It is possible to write about jazz after hard bop without having any ear at all for song form, or, indeed, without knowing any songs. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I buy an album from a blowing session with an older saxophonist (I do this because I'm trying to learn drums, and I actually seek out recordings with understated drummers' drummers like Mel Lewis or Ed Thigpen) to discover some old "standard" that I'd never even heard of, and isn't in the Real Book (!). I just bought Mosaic's Don Byas, and I admit that I had never heard Don Byas (I'm 63) until putting the disks in the changer. I'm no expert, but man, he does not remind me of Lester Young. At a certain point, the changes ARE the music. Bach sounds great at a coffee shop, but until you internalize some of the harmony, he's boring at length. If there's music that you'd have to make an effort to understand, that doesn't indicate a flaw in the music, any more than length is a flaw in a novel.
perfectly stated. I agree on all points. The only problem, about technical knowledge, that I have seen is when non-musician critics attempt to support their opinions with technical comments that are invariably incorrect. They don't need to do this if they have enough intellectual strength in their opinions to explain their aesthetic responses.
Hello. I,d like to confirm I understand your interesting comment. I'm not a musician and don't much read musical criticism so I felt myself foundering a bit. I think you are saying that a good critic must be grounded in the music he criticizes. A critic who has internalized Bach over many years, for example, will not hear the same music that someone less grounded in complex baroque music will hear in the coffee shop. So readers of criticism would do well to consider the source and adjust reactions appropriately. Makes total sense, but after reading Allen's response I think maybe you aren't saying this at all!
(If I have misunderstood, maybe you will explain a little more?)
You were nice enough to ask me a detailed question, but I tend write my comments quickly during breaks from work, so I'm not sure I'm always cogent. The comparison to Baroque music is a good one, given that everyone knows there are rules there, but they take a lifetime to internalize. Everyone likes something overtly tuneful like The Four Seasons (I recently enjoyed seeing Les Arts Florissants zip through it like they were excited to have discovered it); Bach is often just harder. There often is not some hummable tune or ceremonial occasion (i.e. the Passion) to which complexity is then added. The complexity is the music.
You can have no grounding in harmony and still say _something_ about music. A lot has changed over my lifetime in the understanding of Baroque performance practice, and it has to be possible for a musician to be aware of none of that, and still play Bach. The rock critic Robert Christgau writes sensibly about Monk and Armstrong: but he knows his 20th century American vernacular music. I would not expect him to have anything sensible to say about Art Tatum, and indeed he doesn't. As I said, I like your comparison, but to rephrase it as a question, can someone with no grounding in the harmony of American pop song, and the structure (as Allan has recently emphasized), have anything to say about a performance of them? Maybe. Likely not. Nowadays people tend to learn those songs from the Real Book: they don't know them. If you asked me if I knew a tune, and I said yes, you'd probably ask me to sing a bit of it. It would take a tremendous effort on a musician's part, or a critic's, to internalize jazz standards. As I said initially, if a listener encounters a song for the first and last time on a Don Byas anthology, and thinks, "That's a great tune; I've never heard that before!" then it's not really a standard, is it? But it was in fact, a long time ago, something like a pop song.
I'm a barely competent drummer, but I was at a jam in the Northern VA suburbs Firday night, and someone asked me to call a tune. I called "Angel Eyes." No one knew it. I mean, I was born in 1961, too late for that period of Sinatra, but how do you not know that tune, or that performance? But then, it's 2025 already.
As the knowledge of that kind of popular music fades, critics will be more and more tempted to emphasize what's novel or striking in a performance of such standards, and have no sense whatever of what this standard once was as an actual song.
It is possible to write about jazz after hard bop without having any ear at all for song form, or, indeed, without knowing any songs. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I buy an album from a blowing session with an older saxophonist (I do this because I'm trying to learn drums, and I actually seek out recordings with understated drummers' drummers like Mel Lewis or Ed Thigpen) to discover some old "standard" that I'd never even heard of, and isn't in the Real Book (!). I just bought Mosaic's Don Byas, and I admit that I had never heard Don Byas (I'm 63) until putting the disks in the changer. I'm no expert, but man, he does not remind me of Lester Young. At a certain point, the changes ARE the music. Bach sounds great at a coffee shop, but until you internalize some of the harmony, he's boring at length. If there's music that you'd have to make an effort to understand, that doesn't indicate a flaw in the music, any more than length is a flaw in a novel.
perfectly stated. I agree on all points. The only problem, about technical knowledge, that I have seen is when non-musician critics attempt to support their opinions with technical comments that are invariably incorrect. They don't need to do this if they have enough intellectual strength in their opinions to explain their aesthetic responses.
Hello. I,d like to confirm I understand your interesting comment. I'm not a musician and don't much read musical criticism so I felt myself foundering a bit. I think you are saying that a good critic must be grounded in the music he criticizes. A critic who has internalized Bach over many years, for example, will not hear the same music that someone less grounded in complex baroque music will hear in the coffee shop. So readers of criticism would do well to consider the source and adjust reactions appropriately. Makes total sense, but after reading Allen's response I think maybe you aren't saying this at all!
(If I have misunderstood, maybe you will explain a little more?)
You were nice enough to ask me a detailed question, but I tend write my comments quickly during breaks from work, so I'm not sure I'm always cogent. The comparison to Baroque music is a good one, given that everyone knows there are rules there, but they take a lifetime to internalize. Everyone likes something overtly tuneful like The Four Seasons (I recently enjoyed seeing Les Arts Florissants zip through it like they were excited to have discovered it); Bach is often just harder. There often is not some hummable tune or ceremonial occasion (i.e. the Passion) to which complexity is then added. The complexity is the music.
You can have no grounding in harmony and still say _something_ about music. A lot has changed over my lifetime in the understanding of Baroque performance practice, and it has to be possible for a musician to be aware of none of that, and still play Bach. The rock critic Robert Christgau writes sensibly about Monk and Armstrong: but he knows his 20th century American vernacular music. I would not expect him to have anything sensible to say about Art Tatum, and indeed he doesn't. As I said, I like your comparison, but to rephrase it as a question, can someone with no grounding in the harmony of American pop song, and the structure (as Allan has recently emphasized), have anything to say about a performance of them? Maybe. Likely not. Nowadays people tend to learn those songs from the Real Book: they don't know them. If you asked me if I knew a tune, and I said yes, you'd probably ask me to sing a bit of it. It would take a tremendous effort on a musician's part, or a critic's, to internalize jazz standards. As I said initially, if a listener encounters a song for the first and last time on a Don Byas anthology, and thinks, "That's a great tune; I've never heard that before!" then it's not really a standard, is it? But it was in fact, a long time ago, something like a pop song.
I'm a barely competent drummer, but I was at a jam in the Northern VA suburbs Firday night, and someone asked me to call a tune. I called "Angel Eyes." No one knew it. I mean, I was born in 1961, too late for that period of Sinatra, but how do you not know that tune, or that performance? But then, it's 2025 already.
As the knowledge of that kind of popular music fades, critics will be more and more tempted to emphasize what's novel or striking in a performance of such standards, and have no sense whatever of what this standard once was as an actual song.
Thank you for taking the time to write such a helpful (and cogent!) reply.