Jazz Conversion

[Old Grumpy]

What a gas!!!

Sorry to be inflammatory, but nothing to do with gas...

...from the Latin, calor = heat

[smittims]

I'm sure you're quite right about pop music, Ian, but unfortunately 99% of people seem to prefer its lazy, repetitious banality , and neevr think of 'moving on.'

[Ein Heldenleben]

I'm sure you're quite right about pop music, Ian, but unfortunately 99% of people seem to prefer its lazy, repetitious banality , and neevr think of 'moving on.'

I dunno . A twelve bar blues is pretty repetitive harmonically. More so than a four chord pop song with a two or three chord middle eight. I had a friend who didn’t like jazz. I said to him well do you like ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ by the Beatles ? When he said yes I pointed out it was essentially a 12 bar blues with a minor middle eight . Then went through all the other Beatles and Stones tracks that also were blues based - in the case of the latter there’s a lot.
I suppose what matters is what happens around the structure. There was some Salsa or Tango music on In Tune last week with essentially a two or three chord structure . On top an incredibly virtuosic Violinist . I started noodling along with it on the piano as is my wont. They played another piece - with EXACTLY the same chord sequence - still caught my attention though.
You are in essence right : most contemporary pop is pretty banal whatever’s going on chord wise. The ‘art’ has played itself out - a new form is struggling to be born.

[Alyn_Shipton]

I think there is a tendency to lump "pop music" into one category, when it is in fact as rich and diverse as jazz (and - in common with jazz - has some very poor and repetitive material as well). But one of the reasons I have researched and written on pop musicians is that someone like Harry Nilsson, for example, was far from "lazy, repetitious banality". The vocal album with Gordon Jenkins (A little touch of Schmilsson in the night) is far from that description with some dense and beautiful settings, his vocal dexterity on "Nilsson sings Newman" is a tour de force (and would be in any genre) and we (probably) all know Everybody's Talkin' from Midnight Cowboy, or I Can't Live if Living is Without you, neither of which is exactly banal...

[Ein Heldenleben]

I think there is a tendency to lump "pop music" into one category, when it is in fact as rich and diverse as jazz (and - in common with jazz - has some very poor and repetitive material as well). But one of the reasons I have researched and written on pop musicians is that someone like Harry Nilsson, for example, was far from "lazy, repetitious banality". The vocal album with Gordon Jenkins (A little touch of Schmilsson in the night) is far from that description with some dense and beautiful settings, his vocal dexterity on "Nilsson sings Newman" is a tour de force (and would be in any genre) and we (probably) all know Everybody's Talkin' from Midnight Cowboy, or I Can't Live if Living is Without you, neither of which is exactly banal...

I would agree that Nilsson is very far from repetitious banality - an excellent tunesmith and full marks for foregrounding the piano. I do think though he used pretty standard chord sequences. I Can’t Live has a chord sequence used in thousands of pop songs . Where pop or rock gets more interesting for me is when musicians push things harmonically or musically like the modal Eleanor Rigby or even in Whole Lotta Love - which has only one chord and is a bit of a lift from A Love Supreme. But superbly put together.
Have to say that Nilsson is pretty much Schubert compared to some of the stuff around nowadays but maybe I’m just getting old.

[smittims]

Point taken, Alyn. Inevitably we're generalising , and for the sake of my sanity I don't actually listen to pop music (except when forced to hear it accidentally) so I cannot comment informatively. But if its so 'rich and diverse' I wonder why so much of it is in duple time with exactly the same tempo, and why the least creative part of it (the thud thud thud thud bass) is so grotesquely overamplified.

That wasn't a question,by the way!.

[Ian Thumwood]

Point taken, Alyn. Inevitably we're generalising , and for the sake of my sanity I don't actually listen to pop music (except when forced to hear it accidentally) so I cannot comment informatively. But if its so 'rich and diverse' I wonder why so much of it is in duple time with exactly the same tempo, and why the least creative part of it (the thud thud thud thud bass) is so grotesquely overamplified.

That wasn't a question,by the way!.

Smittims

I used to consistently avoid listening to any pop music when I was grewing up in a household where my parents either listened to jazz or classical music. However, my head was turned when Sting recruited jazz musicians Branford Marsalis, Manu Katche and Kenny Kirkland to his band before utlimately working with my big musical hero, Gil Evans. This lead me down a path where you start to realise just how much the more "intelligent" pop musicians are either reliant of jazz musicians as diverse as the Brecker brothers, Clare Fisher (who arranged alot of Princes' material) or Mike Gibbs in the UK. If you check out more eccentric artists like Bjork you would find her employing avant garde jazz musicians such as Larry Ochs in her bands. On the other hand there a musicians like Nile Rodgers who started off in jazz. You could expand the list well beyond these examples.

In addition, I would say that the notion of pop music being of the same tempo or in common time is also fascinating. I would seriously recommend listening to Rick Biatto's channel on Youtube which I think is absolutely fascinating. His background is as a rock musician and producer yet he frequently betrays the fact that he is really a huge fan of jazz ( past programmes have featured nterviews with the likes of John Scofield and Keith Jarrett.) Many of his programmes include assessments of current pop music and he is scathing , not only with the use of technology such as Autotune but also regardingly the very basic nature of much contemporary pop music. That said, there have been programmes where he has looked as rock groups and investigated where they have employed odd time signatures like 11/8 or even produced music which regularly switches meters. In a nutshell, the programmes are excellent as they precisely demonstrate the complexity of some rock music as well as some pop music too. His programmes effectively seperate the men from the boys. He is not just limited to pop / rock / jazz and also deals with Classical music. I think the most recent podcast was about 16th century music.

Despite the above, I think you have probably picked on some salient points about where pop fails by accident. I believe that record producers are aware that to get a "hit" record you need to do several things. I think the first is to produce an immediate hook and this is why a lot of pop music dispenses with a verse. In addition, tunes which are too fast or too slow tend not to be "hits." There is an optimum range of tempi for a hit record and producers will therefore be reluctant to deviate from this template if they want to reap the dividends. Incidentally, this is not something new. Glenn Miller did exactly the same in the late 30's / early 40s where his arrangers were not permitted to work outside of particular parameters so that the identity of the band was consistent. I think the difference now is that the level of musicianship required in probably not so high as was the case when Miller recorded something like "In the mood" - again, effectively 12 bar blues but with a cadenza for the trumpet section at the end which would have pushed the musicians' technique in 1939. Anything mildly awkward harmonically is not going to happen in much pop music nowadays. Musicians may have got around this in the 1990s (thinking of Bjork) and even the use of irregular meters in a pop record like Kate Bush'" "This woman's world" used to be acceptable - assuming people realised what was happening! All in all, I think pop music (and song writing in particular) has probably been more creative than you might have assumed even if this is not quite so common these days where many of the artists and producers are not musically informed. Oddly enough, I also contribute to another board for Southampton suppoorters and one of the blokes on there is a record producer who , in a side-thread, often talks about the artists he knows or is responsible for. I find his posts interesting as there is a level of musical knowledge with the artists he is involved with. I think alot of the problem with "pop" owes a great deal to the attitude of people like John Lennon who liked to perceive more technically and musically advanced artists with suspicion. (He famously hated Frank Zappa - the American famously having worked with Pierre Boulez.) In my mind, it is more "limited" artists like Lennon who probably get mre kudos than they deserve.

There has been one track that I have been itching to post a link to on here as , when I heard it played at a T20 match at the Ageas bowl a few years ago, it struck me as very much a watermark recording. I was not familiar with Little Mix beforehand yet I was staggered by the production values of this recording. The production of this record is so good it is off the scale. The music is not up to much but the number of people involved in this track is quite staggering. For me this record sums up where pop music is now at. Too much auto-tune and a record where the production has become more important than the actual artists. Is this the ultimate state of affairs for pop music these days ? It seems to be that this has reduced music to a product where the human element has been totally squeezed out. In it's way it is fascinating albeit in a fashion that does not give you much hope for the future.


I am unable to post the link Little Mix - "Heartbreak Anthem" You can find it easily on Youtube

[smittims]

Thanks, Ian; you do well to mention Bjork. I must admit I do like Nelly Furtado, Regina Spektor and Josh Ritter.

[Ein Heldenleben]

My nomination for some one who bestrides the Jazz and Pop “boundaries” and who commands the respect of both genres is Stevie Wonder. It also strikes me that jazz used to draw on the popular music of the day - that is in the days when Broadway musicals were popular . It would be almost unthinkable for a contemporary jazz musician to record an album based on a Lloyd Webber track but that’s what Coltrane did with Rodger’s My Favorite Things. But I guess Rodgers gives you more to work with.
I almost think there’s never been a greater division between jazz and popular music than there is now. Musicians like Wynton Marsalis have made no secret of their dislike for rap and hip-hop which ,in commercial terms, is the most successful music genre there’s ever been .

[Ian Thumwood]

I totally agree about Stevie Wonder. "Signs in the Key of life" is a brilliant album and I would argue that , if this was released in 2023, it would be classified as a jazz album.

The main issue for people wanting to discover jazz these days is that modern music has such extreme production values. That is a problem I think younger listeners would struggle to overcome. 1-20 years ago an album like Sonny Clark's "Cool struttin'" would have an element of appeal because of it's inate hipness. I am not convinced that a non-jazz listener would be so impressed in 2023. I also wonder just how relevant someone their twenties would consider jazz. Back in the 2010s, a lot of the younger jazz fans I knew were listening to the likes of Robert Glasper's "Black Radio" - the appeals of which seemed to pass by a lot of more middle ages fans like myself.

Oddily enough I had the last Regina Spektor CD but felt it had a few good tracks but otherwise was not as good as it thought it was. I have not played it for ages but it sums up how I feel about a lot of pop music that, even if the best of cases, the good material is often spread a bit thinly. I felt the same about Imogen Heap. Laura Mvula is probably the most interesting but I feel she is effectively a jazz singer in denial. I can see LM becoming more sophisticated and less dependent upon popular music.

[Ian Thumwood]

I dug out Stanley Turrentine's "Hustlin'" today havng not played this for ages. It has always struck me as strange that Turrentine never really acquired "cult status" in the way someoje like Hank Mobley did. These days I am far more enthused by Mobley that I have been in the past yet I remain baffled why jazz fans do not hold Turrentine in similar affection. This disc also feaures Kenny Burrell on guitar and make up part of the team which makes the latter's "Midnight Blue" such a brilliant record. I do not think "Hustlin" is of the same class yet I do think he has some brilliant , accessible jazz from the leader which would be a great introduction to jazz. "Love letters in the sand" is a fabulous ballad performance where Turrentine does not put a foot wrong.

[Tenor Freak]

I dug out Stanley Turrentine's "Hustlin'" today havng not played this for ages. It has always struck me as strange that Turrentine never really acquired "cult status" in the way someoje like Hank Mobley did. These days I am far more enthused by Mobley that I have been in the past yet I remain baffled why jazz fans do not hold Turrentine in similar affection. This disc also feaures Kenny Burrell on guitar and make up part of the team which makes the latter's "Midnight Blue" such a brilliant record. I do not think "Hustlin" is of the same class yet I do think he has some brilliant , accessible jazz from the leader which would be a great introduction to jazz. "Love letters in the sand" is a fabulous ballad performance where Turrentine does not put a foot wrong.

As a tenor player myself I have always enjoyed Stan's work. One of my favourites of his is Rough 'n Tumble which has some very fine playing indeed on it - for example the set closer Baptismal which also has solos by Pepper Adams and McCoy Tyner where he puts aside his Coltrane style and gets properly funky. Stan's also great on Duke Pearson's The Right Touch, for example on the first track Chili Peppers. And as a ballad player he's right up there in the Ben Webster heavyweight class.

I disagree about Mobley. Yes he could blow hot and cold, and his best playing really is Soul Station. If he wasn't in the mood he could switch off - rather like Pres from whom he based his playing style. But Hank did some fine playing on other LPs whether as a sideman (for example Kenny Dorham's Whistle Stop) or as a leader. I have always enjoyed Hi Voltage. The main reason IMO Hank has achieved cult status is because his story doesn't end well and that fits in with the heroic loser narrative that permeates jazz fandom. See also Chet Baker and many, many more.

Stan, on the other hand, was more consistent and enjoyed some success for most of his career, even having a big part in the song A Love Supreme by Will Downing. Here, he's not just blowing 16 bars of a solo break with a squealing altissimo finish, but he's weaving some signature lines across the whole piece. All this on a song that reached number 14 in the UK charts in 1988. Listening to it for the first time in many years here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSIEebXB6fU shows, once you strip out all the 80s R'n'B gloss, that Turrentine is still recognisable.

[Ian Thumwood]

Bruce

I vaguely remember that record athough I was not aware that Stanley Turrentine had played on it. Not sure if something like that would be viable as a commercial record in 2023

[Tenor Freak]

Bruce

I vaguely remember that record athough I was not aware that Stanley Turrentine had played on it. Not sure if something like that would be viable as a commercial record in 2023

Nope, absolutely not. I recall one situation as long as 23 years ago. Of all groups, Steely Dan had to fight their record label to have a sax solo (played by Chris Potter, no less) on one of their songs on the Two Against Nature CD - I think it was Janey Runaway which was released as a single in the US.

[eighthobstruction]

....I think klezmer has definitely had a huge affect on jazz - swing.....