Here's a pretty good but not quite good enough explanation of the importance of Kind of Blue. There are a couple of inaccuracies.

The author, Fred Kaplan, states that a "scale" consists of the 12 notes in an octave. Well, that would be the chromatic scale--but most music is not based on the chromatic scale but on the seven notes of a major or minor scale. All the "modes" are selections of seven of these twelve notes.

But Kaplan never explains exactly what a "mode" is, so the concept of "modal improvisation" is going to remain vague for someone who doesn't already know this. His contrast between chord changes and modal improv does not really work, because he doesn't quite put his fiinger on the different feeling created by exploring one scale in open-ended fashion for many measures.

He doesn't mention Miles's previous recordings with the Coltrane, Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, Red Garland quintets. Kind of Blue didn't just appear "out of the blue." He doesn't explain what makes MIles Davis's playing so distinctive, or how the contrast between Miles and 'Trane / Cannon is so effective.

He writes as though modal jazz was the first significant development after bebop, ignoring Miles's own invention of "cool" jazz, the innovations of Mingus, Tristano... Hard bop... Even Ornette had already developed his distinctive approach by '59. Seen in its context, KOB is just one postbop innovation among many others. It is not at all true that after the death of Bird people were waiting around to see if there was going to be anything else happening. It already was a happening time for jazz. KOB is just one high note in an extraordinarily rich period stretching from the invention of bop (early 40s) to the death of Trane in 67.

I suppose it's good enough for a non-jazz audience, explaining the contributions of George Russell and Bill Evans. Maybe it will get the few people who don't already know this music to listen. I've seen Kaplan do a lot better, though.

I never had a good relationship to fusion when fusion was most popular--a period that coincided with my own teenage years. Now i can appreciate certain aspects of it more because I no longer feel resentful that it watered down jazz just at the moment when i was coming of age as a jazz fan. I remember going to a Hubert Laws concert in college and being very disappointed by the absence of improvisation and the willingness of the audience to applaud the merely familiar, the exact riffs off the records.

To understand fusion, I think we have to think of it as one of the four main movements in jazz between bop and the neo-classicism of Wynton Marsalis in the 1980s. Remember that Wynton began his career reacting against fusion (and free jazz to a lesser extent) and reviving hard bop.

Let's look at these four movements, more or less in chronological order:

Cool jazz:

Key figures: Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Lennie Tristano and his school, Bill Evans, Gerry Mulligan, saxophonists influenced by Lester Young.
Relation to popular music, culture / hybridity: This movement had its moments of greatest popularity in the success of Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, and Stan Getz. It represents the fusion of "white" and "black" forms of jazz in an experimental context. It can be seen as both cerebral or as quasi-popular.

Hard bop:

Key figures: Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Max Roach and Clifford Brown group, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley. Other Blue Note artists.
Relation to popular music and culture / hybridity: Fusion of jazz with gospel and R&B.

Free jazz:

Key figures: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, etc...
Relation to popular music and culture / hybridity: intersection with Afro-centrism and the black arts movement; popularity of Coltrane. Ornette's use of electronic, fusion oriented bands. Beginnings of "world music."

Fusion:

Key Figures: Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea--many other alumni of Miles's bands... Chuck Mangione
Relation to popular music and culture / hybridity: the entire style was based on a fusion with certain elements of rock, especially in terms of rhythm and use of electronic instruments. Collaboration between black, Latino, and white musicians is the norm.

These brief description suggest several conclusions:

*** the interaction of jazz with popular music is a constant, present in all four movements. The bluesiness of hard bop should not be seen as alien to the funkiness of fusion. Think of Joe Zawinul's hit "Mercy, Mercy," which he wrote for Cannonball, and his later hit "Birdland," which he wrote for Weather Report.

*** Jazz is always a hybrid music, always responsive to other styles of music.

*** Miles Davis was heavily involved in just about everything during this period (1950s-70s), except for free jazz. Of course, there are freer influences in Miles's music too, especially in collaborations with Wayne Shorter. Many musicians of the period crossed boundaries among these four styles, though none as much as Miles. We've got to see them as overlapping both in time and in terms of the musicians involved.

*** The neoclassical revival of the 80s chose ONE out of four interesting developments of the preceding period to champion. Jazz-rock fusion and cool jazz were too "white," or too hybridized, for Wynton's taste. You get people like Crouch saying that Bill Evans couldn't swing or play the blues.

My first post is up at Arcade.

A nice post on elitism, though I'm not sure that's really what it's about.

I ran into Kyle Waugh and Cyrus Console in Lawrence a few days ago. They were hard at work in a café downtown editing Ken Irby's complete poetry, which will be a magnificent volume when it appears later this year or early 2010.

The winner of the Lorca giveaway is...

Bob Basil

AND

Tom Beckett

I have decided to give away two copies this month. After all, what better to spend my royalty check on than additional copies of the book? Basil is a friend of long standing (early 80s) with a strong web presence (basil.ca) and has already been generously promoting the book. Beckett is an esteemed poetic collaborator (see the poem "Hurricane Season" that the two of us wrote together) and has corrected his Spanish grammar. I couldn't really decide between these two fine individuals, especially since they both expressed interest in the last giveaway in July.

I may do the next giveaway in September, or just wait until October. Stay tuned. Pretty much, if you enter the contest you have a pretty good chance of getting the book.

Winners, please send me a current mailing address.

I think Skip Gates should just produce the "long form" of his Harvard i.d. and put this whole controversy to rest.

[MOVING TO FRONT}

Time for me to give away another copy of Apo Lorca to any interested person in North America who gives me the best reason, in my own subjective but infallible judgment, why s/he should receive a copy of the book. Contest closes 11:59 p.m. central time on August 5. If you ask for someone else and not yourself, make sure that person actually wants the book and can send me a postal address soon after I announce the winner on August 6.

Use comment box to give me your reason.

I got my Sonny Rollins tickets today. I really want Julia to see Sonny play. It might be her last chance to see someone of that historic stature. I have seen him before, but I think he is still playing extremely well based some recent things I've seen / heard on his podcasts.

This goes beyond teh stupid. Lets look at these criteria for a moment.
To count as Art Music, a work must meet ALL* the following criteria:

It must be written for acoustic instruments and/or unamplified voices (Mechanical and electr(on)ic devices may be employed for textural effect, but not as the main 'instrument'. Technical amplification, for recording purposes or to enhance performances in arenas of poor acoustics, are not part of the composer's effects or intention, and are not counted.)

It must be the original work of a single author (Texts notwithstanding. If a composer dies before finishing a work, its completion by another composer, if based on detailed notes left by the dead composer, may be considered a kind of 'amalgam' art work.)

It must be preserved and transmitted as a score, written in orthodox musical notation, alterable only by the composer (If the composer dies before completion, elaboration of the score may be made by another composer, though only of the dead composer's notes. 'Orthodox' means readily intelligible to professional and proficient amateur musicians.)

It must acknowledge, build on or work from a musical heritage based on structure and tonality and its precursors

It must be conceived for performance according to the instructions and faithful to the intent of the composer (Performers should follow the score precisely, in as much detail as the composer provides; improvisations and ornamentations are permitted where the composer allows or expects, according to practice or tradition.)

It must be musically and intellectually complex, coherent and sophisticated (i.e. display and encode, in various permutations, articulation, originality, discursiveness, subtlety, intricacy, novelty, contrast, suspense, symbolism, logic, humour, passion etc through the use, in various combinations, of advanced harmony, modulation, variation, variance of musical phrase length and metre, periodicity, through-composition, counterpoint, polyphony etc.)

It will therefore:

Require a high level of musicianship (concentration, insight, accomplishment) on the part of performers, who must draw on musical education, personal experience and imagination, knowledge of a work's idiom, and the accumulated body of historical performance practices (even for a merely competent performance)

Require relatively high levels of concentration, understanding and competence from listeners for non-superficial appreciation and comprehension

Be susceptible to detailed musicological (formal) analysis

It must aspire (i.e. be the composer's intention) to provide the listener with emotional and intellectual enjoyment and satisfaction through musical complexity, sophistication and coherence (as above), and thereby communicate exceptional and/or transcendent reflections on the human condition

* For argument's sake, a work not satisfying one of these conditions may also be considered Art Music, especially if a majority of other works by the same composer do. This exception allows the inclusion particularly of pieces of music that would otherwise be excluded primarily on the basis of their shortness.


Let us utterly dismantle the reasoning here:


(1) What is there inherent to acoustic instruments that makes them more artistic? I might prefer that Bob Crenshaw play the acoustic bass when accompanying Sonny Rollins, but he plays an electric one. So what?

(2) Do the notes care how many people wrote them? In other words, what is there about the absence of collaboration that makes music more artistic? What if Mozart and Haydn had collaborated on a piece? Wouldn't you just have to judge the piece on its own merits?

(3) The third criterion has to do with notation. Suppose I go to a concert and enjoy the music. Later, I find out that the scores were not "orthodox." So I ought to revoke my view of the music as artistic? In principle, I can notate music after the fact, such as in a transcription of music not originally written out. The notational status of the music has no necessary bearing on how "artistic" it is.

(4) Most music has some "tonality" and "structure" and "precursors." This criterion is hopeslessly vague. I suppose it is designed to exclude certain kinds of atonality or music based on ambient soundscapes.

(5) Hopelessly vague again. Most music is "conceived for performance" according to certain "instructions" or at least expectations. If the performers don't carry out the intentions of the composer, it might be judged an inadequate performance.

(6) This criterion is a laundry list of things that artistic music might contain to make it complex, ambitious enough, etc... The list seems at once too narrow and too broad, since it is unclear whether these are just examples of things that make a piece of music "artistic" or requisite elements. The footnote basically destroys this criterion anyway, because a classical composer who writes a simpler piece still gets credit for it.

(7) Artistic music will be hard to play. This seems to confuse the intrinsic artistic quality of the music with issues of performance. It's hard to play guitar like Eric Clapton too, so any kind of music involving performance at all will satisfy this criterion, I think.

(8) Hard to listen to? Of course, my appreciation of Clapton's guitar might be every bit as superficial as my appreciation of Yo Yo Ma playing Bach. In either case, I could be a more competent listener and hence achieve a less superficial appreciation. I could have Stan Getz or Mozart on as background music, because either one sounds pleasant, or else devote my full attention to either one.

(9) Ready for the musicologist's scalpel? Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? If the musicologist doesn't have the tools to analyze it s/he should acquire them.

(10) I suppose the final question-begging escape clause in the footnote is designed to let in a shorter Schubert song, for example, with the excuse that Schubert wrote other, more complex and longer works with more modulations, more complex structures, etc... So the artistic value of that song would depend on the existence of other works outside of itself? These people don't know how to think.

The purpose of this list presumably is to separate traditional "classical" music in the European tradition from various kinds of pop, jazz, "postclassical" forms of minimalism and chance, electronic music, etc... not to mention entire traditions of music outside the Western world. The mixture of overly broad and overly specific criteria make such a list entirely incoherent. It is clear that it is not based on any underlying idea of "ART" at all, but on a series of characteristics and conventions that this particular variety of Western Art music already possesses. The reasoning is entirely circular, in other words.

George Russell, pioneer theoretician of modal jazz, has died. One thing I wondered about when I heard this news was whether Russell was the question of what race Russell was. I had never really seen a picture of him and accounts of his place in jazz history don't usually identify him by race in any explicit way. He was closely associated with musicians like Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Art Farmer... In other words, the black and white musicians on the forefront of avant-garde music in the 1950s and 60s . In the picture above you see him standing behind Coltrane.

Why is it important to assign him to a race? Well, it seems that part of what a jazz fan knows is, for example, that Art Taylor is a black guy, along with Sonny Stitt. That Pat Matheny is a white guy, like Keith Jarrett or Art Pepper or Shelly Manne. In other words, for every jazz musician you've heard of, you have a race assigned to that person, if you've heard of the person at all and even if you don't necessarily have a visual image of exactly what the person looks like.

What is interesting here is that after looking at several pictures of George Russell, I still didn't have a category for him. Looking at the biographical information, I noticed that he was adopted, grew up in the African-American church, attended Wilberforce, a traditionally black college in Ohio, and played with Benny Carter. So if someone wrote about the contribution of white musicians like Mulligan, Getz, and Russell, in the 50s, you would probably correct the person and point out the Russell was no more white than Mingus was.

It would be nice to have a nicely politically-correct color-blind conversation about all this, but the 50s was a time that race was at issue (as it still is now, evidently). Mixed-race or ambiguously raced people blur the boundaries, raising the question of why we need to categorize people along these lines in the first place.

I think of my daughter, for example, as simply herself, not as someone that is half of one category and half of another, like some star-trek character painted black on the left and white on the right.

I'm going to be posting soon at a new blog called "Arcade" published at Stanford University and edited there by Roland Greene. I'll let you know when it's up I begin my contributions. I suspect I'll be doing very similar postings to what I do here, but in a slightly more formal style.

Here's my new outline. The problem I was having was the feeling that I was writing pretty much the same book as I just published. To avoid that, I've taken out some chapters that I've already written or are about to publish as articles, that are too similar to what I've already done, and de-emphasized Valente, who was a dominating presence up to this point. Material from various half-begun chapters will go into chapter 1, which will do double duty as an intro of sorts. Since I've already written 2 and 3, I can work pretty much chronologically, after i finish the Spanish version of the Ullán paper. PART ONE deals with literary-historical issues and has more to do with my previous book, The Twlight of the Avant-Garde. PART TWO deals more with actual poetics/poetry, taking Lorca's duende article as a theory of poetic performance, moving on to a translation from a paper in Spanish I've written on Claudio Rodríguez, and adding the chapter on OGV.

Of course, I'm anticipating that all this will change a few more times before I'm done, probably in the direction of even less overlap with previous work. Articles already published can be a kind of crutch, in that I don't have to start the new project from scratch. Once I come up with a few more ideas I won't necessarily need to reprint this work.

The other alternative is to just go back to being "article guy" again, instead of "book guy." The book, though, provides a way of structuring my work, even if it doesn't ultimately become a book.

Fragments of a Late Modernity: Spanish Poetry from García Lorca to García Valdés



Preface
Acknowledgements

PART ONE: Fragments

1. A Map of Modernism
2. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Literary Institutions of Late Modernity**
3. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Valente and Beckett**

PART TWO: Performances

4. Performative Poetics: Lorca's Duende
5. Claudio Rodríguez: "Manuscrito de una respiración" **
6. José-Carlos Ullán: Performativity and the Visual Text
7. Olvido García Valdés: [Interesting Subtitle]

Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Modernity

I got out my clarinet last night. Julia is in jazz camp in Kansas and staying with me, so I was trying to see whether I could play anything by ear. Sometimes my fingers knew how to play something and sometimes they didn't. They knew Body and Soul and In a Mellotone, for example but for some reason they didn't know Stella by Starlight. Holding the instrument in my hands I found that my memory for certain songs dissolved into thin air. Not only did I have no idea of how to make the fingers play, but I had no notion of the melody. These were songs I know pretty well, too, when I don't have the instrument in my hands.

It was an experience akin to groping for something in a box full of junk in the pitch dark.