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?

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.

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.

So, jazz is music that includes all the normal elements of music (melody, harmony, rhythm, and silence), as well as improvisation (a very important part of jazz), and specific relationships of those elements (such as the “swing feel” that anyone who listens to Count Basie knows well.)  But fundamentally, jazz is a feeling.  Whether it is dixieland, big band swing, be-bop, or cool jazz, it is all jazz, and you know it when you hear it.

So when people say to me they don’t like jazz, what they really mean, if pressed, is that they don’t like to hear soloist after soloist, with long solos with (what sounds to them like) lots of notes that don’t make any sense and has no melody.  Frankly, I often agree with them.  I don’t really like that style of jazz either, unless the soloists are unusually talented and can really make a statement that emotionally touches me.

The kind of jazz I like to listen to, and to play, is melodic.  There is a melody, and the harmony and the rhythm serve to support that melody.  The solos take the music somewhere melodically, acting like the exposition part of a piece of classical music.  Listen to early Miles Davis, or any Gerry Mulligan, or Stan Getz, or Dave Brubeck, or Paul Desmond, or the Modern Jazz Quartet, or any others in the so-called cool school (or West Coast Jazz) style of playing.  That is what I’m talking about.  (Here‘s the Wikipedia page on Cool Jazz.) If you’re interested in a sample, here is part of a tune off my CD Monsoon.  This is an excerpt from Marc VI, played by Marc Rosen and Sweet Thunder Jazztet to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

A lot of serious jazz musicians and fans don’t respect this kind of jazz.  I don’t know why.  Playing it takes just as much skill as playing be-bop.  I think it is because some jazz musicians don’t like the fact that this type of jazz is more accessible and understandable to the listeners.  It isn’t just an inside thing that you can only “get” if you’re “hip”.  Regular people can actually listen to it and enjoy it.  To me, that is a good thing.  We need more of that in order to get jazz back as part of the national musical conversation, so that there are a lot more jazz fans and jazz is much more available here in the US, where it was formed.  To me, good music is about making an emotional connection, not showing off how many notes you can play.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but we needed to start somewhere!  Let me know what you think.