be.jazz comments
Great analysis of Brubeck's analysis, Mwanji. I read it and have been pondering what was wrong with it, and you've summed it all up beautifully.
The article is not uninteresting, though, in the sociological aspects it brings up:
"In this ferment of old and new competing trends with the reward of stardom for successful jazz musicians at stake, it was important for listeners and musicians alike to feel confident about differentiating between ‘charlatans’ and genuine innovators, between ‘acts’ (a trade term inherited from vaudeville) and serious artists, even though criteria were elusive. (These were great days for professional jazz critics.)"
Authenticity vs. innovation, and at what point one cancels out the other, is always a judgment call leading to much debate, often acrimonious. In the above quote he merely describes the social situation, although he pretty clearly values the former over the latter.
"[...] the level of jazz then, as Scott DeVeaux shows in The Birth of Bebop was the direct outcome of jam sessions and cutting contests that determined rank and respect in the professional world. Vestiges of this persist to this day.
Bebop in the narrow sense was already dated in 1959, but its standards of musicianship carried over into every modern style. Unlike his contemporary Bill Evans, who was at Lenox as a teacher that year, Coleman would never have succeeded in the regular professional scene with its daily demands – sight-reading, playing in tune and consistency of execution. However, with respected and articulate champions in John Lewis, Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams and a contract with Atlantic Records, he never had to. A question for us, is whether we sometimes over emphasize professional skills?"
At least he acknowledges that this is a legitimate question and poses it, but one senses he only grudgingly would allow that too much weight is "sometimes" given "professional skills."
Hi Tom, it's great to have you over here.
Yes, there are good points in Brubeck's essay, but, as you say, much of it sounds uneasy or grudging, and those were the aspects I wanted to discuss, especially as they are the central topic! What you quote is interesting, because they clearly show the limits of Brubeck's thinking in this article.
"Authenticity vs. innovation": but how much of authenticity is precisely about innovation?
"Professional skills": the question then, is, would Coleman have been a better, more meaningful musician, had he complied to the demands of the everyday grind?
Hey Mwanji,
That was probably a more thoughtful rebuttal than the piece deserved, but nice job all the same.
How much of authenticity is "about" innovation, you ask? Personally I thinks it's problematic to define a genre's essence as being "innovative." It puts pressure on artists to be consciously "innovative" rather than following their own muse.
"would Coleman have been a better, more meaningful musician, had he complied to the demands of the everyday grind?"
Depends on what "meaning" one is looking for, and what it is one judging in terms of good or better. Had he complied with ordinary professional demands, he would have been better at that particular set of skills and hence earned more respect from his peers, who, because their professional competition hinged in large part on how well they met those standards, instinctively respected proficiency in them. Respect for those standards among fans is still strong, as evidenced by "avant garde" fans who regularly, but not always accurately, maintain that their free-jazz heroes could play bebop with the best of them if they so chose. Some of them could, some of them couldn't--does it matter? Not if they're not playing bebop.
- Tom
Personally, I hadn't a single quibble with the piece. It struck me as a logical extension of the famous Mingus quote, which always struck me as just right.
Your alternative to "fence sitting" is apparently the common attitude that once someone has been accepted as a Great Man, he is beyond criticism. Or would you rather take Wynton's approach, pretending that Ornette's musicianship is better than it really is, in order to allow him into your (i.e. Wynton's) aristocracy of great men?
Ornette has obviously been a very important innovator, and his playing has unique personal qualities that nobody have ever quite imitated, one can easily make a list of muscians who, overall, play his style much better than he could, because they are better musicians.
It seems to me that the only honest appoach is Brubeck's fence-sitting one: acknowledge both his importance and his deficiencies.
Personally, I don't think Coleman is beyond criticism; however, criticisms too often fall in the realm of criticizing his "legit" musicianship, which is somewhat beside the point. However, Brubeck has little specific criticism of Coleman as a player, other than complaining about his pitch (other jazz musicians who are criticized for dodgy intonation: Jackie McLean and Lee Konitz (sharp), Ron Carter and Donald Harrison (flat), and there are certainly others). With some exasperation, Brubeck complains that Coleman's attempts to theorize about his music are awkward and unconvincing (a kind of fakery) and implies that the sudden stardom of a musician who was not "playing by the rules" weakened the whole "rules" system and resulted in the eventual atomization (if incomplete) of the close-knit jazz community of the 1950's that he describes so nostalgically by creating "a non-imitative space for improvisers."
Brubeck's piece is intelligent, well written, and contains many good insights about Coleman. But although he makes sure to praise Coleman's "idiosyncratic brilliance" and calls him a "confident, self-aware artist," I think his gut reaction is to pine for the good old days.
"Your alternative to "fence sitting" is apparently the common attitude that once someone has been accepted as a Great Man, he is beyond criticism."
Re-reading what I wrote, I criticise the fact that Brubeck actually says very little about Coleman's music. What's there has, as Tom says, a strong whiff of "this is not legit" about it.
Had he said that it brought X that was new, but was severely lacking in department Y, I would have taken his words as a musician and teacher and board and listened to the albums I have with them in mind. But that's not at all what Brubeck did.
Most of my other arguments are much larger than Coleman himself and attack more fundamental elements of Brubeck's thinking. In order: -pandering, conservatism and careerism as the "responsible" path;
-maintaining that avant-garde = anarchy despite the evidence Brubeck himself presents;
-a very limited view of modernity (essentially, virtuosity and academia) that leads to any kind of paradigm shift being cast as cheating ("tennis without the net");
-the casting of historically-constructed parameters as fixed and objective (this point in particular is something that I've been thinking about for a while, so that I should talk a bit about it in relation to Coleman is coincidental).
Actually, Mwanji, I don't think Brubeck maintained that avant-garde = anarchy; I think his rueful comment about free jazz "opening up a non-imitative space for improvisors" means that what he values is a *shared* technical discipline, the same core standards which everyone can use as a handy yardstick to measure any jazz musician. This is the essence of the Wynton/Crouch critique as well, insofar as it implicit that the standards in question are blues, swing and changes. The trend in jazz, as in many other arts, is towards individuals developing not just a personal instrumental sound, phrasing, etc., but entire idiosyncratic systems, cf. Steve Coleman, Threadgill, Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, etc. Of course they develop schools and coteries, but relatively small ones. Hence the nostalgia for the days when there was less for the curious listener/academic/critic to have to grapple with.
Anyway, you know I already went into my thoughts about Coleman a while back in a Blogcritics comment, and, as usual with online debates, I'm not really that interested in getting into a thing over it. My impression of the article was that he wasn't disparaging Ornette's music so much as cutting through some of the B.S. attached to it e.g. "harmolodic theory." (BTW, if your curious about what I was referring to about Wynton above, it was in interview in which he said something along the lines of "Ornette was playing Rhythm changes on Change of the Century, but I've never heard a critic say that, because critics don't know what Rhythm changes sound like." To paraphrase what I said above, I think he's artificially propping up Coleman's skills as a musician in order to fit him into his ideology - and this tends to lead to speculation about the influence of his birth father, and the surrogate fatherhood of a certain former free jazz drummer, but I digress).
Anyway, intonation. It is true that that the boppers made it acceptable to play further out of tune than previously (Bird also played sharp; Frank Morgan's intonation can be all over the place, sometimes disturbingly so, til he gets warmed up, etc), and even the Ellington Orchestra could be out of tune, though those big vibratos made it less obvious.
There's a vast difference in degree between the above and Coleman, though; his intonation, especially on his early work, sounds completely out of control, especially in conjunction with his - not coincidentally - very sloppy technique - a criticism I don't think . I think these problems have become less extreme over the years, which have seen an improvement in his technique, which is actually not irrelevant to his music.
More interesting to me was Ethan's comment a while back that when Dewey Redman joined Jarret's group, he told him that he couldn't play changes. This was a surprise to me, because the first Dewey Redman I ever heard, except for a track from that alto album on a sampler, was The Struggle Continues, which has a couple of pretty well-played bop tunes on it, and I'd assumed that that had something to do with why he played Coleman's style so much better than the originator. Apparently that's not quite right, but I'm still pretty sure he could deal with them better than Ornette could even in the old days. As I said on that Blogcritics thread, the ability to playing changes (or play in tune) isn't really as clear-cut a distinction as musicians might sometimes assume or pretend - but gradation and nuance do not equal irrelevance.
Edited By Siteowner
And regarding the White House event, just 'cause he's an important innovator doesn't mean he belongs in a bebop band.
Tom,
I agree with what you say, but as for Brubeck: "Should students be told to play whatever they can and feel like playing?" and "anti-disciplinary artistic extremism" = anarchy, to me.
G - what thread was the BlogCritics comment on? I didn't see it (or don't remember).
Thanks for explicating the Wynton reference. As an aside, is playing rhythm changes actually that difficult? It's something that needs to be learnt and worked on, but, particularly difficult? Its frequent use on uptempo tunes would seem to indicate not, but I don't have first-hand experience.
"My impression of the article was that he wasn't disparaging Ornette's music so much as cutting through some of the B.S. attached to it e.g. 'harmolodic theory.'"
Well, 70% of writers call harmolodics incomprehensible whenever they mention it and the other 30% use it to mean "sounds like Ornette." So it's a pretty moot point, IMO.
Actually, by saying that others with more/better technique, "played Ornette's style better," you've actually said (or hinted at) more about what Coleman's music was than Brubeck in his whole essay.
I finally got a chance to read Brubeck's piece and found it puzzling and largely infuriating. The opening White House story and his not unfavorable slant on Coleman's rejection by fellow musicians was an immediate red flag for me. Not unlike people trying to slap down Cecil using the duo concert with Mary Lou Williams as an example of how he can't play in the tradition or make nice or whatever.
Although Brubeck makes some articulate and reasoned points, his basic theory seemed so wrongheaded that I found it even hard to engage. Mostly it was difficult to believe that someone had written this piece about Ornette in 2006. All to say, I was glad to read your wonderful in-depth rebuttal. Thanks for taking the time to dissect his arguments and refute them in a public forum.
Mwanji,
Thanks much for addressing this with such insight. Good comments, too. (Hi, Chilly.) On first reading your post, I was thinking something in line with DJA, that the response was more than the original piece deserved. But having digested Brubeck's "debate," I agree that it warranted a serious answer.
As someone making more than one reference to a master's thesis on jazz in 1959, Brubeck clearly has a lot vested in the tradition, if not academia. And 1959. Stepping back a bit, on a meta level I read this merely as ye olde new vs. tradition conversation, with the author trying to carry both sides of the debate, but clearly favoring tradition and established norms. Which is fine, if totally needless at this point.
I liked the line about '59 being a good time for jazz critics. Much of what Brubeck describes is the anxiety of the new: "How do we as listeners know if the music's any good if the performer doesn't provide us with the usual cues?" This is largely a concern for pro listeners; hoi polloi like me are free to judge the music on less rigorous grounds. (Did Coleman not have his own Clement Greenberg? Hentoff?)
And it's the formal rigor of Coleman's music - or lack of it - that gets musicians' dander up. Or used to, anyway. "What are we as musicians supposed to do with this 'shit from the 50s, 40s and 30s' if it's no longer relevant?" You can hear in Branford's "that right is earned" the bristling intensity of every dues-payer who sees someone come along with a new way to work, a new "rationale," that discounts everything that came before (or does it?).
Also, yeah: "forty-five years later?" That's just ridiculous. Have their been no cogent critical responses to OC's oeuvre in that time that Brubeck can address? Are people still having heated arguments about whether "the tradition" died at the Five Spot (only to be reborn at J@LC)? I guess so....
Mwanji--just a quick reply to this "Thanks for explicating the Wynton reference. As an aside, is playing rhythm changes actually that difficult? It's something that needs to be learnt and worked on, but, particularly difficult? Its frequent use on uptempo tunes would seem to indicate not, but I don't have first-hand experience."
Rhythm changes aren't "difficult" exactly (aside from being usually played uptempo, & also there are many harmonic wrinkles that can be introduced to keep things interesting--something the boppers liked to do at Minton's to scare off amateurs); but I think Marsalis was simply referring to them as a kind of jazz lingua franca. In other words, being able to run rhythm changes is basic, & if a critic can't hear them then you gotta wonder....
That said, though I can sort of hear why His Wyntonness might describe "Change of the Century" as a rhythm changes tune, it's not a very helpful description of that tune or performance. It's like that dumb Dana Gioia thing on free verse that rearranges WCW's "Red Wheelbarrow" into two (bad) lines of blank verse--not analysis so much as procrusteanism. There are better instances of Ornette's using conventional tune structures--for instance "Chippie" on his first album is a clear-cut rhythm changes tune, & "Jayne" is a (IMHO) brilliant reworking of "Out of Nowhere".
Regarding Branford, I'd I'd actually include him on my list of musicians who can play Ornette better than Ornette (in most waysl Branford maybe doesn't play it with as much emotion, and he also lacks the sheer weirdness that makes so much of Ornettes music fun.
Rhythm changes are the next thing you learn after the blues. They're fairly easy to hear, but they make you deal with ii/V/I in several keys. Lots of improvising musicians wouldn't be able to deal with them correctly.
They other thing that's influenced me is that my old improv teacher Bobby Bradford, who liked to tell a lot of stories in class, used to cite Ornette's recording of Embraceable You as proving to skeptics that he knew what he was doing. My improv teacher the summer after Bobby's class Andy McGhee, brought up the same recording, without any prompting from me, calling it "terrible." I love Ornette, but I'm more inclined to agree with the latter opinion.
You blogged about that blogcritics discussion, Mwanji,but your post doesn't appear to be archived anymore. I guess I could try to dig up the original discussion, but it's not like it's a great source of pride to me or anything.
I guess that should've been "ii/Vs in several keys."
G., seriously -- criticizing Ornette for playing out-of-tune and with sloppy technique is even more ridiculous than criticizing Bob Dylan for the same sins. That's Ornette's sound, and wishing it were otherwise seems wrongheaded in the extreme, like wishing Monk or Miles had "better" chops. If it doesn't work for you then doesn't work for you... Speaking for myself, Ornette's sloppy, heart-rending wail takes me places that the cleaned-up, disinfected versions of his tunes by superior technicians don't even hint at.
As for "harmolodics," it's a perfectly sensible term for Ornette's music so long as you ignore everything he says about it. (I'll agree with Bruckbeck on this one point, Ornette's theorizing is gibberish.) But it's actually quite a good word to describe what he did in the classic quartet -- his melodic lines have harmonic implications. Charlie Haden's bass lines, though primarily melodic, also have harmonic implications. When the harmonic implications of the melody and the bass line are in agreement, there's a sense of resolution, and when they diverge, there's a sense of tension or ambiguity. So while this ebb and flow isn't written into the form (as they are in a tune with a predetermined set of chord changes), it still plays a crucial role in shaping the music.
It's also worth noting that lots of early Ornette tunes do have a predetermined, standard form and chord progression (or at least root motion) that the band respects all the way through -- like "Chronology," for instance.
From the amen corner: Amen.
godoggo, you say Branford can play Ornette better than Ornette, then in the same sentence you say he does it with less emotion and without the "sheer weirdness that makes so much of Ornette's music fun." I can't help but think you contradicted yourself.
Better lines, less dependent on cliches, and I like the better control of his tone.
I'm not dismissing Ornette, any more than Brubeck is, just saying that if he's discussed, it should be done accurately, without the dysinformation that is perpetuated by people like Bobby, with all due respect.
One last thought, DJA's comments about Ornette's use of chords reminds me of a problem I've occasionally had with James Newton (I'm momentarily abandoning my usual boosterism here, so imaginge the word "great" repeated a dozen times before his name, plus a link to his site): he writes extremely sophisticated harmony, but sometimes doesn't know what to do with them as a soloist (as with Ornette, the best solution is often not to try to).
OK, one post-final comment: I think Max Roach's reaction to Ornette (i.e. punching him) was really interesting considering some of the people he ended up playing with. And I thought the reference to machismo in the bopper's attitude toward craft also to be thought-provoking, though - sorry to citing him so much - I recall Wynton calling craft a matter of "morality."
Personally, I resolve the whole innovation/emotion/craft debate by embracing contradition.
boppers' attitudes
I have belatedly posted about all this over at DTM.
Hi- How funny (yet oddly satisfying) to find a lively conversation about news that's almost 50 years old. Reminds me of the Steve Allen show where he'd have figures from history sitting around debating the economy.
Professor Brubeck is fairly easy to deconstruct. Branford Marsalis and the whole contingent of repertory, conservatory jazz "owners and preservers" are more challenging on many levels. But allow me to get biblical for a minute: judge by the fruits. Give "Blackzilla" a listen. It's embarrassing. Here's BM (by some strange twisty rhetoric) "playing 'Trane better than 'Trane." haha, yeah, right. SAD. (compare the unreleased "Creation" posted on Iverson's blog, the quartet from 1965 (41 YEARS ago), to see just how pale things can get even when you have a certified, laminated Jazz License like Branford...)
The jazz Academy and industry emperors have no clothes. Funny the word "charlatan" would come up in Darius Brubeck's "essay." The real charlatans on a media and cultural level are those who are loudly laying claim to "ownership" of this art form. Those who can't do, preach. (And what's worse than a *failed free jazz drummer* turned critic turned evangelical...I don't know, but there's a punchline in there somewhere...)
and another amen for Brother Peter for waxing biblical on just the right note on the tree and its fruits. I can't say I've ever heard tell of someone proclaiming how DB or BM so shook their foundations they had to re-invent their occupation just to reassure themselves. I suppose it could happen, but I ain't never heard about it.
apropos too the quote about historical figures and economics, because if you dig both subjects, there's quite a very interesting set of posts that flurry about the journals circa 1603 as philosophers try so in vain to expose the Royal usurping of the Commons via Emperor Malthus' fundamental lack of attire, forever crippling the chances for common folk to turn a profit, and cementing the certainty that banks always will. There are, I think, many good solid power-structure parallels between that story and this one.
G, what's that from?
It'll be Joanne Brackeen's Fifi Goes to Heaven, which has Branford on soprano & alto (sez the Penguin Guide). A disc I've always avoided because of the title (in fact she has a perverse gift for terrible titles--the one Brackeen album I have here is Pink Elephant Magic).
Thanks for posting the Branford snippet. Golly, who *are* they playing like? It sounds vaguely familiar but I just can't place it...maybe because I've actually been *deaf* for five decades....
PB
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