Monday, July 23, 2012

Evaluating Free-Improvised Music


In this letter published in 1973 (h/t Tyshawn Sorey), Charles Mingus questions the musical abilities of the musicians associated with what was known at the time as the “New Thing.” At the beginning of the letter, he wonders “what would happen if some musicians who could really play the chord changes, who could really play a tune and not get lost, were to improvise and play free.”

To solve this mystery, he could have started simply by listening to Lennie Tristano’s quintet recordings of “Intuition” and “Digression,” which were almost a quarter of a century old when his letter was published.

Anyway, is Mingus right to make a distinction here between musicians who can really play and those who can’t? When it comes to free-improvised music, is there an objective way to differentiate between well-crafted and poorly-crafted? Would we admit that Charles Mingus is qualified to make such an evaluation? Is anyone?

I would answer in the affirmative and assert that we have at our disposal the tools of musical analysis to help us make these evaluations. In this paper, I analyze four free improvisations by trombonist Ben Gerstein and attempt to point toward the sense and beauty that can emerge in this type of music through set class manipulations, motivic development, and hierarchical voice-leading. 

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Transcription - Antoine Roney, "Anu"

Here is a somewhat older transcription I did of saxophonist Antoine Roney's "Anu" from the album Antoine Roney/Daniel Moreno (2006). 


Of course, the usual caveat regarding transcription applies here. This one is not prescriptive nor exhaustively descriptive. It is my interpretation of the sound on the recording and merely points in the general direction of the two most easily notated musical components: pitch and rhythm. Timbre, articulation, dynamics, and phrasing, which likely contain the bulk of the musical information, do not appear in the transcription

Monday, July 16, 2012

Otto Link on alto sax

Conventional wisdom has it that the Meyer-style mouthpiece, with its medium-sized chamber and S-shaped baffle, is ideally suited for playing jazz on the alto saxophone. With the discovery of the video below, we can add Gary Bartz to the list of preeminent alto saxophonists who instead chose to play large-chambered Otto Link mouthpieces at some point in their careers. That list includes Benny Carter, Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, Gigi Gryce, Dave Schildkraut, Jackie McLean, Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz, Charlie Mariano, and now Bartz. Contemporary saxophonists currently using Otto Link mouthpieces on alto are Joe Lovano (apparently) and Loren Stillman. 

All of these players have distinctive and highly personal sounds and arguably constitute a significant portion of the best altoists of all time. Will the Meyer mouthpiece orthodoxy continue to stand? 




Friday, July 13, 2012

Jacam Manricks in "Sonic"

Here is my translation of a new article about saxophonist Jacam Manricks from the German magazine, Sonic:

“Sound-Forms Frozen in Time”

Jacam Manricks

Jacam Manricks arrived in New York from Down Under shortly before the turmoil of September 11. It was there that his worldview quickly changed, and the music of this saxophonist, clarinetist, flautist, and composer made a quantum leap.

By Ssirus W. Pakzad
Translated by Dan Voss

Jacam Manricks is the master of a great art: he makes the complicated sound accessible, and through rhythmic finesse he instills his music with an unobstructed flow. Another of Manricks’ talents: his music is embraced both by those with an ear for the traditional as well as those for whom the term “jazz” means constant progress.

In the isolation of his practice room, this doctor of music concocts new systems and concepts, experimenting with the metrical division of time. As the title of his third and current album, “Trigonometry,” suggests, the Australian likes to use mathematics for emphasis and accent. It would be wrong, however, to think this means his music is coldly intellectual. “The appeal of jazz is in the interaction. Intuition and spontaneity are what makes this music exciting,” says the thirty-five year old, who lectures, teaches, and gives master classes and clinics worldwide. “Composition and improvisation are essentially the same. Composition is improvisation that’s frozen in time. The nice thing about writing is that you can throw something out if it doesn’t work. I often experiment with polyrhythms and hemiola and constantly shift the pulse around. But all of these considerations are worthless if the music that results isn’t able to create a vibe and excite the audience.”

Manricks doesn’t just write music for various jazz instrumentations, but for symphony orchestra as well. Since he has studied orchestration, he even writes out all the parts himself. Do his small-group pieces benefit from his work for large ensembles? “Definitely. You learn how to build to a climax, how to create drama from the nuances of the dynamic spectrum, and how to handle the different registers.”

In addition to all of his hard-earned skill as a composer, one shouldn’t forget that Jacam Manricks is a terrific saxophonist. Indeed, he is a master of the soprano and tenor saxophones---as well as various flutes and clarinets---though his main instrument is the alto saxophone. He plays it with a brilliant and pliant tone that he often bends and stretches, a tone which transforms in the heat of battle and seems to encompass the entire range of human emotions. Whoever hears Manricks live can witness how thoughtfully he builds his solos. He takes striking pauses between longer phrases, then shortens his rests with unmistakable flair until finally they have disappeared entirely, and the saxophonist can whoosh unrestrained through the tonal systems of his own devising. He compares his playing to grammar, with syntax and punctuation being thought of exactly the same way.

Jacam Manricks is originally from Brisbaine, Queensland, where his parents make a living playing together in the state symphony. His birth name, by the way, is derived from the first names of his mother and father together: Ja-net and Cám-ilio. They listened to a lot of jazz as well as classical music at home, and the young boy quickly internalized both styles. Jacam began playing the piano at five years of age and the saxophone at nine. His father, who has Sri Lankan, Portuguese, and Dutch roots, was rather strict when it came to practicing and urged the boy to take on a demanding daily workload. Jacam complied and developed magnificently as a musician, later studying for a degree and then working with a theater orchestra in Sydney. He received a grant and travelled to New York at the end of August 2011 where he was soon playing with some of the most important creative musicians. He had barely gotten over his initial culture shock when those airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center. “At home in Australia I had led a carefree, innocent, naïve life, and then all of a sudden the world fell apart. The events of September 11 changed my whole attitude towards life and my way of seeing things.” When like many others Jacam tried to channel his tumultuous feelings into music, it suddenly manifested unfamiliar dissonances, and thus he gained an insight: “Music is essential for human existence. It’s a way to bring out what engages and occupies us inside our hearts, and it allows us to document and comment on life and the events of history.”






Check him out: http://jacammanricks.com/



Thursday, July 12, 2012

Miles Davis "Blindfold Tests"

Making the rounds at the moment is this version of a Downbeat Magazine "Blindfold Test" with Miles Davis from 1964. His remarks are typically caustic.

Another "Blindfold Test" from four years later finds Miles being similarly harsh, but some of Leonard Feather's accompanying comments are worth highlighting:

"Recently, visiting Miles in his Hollywood hotel suite, I found strewn around the room records or tape cartridges by James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett, the Byrds, Aretha Franklin, and the Fifth Dimension. Not a single jazz instrumental.

Why? There are several explanations, but the simplest and most logical, it seems to me, is that when you have reached the aesthetic mountaintop, there is no place to look but down...

Finding nothing that measures up to the standards he has set and met, Miles turns to other idioms. He relies on pop music for entertainment and classical music for serious listening.

There is nothing unprecedented about this. Walking into Charlie Parker's apartment, you were more likely to find him listening to Bartok than to some contemporary saxophonist. Similarly, there was nothing Art Tatum could learn from other pianists."


While perhaps reserved at the time only for a Titan like Miles, this reliance "on pop music for entertainment and classical music for serious listening" is undoubtedly shared more widely today.

Incidentally, here is Charles Mingus's response to Miles's far more generous "Blindfold Test" from 1955, and here is the test from 1958

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Influenceability of Taste

This recent article discusses the dubiousness of lay as well as expert judgement when it comes to wine-tasting. "The perceptual ambiguity of wine helps to explain why contextual influences---say, the look of a label, or the price tag on the bottle---can profoundly influence expert judgement." 


Although wine-tasting and aesthetic evaluation are not directly analogous (I would argue that music is less "perceptually ambiguous" than wine), one must wonder about the extent to which a similar phenomenon is at work in the appreciation of jazz, for example. Could it be that musical taste is not disinterested and unbiased, even among the soi-disant "experts," but is heavily burdened by such "contextual influences" as marketing, image, and hype?

Monday, July 9, 2012

DarwinTunes

The democratization of music (?) "led to pleasant, jingly tunes that didn’t offend anyone but didn’t really move anyone, either."


http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/computer-music-evolution/

Friday, July 6, 2012

Against IP

In light of the viral response to this question-begging article which condemns music copying and file sharing, I want to suggest to fellow musicians and others that there is no such thing as "intellectual property." 


Stephan Kinsella and others make the case against IP