(reprints from old DTM with a new bit at the end)

 

Modern Mythic: Tom Baker and Sarah Michelle Gellar (2007)

—

Doctor Who initially ran from 1963 to 1989. The popular reboot began in 2005. Discussing the show’s entire history from 1963 to 2007 has gotten complicated, so my shorthand designations are:

Doctor Who = the complete older show that ran from 1963 to 1989
new Who = the current series
TB = the years that Tom Baker played the Doctor

This essay is only about TB. My “expertise” was acquired while still in elementary school: The most important event in my day was getting home by 4:30 to watch a half-hour episode on PBS. Eventually, in fifth grade, I took second-place in the Chicago Doctor Who Convention Costume Contest as the Doctor. I won as Baker’s predecessor Jon Pertwee, because I didn’t feel worthy enough to imitate Tom Baker.

After getting serious about music, I turned my back on Doctor Who. But one can’t disregard one’s formative experiences. In my early-twenties, prompted by my first trip to England, I rediscovered the show and started collecting the videotapes. I thought this was just harmless nostalgia, of course. Surely I was now too old to ever form a significant relationship with another fantastical television series…

Hah. Ten years later, my wife showed me an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, and I was instantly hooked.

—

The shows are very different.

++ TB is a kids’ show (although it has a major adult following). BTVS is for teens and up.

++ TB is firmly science fiction/space opera, and BTVS is firmly fantasy/supernatural. There is a TB that is about vampires (“State of Decay”), but it also involves space ships and takes place on a far-away planet. There is a BTVS that involves an alien (“Listening to Fear”), but it is called to earth by a local god.

++TB is not the product of any one imagination, but BTVS was created and overseen by Joss Whedon.

++ While there are companions who travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS, there is no one as remotely important to the plot as the Doctor. In BTVS, Buffy is surrounded by friends and enemies who get their own important story arcs.

++TB is English, and BTVS is American.

++TB is formatted as half-hour episodes that make up two- to six-part serials. BTVS is made up of 45 minute episodes that, while usually complete in themselves, end up being part of the longer soap-opera of the season. All seven seasons of BTVS also comprise an arc. This is not the case with TB with the exception of its 5th year, the Key to Time.

While there are also countless other differences, large and small, between the shows, there are also a surprising amount of similarities. As far as I know I’m the first to anthologize them:

++ Both TB and BTVS ran for seven seasons: TB from 1974 to 1982 and BTVS from 1997 to 2003.

++ The first three years of TB were produced by Philip Hinchcliffe, and the look and feel of the show was very consistent. In year four there was a new producer, Graham Williams, and the show opened up a bit, at times uncertainly. Many TB fans would consider the first three years “the classic years.”

Likewise, the first three years of BTVS took place at a high school. Joss Whedon was the hands-on producer at all times, and the look and feel of the show was very consistent. In year four BTVS changed networks, Whedon began looking after the spin-off Angel as well, the characters were now at college without the same place to go to every day, and the show opened up a bit, at times uncertainly. Most BTVS fans would consider the first three years “the classic years.”

++ Season six of TB has a lot of broad humor installed by the new script editor Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). The sci-fi genre is made fun of in sophisticated ways.

Likewise, season six of BTVS has a lot of broad humor from the Trio, spoofing nerd culture. The fantasy genre is made fun of in sophisticated ways.

Certain fans are incensed by this humor, and really hate Douglas Adams or the Trio for their lack of respect. I have always enjoyed the fun, and certainly find it infinitely preferable to the cheerlessness of the last season:

++ Humor vanishes in both shows’ final year. It’s a grim trudge to the end, often with a new level of incoherence in the story line and a rather sudden and desperate proliferation of new characters (Adric, Tegan, and Nyssa in TB, the potentials in BTVS).

—-

TB was made when the BBC brimmed with wonderful, blue-collar entertainment talent. They could make something out of nothing, and nothing was what they often had to work with.

BTVS is comparatively high-budget and glossy. Indeed, I thought I wouldn’t like BTVS because it was next door to teen soaps like The O. C. or Dawson’s Creek. That’s not true. Whenever there is a too much sentimental romance, a howling, vicious vampire will burst on to the set and the Slayer will draws her stake and kill.

Probably an independent observer would judge BVTS as the greater show overall. However, in the heart and mind of this author, TB does manage some kind of ineffable magic (a magic admittedly based in nostalgia) that puts it on the same playing field.

—

From Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, “Send up: Authorship and Organization”:

The disagreement over audiences and dramatic values between [Graham] Williams and [John] Nathan-Turner itself raised quite dramatically the ways in which an institution like Doctor Who can vary according to different production and professional practices.  This chapter will look at ways in which variations within professional ideology materially affect production practices; and further, at ways in which professional values that are ostensibly identical can themselves be inflected differently according to pressure from within and outside the television industry.

From the anthology Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale, “Brownskirts: Fascism, Christianity, and the Eternal Demon” by Neal King:

The quasi-fascist philosophy that justifies Buffy’s slaying concerns me in my next discussion. I will outline the show’s cosmology and by doing so, set up my imaginary Buffyverse, just to make my point about the show’s potential for fascism. I conclude with a better solution to this problem, one that stretches credulity less and eliminates the show’s nasty streak of racism. The important characteristics of the existing Buffyverse that prime it for fascism include elements of a Manichean racism (tempered by an Augustinian division of the world’s evils), adherence to primal and state authority, and formation of citizenship in ritual combat. I consider these in turn.
 

If you want to keep me out of your hair, just give me a new book of TB or BTVS analysis.

While The Unfolding Text is mostly held back by overly turgid prose, that chapter is one of the most interesting things I have ever read. Douglas Adams is interviewed extensively in counterpoint with producers Graham Williams and John Nathan-Turner, and it gets quite gritty and revealing.

As far as Buffy and fascism goes, I have never studied philosophy. Those who have will undoubtedly protest that I need to actually read Augustine for real…

…but that is just not going to happen. Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale is the closest that I am ever going to get.

—

I’d love to read a book that took a serious look at the acting performances of Tom Baker and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Similarities between the stars:

++ While neither was famous at the time of landing their roles, they were both seasoned acting professionals. Baker, 30 at the start of season one, had played many stage roles like Macbeth and had one important movie credit, the villain in Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Gellar, while only 19 at the beginning of BTVS, had been acting since the age of four and won an Emmy for her work on All My Children.

++ They both were divas, especially after the shows proved popular. 

++ They were both the ones to call a halt to production. While there are conflicting stories about Baker, it seems reasonably certain that he said to the producer, “Don’t you think it is time for a new Doctor already?” (Whether he expected his bluff to be called is unclear.) Regardless, at the time, the British press were told that Baker wanted to move on.

In the American press, it was made clear that the decision to end BTVS was Gellar’s.

++ After the series were over, both would refuse to do more with the show, at least at first. “The Five Doctors” had make do with outtakes of Baker from a previous episode and a mannequin from Madame Tussauds.

The 100th episode of Angel, “You’re Welcome,” was initially written to conclude the Buffy/Angel story, but then Gellar pulled out.

While we are told that both were simply too busy to participate, it is ridiculous to think that Baker or Gellar couldn’t have made time to do these small but meaningful projects if they had wanted to.

The main thing about both of them however, is this:

++ They transmit their character in a pure, natural fashion. Whenever they are on screen, the viewer can relax. Both actors take whatever the production crew has thrown at them that week in stride. Their total commitment keeps the viewer from disengaging.

After all, like all television ever made, these two shows have a constant collection of flaws and blemishes. Even in the best television shows, there is just not enough time and money to get it all right. The star needs to carry the day.

TB can flag when Baker isn’t there to move it along.

In BTVS, the situation is much more complicated, since there is so much invested in every character. Indeed, many consider the “multiple character story arcs” one of the most innovative and important aspects of BTVS. (Ironically, New Who emulates many details of BTVS, including giving the Doctor’s companions their own story arcs.) The group casting of Alyson Hannigan for Willow, Nicholas Brendon for Xander, and Anthony Head for Giles was wonderfully fortuitous. Whedon justifiably called them, along with Gellar, the “core four.” 

—

Overall, the person with the harder gig is Gellar. Baker simply needs to be a genial madman, first eating a jelly baby and then furiously accusing an alien of attempted genocide. Gellar needs to reach much deeper. She has to be (among other things) a perky girl, a lover, the bereaved, a seer, and, of course, a fighter.

One of the most telling Gellar performances is in “I Will Remember You,” from the spin-off show Angel. I accept David Boreanaz. He’s fine. The idea of him taking a vampiric place in the long line of “brooding Los Angeles private eyes” on Angel was solid.

But compared to Gellar, Boreanaz is average. On “I Will Remember You,” Buffy and Angel reprise their usual double-act of heartbreak and demon destroying. Gellar is phenomenal, going from stern ass-kicking to goofy immaturity to mushy love to further ass-kicking and, at last, deep heartbreak.

Seeing this episode made me realize I was not going to keep watching Angel. Television needs the power of a star to keep me interested, and Boreanaz is just not that kind of star. 

—

According to my rough calculations, there are about 70 hours of TB. My favorite Baker performances include:

Ark In Space A desperate, almost action-movie type of performance
Genesis of the Daleks  Even Baker-haters love him in this one. When he gives Davros the history of the Daleks, his voice is chilling
Pyramid of Mars Casual callousness, a genuine alien
The Deadly Assassin Poking fun at stuffy home planet Gallifrey, plus getting tortured in a vivid dream
The Talons of Weng-Chiang Baker imitates Sherlock Holmes. Racist but great
The Stones of Blood The debate with the interstellar jailers is superb
City of Death 10 out of 10. Perhaps best intro to TB for a newbie
State of Decay The presence of old-timers Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks means that this story is by far the best in the otherwise disappointing last season. Baker responds beautifully 
Logopolis  The last serial has a weak story and weak companions. However, Baker is absolutely King Lear

According to my rough calculations, there are about 108 hours of BTVS. My favorite Gellar performances include:

Prophecy Girl Vulnerable and invincible
Innocence A bad morning and death everywhere
Homecoming  Pure bitch-fest with Cordelia
The Wish The alternative universe episodes allow Gellar to shine
The Zeppo The greatest meta-TV I’ve ever seen puts Buffy on the sidelines in favor of Xander; still, the Gellar scenes have the juice, too
The Prom  The normal girl and the heroine in dialogue
Hush Powerful acting by all concerned, with far fewer lines to deliver than usual
Fool for Love In James Marsters, Gellar has someone who can actually threaten to steal a scene from her. But the Slayer triumphs
The Body  As shocking as TV gets
Once More, With Feeling The greatest episode of TV ever broadcast? Gellar is not the best singer of the cast, but her segments are among the most moving 
Normal Girl Again, the alternative universe episodes allow Gellar to shine

—

The slightly sombre coda to this celebration is the guarded assertion that these were Baker’s and Gellar’s best roles. Baker is now over seventy, and while he has done plenty of work since TB, none of it is immortal. Gellar is of course much younger, and has already starred in some high-profile movies (she’s good in them, too). However, there really hasn’t been something with the electric charge of BTVS for her yet.

It probably doesn’t matter if neither ever gets a genre-defining role again. They both were called to duty, “chosen” not unlike Buffy Summers herself. They should be honored as the caretakers of our modern myths.

—

Far Out in the Uncharted Backwaters of the Unfashionable End of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy (2009)

—

Televideo is a valuable analgesic for those incessantly on tour. Consuming pop culture about 15 years too late to be of much commonplace social use is a frequent “strategy” of mine: For much of 2009, I have been watching Chris Carter’s celebrated The X-Files with pleasure. iTunes vended me the first four seasons. It’s been a great ride, but I think I’m done: I don’t need to watch the next five series or see the movies.

I’m quitting because the mytharc is becoming too prominent. The Cigarette Smoking Man? Blah. I’ve already been tempted to skip episodes when William B. Davis is credited as guest. That big story – which I understand runs through all nine seasons and the movie, too – has already stretched to the point of logical nonsense. In coming seasons, there will surely be even more reversals and revelations to strain credulity even further.

Apparently, some of the hardcore fans love the mytharc, going so far as to watch those episodes all in a row, skipping the standalone “monster of the week” stories. But for me, the standalone episodes are the reason to watch The X-Files.

Television requires star power. A weekly show will always suffer from budget and time constraints. But we don’t need perfection if we get to watch a cherished hero do new stuff every week. In the X-Files, we have not just one hero, but two: Scully and Mulder. They are just so great. Two of the prettiest humans (Wendy Lewis pointed out to me how attractive just their mouths are; we could watch just the mouths forever) with mellifluous voices are placed in government suits and badges and exhibit deliberately square acting styles.

I’d happily listen to an audio-only mix-tape of Scully and Mulder technical discussions and expositional info-dumps. From “2Shy”:

SCULLY: It’s a metacarpal from Lauren MacKalvey’s hand. In life, bones have the tensile strength of forged iron. Even in death, they remain strong. But look at this. (she squishes the finger with a clamp)

MULDER: (referring to the vial of slime) What did this turn out to be?

SCULLY: It’s organic. Mostly hydrochloric acid similar to what is secreted by the gastric mucosa.

MULDER: It’s similar to stomach acid?

SCULLY: Almost identical, only twice as acidic. I also found trace amounts of pepsin, which is a digestive enzyme.

MULDER: So you’re saying that this did that?

SCULLY: I don’t know how else to explain such accelerated autolysis.

MULDER: (pointing at the remains in the drawer) What’s in here, Scully? Theoretically it should contain the same cellular components as her various tissues—skin, muscle, blood …

SCULLY: In some broken-down form, yes.

MULDER: In the results of your chemical analysis did you find anything missing?

SCULLY: (looks at him strangely) Missing?

MULDER: Yeah.

SCULLY: I don’t think so. (looks at chart) All the body tissues were accounted for …. except there were extremely low almost trace amounts of adipose.

MULDER: Fatty tissue. That could explain the weight discrepancy.

SCULLY: What weight discrepancy?

MULDER: The ME recorded Lauren’s weight at 122 but her driver’s license had her at 165.

SCULLY: She probably lost weight since the license was issued.

MULDER: No, actually Lauren’s roommate said she was quite nervous about meeting this guy because she put on some weight recently.

SCULLY: (stumped) What possible motivation could the killer have for removing his victim’s fatty tissue? I mean, who do you think we’re dealing with here?

MULDER: I don’t know.

Again, it is how Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny deliver this nonsense that makes it so wonderful. (I mean “nonsense” with love: this is really a very solid episode written by Jeffrey Vlaming.)

The mytharc episodes promote sentimental backstory at the expense of unruffled surface. Scully and Mulder’s personal involvement in conspiracy and extreme possibility is dangled in front of the viewer. Rather than making me more curious, I get bored. Dream sequences, abducted sisters, cancerous lesions, personal vendettas, go away! I want the sexy robots who are good with guns back.

The mytharc’s nadir so far was the crass hijacking of Native American spirituality in the interlinked episodes connecting seasons two and three. Mulder’s pretentious dream-musings while being saved by chanting tribesmen? Unforgivable. Mulder is not “spiritual,” he is a pod.

Going ethnic is usually wrong for the X-Files, anyway. The white worlds of medicine, the army, suburbia, business, etc. are the milieus where the show is most successful. Bland backdrops show Scully and Mulder in their most subversive light. We keep looking at them, wondering what is really going on. When we aren’t told too much about them, they are engagingly mysterious.

A lot of the best episodes of the X-Files have as much darkness, suspense, and terror as I’ve seen on mainstream TV. This is why I watch the show, of course.

But a few episodes jumped out as being not just suspenseful but credibly humorous, besides. A quick internet search revealed all: Darin Morgan was the writer of many of my favorite stories. 

Morgan’s history with the show is intriguing: he began by playing one of the series’s most memorable monsters, the Flukeman. Then he wrote “Humbug,” “Clyde Bruckman,” “War of the Coprophages,” and “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.” He concluded his relationship with the show onscreen as the humble villain in season four’s finest episode, “Small Potatoes” (written by Vince Gilligan, another of the show’s best writers, and the man responsible for Breaking Bad).

There’s a good article on Morgan by Jonathan Kirby at Popmatters which summarizes Morgan’s importance. He’s got dry humor, spectacular command of meta, and an ability to generate dialogue which actors clearly love to speak, usually by allowing the stars to be even weirder than usual.

Scully eats a cricket in “Humbug,” cleans her clothes and gun in “Coprohages,” and is a fanboy of thriller writers in “Chung.” These details don’t sentimentalize Scully: she’s still mysterious perfection. Morgan just makes her an even more interesting mysterious perfection.

I began watching The X-Files because I’d read how influential it was to my favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I regard the “final” episode of Buffy to be the musical, “Once More With Feeling.” I acknowledge that there are good stories after that in season six, and that there are even memorable episodes of season seven. But the final song (and line) of “Once More With Feeling” is “Where Do We Go From Here?” This open-ended question is where I want to end Buffy, before that show implodes under a too-weighty mytharc.

Now with the X-Files, I declare the “final” episode of the show to be “Small Potatoes” from season four. I don’t want to watch the grueling series of surprises and ham-fisted tying-off-of-knots sure to come. I want my last image to be Eddie Blundht (played by Darin Morgan) dressing down Fox Mulder. For all his obvious unattractiveness, Blundht is a “normal guy” who therefore has more success with girls than Fox Mulder:

EDDIE: I just think it’s funny. I was born a loser, but you’re one by choice.

MULDER: On what do you base that astute assessment?

EDDIE: Experience. (Eddie leans forward) You should live a little. Treat yourself. God knows I would if I were you.

(Mulder gets up and leaves. Scully is in the hallway. She has watched and heard the conversation on a TV monitor. He signs out with the guard.)

GUARD: Good day, sir.

(They walk down the hall together, neither looking very happy. Scully’s arms are folded, but then she unfolds them and puts her hands in her coat pockets. Mulder is fiddling with his sleeves and looking down at the floor as he walks.)

SCULLY: I don’t imagine you need to be told this Mulder, but you’re not a loser.

MULDER: Yeah, but I’m no Eddie Van Blundht, either. Am I?

—

I’m in Manchester, England at the moment, and will pick up the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book tomorrow since it came out yesterday. I’m against this thing on principle (can’t Douglas Adams lie in his grave in peace?), but I guess I’ll have to at least take a look.

A friend sent me this very excellent article on 30 years of Hitchhiking by Jenny Turner, which I endorse in every regard.

One of the wonderful things about the BBC TV version of HG2G is how it stops before it’s own mytharc gets bloated. At the end of the televideo, there are still as many questions left as answers given.

Unfortunately, that’s not really true of the books: While there are brilliant passages in Life, the Universe, and Everything and the following two volumes, the first two books (and the material of the televideo) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe are the immortal displays of effortlessly spun gold.

In the sequels one begins to see the seams and the recycling. I cannot believe that there is a fan out there that really approves of how Adams “ties-off-the-knots” at the end of the depressing Mostly Harmless. That’s the real appeal of Eoin Colfer’s sequel: to see if there is life after death after all.

However, Adams’s knot-tying in Mostly Harmless is infinitely more acceptable than the gross violation perpetuated by the Hollywood movie, which ties the knots off so completely and happily that the greatest surrealist dark-humored sci-fi work in history is rendered as what? A romantic comedy!?!  The producers should have been fed to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

—

Before HG2G, Adams spent a season as script editor for Doctor Who. He even contributed one of the most beloved stories of the era, “City of Death.” My own personal “arc” in the 1980’s was not unique to a certain kind of geeky American boy, one who loved early, “scary” Tom Baker Who around 8-9 yrs; loved Adams-era “funny” Baker Who at 10-11; and loved the BBC TV HG2G at 12-13.  It was a logical progression.

I’ve finally checked in with the wildly successful Who reboot. (Televideo is a valuable analgesic for those incessantly on tour…) It’s a lot better than I feared, and David Tennant is an authentic TV star.  However, Tennant is leaving, and so is Russell Davies, the mind behind the coup.

The good news is that Davies is being replaced by Stephen Moffat, who wrote several of the best episodes of new Who. But I’m worried that this show is suffering under the weight of too much mytharc, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files. Let’s hope Moffat senses the danger and just promotes great new plots for his first season, refraining from digging for more backstory and connecting links to every character that ever was on the show, etc., etc.

I was reminded of Moffat’s “Blink” (season three Doctor Who) last week when watching Howard Gordon and David Greenwalt’s “Synchrony” (season four The X-Files; Greenwalt also wrote several of my favorite episodes of Buffy). Both episodes deal with time travel and its uncomfortable paradoxes. Both superbly show how limitless genre entertainment can be in the hands of the right technicians.

Darin Morgan; Stephen Moffatt; David Greenwalt; Howard Gordon; Vince Gilligan. I began this rambling post by praising TV stars, and its true I tune in to see Gillian Anderson, David Duchnovy, David Tennant, and Sarah Michelle Gellar give me a thrill. But it’s the technicians – technicians of the sacred, really, the witnesses of the heroes – who give the stars the fuel to entertain us. A cup of Douglas Adams-brewed tea raised to them, those writers who never get the name recognition accorded those who are lucky enough to speak their lines.

— 

Don’t Even Blink (2010)

 (The following was just written to follow up on the above)

 —

Regrettably, Steven Moffat did not take Doctor Who in a less sentimental and overblown direction, but rather the reverse. The only thing I really like about the recent season is Matt Smith as the Doctor. He’s great.

How sad that the Weeping Angels of Moffat’s previous success “Blink” have become a part of the current season’s mightily emotional mytharc in such a banal way. In “Blink,” the Angels were a superb one-off. Part of what made them unusual was how they never apologized or explained anything. They also didn’t kill anybody.  Now, in “The Time of Angels” and “Flesh and Stone,” the Angels not only talk, but even taunt the Doctor while breaking neck after neck of fearful human victims.

I wonder what that old technician of the sacred, Terrance Dicks, thinks of the current show? Dicks kept his characters more or less within the frame of possibility. Now the Doctor is a superhero who solves everything through magic, fantasy, and soulless CGI. Probably Dicks can’t speak up, but another Terrence, writer Terry Pratchett, has, in a blog post that was roundly condemned by Who fandom. I heartily endorse Pratchett’s criticism – and also his capitulation with the inevitable: “I will watch again next week… After all, when you’ve had your moan you have to admit that it is very, very entertaining, with its heart in the right place.”

(reprints from old DTM; edited for style.) 

 

The Bad Plus Plays Modernist Classical Music 

(written for 

JazzTimes

) (2009)

 

—

In the liner notes to his first 1956 Blue Note LP, modernist classical music fan Herbie Nichols wrote: “Sometimes I burst into laughter when I think of what the future jazzists will be able to accomplish.” He goes on to cite Hector Villa-Lobos, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Dimitri Shostakovich, Walter Piston, and Béla Bartók as his own inspirations. I first read Nichols’s prediction as a teenager and began wondering then if I might be able to participate in this “future.”

Nichols didn’t need to wait very long: the very next year, jazz musicians Charles Mingus, Jimmy Giuffre, and George Russell joined modernist composers Milton Babbitt, Gunther Schuller, and Harold Shapero to release the Columbia LP Modern Jazz Concert. This mixture of advanced classical idioms with jazz was named Third Stream by Schuller, who quickly midwifed various recordings by John Lewis, Ornette Coleman, Jim Hall, Eric Dolphy, and others.

I like some of those records a lot, but the limitation of the Third Stream movement was actually foreshadowed by Nichols himself in those same liner notes: Nichols name-drops Stravinsky et al., but he is actually more passionate about how Denzil Best, Art Blakey, and Max Roach are dedicated to getting the drums to “sound” right for jazz. In stark contrast, none of the late 50’s/early 60’s Third Stream music interfaces with drummers on any level but that of a cool handshake. (Tellingly, the drummer on Modern Jazz Concert is Ted Sommer, and the drummer with Ornette and Dolphy on Jazz Abstractions is Sticks Evans. Both Sommer and Evans are unknowns compared to the company they are keeping.)

To be fair, serious drumming would have interfered with an understandable need to be careful with those first Third Stream charts. That’s problem A: how do you fit real, grooving drumming into the context of harmonically advanced and rhythmically disjunct modern classical music?

The next question is the one of improvising within the style. Bob Brookmeyer always correctly complains of this even in his big-band charts: “You write all this complicated music and then the soloist just plays his normal jazz licks.” And Brookmeyer’s music, while harmonically advanced, is still tonal jazz, not 12-tone or even really atonal. (Brookmeyer discusses this problem in Ben Ratliff’s latest, The Jazz Ear.)

That’s problem B: how do you bridge the gulf harmonically between really modernist classical music and what a normal jazz musician can improvise?

An important critical exploration of this topic is “Jazz and Classical Music” by Terry Teachout, in The Oxford Companion to Jazz. He concludes that the hybrids are usually more interesting than wildly successful,  with the notable non-modernist exceptions of Gil Evans’s “concertos” for Miles Davis, based on Rodrigo and De Falla, for Sketches of Spain. I think Teachout is more or less right, at least as far as the modernist canon goes. (Jazz-classical blends like Donald Lambert’s version of Grieg’s “Anitra’s Dance,” Uri Caine’s Mahler, or any piece composed by John Lewis are in another, non-modernist category.) I have heard excellent Stravinsky and Webern performances by Dave Douglas and Bartók-inspired Richie Beirach improvisations, but neither Douglas nor Beirach – understandably – had grooving drums at the time. And without drums, is it something that a jazz musician would really want to play every day?

I hardly know all of the examples. One to be admired is saxophonist Patrick Zimmerli, who’s underrated 1990’s output as a composer featured 12-tone designs of an intricacy unrivaled in the history of improvised music. His piece “The Paw” won the first-ever Thelonious Monk composition competition, adjudicated by Herbie Hancock, in 1993. There was no question of Zimmerli playing with a house band: he had to fly his well-rehearsed group of Kevin Hays, Larry Grenadier, and fiery Tom Rainey down to play it. The record they made must come out someday.

When I worked with Zimmerli in the mid-90’s, he showed me the two-page “Semi-Simple Variations” of Milton Babbitt, which became our sign-off theme for a duo gig.

Fast forward: At the book release party for The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, I played pieces by Ives, Schoenberg, Bartók, Shostakovich, Webern, Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton, and, yes, Milton Babbitt’s “Semi-Simple Variations.”

To get ready, I had to practice this repertoire furiously on the road with The Bad Plus. One day at soundcheck, Dave King started playing along to “Semi-Simple Variations.” It actually sounded, well, surprisingly, not so bad. Twelve-tone funk? Silly, of course… but not really so far from, say, Tim Berne’s world.

Reid Anderson joined us, and we played it some more. With bass added, it seemed totally legit.

Huh. Could we learn some others to include on For All We Care, our future record of covers with vocalist Wendy Lewis? Maybe if we added real drums, were careful about how much we improvised, and kept the dimensions modest we could contribute to the absorption of the modernist classical canon by jazz players.

Years ago, Reid’s answering machine featured the striking slow movement from Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète. (After leaving messages for Reid a few times, I got the score and recording.) And what about my absolute modernist hero, György Ligeti? One of his piano etudes, “Fém,” is based on an advanced African Pygmy rhythm. How hard could that be to learn?

This is how we made the arrangements:

We love the melody of Stravinsky’s “Variation d’Apollo” so much that we wanted to play it twice as long as the original. And why bother improvising with such supreme beauty to enjoy for itself? We take arranging just as seriously as composing or improvising in TBP, and worked hard to elongate Stravinsky’s tune in an elegant way. (For the first half of the reprise we are in a different key, and get home via a Beethoven-esque transition.) At first we thought “Variation d’Apollo” would require the common “leaving the drums out in the cold” approach to classical music. However, one of TBP’s signature styles is an acoustic version of modern electronica, like when we play “Flim” by Aphex Twin. When we tried infusing “Variation d’Apollo” with our “homemade electronica” feel, it was a success.

“Fém” is an example of how György Ligeti combined the maniacal excess of Conlon Nancarrow and the rhythmic folklore of the Pygmies to make a new kind of piano etude. Reid and I have too much respect for the authenticity of Ligeti’s sophisticated atonal harmonic language to improvise on it. It is simply a feature for Dave, including unscripted drum breaks.

On one of our versions of Babbitt’s “Semi-Simple Variations,” we play it completely straight (it’s now on YouTube with lovely women dancing), but on the longer version we broke down and improvised a little bit. It sounds good, but sadly it is not in the twelve-tone language. Someday there will be musicians comfortable improvising together in the pure twelve-tone language, and on that day, somewhere, Herbie Nichols will be laughing.

—

 

 

 

The Making of 

Prog 

(written for Keyboard magazine) (2007)

 

—

The three of us share a common “tribal language.” Growing up, we drank the same economy-size Mountain Dew from SuperAmerica, saw the same bad movies on Channel Nine, heard the same great rock radio on KQRS, and learned about jazz from going to the Dakota Jazz Club in St. Paul. This Midwestern heritage is not as obviously deep as that of, say, New Orleans or Senegal, but it has its own twisted charm.

The first time TBP played together, we were not called The Bad Plus. We were just teenagers trying to play jazz standards in the living room of Reid’s family’s house in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Reid Anderson and David King had been best friends since the age of thirteen. I was younger by two years, and had met Reid when he went to college in Wisconsin. When Reid put us together in his mother’s house that day in 1990 – well, let’s just say the results were less than magical. We would have been shocked had you told us that fifteen years later we would be a full-time band!

After taking a decade to develop as players, the three of us came back together and played a gig in Minneapolis. It immediately felt special, so Dave came up with the name “The Bad Plus” (it doesn’t mean anything) and we booked some more gigs. Right after Christmas 2000 we went into a studio in Minneapolis for our first recording session. We set up, got sounds, and tracked the whole thing in about six hours while a blizzard raged outside. In true Midwestern style, our first step after recording our first CD was digging our cars out from under two feet of snow.

The Bad Plus was for a small Spanish label called Fresh Sound/New Talent. Next, we pressed a thousand copies of a live show in New York and called it Authorized Bootleg. These two small records had some impact, and led indirectly to the band’s being signed by Yves Beauvais to Sony/Columbia. 

For These Are the Vistas, we went to Real World Studios in England (owned by Peter Gabriel) and worked with producer/engineer Tchad Blake. We were incredibly fortunate to have Tchad on board for our major label debut. He is one of the great indie engineers, whose signature sound has been a crucial element on important records by Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Paul Simon, American Music Club, and many more. Tchad’s fearsome, funky production was one of the reasons These Are the Vistas got noticed in mainstream publications like Esquire. It was natural to record our next two records, Give and Suspicious Activity?, with Tchad, as well.

Unfortunately, Sony released Suspicious Activity? with an XCP rootkit that was potentially hazardous to PCs. Grimly, we put on our website, “Please do not buy Suspicious Activity? until there is a resolution to this problem by Sony.” Eventually, the old SA? discs were recalled and replaced by clean ones, but nevertheless the damage was done: What had been a sweet, unfussy roll on a major label had become a corporate nightmare. We asked to be off the label, and they quickly agreed.

We believe in paying attention to the universe when it sends something our way. While on tour in England, we played a great club in London called the Jazz Café. A mutual friend introduced us to the soft-spoken Tony Platt, who had produced and engineered some of the greatest-sounding records in history, including taping what some consider the definitive “overdriven rock guitar sonority” on AC/DC’s Back In Black. (Tony’s impressive resume also includes work with Bob Marley, Iron Maiden, Foreigner, Buddy Guy, Soweto Kinch, and Cheap Trick.) Tony said he had enjoyed the TBP gig and dug our records with Tchad, too. Of course, we immediately began scheming to pull Tony aboard for the next recording.

Where could we do it? Who would put it out? The clock was ticking.The music business is still geared to the somewhat antiquated concept of the “record cycle.” We needed a new album to tour on, and soon. In the end, we decided to finance the recording ourselves, with the plan to license it to a distributor.

Dave had just recorded an album with Mason Jennings at a Minnesota studio called Pachyderm. He thought it was a very fine studio with a good pedigree: Nirvana had recorded In Utero and P. J. Harvey Rid Of Me there. Also, since Pachyderm was located an hour south of the Twin Cities in a small town called Cannon Falls, Dave could just commute from his Minneapolis home. Not only that, but all of our homeboy Twin Cities hookups for gear could be accessed.

Gear… Keyboard requested plenty of gear talk for this article. Unfortunately, I just play the piano, and have never really owned a keyboard or synthesizer of any kind. (I do enjoy listening to Django Bates, Craig Taborn, and other jazz pianists play electric instruments.) So the only “gear” I really used for PROG was a 9-foot Steinway on loan from Schmitt Music in Minneapolis, where Ryan Walch was one of the important “homeboy gear hookups.” Ryan offered me a couple of wonderful pianos, and I picked the one that had the longest sustain. (If I were playing live, I would pick the loudest and brightest, but for a recording I look for the most resonance.) Thanks to Bill Sadler, the superb piano tech, as well. 

Dave has an Ellis drum kit, Zildjian cymbals, Vic Firth sticks, and toys that jingle. The gong was borrowed. Reid has a Juzek bass from the 1930’s, and uses Eden amps. When we mixed at the Terrarium (another Minneapolis connection), they supplied a mellotron that Reid used to overdub eight bars on “Life on Mars?”…

…and that is basically it for “gear” that the musicians had tactile contact with for PROG. However, Tony Platt used plenty of gear. From his email:

The microphone list is as follows :

Kick drum Neumann U47 & AKG D112
Snr drum  Neumann U64 & Shure SM57
Floor Tom Shure SM7
Rack toms Sennheiser MD421
O/Hs        2 x  Neumann KM54
Ride          AKG C451
Hats          AKG C414
Drum Ambience 2 x Neumann M7
Bass acoustically Beyer M480, Neumann M49
Bass Amp  Neumann U47 FET, AKG C414
Piano Lo Neumann U67
Piano Mid Neumann U67
Piano Hi Neumann U64
Main room Ambience 2 x B&K 4041

The recording console was a Neve 8068 and we tracked to ProTools HD at 96kHz/24bit

No EQ was used during recording and only a light compression was used on the Bass microphones using Universal Audio 1176.

The signal path was direct outs from the microphone amps into ProTools.

It is important to point out that this is not my ‘standard’ recording set up – I don’t have such a thing! This was a custom set up created to record you guys in that studio and was specifically intended to capture the band a naturally as possible. As you will remember we did try out some different combinations of microphones before settling on the final choice.

The other thing that is important was that we adjusted the microphone positions from song to song to take best advantage of the natural dynamics. We also adjusted the drum set up and tuning from song to song to ensure the natural blend of instruments was right.

TBP has made all if its records the same way: figure out the music on the bandstand, then go into a studio and tape it. Since we are improvising, we try to get the music in just a take or two. If you have to keep playing an improvised solo on the same song over and over again, you can begin feeling trapped in a cage. Rarely has TBP gone on to do four or five takes of a song, since we realize the law of diminishing returns kicks in after three. For some reason, almost everything on PROG is a second take. We would put one down, go in and listen, and realize we could do a little better.

If you have heard of TBP, you probably know that we play some covers. For PROG, we recorded “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears For Fears, “Tom Sawyer” by Rush, “This Guy’s In Love With You” by Burt Baccarach, and “Life on Mars?” by David Bowie. The iTunes exclusive, “NARC,” is by Interpol.

Playing covers helped us get some press in the early days. It also caused consternation in certain dusty corners of the jazz community that have little regard for rock. In other dusty corners, people think we are naughty jazz nerds poking fun at Blondie (we played “Heart of Glass” on These are the Vistas), Black Sabbath (“Iron Man” is on Give) or Rush (on the current album). The simple truth about TBP’s covers is this: we like playing these songs! We would play them even if they got no press at all, and we aren’t sending them up. After all, improvisers since the beginning of time have enjoyed taking apart famous music to see what new complex emotions can be found. Some of the freest playing on PROG occurs during “Life on Mars?”. The first take was kind of straight, almost banal. After listening and being somewhat disappointed, we made the second take wild and surreal. As soon as we finished, we knew we didn’t need any more takes.

While we love the covers, the three of us regard the original music as the real heart of the band. There are very few lead sheets and little other paper in TBP. Reid or Dave will show me the song at the piano, or I will play them one of mine, and we learn the music by rote. Once in while, I hand out a scrawl, or Reid gives me a notebook to look at for a minute. But we are careful to never play live with any sheet music, and there wasn’t any at the recording session, either.

One of the standout tracks on PROG is Reid’s song, “Physical Cities.” We take the word “prog” to just mean progressive, but of course it really comes from prog-rock. “Physical Cities” is in three different meters and two different tempos. We improvise on it a little bit, but it is really just fast organized mayhem, sort of like some classic prog-rock like King Crimson or Yes. At the end, there is a long unison single-note riff that is Reid’s interpretation of death metal.

Live, the one-note coda of “Physical Cities” has a lot of tension, but we were not sure how create that tension for a record. Different ideas were discussed — cutting a bit of it, recording the squeaking of our benches and stools, or overdubbing overdriven guitar — but we settled on having Reid overdub some arco bass noise not unlike some of the denser movements of György Ligeti (the composer Stanley Kubrick used for 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining). Even though it is just one note over and over, the spooky noise made the vamp riveting, if not downright chilling.

The majority of the songs, however, didn’t use any overdubs or tweaks at all. The great thing about working with a master engineer like Tony is how much he can pull out of a performance just by mix magic alone. For example, the side-stick (Dave’s left hand on the snare, rapping the metal edge) sounds so good on “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” that it helped us decide to lead off the album with that track. The blend between bass and drums on “Giant” is quite different than on “Tom Sawyer,” and this is how it should be. Jazz purists may feel that a trio should not have different set-ups for different songs, but it feels just right for TBP.

We tracked for three days and mixed for four. A month later, Reid flew to London to master it with Tony and Ray Staff at Alchemy Studios. Like on previous TBP releases, we art-directed the CD ourselves (mostly Dave’s work) and then were able to offer the complete package to Heads Up (for America) and Universal (for the rest of the world). They both accepted, and now the latest installment of TBP’s development is on shelves and online all over the globe.

—

 

B-Sides (2007)

 

—

A lot of tunes TBP had played live have never been recorded. But some tunes were “bonus” songs for iTunes and still available (at least in America).

 

 

These Are the Vistas  “What Love is This?” (Iverson)

Give  “Every Breath You Take” (The Police), “Knowing Me, Knowing You” (ABBA), “Stacks of Cash” (Iverson)

Suspicious Activity?  “Human Behavior” (Björk), “We Are the Champions” (Queen), “Immigrant Song” (Led Zeppelin)

Prog  “Narc” (Interpol)

There is also a version of “Karma Police” (Radiohead), which was a one-off for the tribute collection Exit Music.

—

We are proud of all these tracks, but “Every Breath You Take” was an arrangement we worked particularly hard on. One day circa 2002, Reid came over to my apartment in Brooklyn. (In those days we both lived on Union Street, five minutes from each other.) We knew we needed to change the bassline of this most famous of Police songs. How were we going to do it?

Our first thoughts were of a twelve-tone line or something else highly chromatic, but the rhythms were still hard to imagine. We finally hit on the idea of writing out a collection of little rhythmic figures and throwing them in a hat. The first two beats of our new bassline were going to be the first draw out of the hat, and we would keep drawing these “random” rhythms until the song was done. For the pitches, Reid and I took turns selecting a note. The basic rule was, “Try to select the least likely note.” We edited freely, but still, the three-chorus monster we came up with made no sense at all. It wasn’t easy for the bass — Reid had to practice — and for the piano it was sheer murder. I don’t think I’ve had to practice anything as hard in the TBP repertoire as learning how to co-ordinate the melody of “Every Breath You Take” with that goddamn bassline.

Tchad Blake was initially skeptical when we proposed recording it. He doesn’t like that song very much, and he wasn’t even that curious about our arrangement. However, he got interested as soon as he got involved, and his production on this song is superb, as usual. He even changed our arrangement slightly (something he hardly ever did). Live, we solemnly played three empty choruses of the original bassline before bringing in the tune/undersea monster. Tchad didn’t think that worked in the studio, so instead he treated just the drum track for two choruses before slowly crossfading the bassline in. Tchad owns these tones: you could play this track for any knowledgeable pop engineer in the world and they would say, “Tchad Blake” before four bars of drums had gone by.

We haven’t played this arrangement for a couple of years, and probably should do so again. Unfortunately, it’s been so long that Reid and I have completely forgotten the monster. Fortunately, the version on iTunes is as good as we ever played it.

 

 

—

(Unusually for DTM, all three TBP members vetted and contributed to the following essay.)

 

Just the Facts  (2007)

 

—

TBP got a lot of press for PROG in the UK this past summer. A lot of the reviews were great, some of them were mixed, and there were a couple of solid drubbings. This is all normal, but a high percentage of the reviews seized on a “snarky” angle that mystifies us.

“Some think the joke is wearing a bit thin with the Bad Plus, the trio with a penchant for playing ‘ironic’ cover versions.” — Metro

“Once you’ve got past the jokey covers, it’s difficult to say what the point of this Minnesota piano trio is.”  — The Independent on Sunday

“…A subversive US group whose jazz stylings seemed calculated to send up the genre…too clever by even more than half.”  — Evening Standard

“…the musical jokes are wearing a bit thin…” — Mojo

“…Isn’t it time to put the clever-clogs stuff on hold for a bit? ….they risk being like that party bore with the flashing bow-tie and shouting, ‘I’m a laugh, I am.'” — Birmingham Post

“…their new album takes their approach further towards gleeful parody.” — Coventry Evening Telegraph   

“…as much macabre burlesque as it is a piano trio…” — The Independent

“…tired of the group’s ironies…” — The Times

“…a slapstick version of E.S.T…” — Manchester Evening News

“There’s something awfully knowing about their arrangements…” — The Sunday Times

First off, before we begin, we just want to thank every writer that has praised or panned us. It is very hard for any improvising instrumental band to get press, period. We bear no ill-will toward any of the above critics.

However, these 10 quotes illustrate a basic misapprehension about the band, which is that we play the covers as a joke or in a non-serious way. This is not true. We are serious about all the music we play, the covers included.

They are NOT a joke.

—

Since Louis Armstrong, there has been a tradition of playing covers in jazz. Of course, they aren’t called “covers,” they are called “standards,” but the principle is exactly the same: you take some popular song of the day and improvise on it. (Before jazz, classical composers would make variations on famous opera arias. It’s too bad we don’t have a recording of Mozart, Beethoven, or Liszt improvising on the latest hit song at a party.)

In common parlance, “standards” are songs from Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, or Hollywood from about 1920 to 1965. This is a wonderful body of music created by high-level composers occasionally touched by real genius. When jazz musicians play a standard, they usually take the melody and a simplified harmonic sketch of the original and weave elaborate variations on its structure. This can be sublime and far greater than the original.

(But not always! At any mid-level jam session in the world, the band will immediately sound better playing something the horns HAVE to play accurately, like a bebop head, than on favorite session standards like “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” or (horror) “Have You Met Miss Jones.” Somehow the standards allow for limp and directionless noodling during the melody. This noodling is one of the major problems with amateur-level jazz playing. Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Gershwin, etc., are worthy of serious consideration, not just casual appropriation. Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, and Sonny Rollins are three artists who can play the melody of a standard with casual improvised beauty, but despite the claim of the fake book at the top, it’s not that easy to do.)

—

With the rare exception, TBP doesn’t choose to improvise on music written from 1920 to 1965. Instead, we find it really interesting to search for ways to make rock, pop and electronica songs vehicles for contemporary improvisation. One reason that this material is not “standard” is that you can’t call “Iron Man” at a jam session and pull off a mediocre interpretation of it the way you can with “All the Things You Are.” There simply isn’t a common language for it.

But just because the non-original songs we play can’t be called at a jam session isn’t the reason ten English critics think it’s a joke. Why do they think it is a joke? There are two possible reasons:

A) The original music itself is a joke: in other words, Nirvana, Blondie, Aphex Twin, ABBA, Neil Young, The Police, David Bowie, Burt Bacharach, Tears for Fears, Black Sabbath, Pixies, Vangelis, Rush, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Radiohead, Björk, The Bee Gees, and Interpol are just inferior and not at the level of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. Implied is the phrase “rock is not worthy of the jazz tradition.”

B) The way we play the covers appears like parody, or at least highly ironic.

Both are wrong.

—

As far as A) goes, let’s compare the lyrics to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Surrey With A Fringe on Top” (played by at least 10,000 jazz musicians, including a fantastic version by McCoy Tyner) with Bowie’s “Life on Mars.”

“The Surrey With a Fringe on Top”

Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry
When I take you out in the surrey
When I take you out in the surrey with the fringe on top
Watch the fringe and see how it flutters
When I drive them high steppin’ strutters
Nosey pokes will peek thru their shutters and their eyes will pop
The wheels are yeller, the upholstery’s brown
The dashboard’s genuine leather
With isinglass curtain’s you can roll right down in case there’s a change in the weather
Two bright sidelights winking and blinking
Ain’t no finer rig I’m a thinking
You can keep your rig if you thinking that I’d keer to swap
Fer that shiny surrey with the fringe on the top!

“Life on Mars?”

It’s a God awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair,
But her mummy is yelling, “No!”
And her daddy has told her to go,
But her friend is nowhere to be seen.
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seats with the clearest view
And she’s hooked to the silver screen,
But the film is sadd’ning bore
For she’s lived it ten times or more.
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on

Sailors
Fighting in the dance hall.
Oh man!
Look at those cavemen go.
It’s the freakiest show.
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy.
Oh man!
Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show.
Is there life on Mars?

We’re not claiming that all the rock songs we cover have lyrics as profound as Bowie’s, but we do declare the lyrics of ANY of our cover pieces more relevant to the current human condition than “Surrey With a Fringe on Top.” (Even apart from the lyrics, which is the better piece of music, “Surrey” or “Mars,” anyway?)

We love all the original versions of the music that we cover, and would rather listen to good rock than much of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. It’s also what we grew up with, and what still surrounds us every day. We believe that artists should utilize their life experience, not turn their back on it.

Next, B), irony/parody/joke.

It follows that if TBP loves these songs, we love playing them. As far as irony goes, let’s dismiss our versions of Nirvana, Bowie, Aphex Twin, and Pixies right now: there is nothing but respect in our reworkings of them. But at least three of our covers could generate confusion:  “Tom Sawyer,” “Iron Man,” and “(Theme from) Chariots of Fire.” Until you hear us play those three pieces, it is fair to think we are being totally ironic.

Tom Sawyer. Rush is unsexy and Ayn Randian. (The lyrics to “Tom Sawyer” are an easy target.) But Rush is also feel-good music: when this song comes on the radio, even girls like it. And we respect Rush for creating a universe with their bare hands, carving out their Monstrous Math Rock from the granite quarries of Toronto. There is also an intimate connection between TBP and Rush, since Reid Anderson and Dave King bonded over them when they first met. Face it: whatever you dig at 13, you will dig for the rest of your life. (See also this post for more of Dave on Neil Peart.)

Iron Man. OK, this is a pretty weird choice: Science fiction lyrics (He was turned to steel/In the great magnetic field/Where he traveled time/For the future of mankind) and the original Birmingham headbangers. Look, though, that is a powerful riff. When we kick this song, we AREN’T JOKING. We really try to bring the doom with just our poor little acoustic instruments. Our earnestness was rewarded with the ultimate compliment: Geezer Butler put our “Iron Man” on the Black Sabbath iTunes “celebrity playlist” with the comment, “Has to be the most original cover version of any song ever! Saw them at the Knitting Factory in L.A. — mind-blowing!”

(Theme from) Chariots of Fire. Choosing to play this song is unquestionably ironic, especially if you check out Vangelis’ original video, one of the corniest things ever made. But there is more than meets the eye here. First of all, this was one of Ethan’s showpieces when he was 11. He loved it then and he loves it now. Also, it IS really a good tune. Soho the Dog wrote about it:

“If you’re a really honest composer, then you know that the question isn’t so much whether or not you’d give up a body part to write an earworm as indelible as the theme from Chariots of Fire, but rather, how many, and which ones.”

Finally, our exploration of “Chariots” is an embrace of grand drama to express complex emotions. After the blackest, most dissonant free jazz we can play, the tune rises at the end in a mighty crescendo. The feeling is “WE CAN WIN!” There is no irony in this feeling. It’s one of those moments where you can put a lot of people together on the same page: We remember an outdoor performance of “Chariots” in Prospect Park for several thousand people that went particularly well. The massive roar of the crowd afterward was not “that was a successful snark, guys!” but one of pure joy.

Irony — and its allies: surrealism, sardonicism, and dementia — do occasionally play roles in our music, just as it does in the work of many artists we admire. Consider some famous performances of jazz standards: What is more ironic than Thelonious Monk’s “Just a Gigolo?” What is more surreal than Duke Ellington’s trio version of “Summertime?” What is more sardonic than Charlie Parker’s quote of “Country Gardens” at the end of many ballads? And what is more demented than Django Bates’ “New York, New York?”

But just like with those artists, irony is just a small part of the story in The Bad Plus. Here’s our real story: We love songs. We believe in the power of song. We write songs as well as we can. There is not anything in TBP’s repertory that is not based on melody, originals included. Thinking that we are not serious about the melodies we play is incorrect.

Once, a very straight-ahead jazz player came up to us after a gig and said, “You know, I’m surprised!  ‘Heart of Glass’ is actually a good song!” Hell yeah it is.

 

 

—

 

The Business of Jazz (2007)

 

—

Excerpts from Tony Pistilli’s recent email:

I am a student at a local private high school. I’ve grown to absolutely love Happy Apple, and I figured any group Dave was in was worth listening to, so I checked out Suspicious Activity? from the library. It was absolutely amazing, which I proceeded to tell every somewhat musically inclined friend…

I began reading your blog about a month ago. My eyes were opened as to how much there was on the internet to learn about jazz…

I put your music blogs in my favorites and print off the larger articles (no sense staring at a screen for an hour reading). Today I came across stories concerning intermixing genres, an article about promoting classical music to youth etc., and a story about a violinist playing in a subway. Last night there was the demise of record stores. The sense I’ve gotten in my short blog reading experience is that jazz (and classical) musicians are slightly bitter.

Jazz is unpopular with the masses, I would say. I played an original arrangement (basically Fm7, Eb7, Bbm7/Db, Cm7 to a bossa beat… nothing fancy) at my school’s talent show. It was just a piano, bass and drums and as we were playing, people were sitting there as if they were wondering what we were doing… if we were serious… Afterwards, my dad told me that he liked music that he has heard before, and suggested that I play “In The Mood” at the next concert. The whole thing was discouraging.
 
My mom told me that John Coltrane was playing “My Favorite Things” wrong on the One Up, One Down CD. I don’t know if she is best described as ignorant or as holding public opinion.

And in all of this I wonder, why do people play jazz for a living? Like I say, I love jazz and music in general. I play both saxophone and piano, and… well, I’m into music, simply said. And yet I am faced with the “realities of life”, as it has been told to me. I need to have a place to live, I need to eat etc., and while people do this as jazz musicians the business doesn’t seem in their favor.

So all of this leads up to (hopefully I wasn’t too wordy) this question: Why are you guys jazz musicians? And what advice do you have for somebody who would want to be one of those making a living from jazz? Did you ever find yourself working another job to make money? I’m just interested in how one goes from me, this guy who practices the ii-V-I licks he is given at his MacPhail lesson, to making a living at it like you do in The Bad Plus.

—

Reading this email reminded me of when I was a teenager myself. Tony said it was fine if I answered him on the blog.

Dear Tony:

Thanks for the supportive email. It’s always nice to hear that someone enjoys our music.

You asked, “Why do people play jazz for a living?” Well, Tony, it is certainly not for the money. There is no other way to put this: it is very hard to have a career in creative music. All of us in the band have had MANY other jobs. In fact, almost every musician I know has had to do other work to pay the bills. Some of us like to have non-music jobs (to keep the creative work entirely separate) but most of us play gigs that aren’t jazz. Although I moved to New York in 1991, I hardly played a jazz gig until about 2000. Instead, I played for comedy sports, in a tango band, for musical theatre rehearsals, for dance classes, and was the music director for a modern dance company.

The public at large will probably never be the least bit interested or impressed with One Up, One Down. That’s their loss, since it’s the only recording of the classic Coltrane quartet in a club from 1965 (their last year together). If you understand this band’s language, it is an astounding document.

Check this out: I can guarantee all four members of the Coltrane quartet were making no more than 50 dollars a man per night at the Half Note, where One Up, One Down was recorded. Furthermore, the legend is that McCoy Tyner went to work as a cabbie for a while AFTER playing with John Coltrane. You might say, “Well, gee, that was forty years ago. Isn’t it better now?” Actually, right at this moment New York City is going through kind of a rough time for jazz. Some of the best jazz musicians on the planet have been playing for tips at the Tea Lounge in Brooklyn, probably making less than 50 dollars a night.

In a way, having some difficulty in making a living can be a kind of asset, keeping what you do honest and sincere. When financial success is possible, there is a real danger that money will become more important than truth. Jazz doesn’t need to worry about this trap like TV or radio pop does. Also, scuffling for money can enable a kind of soulful “grit” to enter a musician’s playing. I can’t say that being rich is an impediment to playing jazz, exactly… but it certainly doesn’t help.

One thing that I must clarify is your perception that many musicians are bitter, though. I don’t think any of us would trade playing music for having a well-paid job, since music is just so wonderful. We all like to complain, but few are truly bitter.

—-

As far as what you should do now, I have a few obvious suggestions.

1) Listen to the music incessantly (I’m sure you are already doing this). Jazz used to come from a certain social environment which has been gone a long time. The only thing young musicians can do now is immerse themselves in listening. Also, see the music live whenever you can.

2) Try to meet and play informally with many other musicians, without worrying about getting paid for at least ten or fifteen years.

3) You mention practicing II/V/I licks–that’s ok, sure. But you can practice anything you want. Look for the material that excites you the most, and practice that. It could even be material that has little to do with regular jazz, but if you like it, work on it. For example, both Reid and I have studied classical music and Dave different types of Latin music. If you love rock, play that, too. We are getting rid of boxes in the postmodern age.

4) You are probably thinking about music school and so forth for college. That’s great. For me, it was both good and bad. While I was exposed to serious classical music for the first time (a priceless experience), I did drop out after two years… and after over a decade of monthly installments at the lowest amount/highest interest rate possible, I finally paid off my college student loan (New York University, 1991-1993) in late 2006. Citibank Student Loan Corporation was smart to invest in me. They got at least four times as much back.

—

Tony, the fact you are having trouble playing jazz in high school is not surprising. It is, in fact, normal. That your parents know nothing about the music is normal, too. Please keep at it with joy in your heart, and don’t start playing “In the Mood” unless you want to.

best,

ei

(reprints from old DTM, edited for style.)

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Freddie Hubbard (1938 – 2008)

16 iconic jazz albums from 1959-66 show Hubbard’s astonishingly diverse and flexible talent as a young sideman. In addition to being an essential element musically, Hubbard’s presence on the more avant-garde albums on this list is often ambassadorial.

Paul Chambers/Cannonball Adderley Go
Art Blakey Caravan
Art Blakey Free For All (I could really list all the Blakey/Hubbard albums, of course)
Eric Dolphy Outward Bound
Eric Dolphy Out To Lunch
Ornette Coleman Free Jazz
Oliver Nelson The Blues and the Abstract Truth
Andrew Hill Pax
Wayne Shorter Speak No Evil
Wayne Shorter The All-Seeing Eye
Herbie Hancock Empyrean Isles
Herbie Hancock Maiden Voyage
Sonny Rollins East Broadway Run Down
John Coltrane Acension
Sam Rivers Contours
Bobby Hutcherson Components

Hubbard’s own albums on Blue Note and Impulse! from this era are all classics. Sometimes Hubbard’s early writing and bandleading suggests an experimental edge, nowhere more obvious than on the 1970 Ilhan Mimaroglu-masterminded Sing Me a Song of Songmy on Atlantic.

In the “stadium jazz” era of the 70’s, Hubbard repeatedly showed that he was one of the most magnificently assured and powerful soloists of the decade. His CTI output like Red Clay and Straight Life holds up well today, and he periodically threatens to steal the show away from Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock on several albums with V.S.O.P.

What about that ludicrous solo on “Just One of Those Things” from 1969’s The Hub of Hubbard? I’m not saying this is good music — it is just too fast and messy in the ensemble — but it is certainly something. “Without A Song” from the same album shows how Hubbard’s time is so good that he can swing the band (which constantly verges on falling apart) from the trumpet on down.

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Max Roach (1924-2007)

The last remaining innovator of High Bebop has left us today.

Kenny Clarke invented the jazz ride cymbal beat and its relationship to the bass drum, the high-hat, and the left hand. Clarke also had a very warm time feel, always bathing the other musicians in a non-judgmental glow. However, there is only one studio date of Charlie Parker with Clarke, from 1951.

It is Max Roach who plays on myriad classic sides with Charlie Parker from the beginning. Early tracks like 1945’s “Ko-Ko,” “Now’s the Time,” and “Billie’s Bounce” are among the most influential jazz recordings in history. While the drumming on these tracks is immortal, Roach would sound better and better with Bird over the next decade, pushing himself and his instrument on every recording. The 1953 records of “Confirmation” and “Chi-Chi” with Al Haig and Percy Heath feature the highest-level ensemble playing recorded in a studio with Parker. If Percy and Max showed up anywhere in the world right now playing just how they played for Bird in 1953, they could take anybody’s gig.

While Max Roach’s beat would always be a little icy in comparison to Kenny Clarke’s glow, his fearsome clarity and control would ultimately make his music more expressive than Clarke’s. Also from 1953 and with Hank Jones and Teddy Kotick, “Kim” is the definitive Bird and Roach “as fast as you can count it” rhythm changes. To this day, it sounds like the record player is at 45 rpm. “Kim” is slashing, angular, and quite unbelievably virtuosic: classic mid-century Black American art.

Download Kim_excerpt.mp3

The “as fast as you can count it” tempo is still called the “Max Roach tempo” by straight-ahead jazz musicians today. The apotheosis of the “Max Roach tempo” is Sonny Rollins’ Tour De Force with long workouts on “B. Quick” and “B. Swift,” both of which are faster then “Kim.” Indeed, they are almost certainly the fastest performances in jazz history, and Roach is just maniacal behind Sonny on them. Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette: all the assertive drummers come from Max, and all fiery horn-drum relationships in jazz stem from Roach with Bird, Sonny, and Clifford Brown.

Roach was an intellectual player. Some of his solutions from the early days can still stun with their freshness. This is the intro to “Dewey Square” with Bird (1947):

Download Dewey_intro.mp3

I mean, what?

Or his legendary 5+5+6 cowbell part on Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco” (1952).

Download Un_Poco_Loco_ex.mp3

Bud apparently didn’t like this, which is not surprising, given that this unprecedented beat remains an unexplored path in the music. It must have been really hard for Bud to play with in the studio that day for the first time! There are three takes during which you can hear Roach getting his part together. Bud and Max is a terrific combination, not just on the greatest Bud trio recording, Jazz Giant, but on the 1947 Sonny Stitt quartet recordings.

On Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing,” (from the song’s first recording on Thelonious Monk Trio, 1952) Roach plays a cymbal only once in the body of the performance. Would that every version of “Bemsha Swing” I’ve ever heard had this level of analysis from the drummer! The excerpt runs until the cymbal hit.

Download Bemsha_Swing_excerpt.mp3

Herbie Nichols’ Blue Note recordings feature two great drummers, Art Blakey and Max Roach. Nichols’ compositions were very original and complicated, and his music’s difficulty is exacerbated by his opaque piano playing. Blakey swings with Nichols, but doesn’t try to do much more than that. Roach swings too, maybe not as hard as Blakey, but with a composer’s intelligence and a lot of delicate nudging and shading, enabling the listener to parse Nichols’ strange sound world. Try “The Spinning Song.”

—

Alice Coltrane (1937-2007)

Alice McLeod’s bebop piano playing with Terry Gibbs in the early 60’s is legendary. Sadly, very little of it is on tape.

At that time, her boyfriend was Joe Henderson. Shortly afterwards, she starting going with John Coltrane. Unlike Coltrane’s previous wife, Naima, Alice agreed to learn to play the harp, an instrument that fascinated Coltrane. They married in 1966.

At the piano, she abandoned her Powell style and studied McCoy Tyner’s fourth-chords and pentatonic flurries. Rather than imitate Tyner exactly, she put all that new modal information in the service of free-form rhythm. The John Coltrane records with Alice show her fitting in Trane’s late style much better than Tyner did. Tyner said he left the band because he couldn’t hear himself, but you can hear Alice on the ’66 and ’67 recordings just fine. It’s too bad Alice isn’t on Ascension and Kulu Se Mama, because she would have hooked up those dates much more than Tyner, who sounds a little irritated.

There are at least four classic recordings with John and Alice Coltrane together:

Live at the Village Vanguard Again!
Live In Japan
Expression
The Olatunji Concert

There are also many more bootlegs and a few more studio recordings. The pick of the bunch might be The Olatunji Concert, John Coltrane’s last recorded gig. Alice sounds marvelous here, especially on “Ogunde,” which is strong enough to make any pianist reconsider what they think they know about free playing.

After John’s death, Alice Coltrane dealt less with playing gigs and making recordings than with matters of the spirit, although her Impulse! albums certainly have a serious cult following. The family seems to have come full circle with their son Ravi, who is a clear-headed, burning jazz player.

— 

Esbjörn Svensson (1964-2008)

In addition to their tuneful music, the outstanding success of E.S.T. with jazz audiences the world over was fueled by two formidable qualities: a belief in a band sound, and a commitment to having a top-flight sound engineer.

E.S.T. was Esbjörn, Magnus Öström, and Dan Berglund. No subs were allowed. This insured that their show was always on a high level: clear, unique, and with no music paper in sight. If more jazz musicians committed to the band concept, the state of jazz would be healthier. (Rock musicians understood this years ago.)

Their true innovation was a deep concern for sonic fidelity at all times. At European jazz festivals, E.S.T. could lay waste to great American jazz bands that preceded or followed them on the same stage simply by having their tones always dialed in correctly while other bands trusted to luck and the local engineer. Esbjörn even announced their superb engineer, Ake Linton, to the audience. In this interview,  Esbjörn called Linton “the fourth member of the trio.”

It is impossible to comprehend that our peer Esbjörn Svensson was killed in a diving accident yesterday. TBP sends deep condolences to Esbjörn’s family, Dan, Magnus, and Ake.

— 

Ronnie Mathews (1935-2008)

Mathews (like John Hicks, Kenny Barron, Harold Mabern, and others) took the “energy style” comping of McCoy Tyner in the 1960’s and made it work in more straight-ahead contexts from the 1970’s on. Dexter Gordon’s Homecoming is a good place to hear this, as are other albums with Woody Shaw and Louis Hayes featuring Mathews.

There is a distinctive rhythmic tradition in jazz that comes out of Dizzy Gillespie, specifically the Gillespie big-band music of the 1940’s. You can hear it somewhere on any Miles Davis record of the 1950’s. One time when watching Mathews play at a European festival, I began noticing that all of his rhythms could have been played by the Gillespie big band. Billy Hart then confirmed to me that Mathews was considered one of the “professors” of this approach.

The late John Hicks and Ronnie Mathews shared something similar in touch and piano attitude. (They could easily have subbed for each other on most of their gigs.) At its best, it felt like “the real thing.” That style — and indeed, most straight-ahead jazz since the death of John Coltrane — is hard to capture on record. It might have less to do with Art than Culture. You need to be there, close to the bandstand, preferably in a small club, hopefully surrounded by other patrons who really love and understand the language.

So, the moral is, go see the older straight-ahead masters now. When they are gone, it is done.   

Michael Brecker (1947-2007)

Mark Turner gave his thoughts backstage at the Village Vanguard tonight:

Fuck those motherfuckers who don’t give it up for Michael Brecker.

He was so influential to so many players. I fully admit to hours of learning and studying Brecker solos. He’s consistently excellent. That Claus Ogerman album Cityscape is prime Brecker — just incredible.

He was one of the greatest technicians of the saxophone that ever lived. The saxophone is deceptive — it is initially easy to play, but hard to really delve into. Brecker really delved into the details. His sound was huge, but he only used a [size] seven mouthpiece. Trane used a six-star, Wayne a seven (nowadays an eight) and many modern players are using sizes up to ten, but Brecker always used a mid-sized mouthpiece with tremendous control, paying attention to the voicing of the low, mid, and high registers of the saxophone in a way that few have. This enabled him to play things that are really hard to play. I saw him put his horn on at clinics and soundchecks and — cold, without warming up — instantly play the most fucking incredible shit, stuff that most saxophonists simply cannot deal with.

In recent years he was improvising more, taking more chances, and exploring more kinds of music. He was really blossoming. I was really looking forward to a few more decades of powerful Brecker.

I met him a few times, and he was always just so cool. A true master. 

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Dewey Redman (1931-2006)

Jazz listeners were introduced to Dewey Redman in a famous moment on Ornette Coleman’s 1968 Blue Note album New York is Now! :

Ornette was proud of his new saxophonist. “Dewey Redman could play the keys off the saxophone,” he said. Ornette was so proud that he decided to bare his neck and be sacrificed for Dewey on the first track, “The Garden of Souls.” It’s a long track — too long. Ornette’s solo lasts for six or seven minutes, during which time the rhythm section and Ornette do not hook up once. Finally, Ornette stops. Pause. Dewey Redman enters.

Dewey Redman enters with a shattering roar, literally screaming while playing the saxophone. The earth opens up and you contemplate the multitudes of strange large brown insects that burrow and feed near the ancient runes. Dewey plays for less than two minutes, but it is more than enough to make you completely forget that long alto solo.

—

Dewey and Charlie Haden could fluidly improvise free harmony together. This magical association was a crucial element of three of jazz’s greatest bands:

The Ornette Coleman quartet with Dewey, Charlie, and Ed Blackwell. This band played a lot of gigs but did not make a studio record. There are several bootlegs, all of which are amazing. Friends and Neighbors is easy to get and has good sound, too. Of the other Ornette/Dewey records, Science Fiction has the working quartet with other musicians, and an immortal Dewey solo on “Law Years.” On Crisis, with Don Cherry, Charlie and 12-year old Denardo Coleman, Dewey’s solo on “Comme Il Faut” is a concentrate of beauty.

The Keith Jarrett quartet with Dewey, Charlie, and Paul Motian. This courageous, outlandish, down ‘n dirty music is shamefully underrated and misunderstood. They left a large body of work, too: at least 15 LPs! Classic Dewey solos with this band include “(If the) Misfits (Wear It),” “Gotta Get Some Sleep,” “Byeablue,” “Rotation,” and countless others. The last live performance of this band together is documented on Eyes of the Heart. The legend is that Dewey was drinking wine backstage and ignoring the gig. This seems to be true, since almost the whole first two sides of the three-sided two-LP set is a boring piano vamp. Finally, near the end of side B, Paul Motian crashes in. Dewey puts down the wine, picks up the horn, and for five minutes plays only the notes of a pure minor scale with heartbreaking intensity. After this cataclysm, the encores on the last side have the quartet playing some of the most joyous music ever recorded.

“Old and New Dreams,” with Don Cherry, Dewey, Charlie and Ed. After Ornette formed Prime Time, his most devoted disciples formed a band to continue the Coleman acoustic tradition. My favorites are the first session, Old and New Dreams on Black Saint, and the live concert Playing. Dewey’s musette is also a confirmed asset in this context.

Early on, Dewey told Keith Jarrett that he couldn’t play changes:

“Basically, he thought he was not as good at it as he really was. But I remember one night, at the Village Vanguard, it was the day Don Byas died, and Dewey played a solo on a tune with chords. Usually he’d ignore the changes, but he got into the chords, and he became Byas that day, as a sort of tribute thing. The rest of us just stared at him and I said to myself, ‘Jesus Christ, he doesn’t realize some of the things he could really do.” (Keith Jarrett quoted by Neil Tesser in the liner notes to Mysteries: The Impulse Years 1975-1976.)

Dewey knew enough about the immaculate threading styles of Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins to tread carefully. He also probably thought that “running the chords” was a bit outdated in the early seventies. He was right, at least for the moment: his recorded output with the harmonically advanced Jarrett proves again and again that if you have heart, imagination, the blues, and “the sound of the earth opening up” coming out of your horn, you don’t need to play changes.

Perhaps feeling a need to show the world that he wasn’t just an “out” saxophonist, Dewey started playing standards and jazz classics when he was older. A rhythm changes tune like “Second Balcony Jump” was threaded very well, but hard tunes like Coltrane’s “Lazybird” weren’t his best thing. (His son could run rings around him then.) Maybe if his innovations with Coleman and Jarrett had become widely accepted as fertile soil for exploration and elaboration by other musicians he wouldn’t have needed to change. With the exception of Bill McHenry, Mike Lewis, and a few others, most modern tenor players have not seriously considered Dewey Redman, choosing instead to slice and dice advanced harmonic realms without playing a note of surreal irrationality. This is our loss, because music-making is not just about the grid, it is about the ineffable. For conjuring the ineffable, Dewey Redman was king.

(For a few months in 2005 and 2006, I contributed reviews to DownBeat.)  

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Cy Walter

 

The Park Avenue Tatum

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Who was Cy Walter? Unless you used to drink at the posh Drake Hotel in the early sixties, you probably don’t know. However, a small group of devotees have kept his name alive, and they are why we have The Park Avenue Tatum, a collection of his 1940’s recordings. This is the first CD of Walter (1915-1968), and it firmly establishes him as one of the finest interpreters of the golden age of show music.

Walter’s art is far more advanced than any other cocktail pianist. In addition to a sophisticated harmonic language, his intricate arrangements exhibit an astonishing amount of counterpoint: the low, high, and mid-registers of the instrument relate in euphonious polyphony. Jazz pianists from this era always wanted to know, “How good is your left hand?” By any standard, Walter’s is very, very good.

It’s interesting to compare Walter and Art Tatum on “Begin the Beguine,” which they both treated as a virtuoso showpiece. Walter tells the song’s sophisticated story better than Tatum, who doesn’t follow the composer’s elaborate form. (“Beguine” has the longest form of any standard, closer to a rondo in classical music than a 32-bar pop song.) Tatum swings harder. I’d call the match-up a draw.

Jazz history has shamefully ignored Walter, but in his heyday he was well known among Broadway’s elite. Richard Rodgers preferred Walter to any jazz pianist, since Walter always honored the song instead of merely “blowing.” One of the finest things on The Park Avenue Tatum is Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” which Walter plays as a hushed reverie. Suddenly you understand why Kern hated up-tempo bebop versions of his music.

Walter is probably best understood not in the context of either jazz or Broadway, but in the tradition of classical composer/pianists like Leopold Godowsky and Ignaz Friedman, both virtuosos who loved to transfigure Viennese waltzes and other light fare into complicated piano music. Walter’s beautiful chorus of “All the Things You Are,” with the melody singing chastely in the middle-register, decorated on top and bottom with delicate slides and runs, sounds considerably like a Godowsky treatment of a Schubert song.

—

 

Bernard Peiffer

 

Formidable…!

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We finally have a proper document of the legendary Bernard Peiffer (1922-1976). Formidable…! is a collage of lo-fi tapes from different venues in the 1970’s, mostly solo, and it is a better representation of Peiffer’s talent than his early LPs.

A little spoken word on this disc has Peiffer praising improvisation, which was clearly his own greatest gift as a musician. The more conventional standards on this disc are fine… but when completely unfettered, he soars to the sky and plays the impossible. “Voyage” opens the album with a rocketing Ab minor scale idea. It seems like it is going to be a proper tune with a predictable blowing form, but Peiffer just rampages, both hands whirling, through a multitude of ideas: it’s free-form, but he carefully guides us all the way.

Peiffer displays sovereign mastery of the keyboard with a pearly, Tatum-esqe touch. (Indeed, he quotes Art Tatum quite a bit.) His hyperactive hands can hit a few too many random notes for comfort, and his rubato or non-jazz rhythms are more credible than when he hunkers down to swing (“Merry Go Round”). Far more credible is “Black Moon,” which has the kind of rhapsodic strangeness – almost gypsy in feeling – that really suits this provocative musician.

Thelonious Monk’s  “’Round Midnight” is quite beautiful during the solo intro, devolves into a merely adequate trio recitation, and then has a stunning solo coda with a wild Chopin transfiguration and an extraordinary amount of tone color lavished on a tolling major third at the close. George Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland” gets an overblown Busoni-style treatment as “Prelude” and “Fugue.” A comparison of this performance with the one on The Astounding Bernard Peiffer (1957) proves that Peiffer improvised a new version of this amusing baroque monstrosity each time out.

The liner notes say more Peiffer releases are planned. Like this disc, they will be major events for jazz pianophiles.

—

 

Kyle Gann

 

Nude Rolling Down An Escalator

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Kyle Gann is best known as a critic who has supported the Downtown school of young, post-minimalist composers in the pages of the Village Voice for the past twenty years. Just about anyone involved in contemporary classical music in New York City has crossed either paths or swords with Gann, since his opinions are impassioned and occasionally a little scandalous. The surprising truth is that Gann is even more important as a composer than as a critic.

This jaw-dropping CD documents music written for the Disklavier, which is like a 21st century player piano that uses MIDI instead of a roll. (More about the Disklavier and some of the scores are at kylegann.com.) As in Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano music, the instrument has a metallic, brittle timbre. This sonority may become tiring in long stretches, but in small doses this CD is exhilarating, blowing apart preconceptions with such good-natured devilishness that the only response is a kind of horrified awe.

The compositions are all studies in rhythm, counterpoint and style. Jazz musicians simply must hear “Texarkana” and “Bud Ran Back Out.” The former is a rag gone haywire, churning with supreme nonchalance under the disquieting tyranny of a 29 to 13 polyrhythm. The latter is an astounding tribute to Bud Powell. (It’s troubling how a classical composer glosses the Powell style so well, but Gann did study with an excellent jazz pianist, John Esposito.) “Cosmic Boogie-Woogie” is an exotic scale layering exercise that makes Lennie Tristano’s “Turkish Mambo” seem naïve, and the long, lovely “Unquiet Night” features sophisticated harmony waxing and waning in polyrhythmic splendor. There are also maniacal Beethoven and Chopin tributes that made me laugh out loud.

Although it would be absurd to say any of this music swings or grooves in a normal human sense, the endless manipulation of time gives the computer some remarkable depth of feeling (try “Tango Da Chiesa”). The future beckons.