Status: Work-out

Gary needs some exercise. A real work-out. Get some sweat.
He's going to start with diminished scales. In C#

Struttin' with some barbecue

There's some great talk over on Darcy's blog about the notions of jazz vocabulary and strategies for jazz education, and some very good discussion too, I've chimed in with my own (cosmic) ideas, but the groove of the conversation is tenaciously clinging to the what of the playing more than the why. I find the same when I hunt through videos of school and community bands, more often than not I find execution and articulation but with very little fiyah. They sit, they play, there, done it; next?


They have the 'what' down pat sufficient to dazzle the judges, but there's a gap in their education on the 'why', even though the 'why' of this music is so simple: it is the sound of joy.


Amazon: Louis Armstrong

Improvisation is Plural

Miles Davis illustrated the collective coherence of improvisation by having the so-called 'backing' players punctuate the soloist lines with ad-hoc phrases, jarring the 'leader' back into the real-time, a push-pull give-take phrase by phrase inter-PLAY described by Ornette as "what if 10 people all 'solo' at once?"; ex-Allman Bros guitarist Warren Haynes says much the same in this clip, he talks about being "one second behind your brain" and being "in the moment" as he's trading musical words in a southern blues dialect with Phish lead Trey Anastasio; there's also a brief guitar lesson over at gibson.com where Warren talks about Miles, about the spaces between notes and giving others room to be part of the now of the sound.


Amazon: Warren Haynes

The Abstract Truth

Following up the last post On the Edge of Now, I thought I might offer a glimpse of the host of that documentary through this clip of Derek Bailey and dancer Min Tanaka as an illustration of the contextual essence in abstract improvisations like Baileys. I was delighted to hear in that documentary where Derek Bailey himself expresses surprise that his labels were able to peddle his discs at all -- by its very nature, improvisational music is deeply entangled in the live time-space; wrest from that space, there is as little to grasp as when taking a Pollock canvas into a textbook.


The music expresses that space there, and in this space here, it is only artifact and shadow, a document at best. History. His story. Is it any wonder people prefer dance music on CD, music they can spin alive into their personal now? Or at least, they can try.


In this particular video I imagine that 'then' and become transfixed by Min Tanaka's dance; I feel I want to digitally sweep away Derek standing there among the onlookers, divesting the scene of any visual ground to the setting and just leave Min as the focal dynamic, illuminated by Derek's sound the way Toru Takemitsu might have illuminated such a scene for a Kurosawa film, at once totally personal and perfectly ordinary. So too the aleatoric works of John Cage and David Tutor, the dada-bent soundscapes of purposelessness which are post hoc threaded into sense by our compulsions to link the purposely unrelated events.


Only, there is a difference with improvisation: While John Cage would choose his scenarios and materials to fit the event and while Takamitsu would linger on the sets and absorb each scene before scoring it, and while he often would recommend directorial changes, theirs was a passive reaction to the visual; Derek and Min, on the other hand, are entangled, each influencing each other right there, in real time, trading time and choice, a living forging the present tense together.


Amazon: Derek Bailey

On The Edge of Now

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cbQHkrRS3M&hl=en]

By way of a teaser, the opening scenes from "Passing It On", Derek Bailey's 'Improvisation' entries in the BBC's On The Edge - - dmtls tips us to the full episodes one and three which we can watch over at at UBU Web.

And they are quite a trip. From school children spontaneously engaged (without instruction) in a real participation to Zorn's social-noise to Eugene Chadbourne being, well, Eugene, to a master class in Indian vocal music and elementary bebop drums, to the performance strategies of one of the greatest improvisational ensemble composers of all time, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

As Derek Bailey explains, and as Mozart scholars Christopher Hogwood and Robert Levin explain, as the Hebridean gaelic psalm singers and Indian Raga singers explain, the fragile and precious moment of the music of any 'now' is impossible to capture, package and sell. Sure, we can learn from recordings, we can learn technique and the method and gesture, but when it comes right down to it, the essential essence of the the music escapes. It is too immediate, too entangled in the present place and context, too intimately personal to the performers and to the audience.

Amazon: based on the book Improvisation by Derek Bailey

Smells Like Teen Spirits

In honour of last Friday's Conan feature on the always deep-thoughtful and harmolodically charged The Bad Plus, and considering the U-vid of said gig was yankedrepatriated by the NBC, here they are in a dark but lively den somewhere in Argentina. But that's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about Oscar Peterson.


I'll tell you about my close encounter with Peterson someday, but what I wanted to tell you is about the show just prior to that, it was at the Winnipeg concert hall and I had my pair of decent-view jazz-DJ comps and took my then-girlfriend to see pure genius in action.

Ben/Gerry

Happy St. Pats! And yes, I did look about for something Irish to post and pondered a few but settled on stretching the genre just far enough to include Gerry Mulligan.


His Father was Irish :)


And in keeping with the fathers and sons, here's a rare clip of Gerry Mulligan with Ben Webster, another evolution in the making that lets you compare the outside Basie-sound put out by Ben with the emerging new sound of Gerry Mulligan backed by Mel Lewis and Leroy Vinnegar on bass, and Jimmy Rowles on an unseen piano.


And that's apropos too because the claim to fame for Gerry's sound was rooted in the piano-less small combo, a session innovation brought about ten years earlier by Red Norvo taking over from Earl Gardner at The Haig club. This was coincidentally the same spot where Mulligan and his group with Chet Baker were fixing up their chops; to make room for the feature vibraphone, and since the feature pianist was gone, the grand was shipped out leaving Gerry to not only craft a new sort of sound, but also, being the ever masterful ensemble arranger, prompted his contributing to that art in a very clever use of widely spaced harmonies among the horns to fill out newly available sonic spaces. Just goes to show: Sometimes improvisation is as much a part necessity and resourcefulness.


Oh, and did I mention? About 'Jazz', it's an Irish word. Tis true as true can be. It means "the breath of life" or some such. Perhaps.


Amazon: Gerry Mulligan / Ben Webster ... and both, too

The Eternal Braid

From 1969 or maybe a bit before, a german tv clip featuring Roy Haynes on drums, Steve Swallow on bass, Jerry Hahn on guitar with the four-hand vibraphone played by the old master Red Norvo fronting Gary Burton's band. I love these sessions where you can catch the evolution live, like the Bird vs the Hawk or Count Basie and Monk, there's a raw awe and appreciation in this conversation that goes both ways, and you really can't tell who is having more fun.

Carla Bley Big Band

There is a telling interview with Carla Bley also on YouTube, but this clip is really the most direct example of her strategy: First, you have to get the listeners on your side, and once you do that, once you've real'ed them in, they'll very likely discover that all this free jazz stuff is really quite beautiful.

Amazon: Carla Bley Big Band