Setting the Record Straight

10/16/17

 

I’m in the process of re-designing my book, Creative Jazz Composing and Arranging, Volume 1.  It was originally written and released as an eBook, but very soon it will come out in hard copy.  With the help of my editor, Nikola Tomić, I’m correcting a few typos and re-wording some awkward sentences.  My old friend Nina Schwartz is redesigning the look of the book.   She’s changed the fonts, page layouts, added pictures and basically made the book more reader-friendly.  In doing all this, she is reading every word and giving me a non-musician’s perspective.  This is all extremely helpful.  I’m enjoying re-thinking this book that I wrote two years ago.  In fact, the publishing date is exactly two years ago to the date.  In those two years, I’ve written a second volume and half of a third volume, a manual for high school jazz band directors, as well as 110 articles for my blog.  Needless to say I’ve learned a lot about writing in the process.

 

Last week Nina sent me an email saying that the book reminds her of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts.  I watched a few of those on TV back in my childhood and teens, and even had a set of LPs of those lectures.  They made a big impression on me back then.  Bernstein seemed so articulate about an art form that I had previously thought defied verbal explanation.  He started with What Does Music Mean? 

 

Basically, music is a language unto itself.  There are some programmatic pieces about trains and the sea, but mostly music is about how we feel.  Some of those feelings can be put into words, but as Bernstein says, the best emotions that music offers us can’t be verbalized.  That is so profound.  Music is at its best when it does exactly that.

 

I’ve loved music my entire life.  I probably loved it while I was in my mother’s womb.  It spoke to me and about me.  I’ve always related to it in ways that people feel about God.  Some music I liked for a short while, and some music has stayed with me for 50 or more years.  Some music I outgrew, while other pieces keep showing me greater and greater depth. 

 

One of my beefs about Bernstein’s book is his hierarchal view of music.  What he calls “serious” or “exact” music, which most people call classical music (either European or derived from that tradition) he sees as superior to folk music, pop music and jazz.  His argument is that there is more development in this kind of music than in the others.  Folk music and pop music rely mainly on repetition.  This is true.  But does that disqualify music from being great?

 

He concedes that jazz doesn’t repeat as much, and is closer to classical music in that respect.  He doesn’t recognize the serious development in jazz masterpieces and great solos, nor does he speak about jazz having its own aesthetics and language—that the big band is the American equivalent of the symphony orchestra, or that the jazz quintet has its parallels to chamber groups like the string quartet. 

 

Furthermore, whenever he writes out what he thinks would be a jazz version of something (like how Louis Armstrong might play I Can’t Give You Anything But Love), it doesn’t resemble jazz at all. 

 

I have much respect for Bernstein as a symphony conductor and as a Broadway composer.  One only has to hear a recording of him conducting Mahler or his scores to West Side Story, Candide and On The Town to recognize his place in the pantheon of musical greats. 

 

He cites composers like Gershwin, Copland and Stravinsky for their incorporation of jazz in their “serious” works.  Gershwin did spend enough time uptown at Willie “The Lion” Smith’s elbow to absorb some aspects of jazz, but his music comes from a different place.  For me, Gershwin (who also learned first hand from The Lion) is the greatest of the American songwriters, and that’s saying quite a lot.  His songs have a grace, nobility and imagination that even Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Harry Warren and Harold Arlen cannot match. 

 

I’ve spent a lot of time with Gershwin’s most popular “serious” works, Rhapsody In Blue and Porgy and Bess.  Although the melodies are beyond first rate, I find his harmonies erratic and his understanding of counterpoint, rhythm, and orchestration to be third rate.  In no way could his music be considered jazz.  He doesn’t understand jazz movement and dance, nor does he develop his themes sufficiently as would Stravinsky or Ellington (another “student” of The Lion).  Gershwin’s music lacks a true connection to American speech and movement.  Performed as written, it is stiff and not truly American.

 

Speaking of Stravinsky, I don’t hear any jazz in his music nor do I hear any in Copland’s.  Bernstein cites syncopation as a jazz trait that “serious” composers appropriated.  The syncopation I hear in 20^th century “serious” composers is more like the rhythms of ragtime than jazz.  Jazz rhythms and inflections are so much more sophisticated and complex than that.  Gershwin may throw in a blue note here and there, but his music does not embody the feeling of the blues.  For all of Bernstein’s acknowledgements of the importance and influence of jazz in 20^th century music, he cannot write or play it at all.  Like the other “serious” composers he cites, he writes syncopations that have no relationship to jazz rhythms or forms. 

 

The irony in Nina’s statement of my book reminding her of Bernstein’s is that Bernstein, in trying to relate to “young people” deals with quite a few musical issues (citing many examples from the repertoire) in a superficial way, while in my book, I deal with fewer musical issues and focus on four compositions, dealing with each one in depth.  If you didn’t know jazz or “serious” music, and only read our two books, you might erroneously conclude that jazz is more serious than “serious” music. 

 

I recognize the difficulty of analyzing something without the use of specific nomenclature.  Every time I get a report from my doctor, I ask her to translate it into English that I can understand—and she does.  Speaking in depth about music is equally difficult.  There are technical terms and conventions that musicians toss about freely that can make non-musicians’ heads spin.  But music has a universality that can be addressed so that anyone can understand it. 

 

A great example of plain speaking is a one-hour National Public Radio show that I narrated with Wynton Marsalis as part of their 26-part Making the Music series many years ago.  A few months earlier, Wynton and I sat at my dining room table and spent three or four hours analyzing Ellington’s score to Harlem.  The piece lasts only 14 minutes, but it took that much time to unravel it.  The two of us egged each other on, discovering the hidden and not so hidden beauty in Duke’s music.  The logic and imagination in that piece rivals any music I have ever heard.  Both Wynton and I learned plenty that afternoon.

 

When I showed up at NPR’s studio in Washington DC, I felt a bit unprepared.  Although I knew the music, I had no idea what the format of the show would be.  Wynton and I sat opposite each other.   A few feet away was a 16-piece big band ready to play the musical examples from Harlem after Wynton and I described what was going on in each section of the piece.  What I didn’t expect was that Wynton had prepared how he would describe each section compressing our four-hour analysis down to 45 minutes.  This seemed to leave little for me to add. 

 

The beauty of Wynton’s analysis is that he dealt with the form and motivic development while staying away from using musical jargon.  Whenever I would throw in a term that might not be known to a general audience, he would have me explain it.  At the end of our 45-minute dissection, the band played the entire piece from beginning to end.  To this day, whenever I hear Harlem or think about it, I hear Wynton’s words. 

 

Leonard Bernstein spent a chapter talking about nationalistic music—how the composers who grow up in each country write music that sounds like the speech patterns of their countrymen.  They also incorporate how their people move, and especially how they dance.  I’ll add that they also convey how they feel—the dark melancholy of Russian music, the brightness of Spanish music, and the loving warmth of Italian music.  

 

When I hear jazz, and especially Ellington’s Harlem, it expresses the American ways of how I feel, talk and move.  In the early days of jazz, when records first started circulating around the globe, people of all nations fell in love with this new music and the essence of what it means to be an American.  Jazz has been our greatest ambassador.  It speaks of freedom, joy and democracy in its own deep and serious way.  It embraces all of life, from the highest ideals to the lowest degradation, but always with style and optimism.  As the blues says, “Life is hard, life is hard, but the sun’s gonna shine on my back door someday.”