Vibrato

Vibrato is kind of the eminence grise of jazz improvisation, working behind the scenes as a stealth emotional force.


May 14 is the birthday of Sidney Bechet, one of the bedrock performers in jazz. Great player, but whenever I hear Bechet blow, I want him to take about 35% off his vibrato. On the other hand, you could drive a charette through Louis Armstrong's vibrato, but it connects with me while Bechet's doesn't.

My emotional responses not withstanding, Bechet and Armstrong both fall in the category of "hot" players and, in general, the degree to which a player utilizes vibrato marks him as either "hot" or "cool." 


It's the most straightforwardly emotional part of the arsenal that horn players, especially trumpet players, can call on, some of which I mentioned in my Lee Morgan post: half-valve, smears, shakes, rips, growls, flutter-tonguing, double and triple tonguing, false fingering and vibrato. 


Vibrato is hard to hear in short notes, so it's mostly about held tones: quarter, half or whole notes. It can be applied either through the player's lips or through his hands moving the horn at whatever rate he wants the vibrato to be (more violent hand movements become "shakes").

Vibrato as exemplar of hot and cool goes back pretty far into jazz history. It's been personified by the difference between Louis Armstrong and Bix Biederbecke, or Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. Miles Davis brought the cool approach pretty much as far as it would go, but while the notion of "cool" became bundled with less vibrato. everyone, even MIles, has some vibrato in their playing. Hot or cool is less a question of whether it's there, but how "heavy" or "wide" it is; how subtle or overt.

Wild Bill

The choice to play cornet, as opposed to trumpet, is also a choice to use more vibrato. It's easy to hear in the playing of those who followed the cornet lineage from King Oliver and Louis Armstrong- Wingy Manone, Muggsy Spanier, Bobby Hackett, Wild Bill Davison, Ruby Braff, Warren Vache and pretty much anyone playing in the "Trad" style. 



Vibrato has been one way that improvisers-and, of course, musicians in general-have tried to communicate emotion to an audience. That kind of exposure to overt (unhip) emotion seems to have become less acceptable and/or less effective, in the jazz environment. Do improvisers still want to connect emotionally with an audience? Of course, but as I've said a few times here at  Brilliant Corners, a lot of that emotional connection appears to be missing and seems to a large extent to reside more in the vocalist's domain. 


[All the above links go to musical examples, so I hope you check them out].


Next time: Vocalists and Vibrato.

Lee Morgan; Thoughts, Audio & Transcriptions

Prodigy, post-Parker junkie, dead by homicide at a young age (1938-1972). Whatever. The myth shouldn't crowd out the player. Musically, Lee Morgan was a muthahfucka.

No matter what influences he brought into his music-funk, modal, latin, free-Lee always sounded like Lee and the quality of his playing was always superb (apart from a period of chops trouble resulting from a drug-related tooth debacle).

The mid-50's Philadelphia that Morgan grew up in was an active and supportive jazz scene. He started the trumpet at 13 and by 14, he was playing at sessions, first at the Jazz Workshop at the Heritage House and then at Music City. He crossed paths with Clifford Brown, with whom he hung out for about 2 years, until Clifford's death on the road. He gigged around town with fellow teens bassist Spanky DeBrest and McCoy Tyner. Jess McMillan's authoritative article on Lee's days in Philly says that when Chet Baker came to town, the 15 year-old Morgan cut him-"blew him completely out of the room."

Dizzy Gillespie also made the Music City Club sessions and when he heard Lee, who was at that point 18, he recruited him for his big band.

Practical Tips From Jazz Masters

After I was shown the Charles Mingus Cat Training Toilet Training web page (guaranteed real), I gave an earful to my flunkies at the Institute. If one is not at the cutting edge of such surreal conjunctions, where is one?

To grease the machinery, I upped the number of nembutal breaks for Institute staff and threatened to shut off their twinkies ration. Productivity skyrocketed and here we are, all smiles. The results will be available in convenient .pdfs when Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane. Until then, here are your ten teasers:

• Harry Carney on Proper Pipette Cleaning
• Coleman Hawkins' Philately for Dummies
• Mal Waldron's 5 Steps to a Cleaner Colon 
• J.C.Higginbotham's Esperanto Recipe Book
• Buddy Rich Solves Your Septic Problems
• Warne Marsh on Mulch
• Charlie Shavers: Lepidopterist On The Move
• Johnny Griffin Grills For you!
• Zoot Sims' Duck Tape Omnibus
• Gato Barbieri's 10 Secrets For A Successful Luau

Watch your local google-owned website for the arrival of these valuable tracts.

"Like, So Not Swingin', Gate" By Steve Provizer

Insomnia can be educational. Early risers or the sleep-deprived might want to know that from 5:30-6:00 AM, you can catch Dobie Gillis on one of the Pronoun channels on cable TV-"Us," or "We," I forget which. The episode I saw had Dobie and Maynard both wearing ROTC uniforms. Like, for real. It brought me back to this old post I wrote a couple of years ago. Speaking of re-runs...

Yankee Dog mentioned Frank Gorshin's hep cat role in "Where the Boys Are." I have no doubt that there's a large sub-division of the Academic Culture Industry that has chewed on the subject of jazz/beat portrayals in film and TV like a chia pet on a licorice rope. But boys, if you're reading, try to chill. I'm not trying to grab anybody's dissertation. This is just personal flashback and speculation based on such ephemera as I recall from adolescence.

The steadiest diet of jazz-beatnik-hipster my cohort got was from Maynard G. Krebs, Dobie Gillis' pal. Each on-screen appearance by Maynard (Bob Denver, who eventually reincarnated as Gilligan) was signaled by a very cool little blues motif played on flute. Maynard (Ferguson, anyone?) threw in an occasional "man" and "cat," but his most salient character trait was, as Washington Irving said of Rip Van Winkle,  his "insuperable aversion to any and all kinds of profitable labor." If the notion of getting a job was mentioned, he would stammer out "W-W-W-work?!" He was lovable and ineffectual. If there was any cultural danger represented by jazz-loving beats, Maynard was there to reassure us they represented no real threat.

Gorshin was slightly more threatening because to me, no matter what he played, he always exuded a barely-controlled murderous impulse (see his 'Riddler'). But in "Where the Boys Are, he was an egghead loser, with thick horn rimmed glasses. Shoot-his name was Basil. The rest of the gang was rock and roll. He was jazz and out of it. Impotent over-intellectualizing, thy name is Beat.



In Roger Corman's "Bucket Of Blood," the hapless Walter Paisley kills a few folks and covers them with plaster so he can be accepted as an 'artist' by the crowd at the beatnik coffee house-a dupe of the fast beat crowd. That crowd, while not homicidal, was shown to be steeped in bohemian self-delusion and was really just there for cultural sport. The presence of real jazz musicians Paul Horn and Fred Katz in the house band undermines that conceit-the music's too good.


The only really evil character in the beat movie milieu that I know of was played by Peter Falk in his first big movie role-The Bloody Brood-1959-same year as Dobie on TV. This is a picture riddled with sado-masochism, and a very confused message. On the one hand, the filmmakers want to blame the wayward milieu of the Beats for

providing ripe soil for evil, and yea, maniac faux-beatnik Falk wanted to get his "kicks" (beat code), but they dressed him in a suit, he smoked a cigar and his name was Nico. The feeble Beats murdered, but only because their lack of will made them powerless to stand up against Falk. Eventually, someone with a sane haircut brought them to their senses.

The final characters in this cultural menagerie are Steve Allen, first host of the Tonight Show and Soupy Sales. Allen was half yenta/half aspiring hipster, a composer and decent jazz pianist who had an odd lot of people on his show, including Frank Zappa,  Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac.  Soupy had a serious array of jazz folks on-Hawkins, Armstrong, Bird... Let it be noted that the only Clifford Brown footage I know of is from Soupy Sales' show. But these guys are less about Hollywood dealing with jazz/beats than the jewish/jazz/hipster conspiracy-a discussion that needs its own space.

In the meantime, I'd be willing to bet my tattered copy of "Howl" that when drugs and beats are part of the plot of any movie made in this era, jazz is the soundtrack-not rock and roll.

The "Chick Singer" Phenomenon

My whole musical life, I've heard snide comments about "chick singers." Maybe the level of enmity jazz instrumentalists harbor toward vocalists doesn't quite rise to that between the Houses of York and Lancaster, but there is definitely something there.

War of the Roses

Mostly the battle is carried out sub rosa-among the boys-and anecdotes are few in the jazz history I've read. Buddy Rich and Frank Sinatra exchanging blows and engaging in various forms of mutual psychological torture in the Dorsey band in the 1940's doesn't stand as a fair example, as it involves two of the biggest egomaniacs in the history of jazz/popular music. Also, while sex no doubt played a part there, it's heterosexual sex that keys this story. Seems like where there's smoke, jazz and sex, there's always been fire.

There's a thesis online by Ariel Ann Alexander with reasons why female participation as instrumentalists in jazz is limited. Many subjects of her study note that band members seem more interested in hitting on them than in playing with them. They also note faculty members who tried to steer women away from playing instruments toward singing and generally tried to get them to tart themselves up for performance. Sexual harassment by teachers was also widely noted.

So, lust is a touchstone. The other 7 deadly sins I'm accusing jazz musicians of (at least in this post), are pride and envy.

In previous posts I have tried to make a case for the importance of vocals in sustaining jazz. My premise is that, while instrumentalists can be credited with the major musical advances, there is a feedback loop with singers. And, that vocalists and instrumentalists who sing have consistently connected with larger numbers of people. With rare exceptions, even the most gifted jazz instrumentalists would have been hard-pressed to sustain their careers without in some way working with or on the same bill as vocalists.

Jazz musicians may not have parsed it out this consciously, but their egos know it even if they don't.

One way to defuse this emasculating predicament is to reduce women vocalists to second class citizens and the easiest way to do this is to reduce them to sexual objects-or at least "the other" and not worthy of a hang with the boys. Nothing has changed, of course. You've simply wrapped your self-delusion around a flimsy sexual chimera, which you then try to project onto someone who has probably invested as much sweat equity in her art as you have in yours.

I understand the problem. Thousands of hours wrestling with your horn, you think, entitles you to something. Well, no. It entitles some geniuses (not even all), to something, but not to you and me. It entitles you to play and maybe to a few bucks. If you get a fortune cookie that predicts a ticker tape parade down Broadway, ignore it.

I've been tough on us jazz guys, but we are not really loathsome creatures. No more than most. Some of us may take the more arthritic aspects of jazz mythology too seriously and that doesn't help, but we can be very generous people. So suck it up, guys and relax. Man or woman, our trip on this paper moon sails over the same cardboard sea.

Jazz Paradigm Re-adjustment

In a recent post, I talked about the rise of vocalists in jazz. The point being that vocalists are surviving better than instrumentalists the aging process of the jazz repertoire and the need for anyone to have follow Bird/Tatum/Any Other Jazz Giant's version of "All the Things You Are;" that at one time, jazz instrumentalists and audiences might have forged a strong emotional bond, but that singers are now better able to do that.


A neat theory, but one derived from my buying into the common wisdom: that jazz is intrinsically instrumental and that cyclically, vocals "crowd out" instrumentals for the public's attention. Reasons used to explain this are as useless as the bromides used to explain fluctuations in the stock market. So, to replace this flawed common wisdom, I hereby propose a new Unified Vocal/Instrumental Jazz Field Theory: 

Einstein could never come up with this

Instrumentalists have been responsible for the dynamic musical changes in jazz, but without the presence of singers, or hybrids (think Armstrong) absorbing and translating these changes into vocals, which then fed back to soloists (think Lady Day and Lester), jazz would have been listened to and respected, but it never would have inhabited the center of American musical culture. Rather than "crowding out" instrumentals, vocalists have actually sustained jazz as a popular force. 

The perceptive will note that this is actually the current status of jazz: respected, listened to by a relatively small group, ignored by most; essentially a niche music. For instrumentalists today, the vocal context is where jazz soloing is more likely to be heard, expanding audience exposure and possibly opening up employment possibilities for musicians in a non-vocal context.

Statistics on the percentages of recordings throughout jazz history that were instrumentals versus vocals, and sales stats on these would be very telling. I'm told that such data is scarce and unreliable, especially before the 1940's. I'm just a lowly blogger without a grant (aka "bomb thrower"), so I'll just toss a few skimpy internet-derived perspectives into the pot:

At this site you can find one person's notion of the "Top 25 Jazz albums of all time." They're all instrumentals and I bet vocals would be hard to find on anyone's list out there.
Here's another chart, of The Most Successful Artists of Each Decade. They're almost all vocalists.
This site, by a Swedish statistician, has something he calls The Top Songs of the Decade.
Take it as you like. In this nebulous statistical world, cases could be made to fit a great many theories (jazz crop circles outlining II-V changes?)

In any case, I don't think this breaks down to the Low versus High Music dichotomy. At least, it may not be a useful way to see it, as the musicians who made jazz happen are on record as preferring the "good vs bad" model of music, as opposed to the "high-low" one. Is Shaw's Begin the Beguine High or low? What about Armstrong's Dinah? 


Is the general misperception about the relationship between instrumentals and vocals in jazz the result of a yawning crevasse between the makers of jazz and the writers on jazz, with listeners wandering bewilderedly in critical limbo? Or-although this is almost unthinkable-am I just plain wrong?

What's In A Name?

Chris B.

Is it churlish to question whether some musicians should be called "jazz" musicians? I doubt it keeps them up at night and in fact, calling yourself a jazz artist is probably a bad career move.  It's not a question of chops and whether someone deserves to be put under the jazz umbrella. I mean, who's the arbiter? And who really gives a crap?

And yet...

Bubber M.

If we care about getting the young 'uns to tune into jazz and discover the rich history of the music, maybe we should be aware that some of the popular performers labeled as "jazz" are probably even less interesting to people under 21 than Pee Wee Russell, Bubber Miley or Roswell Rudd would be.

Youth is a time when the debate about who is "keepin it real" is even more extreme and heated than it is among us elderlys. The DIY movement prefers vinyl to mp3 and I imagine a solid campaign behind 78's with a little surface noise would get traction.

Yea, there's always a lot of "fronting" about realness. Maybe it's the physical needs charged up by hormones run amok, but however you explain it, intensity and challenge are highly valued in the young. And, when everything is so available, difficulty and scarcity create value; create charisma.

Rex S.

I know, this is beginning to look like the "5 reasons not to use the word jazz" list, but let those who care be conscious of how they throw the word jazz out there.  Keep in mind that music that soothes rather than disrupts and lulls rather than challenges will get the swift boot by young people. Give em Trane, Cecil, Rex Stewart and Oscar Pettiford. That might shake some adolescent trees.

The Orchestra Pit & The Pendulum

Dismantling the pit orchestra

The New York Times ran a piece on 3/24 talking about how pit orchestras are being moved out of pits so that more prime seating can be made available to Broadway big-spenders. The orchestras conduct their business by video and audio link from basements and other storage facilities far away from the theater where the show is actually being staged.

I have no quibble with this savvy business move and, in fact, am taking steps to implement a similar program in my own home.

First of all, my daughter's bedroom takes up a lot of space, but does she pay rent? Not on your life, buddy, so I looked up how much a room at the local boardinghouse would cost and calculated the difference between that and how much I could get for renting her room. Result? She's got to go. OK, we'll miss her, but she's a teenager, not around much anyway and her creams and lotions really clutter up the bathroom.

Next, I took a look at the living room. Nice and spacious. Then, I looked at my study-a tiny converted porch. You know which one I get to declare on my taxes. So, as of Monday, all my stuff moves into the big room and I now get to take six times the business office deduction. There'll be room for the TV in my former study and while it gets a bit cold out there in the winter, my wife is fond of camping and I think I can deduct the cost of blankets.

The final move is sheer genius. My mother lives all by herself on the first floor of the house. Meanwhile, I have a whole attic going unused. I can't rent it-it's not insulated and the floor won't pass inspection-so up you go, mom.  It's a pull-down staircase, a bit too heavy for her to operate, but there's usually someone around if she wants to get out. Oh, don't worry, she won't mind, believe me; anything to keep her baby solvent.

The show must go on.

Jazz Makes a Standard

Pianist Robert Glasper said, in reference to The Great American Songbook: "It's time for a new standard. We can't do the old thing forever." Given the many attempts to bring jazz into hip hop or hip hop into jazz, I then posed the question: How far can you bend a standard before it breaks?  

Sung to the tune of Melancholy Baby: "Come to me my broken metatarsal"

Jazz has always been in the business of bending tunes. In fact, it seems completely reasonable to think that the Great American Songbook would be a much smaller part of American musical culture if these now "standard" tunes had not been plucked from their original Broadway or Hollywood context by jazz performers, who dug out and actualized their rhythmic, harmonic and melodic implications.

Going back to the 1920's, there were both vocal and instrumental jazz/pop versions of tunes originally used on stage and in film. Working alone, neither sung versions or instrumental versions could have done the job, but together they showed how a tune could be transmuted into a musical entity that transcended its initial conception and performance.

To see if this process unfolded in a way that is comparable to current cross-fertilization efforts between hip hop and jazz, let's look at how the process traditionally happened, using one of the great jazz war horses: "All the Things You Are."


With music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, Jr. this song originally came from a show called "Very Warm For May." The history of the relationship between this tune and jazz is long and deep and also a little perplexing. All sources say the show opened on November 17, 1939, but according to Dr. Chalfen, there were two jazz-inflected versions recorded before that date: Tommy Dorsey's on October 20, '39 and Artie Shaw's, on Oct. 26. The sheet music says the song wasn't copyrighted until 1940, so maybe someone heard it in previews in Boston or New London and rushed out arrangements before the legal profession could stick its oar in. Sheer speculation.


In any case, this is the way Kern and Hammerstein conceived it to be performed in 1939 (as produced in a later re-creation):


The song was lovely in its fashion, but completely rooted in one particular era and style: Broadway Musical-shading-toward Light Opera. Kern marked the chorus a "Burthen," and "cantabile," (singable). These are archaic and/or fancified terms, reflecting Kern's roots in 1910's musical theatre. Withal, given its sophisticated harmony, it was clearly a song worth the attention of jazz people.


As noted above, in 1939, before the show actually opened, Artie Shaw recorded it with Helen Forrest. The first part (verse) was eliminated. There is a "classy" intro (big brass chords) before the low-down-ish piano slides in. Then, Shaw's clarinet chorus is a great illustration of how jazz claims source material and makes it its own. Forrest's vocal follows Shaw's lead. 

Although we're focusing on vocal transformations, we need to have an instrumental version, done in a style that would have been formative for any jazz vocalist. Here's Charlie Parker, with Red Rodney, Al Haig, Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes in 1949. 


This is Ella Fitzgerald in 1963, long after the song had been enfolded by jazz into its protean bosom. The tempo is up a bit, the background is more overtly jazz-like and Ella inflects the song all the way through. Even though Ella could handle a soprano range, the key has been brought down to take the gleam off and give it a darker feeling. When she picks it up after the instrumental, she completely alters the melody, then takes it home.


Through the years, various jazzmen wrote new melodies for the song's chord changes, including "Bird of Paradise" by Charlie Parker, "Prince Albert" by Kenny Dorham and "Boston Bernie" by Dexter Gordon. Charles Mingus retitled it "All the Things You Could Be By Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife was Your Mother." 

Addendum: Who first came up with what became the classic jazz intro for "All the Things You Are?" It's completely unlike the Kern verse. I'm thinking that Dizzy wrote it, but would love to hear from anyone who can spec this out. Thanks, Steve.

The Tenuous Rise of the Singing Class in Jazz-Pt. I

In a recent interview at Jazz wax, Robert Glasper said of existing jazz styles: "I think they've run their course in terms of attracting a new audience."  Glasper also said, in referring to The Great American Songbook, that "It's time for a new standard. We can't do the old thing forever."


He's on to something. Two trend lines are going in opposite directions.

Chet's Funny Valentine

For many years, learning "All the Things You Are," "Laura," etc. served a dual purpose: you could study how the masters negotiated the chord changes and you could play songs that audiences wanted to hear. Today, aspiring jazz musicians continue to learn pretty much the same tunes their forebears have for the last, say, 50 years, but at this point, a rapidly diminishing number of listeners recognize these tunes.  And, the work of any instrumentalist playing standards in the traditional, bop, or swing style will always be compared to the incomparable body of work generated by the great jazz masters. After having heard these tunes played by the likes of Dexter Gordon and Miles, will even these listeners hear the 1000th iteration of "My Funny Valentine" as anything but pleasant background to a nice meal?

Jazz vocalists are apparently surviving this process better than instrumentalists. Of course, singers doing the American Songbook in a jazz style can also be compared to previous jazz giants, but at this point, the abstraction of a note combined with the specific gravity of a lyric (a.k.a. singing a song) continues to foster a free-floating emotional exchange between the artist and a fairly broad range of listeners. This kind of exchange may have once been the norm between mainstream jazz instrumentalist and audience, but it's now a lot rarer.

I have no hard stats to back me up, but my strong perception is that in the last fifteen years, there has been a increasing percentage of vocalists booked into Boston-area jazz venues. Booking follows taste.  Other circumstantial evidence: the various incarnations of Roy Eldridge playing "Rockin' Chair" on YouTube have about 13,000 views. The vocal version done by Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden have hundreds of thousands of views. Michael Buble's "The Way you Look Tonight" has over a million views. I think you'd be hard pressed to total up 50 posted jazz versions of the tune to reach a million.


People often talk about these songs being cyclically re-discovered, but to people under 30 (except those studying jazz), knowing "Just In time" is like knowing who preceded President Taft. 
















Part 2: Can you salvage the standard repertoire by infusing current influences. Or, if you bend a standard too far does it break?

Out of the Mouth of River

 

Snap, Diddly and Squirt, in person

There were a number of fabulous suggestions for re-naming this blog. But-my bombast notwithstanding-I couldn't quite convince myself to completely ditch "Brilliant Corners." Instead, I decided to extend the name with a submission that completely killed me: "Snap Diddley Squirt: A Jazz Blog.'"

Here's my friend Amy's description of how she and husband Ken undertook the process:

"Steve Provizer was looking for a new name for his illustrious jazz blog. Ken and I love a challenge so we started brainstorming. Then River, our 6 year old daughter, chimed in and said, 'Snap Diddley Squirt: A Jazz Blog!'"  We laughed and laughed. It was the best idea of the evening.

We made an audio recording of our brainstorming session for fun.  You can listen to it here:  

http://radiowednesday.blogspot.com/2012/01/radio-wednesday-jazz.html

Hope that works!!  we still sing it for fun - (with Riv's sing-songy touch she added)   it's very memorable."

Thanks, guys. It certainly worked for me.

"Jazz: Analog Music in a Digital Era?" by Steve Provizer

Gentlemen, we must not have an analog/digital Gap

When you talk about the struggle for economic justice for jazz musicians (see posts below), you have to talk about the why's and wherefore's of the shrinking jazz pie. One factor I've yet to see explored is this: People, especially those who grew up in the digital sound era, have become used to a certain kind of "pristine" low-noise (and highly compressed) sound, and attendance at live performances may be taking a hit because of this. In a digital era, I believe that jazz-at least mainstream jazz-is, by its nature, analog.


Let's go back a bit:

We humans tend to adjust our expectations as necessary. Until the mid-1920's and electronic reproduction, recordings were fairly crude and listener expectations were low. When you bought a King Oliver record in 1924, you understood that it would be a vastly inferior sonic experience to hearing him live. During the 30's and 40's, recording technology continued to improve and people expected better audio.  Then, in the 50's, stereo, recording tape and the long playing record significantly raised the bar. When you bought a studio-recorded Blue Note record, you expected to hear audio quality that approached what you got at a live performance. 

A cultural meme was alive and well: "There's nothing like hearing music live."


Up to the 60's, most recordings still represented "performances," an entire band playing together either in an acoustically-controlled environment (studio), or live on location. Then, isolation booths, layered sound and significant editing became much more widespread. Plus, the content of recordings began to seriously diverge from what could be heard live. People did not expect to hear Sgt. Pepper or, for that matter Ascension, in concert.


Over the next few decades, recording moved from the analogue to the digital domain. CD's and digital files replaced the cassette and LP's for personal listening. In every genre, recordings were expected to sound crystal clear (if reduced in quality by compression to MP3's).

While there were always comments along the lines of: "They sounded better on the record"-and popular recorded solos were duplicated live-more and more, rather than conceiving the LIVE performance as something that a recording should try to capture, the RECORDING has become the standard by which the live performance is judged. 

The truism "there's nothing like hearing music live" has been taking on serious water. 

Theatrical spectacle, stacks of amps and enormous woofers get rock and pop fans to live shows, giving them an experience they can't get on their ipods. On television, performances like Robert Glasper's recent appearance on David Letterman demonstrate that TV has the tech to give us the hi-fi experience. Film does too, although with atrocious decibel abuse.  Not so the typical jazz venue.

Ancient fetishists like me, who abide the scratches and clicks that we grew up hearing on vinyl can live with less than stellar sound, but we're already deeply invested in the music. For young people, lower quality audio can be a reason, along with high prices and lack of media attention, to make going out to hear jazz a non-habit.

There's been a lot of blog talk about jazz musicians making more of an effort to relate to the audience-to make a better "presentation." This is important, but jazz venues must reckon with current audio expectations or expect increasing erosion in a demographic whose attention they must capture.


Truth is, I don't know if even a staunch effort to produce better live mixes of acoustic instruments will stem the tide. Recording has become atomistic to the degree that recordings can fairly easily be pieced together note by note and out-and-out mistakes seldom slip through the digital editing net. Plugging in a MIDI cable will always guarantee a cleaner signal than putting a mic on a trumpet-especially in a live performance. 


Jazz is a music that thrives on getting in and out of dark corners, but it doesn't seem to be thriving on the native soil of Digital-Vania.

Jazz &, er, Golf

The action by Justice for Jazz Artists  (see below) is getting a mixed reaction. Most people who contacted me are supportive of the action and there's a great deal of support online. I received emails from a couple of folks involved in the operation of clubs in NYC (sent to everyone who signed the online petition?) that fiercely defended the way they do business. A fellow Boston jazz blogger, Stu Vandermark sent me an email saying that it was a bogus effort. He wrote about these kinds of actions here.


I'm not sure whether the campaign is not well timed or focused, but I continue to believe, especially because of union slacking, that such a campaign is needed. 


I realize that the idea of tarring the mass of jazz club operators with the brush of avarice and lack of concern for jazz musicians doesn't always ring true-good luck if you go into the business of jazz to make a quick buck. The idea of pushing back specifically at them may or may not be the best strategy, but having a specific target means the issue is much likelier to get out there in public. And get out there it must. It's one way to wake people up to the real issue: who gets subsidized in America. 

Think about just one example: golf courses. The golf courses in Las Vegas are estimated to use 22 BILLION gallons of water a year for irrigation. The golf courses on Long Island use 50,000 POUNDS of pesticide a year. Precious water syphoned off, pesticide use running amok and corporations can write off their support of golf tournaments. 


Fine. Let it be. I like a nice chip shot as much as the next guy. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking we haven't made the choice-that it all "just worked out that way." Tax codes are written by Congress. Media conglomeration rules are written by Congress. Government controls the allocation of natural resources, as it does that paltry business known as support for the arts via NEA and NEH; both constantly threatened with defunding. 


Maybe this campaign can help us all start to make some necessary connections.

Jazz Standing Up For Itself

I wanted to make note of the campaign being organized by Justice for Jazz Artists, details of which you can read here.

In a previous post, I talked about the need for musicians to organize and/or collectivize on their own behalf. This organization and this campaign represent a credible way to do just that.

Happily, JJA is savvy enough to know that they have to broaden the campaign to include not just musicians, but everyone in the jazz community and, in fact, anyone who cares about artists in our culture not getting the usual shaft.

I urge you to go to the website and sign on as a supporter and to let your circle of friends know about this campaign.

"Coleman Hawkins: Sonic Gravitas and Bop" by Steve Provizer

A nice comment on my last post cited Coleman Hawkins as prime example of a musician who throughout his life sought new musical input. But, unlike the dramatic musical changes made by Coltrane, Byrd and Miles, Hawkins' playing changed less than the musical context did. He challenged himself by putting himself in situations more "modern" than the one in which he first reached musical maturity, but what he played changed only subtly.

And, while Miles, Trane and Byrd drastically changed their sound, either through mutes, electronics or overblowing, the particular quality of Hawkins' sound-its weight, timbre and vibratto-continued to project classic swing-era Hawkins, making it that much harder for us to hear the way he assimilated new influences into his playing. Our ears are so much drawn to that sound. The effect Hawkins' tone had of drawing the listener into the past became more and more pronounced as Lester Young's lighter tone began to dominate, then Rollins' and Coltrane's-closer to Hawkins, but with much less vibratto.

We'll listen to a few representative Hawkins recordings and try to gain some insight into how the process unfolded.

As a basis for comparison, we won't start with the earliest stuff from the 1920's, but from this recording, made in Paris in 1935, which shows us the basic, mature Hawkins. He's still a few years away from his 1939 Body and Soul triumph, which I won't post here, as it's so well known, but which you can easily find.

The Pothole of Periocity (Donald Byrd)

Here's what I mean: I played some 1950's Prestige tracks for a friend who knows a lot about jazz. He listened and said "I never knew Donald Byrd played like that." 


Another victim of the dreaded Pothole of Periocity. He knew the later stuff, didn't like it and never worked backward. The ease and access of music on the internet has eased the syndrome less than you might think.


Coltrane and Miles are probably the two most well-known examples of musicians who shed audience as they move through different periods. Some only go with Trane through his Prestige period, some through Atlantic, some through early Impulse and a few all the way through to the end.

How often do people who hook into Trane at Meditations go back to Blue Trane? Or, who pick up Miles at Tutu and go back to Embraceable You?

Donald Byrd (b.12/9/32) is another who made extreme enough changes that he exchanged much of his old audience for a new one. In this case, a larger one-and here the bugaboo of "selling out" rears its endless head (No comment). 


Interestingly, Byrd's music became more "pop" and "soul" oriented while he pursued advanced academic degrees: Masters in Music from Manhattan, Law degree from Columbia, Phd from Columbia University Teachers College in 1982. Here are examples of the change:


Straight ahead, 1958:



Soul/modal-1960



Funk/electric-1975:



Gotta say, it's early Byrd for me.


Who have you shed all along the way? Or picked up?

We're Off...

...to bring civilization to the West Coast. Back next week.