Month: December 2009

Rhythmicity

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Historicity, a disc issued earlier this year by the Vijay Iyer Trio, has been appearing on various best-of-the-year lists, and deservedly so. Those of us who write fully notated music could learn a lot from this group’s fluidly shifting treatment of pulse, as in Iyer’s own Helix on this album.

I remember being impressed years ago when I first heard Wynton’s Autumn Leaves on the early Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1, where the bass and drums gradually accelerate against a steadily pulsed statement of the head in the trumpet. But the Marsalis strategy, though smoothly executed, is clearly pre-plotted and relatively schematic compared to the richness of what Iyer and his colleagues improvise in Helix.

Yes, Elliott Carter has been flexibly shifting pulse rates in his music for decades, but those changes are often not as lucid as what you can hear in the work of Iyer and other current jazz musicians. (Has enough been said about the relationship between Carter and jazz?)

I briefly thought that perhaps a particular notation-oriented composer was more in touch with Iyer’s work than most of us, since the name of my colleague Steve Mackey is listed as one of the composers of a track called Galang on Historicity. However, the Galang Steve Mackey is actually a different fellow, who, among other musical activities, played bass with a band called Pulp. Neither of these Steves is to be confused with the phony Steve Mackey who tried to scam the Ojai festival in spring of this year - details on that story here.

Monk, the Virtuoso

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I am reading Robin D. G. Kelley’s new bio of Thelonious Monk with great pleasure. (Do visit Kelley’s site about the book for lots of great supplementary info - audio, video and prose “bonus tracks” you might say.) The book is highly detailed, and meticulously researched. If you want to know the precise date of David Amram’s 1955 arrival at New York City from Rotterdam on the ship ‘Groote Beer’, you’ll find it here in the footnotes. But the book is more than just minutiae. You’ll read about the importance of family life to Monk, and about his bipolar condition; about the challenges and pleasures of searching out the right sidemen, and about what it means to be a black artist in the United States. If you think of Monk as strictly an outsider, you’ll be set straight about just how big a star Monk was - the world tours, the cover of Time, the Downbeat poll wins. The book makes me eager to go back to the music, the sign of the best musicology.

There is one theme in the book that has given me pause - the references to Monk as a virtuoso pianist. I need to revisit the recordings, but surely Monk is not a virtuoso in the Art Tatum/Oscar Peterson/Phineas Newborn Jr. sense; not even in the Bud Powell sense of commanding florid Parker-esque bebop lines. However, a quote in the book from Hall Overton did help me get a handle on this notion. Overton refers to Monk’s “rhythmic virtuosity”. This is not a matter of dexterity, of fleet physical command of the keyboard; Monk’s pianistic virtuosity is more conceptual, more compositional.  This makes sense in light of Monk’s stature, along with Ellington and Mingus, as one of the greatest jazz composers.

Holiday Musicianship

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It’s always a good idea to be keeping up your musicianship, and the holidays are no excuse for slacking off. The following may be helpful.

Octaves roasting on an open fire
Major sixths nipping at your nose
Major seconds being sung by a choir
Chromatic alterations of the scale
Diatonic scale
A turkey and some mistletoe
Major sixths make the season bright
Major seconds with their eyes all aglow
Will find it hard to sleep tonight
There’s minor sevenths on their way
They’ve loaded lots of minor seconds on their sleigh
And every minor sixth will want to spy
To see if reindeer really know how to fly
And octaves offering this simple phrase
To major sixths one to ninety-two
Although its been said many times, many ways
Meet the Flintstones
To you.

-with thanks to Davy Rakowski, via Hayes Biggs, and with apologies to Mel Tormé

Out on the Frontier

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Frontiers, an online magazine about research, scholarship, and other forms of creative work being done in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, has posted a very nice article by Peter Nichols about the premiere of Songs for Adam. Thanks to Susan Stewart and Augusta Read Thomas for their kind contributions to the piece.

How we fool ourselves

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“The determining impulse for the Third Quartet was a fall 1971 concert that took place at the University of Pennsylvania… [that included] George Crumb’s Black Angels… This concert and performance of Crumb’s work, which I’d not heard before, helped produce the seed for my Third Quartet. I remember with absolute clarity that the moment Black Angels ended and I was leaving the hall I said to myself, “Now I know what not to do.”

-from, Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music by George Rochberg

And so George went home and wrote his important and beautiful Third String Quartet: a piece that juxtaposes tonal and modernist musics; that layers tonal music with non-tonal figuration; that features a rapturous major key adagio; and that opens with a fortissimo statement in rhythmic unison of a repeated tritone-laden motto that returns later in the piece - all traits that Rochberg’s Third Quartet shares with Crumb’s Black Angels.