Jazz Riffs

 

 

Some Dynaxioms with the word "jazz" in it:

Jazz sounds like art, but it's really more like a science. 

[Bucky Fuller] remained capable of drawing important new admirers. In France, he met the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who had pioneered the art of free jazz. Coleman had first seen him speak in the fifties, and he was reminded of his approach to music as Fuller demonstrated the properties of the tetrahedron. “He manipulated the model, turned it inside out, made it dance—but the corners never touched,” Coleman remembered, and he composed a piece for string quartet and drums inspired by Fuller, whom he described as his “number one hero.”  Inventor of the Future (442)

My definition of improvisation: taking set structures and using developed skills in rhythm, harmony, and melody to create organized sounds that comport with the set structures in a listener's brain. When you define (or create a Definition for) something it helps you understand what's involved. Jazz uses 'instructions' (the 'Head') so the players can create a definition. But they are simple instructions, or no more complicated than necessary. Anything more is less defined.

Jazz sounds like complex noodling, but all improvisations are a form of complex noodling.

Jazz will always be joined at the hip with technology because it does what any technology does: extend.

Coltrane was one of the bridges from jazz to rock. His approach was mostly horizontal.

In jazz, musicians typically know the 'operating system' of music; Individual pieces of music are just 'software'.

Jazz can sometimes be 'melodizing' a harmony.

Blues didn't come from jazz, it reversed it, at least harmonically.

Jazz is about emulation: either the voice is emulating an instrument or vice-versa.

Since jazz is known to be a vertical phenomenon (with the harmony informing melody), it can also be completely linear, based on artificial scales or modes, and letting the spontaneous counterpoints suggest chords. It's like the solo sax player on the street playing over changes: you can hear the changes based on melodic landmarks. If you set it up a composition as pandiatonic, anything can work, and you don't have to be so concerned about the vertical implications. Harmolodics was similar but more dissonant and cryptic

Free will is a kind of 'jazz'--you improvise over a set of 'Changes', but you can't change the Changes.

Master jazz musicians know how to control the tiny space between listening and playing.

The world was always a form of jazz; It just wasn't always played that way.

It is assumed Jackson Pollock was inspired by jazz--which is an idea (or meme) that has become almost a fact, such that Pollocks are now the visual representation of Ornette Coleman. But Ornette's first record was released in 1959, 3 years after Pollock's death. 

The strength of an idea is in its ability to be both transformed and expanded, yet retain its main 'blueprint". This is how jazz developed--from a continuous transformation of seed ideas. The blueprint for jazz is a reduction to only chords and melody. Artists also do this: The sculptor Tony Smith was known to make drawings of sculptures after the models were made, or even after they were installed. Even if the idea has no seed, an artificial seed can be made.

Jazz is about 'shortcuts'. Jazz probably has more heuristics, a prime example being the chord symbol.

Jazz learned from Classical music via African music.

We must continue to nurture jazz, and not let it fade. It was the first style of music that had a synergy between the body and mind, and you could access any point on the axis to make something new, without reflexively creating sub-genres in the service of fashion.

Jazz is sometimes viewed as elitist, but it is still essentially a form of roots music.

Jazz was inevitable; it was only a matter of changing some rules. 

It's more difficult to be sly with irony in instrumental music. Abstract Expressionism sometimes gets conflated with the freedom in jazz, when in fact jazz improvisation can have all kinds of rules and constraints. Jackson Pollock paintings had the primary constraint of avoiding representation, but jazz can't avoid melody, even if dissonant.

The jazz avant-garde was partly an attempt to break free of the grid of tonal music, but at the same time created a grid of its own. As Charles Mingus once said, "You have to improvise from something--you can't improvise from nothing". Inevitably, you need some type of map eventually, as the mind is wont of them. Even when structure is replaced with Dionysian spirit, we very often find ourselves inside different boundaries based upon exclusion and avoidance of the status quo; and find ourselves again ensnared by rules, even when the whole point was to get rid of the rules.

Ultimately art gets defined by boundaries. It's the boundaries of something that give it a unique identity. If there were no boundaries it would be more possible for it to sound like something other than jazz, but perhaps that's the point.