Mozart not hip enough for jazz?

[Ian Thumwood]

French Frank

I think that Loussier is a bit of a charlatan. The Bach re-workings were very much conservative and sometimes he just played a 12-bar blues instead of taking a proper look at the harmony of the material. The Mozart track sounds extremely tame and although I quite like his touch, Loussier is far from being a heavy hitter in the improvisational stakes. I thought that he was going to go into a blues on this track too when the "meat" of the improvisation started.

The litmus test for a Mozart influence would be to see how someone takes the harmonies or looks in detail at how Mozart composed and then used this as a basis for further development. There are plenty of examples of jazz musicians playing originals and taking these ideas produced by other composers so that something fresh can be produced.


Here is a very good example of the influence of Ravel:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYzT6MVeHZA

There is also a fascinating version of this by Dick Hyman but I can't find it on Youtube - I know it's there as I was listening to it before Christmas!

[Quarky]

With all due respect Mr. Thumwood, harmony is just one part of Mozart's music. Schoenberg admitted that Mozart was a principal influence on his music, but of course Schoenberg did his best to destroy conventional harmony.

Please view this clip which I found extremely interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXlii5kUsjY

I rest my case.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

just googled mozart jazz and out these popped:

theory

http://www.tedrosenthal.com/mozart.htm

http://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2009/11/18/Mozart-Could-Play-Jazz-An-Interview-with-David-Braid

practice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9vuW1jQjSw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfFebeiO3VU

....listening to the clips i am inclined to Ian's point of view .... bit cludgy

[Bryn]

Unfortunately the link is only in the title. The music is unrelated.

Indeed, the "a la Turk" was instead a rhythmic allusion, to the 9/8 meters popular in Turnish music, IIRC?

[subcontrabass]

Indeed, the "a la Turk" was instead a rhythmic allusion, to the 9/8 meters popular in Turnish music, IIRC?

That seems to be the case: 9/8 - four beats to the bar (2 + 2 + 2 + 3) - as heard when Brubeck was on a visit to Turkey.

[mikerotheatrenestr0y]

David Rees Williams

The trio's latest CD Back From Before has a track based on the Gigue K.574

[Ian Thumwood]

With all due respect Mr. Thumwood, harmony is just one part of Mozart's music. Schoenberg admitted that Mozart was a principal influence on his music, but of course Schoenberg did his best to destroy conventional harmony.

Please view this clip which I found extremely interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXlii5kUsjY

I rest my case.

Oddball

Sorry, I don't really understand where you are coming from. Fair enough, Schoenberg dug Mozart (don't mind some of the samples either ) but Arnold never played jazz as far as I am concerned. Composers such as Messaien have also admitted that Mozart was an inspiration and this music was composed to celebrate his bi-cennential in 1991:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd2ka7Z1G7c

Just for the record, Messaien hated jazz.

Whilst I agree that there is more to music than harmony, what else is there in the music that jazz musicians can take from it?

1. Form ~ Jazz composers have only been experimenting with extended form to any large degree since the post-war period. I suggest that the most serious attempts have been within the last 30 years and , then again, the inspiration would have come from composers far more "modern" than Mozart. Even so, you could argue that the forms that Mozart used such as sonatas or symphonies are little used by classical composers as the 20th century has progressed. I am not expert on this but would guess we could write the use of Form off as an influence.

2. Melody ~ Well, as the clips Calum posted illustrate, this is a non-starter. Mozart's themes are definately not ambiguous enough to have any bearing on jazz. Doubtful if melody has really had as much influence as harmony in jazz.

3. Timbre ~ The use of timbre in jazz is far more sophisticated than that used by Classical composers in the late 1700's (growling trumpets / brass, tone of reed instruments excluding saxes that were not around at that time, tone produced by violin players such as Stuff Smith, Billy Bang, Ray Nance, etc, etc.) No Mozart influence there.

4. Rhythm ~ Probably safe to say that jazz has had a greater influence oin classical music than the other way around. Compared to much jazz, the rythmic feel of Mozart is extremely remote. It doesn't even have what John Mehegan called "harmonic swing" where a sense of momentum is produced througout a harmonic progression as is the case with JS Bach. Even Mozart's most rigorous rhythmic ideas ("Rondo"??) sound twee in a jazz context.


The more I think about it, Mozart has nothing to offer jazz. Even the examples chosen to support an alleged Mozartian influence are by performers who , as jazz musicians, seem well below the comparative stature of Mozart as a composer. If you take the arc of the great jazz soloists from Armstrong, Hawkins, Young, Parker, Rollins, Miles, Coltrane, Ornette, Brecker, etc or jazz composers from Morton onwards, all of these could have existed without Mozart. I don't think you could have said the same with classical composers such as Bach, Chopin, Debussy, etc. I would love to be proved wrong but I regret the examples in favour of WAM seem like clutching at straws. Some jazz players might have studied Mozart as students or enjoyed his music (for example, bassist William Parker has made some very postive comments and stated that he is a huge Mozart fan) but I don't see how this has fed into any of their own music. I will have to google this interview which was on the "All about jazz" website a few years back.

Cheers

Ian

[Quarky]

Hi there Ian,

Thanks for your detailed post. Where am I coming from? I have long wondered why 20th Century Composers such as Schoenberg, Schnittke, Messiaen, held Mozart in such high regard, since their music is so different. This thread, about Mozart in a Jazz context, got me thinking about this issue again .
Mozart probably does not work in a Jazz context, I am inclined to agree, but that may not be the final word on the matter. The issue as far as I am concerned is what aspects of his music that I find enjoyable might be transported into a Jazz setting.
Schoenberg was much too serious a person to get into Jazz, but what I found interesting in the clip I quoted was his analysis of Mozart’s technique. Arnie of course rejected Classical harmony, but he highlighted some aspects of Mozart’s music:
• Composition without aid of an instrument, copying music down from a mental vision
• Graceful, nimble and clear
• A sense of balance and belief in infallibility of the logic of his musical thought

To which I would add Mozart always seems close up and personal.

As regards your analysis of Form, Melody, Timbre and Rhythm, my only thought in regard to timbre is that Mozart particularly in his wind ensembles made things work by superposition of sounds from different instruments. Each individual instrument is of course played “correctly” with a correct tone, but the magic lies in putting these instrumental sounds together.

None of these points concern the key issues that distinguish Jazz from other forms of music, but may be Jazz compositions might benefit from using Arnie’s points as a check list?

[3rd Viennese School]

There was a mellow Jazz version of the slow mvt of Mozart symphony no.41 on a film once. There were these people, right, in a hotel room and that was playing.
3VS


"We are all but cows looking over a gate for half an hour"

[Serial_Apologist]

Oddball - huge thanks for the Schoenberg clip.. and the others which I shall look into with time.

When I think about this, I came to Mozart at about the age of 6, through my parents' love of classical (and romantic) concert music and record collection. Moving on from Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schuann, Mendelssohn and Chopin, by way of Wagner, Brahms, the Russian "Five" and Mahler/Strauss to Debussy, Ravel and the early "moderns", I eventually reached Schoenberg aged 15, at around the same time I was discovering Bebop and post-Bop jazz. (This was in the early 60s). Of all the pioneering moderns, Webern excepted, Schopenberg I found the most unapproacheable, and it has only really been since the 1970s, when I first started really listening to free jazz and free improvised music deriving from it, that I really began immersing myself in Schoenberg. I guess as time has gone on Schoenberg's music has come to mean more to mwe than practically anybody else, jazz included, broad though my tastes are. There were depths to his music in terms of the way in which the entire tradition he emerged from, from Bach onwards, seems incorporated into its essence in a way one only finds in some of the greatest jazz exponents. I think that was because Schoenberg took from composersx in his lineage who took from their immediate predecessors rather than going back and feeling the need to dot every undotted i and cross every undotted t of those coming in between. Bach and Mozart are in the depths of Schoenberg in the same way the blues and harlie Parker are in the depths of ornette Coleman - if that doesn't sound too pretentious.

The main difference between composers working within the western clasical tr4adition and those in jazz is in the primacy of the mode of expression. The harmony of Bach may be as important in one sense to Brubeck, say, as to Alexander Goehr; but the clasical composer works and works to find the perfectest exposition of his or her art on paper for a.n. other to perform if not him/herself; the jazz muso works directly through his/her instrument of choice; learning how to score for other instruments, harmonise etc involves the same kind of learning a classical scorer goes through, but from a different perspective which must bear upon hiis/her approach to harmony. Also, harmonic approach from a jazz pov can be as much affected by conventions which reflect the relationship of the exponent to his/her traditions and those of the African American. The input will be much more physically determined in terms of the emotional input and physical outcome than the classical composer encounters, except possibly operating from the rostrum. One of the few exceptions I can instance as of now is the account of Stravinsky demonstrating The Rite of Spring to Monterux and Debussy on his piano.

That's all I can think of to say right now. Supper! Excuse any typos!

S-A