Thanks for deep diving and holding the “jazz press” accountable as you do. The sheep have slept on me and especially my orchestra for many years, most don’t know I exist I believe. But aside from my own struggle with being seen vs a devout musical practice, I feel the narrative has been purchased, branded, sold, and divided up. I tried to join academia to try and get involved but was rejected big time. Maybe you peeped my thesis Ornette Coleman and Harmolodics
I suspect the "standards album" has become a kind of "Last Refuge" kind of thing. Jazz musicians try to do something new and can't get anyone to show up for it so they make it clear that they're going to be playing standards, and it's more demoralizing for them than anyone else. As for latter day pop musicians its a way to juice a morbid career. The list speaks for itself: James Taylor, Art Garfunkel, Rod Stewart . . .
Well, there will never be another Jaki, but for some reason(s) this got me thinking also of Hal Russell, who (to my ears, at least) understood how to play forms not charts.
JM's take is not very good. Sounds like he's fighting a losing battle against the raw material. And, given that the original has a simple structure and does not involve enormous technical demands, maybe there's something else in it that he hasn't heard or can't internalise.
Like paper-pushing rubber-stamping bureaucrats, the gatekeepers of creativity have lately amassed more and more control. Their alliances with media channels exacerbate the situation. Testify, Allen!
Such an interesting post and responses. It,s a real treat to read a conversation among experts, especially when the experts are miffed. So much steam between the lines - good faith, bad faith, disappointment, justification, temperament and ego can make a heady stew. I had reactions to all three recordings but won't voice them because I know too little to make substantive comments.
I do have a question of anyone who cares to answer. My background is “classicaI." I am used to regarding performer and composer as separate entities, judged to wholly different standards. Mediocre composition will never transcend mediocrity, no matter how brilliant the performer.
Clean playing and tonal purity are important always, at least to me, no matter how simple the music. I appreciate technical virtuosity when the music demands it (otherwise, for me, it is overkill). When there is transcendence, it is lifted from the score by the great performer who is able to complete the great composer's work, to give it life.
Does modern music separate the two roles, or does it demand that performer and composer unite as a single creative being? No wonder there is trouble on the modern stage. I suspect there are many more virtuoso musicians than genius composers.
I apologize for being to tired right now to give a detailed answer....and I can only speak about jazz....but I would say jazz has both the separation of composer and performer AND the unification. Depends on the musician - I would put Ellington and Mingus and Morton in the category of single entity - and maybe Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins as separate (though both Bird and Sonny were good composers).
please cite the offenders in the jazz press. I think your take is over-generalized. Yes, it’s true writers write more, and more positively, about Jason Moran more than they do Allen Lowe or Matt Lavelle, but I suspect that’s due to Moran’s higher profile for a couple decades. I realize Allen and Matt have both collaborated with well-known musicians, and I admire their originality and independence. I have met all three of them and they are all honest about what they’re doing. But Allen’s dumping repeatedly on the so-called “jazz press”, which is far from a homogenous body, is misplaced and comes off as sour grapes. It’s damn hard to get recognition as a jazz musician, to get booked, to find an audience. Similarly, it’s difficult ( arguably more so), to gain a platform as a jazz journalist, to attract readers, to get paid enough to sustain the activity. Why are writers ( photographers, broadcasters, videographers) the scapegoat for a musicians’ problems? If there is evidence, show it, please. And absence of coverage is not a clear demonstration of orchestrated negligence.
of course it's sour grapes! What else should it be? I have only been playing and recording for 40 years. And ABSENCE of coverage sure-as-fucking-hell is a demonstration of negligence - I didn't say it was orchestrated. IT DOESN't HAVE TO BE, because you all just snap into place. The evidence, by the way, is the bunch of stories (including the NY Times) on a mediocre performance of a solo piano version of Black and White Fantasy. And look at all the praise given to the artist-in-residence at the Winterfest, whose music was essentially Smooth Jazz. Telling me you admire my independence and creativity is what we used to call a shit-filled Twinkie. It looks nice but it has no real (nutritional) value to me or anyone else.
Saying my compliment is a shit-filled Twinkie is a sure way to gain my interest in listening to and commenting further on your virtue-filled music. You get a lot further promoting your music without smearing the work of professionals trying to participate productively in this damn world.
Come on Howard you’re being a little bit dishonest. You’ve been listening to my music for about 40 years and have yet to comment on it, which is fine, you don’t have to have an interest. But to say otherwise is really quite ridiculous. As though all of a sudden now I’ve offended you and everybody so much that they won’t write about me. But there is a core of influential and high profile critics who act as though they don’t know I exist. And honestly I don’t feel the need to be diplomatic. This is reality and after almost dying a few times it seems to me that I no longer have to worry about some reputational legacy; let them consider me a crackpot or otherwise disagreeable person. I just say what I mean, and if you are implying that otherwise I would be a star, then you really don't understand the business as well as you think you do.
Honestly, I am more taken with your research and writing than with your music, you've taught me a lot (which I've tried to pass on to students) but also honestly I have not delved into your music deeply enough, over all this time, to render an informed opinion. I know you work very hard on your music, and as a very amateur instrumentalist myself I respect that, but as a listener I've not been motivated to get into your sound more. My failing, I suppose -- for whatever reasons you care to imagine. I have never heard you in person, Allen, and that's something I'd like to do.
If assigned to review your work, I would put myself to it as I always do. I don't choose records to review for DownBeat but take what's assigned so I don't have to play games with musicians I know who might like an endorsement. I don't review records I've written pr or liner notes of. And I try to keep my personal tastes in music out of JJA activities.
well, the Armstrong Project and my prior 2 CDs, In the Dark and America the Rough Cut, are really the best things I have done. If you still listen to CDs I can get ESP to send them to you.
You offer the choice to “Either jettison the original and construct a tone parallel to it, or go back to that composition and take a walk away from the theme, reharmonize it, re-rhythmize it.” Actually Moran is a good example of the latter: Moran truly walked away from the theme around a million miles from the original. You insist that Jaki Byard would have done a better job, but there is no reason to compare Moran to Byard except that Moran studied with Byard. Moran here rarely plays anything stylistically related to the pre WWII piano style, as Jaki Byard sometimes did. His intense bass register rumbling tremolo has more to do with modernistic aesthetics than with Jaki Byard.
honestly, your comment makes no real sense to me. Yes, Jason walked away, but only in a self conscious manner, to act as though he was rebuilding the elements of the piece. Which he wasn't. And yes, there is plenty of reason to compare him to Byard, because he is clearly trying to do what Jaki did, revisiting an old work and trying to find new ways to express it without discarding the original; otherwise why bother at all? And that rumble you like so much is a big nothing; I could sit at the piano and come up with a more interesting variation. Here is the problem: Jason is a brilliant pianist but he has little understanding of the way that old music worked, stylistically, rhythmically, harmonically - and, I have a hunch, socially. He has, yes, created a "new" piece, sorta, but it is a "new" piece that has no life of its own outside of its dubious relationship to the original. Have you listened to Morton, Waller, James P.? Jason has tried, I know, with Waller as well, and not done well. Historically those pianists had an aura, a way of touch and time to their playing. Jason should stick to what he knows best; he also woefully misinterpreted James Reese Europe in the recording he did previously. I hate to pull rank here, but unless you have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of early jazz, attempts like his to reproduce those sounds come across as misguided museum exhibits, frozen in place. And he rarely plays "anything stylistically related to pre-WWII piano?" What do you call the James Reese Europe project, his Fats Waller playing, and this, of course. Not to mention his comments on Louis Armstrong having no "agency" in his professional life, which is silly and inaccurate. And I have also heard Jason play Bert Williams on piano (Nobody). So that is not correct, he seems to be interested in exploring that whole musical realm.
I just listened to a bunch of your stuff. Personally it’s not the way I would do it but is pretty good. The point being that you took the revivalist approach, which is fine. Jason is trying to offer an alternative which is also potentially fine but in his case he doesn’t really do it very well. The only thing I would say for instance about your approach with maybe someone like dock Boggs is that you miss the edge in that old music, the danger in the way it poised itself on a bit of an emotional clff, the dissonance, both cognitive and musical. Which tells me that for certain types of that music you really have no idea how to turn it into something more personal. But clearly we have fundamental differences in how we want to approach old music.
I think it's really weird that your jermiad doesn't once reference the difference in ensemble across all three performances. Moran's piece is a solo piano, and it attempts to encompass the sound of the full band original.
Your piece actually sounds more pastiched and deliberately "old-timey" to me than Moran's, which seems kind of like the whole point. I also wonder why your album cover is of Baroness Elsa, since Louis Armstrong (and Duke) were in no way that I am aware of associated with white Dadaists (though I imagine many of the Dadaists were fans). I actually like all three performances, but I am not inclined to take instruction from you on how to listen to them, just because you yell at me in typing.
You also seem to have formed a critical baseline that I recall from the 90s and was then a kind of ultra-hipster take, that jazz must "move forward" or "evolve" or whatever term of art to express the desired teleology of constant novelty. I like novelty, I think jazz is always shifting from a variety of pressures, and there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to push a particular aesthetic preference -- it's what artists have always done. But jazz actually IS a tradition, not like that "roux in the gumbo" nitwit talks about, and every tradition is revivified when its practitioners return to the well and then take flight rather than desperately seeking relevance by mere novelty (which usually isn't actually that novel).
first time anyone has ever called anything I've done "old timey." Ask Julius Hemphill and Ursula Oppens. As for Elsa on the cover, that's actually the point.
what's "actually the point"? To associate unconnected artistic movements to. . .draw a new connection? Claim one for the other? Get some capital M modernist cheesecake? Not obvious as you think it is.
"asking" some third parties really doesn't have anything to do with what I said it sounds like, to me, subjectively. What are they going to tell you? I don't expect you to agree with my take on it, but this deflection by reference to some sort of expert or background figure is just deflection, not critical judgment. You sound defensive. Like, it just my opinion, man.
Of course I sound defensive. I'm defending myself from your very spurious charges, though I can't quite figure out what they are. Am I guilty of putting a picture on the cover that doesn't please you or make sense to you? I mean you make these insane claims about baselines from the 90s and modernism that are basically incoherent. modern cheesecake? I will hire you to do my next cover, just to be sure it's appropriate.
Of course I sound defensive. I'm defending myself from your very spurious charges, though I can't quite figure out what they are. Am I guilty of putting a picture on the cover that doesn't please you or make sense to you? I mean you (make these insane claims about baselines from the 90s and modernism that are basically incoherent. Modernist cheesecake? I will hire you to do my next cover, just to be sure it's appropriate.
Yes, absolutely, it is if you are, as Moran is, TRYING to do exactly that - otherwise Moran would have played the piece exactly as written, which he clearly did not. Otherwise what is the point? Every great jazz musician has done this - Louis Armstrong with basic early jazz material and then American standard song (particularly as he sang) and, of course early jazz rhythm; Charlie Parker with basic, standard harmonic form and jazz rhythm; Duke Ellington himself, with blues, standard form, harmony, et al - ; and Jelly Roll Morton with New Orleans polyphony and piano. Otherwise what's the point? Did Picasso paint idyllic waterfronts with photographic realism? Did Soutine draw hanging, butchered chickens for magazine ads? No, because they had a new and original vision of old forms.
Hi Allen,
Thanks for deep diving and holding the “jazz press” accountable as you do. The sheep have slept on me and especially my orchestra for many years, most don’t know I exist I believe. But aside from my own struggle with being seen vs a devout musical practice, I feel the narrative has been purchased, branded, sold, and divided up. I tried to join academia to try and get involved but was rejected big time. Maybe you peeped my thesis Ornette Coleman and Harmolodics
Peace
ML
I suspect the "standards album" has become a kind of "Last Refuge" kind of thing. Jazz musicians try to do something new and can't get anyone to show up for it so they make it clear that they're going to be playing standards, and it's more demoralizing for them than anyone else. As for latter day pop musicians its a way to juice a morbid career. The list speaks for itself: James Taylor, Art Garfunkel, Rod Stewart . . .
As always I enjoy your writing. Thought provoking. What u don’t say is that it’s hard to find the way forward.
Well, there will never be another Jaki, but for some reason(s) this got me thinking also of Hal Russell, who (to my ears, at least) understood how to play forms not charts.
he was an amazing musician, Hal Russell, I mean.
JM's take is not very good. Sounds like he's fighting a losing battle against the raw material. And, given that the original has a simple structure and does not involve enormous technical demands, maybe there's something else in it that he hasn't heard or can't internalise.
I do like yours.
Like paper-pushing rubber-stamping bureaucrats, the gatekeepers of creativity have lately amassed more and more control. Their alliances with media channels exacerbate the situation. Testify, Allen!
Such an interesting post and responses. It,s a real treat to read a conversation among experts, especially when the experts are miffed. So much steam between the lines - good faith, bad faith, disappointment, justification, temperament and ego can make a heady stew. I had reactions to all three recordings but won't voice them because I know too little to make substantive comments.
I do have a question of anyone who cares to answer. My background is “classicaI." I am used to regarding performer and composer as separate entities, judged to wholly different standards. Mediocre composition will never transcend mediocrity, no matter how brilliant the performer.
Clean playing and tonal purity are important always, at least to me, no matter how simple the music. I appreciate technical virtuosity when the music demands it (otherwise, for me, it is overkill). When there is transcendence, it is lifted from the score by the great performer who is able to complete the great composer's work, to give it life.
Does modern music separate the two roles, or does it demand that performer and composer unite as a single creative being? No wonder there is trouble on the modern stage. I suspect there are many more virtuoso musicians than genius composers.
I apologize for being to tired right now to give a detailed answer....and I can only speak about jazz....but I would say jazz has both the separation of composer and performer AND the unification. Depends on the musician - I would put Ellington and Mingus and Morton in the category of single entity - and maybe Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins as separate (though both Bird and Sonny were good composers).
Is it acceptable practice for notable jazz musicians to “cover” other people's work?
Are jazz interpretation and improvisation considered performance or composition?
Are jazz interpretation and improvisation the same or different?
You gave us a good definition of the concept of “classic.”
Submission for review in originality based in interpretation of Ellington: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/alexander-hawkins-matthew-wright-suite-duke/
please cite the offenders in the jazz press. I think your take is over-generalized. Yes, it’s true writers write more, and more positively, about Jason Moran more than they do Allen Lowe or Matt Lavelle, but I suspect that’s due to Moran’s higher profile for a couple decades. I realize Allen and Matt have both collaborated with well-known musicians, and I admire their originality and independence. I have met all three of them and they are all honest about what they’re doing. But Allen’s dumping repeatedly on the so-called “jazz press”, which is far from a homogenous body, is misplaced and comes off as sour grapes. It’s damn hard to get recognition as a jazz musician, to get booked, to find an audience. Similarly, it’s difficult ( arguably more so), to gain a platform as a jazz journalist, to attract readers, to get paid enough to sustain the activity. Why are writers ( photographers, broadcasters, videographers) the scapegoat for a musicians’ problems? If there is evidence, show it, please. And absence of coverage is not a clear demonstration of orchestrated negligence.
of course it's sour grapes! What else should it be? I have only been playing and recording for 40 years. And ABSENCE of coverage sure-as-fucking-hell is a demonstration of negligence - I didn't say it was orchestrated. IT DOESN't HAVE TO BE, because you all just snap into place. The evidence, by the way, is the bunch of stories (including the NY Times) on a mediocre performance of a solo piano version of Black and White Fantasy. And look at all the praise given to the artist-in-residence at the Winterfest, whose music was essentially Smooth Jazz. Telling me you admire my independence and creativity is what we used to call a shit-filled Twinkie. It looks nice but it has no real (nutritional) value to me or anyone else.
Saying my compliment is a shit-filled Twinkie is a sure way to gain my interest in listening to and commenting further on your virtue-filled music. You get a lot further promoting your music without smearing the work of professionals trying to participate productively in this damn world.
Come on Howard you’re being a little bit dishonest. You’ve been listening to my music for about 40 years and have yet to comment on it, which is fine, you don’t have to have an interest. But to say otherwise is really quite ridiculous. As though all of a sudden now I’ve offended you and everybody so much that they won’t write about me. But there is a core of influential and high profile critics who act as though they don’t know I exist. And honestly I don’t feel the need to be diplomatic. This is reality and after almost dying a few times it seems to me that I no longer have to worry about some reputational legacy; let them consider me a crackpot or otherwise disagreeable person. I just say what I mean, and if you are implying that otherwise I would be a star, then you really don't understand the business as well as you think you do.
Honestly, I am more taken with your research and writing than with your music, you've taught me a lot (which I've tried to pass on to students) but also honestly I have not delved into your music deeply enough, over all this time, to render an informed opinion. I know you work very hard on your music, and as a very amateur instrumentalist myself I respect that, but as a listener I've not been motivated to get into your sound more. My failing, I suppose -- for whatever reasons you care to imagine. I have never heard you in person, Allen, and that's something I'd like to do.
If assigned to review your work, I would put myself to it as I always do. I don't choose records to review for DownBeat but take what's assigned so I don't have to play games with musicians I know who might like an endorsement. I don't review records I've written pr or liner notes of. And I try to keep my personal tastes in music out of JJA activities.
well, the Armstrong Project and my prior 2 CDs, In the Dark and America the Rough Cut, are really the best things I have done. If you still listen to CDs I can get ESP to send them to you.
You offer the choice to “Either jettison the original and construct a tone parallel to it, or go back to that composition and take a walk away from the theme, reharmonize it, re-rhythmize it.” Actually Moran is a good example of the latter: Moran truly walked away from the theme around a million miles from the original. You insist that Jaki Byard would have done a better job, but there is no reason to compare Moran to Byard except that Moran studied with Byard. Moran here rarely plays anything stylistically related to the pre WWII piano style, as Jaki Byard sometimes did. His intense bass register rumbling tremolo has more to do with modernistic aesthetics than with Jaki Byard.
honestly, your comment makes no real sense to me. Yes, Jason walked away, but only in a self conscious manner, to act as though he was rebuilding the elements of the piece. Which he wasn't. And yes, there is plenty of reason to compare him to Byard, because he is clearly trying to do what Jaki did, revisiting an old work and trying to find new ways to express it without discarding the original; otherwise why bother at all? And that rumble you like so much is a big nothing; I could sit at the piano and come up with a more interesting variation. Here is the problem: Jason is a brilliant pianist but he has little understanding of the way that old music worked, stylistically, rhythmically, harmonically - and, I have a hunch, socially. He has, yes, created a "new" piece, sorta, but it is a "new" piece that has no life of its own outside of its dubious relationship to the original. Have you listened to Morton, Waller, James P.? Jason has tried, I know, with Waller as well, and not done well. Historically those pianists had an aura, a way of touch and time to their playing. Jason should stick to what he knows best; he also woefully misinterpreted James Reese Europe in the recording he did previously. I hate to pull rank here, but unless you have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of early jazz, attempts like his to reproduce those sounds come across as misguided museum exhibits, frozen in place. And he rarely plays "anything stylistically related to pre-WWII piano?" What do you call the James Reese Europe project, his Fats Waller playing, and this, of course. Not to mention his comments on Louis Armstrong having no "agency" in his professional life, which is silly and inaccurate. And I have also heard Jason play Bert Williams on piano (Nobody). So that is not correct, he seems to be interested in exploring that whole musical realm.
No point in responding. Pulling rank? You don’t know me. Ask Lewis.
I just listened to a bunch of your stuff. Personally it’s not the way I would do it but is pretty good. The point being that you took the revivalist approach, which is fine. Jason is trying to offer an alternative which is also potentially fine but in his case he doesn’t really do it very well. The only thing I would say for instance about your approach with maybe someone like dock Boggs is that you miss the edge in that old music, the danger in the way it poised itself on a bit of an emotional clff, the dissonance, both cognitive and musical. Which tells me that for certain types of that music you really have no idea how to turn it into something more personal. But clearly we have fundamental differences in how we want to approach old music.
You just answered my question
I think it's really weird that your jermiad doesn't once reference the difference in ensemble across all three performances. Moran's piece is a solo piano, and it attempts to encompass the sound of the full band original.
Your piece actually sounds more pastiched and deliberately "old-timey" to me than Moran's, which seems kind of like the whole point. I also wonder why your album cover is of Baroness Elsa, since Louis Armstrong (and Duke) were in no way that I am aware of associated with white Dadaists (though I imagine many of the Dadaists were fans). I actually like all three performances, but I am not inclined to take instruction from you on how to listen to them, just because you yell at me in typing.
You also seem to have formed a critical baseline that I recall from the 90s and was then a kind of ultra-hipster take, that jazz must "move forward" or "evolve" or whatever term of art to express the desired teleology of constant novelty. I like novelty, I think jazz is always shifting from a variety of pressures, and there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to push a particular aesthetic preference -- it's what artists have always done. But jazz actually IS a tradition, not like that "roux in the gumbo" nitwit talks about, and every tradition is revivified when its practitioners return to the well and then take flight rather than desperately seeking relevance by mere novelty (which usually isn't actually that novel).
first time anyone has ever called anything I've done "old timey." Ask Julius Hemphill and Ursula Oppens. As for Elsa on the cover, that's actually the point.
what's "actually the point"? To associate unconnected artistic movements to. . .draw a new connection? Claim one for the other? Get some capital M modernist cheesecake? Not obvious as you think it is.
"asking" some third parties really doesn't have anything to do with what I said it sounds like, to me, subjectively. What are they going to tell you? I don't expect you to agree with my take on it, but this deflection by reference to some sort of expert or background figure is just deflection, not critical judgment. You sound defensive. Like, it just my opinion, man.
Of course I sound defensive. I'm defending myself from your very spurious charges, though I can't quite figure out what they are. Am I guilty of putting a picture on the cover that doesn't please you or make sense to you? I mean you make these insane claims about baselines from the 90s and modernism that are basically incoherent. modern cheesecake? I will hire you to do my next cover, just to be sure it's appropriate.
Of course I sound defensive. I'm defending myself from your very spurious charges, though I can't quite figure out what they are. Am I guilty of putting a picture on the cover that doesn't please you or make sense to you? I mean you (make these insane claims about baselines from the 90s and modernism that are basically incoherent. Modernist cheesecake? I will hire you to do my next cover, just to be sure it's appropriate.
"You have to say something different about something that seems, all by itself, to have already said everything that needs to be said about itself."
Do you? Is that the rule?
Yes, absolutely, it is if you are, as Moran is, TRYING to do exactly that - otherwise Moran would have played the piece exactly as written, which he clearly did not. Otherwise what is the point? Every great jazz musician has done this - Louis Armstrong with basic early jazz material and then American standard song (particularly as he sang) and, of course early jazz rhythm; Charlie Parker with basic, standard harmonic form and jazz rhythm; Duke Ellington himself, with blues, standard form, harmony, et al - ; and Jelly Roll Morton with New Orleans polyphony and piano. Otherwise what's the point? Did Picasso paint idyllic waterfronts with photographic realism? Did Soutine draw hanging, butchered chickens for magazine ads? No, because they had a new and original vision of old forms.