This thread is prompted by my experience at a Masterclass given by the virtuoso Armenian pianist Tigran Hamaysan (incidentally backed by American's Sam Minaie and Nate Wood who both appear to enjoy careers playing other music as well as jazz) during the course of the week before last. When he first appeared on the scene, Hamaysan appeared to have a grasp of every style of jazz from stride through to Avant Garde and taking on everything in between including Bill Evans and Jerry Lee Lewis. It was intriguing to listen to his comments after hearing his set the night beforehand and to hear him discuss just about every style of jazz piano from Morton onwards with Art Tatum singled out for god-like reverence.
However, the afternoon session tended to take the conversation into more abstract areas. Much of the conversation concerned the discussion of using different time signatures and how a "space" of a number of measures could be divided up into all sorts of bizarre and eccentric time signatures which could be chopped and changed in an alarming fashion. The impact was staggering in it's proficiency and helped explain what was going on when the group had played the previous evening. Some of the music didn't even involve improvisation although it sounded like contemporary jazz albeit superficially. This style of music kept cropping up over the course of the week and it was marked just how many players under the age of 30 are not taking their cues from any earlier forms of jazz. Indeed, Hamaysian made a point of repeatedly performing Armenian folk music and how wrong it would be to play it in a "swing" style - by which he mean't swing in the wider sense. (Bebop, if you like.)
The music seemed to please most people in the audience of the workshop and members of an American big band behind me at the concert seemed to appreciate how original and different it was. Other voices weren't quite so favourable and two colleagues who lectured on another workshop were extremely critical of the fact that the music seemed to consist of loops. Indeed, they were even critical of Metheny for doing this in once number although it seemed very much a feature with European musicians. Having been party to the conversation, it was possible to hear this repeated use of loops quite frequently and probably the worse offender I heard was Lars Danielson's quartet (with Hamaysian on piano) which reduced the music to a composed theme with the improvisation consisting of a vamp / sequence over a number of bars. I can't transcribe or write music and don't know the full mechanics of it but it was clearly a conceit and readily recognisable once you appreciated what to listen out for. I must admit that I hated Danielson's music with a passion as it seemed clinical and monotonous.
About a week afterwards I had a long conversation with my good friend and drum teacher Alain Dumont who hads worked with Americans such as Hank Mobley and Nathan Davis and used to teach at the conservatory in Lyon. I really value his opinion and he was extremely hostile to much of the newer forms of jazz. At Lyon, one of his colleagues is the former Dizzy Gillespie pianist Mario Stanchev and he commented that Stanchev was obsessed with unusual time signatures to the extent that the music he taught often didn't swing and Alain eventually had to tell him just to play a blues. For him, swing and the blues are essential incredients and take them away, you make it difficult to define the resultant music as jazz.
I don't know if it is a consequence of getter older but I certainly agree with Alain. From a harmonic and metric point of view, some of the new "jazz" I have heard over the past couple of weeks is far more complex and sophisticated than anything put down by Parker, Coltrane, Ellington or even some of today's finest players from the States, it doesn't swing. Granted that there is an argument that not all jazz swings but there seems a calculated effort not to swing. I acknowledge that jazz almost by definition evolves and absorbs from other musics like a magpie but the likes of Danielson and Hamaysian are perhaps a step too far. It probably isn't as clever as it thinks it is from a structural perspective at least yet the music seems sedcutive to both the teachers in conservatoires and their students. It made me start to think in a reactionary manner than jazz should essentially be an African American music and white musicians are only playing this music under licence. It is arrogant to think that Europeans are now offering such a marked alternative. Stuart Nicholson certainly had his finger on the pulse about ten years ago about Europe changing the perception of jazz but having heard the likes of Trotignon, Lagrene, Rava, Romano get things so right, I wonder if with hindsight he would have been quite so enthusiastic had we been aware that the music would evolve to the extent where Hamaysian and Danielson seem to get it so wrong. (Or pehaps not really even care?)
However, the afternoon session tended to take the conversation into more abstract areas. Much of the conversation concerned the discussion of using different time signatures and how a "space" of a number of measures could be divided up into all sorts of bizarre and eccentric time signatures which could be chopped and changed in an alarming fashion. The impact was staggering in it's proficiency and helped explain what was going on when the group had played the previous evening. Some of the music didn't even involve improvisation although it sounded like contemporary jazz albeit superficially. This style of music kept cropping up over the course of the week and it was marked just how many players under the age of 30 are not taking their cues from any earlier forms of jazz. Indeed, Hamaysian made a point of repeatedly performing Armenian folk music and how wrong it would be to play it in a "swing" style - by which he mean't swing in the wider sense. (Bebop, if you like.)
The music seemed to please most people in the audience of the workshop and members of an American big band behind me at the concert seemed to appreciate how original and different it was. Other voices weren't quite so favourable and two colleagues who lectured on another workshop were extremely critical of the fact that the music seemed to consist of loops. Indeed, they were even critical of Metheny for doing this in once number although it seemed very much a feature with European musicians. Having been party to the conversation, it was possible to hear this repeated use of loops quite frequently and probably the worse offender I heard was Lars Danielson's quartet (with Hamaysian on piano) which reduced the music to a composed theme with the improvisation consisting of a vamp / sequence over a number of bars. I can't transcribe or write music and don't know the full mechanics of it but it was clearly a conceit and readily recognisable once you appreciated what to listen out for. I must admit that I hated Danielson's music with a passion as it seemed clinical and monotonous.
About a week afterwards I had a long conversation with my good friend and drum teacher Alain Dumont who hads worked with Americans such as Hank Mobley and Nathan Davis and used to teach at the conservatory in Lyon. I really value his opinion and he was extremely hostile to much of the newer forms of jazz. At Lyon, one of his colleagues is the former Dizzy Gillespie pianist Mario Stanchev and he commented that Stanchev was obsessed with unusual time signatures to the extent that the music he taught often didn't swing and Alain eventually had to tell him just to play a blues. For him, swing and the blues are essential incredients and take them away, you make it difficult to define the resultant music as jazz.
I don't know if it is a consequence of getter older but I certainly agree with Alain. From a harmonic and metric point of view, some of the new "jazz" I have heard over the past couple of weeks is far more complex and sophisticated than anything put down by Parker, Coltrane, Ellington or even some of today's finest players from the States, it doesn't swing. Granted that there is an argument that not all jazz swings but there seems a calculated effort not to swing. I acknowledge that jazz almost by definition evolves and absorbs from other musics like a magpie but the likes of Danielson and Hamaysian are perhaps a step too far. It probably isn't as clever as it thinks it is from a structural perspective at least yet the music seems sedcutive to both the teachers in conservatoires and their students. It made me start to think in a reactionary manner than jazz should essentially be an African American music and white musicians are only playing this music under licence. It is arrogant to think that Europeans are now offering such a marked alternative. Stuart Nicholson certainly had his finger on the pulse about ten years ago about Europe changing the perception of jazz but having heard the likes of Trotignon, Lagrene, Rava, Romano get things so right, I wonder if with hindsight he would have been quite so enthusiastic had we been aware that the music would evolve to the extent where Hamaysian and Danielson seem to get it so wrong. (Or pehaps not really even care?)
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