How significant would jazz be if this was a piano only art form?

[eighthobstruction]

Yep very much enjoying that stuff you talk about....Footprints....listening very carefully....where does the electric piano become flavour/choice....and why? ( esp with the technical problems it used to often cause)

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Ray Charles was one of the very first to feature an electric piano in the late 50s, I guess for reasons of portability and being in tune...and funk.

Fine with Bro Ray but an evil instrument of lumpen blandness for many others.

I blame the 70s...for most t'ings.

BN.

[eighthobstruction]

Listening to Little one : ESP....great comment on the Utbe wall>>>Down Beat's Jazz album of the year for 1965 / One of the first things I purchased upon my return from a combat tour in Viiet Nam<<<<

....Great stuff music wise....(Mind you wasn't Wayne Shorter writing a lot of this stuff.....)

>>>] In December 2009, the US House of Representatives voted 409–0 to pass a resolution honoring the album as a national treasure<<<<

>>>Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro, on which electric bass, electric piano, and electric guitar were tentatively introduced on some tracks<<<....but it's Chick Corea on piano

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

coz i found it ..

and back on topic ..... it does depend on the central root metaphor you want to use to hold the notion of 'jazz' ....i f this is some platonic pure space form capable of definition in exact tottality welll good luck mate is all i can say ...

if on the other hand it is a large forest with whole colonioes of trees with interlinked roots where it is impossible to define a singular entity .... then it does depend where you are not what [or the two mean much the same] but plato is an exclusive domain ..... and the forest can be dark and frightening with men in tights .... to rule an instrument in or out you have to be at root platonic ..... unwise man, unwise

[Serial_Apologist]

I have a track on cassette, probably taken from JRR in the early 80s, of Sun Ra's band from 1957 performing "Reflections in Blue at the Window", a straightforward 12-bar, in which Ra switches from acoustic to electric piano for his second chorus - probably a Hohner from the sound of it.

As to precisely when Herbie Hancock switched to electric with Miles there are many arguments over this, but it must've happened before "Miles in the Sky". Ian Carr's Miles book has Herbie on acoustic on "Water on the Pond", rec. Dec 28 '67, but listening to this again just now, it is either electric piano or - less likely - harpsichord.

[eighthobstruction]

>>>Do I deny myself the rightful, pleasurable act of procreation just to prove a point? Do I suffer in my own anti-societal beliefs? Or do I give into my animal urges like every other trained monkey out there?<<<....or do I stick a piano in there if I fancy it....what's to loose.....what's not to like....

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Christ Calum, what have you been smoking? Open the window before the cops come.

All that meat and no Platato.

BN.

[charles t]

Calum: Possibly your treatise is distilled within (by an obscure Yank clergyman):

"I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery

than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it."

[Ian Thumwood]

Bruce

Miles Davis 1967 tour did play in London as one of my friends went to the gig. It was part of a double bill (hence the reason why the sets from about 5-6 cities fit on to the box set) with Archie Shepp who actually headed the billing! At the time the "New thing" was all the rave but my friend Dave said he couldn't stand the second set played by Shepp and eventually walked out. Odd, listening to these recordings, but the Miles' group seems comletely "way out" and far more adventurous than anything produced by Coltrane's avant disciples. This has got to be the reissue of the year (is there going to be a volume 2?) and very much in line with the kind of stuff Wayne has been playing with his current quartet. The wierdest thing is watching the DVD as the amount of bombast created by Tony Williams originates from such a small kit! AN essential acquisition in my opinion.

[Quarky]

Geoffrey Smith's excellent programme on Stride last night, together with preceding programme on Contemporary piano, gave a good answer to the question posed by this thread.

Without Roland Kirk, how significant would Jazz be? Certainly not more significant than the contemporary music on Hear and Now. And just a bit too hard going for my musical tastes.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

..indeed Oddball, Geoffrey's prog is well worth catching ...

and i aint bin smokin nuddin for 10 months and i iz CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

beware yer root metaphors tho!

[Serial_Apologist]

Without Roland Kirk, how significant would Jazz be? Certainly not more significant than the contemporary music on Hear and Now. And just a bit too hard going for my musical tastes.

I'd possibly have agreed with that second sentance 20, 30 years ago, just about. Not today.

[Ian Thumwood]

I love the way that stride piano has crept back into the vernacular with contemporary jazz piano. The originators of the style had a tremendous techinque and were all extremely competitive. I have always been amazed by the fact that they often chose to play in difficult keys with loads of sharps and, at least from the point of view of the left hand, Modern jazz piano took several steps backwards to begin with with the left hand relegated to playing shells. This was something of a temporary hiatus as pianists increasingly found a way to re-accommodate the left hand to the point that there are plenty of jazz pianists around today from Chucho Valdes through to Vijay Iyer who seem to have equal dexterity with both hands. If stride had a draw back, it was the fact that it was locked in either a 2/4 or 4/4 time signature but this was typical of the jazz of the time. Nowadays anything seems possible and the "puzzle" of employing both hands seems well and truly solved.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Exhibit A from jazz "pre history"/ before the enlightenment : Phineas Newborn Jnr.

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

Phineas Newborn is hugely impressive and I agree that although I heard heard relatively little of his playing, does he has that control over the left hand. Granted that the comment about "shells" is a bit of a generalization (listen to the likes of Sonny Clark, Bud Powell, Horace Silver or John Lweis, etc) , I feel alot of the players who could employ both hands really well owe a lot of Art Tatum as an influence. I would put Newborn and Oscar Peterson into this category as well as more modern players like McCoy Tyner too. It's open to debate just how "modern" a player like Peterson actually was. Another piano player you could throw into the mix ( a perhaps a better example ? ) would be Lennie Tristano. Not surprising that someone of his rigor would be able to find a solution - his his playing I think counterpoint seemed to be a bit factor but he was yet another player who took his cues from Tatum. In some respects, I feel jazz in the 1950's could be very conservative and it is interesting that many of the more progressive players of this generation like Monk, Tristano, Nichols, etc, often took their cues from earlier forms of jazz. Playing standards, Monk would often resort to an almost "broken" stride piano. There is also a lot of Duke in the works of Monk, Nichols and even Andrew Hill and Horace Tapscott. Later musicians like Mal Waldron and the Jaki Byard also seem to follow this path.

For me, the better "solo" piano efforts in Modern Jazz come from the 60's onwards. The best "piano jazz" of the 1950's to me always seems better with a bass and drums. The ability to swing in this context seems to be the most appropriate solution and the more Bop inspired players like Bud Powell, Hampton Hawes and Wynton Kelly are compelling sue to the huge amount of energy within their music. Players like Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Chick Corea and Herbie have all got around the solo piano "problem" with various solutions in the 60's. Whilst Jarrett has probably been the most epic of these, I sometimes feel that he can get a bit stuck in a rut and can sound a bit corny in a solo context. (I don't have this problem with his group work which is exceptional.) Paul Bley is probably the most compelling as a "narrative" artist and I suppose he is probably the least swinging. I love the way that be breaks tunes down into "sound bites" and uses these as spring boards for his improvisations. The swing in his work almost seems to be what John Mehegan once described as "harmonic swing" insofar that the excitement comes from the impression of his almost mulling over his next choice of note. Despite his avant garde credentials, I've heard him play a blues called "For Roy E" which almost paraphrases some of Roy Eldridges's licks at an extremely slow and thoughtful tempo. Whilst you sometimes get this feel of players like Monk musing over the choice of note too, I feel no one got close to what Paul Bley achieved in the 1950's. Even a virtuoso like Bill Evans never fully realised the total potential of the piano and limited himself largely to the middle two-thirds of the instrument's range. The early trio recordings may have been spectacular, but the solos recordings I've heard don't match Bley for shear originality or Jarrett for stamina and version over a longer form. In this country there have been players like Keith Tippett who have probably helped expand the boundaries too. Check out something like Vijay Iyer's "Solo" record and I think it is pretty clear that the piano has come on leaps and bounds as a solo instrument even within the last twenty-thirty years.

I don't think that any other instrument in jazz has had to work quite so hard to find a solution to solo performance, especially after the questions that Charlie Parker raised with regard to rhythm. As I said in my opinion post, it is very much a tradition unto itself.