What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Serial_Apologist]

The classic version of "Body & Soul" is always the Coleman Hawkins but it is interesting to discover that this tune had already been recorded 9 years earlier by Louis Armstrong with Les Hite's orchestra which was one of the premier West Coast big bands back then. Hite's band is little known now although T-bone Walker started his career with this band.

What is interesting about Hawkins' version was that it terminated a pretty stressful recording session by his big band where there was a staggering number of takes required to capture two arrangements. Ultimately Hawkins recorded his famous version with the rhythm section and the orchestra limited to providing chords towards the end of the solo. Coleman Hawkins' big band did not last too long and I think he grew frustrated with the musicians not being of the same calibre. Certainly he was dismissive of the state of jazz in the US when he returned from Europe and was surprised that there were so few threats to his dominance. I have always wondered why he was so economical with the truth having previously famously been routed by Lester Young in Kansas city. I find Coleman Hawkins a somewhat amazing figure in jazz because he was so significant in Fletcher Henderson's band in the 20's and 30's yet I feel his playing still resonates today. If he was playing in 2019, he would still be relevant and , maybe, getting away from Coltrane's reliance on modes and intervallic improvisation, probably more interesting as an improvisor being as he was more aligned with broadening jazz harmony as opposed to narrowing it down to scales / one tonal centre. As much as I love Coltrane, I still feel there is a lot to be learnt from Hawkins' playing.

Oddly enough, Hawkins returned to this number in 1944 where he performed similar feats albeit the tune was retitled "Rainbow Mist." I am not sure what else the band recorded on this session but the line up also included Dizzy, Max Roach, Don Byas, Budd Johnson, Clyde Hart and Oscar Pettiford.

I agree with Joseph that the Coltrane arrangement is somewhat iconic but there are more recent versions such as the one Joe Lovano recorded with Hank Jones which is pretty good too. I have also been listening to Horace Tapscott play "Body & soul" with Sonny Simmons in my car this week!

I've always found "Body and Soul" to be quite a difficult tune to improvise on - the A-A sections being fine, but the B section, the bridge, involving a semitonal modulation up, then a turn to the minor, followed by condensed downward semitonal step of modulations to the eventual home key, calling on a versatility beyond familiar keys, I would have thought, even presaging "Giant Steps" - so it's quite amazing to me to have presented this 1930 version: I wasn't even aware the tune was that old!

[Serial_Apologist]

Picking up on the Gary Windo topic, I think it is almost quaint that Windo was operating in a field where jazz over-lapped with rock n' roll. Some of the projects he was involved with seem so redolent of the era even though I had got in to jazz around the same time in the early 80's and totally missed what he was doing because I was not ready to listen to that approach towards jazz at that time. It is quite peculiar to look back at those times and see just how much levity there was in jazz at that time and there seemed to be almost an irreverence in the performances of bandleaders such as Carla Bley which you don't find in jazz now. I think you can find the same spirit in bands like Willem Breuker's Kollecktief who trod a similar path. Gary Windo has always been a mythical name to me yet someone I have never heard to any great extent. Some of the stuff from the early 80's is curious in that it predates the seriousness of the New Neos and a number of musicians were happy to mix with the more creative members of the pop fraternity such as Robert Wyatt, Marianne Faithfull, etc. If anything, the lack of separation between categories is even more pronounced in the work of someone like Michael Mantler which covers so many bases that it is beyond classification.

The weirdest thing regarding the Gary Windo topic was the bill board on the wall in the link to the Ray Russell clip on YouTube where the more adventurous musicians of the day seem to have been booked at the same venue as pretty full-on Trad Bands. (Bob Kerr's Whoopee Band, Avon City etc) I was fascinated to see this odd mixture and wondered how people would have commented at the time. For one, the radio commentary sounds like the gig was recorded for Open University! Quite intriguing to consider if the same debates were raging back then and to think that Russell's band sounds pretty mainstream now. I managed to find the recent edition of Jazz Journal on line and found the letters page quite interesting. Not withstanding the usual sensible comments from our friend Jazzrook, it was curious to see some letters lamenting the lack of coverage of mainstream jazz" and comments about "bands not swinging" which appear to pick up from the late 1980's when I stopped buying the magazine! I loved the letter pages in that magazine and I did use to envisage Trevor Cooper, late of this board, spilling his vitriol to the editors lamenting the demise of jazz since about 1967! Still, it was immensely satisfying to see one reviewer award a new album on the ACT label by Emil Parisien at 1/2 a star out of a possible 5! That made me smile as I feel the same about this label too.

I remember there being a lot of levity among one side of the free scene at around the time you were entering the world of jazz, particularly those musicians who crossed over ill-defined boundaries between rock, jazz and free improv; and it was part of a live scene that was marked by goodhearted banter and conviviality, often weed-enhanced! That was by no means characteristic of the whole scene, of course: the more abstract end of free improv could be like attending church; and one wouldn't expect (or want to expect) piss-taking jollity at, say, a Kenny Wheeler quintet gig. The improv scene of the 70s - London Musicians' Collective and various other collectives set up in its wake - was so set on abstraction and trying to avoid tried and overtested musical devices that when Steve Beresford's band Alterations decided to ditch all that and just spontaneously indulge their secret musical vices, much of the improv community looked on askance, even though such satire-making had been around since back in the days of The People Band, a kind of survival-of-the-fittest struggle to survive whims and trip-ups of every kind, and of course Lol Coxhill's involvements with Kevin Ayers Whole World Band and Gong. While one side of free improivsed music engaged at the most serious end with avant-garde and experimental music, post-Cage and Stockhausen, another was offering an updated pop and concept art-infused latter-day variant of 1920s Weimar agitprop critique of consumer capitalism. There was an overlap with radical street theatre, represented by Broken Biscuits, an early Chris Biscoe involvement, and their work with the Red Ladder Theatre Group; also Lol Coxhill's work with the Lancashire-based archetypalist Welfare State travelling theatre group, and possibly both Biscoe's and (before that) Coxhill's association with Mike Westbrook at his most theatrically involved. Then of course there was Maggie Nicol's improvising group FIG (Feminist Improvising Group) along with their laudible community-orientated projects, and indirect connections with the big push from some young female musicians to create their own takes on the various genres: Deirdre Cartwright's group; the brief Lydia D'Ustebyn Orchestra invollving many of them at a feminist music get-together in the Marylebone district in 1982 or 3, dedicated to Kathy Stobart! One doesn't see those older guys and guyesses (of my generatoin) of free players around so much today - quite a few have physically left us. The sense I have is that the younger generations that have emerged since the Millennium (F-Ire Collective and so on) are in every sense more seriously focussed on making jazz the art form they sometimes seem to mythologise, based on figures from the past that have been presented to them as representing jazz - the American icons and their British equivalents like Tubby Hayes, who every young musician I speak to seems to know about - probably reflecting musicians of my generation's involvements in formal education, or the one before me. Hence the rather forced "humour" one used to find in performances by Michael Garrick's big band! We can't overlook the psychological mass effect living in a less secure age than was the case 40 years ago must be having in shaping how young musicians, many of whom, unlike the Annie Whiteheads, come from middle class backgrounds, visualise jazz as a serious alternative to lifelong careers in classical music. I do see something to the contrary in the black or at any rate multi-ethnic bands coming up the past few years on the London scene (the one I pretend to know a tiny bit about), whom I linked to on this thread yesterday. They seem more realistic than the likes of Steve Williamson, who in the 80s spoke of making a good living out of the music, reflecting how the new Soul and Jazz Funk bands he and the more opportunistic Countney Pine were signifiers for a rising new black professional class. If I'm right to feel re-optimised it's because I see them re-engaging with that conviviality that can afford to take risks with "generics" and lift young audience expectations to new levels... all without resort to... substances!

[Joseph K]

... and , maybe, getting away from Coltrane's reliance on modes and intervallic improvisation, probably more interesting as an improvisor being as he was more aligned with broadening jazz harmony as opposed to narrowing it down to scales / one tonal centre...

Just curious - I have pointed out in the past that you tend to oversimplify Coltrane's or indeed the whole concept of playing over tunes that comprise a one or two-chord vamp (or no chord) - what do you think of Indian classical music? I mean, Coltrane never just sticks to just one or two scales, or at least rarely does, whereas in Indian classical music, they actually do stick to one mode.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

SA..."They seem more realistic than the likes of Steve Williamson, who in the 80s spoke of making a good living out of the music, reflecting how the new Soul and Jazz Funk bands he and the more opportunistic Countney Pine were signifiers for a rising new black professional class"

I think Steve Williamson learnt the hard way that didn't last! There's a very good bit of interview where he talks about modeling suits (Armani?) and being given any clothes he pointed at, as he and Courtney etc were boosted for five minutes and then dumped just as quick. I remember their pictures in the Face etc (no, I didn't buy it!)

[Serial_Apologist]

SA..."They seem more realistic than the likes of Steve Williamson, who in the 80s spoke of making a good living out of the music, reflecting how the new Soul and Jazz Funk bands he and the more opportunistic Countney Pine were signifiers for a rising new black professional class"

I think Steve Williamson learnt the hard way that didn't last! There's a very good bit of interview where he talks about modeling suits (Armani?) and being given any clothes he pointed at, as he and Courtney etc were boosted for five minutes and then dumped just as quick. I remember their pictures in the Face etc (no, I didn't buy it!)

I think there may even have been a recording Steve Williamson made of cat walk music!

[Stanfordian]

‘The Waiting Game’
Tina Brooks with Johnny Coles, Kenny Drew, Wilbur Ware & Philly Joe Jones
Blue Note (1961)

[Ian Thumwood]

Just curious - I have pointed out in the past that you tend to oversimplify Coltrane's or indeed the whole concept of playing over tunes that comprise a one or two-chord vamp (or no chord) - what do you think of Indian classical music? I mean, Coltrane never just sticks to just one or two scales, or at least rarely does, whereas in Indian classical music, they actually do stick to one mode.

Joseph

I cannot really comment about Indian Classical music but the whole point of the modal experiment was as a vehicle to get beyond the run-of-changes associated with be-bop and offer a more expansive route for improvisation. In a nutshell, the concept entails improvising on a scale as opposed to a chord. By ditching the sequence of chords you are able to dispense with the structure of a tune and the improvisation effectively goes beyond the tine's form. Coltrane relied on intervallic improvisation which effectively involved pairs of triads deriving from each scale. In the cases of some of the triads, they can imply other keys that differ from the original scale. On top of the possibility of implying possibly two other keys, you can also improvise "off" from the scale and choose to employ another scale in it's place. This effectively means that in modal jazz there are two alternatives, "off" and "on" whereby you are either playing on the key or in another key.

For me, this may mean that you can expand beyond the form of a tune but you lack the multitude of key changes associated with a sequence of chords. I would concur that jazz harmony needed a kick up the backside towards the end of the 1950s but modal jazz was only one solution. It is a tool for improvisation. Here is a good example where the standard "Nature boy" is reduced to playing variations from the D minor scale:-

I think Coltrane's rendition of the theme is as near to perfection as you could get. The improvised section only really relates to the tune in the fact that Coltrane is employing motifs based on the melody You can hear the "off" and "on" aspect with regard to Tyner's piano. The harmonic variation comes from Coltrane's mutations of the scales. I think this version is more interesting for the improvised line of Coltrane and the way that the rhythm breaks down but harmonically, there is not a great deal going on. The piano is almost pointless in this track.

[Ian Thumwood]

I think that this is the definitive version of "Nature boy"

I just find that this version is so much richer. The original tune is respected and I think it is far more interesting. Roy Hargrove is the trumpeter.

Once you start to pay attention to modal jazz it become less and less interesting in the hands of less capable musicians than Coltrane or Miles Davis. I am not opposed to it but just personally find it more interesting to use altered chords and unusual progressions as opposed to vamping on a couple of chords. Luckily jazz from the 1980's onwards seemed to get more savvy and I think that the music has moved well beyond modes as musicians become more savvy about more modern approaches to harmony. It was fresh and original in 1958 but I feel the "better" chase these days is far more sophisticated.

[Joseph K]

This effectively means that in modal jazz there are two alternatives, "off" and "on" whereby you are either playing on the key or in another key.

Ian, thanks for replying. I still take issue with the statement of yours I've quoted. I've dug out Lewis Porter's Coltrane book, which features a transcription of Trane's solo on So What from Kind of Blue. As you know, this tune alternates between D Dorian and E flat Dorian. However, Coltrane often uses, say, D melodic minor over D Dorian - where does this fit in your binary off or on idea? It's both off and on - it features a note outside of Dorian, and yet it features notes in common. This is what I said before on the Late Coltrane thread - there is a spectrum of possibilities, right from bang on, to slightly out but mostly in to half out half in etc. etc.

[Joseph K]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M107rD9DDIQ

Miles Davis- November 6, 1967 Salle Pleyel, Paris

I think this is the second disk of the first Miles Bootleg series boxed set. Truly awesome it is, too. It is extraordinarily rich in the variety of harmonic and modal substitutions used by these players.

[Ian Thumwood]

Ian, thanks for replying. I still take issue with the statement of yours I've quoted. I've dug out Lewis Porter's Coltrane book, which features a transcription of Trane's solo on So What from Kind of Blue. As you know, this tune alternates between D Dorian and E flat Dorian. However, Coltrane often uses, say, D melodic minor over D Dorian - where does this fit in your binary off or on idea? It's both off and on - it features a note outside of Dorian, and yet it features notes in common. This is what I said before on the Late Coltrane thread - there is a spectrum of possibilities, right from bang on, to slightly out but mostly in to half out half in etc. etc.

Using a melodic minor is not a massive difference, though. You could also use a harmonic minor. The improvisor would still be in the total centre of D. I would recommend the Walt Weiskopf if you want to explore this further:-

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intervallic-Improvisation-Modern-Beyond-Linear/dp/1562242598

I think the on / off harmonic relationship still applies when it comes to improvising. It is quite interesting to look "beyond" this approach to improvising and maybe you will find it interesting to get hold of lead sheets of compositions by the likes of Tom Harrell, Wayne Shorter or even Pat Metheny to see how harmony has evolved well beyond playing on modes. I don't dislike modal playing buy when you have more interesting options, it always comes second in my opinion and these days often symptomatic of musicians who have lost creativity. Someone like Harrell would be a good starting point for you because of the way he used inversions all the time and is thinking "outside the box" with regard to harmony. Easy to be innovative when you are improvising from a scale as opposed to negotiating a difficult set of changes.

I suppose bop reached it's apogee with a tune like "Giant Steps" which features a rapid fire set of changes through the keys. By going modal, Coltrane by-passed this complexity albeit I think jazz harmony is now far more sophisticated. Reads SA's comments about "Body & soul" regarding harmonic movement.

I wouldn't get hung up about modal jazz - modes are just a tool.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

JD Allen Quartet, "Stranger in Paradise" from his "Love Stone" ballad album. For those who suspect I do not listen to the "younger generation".

It's beautiful played, recorded etc, and it seems everyone of that generation needs a "ballad statement", and I've listened to it a LOT. But I still have doubts if it is more than a very "pleasant" album. I like/prefer his more aggressive playing elsewhere. Btw, the lovely guitar on this by Liberty Ellman is a real plus, the Jim Hall to his Rollins.

http://youtu.be/RQ9zLgGi6B8

[Stanfordian]

‘Soul Stream’
George Braith, Billy Gardner, Grant Green & Hugh Walker
Blue Note (1963)

[Joseph K]

Easy to be innovative when you are improvising from a scale as opposed to negotiating a difficult set of changes.

Is it though? Depends what you mean by 'innovative'. In one sense it's easier playing just two scales, as in So What, but at the same time it puts greater onus on the improviser to keep it interesting. If it's so easy being innovative on a modal tune, why do you complain about the lack of interest apparently in so much modal jazz? Certainly I've met musicians who say they find it easier to improvise interesting music when they're following chord changes.

I suppose bop reached it's apogee with a tune like "Giant Steps" which features a rapid fire set of changes through the keys. By going modal, Coltrane by-passed this complexity albeit I think jazz harmony is now far more sophisticated. Reads SA's comments about "Body & soul" regarding harmonic movement.

I think a similar complexity found its way into Coltrane's playing of modal music when he started superimposing harmonic sequences derived from his Giant Steps and Countdown compositions on Impressions, but obviously with much more freedom. I think it's wrong to state jazz harmony is more sophisticated now than in Coltrane's music... perhaps you'd like to show me something more sophisticated than Interstellar Space? I did read SA's comments about Body and Soul, why are you telling me that?

I wouldn't get hung up about modal jazz - modes are just a tool.

I don't know what gave you the impression I was getting hung up about modal jazz.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think a similar complexity found its way into Coltrane's playing of modal music when he started superimposing harmonic sequences derived from his Giant Steps and Countdown compositions on Impressions, but obviously with much more freedom. I think it's wrong to state jazz harmony is more sophisticated now than in Coltrane's music... perhaps you'd like to show me something more sophisticated than Interstellar Space?

I think that's right. For what's my twopennorth's worth, I think the original modal idea - which probably started when jazz musicians would end a tune by protracted improvisation on its final chord or final cadence (nearly wrote dcadence!) - was to have a more open, static harmonic context in which to move around with greater freedom than defined by the major-minor diatonic universe inherited from white, if you will, Western concepts that had evolved to subordinate rhythmic continuity and discontinuity to tension building by chromatic elaboration and cadential suspension - hence the "floaty" feel that simultaneously entered early European modernism in Debussy's music and that of the otherwise very different Schoenberg and his circle. Modern classical music carried this further by taking the resulting rhythmic ambivalence, and either reconstituting it by means of external imposition - which is what Stravinsky did in "The Rite of Spring" and subsequent works before partially reinstating harmonic hegemony over rhythm and metre in his neo-classical period; or by taking harmony beyond the point of cadential resolution altogether, at which point set rhythmic procedures based on harmony determining the rhythmic mileposts goes out of the window, and can only be implied by degrees of harmonic tension - something for which Boulez later accused Schoenberg of remaining faithful to the cadential impulse to closure while undermining its psychoacoustic rationale and therefore theoretical basis in serial theory.

Where this relates to jazz is that up to modal and Ornette Coleman free jazz, improvisation - even including bebop, cool and hard bop improvisation, had remained faithful to the major/minor diatonic harmonic universe ineluctably accepted by Tin Pan Alley and Broadway composers who had furnished the materials jazz musicians used as their basis for improvising. The tension came between the freedom to superimpose in contradiction to the re-iterated chord changes, and beboppers following Charlie Parker did this by invoking chromatic extensions to the popular chords to expand the improvising vocabulary beyond recycling around the set chords of the tune, (which might themselves include chromatic chords, of course, as can be heard in the way Coleman Hawkins took them on board in his 1939 version of "Body and Soul"). The opening out of the rhythm section, cutting back the left hand stride of the pianist so as not to duplicate the role of the bassist, and having the drummer provide counter- and poly-rhythms, would prompt the soloist, like Parker or Diz, to "think outside the box" of the otherwise harmonic straitjacket, while still bearing it in mind as providing useful cadential resting places or mileposts.

Now, if you either simplify the harmonic underpinning to just a few repeating chords over a bass ostinato, you (a) free the soloist to think, ie feel his or her way forward without having to have harmonic deadlines as self-limiting guides or reminders, and while the bass ostinato keeps things rooted, the pianist or harmonic intermediary can follow or even lead the front line soloist in directions less posited on predictability and more based on spontaneity; and (b) thereby return music making to its connections with cultures where spontaneity and immanent as opposed to externally imposed tension and release, with its implications of colonialisation, prevailed. And if you go further and say, atonality did this for modern white, mostly male-dominated Euroclassical music; now we, with our chromatic and rhythmic elaborations and superimpostions having virtually obscured and, to all intents and purposes, effectively rendered the materials on which we have always improvised (12- 16- 32-bar repeated structures and their elaborations into Ellingtonian suites etc) surplus to requirements, can do it in our way. This is our cultural claim to equivalence with the bourgeois art music tradition in making and supporting the music.

Thus what had been superstructure - the underlying tune - and substructure - the slot permitted the soloist to show off his or her skills and originality as far as the format, bandleader and tradition allow - is now turned upside down: from now on the inscribed practices determining how jazz is created and taken forwards are those that drive the music. And this - the form, its derivations, limitations and possibilities, the social and political circumstances shaping it, and the tensions between all these factors, is what, I believe, is singular to jazz.