Tony Coe (1934-2023)… Alyn's obit in Jazzwise

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Bluesnik

I was staggered by the interview as well and concur that the honesty of the responses was refreshing. It is really fascinating to compare the responses given int his issue with some of the nonsense spouted in the Ezra Collective one that SA posted. It struck me that Tony Coe's comments were more about how the music is put together and which musicians are sincere. He was judging things on a more practical set of criteria. I have to say that I totally get the comments about big bands (except the British dance bands which rarely played jazz) and the criticisms about Sheppard and Garbarek were very insightful. The comments about Free improvisation struck me as being made by someone who had tried this and found the experience unrewarding . The criticisms about the use of harmony seem salient in my opinion yet I think the draw with Improvised Music is that it wears it's heart on it's sleeve. It can be dreadful but you call also have Eureka moments. The risks are far greater than with plying jazz and you could argue that that the rewards might be greater. The problem is that it is really difficult to put criteria on what is deemed "successful" when the boundaries are always being challenged. There is nothing worse than "bad avant garde" and having dipped his toe in the water, it was clear to me that Tony Coe had the experience to register those elements with which he seemed particularly dissatisfied.

The one element that shocked me was his opinion of Eric Dolphy which was dismissed for his inability to play the "correct" notes and the fact that he was playing for effect. In my opinion, Dolphy is probably only rivalled by Coltrane, Shorter and Henderson as a jazz saxophonist in the 1960s. His music is essential. I have to admit that I wish this interview had been longer and that Tony Coe had elaborated on those "icons" whose reputations he felt to be over-rated and why he held this view. For all the enthusiasm on this board for Coe's more adventurous output, it seems clear that these were not the works of his that he valued. What I admired was that he was not afraid to praise music which has long since been out of fashion and that he was judging the alleged shortfalls of others on musical terms. There has been an interview on line with week with Keith Jarrett whose own opinion of Garbarek is far more favourable but this was in a more solid jazz context. In addition, there cannot be many on here not nodding their head regarding modal jazz/ Jamey Abersold -style improvising. Chromatic improvisation is demonstrably more colourful and more interesting. I would also argue more progressive. Not everyone playing modal jazz was a Coltrane.

It is fascinating to read musician's opinions like this when they are not bland responses. I find the curious aspect of the Tony Coe interview was that he was not looking at music being "advanced" for the sake of it so that music was praised on the basis of where it sat on a notional musical evolutionary tree. this last week I have been listening a lot to both Syzmanowksi piano works and the broader music of Georges Enescu. In both instances, they were not necessarily at the cutting edge of music at their time yet, with the passage of 100 years, it no longer matters. For me, both were giants of classical composition just as Ben Webster was a master-craftsman of his art. I strongly believe that music does not have to be atonal to be "advanced" and if you have tried an ouevre and found it to be unrewarding, I think you are better placed to make a judgement upon it - especially if your perception is negative. I wish more interviews were this idiosyncratic!

I remember way back when Eric Dolphy emerged and was making a name for himself, Clark Terry being particularly dismissive, along the lines that "I know Dolphy, he can certainly play, but all this stuff he does now is a kind of crazyness just to get attention, to be the new Bird or something, he's admitted it to me". A view I most definitely didn't share then or now, but It was around.

[Serial_Apologist]

Bluesnik

I was staggered by the interview as well and concur that the honesty of the responses was refreshing. It is really fascinating to compare the responses given int his issue with some of the nonsense spouted in the Ezra Collective one that SA posted. It struck me that Tony Coe's comments were more about how the music is put together and which musicians are sincere. He was judging things on a more practical set of criteria. I have to say that I totally get the comments about big bands (except the British dance bands which rarely played jazz) and the criticisms about Sheppard and Garbarek were very insightful. The comments about Free improvisation struck me as being made by someone who had tried this and found the experience unrewarding . The criticisms about the use of harmony seem salient in my opinion yet I think the draw with Improvised Music is that it wears it's heart on it's sleeve. It can be dreadful but you call also have Eureka moments. The risks are far greater than with plying jazz and you could argue that that the rewards might be greater. The problem is that it is really difficult to put criteria on what is deemed "successful" when the boundaries are always being challenged. There is nothing worse than "bad avant garde" and having dipped his toe in the water, it was clear to me that Tony Coe had the experience to register those elements with which he seemed particularly dissatisfied.

The one element that shocked me was his opinion of Eric Dolphy which was dismissed for his inability to play the "correct" notes and the fact that he was playing for effect. In my opinion, Dolphy is probably only rivalled by Coltrane, Shorter and Henderson as a jazz saxophonist in the 1960s. His music is essential. I have to admit that I wish this interview had been longer and that Tony Coe had elaborated on those "icons" whose reputations he felt to be over-rated and why he held this view. For all the enthusiasm on this board for Coe's more adventurous output, it seems clear that these were not the works of his that he valued. What I admired was that he was not afraid to praise music which has long since been out of fashion and that he was judging the alleged shortfalls of others on musical terms. There has been an interview on line with week with Keith Jarrett whose own opinion of Garbarek is far more favourable but this was in a more solid jazz context. In addition, there cannot be many on here not nodding their head regarding modal jazz/ Jamey Abersold -style improvising. Chromatic improvisation is demonstrably more colourful and more interesting. I would also argue more progressive. Not everyone playing modal jazz was a Coltrane.

It is fascinating to read musician's opinions like this when they are not bland responses. I find the curious aspect of the Tony Coe interview was that he was not looking at music being "advanced" for the sake of it so that music was praised on the basis of where it sat on a notional musical evolutionary tree. this last week I have been listening a lot to both Syzmanowksi piano works and the broader music of Georges Enescu. In both instances, they were not necessarily at the cutting edge of music at their time yet, with the passage of 100 years, it no longer matters. For me, both were giants of classical composition just as Ben Webster was a master-craftsman of his art. I strongly believe that music does not have to be atonal to be "advanced" and if you have tried an ouevre and found it to be unrewarding, I think you are better placed to make a judgement upon it - especially if your perception is negative. I wish more interviews were this idiosyncratic!

Difficult to know where to start with answers, but a couple of observations. Firstly "modal" can be used broadly to cover a large proportion of jazz from all around the world, post say 1960, since modal can describe music that is based on scales of many kinds, and from which horizontal (melodic) and vertical (harmonic) shapes can be derived, or drawn. Listen to Tony Coe, and he's drawing on modal patterns much of the time when improvising. A very narrow definition of "modalism" seems to have been selected to "bag" a lot of jazz, one which apparently sees the term referenced only in relation to use of prolonged ground basses, ostinatos, drones and riffs. Already in the early 1960s we hear for example Tubby Hayes making frequent use of modal extensions of 12-bar blues in order to sound "contemporary" in a post-"So What"/"Impressions", erm, kind of way. The late 60s "songbook" of the Miles Davis Second quintet based most of its harmonic structures on modes, thereby contributing to their feeling of "otherworldliness" - which has also been commented on by Anthony Payne in discussing the "English pastoral generation" of early 20th century composers, including Vaughan Williams and Holst, and the many lesser subsequent figures they influenced, people like Moeran and Rubbra. There's a fine line between what I offer to call "chromatic modalism" and the chromatic elaboration which took a small but influential number of first half 20th century modernist composers beyond passing notes (suspensions and apoggiaturas) - in other words chromatic steps moving from chord to chord to effectively delay harmonic resolution as in Wagner's "Tristan & Isolde", Strauss in "Salome", Schoenberg in the first 3 movements of his second string quartet, Berg's Piano Sonata,middle and later Scriabin, early Bartok and middle period Szymanowsky, to name just a few.

Schoenberg, Berg and Webern then took the chromatic course the next logical step into atonality, echoing by chance Charles Ives's famous statement that "My chords don't have to resolve if they don't want to"; modalism, or "chromatic modalism" can side-step the issue of harmonic predictability (or inevitability) by different means, modulation or limited transposition for examples, and yet end up at similar results. Take the Dorian mode - it is most easily identified by playing an octave on the white notes on the keyboard from D natural to D natural; one is "hearing" D as the "tonic" although terms such as "tonic" became theorised with the academic granting of superiority to the major/minor diatonic musical world view of what would become thought of as the western Baroque/Classsical/Romantic historical succession that would come to feed into light and popular forms, including jazz up to and including the Swing era. In respect of accuracy the term used should be "root" rather than "tonic", given that major/minor diatonicism was a selective reduction down from hundreds or even thousands of years of cross-cultural musical travel in modal thinking - albeit often proscriptively in terms of the ecclesiastic musical models passed on into the western classical tradition, unchallenged until the rise of national(ist) movements in the 19th century, and a concomitant interest in older folk forms, with their modal (pre-diatonic) underpinnings. Even if one thinks of the simple flattened sixths and sevenths typical of western European folk music, these would be considered as unresolved dissonances to a dogmatic professorial adherent of Diatonic Correctness, but not to a folklorist or ethnomusicologist; and to a modal composer (or jazz improviser) they offer fresh and, to a major/minor-fixated 17th century classical addict, unexpected alternatives either divested of convention-bound power as means for getting from chord to chord, or re-invested with meaning for the modern age, as composers from Bartok to George Russell have given us.