Pub Date : 2018-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2019.1679857
Fumi Tomita
ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to show how Charlie Haden’s solo improvisation on “Irene” is a manifestation of his spiritual beliefs. My interpretive analysis demonstrates that he took advantage of the unaccompanied setting to create an improvisation complete with a detailed, solidly conceived structure that was improvised in the moment. This solo has also become a perfect representation of what Haden was striving for musically, a search for his own distinctively American improvisational language, that blends his background in country/hillbilly music and his identity as a bassist in an African American-based art form jazz, and finding a common space in the blues. This article also explores how his spiritual beliefs manifest themselves in every aspect of his musicality including his technique, his equipment, and his sound.
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Pub Date : 2018-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2019.1682638
Matthias Heyman
ABSTRACT Throughout his career, Duke Ellington (1899–1974) has been partial to the deep sounds of the bass, as evidenced by records ranging from “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” (1926) to “Portrait of Wellman Braud” (1970). He always made sure he had the finest bassists at his disposal and used them to good advantage, not merely as accompanists or soloists, but also by having them provide counterpoint, double melodic lines, add percussive effects, and so forth. It can even be argued that although he did not play the string bass, Ellington was instrumental to its development. This article discusses the compositional devices and strategies Duke used to explore new approaches to the bass function between 1925 and 1941, and reveals how he in the process helped define its role in jazz.
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Pub Date : 2018-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2019.1679858
Vic Hobson
ABSTRACT This article explores how two early New Orleans bass players, George “Pops” Foster and Ed “Montudi” Garland, used countermelodies to construct their basslines, and how the principles they used to construct their lines were rooted in the voice leading of barbershop harmony. Their note choices are explored in relation to the blues and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”
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Pub Date : 2018-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2019.1701063
Adam Booker
ABSTRACT While it is no secret that many early jazz recordings featured the tuba as the low-end instrument of choice, something seems to be missing from the standard pedagogy in regards to jazz double bass. The double bass had been treated, it seems, with a great deal of speculation as to its true role in early jazz performance practice. In light of this, there is a pressing need for hard research into the performance practices of the early jazz bassists. This article will outline the various ways in which the most notable jazz bassists of the era employed those techniques, with particular attention to the works of Wellman Braud, Steve Brown, and Bill Johnson, as well as to highlight several examples from after the early jazz period which directly reflect the influence of traditional New Orleans style performance practices.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2019.1625235
Ken Prouty
There are probably as many ways to think about jazz as there are, well, people who are thinking about jazz. Musicologists, theorists, cultural historians, sociologists, and individuals in many other disciplines bring their expertise to bear on the music, providing a rich chorus of scholarly and critical voices. The articles in this issue of Jazz Perspectives reflect such approaches, coming at the music from widely divergent perspectives. In the first article, Dean Reynolds examines some particular developments in the contemporary jazz scene, particularly with respect to the use of electronic effects more commonly associated with popular genres such as rap and electronic dance music. Reynolds suggests that such developments, spearheaded by artists such as Remy Le Bouef, Robert Glasper, and Aiden Carroll, to name a few, reflect what he terms a “recording-oriented” aesthetic (as distinct from an emphasis on live performance). Reynolds places these artists at the forefront of a movement which calls into question basic ideas about the role of production in jazz. Following this, Tobin Chodos contributes a deeply historicized look at the different ways to conceptualize the “blues scale” in jazz writing. Beginning in the 1930s, Chodos spotlights the ways in which scholars, performers, and composers have grappled with a theoretical concept that is at once ubiquitous in jazz improvisation, but which seemingly defies easy description. It was, as Chodos argues, the emergence of major jazz pedagogues such as Jamey Aebersold in the 1960s that would prove to the catalyst for a commonly accepted blues scalar concept in jazz theory and pedagogy. Our third and final article in this issue comes to us from Vietnam. Stan B. H. TanTangbau brings us the story of Quyêǹ Văn Minh, saxophonist and pioneering figure in Vietnamese jazz. Tan-Tangbau centers Minh’s voice in this narrative, but also provides important cultural and historical perspectives. The resulting narrative is a fascinating portrait of one artist’s quest to bring jazz into the public eye within the context of a nation that was emerging first from colonial domination, and then a devastating war. Minh’s story ought to be considered as a seminal case study in the intersections between jazz and particular local and national histories, and Tan-Tangbau’s work represents an important contribution to the increasingly globally-focused field of jazz studies. This issue also features a review essay by Rashida Braggs, on Carol Bash’s documentary devoted to pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams. And as always, we welcome your own contributions to these conversations, and to the growing, complex conversation that is contemporary jazz studies.
思考爵士乐的方式可能和思考爵士乐的人一样多。音乐学家，理论家，文化历史学家，社会学家和许多其他学科的个人将他们的专业知识应用于音乐，提供了丰富的学术和批评的声音。本期《爵士乐视角》的文章反映了这样的方法，从广泛不同的角度来看待音乐。在第一篇文章中，Dean Reynolds考察了当代爵士场景的一些特殊发展，特别是关于电子效果的使用，这些电子效果通常与流行类型(如说唱和电子舞曲)有关。雷诺兹认为，这种由雷米·勒布夫、罗伯特·格拉斯珀和艾登·卡罗尔等艺术家带头的发展，反映了他所说的“以录音为导向”的美学(与强调现场表演截然不同)。雷诺兹将这些艺术家置于一场运动的前沿，这场运动对爵士乐中制作角色的基本观念提出了质疑。在此之后，托宾·乔多斯对爵士乐写作中概念化“蓝调音阶”的不同方式进行了深刻的历史化研究。从20世纪30年代开始，Chodos聚焦于学者，表演者和作曲家如何努力解决一个理论概念，这个概念在爵士乐即兴创作中无处不在，但似乎难以描述。正如乔多斯所说，20世纪60年代出现的主要爵士教育家，如杰米·埃伯索德(Jamey Aebersold)，将成为爵士理论和教育学中普遍接受的蓝调标量概念的催化剂。本期的第三篇也是最后一篇文章来自越南。Stan B. H. TanTangbau为我们带来Quyêǹ越南爵士乐萨克斯演奏家和先驱人物v Minh的故事。《唐包》在叙述中以明的声音为中心，但也提供了重要的文化和历史视角。由此产生的叙述是一幅迷人的肖像，描绘了一位艺术家在一个国家首先摆脱殖民统治，然后经历了毁灭性的战争的背景下，将爵士乐带入公众视野的追求。Minh的故事应该被认为是爵士乐与特定地方和国家历史之间交叉的开创性案例研究，而Tan-Tangbau的工作代表了对日益全球化的爵士乐研究领域的重要贡献。这期杂志还刊登了一篇拉什达·布拉格的评论文章，评论卡罗尔·巴什关于钢琴家和作曲家玛丽·卢·威廉姆斯的纪录片。一如既往，我们欢迎你对这些对话，以及对当代爵士乐研究中日益增长的、复杂的对话做出自己的贡献。
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Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2019.1616871
Stan B. H. Tan-Tangbau, Quyền Văn Minh
ABSTRACT Written in the form of a collaborative narrative, this paper is an account of the live concert at the Hà Nội Opera House on 12 April 1994, an important chapter in the story of Quyền Văn Minh and jazz in modern day Vietnam. Quyền Văn Minh had earlier brought jazz to the public sphere in socialist Vietnam with two groundbreaking concerts in 1988 and 1989. For this solo concert in 1994, Quyền Văn Minh premiered three of his original jazz compositions. Each tune was inspired by the sounds of different ethnic folk music Minh heard during his travels as a musical cadre in socialist Vietnam during the 1970s and 1980s. Minh wrote original melodies and made room for improvization in his compositions to tell the stories he had in mind with his music. With this performance, Minh stamped his mark as the pioneer bona fide jazz musician in the early Đổi Mới years of Vietnam. More significantly, a new genre of sounds in the form of Vietnamese jazz was born that evening. This paper is part of a larger book project on the life story of Quyền Văn Minh and the story of jazz in Vietnam under the socialist state.
本文以合作叙事的形式，记录了1994年4月12日在胡志明Nội歌剧院举行的现场音乐会，这是Quyền胡志明和现代越南爵士乐的重要篇章。Quyền varchin Minh在1988年和1989年举办了两场开创性的音乐会，将爵士乐带入了社会主义越南的公共领域。在1994年的独奏会上，Quyền胡志明首演了他的三首原创爵士乐作品。每首曲子的灵感都来自于Minh在20世纪70年代和80年代作为一名音乐干部在社会主义越南旅行时听到的不同民族民间音乐的声音。他写了原创的旋律，并在他的作品中留下了即兴创作的空间，以讲述他在音乐中想到的故事。通过这次演出，Minh在越南早期Đổi Mới年成为真正的爵士音乐家的先驱。更重要的是，当晚一种新的音乐流派——越南爵士乐诞生了。这篇文章是一个更大的书籍项目的一部分，该项目是关于Quyền v Minh的生活故事和社会主义国家下越南爵士乐的故事。
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Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2019.1625233
Rashida K. Braggs
Why now? What does Carol Bash’s documentary of Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981) add that we don’t already know about the incomparable composer, arranger and pianist? These were the first questions that came to mind upon learning of the film Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band. In 1990, Joanne Burke produced the first documentary on Williams, Mary Lou Williams: Music on my Mind. Burke’s filmic investigation presented new photos, interview footage and personal video that created an intimate picture of Williams and showed some of the dynamics of her working relationship with manager Father O’Brien. The film’s most prominent narrative was that it was very important for Williams to promote the value of jazz, to teach its history, and to show how jazz was both an important American music as well as always already a spiritual music. Burke’s film opened the door for more critical scholarship in written form. In 1999, Linda Dahl wrote the first seminal biography on the musician, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. With the breadth of space the book form offers, Dahl’s account contributed more depth to Williams’ relationships and encounters, such as the not-always-so-rosy time Williams had in Europe in 1952–1954 as she struggled to collect money for her return to the U.S. Tammy Kernodle offered another account of Williams’ life just five years later with Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams in 2004. The book added salient interviews and a useful selected discography. Kernodle’s work complemented Dahl’s, showing also the challenges to surviving in the jazz industry–especially as we see Williams’s 1956 letter to the IRS in which she says she has been “broke since 1947.” Despite her dire financial situation, both biographies show how Williams mentored musicians, helped them rehabilitate, and took care of relatives. This is a perspective in which the books excel but which both films show cursory attention. So then to return to one question: what does Carol Bash offer that is new to the legacy of Mary Lou Williams? Bash interweaves the rich (if still not plentiful) jazz scholarship with the archival material on Mary Lou Williams. Burke’s film created an archive of materials now housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Throughout the film Bash draws on their work as well as the vast Mary LouWilliams collection at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, which has stored everything from personal letters to financial records since 1981. Bash’s film works almost like a scholarly argument, illustrating an artifact from the historical archive in one scene, sharing William’s own words read in voice over or illustrated through video in the next moment, then featuring a cast of jazz scholars who share their perspectives. Bash also joins these historical materials with the present by showing a range of Williams’s performances in conjunction with contemporary performances by Geri Allen (a fitting choi
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Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2019.1616872
Asher Tobin Chodos
ABSTRACT Today, the blues scale is familiar to most people who have studied music formally. Although there has been since 1967 a broad consensus as to what that scale is, for the first half of the twentieth century there was actually a good deal of disagreement on that point. A close look at the history of the blues scale reveals that disagreements over its content are bound up with widespread ambiguity concerning its epistemological status. This paper seeks to illuminate that epistemological confusion, proceeding in two ways: first, it historicizes today’s blues scale by laying out the main blues scales proposed between 1938 and 1967, attending to the role these scales played in the institutionalization of jazz education; second, it demonstrates that these scales differ not just in content and attitude but also in epistemological orientation. Because of its social overtones and political implications, disagreements over the nature (and even existence) of the blues scale have frequently been heated. This paper argues that these disagreements derive in part from a persistent epistemological confusion that has characterized much of the discourse surrounding this musical idea.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2019.1616873
Dean S. Reynolds
ABSTRACT Jazz musicians have increasingly incorporated advanced recording techniques like overdubbing, sampling, and virtual instrument programming into their creative processes. While some of these techniques are not new to jazz, their recent use is often distinguished by transparency – musicians make little effort to conceal their use and may, in fact, foreground it – and, relatedly, by the extent to which they have been accepted as legitimate creative practices. Indeed, many musicians identify with music “production” as it is practiced in contemporaneous recording-oriented genres like hip-hop, electronic music, and pop. Further, the ascendency of this type of production in jazz has been concomitant with new approaches to text, melody, rhythm, timbre, and form. In this article, I identify several technologies and techniques of production in jazz, and I organize related stylistic trends under the frameworks of song, beat, and sound, concepts drawn from the discourses of musicians that have deliberate valences to other genres of production-based music; I also briefly consider how these stylistic trends accommodate the improvised solo. Ultimately, I identify a recording-oriented aesthetic of jazz, which runs contrary to a dominant jazz aesthetic that privileges traditionally “live” performance, wherein recording is figured largely as a means of “capturing” otherwise unmediated performances.
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Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2018.1528995
James Aldridge
ABSTRACT Controversial pianist and pedagogue Lennie Tristano (1919–1978) stands out as one of jazz’s most polarizing figures. His color-blind artistic ideology, Eurological improvisatory approach, and repeated condemnations of established African American artists problematizes jazz’s Afrocentric narrative while undermining his own canonic relevance. Time and again he challenged the idiomatic importance of figures like Coleman, Davis, Rollins, and Coltrane, unconvinced of their musics’ value and skeptical of their abilities to engage in “honest” music-making. These criticisms were informed, I argue, by unorthodox interpretive criteria largely overlooked by Tristano scholars to date. Here I assert that Tristano’s critical toolkit was comprised of analytical devices inspired by Neo-Freudian psychoanalytic theories of neurotic human selfhood. I also propose that his improvisational philosophy was informed by Freudian psychoanalytic concepts; and his students’ by the works of Neo-Freudian bio-psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. To do so, I identify public statements, published writings, interview responses, and criticisms by and from members of the Tristano School that indicate a collective familiarity with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, an interest in its musico-improvisational implications, and evidence of active attempts to incorporate it into their own improvisational approaches.
{"title":"Tristano’s Reichian Theory of Improvisation: Jazz of the Unconscious Mind","authors":"James Aldridge","doi":"10.1080/17494060.2018.1528995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2018.1528995","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Controversial pianist and pedagogue Lennie Tristano (1919–1978) stands out as one of jazz’s most polarizing figures. His color-blind artistic ideology, Eurological improvisatory approach, and repeated condemnations of established African American artists problematizes jazz’s Afrocentric narrative while undermining his own canonic relevance. Time and again he challenged the idiomatic importance of figures like Coleman, Davis, Rollins, and Coltrane, unconvinced of their musics’ value and skeptical of their abilities to engage in “honest” music-making. These criticisms were informed, I argue, by unorthodox interpretive criteria largely overlooked by Tristano scholars to date. Here I assert that Tristano’s critical toolkit was comprised of analytical devices inspired by Neo-Freudian psychoanalytic theories of neurotic human selfhood. I also propose that his improvisational philosophy was informed by Freudian psychoanalytic concepts; and his students’ by the works of Neo-Freudian bio-psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. To do so, I identify public statements, published writings, interview responses, and criticisms by and from members of the Tristano School that indicate a collective familiarity with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, an interest in its musico-improvisational implications, and evidence of active attempts to incorporate it into their own improvisational approaches.","PeriodicalId":39826,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17494060.2018.1528995","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48196125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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