The Cat's Pajamas

Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus

Well, I am suddenly, and officially a big fan of Charles Mingus.  Up until tonight, I didn’t really know a lot about his music.  I have had a bootlegged digital version of an album of him playing the piano, and a vinyl version of an album of his entitled Three Worlds of Drums.  Then, a couple weeks ago I picked up Let My Children Hear Music on vinyl.

I was very impressed by Let My Children Hear Music.  I wanted more, but I just hadn’t gotten around to getting it, nor had I chanced across it.  Then, earlier tonight, I picked up some new records, and after I got back, I went on a minor downloading spree.  Amongst all this new music ended up being The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.  To say I was very impressed by this album, like I was Let My Children Hear Music, is an understatement.

I am trying to pinpoint exactly what it is about these two albums that I like so much.  The first thing is that they have a dense “vertical” component.  What I mean by this is that there is a great deal of layering of the parts played on them each.   It seems like a common theme for these pieces to begin with a fanfare of bawdy horns, and to lead into a swinging melody which sets up the remainder.  It all seems really carefully planned, but at the same time, surprisingly natural — it doesn’t have any rigidity to it, in spite of the fact that it has clearly been meticulously constructed in advance (for the most part at least).

At several points (especially on Black Saint), something unexpected emerges from the established sound.  On the first and last track of Black Saint, it is a non-sequitur Spanish guitar part.   On Let My Children Hear Music, there is an heavily orchestrally accompanied reading of a poem (read by Mingus himself).  These bizarre elements complement the core of solid composition, blaring horns, and thunderous, symphonic percussion (in contrast to, say, rock percussion, or jazz percussion, a la Billy Cobham).  The change in tone doesn’t upset the precise feel of it all;  It has been carefully worked in such as to be different overtly, but not to drastically vary stylistically.  Mingus somehow makes spoken word poetry seem compositionally natural.  That takes some skill.

I think that, by far, the most impressive feature of both albums is the fact that they are so intricately composed.  No track on either of these albums feels like an excuse for some jazz musicians to go ahead and improvise.  This is a stark contrast to some other jazz which is actually quite good, but less (or at least less *obviously*) composed.  Specifically, the work of Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy come to mind when I think of the contrast to Mingus’ compositional style.  Coleman and Dolphy set the tone and build the theme of the piece, but the bulk of the presentation is devoted to their chops, or to the collective chops of the group.  Mingus’ work, on the other hand is more devoted to the structure and specific layering of sounds and melodies, to produce songs that sound almost cinematic.  It is as though each of these records is the soundtrack to a movie which doesn’t exist, or the score to a wild, suggestive 1930’s cabaret performance.  It is really captivating to listen to.

I plan to devote more time to listening to Charles Mingus, and perhaps I will have something more insightful to say about his work in the future, but I couldn’t contain myself tonight when I was listening to this new album, I had to say something about it.

Ethiopiques

Not so recently, I watched an excellent movie called Broken Flowers.  Bill Murray plays a depressed, aging Don Juan who learns he has a son he didn’t know he had.  His apparently rastafarian private eye friend sends him on a journey to connect with his exes to hunt down his son, and his son’s mother.  The movie does a great job of making each meeting trick the audience into thinking that he has found his lost family, and so it keeps things interesting and mysterious.  The mystery is also supported throughout the movie by an incredible soundtrack composed by an Ethiopian jazz musician/composer Mulatu Astatke.  I’ll leave the specifics of his life to be discussed elsewhere, and focus on his unique musical style.

His music is clearly heavily influenced by the music of the west, but also feels distinctly foreign at times to my ears, which up to this point have been deprived of Ethiopian sounds.  The drums in his music tend to be busy, but mixed (and/or played) very quietly for the most part.  In addition to this, the drum parts include a mixture of traditional jazz kit playing, as well as some really unique (and I guess east African influenced) hand drum playing.  There is an interesting rhythmic quality that emerges, and because it is all muted down below the level of the other instruments, it feels like these serve as a substrate on which the rest of the music is laid out.

The bass parts on the songs that I have heard are tightly coupled, compositionally to the melody parts, which are primarily  on reeds (I think, but I’m not exactly sure what some of the instrumentation is), and on keys.  The bass parts make use of scales that provide an interesting and mysterious quality that I think is uncommon in the music of the west.  This, plus the meandering saxophone parts make for a really interesting and dynamic sound.

Learning about Mulatu Astatke by watching Broken Flowers has opened my eyes to an awesome collection of music of this style, all composed by composers from within, or around Ethiopia.  This collection is called Ethiopiques, and was compiled to ensure that the incredible music made in this area is available.  I am just now having a chance to familiarize myself with the albums individually, but even within the collection, there is a huge amount of diversity.  Some is instrumental, some vocal.  Some is very funky, some comes close to syrupy and more like a ballad than a dance track.  All of it seems to have the interesting property that it combines some compositional techniques from the jazz of the 60s-80s with the distinct sound of Ethiopian traditional music, by way of lyrics, rhythm parts, or melodic structure.  I hope to break down this collection with more detail, when I’ve had a chance to better digest it, and learn about the subtlety of each of its component albums.

Sonny Rollins

I have been on a serious jazz binge recently, and three artists have really stood out amongst the new listening I’ve been doing.

First, Sonny Rollins.  Just browsing the discography on his wikipedia page suggests how prolific a career he has had.  There are 39 recordings listed, which were recorded before 1960!  And there are as many from 1960 onward.  He has of course worked with the greats - Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane (though only on one track ever), Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Art Blakey and Clifford Brown, to name a few.

His music has a unique character, which is very punctuated and rhythmic.  This fact is articulated well in a segment on Rollins in Ken Burns’ Jazz (the PBS documentary).  I forget who, but during the segment, someone discusses the way that Rollins solos.  It is interesting because in some cases, his solos rarely consist of more than three or five different pitches.  The allure of solos like this is that they become allusions to the percussion work on the tunes.  St. Thomas, which is probably Rollins’ most famous piece is a good example of this.  On an album recorded Live in Japan (I think it could be a bootleg that I’ve got — it is undated, and from the internet) his solos on St. Thomas rehash the main theme, but in a way that is almost a pun of the wide-spectrum calypso melody.  For measure after measure, the solo hops between two or three notes only, and there are several points where Rollins’ playing puts complete focus on rhythmic structure, as opposed to melody.  This is interesting because for this duration, it puts the sax in a group with the drummer and the keys player, instead of a logically segregated top-layer to the piece, residing above the rhythm section.

As a drummer, I love the way that this puts pressure on the idea that lead parts need be melody and then rhythm — rhythmic form is intricate and interesting, and conveys a song’s theme to a listener differently.  In addition to this, simplifying the melodic structure lets players incorporate more technically extreme rhythmic elements which may, in a more melodically intricate solo, result in technical overcrowding (or just be impossible to play!)

A final note on Rollins’ work, and for this, I really wish I knew when the recording that I have was recorded.   In Rollins’ playing on this recording, I can hear what seem like stylistic suggestions of the themes in Coltrane’s A Love Supreme during some of the more melodic stretches. [An aside: I plan to post on A Love Supreme, as I consider it amongst the best jazz that exists, and it is my personal favorite record].  Anyway, this potential stylistic similarity is interesting, and leads me to wonder in which direction the influence went in this case — was A Love Supreme so ground-breakingly awesome because of Sonny Rollins’ influence on Coltrane?  Or was it that Coltrane’s composition and playing had an effect on Rollins’ style later in his career (when, perhaps this recording that I have was recorded)?  Since Rollins was so active before 1960, and A Love Supreme was made in 1965, I have to imagine that Coltrane’s work was inspired by Rollins’ work.  The fact that these two are both so great individually kind of makes it disappointing that they only recorded one track on one album together (Tenor Madness in 1959).  I haven’t heard this, but this review has some discussion on how they ended up getting together on this one.

I think that there is definitely room for more Sonny Rollins in my collection, and I hope to do some more listening to broaden my experience with his work.

Hello, World!

Well, this post signifies the “hello, world” moment for this blog.  I am not sure what exactly I intend to write about here, but I have a feeling it is going to be a combination of things about music, issues in computer architecture, sitcoms from the 1990s, things I learn about in Brain Class, and anything I come across that I think is interesting.  I am going to try to include a note on something music-pertinent with each post, and I am going to make an attempt to post on a reasonably regular basis.