Tag: jazz

Scratch

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Up late talking to my brother last night means up late this morning. On time, though.

Got to work and felt the crackling nerves of energy and excess brainpower. I feel like I’m a school of fish and a fishing boat at the same time. The net is in the water, and as my fish swim round and round, I’m cutting off a channel through which to flee. Cutting off dumb web browsing. Cutting off most social media. Trying to stay off my phone. Cutting out inspirational reading. I left myself options for distraction, but they are primary materials. It’s hard enough—sometimes it feels like I can get my phone out and have my Reddit client open and in front of my face before I’ve had a conscious thought about it. But it meant that I spent some time job hunting, and reading Mrs. Dalloway, and writing.

If you start playing this and think you hate it, please stick with it until 1:36.

I did spend some time listening to Steve Reich’s Four Sections. I was a Reich hater because I didn’t like how popular he was, until I was a Reich fan for the same reason that he became popular, but most of that is on the strength of Music for 18 Musicians, which I am a superfan of. I’ve always meant to listen through a Reich boxed set that I got my hands on, but it was only a couple of nights ago that I put it on to go to sleep to. One of the most bittersweet experiences I have on a regular basis is of drifting to sleep to glorious, sublime music and having the conflicting desires to surrender to the experience and also wanting to know what I’m listening to. I did a thing I hadn’t done in a while: opened up JSTOR and just browsed around for what I could find on the piece and Reich’s music in general, and downloaded a couple things to read later. It is far outside normal habit now, and I was happy that I was able to chase an instinct to just learn about something because I wanted to. It felt like reconnecting with a dormant part of myself, but not any feeling of regression.

I also spent a lot of time reading this piece on the legacy of the New Republic. This is a classic example of something that I already kind of don’t care about thinking about and shouldn’t, but at the same time, I love reading clear opinionated arguments.

Work was whatever. I played computer teacher and introduced 5th graders to a visual programming language for kids called Scratch. It was interesting to see the breakdown of interest. There was a small number of kids that were so resistant to the structure of the activity that they didn’t even sit down with the computer to try. There were a larger number of kids that did sit down and did try to follow along, and found it difficult to get the concept of the programming blocks or the causality of the blocks to the action that resulted. Another large group of kids understood how the blocks corresponded to the sprite characters, and found one annoying thing to do with it (which was annoying, but also totally how you learn how to do things, and I was happy to see it). And then there was another very small group that understood right away what the possibilities of this program is, were already thinking of the cartoons they could make or the puppets they could make say dirty things, or games they could create. It was incredible to see that some kids really didn’t get it, and others really did. I wondered what kind of kid I would have been. I usually had no patience for systems that I didn’t understand right away. At the same time, there’s a decent chance that I would have understood this right away. It’s impossible to tell. I remember a similar type of programming that we did with Apple Hypercard, but I never had that much time to work with those computers.

I talked with a lonely 6 year old girl. I see myself in lonely children.

After work, I ran home and changed in and out the door in like 180 seconds. I headed over to the Academy Theater, where there was a special screening of the documentary Keep on Keepin’ On. It’s a very sweet movie about 94 year old jazz trumpet legend Clark Terry and his 23 year old piano protege. It was wonderful just to be let into the life of this incredible man with such a history and such a firsthand connection to the musical tradition.

I watched the movie with ex-coworked KK and her boyfriend, G, who I had never met. After the movie, we caught up a little bit, and I got my first chance to summarize where I’ve been since I’d last seen her in December. January has turned out to be quite a month for me, with a lot of change and a lot more coming down the pipeline. I was sharing about this Artist’s Way group I’m trying to get started—the response hasn’t been overwhelming, but it has been whelming and I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to get the group going—and both of them expressed some interest. It was validating, and I’m very excited to move on, feel like I’m going forward.

highway rider

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Changed my little album dealio on the left there after way too many months to Brad Mehldau’s 2010 album Highway Rider.

Highway Rider is an album that has really grown on me. I liked it immediately—I really like Mehldau’s easygoing harmonic language and percussive style, and the album was produced my one of my favorite musicians, Jon Brion—but the album is a little, well, tame and I never thought it would edge its way into my favorites. It’s not very harmonically adventurous, its sound is slick and sometimes over-controlled, sometimes Mehldau’s piano patterns are extremely repetitious, and it sometimes strays close to muzak or easy listening. The thing is, it’s also just so right. It’s an album that conjures a world in its sound, and that world is warm and inviting, both communal and apart. It’s pre-language, pre-cognition; the perfect music for sitting outside on a sunny day without a single thought in your head.

Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman performing “The Falcon Will Fly Again” from Highway Rider:

Game of Tones

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Ahmad Jamal Trio with Gary Burton “One” (1981)

Gary Burton’s reflexes in this performance make me so jealous. Ahmad Jamal is actively trying to fuck with him and throw him off, and once he catches on to that, his responses are genius.

El Amor Brujo

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Miles Davis “Will o’ the Wisp” from Sketches of Spain

1. prologue

In a weird case of repeating myself, I had another revelation recently while trying to track down the origins of a Miles Davis tune. A few weeks ago, I described my journey of tracking down the origins of a particular combination of bass and piano chords from Kind of Blue. I had a similar kind of revelation this last week.

2. the hook

“Will o’ the Wisp” from Sketches of Spain was the track that most piqued my interest the first time I listened to the album. Like the rest of the album, it’s strongly driven by clipped Spanish rhythms, but there is something about the combination of catchy, modal melody and the slightly demonic harmonies in the verses that is just arresting.

After trolling YouTube, I finally realized that, like most of the tracks on the album, it is an arrangement of a piece of Spanish classical music, “Canción del fuego fátuo” from El Amor Brujo by Manuel de Falla (1876-1946).

4. a defense of ‘sketches of spain’

Sketches of Spain is one of Miles Davis’ best-known and best-selling albums, so in that respect it needs no defense. I think its accessibility means that it’s undeservedly treated differently. One album database site I visited categorized it as “easy listening!” What fascinates me about this album is the layers of subtext involved in the very creation of the album, a collection of jazz covers of Spanish classical music pieces.

Spain occupies a very strange place in the classical music economy. Although the country has a classical tradition as old as any other country in Western European, the “Spanish” sound in classical music has mostly been defined by French composers. Think Bolero by Ravel, or Iberia by Debussy, or the opera Carmen by Bizet. Part and parcel of this fascination with Spanish rhythms and folk sounds is the idea that Spain represents a liberated, and therefore savage, shadow of France. It’s the Spain of the Basque, of the Roma. It’s the Spain of Resident Evil 4. It’s the exoticized Mediterranean in the heart of Europe, and with the exotic there are always connotations of danger.

So it’s in this context that you get the music of the great 19th/20th Spanish composers, de Falla, Albéniz, Granados. Their music was nationalistic, but in a different way than is usually described by music historians. It was not an attempt to create a national identity against the forces of shifting borders, as Chopin, nor was it an attempt to establish a new musical tradition and sound where there had been none before, as Sibelius. Instead, it was an attempt to reclaim an authentic musical tradition from the realm of caricature, and to translate that tradition into the language, classical music, of the elites.

Jazz is also a musical project that gave a voice to a population that had previously only been represented in the elite culture by caricature. If you look at the language that was used to describe black musical culture and Spanish musical culture, it’s amazing how many of the same clichés surface: the music is more rhythmically obsessed, it’s more passionate, it’s vulgar. And in both cases, there was the fear that there was something corrupting in the music.

5. will o’ the wisp

Miles Davis engages directly with this web of associations on Sketches of Spain. There’s something a little…off about the arrangements. Remote. Tense. Far from easy listening. There’s plenty of idiomatic Spanish melodic and rhythmic content, and nothing of the easy caricature of French composers. I think this reflects some of Davis’ own engagement with the European classical establishment; one should never forget that he attended Juliard and there’s an alternate world where he was America’s greatest 20th century composer. There’s something about the web of oppositions that permeate the album that consistently fascinates me. It’s a mixture of two musical cultures, one white, one black, but both defined in opposition to the European classical tradition. At the same time, both the Spanish composers and Miles Davis in adapting their music decided to speak in the language of the elites.

I don’t have any answers to these apparent contradictions, however I do know that this album deserves a lot more thoughtful engagement than just dismissing it as an easy listening album of Miles Davis covering classical music.

On Sacred Ground

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

I’ll be up late writing a paper on the significance of the compositional chronology of the last section of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor,* but I wanted to link to a release of the premiere performance of On Sacred Ground, The Bad Plus’ reworking of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Pianist Ethan Iverson is a beast on the recording, and his blog post on his creative process is a must-read. I’m also grateful to him for pointing to pianist Serhiy Salov’s album The Sacred Spring of Slavs. The album contains Salov’s own transcription of the Rite for solo piano as well as a suite of character pieces by the Ukrainian composer Igor Shamo. The transcription is rough and edgy, while at the same time showing off near-superhuman piano technique (there were several times where I had to repeat a section to try and figure out how he was producing these sounds with only two hands), and the Shamo pieces are strong in their own right, a combination of the folk melodies of Stravinsky/Bartók and the atmospheric washes of color of Debussy.

*Don’t worry–I’m putting myself to sleep.