Jazz for aficionados

wharfy, I know a lot of rock bands have covered Mose Allison’s songs. I’m not sure which have covered what, though. Several times a year, I get out of bed and say to myself, "I have to listen to Mose today." 

I’m not a straight-up jazz listener. I like all kinds of music, but I also like all kinds of jazz adjacent music. If Mose  is just playing jazz, then he’s a jazzman. If he’s playing and singing, he’s not exactly a jazz singer  but his piano is playing jazz.

I’m a big Gato Barbieri fan. I don’t have "Fenix," though. I’ll stream it. Thanks for mentioning it.

frogman, mahgister, stuartk, I want to probe a bit and see if we can define the boundaries of jazz. So, I'm going to start with a performer who might or might not be a "jazz" performer: Frank Sinatra. What do you think?

curiousjim, glad I could get your toes tapping!

stuartk, the reason I mentioned Sinatra was because many musicians and singers have called him a genius. He lost his voice early on in his career, I think when he was in his twenties. Early Sinatra sounds much like Bing Crosby. Sinatra made up for the problems with his voice by inventing new phrasing, and it is this phrasing that other musicians refer to as his genius. I wondered if that phrasing would give him a place in the jazz world along with Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Every New Years I am absolutely blown away that New York is still playing Sinatra's "New York, New York." He was born 110 years ago and died 27 years ago and I still hear him everywhere, as I do with Ella Fitzgerald.

I grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and I don't know who else remembers Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Jazz was all around but I didn't think of it as jazz. It was just the music my parents were playing. And, of course, Sinatra was all around.

I'm listening to the Belgian musician Toots Thielemans, the preeminent jazz harmonica player. "The Soul of Toots Thielemans" if you want to stream it for a taste. 

I went to hear Kurt Elling sing last year. He uses his voice as a jazz instrument. I knew it was true jazz because my wife couldn't stand it.

acman3, thanks for finding that article. That's what I was talking about when I said other musicians regard him highly. On the level of Billie Holiday! High praise.

mahgister, on the topic of Persian singers I have a story. I was a pretty wild young guy at 21. My girlfriend and I had $300 and two charter tickets to London. From London we hitched through Europe, mostly took trains through Turkey, but in Iran, people wanted to pick us up to speak English. Plus my girlfriend was beautfiul.

We were theoretically going to India, but were running out of money. We hit the last town in Iran before Aghanistan. Very religious. One guy pulled a knife on us simply for being infidels. We had a local who was showing us around and he took us into a club, I guess you'd call it. And I was floored because the Iranians at the border were so religious, but on stage was a woman singer, and she had one of the most soulful voices I've ever heard.

mahgister, thanks for the music!

stuartk, I have a lot of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and Billie Holiday albums. They often don't improvise except in the way they interpret songs, like Frank Sinatra. No doubt, Fitzergerald can scat with the best of them, but she doesn't always feel the need. So, I don't think improvisation is a necessary attribute of jazz. BTW, I think you didn't like Tania Maria, but she can scat like nobody's business.

stuartk, I don't define jazz vocals as scatting. Billy Holiday does not scat on the records I have by her.

I think where we're diverging is that I like to be lost. I like to pose questions I can't answer, and I don't feel the need to know the answer.

I spent 10 years writing a novel about a Holocaust survivor who had been an assassin and could no longer love. I was in uncharted territory (this was about twenty years ago) and loved being there. I like research. I am now working on a book asking a question which I don't think anyone else has ever asked, and I have no definitive answer. I feel like an explorer.

I have no answer about jazz, either. I just wanted to hear what other people thought. And apparently other people have more definite ideas than I do. So far, I'm kind of taking from all this that perhaps thinking in musical genres is not such a great thing. 

stuartk, you're not understanding me at all. When I hear a jazz group I can hear what is planned and when a musician goes into improvisation. That's a no brainer. Coltrane on "My Favorite Things" plays with his band the setup going through the melody a few times. Then he goes off on his own and flies high above the band who is just trying to keep up with him. I think I understand jazz a lot better than you think I do. 

When L.A. had a commercial jazz station they would play what they called "soft" jazz. Sade, Diana Krall, maybe Davis playing "Some Day My Prince Will Come," and Trane playing something off his album "Ballads." I have an extremely abstract ear from listening to "modern" abstract classical. Shostakovich, Bartok, Stravinsky. In modern classical music the beat can be all over the place. Listen to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. 

I think in the jazz you're talking about nobody is on the beat yet it is implied and they all know where it is. And I know where it is. Coltrane often plays like that. And Davis on some of his later stuff. Bebop has syncopation. 

In classical music, there is light classical, early classical with composers like Bach, and even up to Mozart. Then the Romantic Era begins with Beethoven and people see that as a more serious classical. And more difficult classical comes with 20th century and 21st century classical.

It would be so difficult for me to explain to you my understanding of music, but it begins in the Upper Paleolithic with people who lived in caves. I know nobody knows what that music sounded like, but I think I know why they made music. It was a spititual thing. Just like Coltrane, Sanders, and Davis felt their music was spiritual. And I believe the shamans and creative artists were women. But that's another argument.

I'll stop with this. But I think you're really underestimating my understanding of jazz.

stuartk, sorry for my tirade. I have to admit that I felt insulted by what you said. I have mentioned how many live jazz concerts I have attended. How would it be possible for me to see so many live jazz concerts and not know what improvisation is? You can see it. Sometimes the band has musical scores which they look at for the setup and then the improviser goes off on their own and the backup no longer look at their scores. 

In regards to being lost, Malcolm Gladwell talks about types of artists in a New Yorker article called "Late Bloomers." He talks about two kinds of artists. One is exemplified by Picasso whom Gladwell says saw what he was going to paint in his head and then executed it. The other was exemplified by Cezanne who had to find his painting on the canvas while he was working. Action painters like de Kooning and Pollock were lost until they found themselves on the canvas. Another example might be Agatha Christie who did not know the ending of her crime novel until she got there. I think a lot of jazz musicians are lost until they find themselves in the spur of the moment on their instrument. That’s what I mean when I say I like being lost.

mahgister, very interesting what you say. I’m particularly interested in the word "gesture." What exactly do you mean by a musical gesture?

maghister, wharfy, I think I understand the concept of a musical gesture. The musical impulse must begin in a human who then has to embody that internal gesture into music, poetry, dance, etc. I think, however, that you are talking about music with a spiritual component. By "spiritual" we may mean different things, but I'll leave it for now.

In my poem on Coltrane, I said music comes from the streets, because if you study music it might seem it came from the courts. We must remember that up until Beethoven musicians wrote solely for royalty, and even Beethoven tried to curry the favor of royalty. Therefore, all music had to have pleased the lord for whom it was written. This is still true to some extent in that most musicians write to please the masses. And that has little to do with spirituality in music.

I think we should separate music with a spiritual impulse from "chamber" music. To me, some jazz resembles chamber music in that it does not have that spiritual component informing its musical gestures. 

When Parker played bebop it came from his soul. That is not necessarily true of those who followed him. Coltrane infused his music with his own original musical gestures. (Hope I'm using that word correctly.) John Klemmer who was influenced by Trane was just copying the man, but had no soul.. That's why we call him commercial.

Since you brought up poetry, I know all about embodying words with the gesture. My poetry becomes more spiritual the more "lost" I become. In other words, I can't think through it. I just do it. And my best poems have been written that way. 

In some jazz, although they have improvisation, the improvisation seems "of a piece" with the composition not rising above the written music. When a spiritual musician goes off on a riff, it rises very high into the stratospheres. 

I disagree with mahgister about his assumption that music was written by men on their hunts. As difficult as it's going to be we need to get beyond the patriarchal lens. Yes, we think of men making art because they have for all the history we know of. I think the first music was integrated with art (body painting and adorrment) and was practiced by men and women. They were first acknowledging their own existence and second expressing awe that their existence was part of the existence of the universe. I'll stop here because it becomes complicated and I don't want to start citing books on the subject.

I think it was frogman who asked me why I said men swagger with their shoulders and women swagger with their hips. It is because jazz is about swagger, and I was saying that women express themselves artistically differently than men. This difference in the genders is being noticed and embraced among most arts. mahgister mentioned Furtwangler. I hold series tickets to the L.A. Phil and have heard the most important living conductors (which obviously doesn't include Furtwangler). The most exciting conductor I have heard is a woman named Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. I'd tell you more but this is a jazz thread.

I have been attending jazz concerts for over sixty years. One of the most innovative and interesting saxaphonists I have heard is Melissa Aldana. She is young, 36 years old, but obviously brilliant. She composes the music on her album, and whether you like it or not, it is like nothing else you have heard in jazz. I think as jazz aficionados we should all keep our ears open for new, young sounds. Here is a cut from her newest album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1hObK9HiGA

I'm listening to Randy Weston. Like him a lot.

I rewatched the first episode of the documenatary "Jazz" last night. Wynton Maralis was their go-to man on the origins of Jazz in New Orleans. The first part went from slavery in the early 1800's up through Ragtime and ended with a tease on Louis Armstrong. The next episode will be much about him and his genius which I had not recognized until I saw this documentary the first time, maybe 15 years ago or more.

stuartk, I don't think their art/music has to do with their personalities. I could use actors as a comparison. Personally, some actors are quite modest while others like to fill a room full of people at a party. On stage, they all must "swagger," whether that means playing a timid part or large part. 

You think about a musician improvising, they have to bring out their inner musical "swagger." (Perhaps a bad word.) In the documentary on jazz, Wynton Marsalis said that jazz was about the musician showing their "personality." And perhaps that is a better word than swagger. He used a very interesting metaphor of a writer and a pencil. The pencil doesn't write the story, the writer does. He was talking about Buddy Bolden who is considered the first jazz musician. Marsalis said that Bolden's coronet did not play the music, Bodlen did. And apparently he had plenty of swagger.

One other thing about the first episode of the documentary "Jazz" that really struck me was that for about four decades jazz was the most popular music in the country. That's when people could dance to jazz. I think somewhere in the fifties (after Parker?), it became more cerebral and the mass audience went elsewhere, to rock n' roll, I would guess. Although some jazz players, most of whom I think would be eschewed in this thread, like Diana Krall and Herbie Hancock (he played the tribute to Joni Mitchell in the Hollywood Bowl), most jazz players play in small clubs to a selective, more "cerebral" audience who aren't dancing.

Although I like straight-up jazz (I was playing an album of Tina Brooks yesterday), i love jazz that has a dance beat and makes me want to get up off my chair. Lizz Wright has that quality. Here is an excerpt from a review about her in Downbeat:

"Lizz Wright comes to her music with equal parts gospel, jazz, r&b and blues. The alto vibrations of her dark-toned, rich voice would sound at home in any church, jazz club, theater or even arena. She’s just that versatile as an artist."  

stuartk, let me elaborate just a bit on the feminine angle. On Melissa Aldana's last album "12 Stars," the Chilean sax player has a song she wrote called "Emilia." Aldana is 36, a woman of childbearing age. When she played the song, she explained that "Emilia" was to the child she had never had. Not a subject a man would write a song about.

I find the melody haunting and played in a way that I could not imagine a man playing. She rarely blasts the sax, and when she does it is not nearly as strong as Trane or any other male sax player I've heard. Her notes are gentle and wavering, and I find them to be haunting. There is an innate difference between her jazz and male jazz.

This, I think, was not so true in the past. I would not have said that Carla Bley's sound was obviously feminine. Women in all the arts, however, are beginning to express a sentiment that they would not have in the past, because they wanted to be accepted in the man's world of jazz. Singers, aside, of course. We have always wanted our female singers to sound feminine and express the entire panoply of the feminine experience. Even in a deeply religious part of 1968 Iran.

Why do I care? Because like curiousjim, I am curious about what is happening now. I like new things and experiences. And we live in an extremely important time when women are expressing their entire selves and men, as usual, are trying to slap them back. We see this in many, many goverrnments around the world, often expressed with the backing of religion.

curiousjim, thanks. I'm always looking for something different. Mediterranean sounds good. I often go to the Absolute Sound music reviews. That's where I found out about Lizz Wright's new recording "Holding Space." You can only stream it, though. 

I have been listening to a Keith Jarrett album with Charlie Haden. Just the two of them. They do standards. It's very mellow, if you're in that kind of mood.