Tuning Slide 5.29- Experience the Music

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you,
following you right on up until you die.
— Paul Simon

I have talked before about the impact of music on musicians- or at least on this musician. It has been known to happen in a rehearsal that I get so caught up in allowing the music to flow around and through me that I lose my place. That happens especially in concert band music since there are more than a few times in any concert when the trumpets are resting and other interesting things are happening around the band.

One thought when playing a more famous and familiar piece from some well-known composer is the honor I am having by playing the piece. My part may be as simple as some moving accompaniment line that few will hear separate from the whole or it could be the wondrous melody line played by the whole section. It doesn’t matter- it is still participating in something that has been around for years or centuries and here I am in that same line of musicians privileged to be able to play it.

One particular concert I remember was one where the director chose a complete concert of numbers by George Gershwin. I have been in love with his music since 9th grade when in music appreciation class the teacher played the opening of "American in Paris". From the moment I heard the “traffic noise” and the mood of the crowds in the street, I was hooked. Over the years I have played a number of arrangements of his works. A whole concert with selections was almost more than I could bear.

“I am playing Gershwin,” would go through my mind as we rehearsed. “This is immortal music,” was my next thought. I was in awe and the music flowed. That concert was one of the more enduring memories I have of playing music. To be able to actually be part of making the music was in itself a significant life moment. I probably am still working from the store of endorphins from that one concert alone. It went far beyond just playing music, it was experiencing the music from within.

I love going to concerts as a listener. It can anywhere from bluegrass to blues, Mozart to Mahler. It can be ensembles or wind bands or brass bands. At one concert last week I was being moved by the music and, as I am often led to do, I closed my eyes. My wife thought I was falling asleep and nudged me. I later explained to her that when music like that is at work I will close my eyes so I can shut out the extraneous “noise” and sensory input from vision. I need to allow the music to do what only music an do. I describe it in four words.

• Music Moves.
Music is not static. It doesn’t just sit there. Even when I am practicing and playing long tones, no note ever remains still. I visualize it leaving me as I hold that “whisper G” and heading out the bell. Music is sound, of course, which means it is made up of waves, moving waves. The music is coming at you- or if I’m playing- moving away from me. When it doesn’t seem to move, when it might be blah or nondescript we can often say that the music didn’t “move me.” But most of the time there is, I believe, a sensory but unconscious awareness that music is movement. But it is, I believe, a special movement that our brains are made to pick up as unique and important.

• Music Flows.
What that movement is can be called “flow.” We use that word to describe a state of being that we can experience. We can be “in the flow” as psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called that special state of being energized and focused resulting in creativity, enhanced learning, peak performance, and life happiness. I believe there is a correlational and causal relationship between music and “flow” because it can often be a flowing movement. Some compositions naturally do not “flow”, or more to the point may actually interrupt flow for good reasons. But even a martial march often gives a flow to the movement forward. As a result of that movement of flow, I often sense that the music is surrounding me, moving past me, circling back and coming toward me again.
This may be why when a band is playing in a “dull” room where the sound is lost and never seems to come back, you lose the sense of flow. The music seems to leave the end of the horn and kind of drop somewhere out there. Sure it is still music and it can, I am sure, have an impact. But in the right place at the right time with the right movement, music is an unstoppable force.

• Music Infuses.
Simply put, this means that music gets inside us, into what I could call our psyche, our soul, our spirit. It is not just something outside of us, it becomes part of us. Even people who may be “tone deaf” or can’t carry a tune in a bucket can still have this happen. When the movement of music connects with the energy within us, they interact in either harmony or discord. Sometimes the music provides the discord, sometimes our lives produce it. But in that interaction, the music as waves become part of the energy of our lives. Some of that may be in the production of the hormone oxytocin- the feel-good hormone- that can help improve our sense of well-being. This is far beyond the limits of what I am talking about, but they are in some ways interconnected.

• Music Transforms.
Finally, through the movement, the flow, the infusing spirit and release of oxytocin, music transforms us. This may be why music is often seen and utilized by protest movements to energize their supporters and by the powers-that-be to combat such movements. The transformation of music as an expression of emotions, desires, anger, or hope is often irresistible. Musicologist Ted Gioia, famous for many great writings on jazz, has a recent book simply called Music that explores this from our primitive pre-historic music to contemporary movements.

I have discovered that when I play music these same things can happen to me. I am never the same when I am doing practicing. I am never the same when I am done playing a concert or another gig. When practicing I am learning to experience the movement and flow, the infusion and transformation in my own life and how to join with it in my playing. When I am rehearsing with a group, I am finding the ways that we as a group can move and flow and together, interacting with each other in some kind of synchronization so we can perform it for others. Finally, when I am performing I am taking what I have learned and experienced in the practice room and rehearsal hall and giving it as a gift from me to the audience.

So, my advice- pay attention whenever you are making music, even if the music is on the radio or coming from your computer speakers. Pay attention and, at times, you will discover that you are part of this amazing transformation that music provides.

Tuning Slide 5.9- Learning from Jazz

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

You have to take a deep breath and allow the music to flow through you. Revel in it, allow yourself to awe. When you play, allow the music to break your heart with its beauty.
― Kelly White

As any regular reader of this blog knows, I am a huge jazz fan. I was first introduced through Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Al Hirt. I expanded with Buddy Rich and Maynard, then later with Miles. I was hooked when the jazz DJ at the college radio station started playing other musicians and then my good friend Glenn opened the whole jazz world to me. It is a musical language I understand at all kinds of levels and has enriched my life in countless ways. (It’s in my earbuds as I write this!)

Over the past 10-12 years I have been working hard at taking that language into playing it in groups. As I was surfing the other week I came across a post on the Piano Power site on how learning jazz can give us musical superpowers. Overall jazz takes us into all kinds of different nuances, styles, and emotions than we are used to. As I looked over the list all I could say was, “Amen! That IS true.” Here's the gist of it, starting with the question:

How will jazz make me a master of my instrument?

The answer to that is so simple as to defy imagination. Improvisation! (I said simple, but far from easy!) Improvisation moved me away from the printed notes into thinking, listening, feeling, and then playing the music. When I attempt to improvise I end up with a far more physical and even spiritual connection with my instrument and what it can do. Which leads me to see what I can begin to do. Like with any language, it takes practice and it can seem like a long road ahead when you start. The easiest way to start working the sounds and chords is through the blues- and then moving up from there. You get it in your head and heart and you become the composer. As a result I have found that I am also better able to hear the sounds of other music and more easily fall into the rhythms and scales. I become a better trumpet player in all styles I am playing.

Lucas Gillan said in the post, “If all you ever do is read notes on a page, you’ll never quite know what your instrument is capable of.” Nor will you discover what you are truly capable of across the whole range of the instrument.

Another post by Austin Consordini on the Making Music site took me into a different area- about the Seven Everyday Tasks That Every Jazz Player Must Do.

1. Clean Your Instrument
2. Practice Scales
3. Play Something by Ear
4. Practice Improvising
5. Listen to Music
6. Increase Your Repertoire
7. Practice Multiple Instruments

I don’t know whether he put these in this order for any particular reason, but I was struck by #1. Only in the past few years have I paid much attention to that one. How does regularly cleaning my horn make me a better musician? Personally, I have found that taking care of my trumpet is an expression of my caring about the music I am making. I don’t know if my sound or style changes with regular cleaning, but my feeling about my playing does. This reminded me of something else I have long observed. When I take my car to the car wash and get it cleaned inside and out, it “feels” like it drives better. I know it is my perception and reaction, but I feel more comfortable driving a clean car. My horn helps me make music! I need to be kind to it and take care of it!

The second item on the list takes me back to the idea of improvisation and knowing music overall. It is one thing- and an important one thing- to do the scale exercises in Arban’s. It is another to do the 12 major scales by doing them without music in front of you. Sometimes I work my way around the Circle of 4ths (C, F, Bb,…); sometimes I start at middle C and work up the notes to the next C and beyond; sometimes I start on G on the staff and expand down and up one note at a time. All this without music in front of me. It is “relatively” easier to do it from a written page, but I think I learn it more deeply when I don’t use the music. BUT, I found I also have to do scales from the written sheet so that when I see a piece of music in one of the scales, I know what I am looking at! It’s a “Both-And” situation.

I still have to do some work on the minor keys, though.

Playing by ear and practicing improvising have been covered earlier but they lead to the next two for me. The more music I listen to with attention and intention the broader becomes my understanding of music overall. That has then led me to the increase of my repertoire. Sometimes I do that through new or different etude books or some of the solo and etudes I have worked on in the past. Pulling out Mozart or Haydn or taking a fake book and working through the melodies can increase what I am discovering about music. A friend recently mentioned an etude book I had never heard of. I borrowed it and played through some of the pieces. I found them significantly different from any of my other etude exercises in ways that changed my listening skills.

In the end Consordini says in his post:

Becoming a jazz master takes living and breathing jazz music every day. You must be willing to dedicate time each day to mastering your instrument and sound. Being able to integrate these 7 steps into your everyday life will help you to be immersed in jazz and be on your way to becoming one of the greats yourself.

I may not become a jazz master, but I am improving as a musician by doing these things. Amazing how that works.

4.24- Tuning Slide: The Never-Ending Gift

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Music is an outburst of the soul.
Frederick Delius

It is a week of gifts. No matter how we celebrate Christmas (or don’t) the season reminds us in both crass commercialism and in profoundly soulful ways that it is a blessing to give as well as receive. As a musician I have found that music is a two-way street. I most certainly enjoy playing music for an audience or a dance. It is my gift to them and watching people enjoy music is incredibly satisfying. But just putting it that way also indicates that when playing for others I get something back as well.

But just playing and listening to music, exploring it, figuring it out, letting it flow around and within me is in and of itself a gift to me. Perhaps more than that- a way of having my life enriched so that I can share it. If music were only about what it did for me, I would not have as rich an experience of music. The wonders of music are never ending. On any given week I come across numerous articles, studies, and personal reflections talking about how music can make a difference in life and in the world.

So for this Christmas Eve Day edition of the Tuning Slide I did some digging into the wonders of music from a number of different and quite diverse sources. What is it that music can do. Here from the magazine/website Business Insider are nine ways that music makes our lives better:

Music Can Help You Relax
Angry Music Improves Your Performance
Music Reduces Pain
Music Can Give You A Better Workout
Music Can Help You Find Love
Music Can Save A Life
Music Can Improve Your Work — Sometimes
Use Music To Make You Smarter
Music Can Make You A Better Person

Most importantly: Music makes us feel good, and in the end, that's worth a lot. (Link)

Lifehack.org came up with "7 Proven Ways Music Makes Your Life Better":

1. Listening To Music Reduces Stress
2. Listening To Music Improves Endurance
3. It Can Make You Healthier
4. Singing With A Group Of People Makes You Happier
5. Learning To Play An Instrument As A Kid Makes You More Successful Later
6. It Makes You Smarter
7. It Improves Your Memory
(Link)

I can attest to these powers of music. Take the time to check these two articles out and I will expect that you will agree.

If music be the food of love, play on.
William Shakespeare

In November the Space Weather news and web site informed us that the universe- or at least our near neighborhood produced music:

On Nov. 18th, however, something quite different happened. Solar wind hit Earth and produced ... a pure, almost-musical sine wave!… Rob Stammes recorded the event from the Polarlightcenter, a magnetic observatory in the Lofoten Islands of Norway. "A very stable ~15 second magnetic oscillation commenced and persisted for several hours," he says. "The magnetic field was swinging back and forth by 0.06 degrees, peak to peak, with the regularity of a metronome. … This was a very rare episode indeed." (Link)

The music of the spheres is not just a metaphor!

As one who works in addiction treatment I found this next piece more than a little interesting. It is from Recovery Unplugged, an addiction treatment program that bases its work on music. They are applying some of what the earlier links mentioned. On their website that talk about:

Why music works:
✓ Music is a core utility in the brain. Our brain responds to and process music in the womb. Music leads to language and all forms of communication.
✓ Our bodies and it’s rhythm. Every notice you’re walking to the beat of the music that you’re listening to?
✓ Music taps into our emotions. Have you ever listened to music and just felt happy? Or felt sad? See what I mean?
✓ Music enhances learning. Do you remember how you learned your ABCs? Through a song!
✓ Music taps into our memories. Have you ever been driving, heard a song on the radio, then immediately been taken to a certain place, a specific time in your life, or a particular person?
✓ Music is a social experience. Music experiences are shared with a group, whether playing in band or going to a concert. (Link)

To which I can only add, “Amen!”

At the Website BetterHumans.coach.me, Niklas Göke reviews some of the changes in the way people listen to music and the repercussions. He suggests several ways to become more intentional in his article "How to Make Music a Useful Part of Your Life Again". He suggests:

✓ Conscious Listening- This is awareness building. Take the time to just listen to music. Sometimes I find that difficult. I am using music to do so many things, just listening doesn’t always just happen.
✓ Web App: Listen on Repeat- This is a technique to put a You Tube video on repeat so you can perhaps dig more deeply into it. I know there are other ways to do this, but this will remind me that I should look into those, too. (Link)

And finally, take the time to go to The Ascent and read this article that sums up a lot of what this post is all about. Why Is Music So Powerful?

In the end, music is a gift that is multi-dimensional, both practical and just plain fun. Without it I life would have so little going for it. It is how we and the universe can communicate and stay tuned in to each other.

Have a great holiday week no matter how you celebrate the season!

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
Lao Tzu

4.19- Tuning Slide: Music and Thanksgiving

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.
— William Arthur Ward

Without gratitude my life would be dull and pretty well beyond help. It is the foundation of whatever I have and whatever I have been blessed to share. A day without gratitude? I really don’t know any more. It would be a day lost.

Music, for me does the same thing as gratitude. I can’t live without either one.

Music, too, can transform common days into thanksgivings,
turn routine jobs into joy, and
change ordinary opportunities into blessings.

The music I am thankful for makes me move, makes me pay attention to life and hope, inspires me to be better than I am at what I do, and moves me to smile in the deepest part of my soul. It’s why I play music. Every day. It’s why I try to listen to music every day. I tried to figure out which ones are my favorites.

Yeah, right! How can I narrow it down to less than fifty or one hundred? But here are four that in a quick thought, make me smile and be part of this amazing gift of music. Have a Happy Thanksgiving this week.

Listen to music.
Play music.
Smile. A lot!

First, the energy that moves the world as best seen in Buddy Rich- Birdland

Then the sound that propels me to be better- even at my age. Listen to the complete range of sound that Doc Severinsen can make- A Song for You.

From an album of all new material, this version was recorded just up the road right here in Minnesota at The Current, part of Minnesota Public Radio. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band- That’s It!

Finally, Satchmo in a true song of Thanksgiving. Listen and give thanks with Louis Armstrong- What a Wonderful World

Tuning Slide: 4.1- Why I Play Music (1)

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

If you play music for the right reasons, the rest of the things will come. The right reason to play music is that you love it. That's why I play music.
— George Benson

Music is- and has been since third grade- one of the centers of my life. Sometime between ages 8 and 9 I started taking piano lessons. I wasn’t particularly good at practicing so after two or three years with the wonderful Miss Palmer my mother thought it would be good to stop. It wasn’t going to happen. She played the piano as did my Dad’s sister, my Aunt Ruth. I enjoyed their music as well as the many old 78 rpm records that they had.

I did learn how to read music in those lessons with Miss Palmer and, from time to time would even pull out a piece of sheet music and play the melody line. Music intrigued me. Playing music intrigued me, but I was more interested in reading than playing music.

In 8th grade, age 13, I decided I wanted to play trumpet. I have no memory of why. I probably saw the trumpets in the high school band marching in a parade and liked it. Maybe I saw Louis Armstrong on TV. Herb Alpert’s first single, The Lonely Bull, was a year from being released and Al Hirt’s Java was three years away. So nothing remains of the first memory- except the trumpet and the never-ending desire to play it- and play it better today than I did yesterday.

As many of you know from previous posts, I have never stopped playing in these soon to be 57 years. There were lean times when playing for Christmas or Easter at church was the extent of my playing, but the horn was always nearby. The last three years since my first Shell Lake Adult Big Band Workshop has been a whole new world of music opening for me. Some of this has been chronicled in the earlier posts in the Tuning Slide. As I get started in the fourth year of the Tuning Slide I sat back and reflected on why I play music. Over the past weeks a number of moments have occurred in various places that have reminded me why I continue to do so. To get Year Four started- here’s the first half of what came to mind.

My Experience of Playing Music (part 1)
✓ Band members smiling in rehearsal as we practiced Holst’s “2nd Suite.”

The two Holst Suites may be the greatest concert wind band pieces ever written- and the 2nd is at the top of the list. We were rehearsing it for a summer concert and I looked up during a long rest in the fourth movement and noticed that almost every musician in the band who was in the middle of a rest was also smiling. I couldn’t believe how my whole body, mind, and soul responded immediately to it when we hit the first notes. Yes, it is that great! Every time.

✓ Carmen Dragon’s “America the Beautiful”

Our director called it perhaps the best concert band arrangement of any time- the Dragon arrangement of America the Beautiful. I have long lost count of how many times I have played this. I have never forgotten the first time. I was a senior in high school and was at our district band festival playing first trumpet (not cornet, since I didn’t own a cornet.) The band arrangement was only three years old at the time and not well-known- like it would become. I was overwhelmed and inspired at that point. I still am today. Even writing this gives me goosebumps.

✓ Remembering my daughter’s solo in “A Copland Tribute” when I’m playing the piece

My daughter played clarinet in Middle and High School. In her senior year the band played the wonderful music of Aaron Copland in the piece, A Copland Tribute. As both her father and as a musician myself I enjoyed that piece when it came to the section known as the Shaker Melody (or Simple Gifts.) It begins with a clarinet solo- which she played beautifully. Every time a band I am in plays that piece- and it has been at least five times in the past 20 years- my mind lights up in joy remembering her.

✓ Falling in love with new pieces

At our spring concert our community band played a new piece by composer Jay Bocook, Down in the River (Hal Leonard.) It is a series of variations on the gospel song, Down in the River to Pray. It was fun to play and I loved the way the theme came in and out from the background. It also happens to be one of my favorite gospel songs. Yes, people are still writing music that can move me!!

Then at the recent July 4th concert I was introduced to another song I had never played before, an arrangement of the hymn God of Our Fathers by Claude Smith written in 1974. I am surprised I have never heard it before and fell in love with it in spite of mangling the trumpet trio in the first three measures during the last rehearsal. (I played it spot on in the concert!) It was a wonderfully challenging and inspiring piece. There will always be new pieces to play for the first time and fall in love with!

✓ Learning Al Hirt’s “Java”

It was my first favorite trumpet song. Released in 1964 it captured my imagination. I bought a transcription in the late 60s and tried to learn it. No luck. I didn’t take the time to really work on it and by then I was heading into my career and let the advancing of my trumpet skills slip. About six or seven years ago I found a transcription online and began working on it again. I can now play most of it and sometimes even up to tempo. It may be 54 years late, but it is why I am still playing music.

✓ “1812 Overture”- as exciting as it was 50 years ago when I first played it

• College band, 1969, in Carnegie Hall. We even used the cannon the football cheerleaders used at games. What a kick!

• Every Fourth of July, just before the Stars and Stripes and the fireworks. It never gets old! It is new every time! That is what music can do!

That’s why I play music!
What’s your reason?

(More next week as we continue into year four of The Tuning Slide.)

The Tuning Slide: Keep Tapping Your Feet

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.
-Leonard Bernstein

A few weeks before writing this post I was listening to one of the jazz programs on Sirius XM channel 67, Real Jazz. Award-winning bassist Christian McBride was hosting his talk and music program The Lowdown: Conversations With Christian. Talking to the audience at the beginning of the show he encouraged them to be involved in the show. The gist of what he said was that too often we think jazz is something that only scholars and music specialists listen to with some kind of academic distance or in some indescribable mystical trance. (My words and interpretation!) This is “party music” he said. It is not dull and dead. It is alive- and has been alive for over 100 years now.

• You don’t have to be able to discern all the ins-and-outs of the music.
  
  • You just let the groove grab you where you are.
• You don’t have to know the chords and structure of the music.
  
  • You just let the melody move you with is rhythm
• You don’t have to be a musician to know that this can be sung and played and enjoyed.
  
  • You just celebrate those who make the music.
• You don’t have to be able to put into words what the music does to you.
  
  • You just have to let it do it.

I hope that is what I leave you with after these posts on jazz. Jazz is remarkable music. It is simple and complex. It is the blues and jumping dance music. It is chordless or as strictly structured as any other music can be. It can turn a Broadway-standard song or old country song into a new musical invention. It is freedom expressed without words; resistance without slogans; revolution without arms.

I recently had the pleasure and honor of being part of the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire jazz festival. I had the opportunity to listen to a number of amazing high school big bands compete for recognition. High school students stood up and played improvised solos for the judges. Some schools had as many as three or more bands competing at different levels. These students get up and show up at school at 7:00 in the morning or stay after school to rehearse. They do it for the love of the music! It shows. It also shows that the music is still growing and still making people dance, even in the intimacy of their own soul.

That’s what Christian McBride was talking about. In general, we make music so that on some level we can dance. Jazz is as close to perfecting that as any other music. It can be a dirge-like dance of the blues or the second-line dance as the Dixieland band leaves the cemetery. It can be a ballad dance of love or the soul-dance of having been touched by a musician who has shared their spirituality through their horn. It can be the driving rhythm of Latin culture, the cool movement of the west coast, the funk of the urban culture, or … take you pick. It goes on and on and hasn’t stopped for a moment. The best of jazz encompasses all of these and much more. I see and hear jazz in the best of bluegrass (which is, of course, the jazz of country music), the roots of rock and soul, even in the music now called “Americana” and folk.

We are a nation of jazz musicians seeking to make melody and harmony with a groove and rhythm. In the earlier post on the “bandstand” being a sacred place I talked about the importance of the big band (i.e. jazz) music in the 1930s and ’40s. Many gave it its own place in keeping us strong in the midst of World War II. After the war it went into “hiding.” It is our music- who we are and who we can be. That is why Len Weinstock on the website Red Hot Jazz (http://www.redhotjazz.com/index.htm) said:

Millions await its return. Believe me, we need it badly!

After fifty years of listening and ten of playing jazz, I am only now beginning to understand what it means for me.
These ten posts come nowhere near even scratching the surface. There will be more in the next year.
There is more to learn, more to experience, more to hear-
and more dances to be danced.

Keep on listening- and tapping your feet.
- Count Basie

The Tuning Slide: What It's All About

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

There are two kinds of music.
Good music, and the other kind.
-Duke Ellington

Back in the first of this series on jazz I wondered where to begin. I am still wondering and asking that question. Nine weeks (and one more to go) is nothing in the great flow of this music. In it’s past century, jazz has transformed American life and been transformed by it. Yet its power has never diminished. Hearing a Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, or Buddy Bolden recording today is just as transformative as ever. The music lives! I could explore all the ideas and sidelights of jazz for the rest of my life and probably only scratch the surface.

I turned to Wynton Marsalis for some insight, then, as I came to this incomplete ending to the series. I have mentioned his book, written with Geoffrey Ward, Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (2008, Random House). It is a good introduction to jazz on a popular level. In his opening chapter he describes his experience in learning and experiencing jazz:

This is some of what I found:
The most prized possession in this music is your own unique sound. Through sound, jazz leads you to the core of yourself and says “Express that.” Through jazz, we learn that people are never all one way. Each musician has strengths and weaknesses.

Jazz also reminds you that you can work things out with other people. It’s hard, but it can be done. … Jazz urges you to accept the decisions of others. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow- but you can’t give up, no matter what….

On a basic level, this music led me to a deeper respect for myself. In order to improvise something meaningful, I had to find and express whatever I had inside me worth sharing with other people. But at the same time it led me to a new awareness of others, because my freedom of expression was directly linked to the freedom of others on the bandstand.
—pp. 11-12.

Marsalis clearly understands the inner power of music to make each of us who play it more than we are without it. Each of those paragraphs speaks to us as musicians. First he talks about us finding our “sound.” On one level this means he skills and development of our technique. Because it is “jazz” we find a freedom to develop and express that. While there may be variations, it is very difficult for a musician to express those sounds in a “classical” piece.

Second Marsalis sees the interpersonal musical interactions in jazz as a great paradigm for getting along with others. You can’t take your horn and go home in the middle of a gig because you didn’t like the way the tenor player took the theme. Instead you have to pay attention to the tenor’s message and expressions and see where it fits into your experience. Maybe that will mean developing a contrasting style or building the theme on a different chord. But you can’t deny the tenor player the right to his freedom of expression. It could start an interesting dialogue- musically on the bandstand, afterward while relaxing, or as a metaphor for how you can learn to interact with others day in and day out.

Third, Marsalis makes the obvious- and essential connection. In order for these first two to happen, we have to dig into ourselves. And we must respect ourselves. We must believe that in our solos, duets, or even just section work, we have something worth sharing. Maybe my section work as a fourth trumpet doesn’t get out into the crowd like the solos do. But how can I make that chord sound out when I have the one “blue note” in the section? How do I play that note so it enhances the sound of the section and the band? Do I believe I have a right to make that simple statement in that single note? Next it leads me to pay attention to the rest of the section and the group and give them the same freedom I want for myself and the same respect I would hope to get from them.

Marsalis then adds:

The value of jazz is the same for listeners and players alike because the music, in its connection to feelings, personal uniqueness, and improvising together, provides solutions to basic problems of living. -p. 13

Couldn’t say it any better! So I won’t.

One more thought comes out of Marsalis’s reflections. First, though, to introduce it, here is a quote, again, from Duke Ellington:

Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom…
In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom
and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved,
and the music is so free that many people say it is the only
unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom
yet produced in this country.
-Duke Ellington

Here’s where Marsalis takes the same thought. He puts jazz into the flow of American life, not just in the past 115 years, but representative of the flow of our overall evolution as a nation:

Knowing jazz music adds another dimension to your historical perspective…. Jazz music is America’s past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves to come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
-p.13

The melding of musical styles, melodies, and history may be nowhere more clear than in jazz’s development. European folk styles from the colonies and songs from Africa laid foundations of rhythm and emotion. The Black Church added the preaching style of call and response. Ethnic roots of Irish music and New Orleans parades gave movement to the musicians. Listen closely to jazz and these will echo from the past and into our collective subconscious imagination. Feel it move YOU.

But even more to the point may be the role jazz itself played in the 20th Century in creating a revolution in racial acceptance. When the music began, and for decades after that, it was impossible for white and black musicians to play together. Even when they could it was impossible for the black musicians to stay in the hotels where white musicians did. Movies were edited so they could edit OUT for southern audiences of the black musicians scenes showed them playing with their white colleagues. Jazz music’s influence on the civil rights movement is an essential part of its long-term success. Miles Davis saw this when he said:
Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

We have covered a lot of ground very superficially in these eight posts. Any one of them could be the start of a series on its own connecting music as a whole and jazz in particular, musicians and listeners, and finally, music and life. Jazz plays an important part in my life and will continue to do so. I keep learning and experimenting. It is a never-ending joy and experience. There will be more jazz posts as part of the regular weekly writing here on The Tuning Slide. I hope it will continue to open new paths for you as it has for me.

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
-Dizzy Gillespie

The Tuning Slide: Everyone's Music

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

I merely took the energy it takes to pout

and wrote some blues.

-Duke Ellington

I said toward the end of last week’s post on big band music that jazz musicians need to know the roots of jazz. We are the heirs of an incredible tradition:

• Dixieland and ragtime
• Big band and be bop
• Hard bop and fusion
• Latin and free jazz

But there’s one more- perhaps the underlying roots of much American-based music.

The Blues.

I’m not sure we can understand jazz without at least knowing something about the blues. It is often the first type of music a jazz musician is encouraged to learn. The chord progressions are simple and repetitive. Yet it informs, shapes, colors, and even defines Louis Armstrong and George Gershwin, Robert Johnson, Willie Nelson, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. It is a music of life as it is experienced every day. Wynton Marsalis called it “everyone’s music” and said this about it in his book, Higher Ground:

The blues trains you for life’s hurdles with a heavy dose of realism. John Philip Sousa’s music is stirring. It’s national music of great significance. But Sousa’s is a vision of transcendent American greatness: We are the good guys from sea to shining sea. The blues says that we are not always good. Or bad. We just are. (P. 52)

It’s roots can be traced to the late 1800s in a melding of African-American work songs and European-American folk music.

Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll, is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also an important part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. (Wikipedia)

Robert Johnson is perhaps the paradigm for blues musicians. Only in a bargain with the devil himself could music of such power and emotion develop. The Faustian story of such bargains is as old as human mythology, but is reserved only for the most incredible and impressive accomplishments. Johnson’s artistry in a short lifetime was powered by the incredible and impressive sound of the blues.

It’s simplicity is what makes it so infinitely malleable. That basic three-chord, twelve-bar progression can be the basis of every emotion. It can express the depths of sadness to the heights of ecstasy. They can underlie Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or the “Alleluia” in a worship service. B. B. King can bend them into dozens of melodies or W. C. Handy folds them into the "St. Louis Blues." When you have finished listening to a blues, you know you have been touched by that which is greater than any of us. (See the list "Greatest Blues Songs" at Digital Dream Door)

The Blues contain so much joy and

sadness at the same time.

-Bill Charlap

In that way, the blues can be our own personal guide into ourselves. An essential element to any of us who want to play music- blues, jazz, rock or classical is to be some kind of self-aware. It may only be within our own experiences of emotion that we can put that into our music. Or maybe the music itself digs into our psyche and finds those emotions and blends them into itself. I have no doubt that music is THAT alive and THAT powerful. In the blues is the foundation of what that means. Marsalis says it begins in “pain” but it will always have that element of “things will be better” someday. Even in the blues there is a sense of hope. That, I believe is the hope that lies within us, the view that we can get through this. Sometimes it’s hard to find, but it is there.

This is where the music and life intersect with the blues. It can be very difficult for any of us to live in the midst of pain and uncertainty. Somehow or another I believe we have to find outlets for our feelings, ways of expressing our common humanity. The alternative to that is dangerous to our health and happiness. We stuff it; we put on a “happy face;” we deny our concerns, our fears and our needs. The more we do that the more unhealthy we become. Blues becomes a way to let that out either though listening, singing, or playing. Part of that comes from the very repetitive nature of the blues form. We can fall into the rhythm and the groove to be carried along to new places in life and soul.

One other piece of the blues (as well as jazz, in general) is its place in the American story. It may be easy to overlook the fact that this music is a gift to our national spirit and soul from an oppressed people. It is very much American music. It’s an expression of soul in spite of pain, hope in spite of fear, grace in spite of hate. Wynton’s thought that it is “everyone’s music” is beyond argument. Perhaps in these days of fear, pain, and hate, the blues can lead us into some new ways of sharing with each other. Perhaps we can hear the pain and be willing to do something about it. Maybe we can see the hate and refuse to allow it to conquer. In the end we can allow the American soul which includes all of us of myriad ancestries, faith expressions, racial identities, or sexual understandings. In that we will hopefully discover the power of the blues.

The Blues are the true facts of life expressed in

words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.

-Willie Dixon

The Tuning Slide: Intertwined with Society

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

The bandstand is a sacred place.

--Wynton Marsalis

Big Band- a musical group of 16 - 20 musicians

• Built in many ways on the unique soulful sound of saxophones.
• Set solidly on the bass foundation of the trombone
• Trumpets soaring over the top taking the group to new heights
• Held together by the rhythm section of piano, bass, guitar and drums.
  (Len Weinstock in an article on the website Red Hot Jazz said: No big band that hoped to swing could succeed without a great drummer. Essential for a solid solo to build on top of.)

Behind it all were those genius composers and arrangers. Bassist Marcus Miller commented on his Miller Time show on Sirius XM that the arranger is the mastermind. They took simple leads or complex melodies and put them into a form that the Big Bands could use. Big band history is the story of great arrangers- Billy Strayhorn, Sammy Nestico, Neal Hefti, Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Joe Garland, Jerry Gray, Gil Evans. Without these gifted arrangers, big band music would probably never have made it.

By the late 1930s and into World War II, Big Band jazz was THE popular music. Live radio broadcasts, local, regional and national, brought the music into people’s homes like none before had quite experienced. At the beginning of the war, Weinstock says there were at least fifty nationally famous big dance bands in the US and hundred of others with local reputation. Weinstock says that big band music “was such a positive morale booster that it is arguable whether we could have won the war without it!” Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” has often be called the “song that won World War II.”

Big Band music went into hiding after the war. It lost it’s widespread popularity as radio and then television began to showcase rock and roll and country to wider and wider audiences. Jazz became more of a combo music. It was more and more expensive to maintain a working national big band. Even the great ones struggled and found themselves having to scrape. A revival did occur in the 1990s but it has never reached the level of popularity of the original movement. As that was happening, Weinstock wrote

Millions await its return. Believe me, we need it badly!

It is amazing that the popular music of an era has lost its popularity. As a musician in a couple big bands I have had the joy of seeing people energized by the music. We play many gigs at senior housing and nursing home facilities. This was the music of their generation- and they are fading away. To see the late 80 and 90 year olds swaying to the music, or even getting up and dancing is one of my thrills. We start playing “In the Mood” and a happy response comes back at us. The drummer kicks off “Sing, Sing, Sing” and eyes light up. Even more recent pop songs from the 60s and 70s get positive responses, partly from the power of the big band style.

Fortunately many schools do have jazz bands that are helping to keep the music alive. There are dance venues that will have the “swing” bands do live music dances. Many of the people on the floor when we play these are not the older generation. Music moves people, and for those who like to dance, swing is as much a dancing art as any other.

One of my memories from the 60s, when the big band era was not doing well, was Lionel Hampton. I guess many groups were struggling and it was not unusual to have someone of Hampton’s stature to play in small venues- like high school gyms in rural north-central Pennsylvania. I don’t remember the specifics of the dance, but I didn’t go to dance, I went to hear Hampton and his band. It is now a subliminal memory, perhaps having influenced me in my own love for big band jazz.

For jazz musicians, big band can be quite a challenge. Some might say that is even more of a challenge than combo work- or at least as important. Again, bassist Marcus Miller had a whole 2-hour episode of his Miller Time program on Sirius XM’s Real Jazz devoted to big band music. He referred to the classic and the new. He didn’t like the word “old” applied to the music. He commented that every jazz musician should spend time playing in a big band. There, he said, you learn a great deal.

• You learn to blend your sound with the sound of the group.
• You have to be more aware of the dynamics because it isn’t helpful to have one part stand out from the others.
• You have to be conscious of being in-tune. In a small combo you can get away with it. In a big band, Miller said, you have “twenty other cats looking at you” wondering when you’re going to get it and tune up.

Even more than that, he added, you begin to absorb the music itself. You become a different musician. It changes you and how you approach music. I have told the story before of how when I joined my first big band I realized how underwhelming I could be. I knew and loved jazz, but not as a jazz musician. I was a listener- an educated listener, but a listener nonetheless. Big band jazz speaks the language of jazz and I was a more “classical” trumpet player. I was comfortable in a concert band- wind ensemble- because that language had become ingrained. Jazz was new, even down on that fourth part. The sound and rhythm, the two essentials of great music, were different from what I was used to playing. I knew them when I heard them but I didn’t know how to play them.

That was over eight years ago now. I still play fourth, for reasons to be talked about in other posts. But now I know the language. The music isn’t as strange to play as it was. I hear the changes, feel the rhythm, listen to the others in the group and can actually even adjust my sound once in a while.

One other thing about big band music- it is essential to the ability to speak the jazz language. Classic music of the 30s to the 50s is part of who we are as musicians and as people. If I want to be able to be a jazz musician- or even a jazz fan- in the 21st Century, I cannot, must not, forget the roots of this amazing music. Yes, it is more than big band and I will talk about that next week. But to understand why be bop and hard bop became what they did, you have to know where they came from. To understand Miles’ and Coltrane’s place in music history and how they changed history, you have to know what they built on, and that was the big band sound.

It was swing at its most basic and most exciting.

Jazz is such a powerful cultural statement that

it's almost as if it's intertwined with society.

-Tom Harrell

The Tuning Slide: Adding to the Music

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?
-Peter Capaldi

The previous two posts have dealt with improvising, what could be considered the mainstay of jazz. From small combos to big bands the music is wide open for the possibility of composing on the fly. How that improvised solo fits into the whole form of the particular song varies with styles, size of the ensemble, abilities of different members of the group. In some groups, for example, the first trumpet may not have as many improvisation skills so they tend to play the written parts while the second trumpet takes the improvised solos. In songs from the Great American Songbook of standards, the well-known melody of the song is shared around the different sections with one or two sections devoted to the improvised solo.

In most instances, though, this is built on the originally composed song. The song may be just the main theme (the head) and a closing coda of the theme. In-between the soloists go off on their own understandings of the song’s feel. The rhythm section often “comps” under the solo. (Think Dave Brubeck’s amazingly steady piano in “Take Five” under Paul Desmond’s wondrous solo.) In the beginning, then, all of the music is someone’s composition. The original song or theme or melody. Add to that the chord changes, tempo, mood, rhythmic structure, and written accompaniment and you have the song which will most likely change every time the group plays it.

That is jazz. But it requires that original song. It requires composing something on which to build. It is why jazz musicians do not leave the melody alone. They hear more than just the melody- they hear a whole composition starting with the original melody. This is not something new. Bach was known as a superb improvisor. For some of Mozart’s piano compositions, the solos are at times just a bare bones skeleton of the piece. Know one knows what Mozart played when he performed those pieces. The full score never existed.

How does all this happen? How does any one of us move into composition- either written scores or improvised solos? I have been experimenting on and off with that in the past year. I have a bluegrass medley that I would like to have our brass quintet play. I have been working on an improvisation on the folk song made famous by the Beach Boys and Kingston Trio- Sloop John B. I have some other melodies that I have heard in my imagination and would someday like to turn into a written composition, whether for jazz or brass quintet. I figured this was a good place in this jazz series to talk about that and see how it has fit together with so much else of what music is all about. So here are the essentials as I have been discovering them:

• Listening
“What jazz are you listening to? How often are you listening?” These are two important questions to ask yourself on a regular basis. In order to begin to grasp what jazz music can be you have to listen. On recordings; on the Internet; in person. Finding live, improvised jazz can be difficult in some places, but it is worth the effort. Get in there, watch the musicians, their interactions, their reactions. Listen to the phrases and get into the groove. Don’t use it as background music. It’s alive.

• Learning the language
The reason to listen is simple. Jazz music, like all music has its own unique language. I’ve talked about this before- and I will again. The learning for many of us is that initial listening. You may not understand what it’s saying at first, but as you surround yourself with the music the phrases and low of the music will begin to make sense.

• Listening
So you listen some more.

• Singing your music
For me singing along was a great start to working on composition. Sing the melody, sing a counter melody, sing a walking bass line, sing the chord changes of a 12-bar blues, sing nonsense syllables (scat singing), let the rhythm sing from within you.

• Experimenting
Then pick up your horn and play over some songs you like. Get an app like iReal Pro. Find web sites that have accompaniment tracks available. Work with the Jamie Aebersold books and CDs. Some of these will work better for you than others. For some reason I am still struggling with the Aebersold resources but iReal Pro helps me. One of my goals in the next few months is to double down on the Aebersold and see if I can move past that barrier. Your experimenting will help you get the feel of the language and you will be surprised (I have) when something happens that you never thought you would be able to do. Riff off the melody; play chord progressions; make the mistakes in your practice room and figure out how not to make the same mistakes more than once.

• Listening
Did I make it clear about the listening? By this time it may even be an idea on some of these to record and listen to yourself and your solos. But don’t stop listening to others. The language skills grow from the hearing, the imitating, the experimenting.

• Learn solos by ear- transcribe them
This is the most difficult for me. This is just like ear-training in any language learning. It is just as essential in learning jazz. Even if we never plan on doing much improvisation, to learn the solos, to improve our ear for the language, will help make us better musicians overall and will help the written scores become more identifiable and musical.

• Repeat
Go back to the top and start over.

As we do these things we are composing. We are making our own music. I know that none of this is all that earth-shattering- or new. I used to think and hope that if I bought the right book, read the right information, watched the right YouTube video that this would all fall into place. It won’t. Aebersold books could line my shelves, but if I don’t take the steps into the new and different, I won’t improve.

What this does is get me in touch with me- my music, my songs, my soul. As I express that music I am composing a whole new story to add to the greater story around me. That is important. This is what we do every day in our daily lives- we compose something new out of what has been around us. That something new can only come from us. I can’t leave life alone in the same old rut. Jazz teaches me how to take the risks to tell my story in a new language.

Last year musician John Raymond had this to say after he had spent some time focusing on composing. It is what it’s all about:

At the end of the day, so much of composing (to me at least)
is about trusting who you are, what you love,
and about trusting the music that YOU hear.
Just like improvising, it's an incredibly personal process and your goal is
ultimately to be as honest as you can be.
(John Raymond, email, September 2016)

The Tuning Slide: Swing

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

It Don’t Mean a Thing

(If It Ain’t Got That Swing)

-Duke Ellington

You may remember the old joke about the comedian who asks, “What’s the secret of a good joke?” and then answers the question without a moment’s break. “Timing.”

Until Einstein, “time” was seen as a constant. It was always the same. Then relativity came along and suddenly time was a “changeable” dimension. (Don’t ask me to explain THAT!) Time became, to put it way too simply, relative. As we get older we can agree with that idea. Time sure moves faster when you have more time behind you. (Where did this year go? It’s the end of April already!)

Another way of describing this is to say that “time” is how we perceive it. If we are bored, it hardly moves; if we are having a great time, it ends too soon. Music depends on time- and timing. Music is guided by a “time signature.” In jazz, the idea of “time” can take on another dimension. Time becomes the movement of the notes in a unique and special way. From there that movement is what musicians often call “the groove” or the interaction of musicians, time and melody into something everyone can feel.

When you are in that groove with the movement leading you, holding you and the music together-
That’s Swing!

Wikipedia starts the definition of swing this way:

In jazz and related musical styles, the term swing is used to describe the sense of propulsive rhythmic "feel" or "groove" created by the musical interaction between the performers, especially when the music creates a "visceral response" such as feet-tapping or head-nodding.

Got it? It sounds simple.
1. There’s the movement (propulsive rhythm).
2. That movement is created by the interaction the performers themselves are feeling.
3. There is a “visceral response,” perhaps because of that interaction, responses like tapping your foot or nodding your head.

If that’s all it takes, I have seen many performers “swinging” in some of the dullest ways possible. In some ways it sounds like a small group of people doing their thing in a way that moves them.

Wikipedia continues:

While some jazz musicians have called the concept of "swing" a subjective and elusive notion, they acknowledge that the concept is well-understood by experienced jazz musicians at a practical, intuitive level. Jazz players refer to "swing" as the sense that a jam session or live performance is really "cooking" or "in the pocket." If a jazz musician states that an ensemble performance is "really swinging," this suggests that the performers are playing with a special degree of rhythmic coherence and "feel."

In other words, if you don’t understand it, that’s because you aren’t an experienced jazz musician. It takes a “practical” and “intuitive” understanding to know when it’s “cooking.” That just adds a bit of snobbery to the first part of the discussion. You have to be with the “in crowd” to really know what swing is or even how to make it happen. How about that attempt at paradox- practical AND intuitive.

Do you get the idea they can’t describe it any better than anyone else? All they are saying is that they know it when it happens. When it’s not happening, well, it “just ain’t swingin’ man.”

The crazy thing is that this is as good as it gets trying to nail it down without some time listening to the music. We have all had an experience of the essence of “swing” whether it is in jazz, or any other kind of music. It may have been the Sunday the organist at church nailed a Bach prelude or the praise band’s hallelujah touched the depth of your soul. It might have been at the rock concert when your favorite band never sounded better and every note was right where they (and you) wanted it to be. Those are the same as “swing,” just in a different musical genre. They are peak experiences when music and time come together and meld into Einstein’s four-dimensional universe.

Okay, enough of this. We can wax and wane poetic, prosaic, or scientific night and day and never quite get to that kernel of truth about swing. We know swing because it moves us. We know swing because something in us responds to it. As musicians, we know we are “in the groove” when we come to the end and realize you were simply carried along.

In jazz, we call it swing. Swing always is an interaction in time and musical movement. On a very simple technical level swing is that dotted-eighth/sixteenth combination of notes. But Latin jazz doesn’t do that, yet it can swing as hard as any other jazz.

That’s where the idea of time really comes into play. Wynton Marsalis describes it this way in his book, Moving to Higher Ground:

Jazz is the art of timing. It teaches you when. When to start, when to wait, when to step it up, and when to take your time- indispensable tools for making someone else happy….

Actual time is a constant. Your time is a perception. Swing time is a collective action. Everyone in jazz is trying to create a more flexible alternative to actual time

We are back to our perception of time, and again that perception is grounded in a collective sense of time in the interaction of the musicians, the rhythm, and the music.

Wynton Marsalis applies all this to our daily lives. Swing helps us in:

1. Adjusting to changes without losing your equilibrium;
2. Mastering moments of crisis with clear thinking;
3. Living in the moment and accepting reality instead of trying to force everyone to do things your way;
4. Concentrating on a collective goal even when your conception of the collective doesn’t dominate.

Change happens. It is a constant. Sometimes it is expected and not jarring. It is in time. Sometimes it knocks us off our balance. That is when the understanding of swing, staying in the groove, going with the flow comes in handy. The moments of crisis, times of change, when we can lose our ability to make healthy decisions is when we move back to the basics. The forms of life that keep us moving.

Remember that jazz is made up of forms and when you have an understanding of the forms you can adapt. If you know the forms of your life, you can begin to trust your Self 2 instinct as discussed in the Inner Game of Music. It’s the muscle and mental default mode that keeps us standing when it would be easier to fall.
From there we accept what is- staying in the moment- accepting the things we cannot change, changing what we can, and knowing which is which.

Another way to describe swing is that it’s how you accent the music, what you emphasize, what you want people to hear. Any jazz musician knows the forms for accents, for what to emphasize and what not to. That can change from performance to performance, within the basic forms of course. Tonight the musician may want to emphasize the upbeat feel of a chorus; tomorrow, after a difficult day, the emphasis may take more of a bluesy style.

What you accent in life can become your song or story. How you do that can change the rhythm of your life. That’s your perspective. We all know the analogies of looking at the doughnut or the hole; the cage of horse manure with the optimist seeing the possibility of a horse amid all that. Even the old "is the glass half-empty or half-full" can add a new dimension- the glass is refillable.

Accentuate the positive. Assume positive intent.
Or not.
It’s your choice.

But you are not alone. With few exceptions jazz is a truly collective music. We have to listen to each other, not fight each other in a jazz performance. It is a cooperative action of attempting to make more than any one of us can make on their own. If I accent the upbeat and you slur through them it might sound unique, but will it sound appropriate? Will it sound like one of us is trying to one-up the other? The music will often suffer as a result. It can easily descend into chaos. Some might call that “free-form” but it takes amazing concentration of collective action to produce good “free-form” jazz.

In the end, Wynton Marsalis says, swing demands three things:

1. Extreme coordination- it is a dance with others inventing steps as they go;
2. Intelligent decision making- what’s good for group
3. Good intentions- trust you and others want great music.

Swing is worth the effort. We grow in relationships- and we learn how to develop relationships. We learn how to listen to others and, in the end, ourselves. That will lead us into the next two weeks’ posts on what may be the heart and soul of jazz- improvisation, the ultimate in going with the flow.

Until then, keep swinging.

I don't care if a dude is purple with

green breath as long as he can swing.

-Miles Davis

Note: All Wynton Marsalis quotes are from the book:
• Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life by Wynton Marsalis and Geoffrey Ward. 2008, Random House.

The Tuning Slide: What Makes Jazz, Jazz?

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Jazz does not belong to one race or culture,
but is a gift that America has given the world.
-Ahmad Alaadeen

I remember a discussion I had with a teenager in my church youth group some 30+ years ago. We had been listening to some live rock song that had a great guitar solo. We started talking about different styles of music and came up with a question.

What makes jazz jazz? Why isn’t it rock or vice versa?

Neither of us had an answer, although we did, in general, agree that we knew it when we heard it. Here, then, decades later, I am going to attempt to answer that question from my experiences. As I said in the previous post, I have been enthralled by jazz in all its forms for over 50 years. I’m not out to give an in-depth analysis of jazz and what makes it what it is. There are countless books that do that. Some are history like Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz, a remarkable story of how jazz got to be what it is. Some are on video like Ken Burns’ mini-series documentary, Jazz, from PBS. Barry Kernfeld’s What to Listen For in Jazz has informed this particular post. All three of these are 16 - 20 years old, but capture the story that has become jazz.

Since one of my goals is to relate the music and the experience of jazz to my life and experience, musicology is not my goal. Living jazz is. So, I found in Kernfeld’s book seven things that are essential ingredients to understand about jazz. These, I think, give a little more to work with than just saying “I know it when I hear it.” While all of them can be found in most other musical genres, how they apply to this genre begins to answer the greater question of what makes this music what it is.

First comes rhythm. This should come as no surprise. Jazz started as music for movement. It was street music, dance music, walking and marching music. The power of the “beat” is unmistakable. It is almost impossible to call it “jazz” if it doesn’t have rhythm. It must constantly be supported and carried by the rhythm section- drums or bass, piano or guitar. I know that sometimes that rhythm is pretty hard to find, especially in more free-form jazz, but if you ask the musicians they will say there is something there. It will go nowhere without a living, breathing pulse.

All music breathes. The rise and fall of dynamics, crescendo and decrescendo, are the active elements that make it something more than a one-level sound. In jazz, that breath becomes a rhythm. Some of this is what is called articulation. When you emphasize what note, how you flow from one section to another. But it is always alive, always moving.

When jazz musicians say the music is “in the groove” this is part of what they mean. It is alive and moving. The two most common rhythms can be described as

• Swing and
• Duple.

Swing is a movement of triplets enhanced or bounded by accentuations. Duple is doubles, also enhanced and defined by accentuations. While recognizing that there are numerous variations and exceptions, we can take Dixieland and “big band” traditional jazz as the best examples of “swing.” Duple is more straightforward and can be seen in Latin jazz. I will talk more about rhythm, especially swing, in the next post.

The connection of rhythm and breathing with living is obvious. Drumming has been one of those human endeavors most likely since the first time an ancient relative hit a hollow log with a stick. In so doing they were mimicking the action at the center of our lives- the heartbeat. Rhythm is more than primitive in its origins. It is primal. It is basic, essential. A heart arrhythmia can be fatal- it is out of rhythm.

Second is form. With tens of thousands of possible songs to play, a jazz group and its musicians would be hard pressed to memorize everything out there. That would clearly limit their repertoire and challenge the skill of even the greatest among them. What has developed to make this job relatively easy is the form of jazz music. The most common of these was adapted from the basic “song” form- the music of the Great American Songbook. Very simply this form is the beginning theme, the “head”, the first description of which is usually done twice, the chorus in the middle and then closing with the theme. This often referred to as the AABA form.

There can be many variations on how long these individual sections can be. The song form would, in general, be 32 bars, 8 in each section. Other variations can have a repeating pattern of measures and chord changes such as the 12-bar blues which can be adapted to 8- or 16-bars. Chord changes are often sort of standardized with the 12-bar blues being the grandaddy of them and the progression of the chords of I’ve Got Rhythm (referred to as “rhythm changes”) being another.

One other form is the march and ragtime form. These are usually 16-bar phrases with two, three, or four themes as the song progresses.

Now, in general, a jazz musician can pick up a book of songs and all it might have are the head, chord changes, and the closing. When you understand the basic form of these songs, you have the greater possibility of playing more music and not being completely lost.

Third is arrangement. This is the first of three elements of jazz that are about “writing” the music. Arrangement is taking something that already exists and adapting it. Arrangers can do it note-for-note adding embellishments with their group playing as close to the original as possible. They can also take the original and add embellishments to it to change the patterns around the original. The third is to orchestrate the song differently. Having a saxophone-based combo play a song will give a very different experience from a piano-based one. For example taking a Lennon-McCartney song and arranging it for a big band would take all these into account. What instruments do you want to play when? How close to the original will it be? Will you divide it into sections that build on or riff on the theme?

Fourth is composition. Simply put this is basically writing new music. You are composing a new song. It can be based on the chord progressions from another song, such as the many on the changes of I’ve Got Rhythm or the 12-bar blues. It will be a new melody, a new song.

Fifth is improvisation. Improvisation is so essential to what call jazz in all its forms, I will take at least two posts to deal with that. Suffice it to say here, that being able to improvise is what can help all of us succeed in the ups and downs of life. It is not simply flying by the seat of ones pants. It is the ability to call on our knowledge, experiences, hard work, and creativity to solve problems and enhance our lives. Kernfeld called improvisation the “most fascinating and mysterious” element of jazz. It will be featured prominently in all that we do in jazz.

Sixth is sound. This is where orchestration comes in. Different instruments sound different. Different combinations sound different. How you put them together can make a huge difference in what you hear- or don’t hear. It is also the tuning of the notes and how they fit together. Miles Davis famously said that “there are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.” Thelonius Monk added to that sentiment. "There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.”

The ultimate in the jazz sound is what has been called the “blue note.” Simply put the “blue note” is a note that is played or sung a half-step off from what would be expected. Blue notes add a sense of tension, surprise, or worry to the sound. It comes from its use in the blues progression. The “sound” of jazz is what has led many to say they may not know what jazz is, but they know when they hear it.

Finally, the seventh element of jazz is style. Jazz is not one style of music- it is a genre made up of these elements and then flowing into numerous styles. Kernfeld, in What to Listen for in Jazz, leaves the idea of style to an epilogue. That way he could look at the elements that can be found in one way or another in different styles. Here are some of the styles that have developed in jazz, and are still breathing life into the genre:

• New Orleans Jazz
• Big Band
• Bebop
• Hard Bop
• Fusion
• Free Jazz
• Latin Jazz
• Acid Jazz
• Jazz Rock
• Kansas City Jazz
• Modal Jazz
• West Coast Jazz

And Wikipedia goes on to list another 30 sub-genres.

Talk about diversity. Talk about having an abundance of opportunities. Talk about a perfect music to have developed in a little more than only 100 years in the United States.

That’s jazz. That’s all there is to it. In 2000 words or less.
The details, are in the hands of the musicians- and of you and me as listeners. That’s where we will go in the next six posts, seeing how these are good metaphors for life and how, when we learn jazz, we are also learning how to live.

Jazz is the type of music
that can absorb so many things
and still be jazz.
-Sonny Rollins

The Tuning Slide: What About Jazz?

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Eight weeks on jazz. Ah, where to begin?

-Me

I could start with a dictionary definition, but that would be almost antithetical to the whole idea of jazz. I could find a quote from some famous jazz musician and place it at the top of this page as an introduction. I could find a video of someone explaining the basics of jazz. But jazz is much more than any of those and far beyond any ability to explain it easily, quickly, or purposefully.

So instead I will do what jazz might encourage. I will riff on the theme. I will answer my own question: What do I want to say about jazz? Here goes:

1. It moves me- just like many forms of music. It moves me internally- I feel good when it hits me. It moves me externally- I physically cannot sit still when listening to jazz. My family will tell you that I direct music when listening to it. Jazz inhabits me and makes me move like no other music.

2. It is a dialogue in sound that occurs through the interaction of different instruments- just like many forms of music. I’m not even talking about improvising at this point. Just the sonic mix of instruments does it. Again, all music requires some sense of interaction in sound, but jazz has taken it and made it into a musical art and craft.

3. It is alive. Even when it is a studio recording there is a sense of a living form that most other types of music may only get through a live concert performance. This is where improvised solos play an important part, but because the music of jazz has grown out of live experiences, it seems to capture that in ways other genres do not.

4. It is almost infinitely adaptable. That is another aspect of jazz being “alive.” Jazz - combo or big band - can play an arrangement of Jim Croce or Lennon-McCartney as easily as it can play the music of the Great American Songbook or the classic music of jazz and Dixieland. On top of that, composers can write music that is new and exciting and it will be jazz.

5. It can stand up with other genres and styles as well as anything. There is Preservation Hall Jazz Band recording with Bluegrass icon, Del McCoury. You can hear Wynton Marsalis in concert with Eric Clapton or Willie Nelson.

6. It is our American music. It is part of the very roots of our American heritage. It describes so much of who we are and the potential of who we can be.

I have been enthralled by jazz for well over 50 years. Jazz has been involved in all of my adult life, moving me, challenging me, inspiring me. It started with Al Hirt’s Java. Herbie Mann’s Memphis Underground kicked me up the side of the head. Les McCann and Eddie Harris with Compared to What gave me more insights. Doc Severinsen, Buddy Rich, Maynard Ferguson, and, above all, Louis Armstrong all contributed even before I graduated from college! I want to share what this has done and why.

You see, above all else, I think jazz is the best musical paradigm for how to live day in and day out. Life is an improvisational exercise. Life is finding the rhythms, harmonies, dialogues, hopes, fears, and emotions to make it through another day. All of that is what jazz does in ways that no other single genre of music can- at least for me.

Sadly it was reported last year that, as far as music sales go, jazz has become the least popular musical style. That is a long way down from the heights of the big band era when some would argue that Glenn Miller’s In the Mood helped us win World War II. It is a sad departure from the incredible all-time best-selling Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. There are no doubt many cultural factors involved in that, but it still is depressing to think that this rich musical heritage is an endangered species.

So what I will do in the installments of this Tuning Slide series is talk about jazz as I see it. I will explore how it has enlivened me, what it can teach us, and how it can give us all a sense of movement and unity.

Let me close this with a You Tube video of what many consider the greatest jazz solo Louis Armstrong ever made. Way back in the mists of jazz history, Satchmo and His Hot Five recorded West End Blues. It set the standard on which just about everything else is built.

The Tuning Slide: Listening to Some Jazz

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

I have talked about the essential activity of listening to music as part of the process of becoming a better musician. All kinds of music, all genres, even if you don’t like them, can bring new insights. Depending on your likes, dislikes, and age, some may take more work than others, but if we are willing to persist in the activity something interesting can happen. Since I am about to re-run the series I did on jazz last spring and summer, I wanted to take a week to talk about one of my most interesting and productive listening experiences in jazz music. Jazz is a language that is constantly evolving. From the most free-form of today’s music there is a connection to New Orleans and Dixieland over 100 years ago. Jazz builds on itself, grows new branches, adds new understandings to the old, and never fails its connections, even when the musicians may think it does.

Last summer at Shell Lake Trumpet Workshop I had the pleasure of meeting one of the new, young, and exciting trumpet players, John Raymond. As he taught us and performed his magic with us I realized that here was one who was writing a new chapter to the jazz history. He’s just starting at it, but it will be very interesting to see what happens. At the end of the workshop I bought his trio album, Real Feels, Vol. 1. I put it in the CD player leaving Shell Lake and listened to it three times on the way home. I decided that I want to be like John when I grow up!

Then in the fall he came out with a live version of the album, Real Feels, Vol. 1, Live. They both are in constant rotation on my playlist. I have spent many wonderful hours listening to them. I never get tired of them. Remarkable is too tame a word for them. Even with some of the same songs on both- the albums are so very different. The trio has an incredible chemistry that falls into place so smoothly and with grace, the only word that truly describes it.

I believe John made a comment at Shell Lake last summer about wanting to take jazz into new directions. On these albums he is showing that new directions can come from taking several traditional songs, Amazing Grace, I’ll Fly Away, and This Land is Your Land and turning them into remarkable performances. Or they take the iconic Beatles’ song, Yesterday, and give it wordless insight into the human condition. They then add new dimensions to two contemporary pieces, Atoms for Peace by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and Minor Silverstein by Minnesotan and New Yorker Chris Morrissey.

I highly recommend them as a direction for your listening enjoyment and growth as a musician. Volume 1 Live is a recording that lives and breathes the power of improvisation. Even on the same tunes from the studio recording, (listen and compare!) it is like listening to a whole new composition- a finely developed new composition. The same songs on both albums are not the same songs. The live versions are often twice as long as the studio versions and are incredibly alive. Creative artists, like John and his bandmates Gilad Hekselmans & Colin Stranahan. know how to make music together. It is clear they know what they want to say and then put it into the context. John and guitarist Hekselmans have some wonderful conversations in ways we don’t normally expect. They don’t trade 4s, they talk with each other, echoing and adding to the music, giving meaning and purpose. John’s flugelhorn will kind of slip in a few phrases, adding color to a song, then wait his turn to solo again. Behind them is Stranahan’s incredible rhythm.

One part of jazz history has been to take non-jazz compositions like the Great American Songbook and others, and translating them into jazz. Real Feels is a new experiment in this process. Sure, these have all been done in jazz groups, dixieland arrangements, big band charts. Real Feels takes them into a trio context with a more bare-bones style. The emotion and groove of each piece has to be shared and developed across only three instruments. The changes in “color” you find vocally or with more instruments has to be accomplished more subtly. This album succeeds at all those levels. It is amazing! The “feelings” of the music have to be “real” since it’s hard to hide them or embellish them with more instrumentation. And they do it live on the bandstand!

Here is my take on the songs:

I’ll Fly Away
Funky Dixie or Dixie funk? It opens this CD and lets you know that this is something unlike most of what you have heard. The drummer, Colin Stranahan, propels the song from beginning to end. John and Gilad jump on for the ride. In so doing they all provide the spirit that this song calls for.

Yesterday
Even without knowing the theme, it is clear that this is a song of loss on longing. It has the amazing mournfulness of the words without words. Many of us do know the words- they have been a deep part of the American popular music scene for over 50 years. As the traditional melody appears and disappears we feel the words within us before the solo takes us into new space. The flugelhorn’s musical color makes the song speak in new ways.

Amazing Grace
This piece blows me away! It is in the same slow style as Yesterday, but it is never mournful. It is the Blues without being blue. There is joy in this piece. John’s mastery of the sound of the flugelhorn never allows it to sound mournful, which could happen, but is not appropriate for this song. There is quiet grace at the beginning. It then moves into powerful, life-filling grace and ends with an Amen progression- to a coda of the theme. John starts this piece with a beautiful introduction that sets the stage for the grace that is about to be laid on us. (I fell in love with the intro and have made it a work in progress to learn the solo by ear. The first I have ever tried.)

This Land is Your Land
I always have fun trying to figure out what the music is doing that fits the theme or words of the song. This iconic Woody Guthrie song is a reminder of the land.

“…From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters”

I hear that in the music. The joy, the fun of rambling the country is in the words, but listen.. These guys bring it to the music as well. I swear I heard the Woody Woodpecker call in the midst of it. They end with the feel of that wonderful verse:

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

Listen carefully, too, and you will hear Guthrie’s anti-establishment hard-edged politics in the recording as well, the undercurrent of this powerful anthem. I have listened to Vol. 1 Live dozens of times in the past nine months and am never bored- or disappointed. I hear a new lick, a different interpretation. There is so much wonder in the songs on this album, so much creativity and direction, it could be a textbook of what one can do with even deeply familiar- and non-jazz songs.

Atoms for Peace
Which brings me to Atoms for Peace. It starts with 2 1/2 minutes of drums laying down the foundation of the flying saucer eyes and wormholes of the original lyrics. After a bass intro John’s flugelhorn gives the softness of “wiggling warmth”, but it never overcomes the sensuousness underlying Yorke’s original. The drums keep moving, the guitar feels like a series of quantum leaps (i.e. the internal process of atoms) until the flugel ties it all together at the end.

Minor Silverstein
A bonus cut on the CD is Morrissey’s Minor Silverstein. I have to admit upfront that this piece has a lot of jazz language that I have trouble understanding. I can’t even begin to unwrap it for you. Part of that is my age and style of music I have listened to and played. I appreciate the incredible musicianship of the trio and understand some of what it is saying. But, so far, it’s not part of my vocabulary. That doesn’t mean I don’t like it or that I am giving up on it. On the contrary, it is a piece that can no doubt help me grow in my own skills. That is what listening is all about and why I have talked about these here. I’m looking forward to spending some time with John later this month and hopefully again later in the year. I want to know how to speak the language even better!

So go, enjoy music. Find some videos of John and Real Feels. And most certainly, BUY their albums. Support the music.

Then play it yourself!