Great kicks with Jimmie Lunceford! This is just what I hoped this book would do for me – introduce me to artists I knew nothing about but could go for in a big way. I’ve dug into the albums “Jukebox Hits 1935-1947” and “Lunceford Special” and it’s my favorite swing-era stuff outside of Ellington. The exuberance of the arrangements, the interplay between sections of the band – often comic but never clowning. Even the Fats Waller-ish patter song “I Want the Waiter (With the Water)” swings.
Speaking of which, I’d like to put in a plug for Jason Moran’s “ALL RISE: A Joyful Elegy For Fats Waller.” Here’s a 100% contemporary musician (and visual artist) looking back at Waller in several moods. Some of the covers are faithful while others, like “Jitterbug Waltz,” re-interpret freely, but the beauty’s still there. Worth looking into.
I’m just getting my feet wet with Count Basie and Lester Young – pretty great and more to say later. Meanwhile, Happy New Year!
@mfadio, @PaisleyUnderground and @pennstac, I’m having a great time listening to Lester Young, in particular the Complete Aladdin Records album. The Count Basie / Lester Young chapter also got me listening to Basie’s band in a new way, hearing how he led from the piano in such an understated fashion. I love the anecdote on p. 174 about “One O’Clock Jump” starting out as a collective improvisation… not in the way I’m used to thinking about it (starting with Ornette Coleman), but still.
All of which has me thinking of how much I’ve missed till now by paying too little attention to pre-bop and swing. I started out listening to free jazz in my (pretentious) high school years and worked my way back into bebop, but should have kept digging.
It sometimes seem as if these contentious divides between phases of jazz (or pop) mean more to critics and magazines than they do to musicians and listeners. The other day we lost James Mtume, a member of Miles Davis’s band who later led his own funk group. In this debate with Stanley Crouch, Mtume talks convincingly about the virtues of progress (in this case the birth of fusion), resisting that tendency toward division and Crouch’s desire to throw Weather Report and others out with the bathwater. Anyway, a lively discussion: Composer James Mtume Destroys Jazz Critic Stanley Crouch in a Debate about Miles Davis.mp4 - YouTube
In the first chapter of Listen to This, Alex Ross makes the argument that there are 5 fundamental stages of musical development within brand genres
- The genesis of a broadly popular form takes place (this is different than the roots of a popular form). Bach, Duke Ellington, The Beatles
- Romanticism, the bloat of the form, moving to the extremes of what make it. Wagner, 70s arena rock, enormous swing orchestras
- Art rebels against popularism. High Modernists. Rite of Spring, Charlie Parker, punk.
- Avant Garde: Free jazz, Zappa, Schoenberg
- Retrenchment & Neo Classicism : Marsalis, John Williams and The Strokes / white Stripes.
Using the framework, I find that I tend to ignore stage 1, like stage 2 and 3, love the best of stage 4 and tolerate very little of stage 5. Which is kind of interesting in a “know thyself” sort of way.
That’s a great formulation, typical of Ross’s smarts. I’d like to think I’m a 1/3/4 guy, but that’s probably wishful.
I think jazz may be in a healthy period of climbing out of Stage 5. In particular I’m liking a lot of stuff coming out of the UK, like Shabaka Hutchings’ groups (Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming!, Shabaka and the Ancestors). This stuff has the virtue of drawing on antecedents but staying new rather than revivalist. But I’m getting way ahead of our timeline here…
Funny you should mention them, a recent discovery for me.
Having a good time with Roy Eldridge. The vivid expressiveness of his playing makes me think “This is what the Beat Generation liked so much about postwar jazz” – I keep seeing a bunch of Kerouac types yelling “Go!” (probably to Eldridge’s annoyance) as I listen. Giddins singles out Dale’s Wail (Eldridge with Oscar Peterson) as a good album, and I agree – I didn’t find it as an album on Spotify, but all or most of the tracks are on The Complete Verve Studio Sessions.
Eldridge’s encounters with racism are of course painful to read about, and I was reminded of Bertrand Tavernier’s movie Round Midnight (starring Dexter Gordon), about jazz musicians who moved to Europe, temporarily or permanently, to escape. I haven’t seen the movie since it came out but I suspect it holds up well. (Although someone pointed out when it was released that the amount of rain in any given jazz movie would break all records.)
@mfadio, I’m still thinking about that Alex Ross list of musical life cycles you posted. I recently stumbled onto an interesting essay about the academic-popular split in contemporary music by Scott Johnson. He’s a composer whose music I like – John Somebody is the famous album but I think Rock Paper Scissors is even better. Anyway, the essay is here:
https://scottjohnsoncomposer.com/writing/arbitratorsofdoom.html
What an intersting essay. That will take me some time to digest.
I will read the section on Roy Eldridge as well. I lost interest in Giddin’s work when I got into the equivalent the biblical begats. Listing every sideman that a musician worked with is not talking about music, jsut as naming rosters is not talking about baseball. I need to follow @PaisleyUnderground wise move and go directly to the chapters that interst me the most, and venture out from there.
@mfadio, I’ll follow @PaisleyUnderground 's example also – sounds smart.
A bit of a digression, but I feel moved to recommend a present-day jazz record, Shoebox View by the trombonist-composer Naomi Moon Siegel. Some fine warm grooves and good playing.
I have read this link three times now. What a wonderful piece of thinking. Thank you
So glad you got into that. Yeah, he’s a very interesting guy. His record John
Somebody was one of my gateways into “New Music” when it came out. I think what he’s saying about the academic / popular question is applicable to a lot of art forms beyond music.
Hope all is good with you.
I agree – very strong new energies in the music, and a wealth of great composers and players and several generations of avant garde artists have begun to hit middle age and elder statesman status. The old culture wars don’t apply anymore, but even during the so-called retrenchment phase, a thousand other flowers were blooming. We are in one of the most incredible times for jazz/improvisation/neo-poat-whstever.
@Steve_Dollar, I agree strongly that “We are in one of the most incredible times for jazz/improvisation/neo-poat-whstever.” Would love to know what you’re hearing. I try to keep up through various sources – The Wire magazine, the Sonic Universe channel at somafm.com, Giovanni Rusonello’s writing in the NY Times, Bandcamp.com, the New Sounds channel at wqxr.org, streaming-service playlists of “new jazz,” etc. All these are hit and miss, of course, but a new find is such a kick.
To change course for a minute, I enjoyed Giddins’ chapter on Ella Fitzgerald in a very personal way. When I was a kid, my parents played her Verve “songbook” albums (Gershwin, Rodgers & Hart, etc.) all the time. I don’t listen to show tunes, or even to jazz vocals that much, but those albums are spectacular. If you’re not familiar with them, just a few of the Rodgers & Hart tunes (“Blue Room,” “Everything I’ve Got Belongs to You”) will give you the idea.
Hey Enthusiast! All the usual suspects for sure!
I keep a mental list of things I read about, and seek them out on Qobuz or Bandcamp,
and also when I converse with musicians and programmers.
Highly recommend the Arts for Art YouTube channel for live performances … https://www.youtube.com/artsforart
Steve Smith, my old friend and sometimes editor, is always great on new music happenings …
https://www.nightafternight.com/about.html
https://twitter.com/nightafternight
I was also raised on Ella!
cheers
Hi friends,
A couple of links that might interest you this weekend:
@mfadio, our champion Alex Ross has a bracing and well-considered piece on Valery Gergiev and how the music world is dealing with the Ukraine crisis: Valery Gergiev and the Nightmare of Music Under Putin | The New Yorker
And everyone, Cecil Taylor’s collaborator Taylor Ho Bynum writes on the occasion of the release of Cecil Taylor: The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert. If I have this right, the full recording wasn’t released in its time because it has a track too long for LP. Better late than never. Forty-Four Thoughts for Cecil Taylor | Taylor Ho Bynum
I hope all of you have a good weekend, and that the world has better news in its future.
A couple of thoughts on Giddins’ second Duke Ellington chapter: Yes, we get too much information as to who played on which chorus of which tune, and so on. But we also get pointed to the early 1940s RCA recordings, which can be found on a collection called Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band. This is terrific stuff, the best Ellington I’ve heard. There’s a tightness here that suggests a compact group like Louis Jordan’s, or even a proficient rock band… anything except a big band crowding the stage.
Also, the descriptions of the satires of racism in the musical Jump for Joy are worth the price of admission.****
@enthusiast.haas & @mfadio I’m taking a short sabbatical from the book because as you both said, the “begat” style was a little relentless and I needed a break.
Also, as a complete newcomer to Jazz, I found that his focus on individuals rather than sub-genres didn’t necessarily help me figure out what I should listen to. For instance, I found that hard bop and soul jazz were an easy entry point for me, but Giddins doesn’t really talk about hard bop much - is it because it’s looked down upon by purists as “easy listening”?
But I wanted to thank you both for mentioning Sons Of Kemet. I’ve been listening to “Your Queen Is A Reptile” and “Black To The Future” this morning and absolutely loving them both. I’m going to have to listen to more Shabaka Hutchings’ music.
@PaisleyUnderground and @mfadio, I’ll take the rap for suggesting the Giddins book and I absolutely understand @PaisleyUnderground 's issues with it. If you folks would like, I’d be fine with switching to another book (I think Nate Chinen’s “Playing Changes” might be suitable) or just to discuss jazz without a book to hand.
On that note, very glad to hear you’re liking Shabaka Hutchings, and I’ll throw in Throttle Elevator Music, which I think is a great setting for Kamasi Washington.
Hope everyone’s week is starting well.
I think my post came across more negative than I intended. I’ve been enjoying the book, but I’ve come to realize that I get more out of it when I read a chapter or two, and then take a break, coming back for another chapter or two later.
He wears his heart on his sleeve, and when he loves something, his enthusiasm is pretty infectious. Reading his more fanboyish chapters and then listening to the music that he was raving about has been a lot of fun. I’ve especially enjoyed the earlier artists like Fats Waller, and Count Basie/Lester Young, which you highlighted earlier.
Listening to something like Sons Of Kemet is interesting, because I probably would have described it as Jazz-inspired or Jazz-adjacent. Similarly, I was already a fan of a few artists like Robert Glasper Experiment, Esperanza Spalding, Flying Lotus and Thundercat, who I always thought of as R&B/hip hop artists inspired by jazz. If these artists represent the direction of 21st century jazz, then I’m pretty excited to explore more modern jazz.
@PaisleyUnderground, I understand your point about the book better and it makes a lot of sense.
“Jazz-adjacent” seems like a very useful coinage to me. I think it’s true of those acts you mention and, going farther back in time, bands like Traffic and Steely Dan. The song format in those cases is certainly rock but the chords, harmonies and solos wouldn’t be there if not for jazz. More recently, an album like Marc Johnson’s The Sound of Summer Running (a favorite of mine) is… post-bop jazz with rock instrumentation? An awkward description, but “jazz-adjacent” gets it. **
Continuing with the jazz-adjacent topic (and also just recommending an album I’m enjoying), I’d like to put in a word for Craig Taborn’s Shadow Plays (Live at Konzerthaus, Wien 2020). Here’s an artist we associate with jazz crossing over into neo-classical territory, like Cecil Taylor before him. Really I’m not educated enough to pin this to any genre or movement, but I like it fine.