Spicy MacLammermoor (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} wayiseeitbarry) wrote,@ 2008-10-31 09:05:00 |
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About to finish Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones)’s Blues People, an excellent, not-unpleasantly speculative, cultural genealogy of music made in America by those descended from Africans. Some of its most compelling discussions, to me, are of the flipped genre connotations many musics had: for example the Cakewalk arose as a black parody of white dancing, was adopted by whites in the forms of minstrel shows, which eventually featured black performers parodying themselves. At this point the music associated with these shows, ragtime, became a solo piano and small band music, primarily performed by black performers, until it was watered down and repopularlized as more polite white music. This happens many times over; in discussing the post-swing black reaction of bebop and the various reactions to bebop, Baraka comes to the early 60s:
“By now, even the fresh uses to which the boppers put riff-based chords have been exploited and re-exploited to staleness. The hard boppers, if anything, increased to an even greater degree the improvising jazz musician’s reliance on ‘changes’ (recurring chords). Also, the ‘tonal centers’ of this music, especially as influenced by pseudo-gospel harmonies, are so predictable and flat that in this context even the gifted improvisers began to sound dull. What [Ornette] Coleman and [Cecil] Taylor have done is to approach a kind of jazz that is practically nonchordal and in many cases atonal (meaning that its tonal ‘centers’ are constantly redefined according to the needs, or shape and direction, of the particular music being played, and not formally fixed as is generally the case – what composer George Russell has called ‘pan-tonality’). Their music does not depend on constantly stated chords for its direction and shape. Nor does it pretend to accept the formal considerations of the bar, or measure, line. In a sense, the music depends for its form on the same references as primitive blues forms. It considers the total area of its existence as a means to evolve, to move, as an intelligently shaped musical concept, from its largely artificial considerations of bar lines and constantly stated chords, but the more musical considerations of rhythm, pitch, timbre, and melody. All these are shaped by the emotional requirements of the player, i.e. the improvising soloist or improvising group.”
-Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963, pg. 226-7
This is very revealing to me. You see critics always talk in hushed tones about the actual theory or conception behind Mr. Coleman’s music, instead usually talking about inherent “freedoms” it involves. This has never satisfied me, and in lieu of a published theory of harmolodics (something that’s been floated before), this is a very level-headed analysis from when the music was still new. If you are unaware, the general reaction of critics in the early 60s was far more sensational, there’s a great book about it called The Battle of the Five Spot by David Lee. What a great idea of openness though – there’s still a specific kind of expression you prize, but you get there on your own time rather than at the pace of convention. As George Russell is quoted as saying in the next paragraph: “This approach liberates the improviser to sing his own song really, without having to meet the deadline of any particular chord.” Ideas, ideas. One day I’ll get into Cecil Taylor, my first three attempts haven’t stuck. Maybe seeing the guy live would help.
Next up: Jung's Synchronicity. Seems like a book that I've been supposed to read for a while.
This is very revealing to me. You see critics always talk in hushed tones about the actual theory or conception behind Mr. Coleman’s music, instead usually talking about inherent “freedoms” it involves. This has never satisfied me, and in lieu of a published theory of harmolodics (something that’s been floated before), this is a very level-headed analysis from when the music was still new. If you are unaware, the general reaction of critics in the early 60s was far more sensational, there’s a great book about it called The Battle of the Five Spot by David Lee. What a great idea of openness though – there’s still a specific kind of expression you prize, but you get there on your own time rather than at the pace of convention. As George Russell is quoted as saying in the next paragraph: “This approach liberates the improviser to sing his own song really, without having to meet the deadline of any particular chord.” Ideas, ideas. One day I’ll get into Cecil Taylor, my first three attempts haven’t stuck. Maybe seeing the guy live would help.
Next up: Jung's Synchronicity. Seems like a book that I've been supposed to read for a while.
