Recent jazz concert proves the point!

Recently my wife and I attended a concert by an up and coming jazz group, featuring Anat Cohen (clarinet and tenor sax) and her brother, Avishai on trumpet.  These are fine musicians from Isreal, now living in New York, and they’ve received great accolades, and deservedly so.

Their playing is heartfelt and powerful, with amazing technique.  Anat is a composer and arranger, and her tunes are really interesting, with strong melodies.  Unfortunately, the structure of the arrangements was the same every time, and that structure didn’t work for me.

Every song had basically the same format.  The melody would be stated, with nice interplay between the two horns and great support from the rhythm section.  I really liked the use of unusual time signatures, and the way the melodies often floated and moved among the rhythm.  But, immediately after the melody had been stated, the solo section would commence.  The solos went in a completely different direction then the melody.  There was no continuity between the melody and the solos.  While the solos were well executed from a technical standpoint, they didn’t even seem to be part of the same composition.  They usually went on to build up to a very loud and sometimes discordant peak.

After the solos, the following statement would often not be a recapitulation of the original melody, but a new theme.  The new theme did not seem to me to be connected to either the melody or the solos.

My point is that the music was the type of jazz that many folks think of when they say they don’t like jazz.  I would prefer to hear melodies, solos and thematic development that are all related to the point of the tune.  I understand the desire to do something new and interesting and to test the boundaries.  I respect that.  But each tune, to me, still needs to make a coherent composition.  Listen to any Gerry Mulligan composition, or Benny Golson, or Dave Brubeck, or Duke Ellington, or even John Coltrane, or countless others, and you’ll see what I mean.  The solos should extend, explore, and take the harmony and melody in a different direction, but still be part of the same work, not a completely unrelated compositional world.

What do you think?

Whither jazz today?

I was talking to some people at a party yesterday, and we were talking about music.  The people at the party were almost all my age or older, so there weren’t too many folks there under 40.  No one there listens to “popular” music.

We were discussing why that was.  I was talking about the fact that most popular music today is based not on the melody, or the lyric, but on the beat.  Modern “composers” are only concerned about the rhythm.  They don’t seem to be concerned with melodic, lyrical, harmonic or emotional content.  It is very interesting to me that when modern singers, such as Queen Latifah, want to reach inside and sing really powerful songs, they turn to classic tunes from Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and the like.  Why?  Because modern popular music just isn’t concerned with writing music like that.

Also, most popular music today makes very little, if any, use of traditional instruments such as saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, trombones and the like.  When I was growing up, you heard tunes with those horns in them on the radio all the time.  Not any more.

Where do the high school or younger kids get the inspiration to play these instruments?  Not from what they hear on the radio.  It seems to me that we have to turn that around.  Modern music needs to include these instruments and the melody and emotion in music.  That is the only way we’ll keep it alive.  How do we do that?  In later posts I’ll discuss some ideas I have, but I’d like to hear yours.  Leave a comment and let me know what you think about this.

What is “jazz”?

I think it is important to define our terms.  My musical background is in jazz, and that is what we’ll be exploring here.  But what is this thing called jazz music?  It is important, because I’ve had many people tell me they don’t like jazz.  When I talk to them further, I find that they don’t like a particular type of jazz, but other types of jazz they do enjoy.  They just don’t really understand that jazz encompases many styles.

People have been trying to define jazz for years, so I know that we won’t get a perfect definition here.  The Wikipedia post, here, really doesn’t define it.  It just describes various aspects of it.  Leonard Feather, a British journalist who moved to the U.S. and was both a musician and journalist, stated in his Encyclopedia of Jazz that it includes improvisation, and discussed rhythmic elements such as syncopation and “swing”, as well as harmonic elements such as structured chord progressions.  In the end, though, he comes to the conclusion that one just knows it when one hears it.

SaxMarc’s Notes is underway!

Hello everyone and welcome to SaxMarc’s Notes.  This blog will be a place for thoughts, ideas, inquiries and cogitations on music, specifically jazz related music, and life.  I hope you will join me as we explore!