A return to the joys of ensemble playing….
Lee Konitz
Is there are metaphor here for something greater? Something at hand?
Jazz is American’s classical music. It’s a national disgrace that it is so rarely heard, so absent from mainstream culture. Whereas we’ll spend millions on opera, concert halls and theaters, if you want to hear jazz, go to a saloon. It is widely held that the early jazz musicians were primitives, uncouth fellows who couldn’t read music, who played by ear, but who just had that innate ability to play. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of jazz musicians could and did, read and write music at the highest level and their musical education embraced all forms of music, Western classical, South and Central American, popular music, folk music etc. The one thing they all had in common was that they loved good music, from whatever cultural tradition it came from.
What’s more, jazz initially, was an ensemble music, entirely democratic, each instrument playing with and off the others. Highly American, in fact.
As time went by, ego asserted itself and the era of ‘the solo’ arrived. No more was ensemble playing valued. A trio, say, of piano, bass and druns would accompany the Soloist – the same happened in rock music too, and the public were treated to intermnably long, boring solos that eventually almost killed off the form. Many will be familiar with the story of how John Coltrane asked his then boss, Miles Davis, “Miles, when I get on that bandstand, I just go off into a world of my own. I lose all sense of time. People tell my my solos are too long. How can I make them shorter?” Miles said, but less politiely than this, “Try taking the horn out of your mouth.”
Loren Schoenberg, esteemed director of the National Museum in Harlem, and no mean player of the tenor horn himself, says that the ensemble playing that the musicians of the past played, was extremely diffiicult to execute and that most modern players would find great difficulty playing it. He says it is technically much more difficult than soloing in front of a backing group. Indeed, he says, this being so, if audiences were more hip to what’s going on, it’d be the ensemble playing they’d applaud, not the solos.
Lee Konitz, a man they should be building statues for now when he’s still alive, and unquestionably one of the all-time great improvising musicians said to me yesterday, “in playing, more and more I feel like eliminating the concept of solo after solo, and the group really responding to each other. In the moment it becomes a compositional music that is great fun to play and sometimes, although it’s hard to evaluate the musical worth, it’s communicable too. Audiences appreciate not having to wade through these endless solos of mediocrity most of the time.” And he says, “To me that’s a revelation I’ve known all these years but somehow, people are willing to try that now, the young people. And I’ve had great fun doing that with young musicians. I’ll play with Brad Mehldau and Charlie Hayden in July and I’m hoping we can do that because they’re great at that, if they’re willing to do that, it’ll take Brad and all of us off the spot, of having to repeat what he’s famous for, playing great solos and things.”
By the way, Lee is playing with these guys at Birdland, for four days from July 20th.
Lee’s touching something profound in my view. Collective playing opens us up more, is spiritually fulfilling and is rewarding equally for the player and the listener. What are we waiting for? Maybe dancing together is about to come back too?
This could be the platform on which live music will enhance our lives and become commonplace once more, that our best musicians should be accorded the stature they deserve.
But I hope and pray, that these Obama years will be the prelude to something beyond our wildest hopes that human evolution will leap forward so that we all live together in peace and harmony, that this Mother Earth becomes a paradise for all God’s creatures, a place where true values are celebrated and where the rich, the greedy, the manipulators take a back seat for at least a few millennium. Their riegn has lasted too long and maybe the ensembe players are about to have a chance.
Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Spirit, Truth, Uncategorized, Understanding, human brain, ydig
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