Six Reasons Why I Love Jazz

Louis Armstrong's Hot Five - the real Jazz Age

I was recently reading all the hype about the new Gatsby film, and reading so much rubbish, (at least in the Irish papers), being written by journalists about the ‘Jazz Age’ - journalists who have NO idea what they’re talking about, bar what they read in Wikipedia. And this got me thinking about how while there's all this fuss and hyperbole being written about the ‘Jazz Age’, the music itself struggles so hard to be heard and to survive.  A very good point was made by a friend of mine (thank you Billy!), in which he observed that the people who actually created jazz would never have been allowed into the hotels and residences of Gatsby and his pampered idiotic ilk, unless as entertainers, in which case they would have been treated as servants.

And this got me thinking about the REAL value of this music – a music of honesty and beauty, with an incredible history – a music that is in a different universe from the one inhabited and illustrated by the vapid shenanigans of a bunch of rich airheads from the 20s. I began to think about the reasons why I love this music so much, and here are some of them…………

1)   It’s The Product Of An Amazing Human Story

There are three universal musical languages, music that is played and listened to everywhere: European classical music, rock music, and jazz. Classical music evolved through the church and later through an aristocratic elite, rock music by Post WWII, (mostly middle class), English and American baby boomers, and jazz emanated from a people who were an underclass, descended from slaves, and often existing in conditions that were not much better than slavery.

Afro-Americans were despised and abused by the majority population, denied basic human rights and were deprived economically. Yet this oppressed underclass gave mankind one of its greatest musical gifts. A music that was democratic, inclusive, powerfully emotional, a music whose message spread around the world with extraordinary speed, and spoke to people of all races and nationalities. In the history of human art, there has never been a story like this – a music that rose out of the worst social conditions, yet which was joyful, progressive, celebratory, and participatory, with a universal message.

Jazz is a unique human, artistic triumph, created in an environment of incredible adversity.

2)   Jazz music celebrates both the individual and the collective

Jazz is both a group music and an individualist’s music. To be able to play for the greater good of, and contribute to the ensemble, is an indispensible quality for any good jazz musician. To describe a player as someone who ‘doesn’t listen’, is the worst criticism one musician can give to another. To act as one is the ultimate aim of any band.

Yet at the same time individualism is not only highly prized, but expected, and celebrated. Jazz is a music that has evolved both through the work of great bands, and great soloists. To express yourself in an individual way is the sine qua non of all jazz musicians, and the history of the music is illuminated by great soloists on every instrument.

Jazz is both a collective music and a virtuoso music. To work for the collective, yet be yourself – what a wonderful combination of qualities, and, as a human being, what a wonderful esthetic to be involved in.

3)   Jazz is a Meritocracy

Playing jazz at the highest level is hard, and demands a lifetime of dedication practice and commitment. In such an environment only the best players survive and get to play the music – at least in the long term. Yes, like all music, jazz does have its fair share of bullshitters and charlatans – guys who know a little and can sound competent for a minute, as long as it’s in a certain musical environment that they can control. They then depend on various non-musical qualities to keep themselves in the limelight, (they’re usually good hustlers and self-promoters), but ultimately they will always fall away. Because jazz is about being a great player all the time, over a long period of time, in any situation. You can only control the situations you are in for so long, and ultimately if in the end, if you can’t really play, then you can’t sustain a career at the top table of the music.

And I really like that, because then ultimately the people who do the work and have the talent, get the careers. I’m not talking about amateur or part-time musicians here – I love when people play the music for pleasure alone. It’s the guys who can’t really play but pretend they can, and that they are worthy to play with the greatest musicians, that bother me. But happily, the charlatan thing where a musician who hasn’t done the work, but hires and uses great players to give themselves a patina of competence, doesn’t succeed in the long term. In the end the music will find you out (the real musicians will find you out on the first tune……), and that’s a good thing, because ultimately the music will be created and evolved by people who really care about it.

4)   Jazz is the broadest of broad churches, yet retains its traditions

Another seeming contradiction. Jazz music is omnivorous, and always has been.  It is accepting of all material as being grist to the creative mill. It is a music that grew from the combining of many elements to create a new music, and a new approach to making music. From the outset it has been relentlessly modernistic – the new thing being prized, both instrumentally and in the overall music. Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Coltrane, Miles – those five names alone embody a huge reservoir of innovation and dedication to the idea of change. The inclusion of new elements has been in jazz since the outset, and here, in the first part of the 21^st century, jazz can cater for the widest possible tastes, yet still remain true to itself.

If you like swing, Brazilian music, Afro-Cuban music, electronica, extended form composition, instrumental virtuosity, lyrical simplicity, seriousness, playfulness, depth, bluesiness, mystery, orchestral writing, solo playing, funk, minimalism, density, sparseness, sad music, happy music, celebratory music, intense music – then there is something for you somewhere in the jazz tradition of the past 100 years.

There is no other music that encompasses the range of musical influences that jazz does, yet retains its own identity through its history,  rhythmic language, collective spirit, spontaneity, virtuosity, and improvisational traditions.

5)   Jazz musicians love music……..

That may sound self evident, but not all professional musicians love music, surprising as that may seem to the lay person. There are many professional musicians who are not particularly invested in music for its own sake. They may find it a convenient way to earn a living and they may even enjoy what they do for social reasons. Many professional musicians are certainly interested in the craft of music, and interested in the social aspects of being around music (who got what gig, - and why they shouldn’t have, anecdote after anecdote, who screwed up on this or that gig etc.), but they’re often not terribly interested in music as an art form. And some, (though not all of course), orchestral musicians are  clock punchers, working every week for their salary. Highly skilled of course, but ultimately not too invested in the music they play.

But I’ve yet to meet a serious jazz musician who was not ready to talk about music at the drop of a hat. If there’s one thing jazz musicians love, it’s talking about music – great recordings, the differences between one musician and another, their own philosophy of what they do, what they’re working on musically, asking what you’re working on musically, a great musician or recording they’ve recently discovered etc.

If you choose jazz as a means of earning a living, and are prepared for the long haul and hard graft that is required to make a living doing so, you have to love music! Love of the music is the reason people get into jazz in the first place, and the ones who remain in the profession of jazz musician have a passion for the music that is infectious. If you want to see a jazz musician’s eyes light up, start talking to him or her about music…..

6)   Jazz has produced some of the greatest music of all time

‘Hot Fives’, ‘Black Brown and Beige’, ‘The Savoy Sessions’, ‘Miles Ahead‘, ‘Shape of Jazz To Come’, ‘Blues and Roots’, ‘Five By Monk By Five’,  ‘The Bridge’, 'A Love Supreme', ‘ESP’, ‘Bitches Brew’, ‘Facing You’, ‘Birds of Fire’, ‘Mysterious Traveler’……………. etc. etc.

Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Tatum, Parker, Dizzy, Mingus, Miles, Ella, Monk, Rollins, Trane, Ornette, Evans, Konitz, Jarrett, McCoy, Corea, Shorter, Hancock, Steve Coleman, Liebman, DeJohnette, Bill Frisell….. etc. etc.

Nothing more to say really.

Old World, New World

-->

This post is a response to an interesting blog by the great American pianist George Colligan on the subject of jazz in Europe. To get the most sense out of this one, you should read what he has to say  by clicking here

Jazz is absolutely an American art form in its origins, and like any musical art form, if you go to the source country from which it emanates you are always going to get powerful music. There is much great music coming from the US, as befits the country from which the music first sprang. No America, no jazz – period.

However the power of jazz is, (and was from its very beginnings), the universality of its message, which goes beyond the borders of the US. There’s a message for all mankind in jazz, which explains why it went all around the world almost immediately. A consequence of this was non-Americans playing, or trying to play the music. Usually they were poor copies of the American model, (though not always – Django Reinhard wasn’t too shabby for a European!), but as the decades went on, Europeans, (and Australians and Canadians etc), raised the standard of their playing, and then began to develop their own regional dialects of the music – music that sounded different to the original American model, but contained the essential elements of it.

Nguyen Le

 I say ‘dialects’ here, because for sure the way jazz is played in Italy is, (in general), quite different to the way it’s played in Scandinavia. The same would be true of Germany and Ireland. There is no ‘European Jazz’ as a single entity, any more than there is an ‘American Jazz’ entity. There’s a huge difference between the music of  Steve Coleman and Bill Charlap, between the music of Tim Berne and Brad Mehldau, yet they are all American jazz musicians. Similarly there’s a huge difference between the music of Lous Sclavis and Enrico Pieranunzi, or between Nguyen Le and Bobo Stenson.

So, in my opinion, George’s statement:

 ‘I question whether the music being called "Jazz" in Europe is actually Jazz’

is a sweeping approach which doesn’t take into account the sheer variety of approaches going on in Europe. To ascribe the same stylistic qualities to all European jazz is as narrow as assuming that Wynton Marsalis’ approach to jazz is the one followed by all Americans. Yes the origins of jazz are in the US, and the bulk of the greatest innovations and recordings have historically emanated from the US, (the majority of that coming from the Afro-American community of course). But to deny that non-American jazz musicians can produce jazz of value and originality is like claiming that because the great composers of classical music were European, then the music of Steve Reich, John Adams or Leonard Bernstein has no importance or value.

But while asserting that Europe has many creative world class jazz musicians, I would never subscribe to the argument that jazz in Europe is more creatively vibrant than that being created in the US. Conversely I don’t think the reverse is true either – that America has the monopoly on innovation and creativity. They’re both generalisations, and both arguments can be dismantled in a matter of minutes by even a brief examination of the music being created on both continents. The truth is that there is great music being created on both sides of the Atlantic, by both American and European musicians. 

John Hollenbeck

And to the interested student of the history of the music (such as myself), I think we’re currently in a wonderful period in which jazz musicians from Europe and America are collaborating as never before in creating great music together. There are more European jazz musicians living in New York than ever before (Lage Lund, Jean-Michel Pilc, The Moutin brothers), and a bunch of Americans living in Europe, (John Hollenbeck, Gerry Hemingway, Kurt Rosenwinkel), and I don’t think there have ever been more bands with mixed European and Americans in them than there are currently. Which is tremendously healthy, and shows that this artificial division between European and American jazz is exactly that – artificial. Musicians on both sides of the Atlantic are producing amazing music, and both can, and do, enrich the other.

One thing that George talks about that is definitely true is that jazz is much more subsidized in Europe than the US, which is incredible if you think about it. Jazz  - the amazing art form that America gave to the world, should be feted, celebrated and supported by the US, in the same way that Irish Traditional Music is supported in Ireland, Flamenco in Spain and Taiko drumming in Japan. 

 Vanguard Jazz Orchestra

Jazz is an American national cultural treasure and I find it extraordinarily sad that most people in the US, and the local and Federal governments in particular, couldn’t care less about it. How often do we see the US big gun orchestras, such as the NY Philharmonic, touring in Europe, playing European music to Europeans? Why isn’t the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra sent out instead? At a time when the US often has a poor PR image abroad, jazz is one of the great good news stories to come from the US in the past 100 years – the Americans should be out celebrating it and being proud of it all over the world……… But American taxpayers are not big on paying for culture of any kind, and so the chances of an entity like the VJO being sent out using taxpayer's money, in the way jazz in Europe is supported by European tax payer's money,  is almost non-existent. Sad but true.

But the music lives on, and the geographical barrier between American and European jazz has never seemed smaller, and this has to be a good thing. Instead of parochial sniping between one side and another, let's celebrate the wonderful music that is coming from both continents, both individually and in combination.

To finish, here is a clip of a concert I was involved with in Belgium, with MSG, a trio featuring my Irish self, the Dutch drummer Chander Sardjoe, and the American altoist Rudresh Mahanthappa. An Irishman, a Dutchman,  and an American, playing jazz together in Belgium - the future is now!

In Praise of Complex Music

Previously I've been critical on this blog of music that is unnecessarily complex, music that is complex for its own sake, more concerned with demonstrating its own rhythmic technique than with delivering a message through music. And I'm still critical of that kind of technical posturing, but recently an incident set me off thinking about this idea of complexity and what value there is in it.

I recently underwent some acupuncture treatment, and having been needled up like a porcupine, I was lying there waiting for the needles to work their magic. I wanted to listen to some music while I was lying there and was going to listen to it on my iPod through headphones, but the Acupuncturist asked me if I'd like the music played through the stereo in the room. So she turned off the 'relaxation' music she usually plays, (which does anything but relax me!), turned on the iPod and left the room, leaving me to my music for about 20 minutes. When she returned to check the needles, a Dave Binney track was playing, in which Dave was taking on two drummers, and winning. She stopped, listened for a moment, and asked me incredulously, 'you find that relaxing!?' I said that yes, I did indeed find that relaxing - she shook her head, adjusted the needles and left the room. On my own again I started to think about this exchange and began to try to observe myself listening to the music in a bid to identify what it was I was listening to, and what kind of effect it had on me. What was I hearing that I found relaxing, but that to the therapist sounded like chaos?

As I lay there listening, I began to identify how I was listening to the music, what effect it was having on me, and what, if anything, was going on in my head. A lot of non-musicians at this point, (if any non-musicians read this blog!), are probably thinking that I was working out the technical details of the music, the time signatures, the harmony, the structure etc. But this was not actually the case - it's true I used to do that, but I gave it up a long time ago and only now do it if I need to analyse something for some particular purpose. It's true that as a musician one can find it hard to switch off the analytical machine completely, but as far as possible, when listening to recordings or concerts, I try to let the music wash over me.

So, there I was, listening to the music and trying to get a sense of what it was I was hearing and how it was affecting me. And I began to realise that what I was hearing was quite multi-layered - a sound here, a rhythm there, combinations of things, twists and turns in the lines, the rhythm section firing things up, a particular colour from the harmony. I tried to find a non-technical way to explain how I was hearing the music, and the best I could do was imagining being on a Gondola in Venice, (without the obligatory 'O Sole Mio' being sung in the background by a licensed bandit, otherwise known as the Gondolier), and floating down the canal and looking at the architecture of the buildings as I, (or they), floated past. In such a situation, you can see more than just the outline of the buildings; you can see the materials they're built from, the various indentations of windows and doors, lights behind curtains, shapes, proportion, half-glimpsed interiors, sunlight on the different surfaces - and all changing slowly as you float by. It's a complex collage of images which un-spools in front of you, but at the end of it you have a sense of what you've seen in a very rich and multi-layered way.

But this rich visual experience needs two factors in order for it to happen - the observed object needs to be multi-faceted, and the observer needs to have faculties to appreciate the different aspects of what's being seen.

And the same holds true for music.

Before I get into that, let me first qualify what I'm about to say - in all cases I'm talking about good complex music.  I'm not saying that complex is by definition good, or simple music is bad. I'm talking about good music which happens to be complex.

Complex music is different to simple music - it is multi-layered, it has a lot going on, the message it conveys is often ambiguous. A complex piece of music is analogous to a complex novel, play or film - its story may in itself tell a different story, what's on the surface may represent a deeper meaning, it may be structurally complex with many twists and turns, the ending may be very different to the expected one etc. In order for the music to have this multi-faceted quality, it must be complex.

In order to tell a more complex story the music must use more complex materials. More use of harmonic colour, more compositional structure, rhythms that are possibly polyrhythmic, more virtuosic playing from the performers. All of this, (and more), is necessary for the music to operate on more than one simple level. It will have a story to tell, but one which requires more narrative tools than the broad brush of the typical pop song. It may be a love song for example, but it will not be in the 'Yeah, I Love You Baby' mode of thousands of quick hits. Human life is complex and multi-faceted and this complex and multi-faceted music is required at times in order to tell these stories.

And in order to tell these stories you need listeners who are equipped to appreciate the intricacies of what unfolds in front of them. If the only buildings you'd ever seen in your life were one-room Portakabins, then Gaudi's Cathedral or a Calatrava structure may be beyond your comprehension. If the only kind of books you've ever read are holiday romances, you're unlikely to get very far with Joyce's 'Ulysses'. If the only movies you've watched were the Police Academy series, you're probably going to have trouble getting the inner meaning of Kurosawa's movies. Art on this level is unlikely to be immediately understood - it's not meant to be consumed immediately and discarded. It's meant to be thought about and experienced on many different levels and in order to be able to do that you will likely need some kind of development over a period of time in order to be able to appreciate all the subtleties.

In the same way that you can't leap from 'Janet and John Go To The Beach' to 'Finnegan's Wake', if you've been raised on a diet of Justin Bieber and Rihanna you're unlikely to be able to jump straight into 'The Rite of Spring'. You need time to develop the tools that will allow you to decode complex music. The usual way is through listening over a period of time to music of growing complexity, attuning your ear to the sheer variety of sound that is evident in this kind of music. You need to develop an ear where dissonance is not in itself automatically painful, where a wide range of dynamics within a single piece is intriguing rather than unsettling, where you can pay close attention to a piece of music that is over 5 minutes long and not get distracted. These are the kinds of tools you need to get the fullest experience from complex music.

And to get the fullest rewards - because rewards there are - good complex music is tremendously enriching for the mind, the body and the spirit. It is multifaceted and can be enjoyed on several different levels. You will get an experience from complex music that you won't get from one-dimensional music - that's what makes the journey and the effort worthwhile.

Now it could be that you couldn't be bothered engaging in the kind of long term investment that appreciating complex music requires, and that's fair enough. If you don't require more from music than what simple music can give you, then great. No problem. But don't try and tell people who do get enjoyment from complex music that they are snobs and elitist. There is a difference between those who enjoy complex music for itself, and those who might use it as a cultural stick to beat others with. If you choose not to go down the route of enjoying multi-layered music, don't make the mistake of condemning others who do. I feel no need to apologise for liking complex music, and I've written about it before here. I enjoy simple music too, but like complex music, it has to be what I would consider to be good before I can enjoy it. In the same way that I don't think complex music is automatically good, I don't think simple music is either.

And in many cases complex music can be enjoyed on a simple level too. I think of this as being like a tree; a tree can be seen as one large beautiful entity, but if you look closer you will see that this one large entity is in fact made of of a very complex series of smaller entities, and the tree can be visually enjoyed on both levels. The same could be said for a complex building like the aforementioned Gaudi Cathedral or the Taj Mahal.

And good complex music can encompass many forms and atmospheres, as in these three examples:

Here is Miles' great 'lost' quintet playing with complex abandon







And Yuja Wang playing two of Ligeti's extraordinary piano études







And finally the joy of Hermeto Pascoal's music - simple to appreciate yet very complex in construction





Miles, Ligeti, Hermeto - Coltrane, Bach, Weather Report, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Stravinsky, Ravel, Monk, Ellington, Steve Coleman, Dave Liebman, Mozart, Keith Jarrett - hundreds of other great artists could be added to that list -  all artists who have produced sublime music in many different styles and atmospheres. With their music you can have the kind of wonderful multidimensional experience that you can only get from complex music. For the unfamiliar listener it can be puzzling and maybe daunting, but for the listener who is curious and prepared to meet it half way, its rewards are unending.

Steve Coleman on Rhythm - Part 1

-->

I’ve known Steve Coleman for a long time – I first met him in 1986 when I was lucky enough to study with him at the Banff Centre. Since then I’ve met him many times and we’ve hung out and discussed music (and other things) on many occasions, and we’ve played at a few informal sessions and I recorded an (unreleased), track with him a while back. All my dealings with him have shown me, time and time again, that he is a unique and very influential figure in contemporary jazz (although he may argue with the description of what he does as being ‘contemporary jazz’), someone with an extraordinary originality in all aspects of what he does. And this originality is driven by intense research and thinking – Steve is constantly on a quest for knowledge, and the results of this quest has provided all kinds of food for thought for the curious musician.

Steve is innovative in all areas of music, but in my opinion his rhythmic concept is particularly noteworthy. I don’t think anyone has really gone into rhythm in the depth that he has, or thought about it in the way that he does. So I took the opportunity of a visit by Steve to our school in Dublin, to interview him on the specific subject of rhythm and the results are here.

Steve is discursive but not digressive  - he has a way of elaborating on every statement he makes that makes the job of the transcriber (me!) a labour-intensive one, but he never loses sight of the point he’s making. The length of our conversation meant that it took me a long time to transcribe it, and for one reason and another, it’s taken a while to get it up here too, but I think the results are fascinating, and it gives a real insight into how Steve thinks about rhythm, and what the influences were that helped to shape the way he thinks about rhythm.

This is Part 1 – Part 2 will follow soon

Early Rhythmic Experiences

RG: I remember in Banff  in 1986 when I first talked to you about rhythm and all of that, it was clear you had a very different way of looking at pretty much everything relating to rhythm in terms of the conventional ways that I’d been exposed to at that point. Your conceptual take on rhythm was very different. I know it’s probably something that’s an amalgam of different things, but were there particular things, or can you identify particular points where there were things that made a very big impact on the way you thought about rhythm, and pulse and the whole rhythmic world?

SC: Yeah, the first thing I can remember is just what I grew up on – this happened before I was a musician or anything. We were listening to these recordings of music on the radio, and it was all R ‘n’ B-type stuff – James Brown and all this kind of stuff. And I remember us beating out the stuff on the top of people’s cars and people would actually come out and chase us away, being kids, because we’d be denting the cars and things like that, but we would actually beat out the drum parts on the cars. And it wasn’t something that somebody was telling us to do, it wasn’t because we were musicians – we just heard this stuff, we heard all this rhythm and we would just try and imitate the rhythms.

So that was the first sense that I remember of specifically listening to rhythms. Not rhythms as in songs but just rhythm by itself and trying to imitate it in some kind of way. So we would be like – {Sings funk kind of rhythm} – and fucking up these people’s cars! (Laughs) Or whatever we could do – we’d be going around the neighbourhood doing this and singing and maybe one guy would be dancing or whatever – it wasn’t me! (laughs). And that was the first concept I remember.

Then when I got into music, I didn’t relate the two things immediately because when I started playing in band in school, they had us reading off the charts – and we were reading you know – {sings the opening to the overture of Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro} – and I didn’t immediately relate that to – {Sings funk rhythm} – the two things didn’t click at first.

But then when guys found out you played saxophone and everything, they’d say ‘We have this band, and we play for dances and stuff like that, do you want to play?’, you know, and the logical thing was to say yes. There were no charts in that situation, there was nothing about charts, it was ‘OK, we’re playing this song that’s on this record’, it wasn’t an original, ‘and you’ve got to take off the horn part’. So we’d learn it by ear – I didn’t know at the time that this was transcribing or anything, we would just take off the horn part, literally. So we would learn the parts by ear, and, you know, just figure it out, there was no education thing or whatever. And as you got better this grew and we had these bands and we’d get hired out for fashion shows and dances and different things like that, but it was always the music of what was popular on the radio.

Then, we were aware that some people could improvise, we called it ‘riffin’ at the time – we would say:

‘Did you hear about this cat in the school? Yeah, well he can riff’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, he took a solo, he didn’t play what was written on the paper – he just did his own thing!”

But this was just among students, I wasn’t aware that there was this whole world, right outside of where we were, of professionals that were doing that.

So there was that, and of course if you were going to do that, there’s what you were going to play, rhythmically and that kind of stuff. And what happened was that people were right away critical of the way you played things – rhythmically of the way you played them. I remember that being a big thing, people would say ‘that’s just not hip’, or ‘that’s corny’, you know. I mean the feel of something, they were critical right away about that.

OK, I’m saying all this to say that as we got better and better in these bands, a little later on I started to get into improvisation and I also joined bands where we started to write our own stuff, you know, we started to create our own stuff. Then these two streams – the improvisation stream and figuring out these rhythms and stuff – started to come together just a little bit, because I first of all started to write my own music, I had to write the rhythms and stuff. Even the rhythm section, I had to tell them what to play, and this included the drummer – what kind of beat that you want and all this kind of stuff.

So you start to become more conscious of this and also the criticism – of stuff that was hip and not hip. It started to dawn on you what that meant – what does it mean when something’s hip, what does it mean when it’s not hip? What is this groove thing, this feel thing, some people had a better feel than others – you started to put together what all that meant.

This was all when I was still pretty young. Then when I got among the professionals all that increased. Everything that we’d been trying to figure out, all increased because these guys all had it together. If your sound wasn’t together they would just tell you that you need to get your sound together. If your feel was, you know – if your shit’s not swinging, or it’s not grooving for whatever situation you were in – because there was a lot of different situations you could play in. You could play with professional R ‘n’ B type cats, or there was a lot of blues happening in Chicago, you could play with professional blues musicians, or you could play with cats like Von (Freeman).

(Von Freeman)

There were at least three distinct scenes – Chicago was very segregated then, it was all among black musicians. There were three separate scenes that were all kind of related in some way. At least in terms of the feel thing a lot of them were related. The Blues scene and the R ‘n’ B scene were closer to each other, than with what Von and them were doing. Because you really had to know a lot to do what Von and them did. You had to know harmony and shit like this, so this wasn’t a scene that you could just jump into. I mean if they’re playing 'Days of Wine and Roses', you just can’t come in there and just play pentatonic scales – you had to know something.

So their scene had to be combined with the sophisticated pitch shit they were doing, and the other scenes didn’t. In those scenes you could get away with playing blues licks and pentatonic things and stuff like that. So I did that first, but when I started following Sonny Stitt and these guys around, their shit was way more sophisticated pitch-wise. But the rhythmic thing, they still talked about it in the same way. So I said to myself ‘OK the pitch shit is more sophisticated but they’re still on this rhythm thing’. And the first thing I noticed is that when I played with Von and we’d play ‘Billie’s Bounce’, or anything, how different it felt. I mean I’m playing with him, but I feel like ‘Man, this guy – the weight of what he’s playing, and the feel – just the way it feels and everything, it’s so much different to what I’m doing. I mean I’m playing the same notes, but it’s not even close!’, you know.

And so I started trying to analyze this whole micro-beat thing I was talking about the other day, {in a conversation we’d had the previous day - RG} like why does it feel like that when he’s playing and not when I’m playing? What is it that I’m missing here? What’s happening?

So I started to try to analyze this, not in a way like – I don’t know if you ever saw Vijay Iyer’s essay online where he does this whole computerised kind of thing, in terms of like ‘we measured the beat and it’s 15% behind’ kind of thing – well it wasn’t that you know, it was just trying to figure out what was happening with what these cats were doing. And then I started listening to the drummers and everything.

So that was one kind of shock, was that whole period of figuring that out, and also realizing this stuff had nothing to do with reading music. It had nothing to do with what cats were doing when they read music. This was something completely outside that and it couldn’t even be notated. Even when I started transcribing, I would transcribe something and I would just write ‘lay back’, or ‘pull back’, or whatever, because there was no other way of notating it. But pull back where? How much? None of that was there – there was no information, I just knew what it meant when I saw that sort of like a ‘stickit’ thing {a stickit is a note you write to yourself} once I saw that it reminded me that that had to be done.

And so I realized that their beat was more like this……….it was like this variable amoeba-like thing, but it wasn’t just amoeba anywhere there was a certain concept to how to do it and it just took listening and all that. So that was my first shock with the rhythmic thing and it included the R’n’B thing and stuff like that.

Thad and Mel

My second big shock was when I played with Thad (Jones) and Mel (Lewis). Thad had this thing, I mean he took the laid back thing to another level. He had this thing where when I first joined the band, he would give a downbeat, and I would come in where he gave the downbeat, and I would always be early. Every single time I would be early – because there was this built-in delay that was just part of what they did, and I had never played in a big band like that. I mean everything I’d played before that when the cat gave the downbeat, that was the downbeat! But it was like a built-in delay, he would literally..{demonstrates by physically giving down downbeat and singing the note a second later}.. and I would be like “what the fuck!?” (Laughs) I mean I’d be WAY early, so the cats would tell me ‘you know, that’s the way it is, you got to get with the program!” (Laughs). So after a while you learned it – so I learned it from him, I’d think “Damn, he has the same shit that Elvin has, only with a big band!’ It was like this late fucking beat! I couldn’t believe it, and also at that time Dexter Gordon just started coming back to the States and HE was late as hell too. So I’m like “are these guys just lazy or is it part of their thing?’

So I started noticing there was this almost extreme laid back thing that was happening with some guys, so that was the second kind of shock I got.

Doug Hammond

The third shock was probably………. Well Sam Rivers’ thing was hip to me rhythmically and everything, but the third shock was Doug Hammond, and that was a big one.

RG: What was unique about him?

SC: Well, this cello player Muneer Abdul Fattah asked me did I want to do this gig with some dancers – he had this small group playing with these dancers, and I said sure – it was up in Harlem – and I asked him ‘who’s the drummer?’ and he said, ‘it’s this cat named Doug, you don’t know him’, and I said ‘OK, fine’. Now Doug’s even older than Muneer, and Muneer had this vision that he was going to bring me and Doug together, neither one of us were aware of this. So we played this gig and we played Muneer’s music, which is fine, and we get to this point in the rehearsal and Doug said ‘Well Steve,  we’re going to play a piece of mine now, and you don’t know this piece so you can go and get a coke or whatever’.

So I said fine, and I was on my way out the door and they started playing this piece called ‘Perspicuity’ and I stopped right at the door as soon as I heard it, I stopped and turned around – I never went outside – I turned around and listened to what they were playing. So he starts off playing the chant:

To listen, click here

There’s this kind of inbuilt counterpoint happening within it, and it had this really nice groove, but it was spacious  - it wasn’t, (sings typical fast Balkan groove), it wasn’t that kind of thing, it had this space kind of thing happening. And then the melody came in and it fit with the rhythm in a certain way (sings excerpt of the melody while clapping rhythm), it fit a certain way rhythmically, it was almost like he thought of it being rhythm as well as being pitches. This fucked me up. I mean it’s a simple tune really, but it messed me up, and then in the improvisation there were no chords and all this kind of stuff, and I was like ‘Man, what IS that!?’, after he finished playing, and he said ‘that’s a tune of mine called ‘Perspicuity’,  I didn’t care about the name or anything like that, but I said ‘Um, do you have more music like that?’ and the guy said ‘Yes, I’ve got boxes of it’, and I said ‘You’ve just found an alto player if you want one’ (laughs), ‘because I’ve got to understand what that is’. He was glad that somebody liked his music so he said ‘Sure’.

In my mind, I’d been doing something with forms and stuff like that, and I’d been doing all this stuff with melody, the symmetry thing  - it was already developed, I was doing all this stuff, feeling around and everything. But I felt like ‘something’s missing’ – you know I always felt that, but I couldn’t put it into words. I always felt like ‘You know, all this shit I’ve been doing but something ain’t right’. When I heard his music, I thought to myself, ‘THAT’S what’s missing’ (laughs). It just hit me – it was something about the balance of what he did.

You see the cats I liked, it turned out to be the same cats he liked – I really liked Max Roach - I really liked Max Roach and I really liked all the stuff I talked about in that Charlie Parker Dozens article..........

{an extensive essay on Charlie Parker written by Steve - you can see it here - RG} 

I heard that stuff early on, his relationship to Bird etc. Even though they were improvising I heard that it was composition – it was like a fixed fucking thing to me, but it was just that they were improvising. But it sounded so fixed, it was like Max could anticipate what Bird was doing and Bird could anticipate what Max was doing and they were creating this composition together. Doug’s music had that in it, but it was developed in a way, like it was updated or something like this. I wasn’t aware of this until later, until Doug told me of the connection to Ed Blackwell and all these kind of cats – I wasn’t aware of that, I was taking the shit straight from Max to Doug. And it had a funky kind of thing, I always felt that Max , even though he was playing swing, that the shit was funky – that it had this funk kind of feel to it. Which is what attracted me to that because it reminded me of the stuff I heard in my childhood when we were beating on the cars and everything. Max had that kind of thing, but it was with this – the swing thing – happening.

And so I really dug it (Hammond’s concept), and then he had these other tunes that all had this chant concept – he called them chants, that’s why I call it that. They all had this drum chant thing, that he had gotten from several sources – from Africa, from Max Roach and plus, he had listened to………..the three drummers he listened to a lot, that he always talked about were Big Sid Catlett, Chick Webb and Cozy Cole. All cats whom I hadn’t listened to a lot up to that point. He talked about these pre-Max Roach type drummers, and most cats when they talk about pre-Max Roach drummers, they talk about Jo Jones - Papa Jo Jones. But they don’t go back – but Doug would talk about Baby Dodds and all these cats from the past.  And he would always say, ‘the young cats today, all they do is play cymbals, they don’t play the DRUMS enough – you’re a drummer - a drummer, not a cymbal-er!’ (Laughs). He would go into this thing – ‘Cymbals came from China!’ – he would go into this whole thing about drums versus cymbals, how Tony Williams was fucking all these cats up – he would go into this whole spiel.

And so eventually he would influence me and I would go back and listen to these cats – and I would say ‘Chick Webb? Cozy Cole? Big Sid? What kinds of names are these? Cozy!? Who names a kid Cozy!?’ (Laughs). But I was piqued by the names and all this kind of stuff and just listened to them, and listened to Jo Jones, and I realized these cats did have some stuff, and I heard some of the stuff that Max was getting some of his stuff from. There was this funky thing in what they were doing and he was getting that.

Ed Blackwell

And then Doug said that the modern cat he was listening to was Ed Blackwell.  Because Blackwell took that shit, plus went to Africa and lived in Africa for a while and took that stuff and basically adapted it for the drums. And then brought that into Ornette’s thing, plus this New Orleans thing that he had, that Second Line shit. And he brought that into Ornette’s thing, and it gave Ornette’s thing – to me – it gave it foundation, it gave it form. Because Ed Blackwell was a real form kind of cat, he had natural form in what he was doing - plus that chant stuff, when you do those rhythms and everything it’s sort of an automatic form. To me he brought that to the group, so the group – at least the early group – didn’t have that wavy kind of thing that somebody like Rashied has – it had grooves and stuff, even though there was all this crazy Ornette shit on top. Later on I met Ed Blackwell, and he would sit down with me and Smitty, (the drummer Marvin Smitty Smith), and show us some of this stuff and he would be swinging and all of a sudden he would go into this -  (sings rhythm) - these chants and stuff and then he would break back into swing, and he would go back and forth and stuff like that. And he was real influenced by Max but he added this African thing. And so Doug said that messed him up. And so then Doug kind of did an updated version of that, plus he was a real composer, so he could actually write the stuff and everything.

The First Rehearsal

But the big shock was the first rehearsal, because I came into the first rehearsal, and Doug said ‘OK bring some music if you’ve got some music’ and I brought some music and passed it out – there was only a few people there – I passed it out and I gave everybody a part but Doug. And he said ‘Where’s my part?’ and I said’ Well you know, there’s no drum part, what do you mean where’s your part? There’s no drum part’, so I started to describe what I wanted – ‘well you know it’s kind of like…..’ and he said ‘Stop!’ – he was really like a hard cat. ‘Stop – I want my part’, and I said ‘There IS no part!’, and he said ‘Write one!’ and I said, “Write one!? I’ve never written for drums in my life, I don’t know how to write a drum part!’, and he said, ‘Learn’ – he was looking at me all crazy (laughs), and so I was like ‘I don’t even know where to start’, and he said ‘I’ll teach you’ (Laughs). And so he showed me ‘This is a drum key, this is where .. etc”, he showed me, ‘OK you got this? Now I want my drum part’ (laughs). I thought ‘Man, this guy is crazy!’ (Laughs). And he was saying ‘Learn how to write drum parts, don’t give me some of this I want a little Max, a little DeJohnette  - I don’t care about these cats, write my drum part!’ I said, ‘what do you mean, write your drum part’, and he said, ‘Write an example of how you hear it should go, and give it to me’. So I said OK, so I started doing that. And I really dug the results!

And I realized that that’s what he’s doing - that I hear is the thing that’s missing – the glove that’s missing on the hands of my music. What he’s doing is that he’s treating the rhythm like everything else. It’s like it’s a melody and he’s looking specifically at detailed rhythmic information, which to me – at the end of the 70s, going into the 80s – was a revelation. Everybody was doing this ‘Just give me a little beat like this or like this, some Latin shit – yeah but more simple’ (Laughs) You know, everybody was doing that, but his shit was -  ‘I want the same shit that you give everybody else. Other people are going to improvise too, but they have a starting point – I want a starting point. I want to know what’s in your mind. And I don’t want to know about styles – I don’t give a fuck about styles. Don’t tell me about Elvin or Max or something – I don’t want to know about that. What do you have in your mind in terms of this particular piece of music? And then when we move on to the next piece tell what else you have in your mind.” So first of all it was a novel thing – a drummer begging to read something was like a weird thing, because they’re like…………

RG: Well they have a funny thing, because I write drum music, sometimes very specifically too – my brother’s a drummer and I used to play his drums a lot at home so I’ve got a sense of the instrument. So occasionally – quite often – I actually will write something. And I notice a funny thing about drummers – they have a little ghetto that they both hate and yet don’t want to get out of. In the sense that they really get pissed off – and rightly so – when they’re the only one not getting a part. Or someone says ‘here’s the saxophone part’.

SC: Yeah, right

RG: On the other hand if you hand them all the stuff written out, they go ‘what the fuck is this!?” (Both laugh). So it’s a funny psychology that one, you know, because some drummers don’t like you to be specific yet they get pissed off if you’re vague.

SC: Well he was weird because I mean he was a composer, he was a prolific composer. He really literally had boxes of music – he had more music than I had, he was older than me too, but still. And I suppose, from writing so much, he was into it.  And sometimes I gave him stuff that was hard, and he’d say ‘Man this shit is hard!’, but he still wanted it – he still did it.

I remember I wrote ‘Snake Pit Strut’ – these are the early tunes – ‘Murdxas’ and which is really just sax drum written backwards. And those were the first tunes, there on that first album of his that I did – you have that right, Spaces?

RG: Yes, I have it somewhere

SC: So, both of those tunes – but especially ‘Murdxas’  - turned out so well that I basically never stopped doing that. I just got deeper and deeper and deeper into what it was and all this kind of stuff. And right away I noticed that OK, I can just sing this drum phrase, and I don’t have to pay any attention to how long it is, or you know……….it’s just that if it feels right to me, balance-wise, then I’ll just write it down and that’s it. What I used to do is I used to just sing the stuff into a tape recorder or something like that, or if I didn’t have a tape recorder, repeat it enough till I remembered it. Or play it with my hands and feet or whatever, and then just write it down.

It was sort of like a story that Benny Golson told me about ‘Stablemates’. He said he wrote out this tune and it wasn’t 8/8/8/8, it got to a certain point and he said shit, it didn’t work out. And so he went to try to fix it but then he thought – well why should I fix it? If it feels right, then that’s what I intended and that’s what it is.

I was like that with these drum chants, I would write it out, and whatever it came out to be. I was just worried about the feel and all that kind of stuff, but whatever it came out to be I would just leave it – the first time, I would never fix it, I would leave it. So after a while things got – from other’s people’s perspective – odder and odder. Because I began to feel these things and I began to feel, I guess, odder and odder stuff. But I would let it go, I would never come back and say that needs some extra 8^th notes, or that needs an extra beat or whatever. Because I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of 8^th notes or anything when I was feeling it – it was just what it was.

I mean still to this day a lot of things come by feel for me. What I mean by that is that even though I’m working now with these esoteric concepts and things like that, when it comes to the actual information – because that stuff doesn’t determine what the actual information is, if you say ‘I’m going to do something with ‘Venus and Mars’ – musically that could be anything. Musically that could be anything, if you’re John Adams it’s going to be that language, if you’re Henry Threadgill it’s going to be that language. It’s going to be whoever you are. People ask (me) about that but they don’t realize that that doesn’t determine the information, your experience as a musician is what’s really determining the information. I mean if you’re T.A.S. Mani then it can’t possibly come out like John Adams, I mean it just can’t! Your experience is different. So that has a bigger influence over what it’s going to sound like – your experience – than any idea you get that’s outside of music or whatever.

If Beethoven had the same ideas as me it couldn’t possibly come out the same. And people don’t realize how much your experience dictates what you do and who you are and everything. Now for you it could add more variety and lead you in different directions that you might not have investigated, but it’s still going to be some Ronan shit, on some level it’s still going to basically be you, it’s not all of a sudden going to turn into Charlie Haden, it’s just not going to happen. If it does it might do it for like a split second – you might write a beat and a half of something that somebody would say reminds them of somebody, but all this other shit still reminds me of him. Because you have a certain personality and the way that you put shit together it comes out like you.

So when I heard all this stuff that everybody was doing – Max Roach and Bird and everything – my personality was interpreting that in a certain way. So when people go to the jazz.com thing, they say ‘oh yeah, we never thought about that’ – but that’s because you’re not me! That’s what I’M hearing you know – I’m not making any claim that Charlie Parker was hearing like that or that Max Roach was hearing like that. This is what I get from this music when I hear it. It could have nothing to do with what they…….. but what I discovered -  I was lucky enough to know some of these old cats – what I discovered was that they had a way of thinking that, although it was different than mine, in some kind of way it came close to the way I was thinking in their language.

I told Von Freeman one time, I said, ‘you know, me and you we probably think really differently about this music’ and he said ‘Oh I don’t know about that’ – he said that immediately – ‘I don’t know about that. I mean you probably have your way of, your language of interpreting and everything, and I have my language, but I don’t think  - I’ve been listening to you for years – I don’t think it’s all that different’. And I was surprised to hear that from him, because here’s a cat that’s like born in 1922, you know what I mean. I know if Barry Harris or somebody heard the shit he’d be like ‘what the fuck!?’ (laughs). But he was like……’I don’t know…….’ When we did that gig (with Von Freeman), we did Moose the Mooch, but we did it over this tune 'Change the Guard' that we always do. So it was like, you know, bent. So me and Jonathan (Finlayson) were playing it and it was like – {Sings Moose the Mooche in the 7 beat cycle of Change the Guard} – it had that half beat peg-leg shit in it. And so Von was sitting there listening to it, he wasn’t playing he was just listening. This was like the first……. It was during the rehearsal, and I haven’t done many rehearsals with him. So after we finished he said ‘You know, I think I’m finally starting to understand what you’re trying to do’. 

And I know what it was that made it click for him was the fact that he knew part of what we were doing – he knew Moose the Mooche. He knew the way it normally went, and then he heard this corrupted-ass version of it, and he was like, ‘these cats are fucking with the rhythm!’ (Laughs). It became obvious. But when you hear original stuff, you don’t hear that because….

RG: You don’t have the point of reference.

SC: There’s nothing that you know – exactly. So he was sitting there listening, and he was listening really carefully and then we started improvising on it. Rhythm Changes – he knew it was Rhythm Changes, he knew all that, but then he heard what was different stood out more in relief, against what he already  knew. I mean he knew this shit better than we did – I mean he REALLY knew this stuff. So he’s hearing this stuff and he’s like ‘these cats are basically changing the balance of this shit – they’re fucking with the balance’. And so he told me ‘I’m starting to get it’, and I told him, ‘well yeah, what you heard on Moose the Mooche we’re doing that with our original stuff too – it’s essentially the same idea’ 

And he even played on some of the stuff, and that was crazy to hear for me. Because it was a whole different – he had a whole different………… it was like bending the shit. But he could hear it you know. And I never thought I’d have anybody that age playing on my shit. People don’t…… I mean it’s not like Lester Young and them started playing Charlie Parker’s music. I mean they played together with Jazz at the Philharmonic, but it was older stuff.  They didn’t start playing {sings fast bebop-type line} – it just didn’t happen. Louis Armstrong and them, when Dizzy played with Louis Armstrong they played ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ or something like that, but he didn’t really play Dizzy’s music – he didn’t play ‘Things to Come’  or something like that. That never happens. And Dizzy had played with Trane – I mean Trane had played with Dizzy, when Trane was younger. But once Trane got going with his real thing in the 60s, it’s not like Dizzy came in and played that. That’s not how it goes – the older cats never play the newer cats stuff, it just doesn’t go that way. If you want to play with the older cats you gotta play their shit. And out of respect that’s what you should do, you shouldn’t give some old cat some new shit you’re working on and say ‘see if you can do this man’ – give that to Sonny Rollins – you would never do that.

We were very careful when Von did that gig – what he played on and everything, but there was one thing he said he wanted to play on. As a matter of fact he didn’t say it, he just started playing, and I was like ‘oh this is going to be interesting……..’, just to hear it and stuff like that. Those were the things that I took  -  all those specific things that those cats were doing

Art Tatum

Another thing that was shocking that I didn’t mention was Art Tatum. I have a special kind of relationship to Art Tatum, I shouldn’t say relationship because I didn’t know him. He died the same year I was born. But, he did this tune called ‘Aunt Hagar’s Blues’, and there’s this one section that he does on it that has this – I call it ‘Peg Leg’ rhythms, because it reminds me of a pirate with one leg shorter than the other, when he’s doing this, you know. Because this tune I did called ‘Snake Pit Strut’  is based off that. 

{Sings Tatum rhythm followed by Snake Pit Strut rhythm to show similarity - you can listen to it here}

And it has this sort of Peg Leg thing. Cause if you just beat the beat like this {clicks fingers on regular pulse}, then of course the beat would turn around on itself – so it had this long beat/short beat thing. So I started experimenting with that stuff then – some of that came from Art Tatum. This is in Bulgarian music and a lot of other stuff too, but the thing is they fill up all the beats. Art Tatum was doing it in a funky, more like an African kind of way where all the beats weren’t filled up. He was picking his spots where he played and everything.

So I said OK, how do you make it funky like that, make it groove like that, where you’re picking your spots, (because they’re not just picking any spots of course, they’re picking the spots that make it sound a certain way), and still do this other thing. That was my thing - not do the {sings ‘Blue Rondo’-type rhythm}, because I would hear this Bulgarian Music {sings typical Bulgarian folk melody} – and every space would be filled with turns –{continues singing Bulgarian style piece} – and that’s cool and I dig that and everything, I mean that’s because of their language and culture and all this kind of stuff. But when Max would be doing this  - {sings very syncopated drum phrases} and the tempo would be like this {really fast}, and it would be really spaced out where the beats are or the Bata stuff – {Sings typically a Babalu Aye Bata bata rhythm while simultaneously clapping the clave} – that’s really hard because there’s a lot of space and the shit’s placed in a certain way, but it‘s funky. And so to me that’s what Bird and Max and Tatum and all those cats were doing and I was like – OK how do you do THAT, but change the balance? But still keep that – exactly what they have, still keep that thing.

Part 2 will follow soon  - in the meantime, here's a clip from a concert in France in 1999, that gives an idea of the flavour of Steve's rhythmic approach, as well as featuring great playing by him and the other band members

Working with James Joyce

This Saturday, (March 2nd - details below), I'll be premiering a new piece based on the writing of James Joyce. In doing it I'm very fortunate to have three of France's finest jazz musicians - Dominique Pifarely (violin), Stéphane Payen (alto), and Christophe Lavergne (drums), and the great Irish saxophonist Michael Buckley, playing with me. The mix of irish and French musicians isn't accidental, since the piece is called 'Counterparts - Joyce in Paris and Dublin', and is based around work he did when living in those two cities.

Music was very important to Joyce and his works are filled with descriptions of music, songs and singers. He himself was reputedly a fine singer, and he even competed in the Feis Ceol, (a venerable Irish amateur music competition, which is over a hundred years old and still going), entering the competition as a tenor. Joyce’s language is also very musical both in terms of rhythm and alliteration. The cities of Dublin and Paris are similarly very important to Joyce’s work – born and raised in Dublin but spending over twenty years of his adult life in Paris, both cities played crucial roles in his life and work.

The first impetus for writing the piece was my rereading of ‘Dubliners’, and being made aware again of Joyce’s musicality. The idea of Dublin and Paris came from my passing ‘Shakespeare and Company’  - the famous Parisian bookshop which had such an association with Joyce – on a recent trip to Paris. Since I’ve also had a close association with several French musicians in recent years, it was a short jump from the reading of Dubliners and thinking about Joyce’s life in the artistic hotbed that was Paris of the 1920s, to coming up with the idea of writing a piece for French and Irish musicians, based on writing undertaken by Joyce in both cities.

We also rehearsed the music in Paris and in Ireland  - before Christmas Michael and I went to Paris and rehearsed with Dominique, Stéphane and Christophe, and now we're at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, a beautiful artist's retreat here in Ireland, working on the piece and putting the finishing touches to the shape of it.

‘Counterparts’ is partly written and partly improvised, and uses audio taken from street sounds recorded in markets in Dublin and Paris - it's always fun and a different kind of challenge to work with audio. The piece also uses text from various works both as a generator for the music, and in spoken word format as an integral part of the piece. Sometimes I’ve used direct material from the music in Joyce’s work, including ‘Say Goodbye To Girlish Days’, Joyce’s only known musical composition. In other parts of the piece I’ve used ideas from the works he wrote in Paris or in Dublin as generators of musical ideas. 

In Counterparts I’ve tried to create a unique environment for improvising musicians to explore the work of Joyce through musical means, and through that to reveal to the listener the sheer musicality of Joyce’s prose.

For  anyone in Dublin this Saturday March 2nd is interested in seeing the finished result of this work, you can come to the National Concert Hall at 1.05pm where the piece will be premiered as part of the New Music Dublin festival. Full details here

And here is a video clip of some of the rehearsals from Paris last year.

Anatomy of Perfection - Monk's 'Jackie-ing'

I first heard 'Jackie-ing'  almost forty years ago when my father brought home a compilation double LP of Monk's Riverside recordings. At that time I had no technical knowledge or experience of music - I wasn't to become a player until much later and knew nothing about structure, form, jazz history or anything that would have given me an insight into Monk's music. Yet I was attracted to this music immediately. There was just something about it - a vibe, wittiness, swing, or more accurately, the combination of these elements - that spoke to me with an immediacy I don't think I'd experienced with my father's other jazz recordings. 'Jackie-ing' was a stand-out for me, even then. I listened to it so many times, loving it on an intuitive level, and I've been listening to it ever since. Like all perfect music, it never gets old, and this really is perfect music. Flawless.

Almost forty years later I began to think about what elements were involved in this track that made it so great, and when i began to investigate it in an analytical way, the music revealed even more facets which were always there, but were not so obvious. Like investigating any great music, (such as Bach or Bartok), an analysis of Jackie-ing reveals some of the reasons why it's so great, but still remains mysterious.

The recording was made in 1959, and featured Monk's long-time saxophonist Charlie Rouse, (who had only recently joined Monk at the time of this recording), the brilliant Thad Jones on the rarely heard cornet, who puts in an extraordinary performance on the whole album, and the stellar bass and drum team of Sam Jones and Art Taylor. It's an interesting recording in that it's one pf the few times that Monk recorded with the classic bebop line-up of trumpet (or cornet in this case), saxophone, piano, bass and drums.

This piece is classic Monk and in a way encompasses all the virtues that make him so unique - the slightly awry humour, the seemingly naive tune that catches you unawares, the incredible swing, the sonority and rhythmic complexity of the comping, and above all the primacy of the melody in determining the whole piece.

The Melody

The melody is an extraordinary affair - an almost banal tune that creates an anything but banal atmosphere. A seemingly simple 16 bar form, with a unison call/response melody that is largely made up of quarter notes, but which, through the use of displacement, catches the listener unawares, making you feel that you've somehow missed something. I remember when I was a kid, listening to this for the first time, thinking that perhaps the LP had skipped! This effect is achieved through the simple but brilliantly effective displacement of the main phrase of the theme. In measure 12, Monk starts the final phrase of the theme two beats earlier than you would expect, throwing everything out of kilter and effectively displacing the entire final theme phrase. This makes the theme finish two measures earlier than you would expect, leaving the drums to fill in the space at the end of the form that you instinctively feel shouldn't be there.





This displacement dominates the whole piece, as it infects the soloing throughout. It keeps the listener slightly confused all the time, because while the horns refer to this unexpected melodic twist in their solos, the bass and drums place the changes in the more traditional sixteen bar form. So everything feels like it's not quite lining up.

Monk also creates this dual world of off-kilter simplicity by the way he comps the melody, bringing the full range of his control of dissonance and understanding of piano sonority to bear on the melody. The placement of these clangorous chords is very strategic, and when you listen to the melody a few times you realise that there's nothing random or accidental about them. In measure four of the first head, Monk placed a very dissonant E natural in octaves alongside the humdrum F of the melody. This jarring effect is repeated at the same point in the second time through the head, but this time Monk uses an E and an Ab, (an octave and a major third above the E) to create the dissonance against the F. He does this in exactly the same way in the in-head and the out-head - clearly this order of dissonant chords was something that was planned in advance and is part of the composition rather than being something that was improvised on the spot.

The harmony of the tune is also  quite mysterious. Mostly centering around Bb major (with a very prominent sharp 4th), with a few excursions to the territory of V chord, it strongly features the notes E and A, and yet Monk adds this mysterious Ab in his comping which one imagine would suggest a Bb7 chord (but which never appears). Again we are in the world of duality - a simple diatonic type Bb melody but with the major 7th and tritone clamouring for attention and an errant Ab buzzing around the theme.

Bass and Drums

 (Sam Jones)


A huge amount of credit for the success of this track must go to Sam Jones and AT, whose contributions are judged to perfection. The connection between Jones' quarter note and AT's ride cymbal is sublime - both of them play forcefully yet neither of them are dogmatic. The beat is is clearly agreed between them, and they create what can best be described as a loping swing feel that  both clears the ground yet is rooted to it. Jones note choices are always interesting, he never does the expected, yet he clearly outlines the changes. AT keeps the ride cymbal going throughout, there are no real fills, but the snare and bass drum keep up an insistent, percolating rhythmic counter-melody throughout. His wonderful 8-bar intro is a perfect example of what he does throughout the track - swings hard but with a melodic intelligence informing everything he does

Charlie Rouse

Rouse was never my favourite Monk tenor player. I always felt he stayed too long with Monk and all those live albums show someone who knows the music very well yet never really pushes it in the way that Coltrane and Rollins did. I also love Johnny Griffin on the live 5 Spot recordings. Griffin's playing with Monk is often maligned, but I think his playing on those recordings is inspired, the sheer amount of ideas he has and the technical ability he has to carry them out, is staggering. The usual criticism is that he plays too many notes, but if you're going to level that at Griffin you have to level the same charge at Trane!

But I'm getting off topic here - in this recording Rouse is absolutely at the top of his game, his tenure with Monk is just beginning and no doubt he was less jaded than he must have become in later years, playing the same tunes over and over again. His solo on 'Jackie-ing' is marvellous, starting off by brilliantly juggling the theme in different ways, paraphrasing it and using it, rather than the chords, to create his solo. Listen to the first chorus and Rouse's effortless reworking of the theme.





He goes on reworking it until he gradually moves away from it, at least in the sense of clear paraphrasing. By the end he's making more references to the underlying harmony and finishes with a wonderful phrase that doesn't feel like the kind of phrase or place, (the first bar of the form), where you would finish a solo. But despite the unorthodox last phrase, Thad picks it up in the 4th bar and uses it to launch his own solo - reminding me of an improvisational relay race where the baton is handed over effortlessly. Here's that moment:

Thad Jones

Thad Jones was hugely underrated. He was revered as a big band writer, but his abilities were pretty much all-encompassing and he was one of the most original trumpeters ever to play in jazz. Immediately identifiable, he was quirky yet swinging, completely in the tradition yet totally surprising. His note choices and use of thematic material to advance his solos showed how compositionally he thought, and in this regard he's up there with other thematic improvisers such as Sonny Rollins and Jim Hall. And, like Rollins,  this made him an idea foil for Monk and his music. Never one to just run the changes, his ability to fully investigate the simplest motif and set off in pursuit of an idea, while never losing sight of where he was in the overall scheme of things, was unique among trumpeters and had few peers on any instrument.

Here he is simply brilliant. I never tire of his solo on this tune, it's remarkable for its sense of internal structure, respect for the atmosphere of the music, great swing and sometimes startling note choices. While not quoting the melody as closely as Rouse does, his solo still reflects the theme by the way he uses sometimes banal-seeming phrases which through brilliant rhythmic and timbral manipulation become startling. I always feel with his solo here, that though it faithfully follows the harmonic scheme of the piece, that if you took the solo out of the context of the tune, it would create its own internal logic, independent of the melody or chords of the tune from whence it came.

What's interesting harmonically is how he'll often skip notes in the scale and by doing so suggest a slightly Asian pentatonic quality to the line. The descending line he plays in this next clip, at face value conventional in the extreme, suggests a pentatonic scale consisting of Bb, D, E, G and A. This contradicts the conventionality of the phrase itself - more duality. And at the beginning of the next chorus he suggests a C major pentatonic, but heavily disguised by an up-rushing rhythmic shape that seems anxious to escape the confines of his cornet.





Monk himself helps Jones achieve this duality by virtue of his comping. One the things that I love about this track is that Monk comps throughout. These big slabs of bright dissonance appear throughout the piece in an amazing variety of rhythmic places. He is clearly engaged from start to finish and the way he ensures the primacy of the melody through comping that only obliquely refers to it, is an object lesson in both accompaniment and compositional thought through improvisation. And check out the way Monk picks up Thad's last phrase and uses its shape to start his solo - which puts him in a 3-beat cycle which is superimposed over the four of the bass and drums - something he resolves effortlessly........





Another feature of this track, and something that is common on a lot of Monk recordings, is that the solos don't follow the usual bebop dynamic curve, where each soloists starts quietly and then builds to a crescendo before handing over to the next guy. Here the dynamic remains the same throughout and the soloists could finish at any time. In fact this whole track is very far away from the bebop tradition where harmony rather than melody is the main instigator of improvisation. Here, the melody and the comping boss the whole piece and the soloists' prime concern is with melodic manipulation coming directly from the theme.

Here is the whole piece - a masterpiece in which you couldn't add a note, or subtract a note to or from anyone in the band without diminishing the overall piece.

There are very few perfect pieces in recorded jazz, but this definitely one of them