Jazz and tone production

In How to Listen to Jazz, Ted Gioia tells the story of jazz broadcaster Richard Hadlock arranging to take a saxophone lesson from New Orleans pioneer Sidney Bechet. This was Bechet’s lesson:  

“I’m going to give you one note today. See how many ways you can play that note—growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That’s how you express your feelings in this music. It’s like talking.” 

That is jazz. Numerous times I listened to a jazz composition and heard cries, shrieks, moans… 
Gioia goes on to say, “a whole universe of significations could be contained in that single note, and the masters of the idiom were expected to find a seemingly infinite number of ways of expressing them.” 

“It’s hardly a coincidence that this ‘tune and tone’ revolution was spurred by American musicians of African ancestry. The African tradition conceptualizes music-making as the creation of sounds. You may think that music-making is obviously the creation of sounds, but that’s not really the case. The Western performance tradition of the last 2 millennia has been shaped by practitioners who conceptualized music as a system of notes—of discrete tones, tuned in scales with 12 subdivisions. […] But African musicians never got enlightened (or is corrupted the better word?) by Pythagorean thinking. They followed the other path—creating a music that drew on infinite gradations of sound, and not just 12 notes in a scale. […] The African sensibility clashed with the Western systems of music, and both were forced to give ground. Yet how much richer we are for this give-and-take!”  

I’d say that part of the freedom comes from the instruments—with the piano, violin, or viola, you can’t bend notes, distort sounds, or mimic noises the way you can do with the saxophone or trumpet (30-Second Jazz says that “the sound of the saxophone bears an uncanny resemblance to the human voice, and as with the human voice, no 2 players’ tones are exactly alike”). However, it’s fascinating to look at tone production in jazz and go back to its roots and see jazz as a happy marriage between Western music system of notes and African tradition of sound production (especially in the case of Duke Ellington’s orchestra). 



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Here is Ted Gioia taking a dig at today’s pop music: 

“By the way, this tells you why Auto-Tuned vocals on many contemporary records sound so shallow and lifeless, It’s almost as if everything we learned from African American music during the 20th century was thrown out the window by technologists of the 21st century. The goal should not be to sing every note dead center in the middle of the pitch—we escaped from that musical prison a hundred years ago. Why go back?”