"I find it very repetitive. In fact I suspect one learns to play jazz partly through learning a series of rather standard routines."
Derek's speculation is actually not far from the truth. Like most other popular forms of music, basic jazz technique is readily teachable and is normally done so just this way. I have a non-trivial amount of experience playing jazz guitar, although I abandoned it precisely because I could not think past habitual playing (it impresses my friends and family but on reflection is immensely frustrating). Jazz pedagogy begins, and all too often ends, with instructions for soloing revolving around utilizing select scales over given harmonies. For example, one is taught if a progression, as it is expected to repeat, has a major 7th (especially when augmented) to play in its major (root) or relative Lydian modes with preference for the Lydian because of its implicit modulation (for example, C Lydian is formally equivalent with G major). Such a basis for technique can become quite advanced, and countless players adapt to it and can solo, with apparent success, by stringing together practiced rhythms and ideas following the learned, then gradually habitual, modes and scale fragments appropriate for the chord progression. Freer improvisation ignores these heuristics to varying degrees, but as it increases in remoteness it tends toward the chaotic (usually with intention to do so). Music as a meaningful category loses its grip. That said, I think that jazz technique can be developed artistically and glimpses of that are present when a minority of performers improvise with genuine command of their instruments and the technique. If pressed for a summary statement regarding jazz, I would identify it as a performative art and art of performing. In contrast, what is generally termed Western art music traditionally consists in an art of composition. Indeed cults have developed around performers for centuries, but the focus, and honorific title of "art", stays with the composers and their compositions. Jazz music is obviously structured around performance, it takes seriously the notion of improvisation, that aspect of performance technique that is, and has traditionally been, the performer's own, as a musical art-form. Improvisation has long been a primary engine of creation for Western music. Those most famous musicians of the 19th century, such as Liszt and Chopin, were experts in preludizing and fantasizing (extempore developing fantasias, the genre itself is rooted in improvisation). Jazz's artistic potential is invested in the realm of performance, its community of musicians instead of composers. The art of jazz, like any art, requires decisive imagination, which is what most commonly practicing musicians lack. Jazz guitarists need to learn more than 3 chords, unlike their rock counterparts, but reading musical notation is yet optional as well as even a rudimentary understanding of harmony. A serious problem with jazz, rock and other forms of music employing the Western tonal system is that they all think vertically, but harmonic progression is/was a result of thinking horizontally. Memorization of sound and finger positions fills the gap and leaves some of us (apparently a minority) wondering when the music is coming. This is the unfortunate consequence of audiences often being receptive only to technical gymnastics or memorable tunes. Nonetheless, using the inherited tonal language and more unfamiliar sonorities as a basis for an art of performance and improvisation is alive and properly the artistic claim of jazz music. Jazz musicians generally disagree with my conception of jazz (and more often take offense when accused of a poverty of musical comprehension), but those that do also spout rhetoric about "feeling the music" and the allure of head-bobbing or finger-snapping with the beat and loving the chatter above it. But the art is in the details. A player that can "spontaneously" (this word must always be used generously as it concerns any musician who practices a specific form rigorously) develop a harmonic exploration without relying on it as a structural crutch--i.e. not repeating 8 bar patterns ad nauseum--and further elaborate its relations as they unfold semi-procedurally, but never rehearsed, is genuinely comprehending the elements, the necessary impact of using the tonal language inherited from Classical-Romantic music, of the art. I insist that a dialogue be furthered with preceding jazz practice, but in here I emphatically agree with Adorno that nothing was new in jazz music, materially, through the 1950s. If in disagreement, go listen to Beethoven Op. 111 again. 1823, it's all there. Even in the 50s and 60s when the horizon of material includes 20th century developments, even if appropriated for illegitimate reasons, it was not the originating form. Coltrane's Meditations stab at an aesthetic jazz can call its own, but again, in consideration of effect (as Coltrane's freer pieces are considered largely in terms of effect) I'd suggest Webern accomplished this and more, with profoundly more substance. I have anticipated that jazz music is developing its own material, but a downside, to identify one, of making art out of a performance practice is that the material is not given priority, and is done so without realizing the material determines the procedures applicable to its manipulation. In the 60s I get the sense jazz musicians encountered this with sincerity, but on all other fronts, musical practice abandoned material development and also began to fetishize the process (want to discuss impoverished music, Spectral music anyone?) just without a beat to hang onto...But I'm not a New Music apologist (although I think the last "great composer" was Bartok. Subsequently exceptional pieces have been written but not by a single person demonstrating incisive musical vision or sense), nor a performer of it. I think 90% of my piano playing the last few weeks has been devoted to works by Bach. As a side note, Derek, a fruitful discussion is possible if one side of the discussion does not dismiss the other out of hand without substantiation. Evaluating jazz as an impoverished form of music, on musical terms, is completely defensible if your point of reference is Benny Goodman or Louis Armstrong, but maintaining such a position on a small number of uninspiring performances or the ubiquitous brand of piped-in store/radio/tv jazz is not (in my own delusional world I don't take music presented in the most popular media to be representative of current musical forms). As usual with your counterexamples you name composers then deny in some form that you hold them reverently, but I have yet to see even a passing explication of an aspect of a work by Mozart, or more recently Ockeghem, that you find exemplary in comparison to others. -Brian -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 8:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Music and all that jazz -correction Re: 'Jazz is an adventure in music, an exploration of sound relationships and its variety, I contest cannot be reduced to homogeneity.' Re: 'Your description below fits exactly the assessment of Adorno, which was inadequate and which I pointed to in my earlier post.' So I have Adorno on my side? How unusual. Re: "and that the discussion is proving fruitless." What would be fruitful? If I agreed with you? In matters such as this there is no question of convincing the other person. Only the music can do the persuasion. Jazz has persuaded me - not to like it. DA
