The Trees 2

The Trees

are turning yellow one by one. I've seen snows but not falls, so this is a new experience for me. Pretty.

for bo and me courtesy of Ira Kaplan. (punctuation by me)

Hey Mr. Tough, don't you think we've suffered enough? Why don't you meet me on the dancefloor when it's Tiny Tom time? And if you need to tell me something once you won't have to say it twice. And if you ask for a nickel I'm gonna hand you a dime. And we'll forget about our problems, if only for a little while, and leave our worries in the corner - leave them in a big, big pile. Pretend! Everything can be alright.

Hey Mrs. Blue, time to think of something new. The Possum's spinning our hips, the old soft shoe. And if you wanna lose the rest of the night there's nothing better I have to do. And if I tell you something you won't have to ask if it's true. And we'll forget about our problems, if only for a little while, and leave our worries in the corner - leave them in a big, big pile.

Pretend everything can be alright.

thoughts on jazz

1. without a new intellectual leader a la bird, coltrane, ornette, ayler, jazz will die. Rand was right. There are no immediately observable consequences of having a solid intellectual foundation, but without it the music will die. Wynton Marsalis may be a great trumpet player but he's a hack and has done nothing to underpin the intellectual foundations of this music. That is why we don't rally behind him anymore.

2. it was said of Rene Chateaubriand that he was 'incapable of writing any character other than himself', and that he was a 'poet rather than a novelist', even though he wrote novels. This distinction is useful in thinking about jazz. Jazz is poetry rather than prose: this is not to suggest that other music is prosaic. Rather, a jazz musician is incapable of writing a song other than himself - in some sense, jazz songs are not independent works at all but templates applied to personality. In this sense, all jazz songs are the same because they express exactly the same thing, which is the totality of the performer. B.B. King's autobiography includes a quote from Bird to the effect that jazz music was essentially the blues. This is what I think he probably meant - that the musical relationship of performer to sound remains rooted in that tradition of personal expression that originates in the blues.

This is not to suggest that programmatic jazz is impossible. It has definitely been done - Night in Tunisia comes to mind, as well as Syeeda's Song Flute, just to cite two of the most overt examples. Jazz that aims to represent rather than express inevitably fails, however - which is my pet peeve with a lot of modern jazz. When Charlie Parker played Night in Tunisia, the exotica was of secondary concern to his soloing, which was exactly what it had always been - a torrent of (i hesitate to say emotion) intensity of experience.

This situates jazz firmly in the modernist tradition. There have been many comparisons between baroque improvisation and jazz; certainly the forms and techniques are very similar, but my argument is that the purposes differ. The sense of self that jazz requires is very much a modern construct that did not exist in the form it does today pre-20th century.

This idea also helps us unite the disparity of post-1960s jazz, which is a major concern today. There are few ideas today which can reconcile the 'historical' movement (wynton et al) and the free movement (ornette). My argument is that the essence of jazz is not a system of blues and altered harmony and syncopation like Wynton says - nor is it the endless pursuit of the new like some of the freedom players espouse. The essence of jazz really is this particular relationship of performer to improvised music which comes from the blues, and I believe that anything that claims to be jazz but strays from this principle immediately calls into question the necessity and quality of the performance.

There have been a few musicians recently (or not so - Duke Ellington said the same thing) who are for discarding the term 'jazz' entirely. I can see why this is an attractive concept. Calling it simply 'music' invokes a kind of universal quality of the performance and gives it the importance of a primary idea. I think there is probably some merit in this - but like it or not a certain idiom of expression is going to continue to exist, and the only reason why this is important is because this idiom contains the elements that are necessary for jazz to be compelling. Genre labelling is largely superfluous, but to call something jazz is perhaps to give an idea to the listener of what is happening. That has merit.

3. Jason Moran is the fucking bomb. He totally deserved that Macarthur.

Some reassembly required.

brooklyn 1

brooklyn is much more spacious than manhattan. It sits just to the east, across the harlem river, joined by the williamsburg and brooklyn bridges. the distance is deceptive, needless to say. a 40 minute train ride isn't too long but stepping off i felt like Neil Armstrong; a month in Manhattan doesn't prepare you for this. what struck me was the emptiness. i don't mean that there is a surfeit of space but that the city in brooklyn does not acknowledge you the way it does in Manhattan. it carries on its way of life as if you weren't there. manhattan is for consumers: walking down broadway you notice that every sign was written for you, but in brooklyn the signs signify nothing but the life you aren't privy to.
Hence I felt a sense of tranquility, knowing that as I walked down the streets of brooklyn I only existed in my mind.