Music

MASTER CLASS:

An unvarnished insight into the mind of Sonny Rollins (Philip Clark, 3/17/24, the Spectator)

[A]s jazz was becoming increasingly conceptual, Rollins was concerned that too many musicians were neglecting the basics. His goal was not revolution — he was motivated to achieve complete technical “mastership.”

The extent to which Rollins obsessed over the tiniest of technical details on his saxophone runs through the book. One minuscule finger movement could be enough to alter the resonance of a particular note either radically or indeed so faintly you’d need the ears of a bat to perceive it — and Rollins was open to both. This extended to his pushing his instrument beyond where recognized technique could function, to a point where the instrument operated but only in theory. Experimenting with bouncing the same note between different octaves, he described “higher notes that I have not figured out yet,” then scheduled time to explore beyond where his instrument normally sounded. Perhaps he could locate those notes, perhaps he couldn’t, but it was the endeavor that mattered.

Early in the book another theme emerges: his regret at the lowly lot of the jazz musician. All these decades later, figures like Rollins and Coltrane have become icons, but back in the day “the working conditions of many great jazz musicians are very, very far… below par!” he mourns. Making transcendent art in nightclubs, which were operated largely by shady characters “closely associated with underworld elements,” created inescapable tensions between goals of artistic purity and the brutal economic truth that jazz clubs, for the mob, were all about making money, exercising control and selling drugs.

Rollins’s high ideals rubbed uncomfortably against reality. Jazz, he explains, is “the music of America created by Americans for the edification of all of mankind.” As with many musicians, including Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, the word “jazz” became a bugbear to him, a label used, often cynically, to hold the ambitions of black musicians at bay, to retain them as “entertainers” — to put clear boundaries between black culture and the great Western tradition of Bach and Beethoven.

Rollins is clear that “mustn’t we start speaking of MUSIC and not jazz.” This music was “All American.” And although it’s of black origin, care must be taken “not to synonymize Negro and Jazz and not depict Jazz as a Negro product.” As Rollins unpicks the techniques of Indian music, you realize how deeply he believed that jazz also needed to reach out beyond America itself.

“SPONTANEITY ACHIEVED”:

Miles Davis and the Recording of a Jazz Masterpiece (James Kaplan, FEB 26, 2024, Esquire)

The Five Spot was closed on Mondays, but on that March Monday Davis, Coltrane, and Evans had other business anyway: in Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio, they were joining the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb to begin making, under Miles’s leadership, what would become the bestselling, and arguably most beloved, jazz album of all time, Miles’s Kind of Blue. March 2 and April 22: three tunes recorded on the first date (“So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” and “Blue in Green”), two on the second (“All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches”). Every complete take but one (“Flamenco Sketches”) was a first take, the process similar, as Evans later wrote in the LP’s liner notes, to a genre of Japanese visual art in which black watercolor is applied spontaneously to a thin stretched parchment, with no unnatural or interrupted strokes possible, Miles’s cherished ideal of spontaneity achieved.

The quiet and enigmatic majesty of the resulting record both epitomizes jazz and transcends the genre. The album’s powerful and enduring mystique has made it widely beloved among musicians and music lovers of every category: jazz, rock, classical, rap. This is the story of the three geniuses who joined forces to create one of the great classics in Western music—how they rose up in the world, came together like a chance collision of particles in deep space, produced a brilliant flash of light, and then went on their separate ways to jazz immortality.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

“What Was I Made For?”—Billie Eilish as Gen Z Icon (Liz Snell, 3/96/24, Rabbit Room)

Gen Z is the most self-marketed generation of all time. Like Barbie, Gen Zers how to make themselves into products for consumption. They know what sells. But do they know who they are? “I was an ideal/Looked so alive/Turns out I’m not real/Just something you paid for”—I wonder how many young influencers see themselves in that mirror. Eilish has said that at one point she felt like a parody of herself. It wasn’t until after she and her brother had written “What Was I Made For?” that she realized, “This is me. This is my life, and how I feel.”

Youth culture’s obsession with Billie Eilish seems to represent a longing for authenticity, for stars who are real and who can speak deeply to human experience, not just to the lifestyle of the rich and famous. I appreciate Eilish’s honesty both in her interviews and music, an honesty too often absent from Christian art. Eilish is thoughtful and creative and addresses important cultural issues with amazing awareness for someone so young. I applaud her probing, existential themes, but I wonder hope looks like in her world. She seems to be wondering, too.

“What was I made for?” It’s a question at the core of what it means to be human, at any age. It’s a timeless question, and Eilish sings it with all the quavering, searching restraint it deserves. Eilish is seeking the answer to this question through her music, and her fans are seeking along with her. Was I made to be exploited or to be powerful? Was I made to love myself or someone else? Was I made to be happy or depressed? Was I made to save the world or watch it burn? Gen Z is asking big questions. What answers are we going to give?

LOCKED HORNS (profanity alert):

The Icon and the Upstart: On Miles Davis’s Legendary Feud With Wynton Marsalis: James Kaplan Remembers One of Jazz’s Great Generational Battles (James Kaplan, March 6, 2024, LitHub)

The young trumpeter was highly opinionated and highly quotable, and from the beginning the music press, sniffing a possible feud, gave Marsalis’s venting about Miles—he even critiqued the outlandish outfits Miles had taken to wearing onstage, calling them “dresses”—plenty of column inches. The first time the two met, Miles said, “So here’s the police.”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, George Butler, the vice president for jazz A&R (artists and repertoire) of Davis and Marsalis’s mutual record label, Columbia, tried vigorously to get Davis to bestow his blessing on the up‑and‑comer, to little avail.

“George [kept] trying to make friends out of [me and] Wynton Marsalis,” Miles told me. “Like, I’d be sketching, right? And the phone would ring. Cicely [Tyson] says, ‘It’s George.’

“So I said, ‘What does he want? Can he tell you?’ She said no. So I answer the phone. Say, ‘George, what it is?’

“He says, ‘Why don’t you call Wynton up?’ “I say, ‘For what?’

“He says, ‘Because it’s his birthday. He’s in St. Louis.’ “I say, ‘Oh, George—’ ”

I laughed.

“See, you laughing,” Miles said. “But when that shit comes at you like that, you’re like, What? And Wynton and I get together and talk about music; he tells me he’s tired of playing classical. I said, ‘But you’re the only one playing it. Of our race. And you play it good.’ ”

This is what Miles said he said to Marsalis. But in various public contexts he’d also potshotted right back, often asserting what he’d said after Marsalis recorded his first baroque concerto album in 1982 (and would repeat for posterity in his autobiography): “They got Wynton playing some old dead European music.”

And in June of 1986 there had been an incident.

The episode, at the first Vancouver Jazz Festival, was the most exciting thing that had happened in jazz for years, throwing a spotlight on a genre that, in American culture at large, had long since contracted into niche status. The event quickly took on folkloric dimensions. In some accounts, there had even been a threat of physical violence between the frail sixty‑year‑old Davis and the twenty‑four‑year‑old Marsalis. In Wynton’s 2015 retelling, it all started with the goading of the three musicians who played with him at the festival—the drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts, the bassist Robert Hurst, and the pianist Marcus Roberts.

The four were in a car approaching Vancouver, Marsalis recalled, when Roberts, Watts, and Hurst began teasing him about some belittling remarks Miles had made to the press about Wynton and his musical family, New Orleans jazz royalty (his father, Ellis Marsalis Jr., and his three brothers, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason, were all renowned jazz musicians). How long was Wynton going to stand for this? they asked, jokingly. Was he scared of little old Miles? Davis was going to play that night, they pointed out, and they were off. Why not jump onstage with your horn, barge in on his act?

When Wynton replied, seriously, that he had too much respect for Miles to do that, the others began laughing at him and playfully betting that he was too scared to face off with the great man. Marsalis laughed along with them as they raised the ante. When the bet reached $100 apiece, and Wynton saw that his bandmates were serious, he said he would do it. And so he did.

According to a wire‑service report,

Wynton Marsalis surprised everyone—especially Miles Davis—when he walked onstage with his horn, uninvited and unannounced, as Davis and band were in the midst of a blues number. The upstart Marsalis approached the veteran Davis but Miles shook his head in a negative fashion. Instead of leaving, Marsalis walked to a microphone and began playing, which resulted in Davis stopping the music. The abashed Marsalis, who has always revered Davis, then walked off. “I don’t know why he was up there,” Miles said. “We have things that we do and we time everything. If he wants to jam, why doesn’t he go out to a club? I wonder what would happen if I did that?”

As Miles recalled the incident in his autobiography, he and his band were playing to a standing‑room‑only crowd at an outdoor amphitheater. Engrossed in his music, he suddenly sensed a presence in his periphery, and saw the audience reacting strongly—and then Marsalis was standing right next to him and whispering in his ear, “They told me to come up here.” Miles was furious. “Get the [***] off the stage,” he said. Marsalis looked shocked. “Man, what the [***] are you doing up here on stage?” Davis said.

“Get the [***] off the stage!”

Miles stopped the band, he writes, because Marsalis “wouldn’t have fit in. Wynton can’t play the kind of [***] we were playing.”

Marsalis claimed that Davis was playing the organ when he walked onto the bandstand, and that the music was too loud for him to hear anything Miles said. Once the band stopped, Wynton recalled, Miles said a few words to him, but “[***]” wasn’t one of them. And even though Davis was physically fragile, Marsalis, remembering that the great trumpeter had once trained as a boxer, watched his hands carefully, certain that any kind of physical altercation would go in his, Wynton’s, favor, and wind up making him look like nothing but a bully.

The story, Marsalis said, blew up out of all proportion to what had really happened or what he and his band ever thought it would be. And, he said, he never collected his $300.

BEAUTY SATIATES:

If Music Be the Food of Love: A Conversation With Composer Michael Kurek (Joseph Pearce, March 6th, 2024, Imaginative Conservative)

Alluding presumably to my interest in what he now thought of his early compositions, those which were influenced by musical modernism and postmodernism, Dr. Kurek spoke of the “elements of craft to be learned with skill and diligence, which I was required to learn and compose as a student (and even later as a professor, in order to successfully gain tenure).” Having mastered the craft dutifully, he began to see and realize that it was “a misguided craft, the pursuit of which, for its own sake and as an end in itself, only evinced an arcane musical alchemy of techniques that did not edify or uplift humanity”. The realization came as a revelation, an epiphany, which led to a rejection of the techniques he had learned. Feeling creatively revitalized, he began anew. “I started over from scratch, learning the old techniques, not from living teachers (there were no longer any) but from studying the musical scores of the great composers of the past, who became my teachers.”

Driven by a new enthusiasm, he now sought to write music that he would himself enjoy were he a member of the audience. Added to this unabashed populism, he also sought permanence or at least durability for his musical compositions, seeking to write music that people would want to hear more than once, “preferably many times over, even falling in love with its beauty”. There was also a sense of responsibility to the wider world and the living culture. “I wanted to write music that I hoped would mean that, after I die, I would be leaving the world a little more beautiful because of my creative contribution.” Last but indubitably not least, he sought to offer his gifts in thanksgiving to the Giver of the gift, “to honor God with a teleological narrative”, in which the music is seen to be working its way toward a climax or musical goal. “This, for me, reflects a goal of hope and ultimate salvation, unlike music that sounds random, aimless, purposeless, and Nihilistic or like Dada.”

Dieterich Buxtehude, Music, & the Experience of Life (Michael De Sapio, February 5th, 2024, Imaginative Conservative)

“Classical music” is itself a fairly recent concept, going back no further than the early Romantic period, and the formation of a distinct canon of works associated with the term was the work of the 19th and 20th centuries. “Classical music” would have been an entirely foreign concept to, say, Johann Sebastian Bach. For him, music was now, and he had to supply a constant demand of it for the functions of everyday life. The idea of creating art for posterity was characteristic of Romanticism. In Bach’s era the idea was for an artist to do a good job, to be a faithful servant, in the here and now.

And in Bach’s day, music was something to be done, not thought about. Music lovers did not spend hours debating how violinist X and violinist Y played executed a trill differently. They were too busy actually making music.

And music was everywhere. In church, in the village square, in elegant salons of the noblemen. Music for courtly dancing; music for theatrical performances: opera, plays, ballets. Real music, performed by live human beings. Music was experiential to a degree we can scarcely imagine today, when recordings have “frozen” the art form, making it something more like painting or architecture. (And yet recording has its own virtues, allowing us to preserve ideals of performance for reference, enjoyment, and study, to diffuse music widely and allow it to “last longer”—to some extent overcoming its limited and ephemeral nature. This too is a great good.)

We see Bach as the beginning of the Common Practice Period. This is the period that constitutes the mainstream “classical music” repertoire, and it includes the great Germanic line of composers from Bach and Handel through Bach’s sons, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (the Viennese Classicists), and on through Schubert and the German Romantics.

Anything before Bach is typically classed as “early music” and is a somewhat specialized field of interest. This is unfortunate, because there are many musical riches before Bach. Music is a continuing tradition, with each generation building upon the last. Bach’s genius and accomplishments were enormous, but they did not come out of a vacuum. He had an important early inspiration and mentor. His name was Dieterich Buxtehude.

What follows is a brief sketch of this pivotal yet all-too-little-known composer and musician. I wish to highlight in particular how he (like other artists of his day) made music a part of life. In this sense Buxtehude is an illustration of how music used to be enjoyed in a world very different from our own.

REFRACTING AND REFLECTING:

America and Hamilton the Musical (MAJ (RET) Montgomery J. Granger, 2/10/24, American Daily Press)

Despite my frustration at the absence of any traditional patriotism expressed in lyrics or set or costumes, there is, in fact, one mention of such symbolism.

A search of the lyrics of “Guns and Ships” demonstrates that the line “Leave the battlefield waving Betsy Ross’ flag higher” is a metaphorical expression emphasizing the idea of achieving victory and independence. The mention of Betsy Ross’ flag, with its thirteen stars in a circle representing the original thirteen colonies, is a symbol of the United States.

The line comes in the midst of describing the challenges faced by the Continental Army, a “ragtag volunteer army,” in its fight against the powerful British forces. The reference to waving Betsy Ross’ flag higher suggests overcoming adversity and proudly asserting the American cause. It’s a poetic way of expressing the determination and resilience of the American forces in the face of a formidable opponent and adds depth and imagery to the narrative of the musical.

In the end, my own bias is exposed. But maybe that was one of Miranda’s goals. That, like art in general, it’s not about the creator’s interpretation; it’s about yours.

SWEET SOUL MUSIC:

THE BLACK SONGWRITER WHO TOOK NASHVILLE BY STORM (Robert M. Marovich, 1/30/24, Zocalo Public Square)

Theodore Roosevelt “Ted” Jarrett Jr. was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 17, 1925, just more than a month before Nashville station WSM launched the “Grand Ole Opry,” the radio broadcast that turned Nashville into the country music capital. Jarrett’s upbringing was a riches-to-rags story. His father, Theodore Roosevelt Jarrett Sr., earned enough money working for a bootlegging enterprise to enable his family to employ a housekeeper, a cook, and a nurse. But after Ted Sr. was shot and killed, Jarrett’s mother, unable to maintain the family’s standard of living, sent 7-year-old Ted Jr. and his sister, Dorothy, to live with their grandmother and step-grandfather on their Antioch, Tennessee farm. When they were old enough, Ted and Dorothy joined their grandparents in picking cotton and doing other farm work.

Ted always had an imaginative mind, and from knee pants, he spent what little free time he had writing poems. In his pre-teen years, Jarrett was intrigued by newspaper ads that shouted about the “thousands of dollars” to be made by submitting song poems, or lyrics, for publication. Ignoring his step-grandfather’s dismissive retort that “Black boys don’t write songs,” and with surreptitious support from his grandmother, Ted eagerly sent samples of his song-poems to the advertisers. To his dismay, the so-called publishers turned out to be nothing more than “song sharks” who preyed on the hopes of amateur lyricists, only to defraud them in the end.

Disappointed but not daunted, Jarrett made music throughout high school, and enrolled in the music program at Fisk University after graduation. He had to delay his studies when he was drafted during World War II, and again later, when his GI Bill money ran out. To pay the bills, he dove full-time into Nashville’s postwar music scene, fitting in a class or two at Fisk whenever he had extra money.

Jarrett wrote songs and pitched them to Music City publishers. He also worked as a disc jockey on pioneering African American radio station WSOK, as a pianist in the city’s then-booming R&B club circuit, as a talent scout for the R&B and country label Tennessee Records and, briefly, as tour manager for Nashville’s Radio Four gospel quartet. In 1955, his song “It’s Love Baby (24 Hours a Day)” became an R&B hit for local unit Louis Brooks and His Hi-Toppers, and for bigger stars like Ruth Brown, and the vocal group the Midnighters.

Jarrett wrote his first No. 1 Country hit, “Love, Love, Love,” that same year. The song, an exuberant pledge of eternal affection, caught the attention of Webb Pierce, a white singer, guitarist, songwriter, and Opry star known for wearing elaborately decorated “Nudie Suits.” Pierce’s version of “Love, Love, Love,” which gave Jarrett’s song a pedal-steel-drenched reading that sounded like a long-lost Hank Williams piece, spent 32 weeks on the U.S. country chart, eight at number No. 1. In November 1955, Billboard presented the song with a Triple Crown Award for being the most played country record on radio and jukeboxes, and the best-selling country record in stores. The December 10, 1955 issue of the trade magazine the Cash Box featured a smiling Jarrett holding 78 rpm singles of three versions of the song: one by Pierce, one by pop crooner Johnny Ray on Columbia, and his own recording for Nashville imprint Excello.

From there, Jarrett grabbed the music industry with both hands. Music, regardless of genre or marketing category, was his passion. He championed Black artists who crossed over from R&B to pop, managed acts, and founded record labels such as Calvert, Champion, Ref-O-Ree, and T-Jaye. In total, Jarrett wrote approximately 300 songs, several of them portending the rise of southern soul music. The Rolling Stones covered “You Can Make It If You Try,” arguably Jarrett’s best known composition, on their eponymous 1964 debut album. All the while, Jarrett never gave up on his dream of a college degree, receiving a bachelor’s in music from Fisk University in 1974, when he was in his late 40s.