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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Ah, yes....I remember well....
To the Listener: forget the math of music; you'll probably never get it. Just ride the wave of the feeling.
To the Musician: If you need to study the math of music in order to play it you'll probably never master it. Sorry. If you can simply hear what is going on and play along, then you can ride the wave and play it. Your ear is key. Even your charts are just a little crutch to be used at rehearsal. All the theory in the world won't matter if you can't hear it.
Think I'll go put on some Miles...
Just came upon this article and recognized much of my own development and taste. It was a delight to read such a well articulated cruise on a subject(s) that I dearly love.
I only hope that Gary Kamiya caught up with Uri Caine at Herbst this last weekend. It sent me soaring off with much of that drama in jazz that obviously gets him (and me and my wife) off.
Thanks for the article.
Really great article, trying to find the words for elusive feelings...it's so hard to write about music. The musings on entropy remind me of Thomas Pynchon's famous story of the same name, written during the post-bop years. That story always reminds me of jazz (maybe it actually is about jazz! I don't have it with me at the moment....).
For really thoughtful rock music, with complex, subtle melodies and sculpted soundscapes, I am a huge fan of Bjork - she's right up there with Joni Mitchell, but while Mitchell's work is an amazing fusion of jazz and rock, I'd say Bjork is more a fusion of classical/avant-garde and rock. Which I realize is not the point of this article, but there's something about going for the boundaries that links all of this music for me, including Bitches Brew.
Anyway, thanks Mr. Kamiya for a thought-provoking essay - it feels like you really wrote from the heart.
Speaking of Jazz performances where only 20 people show up -- I was once at a performance where two of us showed up. The fantastic jazz bassist David Friesen was playing in a hotel bar one night. Apparently a friend and I were the only ones who heard about the performance. For most of the evening we were literally the only ones there.
Many musicians would have packed up and gone home. But Friesen gave a performance like he was playing at Carnegie Hall. In between sets he sat at our table and sipped on a glass of water and talked to us about the local jazz scene, his instrument, other musicians, etc. It was an unbelievable experience, and in my view David Friesen is not just a great musician but also a great person.
No, no, no! Jazz is wonderful, beautiful, passionate music. In a hundred, two hundred years from now jazz will be resurrected as fresh as ever, but rock will be forgotten, dead and buried, just as the great jazz artists are today.
I am the world''s number one jazz enthusiast and listen to jazz every day of my life, but I still disagree with nearly all of your article.
The fact is that jazz WAS the popular music of America during the jazz age and the jitterbug era.
Louis Armstrong was greeted when he arrived at the train station in Copenhagen, Denmark in 132 by 10,000 cheering fans throwing flowers and garlands--though thirty years later in the US he still had to sleep in the van due to segregation.
Clarinettist Artie Shaw (1910-2004)is my favorite jazz player. I listen to his music almost daily. It is like a drug. He was a good looking musical virtuoso who was the rock star of his day. He married Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, and other wives.
By 1990 he had sold 100 million records. He had seven gold records including Beguine the Beguine, Stardust, Frenesi, Moonglow, Summit Ridge Drive. Frenesis was the #1 hit single of its day for 13 weeks.
After World War II the big band scene started to fall apart.
Shaw had a wonderful big band in 1949 but it was a complete flop. Audiences wanted him to play his hits so they could jitterbug, Shaw wanted to play music that was good to listen to. Shaw hated being a pop star, he hated the music business. The music was superb [Artie Shaw And His Orchestra 1949], but no one wanted to listen.
Many jazz players started to play bebop, a type of jazz that focuses on individual virtuosity on the instrument, and audiences fell away in droves.
Shaw made some quite wonderful small group recordings that are hardly available today. [Artie Shaw Last Recordings Rare and Unreleased & More Last Recordings Rare and Unreleased] which are a brilliant testament to his musical ability, then he laid down his clarinette and never picked it up again. He turned to writing.
He hated the music business that much.
The invention of hi-fi recording and the long playing record gave jazz a fillip in the early fifties and many of the great big band figures recorded extended versions of their greatest music with smaller groups. Albums like Duke Ellington's Masterpieces by Ellington, Goodmans BG in Hi-Fi, Side By Side with Johnny Hodges and Ellington, the Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks, the duets with Ella and Louis Armstrong, great albums by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Tal Farlow, Milt Jackson, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Sun Ra were laid down for posterity and are still wonderful listening, but by 1960 jazz was practically dead.
Part of me secretly thought that jazz was a little, well, square. At its worst, it just seemed to be a bunch of technically proficient middle-aged men taking turns soloing on schmaltzy old tunes.
Miles Davis continued to record and had great name recognition, and many of the jazz musicians who were still standing played concerts on the college circuit in the late 60's. I saw Roland Kirk playing three horns at once with a flute up his nose. Great fun, but his recorded output is poor.
I saw Louis, I saw Mingus, I saw Sun Ra.
But now they are all gone. Jazz flourished for about thirty years--from the mid twenties to the mid fifties-- and then it faded away.
Jazz is America's greatest treasure and its neglect is a huge scandal. If I had my way it would be played 24 hours a day in all federal buildings, prisons, and customs halls too, to remind new arrivals what this country is about.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
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