Melodious Crunk: You don’t know what jazz is

From 2014. The Melodious Crunk column. On creative humming If you asked Joseph Public what the word jazz meant, they would probably suggest men in hats, stroking beards to music that sounds at best like noise. Or perhaps they’d think a cool …

Published: 28 Jan 2020. Updated: 2 years.

From 2014. The Melodious Crunk column. On creative humming If you asked Joseph Public what the word jazz meant, they would probably suggest men in hats, stroking beards to music that sounds at best like noise. Or perhaps they’d think a cool saxophone and extremely understated music. Or perhaps the jazz age of the 1920s and 30s, and dixieland. Either way, if you asked them to hum something jazz, they’d probably hum something fairly tuneless, or if asked to identify from a set of videos which one was jazz, they’d figure it out fairly quickly.

These are the commonly accepted forms of jazz.

To the jazz musician, this is a highly contested issue that goes right to the very core of every musician attempting (or succeeding) to play this music. All jazz musicians have their own personal pasts and futures of what jazz is to them, and it’s not always the same as what the other musicians on the bandstand are thinking of jazz. Let’s picture a common jazz quintet:

First, there’s the trumpet player. It’s his band. But why is it a quintet with saxophone and not a quartet where he gets all the glory? Ah, he’s been listening to a load of late-50s Miles quintet. He wants to go for that cool Miles sound, long, legato fluid lines over bebop tunes and old standards. He’s a trumpet player, so of course he’s influenced by Miles. This is what he wants to hear, and what he wants to play.

The saxophone player knows it’s not his band, but that’s cool, he’s enjoying this band. They play some cool tunes, but he’s coming from a slightly different tradition. Coltrane is great, but really he loves Joe Henderson. That ballsy tone, the rapid-fire flurries of repeated notes and the intricate playing over changes. He wants to play a lot more complicated lines than the laidback lines of the trumpet player, but that’s why they have such different styles and that makes it OK, right?

The piano player comes from a different tradition entirely. He loves old standards that swing, and still feels they’re relevant today. He doesn’t really connect with ‘Juju’ or ‘Impressions’, or most of the trumpet player’s choices of material but that’s OK, he’s just the piano player. He really likes George Shearing, or Red Garland. He likes his music just to sit there and swing and not catch fire. He’d be much more content playing ‘You Stepped Out of a Dream’ – after all, he spends most of his time accompanying singers.

The bass player has no say. He loves the fusion guys like Marcus Miller, early John Patitucci, and of course, his all-time hero, Jaco. What he would really like to play is ‘Three Views of a Secret’, a beautiful ballad. But there are too many chords for the trumpeter, the saxophonist can’t relate to it, and the pianist would rather play ‘But Beautiful’. And so, he has to content himself with playing bebop tunes.

The drummer is more interested in exploring free improvisation. He’d love to start every tune with an extended drum intro, or perhaps a dialogue between the drums and the saxophone. He doesn’t like to be constrained by playing time, and in particular, 4/4. Why can’t we play this one in 7/4, he suggests, to universal disdain. Being a good member of the rhythm section, he keeps his free playing to a minimum.

Here are five completely different approaches to jazz, from five completely different players. Each of them connects with the very basic traditions of jazz, but from there, their interests in jazz develop in completely separate ways.

Some of them prefer to stay rooted in tradition, and some can’t think of anything worse. For the amateur and semi-professional ensemble where players are limited by who is around, this poses an interesting dilemma to the bandleader: who to pick for what ensemble? For the professional ensemble (i.e. those at the very top of the jazz ladder), it’s easy to work towards a common goal, but it takes a lot of work to get there.

For the rest of us, who have been thrown together, it’s always a compromise. Someone wants to take the tune in one direction, and someone wants to take it in a completely different direction.

These different approaches can make a gig fascinating, eye and ear opening, and a revelation… or a complete disaster, with musicians so far apart they can’t bear to work together. And to think that some people find jazz boring!

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Dayna Stephens, Gratitude, Contagious Music

First published in April 2017. An album that contains some unforced passion and ideas, Dayna Stephens who has been on jazz fans’ lips the word of mouth increasing year in year out since the 38-year-old was fast tracked by the Thelonious Monk …

Published: 28 Jan 2020. Updated: 4 years.

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First published in April 2017. An album that contains some unforced passion and ideas, Dayna Stephens who has been on jazz fans’ lips the word of mouth increasing year in year out since the 38-year-old was fast tracked by the Thelonious Monk Institute first emerging in the class of Lionel Loueke more than a decade ago, chooses a battery of saxes and even EWI here. But it is tenor that prevails, for sure he is keeping stellar company with not just Brad Mehldau but the pianist’s bassist Larry Grenadier, former child prodigy Julian Lage on guitar and the Charles Lloyd drummer Eric Harland on board but there is a community of musicians at work here and not a line-up by name check.

Stephens has a full sound, you can hear a huge amount of detail in his lead improvising notes and he has a persuasive improvising style that bypasses paraphrase and instead zones in on the jagged intervals and micro connections that he manages to make with the chordal instruments. Yes there is that Coltranian definition sometimes and there is also that confidence that goes beyond the sheer bravery in discovering the simplicity he needs to communicate his music: the tunes go somewhere.

Recorded in a studio in Rhinebeck, New York State it is not as if if Stephens has not paid his dues having released quite a few albums so far and he has had his own struggles beyond music in battling a rare kidney disease, the gratitude in the title you might say is deadly serious. The material here is interesting, tunes by new composers such as Aaron Parks and Rebecca Martin finding their place alongside Strayhorn and Pat Metheny numbers.

‘In a Garden’ by Aaron Parks has that mournful meditative sound you find on a John Coltrane record, but ‘Woodside Waltz’ by Lage shifts focus and manages to shed any over-earnestness that the album might otherwise indulge. Stephens manages to expand the best approaches in the area of big tenor statement in recent years usually undertaken by the likes of Kamasi Washington or JD Allen but his sound has more room to manoeuvre as he manages to bend the EWI in the right direction on the gorgeous Pat Metheny ballad ‘We Had A Sister’. Stephens keeps his own originals to a minimum with ‘The Timbre of Gratitude’ the only one from his own pen yet timbre is relevant and very important on this record where the character of his sound is best expressed and most deeply embedded. A wonderful record that ought to find wide appeal. SG