What Jazz are you listening to now?

[Jazzrook]

Sonny Criss's 1968 album 'Sonny's Dream'(Birth of the New Cool) arranged by Horace Tapscott:

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=RquO4RRFEHI

JR

[Joseph K]

Dave Holland Quintet at Newport in 2002.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvG8B39_Alc&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR20G_LBvjj4FXN7YpX55mNQsEmZfxNLGIE1cIDMuJggawJu_92EJIkJZk4

[Ian Thumwood]

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

Bliuesnik

I would strongly recommend JD Allen's previous album "Radio Flyer" which is with the same quartet yet pretty aggressive and perhaps more adventurous. The core trio has been around since the early 2000s but Elman was added to the group and his presence tends to pull the music in a more "outside" direction. Elman was actually born in England albeit he has lived a substantial part of his time in the US where he has worked with the likes of Henry Threadgill. Allen is a player it took me a while to warm to even though his music has a reputation of being accessible. "Radio Flyer" was, for me, probably the best album of a few years ago and probably represents one of the best examples of someone from the jazz mainstream really pushing the music. Some of it reminds me a bit of Ornette and the whole disc is underpinned by an air of unpredictability which makes it a compelling listen.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Thanks very much Ian, "Radio Flyer" is now on its way to me.
BN

[Joseph K]

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.

Thanks, SA. Very eloquently put.

[Ian Thumwood]

SA

I think there is a risk of seeing using chord changes as regressive even before the advent of modal jazz. What fascinate me in jazz are those people who might not necessarily think along the lines of the kind of II / V / I cadences in popular music. Some popular tunes from Broadway already has weird harmonies that were appealing to jazz musicians ("Darn that dream") and I think that even in 1934 an arrangements like "Queer notions" could put the cat amongst the pigeons harmonically. One of the reasons I would argue against some of your points might be the pianist Herbie Nichols who was using unorthodox chord sequences and forms which were never really improved upon until Wayne Shorter. Nichol's grasp of harmony was informed by the likes of Bartok and Prokofiev and I think his ideas were far more sophisticated that those exposed in modal jazz. Even the likes of George Russell was far more sophisticated in just using a couple of scales for his compositions. There was so much going on in jazz theory in the late 50s that you need to exercise care putting too much emphasis of modal improvisation alone. Nichol's compositions employ some strange progressions which are difficult to negotiate and took nearly another forty years before people could really understand his process.

If you want to go one stage further, how limiting does modal improvisation sound after someone like Cecil Taylor discovered that there were boundless possibilities for improvisation. The challenges he put forward certainly diminish the whole concept of modalism as improvisation became disenfranchised from form and chromaticism. Modal jazz sounds brilliant when performed by the likes of Coltrane, Adderley, Davis, etc but in the wrong hands is can be more boring than listening to a third rate bebopper running through the changes of "Cherokee." The fact that modes are now central to a lot of fusion and contemporary jazz (thinking of hearing "Girls in airports" last year at Vienne) makes you realise that it was about time modal jazz was put out of it's misery. It is the panacea to a lot of uninspired and lazy composers in contemporary jazz - the total antithesis of what Coltrane was about.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Joe Harriot Quintet (Kenny Wheeler) - BBC Jazz Club, December 1968..."Psychedelic Sally". Joe meets Horace Silver, who knew. Not me about this one although he did record "Señor Blues"...

http://youtu.be/S5WpHoAWwaI

[Tenor Freak]

Bobby Hutcherson/Harold Land Quintet - "A Night in Barcelona" from the LP "San Francisco"

[Joseph K]

Currently listening to Hand Jive by John Scofield; its Wikipedia page informs me that it's classed as soul-jazz or jazz-funk. I'm enjoying this one more than previous ones included in the 5 original albums set. It is groovy, but also very jazzy.

[DracoM]

MJQ Cortege

[eighthobstruction]

Currently listening to Hand Jive by John Scofield; its Wikipedia page informs me that it's classed as soul-jazz or jazz-funk. I'm enjoying this one more than previous ones included in the 5 original albums set. It is groovy, but also very jazzy.

....Nitin Sawney had Shakti track on Desert Island Disc....proper job....

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Vic Feldman big band, "In London II", December 1956. Feldman just back from the States for Christmas, with a band of the then London's cream...Dizzy Reece, Deuchar, Hayes, Scott, Temperley, Phil Seamen et all...

This is particularly good, a nocturnal blues that evokes that London after dark and that entire era.

"Blues in Two Modes"

http://youtu.be/KzsOw_9SjiM

[Joseph K]

....Nitin Sawney had Shakti track on Desert Island Disc....proper job....

[Serial_Apologist]

....Nitin Sawney had Shakti track on Desert Island Disc....proper job....

Repeated at 9 am this coming Friday, when I shall be listening. Interesting guy, Sawhney, though I wonder if he's fulfilled his early promise. ("Beyond Skin", 1999 was brilliant, I thought).

[Stanfordian]

‘Heavy Soul’
Ike Quebec with Freddie Roach, Milt Hilton & Al Harewood
Blue Note (1961)