As reported in The Guardian yesterday, efforts are already underway to fix this year’s Christmas no.1: although this time, it’s a piece with a difference.
A campaign on Facebook is attempting to drive John Cage’s notorious 4′ 33″ to the top seasonal spot this December, in order to confound the usual hopes of chart-topping crooning from the Simon Cowell X-Factor stable.
I’m up for it: who’s with me ?
Very few albums, in my opinion, match Kind of Blue, Miles Davis’ legendary 1959 recording. But I think I have finally found one.
Drummer-turned-leader Manu Katché’s Neighbourhood displays a quite awe-inspiring line-up of jazz legends (a factor so significant that the album cover is simply a list of players on the recording, which shows you the stature afforded the musicians); trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, saxophonist Jan Garbarek, with pianist Marcin Wasilewski and bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz from Stanko’s own quartet, not to mention Katché himself.
Katché is a masterful and versatile dummer, having played alongside pop icons Peter Gabriel and Sting as well as being a colossus amonst jazz drummers – previous credits include Garbarek’s I Took Up The Runes, also for ECM. Neighbourhood is his debut recording as leader for the label, and has something of the timeless quality that made Kind of Blue so special: delicate, sparse textures that allow the music room to breathe, colourful harmonies that are leisurely in their exploration of the potential of modality and the twelve-bar blues. The indebtedness to Davis’s album is perhaps most obvious on Miles Away which employs a similar bass-line and 6/8 rhythmic feel to All Blues.
Here’s a video for ‘Number One’ from the album:
There’s a simplicity about the music on the album that speaks of great profundity; as the leader and the drummer, Katché is completely alive to every nuance offered by Wasilewski’s delicate artistry, Garbarek’s plangent melodic lines and Stanko’s lyricism. There’s a relaxed funkiness to ‘Take Off And Land’ that still manages to generate a compelling rhythmic drive.
Not many albums can stand next to Kind of Blue: but this one, perhaps, just might.
There’s a challenge going round at the moment, inviting you to name your top fifteen albums in no more than fifteen minutes’ worth of contemplation.
Intrigued, I undertook the test, and present here the result: my only rule was that they had to be listed in the order in which they occurred to me, and I had to stop at fifteen. (What the list says about their impact or my tastes in music is another matter!) They should be albums that have stayed with you, or made the greatest impact.
I have to admit, I was surprised that Music for 18 Musicians came third! I can still recall exactly where I was the first time I heard Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint, which opened the door in the low wall to Reich and to Minimalism for me. The Bach concerti used to be played repeatedly in the car on the school run when I was going to school. The Debussy / Ravel quartet disc was the first CD I ever purchased, and was a revelation: the colour, the language, the nuance of French Impressionism.
I’ve never heard as charismatic a performance of Ravel’s Histoire naturelles as that given by Souzay / Baldwin, and although my tastes have changed since, I still have a soft spot for the Barbara Hendrix recording of the Debussy songs.
And for solid swing, the flugelhorn of Art Famer on Manhattan is unforgettable.
Nearly all of these were influential in defining my musical interests which still hold sway, and none of them, interestingly, came from my music studies for GCSE / A-level: they were the result of listening outside the curriculum-imposed works from the Classical tradition. Apart from the Pärt, these had all wormed their ways into my life by the time I left school. There have been fantastic albums since then – the Tallis Scholars singing Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah, Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle¸KidA by Radiohead – but these occurred later, both in life and in the order of recall when writing the list, so they didn’t make it.
Your turn….
It’s 1pm, and Freshers’ Fayre is in full swing across the campus. The marquees are thrumming with eager society members cajoling passers-by into signing up for everything from rock-climbing to capoiera, reps from Subway are handing out vouchers alongside a giant walking hot-dog (no, I’ve not taken anything to affect the senses…) and, over by the Marlowe building, teams are having a tug-o’-war over ‘Spots and Stripes’ from Cadbury’s, a most popular stand, I can’t think why… I kept an eye out for the Pirates’ Society, which had a lively and visible presence last year, but I seem to have missed them this time. Everywhere from The Venue to the Templeman Library and the Gulbenkian Theatre, you can’t move without being accosted by enthusiastic teams, eager to sign you up for a range of activities and societies that show how rich and diverse the University’s community life is each year.
Down in the Eliot College marquee, members of the Music Society, Music Theatre Society and RockSoc are busy signing up new and returning members keen to participate in Kent’s rich musical life. Brochures, hand-outs and flyers are rushing off tables; there’s a general air of bewildered excitement at the prospect of all the cultural activities across the campus starting anew this year. I’m sure the other music-related societies are there as well, it’s just the vibrant crowds always seemed to be moving the opposite way to me. Eventually I had to ride with the throng until I was regurgitated out of the other side like Jonah from the whale, along with a second-year Chorus member who’d come to sign up again. (Wherever you are, Ed: we did it: we survived!).
Phew.
Well done to all the Committee and society members who have worked tirelessly throughout this afternoon, and who have now repaired to the Gulbenkian Café with the Director of Music for some well-earned refreshment. It will all be worth it.
Like an aberrant relative of whom one is slightly wary and mistrustful, jazz has always occupied a slightly equivocal place in relation to the classical music tradition. Briefly adored by Les Six and the aspiring avant-garde in early twentieth-century France, it has never quite managed to find itself a comfortable place in the canon of Western classical music.
At the start of the twentieth-century, composers working in France were seized with enthusiasm for the latest craze, jazz, with printed sheet music of works by Scott Joplin and performances by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra fuelling the interests of composers such as Satie and the group, Les Six. Joplin’s opera Treemonisha ,written back in 1910 (although not performed in full realisation until over sixty years later), and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess from 1935, both show established classical forms embracing jazz: indeed, although famed for pieces such as the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and other ragtime piano works, Joplin always referred to his piece as an ‘opera.’
Evidence of the enthusiasm for jazz can be found in the adoption of ragtime music, as in Stravinsky’s Ragtime; or from Satie’s Parade; although, as always with Stravinsky, you get the sense that Stravinsky is playing with jazz as an objective phenomenon, rather than as a visceral, gut-instinct style; he dissects it and plays with it from a distance, somehow, rather than it being the lifeblood of his writing. Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony saw jazz invading orchestral music in 1925.
Jazz harmonies abound in the music of Francis Poulenc. The second movement of Ravel’s Violin Sonata is entitled ‘Blues’ and is evidence of Ravel’s fascination with jazz. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue opens with the glissando clarinet that immediately speaks of jazz playing; the harmonic palette of the piece is littered with extended jazz chords and copious use of the ‘blue’ note (flattened seventh).
Bad Boy of British contemporary music Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Blood on the Floor sees an improvising jazz trio set amidst a brash, contemporary-sounding ensemble. Turnage acknowledges that jazz and funk are passions of his, and when you listen to Momentum or Your Rockabye, you can hear it.
Artists themselves can be seen to cross the apparently insurmountable classical-jazz divide: André Previn conducts Debussy or improvises with Oscar Peterson; violinist Yehudi Meuhin improvises with Stephan Grapelli;
More recently, former Radio 3 Young Generation Artist Gwilym Simcock is working hard to blur the division between classical and jazz genres. Jazz pianist Julian Joseph collaborated with Harry Christophers’ ‘The Sixteen’ in a programme of Monteverdi for the Spitalfields Festival, up-dating the improvisation expected of keyboard players in the Baroque period for the modern, jazz-infused age. And trumpeter Wynton Marsalis stands astride the classical and jazz genres, moving between both with ease and demonstrating phenomenal technical ability in both fields.
Improvisation has always been at the heart of classical music: from extemporised continuo parts in the Baroque to Mozart’s own improvised cadenzas in the piano concerti, and some elements of spontaneous realisation in the aleatoric music of the 1960s: improvisation belongs with classical music, and isn’t necessarily a separate discipline. Improvisation itself is the very life-blood of jazz, the spontaneous creation of music as a response to the moment of performance, keeping jazz very much alive.
As the twentieth-century turned into the twenty-first, jazz began to establish more of a foothold in classical music, and now it’s sometimes difficult to extricate one from the other in the work of composers such as Louis Andriessen, Turnage, Simcock and others.
Jazz, classical music and improvisation: made for each other.
Just occasionally, a jazz album comes along that stands outside of its time, and becomes a classic. Miles Davis’ 1959 recording, Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus’ Ah Um, John Coltrane’s Blue Train; the list goes on. More often, perhaps, albums are released that as equally as timeless, yet somehow fail to attract the acclaim and the status that they might deserve.
Stranger than Fiction, by British saxophonist John Surman, is a wonderfully lyrical and expressive album on which the pieces display the trademark organic, melodic improvisational skills of Surman, matched by some beautiful exploratory playing from pianist John Taylor, whose careful attention to balance and texture recalls some of Morton Feldman’s piano pieces. There’s some understated support from bassist Chris Laurence, and delicate drumming from John Marshall.
The wonderful climbing line that opens ‘Tess,’ or the asymmetrical shifting patterns of the accompaniment which opens ‘Moonshine Dancer’ show the evocative colours that the group can weave; the mood is contemplative, almost spiritual, and the album never puts a foot wrong. No gesture is wasted, no phrase surplus to requirements: deft yet sure, the players are working together seamlessly yet creating plenty of space for one another.
Here’s ‘Moonshine Dancer;’
Released in 2007 on the ECM label, home of such artists as Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Marcin Wasilewski and other greats, the album is presented in the hallmark ECM style, monochromatic colours with no textural clutter and expressionist cover photography.
Inventive, expressive, and timeless. Listen for yourself to extracts from the album on Amazon here: you won’t be disappointed.
Take two tiny ideas: first, this one.
Add this one.
Not much to look at on paper, really.
But wait. Add a driving rhythm, an insistent pulse, and you get this:
Well, alright, perhaps there’s a little more to it than that: choice of instrumentation, texture, articulation. But that’s all it boils down to, really: two simple ideas, from which a fantastic energy is created. And the ambiguity of the C# – C natural motion in the second idea: is the piece in A major, or A minor ?
I remember the exact moment when I heard this for the first time: at a friend’s house at university; he was playing it in the living-room of his house near the river, and was playing it very loudly on an extremely good hi-fi. (Tim Ward, wherever you are: I salute you!).
Or how about this: a descending minor third.
OK, fairly straightforward. But to build a whole line from this, nay, a whole piece ? Begin stringing descending thirds and variants together, and you get this.
One of music’s great strengths is its ability to create interest from small ideas, which can be sustained over the length of an entire piece. Whether it’s a Baroque keyboard prelude, a piece of Steve Reich, or a pop song: music can unlock magic from the tiniest of blocks of material.
Bach and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers: creative with small ideas.
Tom Service, over on The Guardian, has noticed a similarity between Sibelius and the James Bond theme by Monty Norman.
Alex Ross on The Rest is Noise has helpfully put together an audio extract comparing the two examples here.
I’d like to add another Sibelian Similarity: this time, by saxophonist Wayne Shorter, one-time sideman with Miles Davis and sax player with the great fusion band, Weather Report.
The melodic line from the theme to ‘Port of Entry’ on Weather Report’s live album from 1980, Night Passage, has always reminded me of the beginning of the trombone theme from Sibelius’ great Seventh Symphony.
(The sax theme enters at 25”.)
And the Sibelius theme:
(The theme itself starts at 5’ 25’’).
With a difference in the third note (and obviously in the rhythmic design), the shape articulated by the first gesture of the melody is similar in both cases:
Was Wayne Shorter, like Monty Norman, a secret Sibelius fan as well ?