. Amazing stuff.
This is true of several sub-genres of jazz, but there are many musicians who play a genre that they call jazz who do not worship this canon, do not follow these song structures or instrument combos rigidly, and cross these lines with abandon.
I'll go as far as to say that the entire modern jazz movement recognizes earlier jazz (swing/bebop/cool/funk) as seminal to the art form, but deliberately experiments and takes risks away from classical jazz forms.
there's this concept of jazz "as a verb" vs "as a noun."
musicians back in the day were limited by the technology of the day, so they played things like horns and upright basses. the thing that made their music "jazz" was the improvisation. the jazz was something they did, not an objective genre standard.
if monk or miles or coltrane were alive today, their music would be way different. they'd probably take advantage of samples, synthesizers, maybe even AI? i don't know. but the key to their genius was the intent behind their playing, the way they bent harmonic structure in service of their improvised melodic ideas. this is jazz as a verb.
as soon as jazz became "america's art form, now playing at the lincoln center and available as an honors track college major" it wasn't actually jazz. so many people are doing it wrong. welcome to america!
Readit News
My personal favorite is Keith Jarrett, clearly owing to Monk, with the Tokyo concert. His Koln concert is better known, and less avant guarde, the Tokio requires full attention from the listener.
I like the articles focus on a single person, as jazz itself grew so wide it is hard to say anything about it. The concept jazz can be better understood by learning about the individual concrete parts of it, rather than sweeping generalizations.
At music school I knew a few baroque improvisors, a good one on the harpsichord is one of my favorite music, really miss that.
Last time they were active was 2021, but at this point I'm sure they'll play again.
As Louis Armstrong said "There's only two kinds of music, good music and bad music... and we play good music".
[1] A few simple examples from artists that HN folks may not be super familiar with to prove my point:
Little Simz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxfGQ2AJHGk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh8Q2iytzns
Dave (this was live at the UK's version of the Emmys and noone knew he was going to do the verse about then Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the end so it caused a real stir).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXLS2IzZSdg
holy crap, where are you seeing this happen? I haven't encountered that kind of thing since literally the 1990s. possibly even the 80s.
I recently discovered the MusicBox app; sort of a listen later. My current playlist has 62 albums, as in December, these magazines are publishing their best of lists.
As someone close said a couple of days: "I didn't realize how much time goes into this music I might not always like to listen every day".
Each time I pick a different subcategory (e.g. "rising star trumpet") and check out the artists from the list. When I hear something I like, I add it to a playlist. I'm planning to do the same with Downbeat's readers poll[2] and, now that I've seen it, with the Jazzwise list linked by parent.
I also go to my local jazz club about once a month. The enjoyment you can get from live music is incomparable to just listening to the recordings IMHO, and it seems to me that this is especially true with regards to jazz.
[1] https://archive.maherpublications.com/view/331464720/
[2] https://archive.maherpublications.com/view/1051366422/
That is, I overall enjoyed the tunes, but I think it would have been a much more interesting had there been greater variation beyond a "simple" sax as the main instrument.
However, I fully accept that it's just not for me. I enjoy music from a lot of different genres, from medieval music to goa trance to stoner and doom metal, but somehow Jazz has never clicked for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oPb6D5ZT7Y
Just listen to his solos on "It Don't Mean a Thing," one of his recordings mentioned in the article (I hadn't heard it before):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pU-5pEpfmE
In this Ellington tune, the second half of the first phrase is a bunch of repeated b-flats. And you hear that same segment repeated three times before the tune is done. That's a lot of repeated b-flats.
Like any jazz player, Monk plays that tune at the beginning. Then it's the part of jazz where he's supposed to solo-- that is, show his prowess at improvising and creating new melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. To do so, he... just keeps hammering those fucking b-flats! I mean there are other little flourishes and ideas in there, but he always comes back to those incessant b-flats.
To top it all off, he gives both a four-bar intro and four-bar outro with... guess what? Yep, the b-flats. And he drags over them every time, giving each one plenty of time and volume. There may be other artists from the time who played slower than Monk, but Monk feels slower than any other jazz artist I know.
I think a lot of the praise his contemporaries heaped on him was revisionist. We know Miles Davis initially found his comping distracting. I'd bet there were a lot more who thought he was essentially "doing jazz wrong," but they couldn't easily dismiss him because he could obviously swing. Just listen to his surprise acceleration 19 seconds in to "Don't Mean a Thing" above. He doesn't even retain the "correct" number of measures for that part. Who else was doing stuff like that at the time? Art Tatum is the only one who comes to mind, and he was usually playing solo piano.
Edit: Oops, that's actually the record skipping! Hehe. But I also noticed that after a few choruses the repeated b-flats start to infect the other part of the phrase and take it over, so there's that. (And regardless, Art Tatum did actually do jump cuts like this in his own playing. There's even a recording of him playing a Chopin waltz where he takes that technique to an extreme.)
It's as if Monk was "wrong warping" through jazz. The only comparable thing I can think of was Debussy internalizing Wagner's mature operas and then writing What-Would-Wagner-Not-Do tone poems and character pieces. And unlike, say, a Brahms or a Coltrane-- whose styles typically featured long chains of continual development that left us with clear proof of their compositional work-- Debussy and Monk have a lot of output where there's often nearly nothing there.
It's very difficult to write like that without either falling into incoherence, or convincing your contemporaries that there's something wrong with you.
But then it's dangerous to try to point out exactly what Monk was doing wrong-- after all, one could end up accidentally revealing one's own confirmation biases and assumptions that hamper one's own creativity. Hence, the Diogenes comparison.
> the second half of the first phrase is a bunch of repeated b-flats
Monk does a ton of voicings with those repeated notes. Of the ~16 repeats, he’s playing supporting chords with different roots, augmentation, diminishes for ~25-75% of them.
> He doesn't even retain the "correct" number of measures for that part.
His timing and “dragging” and dissonance can’t be easy on bandmates. But it makes Monk a top example of knowing it’s him 10 seconds into a record you’ve never heard before. And agreed at not looking too closely at what Monk was doing wrong or right — it interferes with enjoying it.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/11/john-thomson-l...
I'm an amateur jazz musician myself (in rural England), and the people I know locally who've seen these sketches also like them. But, when I've mentioned them to Americans they do not seem to be at all amused, and are sometimes rather offended; I'm not sure why.
Belaboring the cover of the album buys into the same image-oriented discussion of Monk the writer seems to want to move away from.
Even today you can hear people like Quincy Jones (on his interview from a few years ago) bad mouth all the rock musicians like the Beatles and even Michael Jackson and say they couldn't play and their music was terrible and blah blah blah and the "if it's not jazz, IT'S CRAP" thing all over again.
For example, the rock "feel/vibe purists", for whom the peak of all possible things is David Gilmour holding a sustained note from the blues scale - anything more strenuous, or of different feel, is considered extravagant, self indulgent, or missing-the-point, man.
Each faction holds some kernels of truth, but when personal bias turns those kernels into hard prejudice, the only lesson left to be learned is that we're all doing our own slightly different versions of more-or-less the same thing - "art", as per life.
The young folks who idolise them confuse that nostalgia for capital-t Truth and I think that has led to a nucleus of purism. (I say this as a reformed purist myself.) But it’s a nucleus with the tiny scale that connotes…most of the top pros in the most straightahead jazz today have diverse musical interests and ambitions.
Disclosure: I'm a performing jazz bassist. I'm at a level where I can collaborate with bands, but am not good enough to blaze my own path, except to the extent of having a playing style of my own.
The canon of tunes, and the "standard arrangement" are both a blessing and a curse, and are hardly worshipped. Those things make it easy to assemble a band and perform with no preparation, but get boring after a while.
At least one of my bands plays virtually none of that stuff. Another plays complex written arrangements. A third is mostly old tin pan alley material, but raucous and fun for the audience. It's all jazz. I've noticed that audiences respond quite well to the variety, including my long solos.
Variety is the fulcrum of all music. And there can be no variety without repetition. Then the variety itself must vary. You're proceeding on the knife's edge, on the other side too much repetition on the other too little. And the proportion of those must vary over time. https://youtu.be/XwIehM-x6kA :-)
I'd love to hear your various groups, and am always up for a long bass solo -- I switched from trumpet to bass in college. I don't know if it's possible but it'd be awesome to mix up all of those styles into a single performance!
Still, if you look in the right places jazz is still very much alive and evolving. I made a top ten list for 2022 if you want examples that acknowledge the tradition but don’t touch the worshipped canon and to my ears are relevant to right now. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NUGbkID4mmc
I recently discovered multi-instrumentalist Robert Stillman, who opened for The Smile (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood's side project with Tom Skinner). He played solo tenor saxophone with some kind of looping effect, along with some lo-fi sampling involving multiple lightly-synchronized cassette tapes of himself playing other instruments. Amazing stuff.
I'll go as far as to say that the entire modern jazz movement recognizes earlier jazz (swing/bebop/cool/funk) as seminal to the art form, but deliberately experiments and takes risks away from classical jazz forms.
musicians back in the day were limited by the technology of the day, so they played things like horns and upright basses. the thing that made their music "jazz" was the improvisation. the jazz was something they did, not an objective genre standard.
if monk or miles or coltrane were alive today, their music would be way different. they'd probably take advantage of samples, synthesizers, maybe even AI? i don't know. but the key to their genius was the intent behind their playing, the way they bent harmonic structure in service of their improvised melodic ideas. this is jazz as a verb.
as soon as jazz became "america's art form, now playing at the lincoln center and available as an honors track college major" it wasn't actually jazz. so many people are doing it wrong. welcome to america!