Friday was a sad day as we found out about the death of trumpeter Rich Turner, a friend to lots of us on the London jazz scene and the main force behind the gigs at Con Cellar Bar. It was at the beginning of our first big band meetup that we heard, sitting with lots of his friends as we were waiting for Rich to come and play. Rich would make things happen totally selflessly and with a great sense of ambition - the work he put into the Con Cellar really showed, with some major international musicians coming to play there alongside lots of the country's top young bands. Round Trip, his long-standing quartet, were one of the bands I've enjoyed hearing most in London over the last few years. He'll be missed.

There have been a couple of interesting takes on my post of a few weeks here from over the pond (then up a bit) - from Peter Hum at the Ottowa Citizen and John Wertheim of A Devout Musician . Both good reads, check them out.

I was playing for some auditions a couple of days ago that were being held in the Music department of UEA in Norwich. The jazz co-ordinator there, Vic Hobson, has a fantastic collection of old jazz magazines going back to the post-war period; we had to be reluctantly dragged off to do some work! There were quite a few duplicates that he was planning on getting rid of, so he invited us to take a few if there was anything that took our fancy. I walked off with a couple of editions of 'Jazz Monthly', from 1959 and 60.
They're quite a fascinating read. I thought I'd just post a little excerpt from the August 1960 edition, just to give you a flavour:



A common theme throughout is the willingness of reviewers to make what we would nowadays call 'value judgements' - there's no tip-toeing around personal opinions, and to someone used to flicking through a copy of Jazzwise , it's quite startling to read. It does put me in mind of one particular critic who is to be found writing about jazz in London today (anybody remember a particularly striking review of Brad Mehldau at the Barbican a few years back?), but, for the most part, writing on jazz today is a lot less about 'what I think as a critic' and a lot more 'what might be useful to my readers, without prejudicing them one way or another'.
Perhaps it's also fair to say that everyone today knows, if not everyone, someone that knows everyone, or at least follows them on twitter or facebook. Musicians/writers/bloggers/PR/agents/labels are all highly visibly connected through social media, and opinions spread, fast. Does this mean that opinions are therefore less individual/more accommodating?
I'm not saying that I would appreciate a return to the kind of thing you find in Jazz Monthly August 1960. I like the fact that most publications and blogs are very positive, pro-musician, and lack the self-importance of old. People still hold strong opinions, and they occasionally get vented (look at this comment stream on the popular LondonJazz blog). There tends (rightly, in my opinion) to be a collective frown, however, if things get close to the kind of review seen above.
I don't have a personal view on the whole issue. Is there an argument for greater critical distance in the media when it comes to jazz? Or is it better just to pass by things that you don't like, rather than going out there to tell everyone why you didn't like it? Tricky business, and I'd be wrong to thing this is an argument that hasn't gone around the houses a few times before. Feel free to comment, although, to learn a lesson from LondonJazz, no anonymous comments please...

A couple of posts ago I wrote about a piece of John Taylor's called Ritual . This time I'm writing about another piece from Phases called Summer, and in the next post I'll be writing about bit of composition I tried myself after looking at this piece.

What do you want to know?
In transcribing an original composition, as opposed to an improvised solo, I think there's something else we tend to be looking for. All the elements of musical language that we think about during improvisation are certainly still there, but there's also something more abstract and intellectual. A thought process, a sense of logic, a method - all things that our brains enjoy having the luxury of time to think about and refine. As eager students, it's something we can absorb and apply through whatever kind of musical language we pick - the more abstract the better!

The transcription - CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PDF
With that in mind, the transcription is my effort to get close to a 'lead sheet' of what I think the composition involves at a basic level. In other words, if John Taylor was to take it to a rehearsal, what would he give the other musicians? I've mixed and matched a few different repetitions of the main melody in order to form what I think might be a fair 'average' - it never actually happens quite like this. The voicings are exact, however - in the 'C' section, I've just provided the voicings, as the way they are played rhythmically changes too much to write one 'definitive' version.


The Piece
The 'A' section is really a kind of introduction/interlude - its harmonic stability throws all the other parts, with their rich harmonic language, into sharp relief. The time signature does give it a restlessness that does create some tension, although it's quite placid. The B section is the 'core' of the piece to my ears - one voicing is taken through a series of transpositions (with the melody very much arising naturally from the shapes of those particular voicings), before a beautiful shift sideways to some kind of resolution :

The whole thing then sets off again a semitone lower (bar 10) before resolving more fully onto B minor. There's a tremendous sense of shape in this section, as the very last chord is the only time you get a stable, rooted chord. As for that recurring voicing, it's hard to know how to categorise it - the harmony certainly comes from the melodic minor scale. You can see this quite clearly in bar 9 when the notes are padded out a little more. What to call it in traditional jazz notation is another question, and one that I'm not sure really matters....
The C section takes the pedal idea from the A section and winds it down through 4 keys - with the 4/4 time signature here and the sense of repetition, it really it like a big exhalation, regular and quite stabilising. You end the C section on this beautifully poised diminished voicing, ready to go through the intensity of the B section again. Everything is balanced, and everything has a purpose.

The Method?
I would take a guess that the B section was written first. It's a stunning example of managing tension and release - the harmonic shifts in bars 7-8 and 14-15 really get me. These are the bars that break away from the 'system' of transposed voicings in bars 3-6 and 10-13 to resolve (the first time only partially). There's no doubt that the sound created by these tense shifting minor chords is quite haunting and rather beautiful, but the strength of its logic is revealed even more by breaking away from them. That's the kernel of the composition for me - taking something that has its own kind of almost mathematical beauty, and turning it into something alive and human.
Now it may be total speculation, but I could make an educated guess at how the piece was written. It really is no more than a guess, but even if it's wrong, it could be useful. Here we go:

1. Find a voicing (here just an interesting way with a fairly basic scale)
2. See how it moves/transposes, put it through a sequence
3. As tension builds, break the system and make it musical and melodic
4. Find yourself with a whole section, judge its effect, see if you need contrasting sections
5. Write some contrasting sections, more simply if necessary, each with a certain purpose

I had a go - up next, the results!

Just a quick thought I've had this week about playing tunes in 12 keys. There are lots of different opinions on whether you need to do it - essentially the argument against doing it is that people never actually play Donna Lee in E (for example). So you'd be better off, if you're practicing Donna Lee, to spend your time getting phenomenally good at playing it in Ab than spending the same amount of time getting moderately good at playing it in 12 keys.

However, I always had the niggling doubt that it was just an excuse for being a bit lazy - various teachers, like Martin Speake, had always recommended learning tunes in lots of different keys, even if you don't end up actually playing in them. If there's somebody whose word you want to take when it comes to playing changes, it's probably Martin! Nevertheless, I never really applied myself to it that well. However, I found myself just playing the other day and realised that I really wasn't getting around the A section of a rhythm changes in Db particularly well. Not surprising really - know many rhythm changes in Db? It's not a really odd key - you certainly find yourself in it quite frequently during the course of a tune, even if it's not the overarching key (more frequently than keys like B, E and A anyhow, particularly in a 'bop' context). So I've started to make my warmup start with taking a couple of Parker heads round the keys, two handed, quite slowly.

What I soon realised is that perhaps the greatest advantage of learning a tune in twelve keys is that it makes you much better at playing the tune in the original key. You start thinking about intervals, the degrees of scales and chords that the melody takes. You really have to engage your inner voice - for somebody who is not a great natural singer, accurately trying to sing 'Crazeology', for example, in A major, without any bassline, is pretty tricky (perhaps more difficult if, like me, you have perfect pitch...?An interesting side-thought...). Once you put together the impulse of your singing voice with your learning of the tune in the 'abstract' (by degrees of scale, chord movement and interval) you have a much deeper musical connection with it that feeds back to your relationship with it in the original key. It may sound obvious - after all, taking transcribed solos/licks etc through keys is something we all do. However, in my mind that was always designed to improve your playing in that particular key. What I understand more now is the general usefulness of transposition. I'm enjoying it, and I'm going to keep doing it.

"nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music
nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music
nothing is accomplished by performing a piece of music"

These slightly alarming words are the first words that appear in John Cage's collection of writings called 'Silence'.They take me back to one of the most enjoyable things I ever did at Oxford - studying American experimental music of the 1950s. I've found it quite amusing recently that Cage is back on the agenda, reborn as a sort of anti-X-factor freedom fighter in that perennial barometer of the state of humanity, the Christmas charts. I even went and bought the single.
After a good number of terms full of dusty musicological tomes on Schenkerian analysis and the like (some of which I quite enjoyed, to be fair), Cage was a bit of a revelation to me during my final year at Oxford. Though he wrote with a light touch and plenty of humour, it was never through arrogance or judgement, but as a result of a complete lack of self-concern. All that he was interested in was exploring every element of his environment, judging nothing, sensing everything. 4'33", his infamous 'silent' piece that has found itself in the UK charts this christmas, is more than a jokey idea - it is an operating mode for every moment of life.
A concept that Cage could never understand was the idea of attaching 'meaning' to music, somehow loading it with human purpose. "Let the notes be themselves" was a recurring motto of his, and the sentiment behind the quotation at the top of this post. I found myself thinking that Cage would be unhappy that his great monument to multiplicity and openness was being seized upon as something with purpose, in a good-vs-evil battle for musical integrity in which I suspect he would have had very little interest.
On the other hand, Cage rarely seemed unhappy with anything (a very good advert for Zen buddhism). What would he really make of 'Cage against the machine'? I like to think of Imaginary Landscape No. 4, one of his iconic pieces involving 12 radios. Famously, Cage had not foreseen that, at the time of evening that the concert was programmed for, most of the radio stations would not be broadcasting, so most of what was heard was white noise. Maybe Imaginary Landscape 27 (or whatever he might have been up to by now) would involve 12 television sets at 8pm on a Saturday night, 12 remote controls, a randomly-generated series of channel switching, electronic manipulations, volume controls, live pauses (we're assuming Sky + here), and tall, greying man at the front with a a gentle smile and open ears.

This Christmas saw the passing of another giant - Joe Zawinul and O.P. in one year is certainly a sad thing for jazz musicians. Night Train was one of the first records I listened to and I always keep coming back to Oscar to remind me that how you play the notes you play is just as important as the notes yourself. His break and solo on C Jam blues on the Night Train album swings like nothing else - a few months ago I felt I had to transcribe it to see what he was up to. It was amazing - the notes he were playing were are straightforward as you could imagine - very few extensions, a few interesting arpeggios....but it was his touch, timing and accentuationg which made it so infectious. And you always got the sense he was enjoying himself too....