"A piece of improvisation is done, and after it's done, there's nothing to be said about it because it affects your life whether you like it or not." (Wadada Leo SMith via Val Wilmer)
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Double Bass Help me understand "free jazz"
- Thread starter krfoss
- Start date
I can’t help but think that the question “help me understand free jazz”, hasn’t even been addressed. Nobody can help you I’m afraid is the only answer and I’m not being pedantic. Musical and visual art both demand only an emotional response, you hear it or you see it it and you react subjectively. You’ve already listened to the music you are asking about and you’ve experienced your reaction to it. You can perhaps understand the reasons you reacted the way you did to the experience. Art should not and does not need education on the part of the listener or viewer. It is possible to understand some of the processes involved in creating art but to understand the art is a different thing altogether. Understanding the creative process can even get in the way of listening to, or viewing art, in an uninhibited way. Artists can only ask the listener or viewer to listen or look, there’s really nothing else they can do. If you want to go to school to understand how you might create art yourself that is a very different question. There are such things as music and art appreciation classes and that is different again. Even putting music into the context of when and where it was created, or who created it, doesn’t alter the fact that an emotional response to the sounds you hear is all that matters. Henry Purcell or Harrison Birtwistle, Pops Foster or Mono Neon, you listen and you react. Art in its purest sense and particularly more abstract art is a universal language, I suppose because it doesn’t need translating or understanding. It simply asks for an emotional response and we’ve all got emotions. Art that requires an explanation is bad art.
Yes. Beautifully expressed and elegantly articulated.
Thank You, Peter M.
Agree, but would add context to that: "Art that requires an explanation in order for any given person to appreciate it at that point in time is bad art for that given person at that time."
I can think of many times where I have considered something "bad art" only to discover later that I was not an appropriate audience for that art at that point in time; later, some of that "bad art" became things that I love dearly, and that pays dividends again and again. Some examples include Bartok, Palestrina, Mahler, Jessye Norman, certain Miles records, etc...
I remember wandering around the MOMA and coming across an expert leading a tour and I stopped and eavesdropped. The piece she was talking about was a bicycle wheel stuck into a stool which was spray painted white. She went on and on, unloading her MFA thesis on us, and sorta had me convinced that the thing was good art. I left and wandered into a gallery filled with Cezanne's and joined all sorts of other bozos getting drunk on their power and beauty - no explanation or decoding needed.
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Sorry Chris, but I can’t agree that there is even such a thing as an appropriate audience or listening response, apart from observing relevant social etiquette. You listen, hear and react, then when you hear the same musician or the same piece of music again you react again (as if for the first time) and that reaction may be different to the previous response. Neither response is either appropriate or inappropriate, it simply is. Of course you can hear or notice different things in the performance or performer, but essentially you are just listening. My point was, that to enjoy listening to Bartok or Jessye Norman (or Free Jazz because that was what were talking about), is out of your personal control, you do or you don’t, on a one off, in that particular moment, basis. No amount of “understanding” can change that. It’s fascinating to talk about music in all its facets but the reaction to hearing it is visceral. So you not enjoying Bartok at any given moment is nothing to do with it being good or bad art. Enjoyment doesn’t even necessarily indicate artistic quality, but it’s a very good idea not to discount anything or anyone you hear too quickly. The whole process is magical, wonderful and inexplicable. And of course by saying it’s inexplicable, I’ve neatly demonstrated why I shouldn’t have started talking about this in the first place.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this point. My appreciation for Bartok began after I had been studying composition long enough to begin to understand his melodic/harmonic language and the way it hints at and simultaneously frustrates the ear's expectation of tonality. Appreciation for Mahler came out of that same basic harmonic understanding, where I came to love the dance he often does in his late works of stretching the boundaries of tonality and the way it fits hand in glove with his ultra romanticism.
My appreciation for Jessye Norman came when I learned just enough German years ago to appreciate the inflection she was giving to the texts of the Mahler songs I had come to love, and the way that the music and the words and the expressive performance were all part and parcel. Same with Palestrina, where the time spent trying to write counterpoint in that style gave me an appreciation for the subtlety of it, and out of that grew a genuine affinity for the music.
Or the dawning realization of the importance of subtext in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, which for me came only after I had experienced the same thing in Kundera novels. And on and on.
So it's OK to disagree, but I definitely believe that a deeper understanding can add depth and meaning to a person's experience of an art or art form that they previously didn't get.
Great thoughts on both sides, @Peter M and @Chris Fitzgerald!
I'm gonna pick a bone with this particular statement, even if it might just be preferred semantics. I've long considered active listening and openness to enjoyment skills unto themselves. It's often much easier to dismiss/not like something than to enjoy it, kinda like kids with food. In some ways I envy people who listen to music but who aren't musicians themselves, since as a musician it's so tempting to dissect the music into its various technical parts instead of hearing the whole.
Personally, I have the most difficult time enjoying modern pop music a la Britney Spears, Justin Bieber et al. I'd rather listen to a construction site honestly, but when I'm confronted with it (say riding in someone else's car) I consider it a challenge and try to find ways to enjoy it. After all, someone had to sit in the control room and say "yeah man sounds great!" It doesn't always work well
, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's out of my personal control, and certainly some level of understanding goes a good ways toward affecting that ability, removing filtering layers of dislike and becoming more receptive, so to speak.Free jazz is maybe in some ways the far antithesis to that type of hyper-produced commercial thing, and I actually find it much easier to enjoy as a category. To me it's essentially taking those moments out of, say Thelonious Monk's lines, where he seems to consciously drop all archetypes and view the piano as simply "maker of some random noise," what I've heard some people term "primitivism," and proceed to mash out-of-time dissonance, only to tie it back in with some nuanced thing that shows off traditional, refined technical skills. It's a kind of transcendence that allows a more unbridled, instantaneous expression, although I may go out on a limb and say that the "appropriate audience" for such expression is often (though not always) musicians who have played so much "regular jazz" as to have become somewhat bored or unimpressed, and I sometimes view it as music for musicians, generally. Or something
If the question were "Why don't I like free jazz?" or " Why do I like free jazz" would it be a more productive discussion in terms of the music? Having no aesthetic context makes it tough to have much of a conversation. If I were a non-musician and had heard only contemporary pop with auto tune, boring loops, etc. I might decide that I don't like those sounds and music in general. Would some context change my opinion? I hope it would encourage me to broaden my listening choices at least.
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Circling back around to free jazz, I generally don't care for it because I often can't perceive the structure that underlies it and that it is departing from. Much of it sounds random and schizophrenic to me. But I also know from experience that other styles/genres of music have struck me this way initially and I have evolved gradually to the point where I start to get them, and some of them to the point where I actively adore them. I don't consider my "not getting" a certain style or genre of music a failing of the music itself, but rather a mismatch between my sensibilities and those that the music is based on. In the case of music that has already been made (i.e. - composed and/or recorded music), the music isn't going to change, but I might, so I try to keep an open mind and not shut the door to something that I might appreciate someday. Sometimes I succeed in this, other times, I suspect I may have thrown out baby with bathwater subconsciously without intending to.
Much of Damon's music strikes me as in the above description. But rather than dismiss it, I try to recognize that it's just not my thing right now. It might never be my thing, and that's OK, too. But one thing I believe beyond a doubt is the sincerity of Damon and others who have devoted their life to this form of music. It is palpable, visceral, and beyond question for me. I respect that greatly even if I am not in a place to appreciate the music the way I appreciate other styles/genres/forms of music. And in the end, that strikes me as important somehow in ways that I can't quite define, and the respect endures on that level.
Much of Damon's music strikes me as in the above description. But rather than dismiss it, I try to recognize that it's just not my thing right now. It might never be my thing, and that's OK, too. But one thing I believe beyond a doubt is the sincerity of Damon and others who have devoted their life to this form of music. It is palpable, visceral, and beyond question for me. I respect that greatly even if I am not in a place to appreciate the music the way I appreciate other styles/genres/forms of music. And in the end, that strikes me as important somehow in ways that I can't quite define, and the respect endures on that level.
Oo-er (British slang for confusion), my head is beginning to hurt, but I’m enjoying the pain. I understand Chris’s and Chain’s two perspectives, or I’m trying to, but they are very much not my perspective, semantics, preconceptions, prejudice, who knows, could be. One of my big personal dislikes is “music for musicians”, “art for artists”, in other words elitism, sorry but I said it. Art forms should be more open than that. I’m not denigrating study or insight, far from it, but I think that is a personal search and not really connected to how one reacts to hearing musical sound. Being an artist implies a certain amount of elitism, but we shouldn’t inflict our innate elitism on our audience. Knowing more about how or why something is created does not improve its worth, it simply helps us know more about how or why it was created nothing more. Improvised music just focuses these questions doesn’t it. To see a great improvising musician doing what he or she does, helps me answer some of these questions. Sonny Rollins is not seen as a free jazz musician, but if that is not freedom I don’t know what is. I wrestle with these questions and insecurities in my own playing on a day to day basis. Bruce Calin’s alternative question would certainly have been easier to deal with than the thread title.
I think quite a bit of what makes many people like music is the feeling of being an insider - hip if you will - who understands the codes. This applies to lovers of Hip-hop, opera, prog-rock, whatever. A lot of what many of us love about 1958 Miles Davis's recordings, for example, is that they just perfectly exemplify a certain concept of jazz and a certain group of listeners who get it. Free jazz has a small but very hard core following of people that understand the codes, are proud of it, and are willing to spend money to prove it. They don't want most folks to like it - they want to be special. When I am coaching students who are preparing to audition for college jazz programs I tell them the most important thing is to sound like you are a jazz musician; that you know the codes. They have been very successful even those who perhaps didn't play their instruments as fluently as others they were completing against.
I definitely understand that sentiment, although I see it less as intentional elitism, and more as scratching an itch audience-or-not, breaking perceived constraints in expression. Not quite free jazz, but take Bela Fleck for instance. An ultra nice guy in my experience without a shred of what I would term elitist vibe, yet I don't personally know anyone who's into the Flecktones who isn't a musician. If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because it bears little resemblance to any other music containing banjo, and while there is definitely structure to the music, it can be so esoteric as to make it inaccessible/difficult to follow ime. Simply put, it's too busy for me generally, as (ridiculously) technically impressive as it is. But folks who are into it are way into it, and many of them are also incredible musicians, Jonathan Scales for example. Like what Chris said above, I respect that music deeply even if it's not my go-to. For me to call it music for musicians is not meant to be derogatory, more like "here's a special small-batch beer for all the hard working brewers."
Somewhere I recall Victor Wooten talking about his music camp for kids, and how one of the activities was to go out into the woods at night and just listen to the insects and whatnot singing. There is of course no set, shared rhythm, melody, form, or such amongst the creatures, but yet there's expression and a sonic coexistence. Something like that. Free improvisation doesn't have to be cacophonous, in fact I love formless "jamming" that uses all of the structural elements, just maintaining the freedom to ditch/trade them at will. I don't call that free jazz though. For me at least, the term indicates that the music is being performed by people who are steeped in the already-esoteric world of jazz, who can easily play in a structured sense but feel the cacophony as a related outgrowth of structure. Or something. Dancing about architecture amiright
You are right, “Dancing about architecture” pretty much sums up the whole discussion!
I'm putting on some Ayler and not reading this thread again.
“It’s like not having anything to do with what’s around you, and being right in your own world. You can’t put you finger on what he’s doing.
It’s like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right. And it gets to you emotionally, like a drummer. That’s what Coleman means to me.”
Charles Mingus on Ornette Coleman - 1960
It’s like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right. And it gets to you emotionally, like a drummer. That’s what Coleman means to me.”
Charles Mingus on Ornette Coleman - 1960
I promised myself that I wouldn't post on this thread several weeks (months?) ago... but here we are... Why can't it just die? Anyway, there is an undertone to so many posts here that is ignorant and misleading. Like vegans and atheists, I am finding that free jazz fans are amongst the most hated group in musical circles. Maybe nobody says it, but comments like the one above and many others in this thread have this sentiment as a subtext. We are just passionate about the music we love, probably like most people on this forum. Are some people overenthusiastic to the point of annoyance? Yes, but this could be said of fans of any genre of music (Have you heard THAT Rush song? Actually no, I haven't).
We don't want to be special and exclude anyone from an already small audience. But when people enter in a discourse with preconceived notions about the intent of the performers/listeners, well... it's pretty hard to have a serious discussion (Evidence: this thread). Over the past 30 years, I have played countless free records for friends and colleagues in an attempt to widen the audience for this music. I have also listened to countless records played by friends and colleagues. A process I am extremely lucky to have taken part in (I NEVER thought I would be a fan of reggae but...). I have found that anyone with a pulse has a strong (generally positive) reaction to the Art Ensemble's "People in Sorrow", so that is my recommendation to the OP. As for me, I am also putting on some Ayler...
