Improvisato

Miles Davis "Summertime" (1958)

2009-07-28T10:46:00.003-04:00

in 1953, pianist George Russell published his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which offered an alternative to the practice of improvisation based on chords. Abandoning the traditional major and minor key relationships of Western music, Russell developed a new formulation using scales or a series of scales for improvisations. Russell's approach to improvisation came to be known as modal in jazz. Davis saw Russell's methods of composition as a means of getting away from the dense chord-laden compositions of his time, which Davis had labeled 'thick'. Modal composition, with its reliance on scales and modes, represented, as Davis put it, "a return to melody" (rovingeye2)

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George Russell checked out last night.
The Concept lives on.

Happy Birthday, Giant Steps

2009-05-04T17:51:00.001-04:00

"The only reason you can sing the blues and not Giant Steps is because you have done it far more often."

Raul Midon demonstrates how while singing with spirit is great -- singing without spirit is useless -- but when you add in a little bit of Coltrane intellect ...

Trane practicing "Four"

2009-03-22T15:47:00.000-04:00

An audio clip of John Coltrane practicing "Four" via Larrys Jazz Improvisation Page

The Devil & Michael Cleveland

2009-02-26T11:57:00.001-05:00

Wrath of the Grapevine: "Our Red-Horned Bogieman presented young Michael with the ancient Fiddle of Souls, strung with the strings of pity, of hope, of love, of joy, of death.

Not only was young Michael of Cleveland the only person in history to ever own this fiddle who did not have to give up his soul in exchange for it, but our unassuming lad was also the only person humble enough to wield such a mighty instrument safely."

Conduction #180

2009-01-30T12:30:00.001-05:00

I'm with Butch 100% on this one:

Morris developed this system gradually in the 1970s and 1980s, after his work in jazz, free improvisation and contemporary music left him dissatisfied. He had tired of the theme-solo-theme patters of jazz; collaborative improvisation had moments of brilliance, but Morris's desire to isolate and elaborate interesting melodic or rhythmic fragments was generally frowned upon; and he felt the reverence towards composers and printed scores in contemporary music did not allow for the full use of each musician's unique voice and improvisations.

Keyboardist/bandleader Sun Ra and drummer Charles Moffett both conducted improvisations of jazz musicians in the 1970s, and Morris credits both as major influences.

(wikipedia)

Morris started with a vocabulary of just 4 signs, leading players to repeat, sustain, change speed or playout; today his Conduction technique uses a vocabulary of some 20 signals that let him play his ensembles like it was a single semi-autonomous instrument, a bank of player-presets he can coax and curl into the sounds he needs for the moment.

Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves.

Trading Fours

2008-06-04T01:19:00.001-04:00

Jazz is a conversation, and a friendly debate is a perfectly viable way to communicate; here it is Joshua Redman and James Carter backed by a big-band arrangement of Monk's "Straight No Chaser" in a great display of the quaint old custom known as "Trading Fours".

The rules are simple: folk-song structures tend to have phrasings given in groups of four bars of four beats, so the soloists take turns, most often at a break-neck rate, each taking what the other has put forth, and taking it up a notch. It's a time-honoured mainstay of the jazz culture, maybe not so noticable in the harmolodic free-er jazz styles (tho still appears now and then) and often used in performances for the finale showpiece. The practice probably has its roots in early jam-session playing in the New Orleans bands or maybe before. The earliest I can dimly recall are in Louis Armstrong days, probably because the music was far more arranged for King Oliver's day; trading fours was honed to a fine art by Bird and Diz, and while it started to fade with the Miles Davis Quintet's ensemble-improv style and on through the Free Jazz bands, it still lives on strong in the Sun Ra Arkestra shows where it can sometimes be staged like a kaiju battle!

There's been cross-overs too, with bluegrass bands trading fours and I suppose the custom also persists into the modern day rap poets trading fours in rhyme or in beat-control switching back and forth between DJs.

Struttin' with some barbecue

2008-05-06T09:42:00.002-04:00

There's some great talk over on Darcy's blog about the notions of jazz vocabulary and strategies for jazz education, and some very good discussion too, I've chimed in with my own (cosmic) ideas, but the groove of the conversation is tenaciously clinging to the what of the playing more than the why. I find the same when I hunt through videos of school and community bands, more often than not I find execution and articulation but with very little fiyah. They sit, they play, there, done it; next?

They have the 'what' down pat sufficient to dazzle the judges, but there's a gap in their education on the 'why', even though the 'why' of this music is so simple: it is the sound of joy.

Amazon: Louis Armstrong

Improvisation is Plural

2008-04-21T09:46:00.002-04:00

Miles Davis illustrated the collective coherence of improvisation by having the so-called 'backing' players punctuate the soloist lines with ad-hoc phrases, jarring the 'leader' back into the real-time, a push-pull give-take phrase by phrase inter-PLAY described by Ornette as "what if 10 people all 'solo' at once?"; ex-Allman Bros guitarist Warren Haynes says much the same in this clip, he talks about being "one second behind your brain" and being "in the moment" as he's trading musical words in a southern blues dialect with Phish lead Trey Anastasio; there's also a brief guitar lesson over at gibson.com where Warren talks about Miles, about the spaces between notes and giving others room to be part of the now of the sound.

Amazon: Warren Haynes

The Abstract Truth

2008-04-05T18:14:00.003-04:00

Following up the last post On the Edge of Now, I thought I might offer a glimpse of the host of that documentary through this clip of Derek Bailey and dancer Min Tanaka as an illustration of the contextual essence in abstract improvisations like Baileys. I was delighted to hear in that documentary where Derek Bailey himself expresses surprise that his labels were able to peddle his discs at all -- by its very nature, improvisational music is deeply entangled in the live time-space; wrest from that space, there is as little to grasp as when taking a Pollock canvas into a textbook.

The music expresses that space there, and in this space here, it is only artifact and shadow, a document at best. History. His story. Is it any wonder people prefer dance music on CD, music they can spin alive into their personal now? Or at least, they can try.

In this particular video I imagine that 'then' and become transfixed by Min Tanaka's dance; I feel I want to digitally sweep away Derek standing there among the onlookers, divesting the scene of any visual ground to the setting and just leave Min as the focal dynamic, illuminated by Derek's sound the way Toru Takemitsu might have illuminated such a scene for a Kurosawa film, at once totally personal and perfectly ordinary. So too the aleatoric works of John Cage and David Tutor, the dada-bent soundscapes of purposelessness which are post hoc threaded into sense by our compulsions to link the purposely unrelated events.

Only, there is a difference with improvisation: While John Cage would choose his scenarios and materials to fit the event and while Takamitsu would linger on the sets and absorb each scene before scoring it, and while he often would recommend directorial changes, theirs was a passive reaction to the visual; Derek and Min, on the other hand, are entangled, each influencing each other right there, in real time, trading time and choice, a living forging the present tense together.

Amazon: Derek Bailey

On The Edge of Now

2008-03-22T11:31:00.003-04:00

By way of a teaser, the opening scenes from "Passing It On", Derek Bailey's 'Improvisation' entries in the BBC's On The Edge - - dmtls tips us to the full episodes one and three which we can watch over at at UBU Web.

And they are quite a trip. From school children spontaneously engaged (without instruction) in a real participation to Zorn's social-noise to Eugene Chadbourne being, well, Eugene, to a master class in Indian vocal music and elementary bebop drums, to the performance strategies of one of the greatest improvisational ensemble composers of all time, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

As Derek Bailey explains, and as Mozart scholars Christopher Hogwood and Robert Levin explain, as the Hebridean gaelic psalm singers and Indian Raga singers explain, the fragile and precious moment of the music of any 'now' is impossible to capture, package and sell. Sure, we can learn from recordings, we can learn technique and the method and gesture, but when it comes right down to it, the essential essence of the the music escapes. It is too immediate, too entangled in the present place and context, too intimately personal to the performers and to the audience.

Amazon: based on the book Improvisation by Derek Bailey

Smells Like Teen Spirits

2008-03-18T09:26:00.007-04:00

In honour of last Friday's Conan feature on the always deep-thoughtful and harmolodically charged The Bad Plus, and considering the U-vid of said gig was ~~yanked~~repatriated by the NBC, here they are in a dark but lively den somewhere in Argentina. But that's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about Oscar Peterson.

I'll tell you about my close encounter with Peterson someday, but what I wanted to tell you is about the show just prior to that, it was at the Winnipeg concert hall and I had my pair of decent-view jazz-DJ comps and took my then-girlfriend to see pure genius in action.

Now, she, bless her heart, thought Jazz died that fateful day when Glenn Miller's plane went missing, and here we were, minor VIPs in the audience of the worthy successor of Art Tatum -- why Winnipeg's only modern jazz DJ was a 'minor' VIP, don't ask, don't matter, unimportant and hadn't really thought of it before -- the thing is, my gf, she was dead bored, edgy board, gown-fidgity looking about to see who's there kind of bored. I was enthralled at the sheer blistering precision of Oscar's execution, but every streaming note of it was sailing right over her head into the cheap seats behind us.

And then Oscar did a brilliant thing: He played a Billy Joel tune! Unannounced, he sailed into Just the way you are, a lyric romance that was not surprisingly my girl's current fave pop-chart topper.

That did it. That was it. That was something she could hang on to, some ground for the figure, some context and frame for understanding what it was that was so brilliant about Oscar Peterson and so brilliant about his outsideness. Oscar Peterson made a new devoted fan that day, leaping out of the Ambient Music bin and straight into the Gotta-Have-More bin.

The Bad Plus may still be a little outside the reach of some ears, even after this, even after their Late Night gig and this week at the Blue Note, but then I always preferred Al Yankovic's version to the original anyway.

Amazon: The Bad Plus / Oscar Peterson

Ben/Gerry

2008-03-17T06:15:00.002-04:00

Happy St. Pats! And yes, I did look about for something Irish to post and pondered a few but settled on stretching the genre just far enough to include Gerry Mulligan.

His Father was Irish :)

And in keeping with the fathers and sons, here's a rare clip of Gerry Mulligan with Ben Webster, another evolution in the making that lets you compare the outside Basie-sound put out by Ben with the emerging new sound of Gerry Mulligan backed by Mel Lewis and Leroy Vinnegar on bass, and Jimmy Rowles on an unseen piano.

And that's apropos too because the claim to fame for Gerry's sound was rooted in the piano-less small combo, a session innovation brought about ten years earlier by Red Norvo taking over from Earl Gardner at The Haig club. This was coincidentally the same spot where Mulligan and his group with Chet Baker were fixing up their chops; to make room for the feature vibraphone, and since the feature pianist was gone, the grand was shipped out leaving Gerry to not only craft a new sort of sound, but also, being the ever masterful ensemble arranger, prompted his contributing to that art in a very clever use of widely spaced harmonies among the horns to fill out newly available sonic spaces. Just goes to show: Sometimes improvisation is as much a part necessity and resourcefulness.

Oh, and did I mention? About 'Jazz', it's an Irish word. Tis true as true can be. It means "the breath of life" or some such. Perhaps.

Amazon: Gerry Mulligan / Ben Webster ... and both, too

The Eternal Braid

2008-03-16T13:24:00.002-04:00

From 1969 or maybe a bit before, a german tv clip featuring the Country Roads band with Roy Haynes on drums, Steve Swallow on bass, Jerry Hahn on guitar with the four-hand vibraphone played by the old master Red Norvo and the new master Gary Burton. I love these sessions where you can catch the evolution live, like the Bird vs the Hawk or Count Basie and Monk, there's a raw awe and appreciation in this conversation that goes both ways, and you really can't tell who is having more fun.

This clip is a good segue from Carla Bley: I had the great good fortune to interview Gary Burton in my basement record shop back in '78 or so, and he told me a tale that isn't often told, not in the Wikipedia page, and not even on his own website, but I asked Mr Burton how it was some kid from Indiana ended up at the forefront of modern jazz and his reply was a telling tale of improvisational music and it goes like this ...

"Mister I met a man once," they always begin, although in this particular incident it was a man and a woman. Paul and Carla Bley were booked to play the campus commons at Yale where Gary Burton was enrolled in Law; one thing led to another, Gary ended up on the stage that night, Paul and Carla had one of their famous post-gig parking-lot business conferences and, he said, "It was two or three stops down the tour road when I called my parents up and said, 'Mom, Dad, I'm not going to be a lawyer anymore. I'm going to be a Jazz Musician!'"

True story.

Amazon: Gary Burton and Red Norvo

Carla Bley Big Band

2008-03-15T11:37:00.002-04:00

There is a telling interview with Carla Bley also on YouTube, but this clip is really the most direct example of her strategy: First, you have to get the listeners on your side, and once you do that, once you've real'ed them in, they'll very likely discover that all this free jazz stuff is really quite beautiful.

Amazon: Carla Bley Big Band