April 5, 2009: Half a century of jazz experience

Recently I wrote about how, where the making of music is concerned, influence can be a two-way street.  The example I posed to make my point concerned the relationship between Ludwig van Beethoven and Joseph Haydn, but I have also written about a similar relationship between George Gershwin and Maurice Ravel.  Much of twentieth-century music actually benefitted from this "two-way street" relationship between what was called "classical music" and what was called "jazz."  John Coltrane used to practice his saxophone by trying to play along with recordings of recent classical compositions;  and there is good reason to believe that his study of the opening passage of Béla Bartók's "Concerto for Orchestra" seeded his own musical ideas that would later flower into "Giant Steps."  In the other direction I have used my blog to cultivate personal fantasies about how composers other than Ravel responded to exposure to jazz.  Thus, I have imagined Igor Stravinsky sitting in the Hot Club de France in Paris listening to Stéphane Grappelli, gnashing his teeth in envy because he could never figure out how to write music that sounded that way.  In the real world, on the other hand, Karlheinz Stockhausen played jazz piano in clubs as a way to pay for his education between 1944 and 1947.  He may later have tried to bury this particular "anxiety of influence" under his own personal theories of composition;  but it is hard to listen to the recordings of Licht (his cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week) without thinking of jazz performers like Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and Jimmy Knepper.

This raises the interesting question of whether or not the "moment" style of composition, for which Stockhausen is best known, was a product of how Stockhausen listened to (or, for that matter, made his own) jazz.  However, at a time when the "serious" composers of the fifties were marveling at Stockhausen's experiments and innovations, the jazz world was developing its own take on the "moment" style.  Ornette Coleman was one of the first to move in this direction;  and last night at Herbst Theatre I discovered that Ahmad Jamal has now cultivated his own voice within the "moment" style.  In both cases I have SFJAZZ to thank for providing opportunities to hear these jazz masters.

In my student days Jamal was known almost exclusively for "Poinciana" and what the SFJAZZ program book described as its "light, dancing sound."  Fifty years on Jamal is still playing "Poinciana," but in a far more deconstructed way.  By assuming that we all remember "how it used to go," he can now extract individual "moments" from the tune, putting each one under a microscope, so to speak, and examining it from a variety of different angles before moving on to another "moment."  Hearing Jamal do this with a familiar tune helps us to hear this same moment-based approach to his more recent work, in which we are less familiar with what his sources are.  It will probably help me go back to listening to Stockhausen, even when his sources may have been based on abstract inventions rather than past music-making experiences.

Jamal was accompanied by a three-piece rhythm section.  James Johnson's drum set was supplemented by a more diverse (and relatively Latin) percussion section played by Manolo Badrena.  James Cammack played bass.  However, there were not the usual breaks for extended rhythm solos that we tend to associate with a jazz performance.  Jamal's emphasis was on the ensemble as a whole and on an integrated composition, rather than a song on which everyone gets an improvisatory take.  To some extent this, too, represents more of an influence from chamber music than from the tradition of jazz combos.  Thus, while the program book emphasized Jamal's influence on Jacky Terrasson, Benny Green, and Eric Reed;  it is the way in which Jamal himself continues to be influenced by music practices coming at him from all directions that most confirms his NEA Jazz Master status.  Through Jamal we learn to listen to more than jazz;  we learn to listen to the broader scope of how music is being made today.