The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music

Between December, 2004 and March, 2007, Ben Ratliff, the New York Times’ jazz critic, held a series of conversations with prominent jazz musicians. The rule for these was simple: they would listen to music, and they would discuss what they heard. Ratliff stipulated one condition: the music could be any that the interviewees selected, but they could not choose their own recordings. The results were almost always informative and stimulating, and frequently enlightening. Musicians, after all, listen from inside the music; they hear things that are inaudible to the rest of us; they know what recordings, even parts of recordings, deflected the course of music history, and they know why.

Ratliff begins with Wayne Shorter, a famously difficult interview. Shorter is a kind and gentle man but – how to say this – his prose can be somewhat oblique. They heard two selections from a box set of Sir Adrian Boult conducting the music of Ralph Vaughn Williams. (It is a striking feature of this book that these jazz musicians so often chose classical works.) Shorter loves movie similes: of a particularly noble scherzo from the Fourth Symphony he remarked, “It’s like something from a movie…It could be astronauts: ‘we need a large vehicle to get beyond this gravity and away from our decadent thinking.’’’ As a Nicheron Buddhist, Wayne shades his interview with mystic conceptions: “when you say, ‘what is life’ – well, life is the one time you have an eternal adventure. Sounds like a contradiction… I like that! It rubs against itself; it makes sparks. To me those sparks are fuel.”

The guitarist Pat Metheney’s first choice was Sonny Meets Hawk, a 1963 recording of two of the seminal giants of the tenor saxophone, Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins. He played a standard of the jazz repertoire, All The Things You Are. Metheney observed, “Hawk was kind of like his father. And it’s like Sonny saying, ‘yeah, but.’ “ But the performance that Pat wanted to discuss was the solo by Paul Bley. “The shot heard ‘round the world because of how it influenced pianists coming up like Keith Jarrett.” I was aware of Bley’s influence on jazz pianists, but I never before knew that it was this particular solo that broke the mold.

Particularly noteworthy was Metheney’s response to Miles Davis’ 1964 recording, Seven Steps To Heaven. He makes two interesting, related observations in his commentary on this performance: “If we go down to the New School [one of the most accomplished of today’s jazz training programs] we’re going to find fifty guys who can eat this tune alive in the way that the jazz education movement has evolved toward. But there’s not one second in what Miles plays that has anything to do with any of that.” Metheney, like many, if not most of the generation that grew up learning jazz improvisation through a combination of autodidacticism and informal master – apprentice relationships, believes that the academic bourgeoisification of the music has drained it of much of its soul, its “street sense”, as he puts it.

His second observation: “it has this whole thing of glue – the way ideas are connected to each other on a phrase by phrase basis.” He calls this “glue” the essence of swing. a fascinating metaphor, as one ordinarily would think of glue as a device of stasis, a substance that holds things still, but Methaney projects a dynamism into it, as swing to him is the element that unites propulsive sound. He hates that jazz pedagogues want to quantify it.

Much of the conversation in The Jazz Ear concerns the desire for greater freedom either from or within the traditional organizing devices of jazz music: time and prescribed harmonic sequences. Sonny Rollins: “jazz means freedom. I don’t think you always have to play in time. But there’s two different ways of playing. There’s a way of playing where you can play with no time. Or you can have a fixed time and play against it. That’s what I feel is heaven, being able to be that free, spiritual, musical.” Or there’s Andrew Hill’s elaboration of Charlie Parker’s dictum that “melody is rhythm.” “If everything is rhythm, then you have these rhythms on top of each other. But they’re not polyrhythms or pyramids of rhythm, they’re crossing rhythms.” Ornette Coleman: “I’m at the point now where modulation is the closest thing to pure improvisation. No key, no rhythm, no time. Just the idea itself.”

Coleman’s first choice of music to listen to and discuss was a recording of the early 20^th century cantor, Josef Rosenblatt. He said of the first recording that he heard of Rosenblatt’s, “I started crying like a baby.” Rosenblatt was “crying, singing, and praying all in the same breath…I said, ‘wait a minute. You can’t find those notes. They are not ‘notes.’ They don’t exist.”

The orchestral composers who are included are unified in their determination to have done with the traditional jazz format. As Maria Schneider put it, “I had this template in my head of bass line, chord, comping, melody, tune, sendoff [release of the improvising soloist], like you were buying a modular unit….Then I started questioning.” To keep their minds expansive, Schneider and the other interviewees often go to classical music. In the 1960s she was so taken with adagio of the Ravel G Minor Piano Concerto that she had to force herself to stop listening to it. (There’s an interesting circle of art closing here, for this was the Ravel who hung out, soaking up the jazz, at the right bank jazz club that Cocteau started, Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit -The Oxen On The Roof. Yes, I know, this was also the title of a surrealist ballet by Cocteau & Darius Milhaud And here’s Ravel paying jazz back with his elaboration of the blues.) She loves that blues feeling in it, used with such originality, “He creates a sense of motion with harmony, the slightest tension between the melody and the harmony, and it’s like, if you bring two elements & they pull apart – that creates motion…[I}n life, sometimes, boy, time goes by really fast, and it’s just a ride. And sometimes, every minute is just excruciating because you’re being forced through issues. He has this way of forcing you through little issues.”

Similarly, Bob Brookmeyer, whom Maria Schneider consulted on issues of writing for large bands, declared the jazz theme-solo-theme format dead. He advised her not to write provisions for solos “until you’ve completely exhausted what you have to say.” Brookmeyer admires John Coltrane, but abhors the over-blowing of Coltrane’s acolytes. During his conversation with Reisner he acknowledged two major influences, Count Basie and Witold Lutoslawski. Basie not only brought Brookmeyer into music, he showed him the way out of a miserable adolescence. When he attended a concert of the Basie band in his hometown of Kansas City, Mo. in 1941, “I melted….It was the first… body chill I ever had. I just said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do this.’”

He played for Ratliff Basie’s 1941 recording of the 9:20 Special. Basie “had supernatural powers…He didn’t evince a lot of effort, whereas other people seemed to take music and pound it off the earth - Basie came from under the crust of the earth and through your feet.”

In the early 1980s, Brookmeyer bought all of Ludoslawski’s recordings and scores. Listening to a section of Mstislav Rostropovich’s recording the Cello Concerto in which the woodwinds and harps ascend and descend in 3rds he said, “It’s so lovely, and so subtle…It’s like a rainbow shooting up.” Brookmeyer contacted Lutoslawsyi through a third party to enquire about the possibility of studying with him and received a favorable reply, but he chickened out. (Is it just me, or has Lutoslawski pretty much disappeared from concert programs these days?)

An aside: I find the comments and listening habits of the composers and bandleaders to be particularly interesting (and let’s count Wayne Shorter, Andrew Hill, Bebo Valdes and Guillermo Klein with Schneider and Brookmeyer as composers) as a lot of us have been waiting for the Next Big Thing in jazz to emerge from this conservatory-bred generation of musicians. Never before has the music had this many practitioners with so much technique, theory and history, yet this is the longest that jazz has been without a defining genius or a radical new movement. I have been wondering if this might become a composers’ era.

Bebo Valdes is a historic figure in Afro-Cuban jazz, yet he is better known as the father of the brilliant pianist, Chucho Valdes. His interview is a brief survey of Cuban music history; his discussions of two of the great composers of Cuban music, Ignacio Cervantes and the seminal Ernesto Lecuono, are valuable. Like all pianists, even the classical pianists who know his work, Valdes is in awe of Art Tatum. (Vladimir Horowitz was a fan, as is Phillippe Entremont). On listening to the solo version of Without A Song, recorded in 1955, a year before Tatum’s death, Valdes remarked, “It’s virtuosic in technique – totally classical, with modern harmony. He was the first pianist I ever heard playing modern harmony with heart.”

“When you know classical music”, said Bebo, “you can do what you want to…’Es mejor ser la cabeza de un perro que la cola de un tibaron. It’s better to be in the head of a dog than the tail of a shark’.” You figure it out.

The soloists’ voices are equally strong. Branford Marsalis bemoans a certain absence of soul in today’s young jazz musicians. His surprising opening selections were of Louis Armstrong in collaboration, first with Bing Crosby and then with Jack Teagarten.. Contemporary musicians “are completely devoid of personality,” he said, while Louis was so visual. “The idea that the music that they’re [playing] is supergenius is completely secondary.” As do others in this collection, he complains of the mechanical approach of his students; he employs the recordings of Bessie Smith to teach his instrumentalists how to phrase. While illustrating his point with her Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl, he stated, “Man, you gotta growl, you gotta bend those notes.” Conversely, Marsalis thinks that jazz musicians should more often avail themselves to the resources of classical music, citing how Charlie Parker once quoted in a solo the opening bassoon line from The Rite Of Spring and his own use of the fate motif from Gotterdammerung in his Braggtown recording.

Joshua Redmond was seduced into music by Sonny Rollins’ famous solo on St. Thomas. “[W]hat Sonny showed me was that you could be completely spontaneous and at the same time have this unerring sense of logic and structure.” But it’s Redmonds’ comments on John Coltrane that are worth the price of the book, for he identifies in ‘Trane the sublime, the highest, the Platonic state of art. (This is gratifying to me personally as I have waxed on this theme so often that I have forbidden myself to write any more poems about it.) Those who can allow themselves to submit to the wide open John Coltrane utter gushing phrases of absolute praise. Redmond chose Transition, a late recording of Coltrane’s, when he had become, I believe, an ecstatic dervish after his studies of Sufism and other mystic systems. Redmond said, “as far as a single piece of Coltrane with the classic quartet, it has perhaps the greatest force, impact, feeling of surrender, you know, abandon, devotion…[T]here’s no intro. It’s just, like, bam: here we are. You can’t go any higher. Yet, they keep climbing, and then they come down a little bit, and then they climb again….” He continues with a useful combination of figurative description and musical analysis and then states that, though he is not religious, “[a]t certain times in my life this music has kind of swept me up & transported me to a place where I can sense that there is something greater than the material existence of things. And a fabric that holds the material world together and offers an escape from that world.”*

That, my friends, is what is meant by the sublime, a state of art that is so extremely rare that I doubt that there are ever more than two or three musicians alive at any one time who reach it. Sebastian Bach lived there, the late Beethoven, Coltrane; I can’t think of any today who can claim it, but that just might be my personal limitation.

Altogether, The Jazz Ear is a good and revelatory read. I appreciate the skill with which Ratliff has rendered these conversations; some of these musicians are difficult interviews, either reticent or prone to lapse into unfathomable flights of homemade ontology or epistemology. Others talk with literary precision, so lucid that one feels that every word must be transcribed. Ben Ratliff has made the best of all of them, though some, of course, are better than others. His introductory and contextual remarks are insightful and learned. The result is that The Jazz Ear doesn’t read like a series of newspaper interviews. Well done.

The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music

Ben Ratliff

Times Books

Henry Holt & Co.

235 pps, ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8146-6

Reviewed by A. B. Spellman

Book Review: A Power Greater Than Itself

Not that George Lewis heard it from me, but I have often argued that musicians, particularly jazz musicians, should write more. We have heard their voices and opinions mostly second hand, through interviews with people like me who are not musicians or, at best, through “as told to” autobiographies. With several notable exceptions we seldom get to read their written opinions about the world and times that they have lived in, their music criticism or their musicology.

George E. Lewis has written a different kind of book with A Power Greater Than Itself; different, that is, from any other text that I know on jazz history. This essential book is music history from the inside: inside the birth and evolution of the seminal Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM) inside the biographies of the musicians who comprise it, inside the music that it has made, and the situation of that music inside the racial and economic politics of the world of modern serious music. That is a lot to attempt, but Lewis, who took nearly a decade to complete this work, has accomplished it in admirable fashion. His book is both scholarly and personal: while he has done careful and deep research on the factors, historical and contemporary, that shaped the many themes that he treats in A Power GreaterThan Itself, there is no pretense at objectivity. He loves and values the AACM, its members, and the music that it has made. Some might see a weakness here for Lewis is never critical of these men and women and they are not equally brilliant, as no school of artists can claim to possess uniformly accomplished members, but Lewis is honest about his stance. He is writing about, and often defending, his family.

Industrial Chicago was the central stop for those African Americans who moved north from Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Arkansas in the massive Great Migration of the 1920’s and ‘30s. This is a point of some importance to the author, for he takes great pains to establish that the first generation of AACM members were all born between 1927 and 1932 and thus were a part of, or at least the children of that Migration. Thus he establishes their working class bona fides, which in turn explains the autodidacticism that was the normal way of musical development for jazz musicians before the conservatories drifted into jazz pedagogy in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

The AACM was officially founded in 1965, but its genesis, as with all great movements, is more difficult to nail down. Lewis sets its origins within the context of the fertile but seldom discussed bebop, hardbop, and avant garde mid-century jazz scene in Chicago that produced such important artists as Gene Ammons, Ahmad Jamal, Sun Ra, Wilbur Ware and many others. The ultimate precedent of the AACM was the Clef Club, the cooperative that was organized in the early 20^th century by James Reese Europe and Will Marion Cook, two of the most important American musicians that most readers probably have never heard of. A more proximate model was local 208 of the musicians’ union, the black Chicago local, as the union, save for 802 in New York City, was segregated in those days. It was at 208’s Union Hall that the young Richard Abrams (not yet Muhal) was able to meet and learn from accomplished instrumentalists and composers as he taught himself to be their peer. Union Hall also offered free rehearsal space, a not insignificant factor in the making of the Experimental Band, the unit that assembled most of the musicians who would found the AACM.

The Experimental Band was a remarkable phenomenon. In the early ‘60s, it met most often at the C & C Lounge in the afternoons. The musicians who attended had developed in various ways: many had learned their instruments under stern and dedicated high school band leaders, particularly the heroic Walter Dyatt of DuSable High. Some had gone on to study theory at Woodrow Wilson Junior College with Richard Wang, who introduced them to the systems of Hindemith and the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg et al). Among Wang’s students were such noted jazz modernists and future AACM members as the bassist, Malachi Favors and the saxophonists, Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill. Other participants in the Experimental Band included the late pianist Andrew Hill, the saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarmon, and Eddie Harris; and the percussionist, Jack DeJohnette, to mention only some of the most famous of them. At the center setting artistic direction was the wise young mystic pianist, Muhal Richard Abrams.

A spiritual, unassuming man, Muhal established some principles of freedom that the Experimental Band and it’s members must follow and these became the musical tenets of the AACM: the Band would play only original music, which all participants would be encouraged to compose; musicians would encourage and assist each other in their development; everyone must be musically curious: any and all sources of music were open to exploration. Of contemporary models, Ornette Coleman was by far the most influential for his excision of chord changes from his unique discipline of collective improvisation.

Having seen the New York based Jazz Composers’ Guild fall apart to form again with less black participation as the Jazz Composers’ Orchestra, the charter meeting of the AACM was democratic to a fault. Every issue was debated to exhaustion though Muhal, the undisputed leader, drew the lines when they were needed. Governing principles were adopted that would commit the organization to community service, self-sufficiency, and continual enlargement of the methods and practice of free jazz performance. The AACM would strive for self-sufficiency in finances, management, promotion, and bookings. Gigs would rotate among the members. Strict standards of professional behavior were set. A school was planned for youth and others that would eventually feed new musicians into the organization. Dues were set at $1, which members sometimes had a hard time making.

In describing the making of the AACM, Lewis painstaking makes a corollary with the Society for Private Music Performance that Arnold Schoenberg founded in 1918. This describes an important value of this book: George Lewis will not allow the music and musicians of the AACM to be left out of the discussion of modern serious music, to be limited to conversations about jazz. Though an early concert entitled Imperfections In A Given Space which had Joseph Jarman performing with John Cage left Cage unimpressed, Lewis considers the modernist master to be a peer, and he pursues this point of peerage when he writes about funding, criticism, precedents, and other themes. He rightly believes that twenty-first century “experimental” (a very unsatisfying term) concert music must include practitioners from the jazz tradition.

The first recordings of AACM members were sonic disasters. Engineers who were accustomed to a standard jazz format of a group statement of the tune followed by a sequence of solos and a closing recapitulation, all in a fixed dynamic range, had no idea of what to do with the multiple tools that even a trio might employ, including the dozens, if not hundreds of “little” instruments that the collective so valued. There were instruments that the musicians had made and found objects that made useful sounds. Dynamics might change several times in a short period, and all of the musicians might not be playing at the same volume. Solos were deemphasized in favor of group improvisation.

The concerts were nearly as theatrical as they were musical. Joseph Jarman’s extended composition Bridge Piece featured his band performing against a recording of itself playing the same work. Any errors that the musicians made added texture, and the improvised sections were entirely different. A woman moved through the audience wrapping some in aluminum foil while others strolled around blaring a top forty radio station. Other listeners were given sacks to put over their heads and then moved around and told to sit and stand. All this plus a juggler and a tumbler flipping over people in a disco setting with film on the walls.

The collective developed a loyal following in Chicago during the ‘60s, mostly among young white people, but also with a reliable base in the African American community. Their reviews varied as the jazz press was firmly and at times acrimoniously split over avant garde music. Aware as they were of a greater appreciation of modernism in Europe, many of the more prominent AACM members tried Paris. The first were the quartet of Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, the trumpeter Lester Bowie, and Malachi Favors, important musicians all. They would become the brilliant Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC). (Famadou Don Moye joined the band in 1970). The AEC flourished in Paris to the degree that artists can flourish while staying broke. With their faux tribal makeup, theatrics, and musical creativity, audiences loved them, and critics couldn’t praise “l’ecole de Chicago” highly enough. The drummer Steve McCall was there; Braxton would follow with the violinist Leroy Jenkins and the trumpet player Leo Smith. This was a mighty collection of artists who were wide open with youthful creativity. They were a big draw at festivals.

And they were different from the New York avant garde, which emphasized hard, intense blowing. Lewis writes that the AACM players changed mood quickly: “a quiet, sustained ‘spiritual’ texture offered by one musician might be interrupted by an ‘ah-ooh-gah’ horn or a field hollar from another. A New Orleans style brass fanfare would be quickly dunked in a roiling sea of tuned trash cans.”

During the ‘seventies many of the stalwarts of the first generation of the AACM drifted to New York City where they found a layered, combative musical scene. Uptown (actually, midtown) was for the symphony, opera, and chamber music. Downtown housed the younger composers and jazz. Funding went uptown, a situation that several jazz modernists, black and white, challenged in 1971 at a “play in” at the Guggenheim Foundation protesting racism and artistic narrowness in grantmaking.

Furthermore, the downtown scene subdivided into factions, a waste of leverage and resources. The best development for new jazz was the rise of the Loft Jazz scene, led first by the saxophonists Ornette Coleman and Sam Rivers, who hosted concerts of free jazz in their lofts. Other musicians followed. This was a vital and exciting movement for a while, and some excellent and important recordings survive as evidence. Many AACM members were prominent in these performances, but even so they felt that the New Yorkers saw them as interlopers.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, a second generation of AACM artists led the organization including Lewis, the trumpet player Douglas Ewart, the percussionist Kahil El Zabar, and Steve and Aqua Colson, saxophonist and singer. The school was at capacity and the concerts continued. The New York members, many of whom were by then commanding large fees, formed their own chapter. Eventually a certain stress developed between the two units as one might expect, though eventually a measure of comity prevailed.

A kind of 19^th century positivist imperative to isolate phenomena into fixed categories that can be observed independently still holds in contemporary criticism, and the AACM artists have suffered from this balkanism since the ‘eighties, when several of them received commissions to write for ensembles that are associated with Western classical music. One critic wrote, “one of the hazards this music may be facing is the ingestion of a fatal dose of root devouring Western intellectual hunger.” AACM composers were attacked from the left and right sides of the esthetic-political cultural divide as lacking authenticity. But it seems to me that in the communication age “authenticity” is a shaky premise to argue in any art form that can’t be defined as “folk”, and even there the ethnomusicologists often struggle with it.

Lewis’ defense is studied, tightly argued, and fair. He is never captious, never goes for anybody’s jugular, even when they have gone for his. Duke Ellington is with him in this fight, for that grandmaster always strove to make music that is “beyond category.” Or, as he put it, “if it sounds good, it is good.” The author offers a sound summation of the bilateral influences of jazz and Western classical music. (Though if I may be permitted to cavil, for many reasons, I wish that he had chosen a work other than Ernst Krenek’s opera Jonny Spielt Auf as an example of a jazz influenced classical composition. Darius Milhaud’s La Creation Du Monde would have been a much more sympathetic selection.) He discusses how African-American composers who wrote in classical forms included jazz elements, and how jazz musicians have historically paid attention to useful theoretical advances in Western music. He finds jazz in Minimalism and sees a more organic and evolutionary movement toward extended composition in the AACM than in the Third Stream movement of the ‘fifties. Above all, George Lewis considers the AACM musicians, though soundly grounded in canonical jazz, to be uniquely prepared to expand the conception, even the definition of composition for they have been trained all of their musical lives, even as children entering the AACM school, to begin and end with composition, and to approach it by giving honor and respect to all forms of music making from anywhere in the world. This is sound argument, not done justice by my precis, and any riposte should be as thoughtful.

The postmodern ‘80s and ‘90s were unkind to the AACM. There was an economic and esthetic retrenchment as the record companies, after the success of the trumpet prodigy Wynton Marsalis, went for the “young lions”, who were decidedly mainstream in their music making. The new musicians were out of the conservatories, taught for the most part by mainstream musicians, and were more standard in their playing. The new fledgling jazz institutions, museums and repertory orchestras, looked backwards. The AACM artists still find work, but they are less often seen as central to the conversations on where jazz is going.

The last chapter, Transition (read “death”) and Reflections, is poignant. Beginning with the funeral of the saxophonist John Stubblefield at St. Peters, affectionately called the Jazz Church, it tenderly tells of the deaths of AACM members. The last story is of the brilliant Leroy Jenkins who in his last hours awoke and joked to those at his bed side that at his funeral he wanted “improvisation… and white horses.” Then the last time he regained consciousness he said, “Well, I’m ready. Where are the horses?” We should all ride out so well.

A Power Greater Than Itself is a good read though it does possess a few bumps. Don’t be daunted by Lewis’ threat in the introduction to write in the kind of Post Deconstruction academic prose that has denuded so much of art and literary criticism of elegance in the last three decades. There actually is very little of that kind of writing here, and when it does appear it is quite accessible. A strong editorial hand could have eliminated some of the repetition and smoothed out those points at which the reader can recognize the fact that the writer has been away from the text for an extended time. These are small complaints though; George Lewis is telling an interesting and important story here and telling it well. Anyone who is interested in modern serious music will learn from and enjoy this outstanding book.

A Power Greater Than Itself

The AACM and American Experimental Music

George E. Lewis

University Of Chicago Press

676 pages; $35.00