Happy 2020!

Happy New Year, everyone!
New decade (go away pedants) so it's time to dig out my favourite New Year song: 



(In Vietnam, at least till I left, they play this song every year. Whenever I listen to it, I think of Vietnam). 

Hope you all have a happy, prosperous year!

Benny Green on Billie Holiday

The passages I’ve so far quoted from the Benny Green book might create the impression that he’s a perceptive but harsh critic who likes to destroy great figures in jazz. That is not the case.  
His essay on Billie Holiday is written with such sensitivity that he makes me listen to her music again. 

“… when one listens to all these recordings indiscriminately, the skilful songs and the average jingles, the peculiar truth emerges that for some reason they were all more or less as good as each other, that apparently Billie Holiday was independent of the material she used. Songs came to her as competent minor products of the popular music machine of the day went through the treatment, and emerged as the touching expression of thoughts and emotions their composers had never dreamed of. ‘Me, Myself, and I’ sung by anyone else would be no more than the slightly cretinous but not objectionable expression of the infatuation of one person for another. The Billie Holiday recording is positively joyous. It abounds with the expression of a happy, helpless love, so that the triteness of the lyric disappears to be replaced by a wit of expression whose incongruity with the original tune is almost comical.” 

Note that this comes from a man who is against the concept of jazz singers, except for people like Louis Armstrong, “whose methods of vocal expression are so clearly extensions of their instrumental personalities”. The idea of a jazz singer, to him, goes against the improvisational nature of jazz. 
But Billie Holiday is an exception. 
Benny Green writes about “Body and Soul”: 

“When Billie sings the words, she invests them with an intensity achieved by the childishly simple device of singing them as though she meant them. The fact that she chooses to sing the lesser-known alternate lyrics on the last middle eight, the lines that begin ‘What lies before me, a future that’s stormy?’ suggests that she must have given close thought to the meaning of the words before singing them.” 

He reminds me of why there was a period in 2015 when I listened to Billie Holiday all day, almost exclusively. Hers might not be the kind of music we can enjoy all the time, but when we’re in the right mood, her performance beats everyone else’s in its intensity and depth of feeling. 
It is amusing to see Benny Green denigrate Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. I’ve never felt much when listening to Sarah Vaughan, except for “Whatever Lola Wants” and “Lullaby of Birdland”, much as I admire her range and vocal techniques; Ella Fitzgerald is a singer I like a lot, but now I’m listening to Billie Holiday again—just place side by side their renditions of the same song, Lady Day almost always wins (except for “Summertime”, my favourite version is the one by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong). Billie Holiday makes the perfection of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald appear hollow. 

“Much later in her career, when the ravages of a desperately unhappy life were beginning to tell, her range shrank much more seriously, so that in singing old stand-bys like ‘Body and Soul’ and ‘These Foolish Things’, she dropped her key by a tone or sometimes more. But by then her voice had changed so profoundly in character that she was a different kind of artist altogether. The great virtue of the recordings from the 1st period was their heart-lifting optimism, a certain buoyancy of spirit which made the listen feel an affinity for a disembodied sound whose owner he might never have heard of before. I am convinced that for much of the time Billie was not consciously aware of what she was doing while she was doing it. To her, singing was not so much the exercise of an artistic function as the natural means of expression towards the world. This relationship involving the mechanics of making music is common enough among the best instrumentalists, but certainly no singer since Bessie Smith could be said to need to sing as desperately as Billie Holiday. The casual effects she threw off would be psychological masterstrokes had they been thought out and planned ahead. As it was, they remained emphatic triumphs of intuition.” 

He ends the essay with: 

“… the normal rules applied to her no more at the end of her life than they had in the beginning. Whatever shortcomings there might now be in her breathing, her range and her pronunciation, she had retained, because it was a very real part of her personality, this unfailing ability to wrest out of every lyric the last drop of significance, and even to insert her own where the lyricist had failed to include it. As this was the very core of her art, the last recordings overcame their own technical limitations in a miraculous way.” 

That is beautiful. 
My only complaint about the essay is that he doesn’t analyse some of her most famous songs such as “Strange Fruit” and “Gloomy Sunday”. 

Here is a collection of tracks performed by Billie Holiday and Lester Young:

Benny Green on Ornette Coleman

In an essay about Coleman Hawkins, Benny Green says: 

“In any case, objective criticism is a platonic impossibility which would not even be desirable even if it were possible. The only criticism which is readable is the fiercely prejudiced, fiercely subjective criticism by a man who cares enough to show his enthusiasms.” 

With that “fiercely prejudiced, fiercely subjective” attitude, he writes about Ornette Coleman.   
Before writing anything about Coleman, Benny Green talks about critics and their mistake at the beginning regarding Charlie Parker. Then: 

“The frame of mind in which most critics trooped down to Scott’s Club to hear the ageing enfant terrible may best be described by reciting the false syllogism which had become the 1st rule of conduct for all jazz reviewers. ‘Parker sounded mad, and he turned out to be a great musician. Ornette Coleman sounds mad. Therefore Ornette Coleman must be a great musician.’” 

I myself haven’t heard much of Coleman, but my experience not only hasn’t been very favourable, it also makes me indifferent to everything else he has created. I have a strong dislike of the screeching noise in “Lonely Woman”, which is more painful than hearing a fork scratching a plate. 
Now that you’ve seen Benny Green tear apart Dave Brubeck, prepare to see him flinging a knife at Ornette Coleman. Slash slash. 

“… in the past 2 or 3 years, Coleman had become a multi-instrumentalist. Part of his early fame had rested on the fact that he preferred blowing a plastic alto saxophone, although why this should have contributed to the legend of his genius it is hard to say. So far from being a crazy novelty, plastic saxophones had been tried and found wanting many years before Coleman took up their cause. In any case, it is difficult to understand on what basis a man can see something spectacular about a plastic instrument who had never handled a metal one. […]
But Coleman had come to London armed not only with his plastic saxophone, but with a trumpet and a violin as well, and if it is true to say that he was at least reasonably familiar with the technical problems of playing jazz on a saxophone, it is also true to say that he apparently had only the most rudimentary of how to handle the 2 new instruments. Coleman as a saxophone player is a fascinating curiosity, an artist whose technique is a bewildering patchwork of dexterity and the most shocking ineptitude. […]
But what of Coleman the trumpeter or Coleman the violinist? What he actually succeeded in doing at Scott’s was to defy all rational criticism. Once he began to struggle with the trumpet or to saw savagely at the violin, the process of ratiocination collapsed entirely. There was no criterion by which to judge. It was not so much bad playing as no playing at all, not so much poor music as antimusic.” 

Such fun. 
This essay was written in 1966, in case anyone’s wondering. Benny Green quotes himself in another review: 

“It ought to be clear to anyone visiting Ronnie Scott’s Club in the last few days that it is not possible to criticise the playing of Ornette Coleman. The act of criticism is necessarily connected with what the artist is supposed to be doing, and as I haven’t the remotest idea what Ornette Coleman is supposed to be doing, all criticism is stilled. It remains only to report in factual terms what happens when he arrives on the bandstand. 
Coleman begins with what might be laughingly called an alto saxophone solo at a fast tempo, brief and to the point, lasting, say, 10 or 15 minutes, in the course of which both harmony and melody are given the brush. Next comes a change of mood, that is to say, the same thing is played slow instead of fast. The violin interlude which follows is even more startling. Coleman staggers through some mysterious pattern of his own devising, sawing away with a ferocity which belies the dolorous expression in his face. 
[…] He is not, however, completely without shrewdness. By mastering the useful trick of playing the entire chromatic scale at any given moment, he has absolved himself from the charge of continuously playing the wrong notes. Like a stopped clock, Coleman is right at least twice a day.” 

Ha ha ha. 
What a devastating review. Benny Green is my new model.

Is Dave Brubeck overrated?

I’m reading Such Sweet Thunder: Benny Green on Jazz—Benny Green the British saxophonist (1927- 1998), not Bennie Green the American trombonist (1923- 1977) and not Benny Green the American pianist (1963), all in jazz, confusingly.  
This Benny Green is very critical of Dave Brubeck. He writes in “Jazz Goes to College”: 

“Brubeck was a new phenomenon in jazz, a perennial student who had never worked in anybody’s group but his own. This in itself was no disqualification, although it was silly to pretend it was much help. It seemed to me that he played the piano so clumsily, and with such consistent clumsiness, that from the day I first attended one of his performances, my impatience was tempered by a touch of that compassion which one usually feels at the spectacle of a fellow musician flung by circumstances into a hopelessly false position. For either Brubeck chose to accept the myth of his own infallibility, or he did not, each of the options being worse than the other, either to accept the reality of a genius he did not in fact possess, or be obliged to strive hopelessly for it every time he confronted a keyboard. At first I was surprised that such footling juvenilia should be taken even halfway seriously by those who knew of Art Tatum and Bud Powell. Slowly my surprise was replaced by wry acceptance of the fact that possibly those who knew of Tatum and Powell and still took Brubeck seriously did not know of Tatum and Powell after all.” 

That is harsh. 
The essay was written in 1973. Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, for example, came out in 1959, and is now still called one of the best jazz albums of the year. 
Benny Green goes on to say: 

“Attendance at Brubeck concerts for me became a nightmare which I would not have missed for worlds. The images were too rich to pass over, of Brubeck falling deeper and deeper into the rut of some wretched cross-rhythm, digging a pit for himself with such relentless determination that soon he falls into it and disappears from view; Brubeck climbing out again and arriving at the same juncture of a song for 6 or 7 successive choruses, ‘improvising’ the same phrase each time; Brubeck shyly telling us that what he is now about to play is more or less impossible but that he is going to be very gallant and play it anyway.” 

Wow. 
In 1964, Benny Green wrote another essay, named “Dave Brubeck”, talking more about the deficiencies and shortcomings of Brubeck and the quartet. The essay, or review, ended with: 

“Audiences continue to be duped by Brubeck’s subtle flattery. When they applaud the trick of playing 4 beats a bar against a background of only 3, they are applauding not only Brubeck’s cleverness but their own percipience in noticing it. They enjoy being offered titles like ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’, because the implication is there that they understand blues, rondos and even Turks. Brubeck appeals to the culture vulture that resides in us all, the beast in the attic of so many jazz fanciers. His quartet produces the warm glow which comes with the assurance that the better artistic things in life are after all within our scope. But to judge Brubeck’s music by the highest jazz standards is to marvel at the comparative neglect of so many more musical groups.” 

Erm… 
In both of these essays, Benny Green attacked Dave Brubeck together with John Lewis (the jazz pianist, not the UK department store) and Modern Jazz Quartet. He mentioned both together, again, in a 1973 essay called “Cult and Culture”. These names seem like his obsessions.  
I don’t know enough about music theory and techniques to evaluate his criticisms, but Benny Green is no Philip Larkin. Whilst I don’t agree with everything he says, he has high opinion of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and my favourite jazz musicians such as John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington (not sure about his view on Charles Mingus and Clifford Brown). When I don’t agree with him, as it’s hard to agree with his mockery of jazz singers in general except for Billy Holiday, and except for people like Louis Armstrong, “whose methods of vocal expression are so clearly extensions of their instrumental personalities”, I can see his point. 
What do you think? Is Dave Brubeck overrated, or does Benny Green fail to recognise his talent?

Listening to Clifford Brown

These days I’ve been listening to Clifford Brown and Max Roach, thanks to David H. Rosenthal’s Hard Bop: Jazz & Black Music 1955- 1965. Look at these lines about Brown:

“… Clifford was far and away the best trumpeter of his generation. Taking Fats Navarro’s style as his point of departure, he breathed new life into bebop, making it sound as fresh as if it had just been invented. Like Navarro, Brown had a fat, ‘buttery’ sound and played long melodic lines that lent his solos a sense of effortless, flowing ease. […]
Brownie extended Navarro’s style. He played with more vibrato, especially on ballads; and at faster tempos he employed half-valve effects, slurs, and grace notes that gave his solos a wryly puckish quality.”

Clifford Brown & Max Roach:


Study in Brown:


I thought I’d never like trumpets half as much as saxophones, then I listened to Clifford Brown. These albums are fantastic. 
Then I listened to him playing ballads:
Clifford Brown with Strings:


I was amazed. His sound was soaring.
Here is Rosenthal again:

“‘Ebullient’, ‘effervescent’, ‘elated’, and ‘exultant’ were words applied to his improvisational style. His ballads were soaringly romantic rather than somber. […] The trumpet statement crackles with fire and swing. Tuneful phrases and shouts of pleasure fill every chorus. Rarely as modern jazz radiated so much sweetness, light, and sheer elan.”

It’s such a pity that Clifford Brown died so young.

On Charles Mingus

1/ As How to Listen to Jazz and now, The Language of Jazz, barely talk about Charles Mingus, I have to look other places for writings about his music.
This is a good article: https://www.thenation.com/article/argument-instruments-charles-mingus/

“For sheer range of expression, his work has few equals in postwar American music: furious and tender, joyous and melancholy, grave and mischievous, ecstatic and introspective. It moves from the rapture of the church to the euphoria of the ballroom, from accusation to seduction, from a whisper to a growl, often by way of startling jump cuts and sudden changes in tempo. Vocal metaphors are irresistible when discussing Mingus. As Whitney Balliett remarked, music for him was “another way of talking.””

This is why Mingus Ah Um is a good place to start—it is diverse and shows his different styles and different moods.

“That fire, that irrepressible energy, made Mingus somewhat unfashionable in an era of cool. So did his unabashed maximalism as a composer. The limpid impressionism of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), the funky vamps of hard bop and soul jazz, and the honky-tonk expressiveness of Ornette Coleman had little in common, but all were attempts at achieving a simpler, more immediate style than bebop with its bewildering velocity and jarring dissonances.”

Is this why Charles Mingus seems to be overlooked? I like both the impressionism of Kind of Blue and Mingus’s “unabashed maximalism”. I love his raw, bold music, full of life, energy, and rage. 

“Ornette and his followers, Mingus complained to Goodman, were like surgeons who couldn’t retrace their steps: “if I’m a surgeon, am I going to cut you open ‘by heart,’ just free-form it, you know?… I’m not avant-garde, no. I don’t throw rocks and stones, I don’t throw my paint.” […]
Mingus wasn’t afraid of the new, but he didn’t see why it should come at the expense of the past, as the slogans of the avant-garde seemed to imply. He was a rebel in defense of tradition. […] In 1959, the year Coleman announced The Shape of Jazz to Come, Mingus called one of his records Blues & Roots: black music, as he saw it, was a continuum, a bottomless source of renewal; you couldn’t move into the future without a thorough knowledge of the past. “Those eras in the history of jazz, like Dixieland,” he told Goodman, “are the same and as important as classical music styles are.” Gospel and blues, the New Orleans polyphony of Jelly Roll Morton and the urbane sophistication of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the stride piano of James P. Johnson and the dazzling harmonizations of Art Tatum: all went into the Mingus cauldron, seasoned with dashes of circus music, obscure pop tunes, B-movie scores, flamenco, scraps of Mozart and Richard Strauss. To listen to Mingus is to hear the black American musical tradition talking to itself.”

Blues & Roots was released in 1960 but recorded in 1959, before The Shape of Jazz to Come. It’s particularly interesting in context—after the period of cool jazz (itself a reaction to bebop) and modal jazz, some musicians were going back to their roots and incorporating blues and gospel music in jazz, with hard bop, whilst others were “going forward” with avant-garde jazz and free jazz around the same time.
I won’t quote more from the article, as it should be read in whole. Quite long but a good piece. Adam Shatz writes about the music as well as the man behind the music—early ambitions (classical music), influences, developments in his career, personality, racial identity, and all the things that shaped Mingus’s music. 

2/ Ted Gioia writes about Charles Mingus in his The History of Jazz—the chapter is published on the Jazz Profiles blog:
http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2018/10/ted-gioia-on-charles-mingus-history-of.html

“Like many jazz bandleaders who came to prominence in the 1950s, Charles Mingus drew inspiration from the hard-bop style, albeit transforming it into his own image. He drew heavily on the same ingredients that had proven successful for Blakey and Silver: an appreciation for African American roots music such as gospel and blues; a zest for hard-swinging, often funky playing; a rigorous schooling in the bebop idiom; a renewed emphasis on formalism and the possibilities of jazz composition; and a determination to exploit the full expressive range of the traditional horns-plus-rhythm jazz combo. Despite these similarities, few critics of the period saw Mingus as part of the hard-bop school. Yet his mature musical explorations rarely ventured far afield from this ethos. Had Mingus recorded for Blue Note and drawn on the services of other musicians affiliated with that label, these links would have been more evident. As it stands, he is typically seen as a musician who defies category—more a gadfly, skilled at disrupting hegemonies rather than supporting the current trends in play. Mingus is remembered as a progressive who never really embraced the freedom principle and a traditionalist who constantly tinkered with and subverted the legacies of the past.”

I’m helpless when trying to write about music, so click the link and read Ted Gioia’s chapter.

3/ Here are my favourite albums:
Mingus Ah Um:


Oh Yeah:


The Clown:


The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady:


I’ve also listened to Blues & Roots and Tijuana Moods (did I check out Mingus Dynasty?)—The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is different from everything else.
Go listen.

Ted Gioia and the need to approach artists on their own terms

In chapter 6 of How to Listen to Jazz, “A Closer Look at some Jazz Innovators”, Ted Gioia writes about: 
- Louis Armstrong 
- Coleman Hawkins 
- Duke Ellington 
- Billie Holiday 
- Charlie Parker 
- Thelonious Monk 
- Miles Davis 
- John Coltrane 
- Ornette Coleman 
With each musician, he not only writes about their style and contribution to jazz but also suggests how to approach them, and what to look for in their music, so to speak. For example, approach Billie Holiday’s music through its emotional valence instead of analysing the technical aspects; see John Coltrane’s music as a quest; look for the unity and core values in Miles Davis despite all the different styles; listen and take in Ornette Coleman without thinking about theory, jargon, or what other people have said, etc. 
Then he says: 

“What other takeaways should you bring from this exploration of these jazz innovators? I hope that 1 lesson stands out: namely, the need to approach artists and styles on their own terms. As you have seen, the listening strategy can’t be the same for every musician. I try to start each listening session with an open mind, and as the performance unfolds, I ask myself: What is this artist attempt to do? Some musicians are cerebral, others are passionate; some want to swing like crazy, while others are seeking a poetic romanticism; some are plunging into the future, while others want to preserve our legacy from the past. You can’t judge all of these with the same rubric, and this is more than just a matter of fairness to the performers. More to the point, you will severely constrain your own listening pleasure if you fault New Orleans trad players for not sounding like beboppers or avant-gardists, or gripe that some introspective ECM ensemble doesn’t swing like the Count Basie band.”  

This is like the way I try to approach a writer or a literary work—on their own terms. It is, for example, silly to read a Charles Dickens novel and dismiss for not being like a Jane Austen. 
With literature, I can put aside my personal taste, make a cool judgment, and recognise the literary merit. With music, I’m too much of a pleb at the moment to do the same. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. So now I just listen, and my responses are personal, emotional responses. 
I suppose it is good that Ted Gioia has an open mind and embraces everything in jazz—everything. The problem with jazz today, he says, is not that there are no heroes, but that there are too many of them and people don’t know where to start or whom to listen to—there is too much diversity in the jazz world. He also argues that jazz musicians today are better technically because of formal training. 
I’m not so open-minded. Maybe some day. Certain things in jazz just don’t appeal at all to me. Meanwhile I’m just going to focus on the 1950s-60s.

On Ted Gioia on the origins and evolution of jazz

1/ Here is Ted Gioia on the origins of jazz (from How to Listen to Jazz): 

“[Buddy Bolden] and the others who participated in this revolutionary movement drew on the full range of music available to them, but especially the blues. They married this blues sensibility to the rhythmic vitality of ragtime, and adapted both these idioms to the horns and other instruments available to them in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. And all of this was infused with an irreverence and willingness to break the rules that ensured that this new style wouldn’t stand still, but continue to morph and change and advance. Even today, more than a century later, we can hear all of these elements in jazz music. All of us involved in the jazz enterprise are still, unmistakably, the progeny of Buddy Bolden and his Crescent City cohorts.” 

2/ Gioia talks about the correlation between world-changing artistic revolutions and plagues, and then uses that to explain New Orleans as the birthplace for jazz. I’m not so sure about that. 
3/ The book has a chapter about the evolution of jazz styles, in which Gioia spends several pages for each subgenre explaining its context, development, characteristics, and major musicians and albums associated with it. He talks about: 
- New Orleans jazz 
- Chicago jazz 
- Harlem stride 
- Kansas city jazz 
- Big bands and the swing era 
- Bebop/ modern jazz 
- Cool jazz 
- Hard bop 
- Avant-garde/ free jazz 
- Jazz/ rock fusion 
- Classical/ world music/ jazz fusion 
- Postmodernism and neoclassical jazz 
It is fascinating to learn about the history of jazz, its development and changes over time. Gioia explains in detail and offers lots of insight.
My complaint is that he talks about cool jazz but doesn’t mention modal jazz, and talks about Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue without discussing John Coltrane. I know the jazz world is vast—some musicians I’m interested in such as Charles Mingus or Thelonious Monk are not mentioned on these pages, but John Coltrane’s among the most influential figures in jazz. It’s good that Gioia writes about him in the following chapter, “A Closer Look at Some Jazz Innovators”, but I think he deserves a bit more mention in the chapter about the evolution of jazz. Gioia doesn’t talk about Giant Steps or A Love Supreme either. 
Or maybe I’m just being a petty fangirl.  
4/ Lest it appears that I’m not happy with How to Listen to Jazz, I do like it a lot. A very good book.  
I also like that for several times in the book, Gioia attacks the banal and stupid idea that it’s all subjective. Every single debate about the arts has at least 1 philistine mindlessly repeating the platitude that nothing is better than anything and it’s all about personal taste (see the nonsense people say about Martin Scorsese’s Marvel comment?). Regarding jazz, Gioia says: 

“… this kind of deep critical listening and judgment is built on more than just personal taste, but draws on clear standards inherent in the music itself and how it has evolved. The music itself makes certain demands on the listeners, and the critic who articulates these demands has left subjectivity behind, at least to some degree”.

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). 



_________________________________________

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?” 

Reading about jazz

1/ After John Coltrane, I listened to Charles Mingus, and particularly loved Mingus Ah Um and Oh Yeah. Bold, raw, exciting. Very different from the musicians I’m used to.
His best composition is “Moanin’”—the version in Nostalgia in Times Square (not the one in Blues& Roots, which sounds more hesitant and has less life).
Listen:



2/ I have been listening to jazz for several years, but in an unsystematic and superficial way. I am a literature and cinema person, not a music person—my musical knowledge is minimal, I don’t even have a good ear.
A few weeks ago I asked a few friends for jazz reading recommendations. 1 of them raised the question on fb, and half a dozen helpful people stepped in to recommend musicians/tracks I could listen to. I mean, thanks, but that wasn’t the question?
I enjoy listening to jazz, and my responses are mostly emotional—some knowledge and guidance would help the listening and understanding. Anyone can enjoy a film, for example, but knowledge about composition, lighting, acting, editing, sound design, production design, and so on, would help you have a deeper understanding and appreciation of the film as a work of art; and sometimes, you might have even more respect and admiration for a film and the filmmakers if you have been involved in filmmaking and know what goes behind the scenes and how difficult it is to get a certain shot or create a certain scene. It is similar with music, and jazz (unlike, say, pop music) makes demands of the listener.

3/ I’ve just read 30-Second Jazz: The 50 Crucial Concepts, Styles and Performers, Each Explained in Half a Minute, edited by Dave Gelly.
It’s a helpful book, introducing some core concepts such as front line (instruments at the front of a band: brass, saxophones…), back line/ rhythm section (instruments at the back, which create the rhythm: drums and bass), jump band, big band, jam session, polyrhythm, cross-rhythm, third stream (synthesis of jazz and classical music), ensemble, reed section (the saxophone section of a big band, whose members play additional reed instruments such as clarinets), mute, gypsy jazz, Latin jazz, fusion music, bossa nova, scatting, close harmony, acoustic, stride piano, and so on.
Of course, as you can tell from the title, the book explains everything in a very basic way—it is good as a general introduction to jazz, but doesn’t explain anything in depth. I still don’t know, for example, the difference between bebop and hard bop, or I know the definition but my ears can’t recognise modal jazz.

4/ 50-Second Jazz makes me realise, though, that jazz is extremely vast and diverse, and I don’t know shit about jazz.

5/ Yesterday I listened to Django Reinhardt, one of the most significant figures in jazz, especially for starting gypsy jazz. 
He’s good, especially considering that he lost feeling in 2 fingers on his left hand. But gypsy jazz is quite different from the kind of jazz I’m used to, and it’s strange to hear the instruments—I have always associated jazz with only saxophones, trumpets, double basses, drums, and pianos.

6/ 30-Second Jazz has a very liberal, open, and welcoming stance on jazz, its various subgenres, and development. 
I don’t want to ditch anything, but I have no interest in fusion (jazz mixed with rock, funk, and R&B) nor nu jazz (mixture of jazz and electronic music).

7/ At the moment I’m reading How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia.

Charles Mingus and the year 1959

After John Coltrane, I spent some time with Miles Davis, and, finding myself unable to get into Porgy and Bess, In a Silent Way, Sketches of Spain, or even Birth of the Cool, I chose not to listen to Bitches Brew or any more Davis for the moment, and decided to focus on Charles Mingus instead.
Charles Mingus was a bassist, composer, and bandleader. He’s one of the greatest figures in jazz, though probably not as well known in popular culture as some other musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, or John Coltrane. I’ve been listening to Mingus Ah Um lately.



What a great album. It doesn’t have a strong sense of unity like the Coltrane albums I’ve been listening to, but it’s diverse—for example, right after “Better Git It in Yo’ Soul”, full of warmth and energy, is the mournful “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, an elegy for saxophonist Lester Young, who wore a pork pie hat, then it is followed by the fun, swing-style composition “Boogie Stop Shuffle”, and so on. Such a ride.
Mingus Ah Um also contains the instrumental version of “Fables of Faubus”, a protest against, and mockery of, Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, who sent out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent 9 black students from entering an all-white high school in 1957.
This is the song with lyrics, re-titled “Original Faubus Fables”, from the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus.



Anyway, as I’ve been listening to the album over and over, I’ve just realised that 1959 was such a fantastic year for jazz. That was the year Kind of Blue was released! BBC4 even made a documentary named 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz.
Here are a few articles talking about the year 1959 in jazz:
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/1959-the-most-creative-year-in-jazz-various-artists-by-nathan-holaway.php
https://www.jazziz.com/year-by-year-five-essential-albums-of-1959/
https://www.albumoftheyear.org/genre/35-jazz/1959/

Here are some important albums for anyone interested:
Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (with John Coltrane):



Dave Brubeck’s Time Out:



The famous “Take Five” is in this album.

Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come:



Bill Evans’s Portrait in Jazz:


Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ Moanin’:



Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book:



Duke Ellington’s soundtrack for Anatomy of a Murder:



Sun Ra & His Arkestra’s Jazz in Silhouette:



Also in 1959, John Coltrane recorded Giant Steps, which was released in 1960.
What a year.

Jazz standard: “In a Sentimental Mood”

“In a Sentimental Mood” as performed by Duke Ellington (its composer) and John Coltrane is one of my favourite pieces in jazz. It’s tender, melancholic, and just wonderful.

Ellington and Coltrane are 2 of the greatest figures in jazz, and we also have Elvin Jones on drums. I’m a peasant, but even I can hear that the drums are great.
Here is the song with lyrics, performed by Ella Fitzgerald.

Much as I love her silky voice, nothing beats the John Coltrane version.
Today, I’ve just heard for the 1st time the original, performed by Duke Ellington and the orchestra. Here it is, if you haven’t heard it.

I mean, what happened? How is this the same one?

Listening to Coltrane: the favourites

I’ve now listened to 12 John Coltrane albums: the 9 albums in the earlier post, plus Soultrane (1958), Dakar (recorded in 1957, released in 1963), and Olé Coltrane (1961).
Instead of writing something to expose my ignorance of music, I’m just going to say that my personal favourite albums are Blue Train, Kind of Blue, and Crescent. If Kind of Blue doesn’t count because it’s Miles Davis’s album and John Coltrane was only playing in the band, swap it with A Love Supreme.
So not Giant Steps. Not Ascension. That probably says something about me.
What about favourite tracks?
I struggle to pick a favourite from Blue Train and Kind of Blue, as I love the entire albums. A Love Supreme should be listened to in its entirety.
Crescent is wonderful as a whole, lyrical, sorrowful, but 2 tracks stand out: “Wise One” and “Lonnie’s Lament”.




Here are my other favourite tracks:
“Equinox” from Coltrane’s Sound:


“In a Sentimental Mood” from Duke Ellington& John Coltrane:


“Big Nick” from Duke Ellington& John Coltrane:


“Angelica” from Duke Ellington& John Coltrane:


“My Favorite Things” from My Favorite Things:


“Giant Steps” from Giant Steps:


 “Milestones” from Milestones:


“Good Bait” from Soultrane:


“Route 4” from Dakar:


Here is someone talking about the albums in a more articulate way: 
https://spinditty.com/genres/Ten-Coltrane-Albums

My listening to Coltrane stopped at Ascension, which means that I haven’t listened to music of his later periods—avant-garde jazz and all that, like Living Space, Transition, Sun Ship, First Meditations, Interstellar Space, etc. That can wait. I don’t want to listen to him so obsessively that I can’t touch his music again in my life.
Next, I’ll probably focus on Miles Davis.

On the idea of relevance and relatableness in the arts

Recently I saw an article in The Guardian which argued that instead of Shakespeare and Dickens, students in English classes should be taught the kind of literature that would be more relevant to their lives.
These arguments are nothing new. Complaints about the teaching of Shakespeare and classic literature always amount to the same word—“relevance”. Even in the book blog world, lots of times I’ve found people criticising a book because they couldn’t relate to the characters or the characters were not relatable—just look at the things people have said about Lolita, Wuthering Heights, Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, and so on and so forth.  
As someone who love 19th century Russian literature, 50s-70s cinema, jazz, etc. I don’t understand. If you look at it that way, in literature and the other arts, I was born and grew up in Vietnam, then moved to Norway at the age of 15, and now live in the UK, and I’m in my mid-20s, how do you think I relate to the experience of Anna Karenina or Marya Bolkonskaya or Natasha Rostova? How do I find whaling relevant? How do I relate to black people’s experience and feel the pain in “Black and Blue” or “Strange Fruit” or “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life”? 
But that is missing the point.  
The idea that readers have to find the story and themes relevant, and the characters relatable, is amusing. You’re facing a work of art, and if a classic, it’s a work of art that has stood the test of time and been recognised as part of the literary canon, why does it have to be about you? 
Don’t you care about history and its legacy?  
Don’t you care about the work of writers who have changed literature and influenced generations of readers and writers, perhaps including the modern writers you now like? 
Don’t you care about literary merit, and the power of literature?  
Don’t you care about the great achievements of the human mind? 
Don’t you care to learn about different lives, and different experiences you never (have to) go through?    
Don’t you have the imagination to see beyond your own lot, and seek to understand people who are very different from you? 
Don’t you care to expand your perspective? 
Why does reading have to be about you? 
I could go on and talk about empathy and some utilitarian values of literature, but it’s unnecessary. If as a reader you can only enjoy books that you personally find relevant and relatable, you’re limiting yourself, but I have no say in what you choose to read in your own spare time. It’s when people talk about the teaching of literature that the idea of relevance becomes a problem. 
One of the common arguments is that it puts you off reading. I don’t know where it comes from, I’ve heard people blame their dislike of reading on the books they read in high school, but how do they know that reading just isn’t their thing anyway, regardless of high school? I could say the same thing about physical education I had in school, but the fact is that I’ve never been athletic anyway. 
There are different kinds of students. There are students who, once they finish school, never touch a book again in their lives. And there are students who otherwise may not have opened these works of art themselves in their free time but appreciate being introduced to them, and would expand their reading beyond these works. Classes are the place for this. I’m lucky to come from a family of readers, but there would be students who don’t get that at home, and who are forced to read the literary works that they come to love. It’s similar to the way I was introduced to jazz—if not for that class at University of Oslo, I probably would never have got to jazz myself, and now I love it more than anything else. 
Another argument is that you don’t need Shakespeare to survive or get a job. Let’s be honest, just to survive or get a job, you don’t need most of the stuff you learn in school—when do you ever need those theorems in maths class or those physics equations or those chemical formulas, unless you choose to follow that particular field? But that’s not the point of education. 
All the talks about relevance and relatableness in literature and the arts are just stupid and nonsensical statements made by philistines. And if teachers think this way, they shouldn’t be teaching.




__________________________________________

Announcing a read-along: 
I’m organising a (re)read-along of Madame Bovary. At the moment it’s me, Himadri (Argumentative Old Git), and my friend Anne. 
Does anyone else want to join?

Listening to Coltrane: the albums

As I’ve decided to delve into John Coltrane’s music, I’m going to listen in a more systematic way—listen to a whole album, instead of individual tracks here and there as I usually do.
Because Coltrane changed and developed his style over time, it’s useful to be aware of chronological order, and put the albums here. Note: for the time being, I’m not going to listen to every single of his albums chronologically, only a few main ones.
1957: Blue Train.



This is the first album that made me love Coltrane. For the past 2-3 years (I don’t have a good conception of time), “Blue Train” was one of the tracks by Coltrane that I kept coming back to (the other ones were “Equinox” and “So What”) but I love the entire album.

1958: Milestones—Miles Davis and John Coltrane started experimenting with modal jazz.



My favourite is the track “Milestones”.

1959: Kind of Blue—Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s masterpiece, and the best-selling jazz album of all time.



Apart from Miles Davis playing trumpet and John Coltrane playing tenor saxophone, the album had Cannonball Adderly on alto saxophone (except on “Blue in Green”), Bill Evans on piano (except on “Freddie Freeloader”), Wynton Kelly on piano (on “Freddie Freeloader”), Paul Chambers on double bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums.
Kind of Blue is just wonderful. I keep coming back to it. 

1959: Giant Steps—after Coltrane left Miles Davis to go in a new direction, this was his most influential album.



Youtube called “Giant Steps” “the most feared song in jazz”, because of the difficulty.

1960: My Favorite Things—1st album to feature Coltrane playing soprano saxophone.



It’s interesting to listen to Coltrane’s takes on these jazz standards, especially “Summertime”, though it’s barely recognisable anymore.

1962: Duke Ellington& John Coltrane.
I can’t find the full album on youtube, but I love “In a Sentimental Mood”, which I used in a recent video. It’s good to see Coltrane perform with another jazz musician I like.



It seems like a rather conservative album, compared to the experimental and revolutionary nature of “Giant Steps” and “My Favorite Things”.

1964: Crescent.



The album has McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on double bass, and Elvin Jones on drums.

1964: A Love Supreme—his most spiritual album, and one of the most critically acclaimed.



I’m not religious, not even particularly spiritual, but this is magnificent.

1965: Ascension— seen as a cornerstone of Coltrane’s work.



Slowly I would probably listen to everything, but these are the albums I choose for now.

Changing tastes

1/ A few days ago I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s again, probably the 3rd time. 
My bf had never seen the film before, but knew about the controversy, which I assume most people would—the controversy about Mickey Rooney playing Mr Yunioshi. Put aside the fact that it’s a white actor wearing make-up and prosthetics to play an Asian character as comic relief, which is seen as offensive, it’s just not funny. Was it ever funny, when the film was released in 1961? It’s crude and unnecessary, and doesn’t fit in with the tone of the film. 
The Yunioshi character was the reason that I could never fully embrace the film. Now, seeing it again, I don’t like it much anymore. Audrey Hepburn is still charming and elegant, the cat is still cute, and Paul’s speech at the end of the film is still poignant, but maybe Breakfast at Tiffany’s is not for repeated viewings. Certain flaws become more obvious, some of the speech sounds expository. Maybe it’s one of those films that should be remembered, as a lovely charming thing, rather than seen again. 

2/ Every year I watch about 100 films, some of which are revisits. 
Some films demand multiple viewings—each time you see something new. Persona, the Mount Everest of film criticism, is an example. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is another. Or F for Fake. 
Masterpieces like Sunset Boulevard or Chinatown, which I saw again over the past year, never become boring or outdated. They are perfect. There are films I’ve seen 6-7 times and will still see again: The Godfather, Casablanca, The Silence of the Lambs, The Shawshank Redemption… 
Some films lose their magic on revisit. I enjoyed re-watching The Phantom of Liberty, which is whimsical and brilliant, but I no longer felt the fun upon my revisit of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—its charm relied too much on the random unexpectedness, which obviously was no longer there when I knew what was going to happen. Mother the 2nd time around was not as good, which is probably the case for films which rely heavily on the mystery and suspense of solving the case/ finding the murderer, and on the twist. As you watch it again, it no longer has much to keep your interest.  
That’s why a film like Chinatown still retain its magic on multiple viewings. I don’t watch it for the answers. I watch it for Jack Nicholson’s performance, for the character of Jack Gittes, for the great dialogue—sharp and full of meaning, for the tight structure and pace, and for John Huston and Faye Dunaway. 
And sometimes, watching a film again, we don’t like it anymore just because we have changed. I just don’t like American Beauty, Edward Scissorhands, or Scarface anymore, though I used to. Our tastes change over time. 

3/ A blog is a great place to make note of what I like, and keep track of how I’ve changed over time. 
In 2015, I listened to Billie Holiday all the time, obsessively, for a long period. Then it passed. Since then, it’s mostly Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone that I listen to. Sometimes Aretha Franklin. Sometimes Etta James. Sometimes Sarah Vaughan. 
Sometimes I wonder how many artists I like now, I will still like in 30 years, or 50 years. My formative years were the time in Norway—that was when I discovered classic cinema, photography, 19th century literature, Russian literature, and jazz. I reckon that for the rest of my life, these things will always be important to me, especially classic cinema, Russian literature, and jazz; it’s my views on the individual artists that change. 
Shall I try to predict? 
Tolstoy, I’m sure, will always be there. He is a giant, not only in Russia but in world literature, and his impact on my life cannot be overstated.  
Same with Nabokov. 
With Melville, I’m not sure, but Moby Dick will always be a favourite and an important novel. With Jane Austen, I expect to still respect her in 30 years, or even 50 years, because I already went from disliking her and thinking she was chicklit, to discovering the great depth and sensitivity in her works, but maybe one day I will no longer care about stories of growth, understanding, and self-understanding. We never know. 
In cinema, I think I will always like Ingmar Bergman and Billy Wilder. I once had a Wong Kar-wai phase, a Martin Scorsese phase, even a Stanley Kubrick phase, but Ingmar Bergman is a director whose films have everything that I think are important about cinema: great cinematography and lighting, striking imagery, creative and haunting use of sound, good editing, great acting and memorable performances, style, depth, personal vision, exploration of relationships and human consciousness, and formal experiments that push the boundaries of cinema. He was also the director that I discovered, and learnt from, during my 3 years at the film school, and who influenced my first short films. 
It’s also hard to imagine a time when I wouldn’t like Billy Wilder. Is there any other writer-director who writes more memorable dialogue and makes so many great films in such different genres? I love his sharp wit and humour, and the humanity of his films. 
About music, I know a few people who listen to jazz their whole lives, so I don’t suppose I will stop loving jazz. It’s just hard to say if I will always like John Coltrane, whom I’m focusing on at the moment. But I expect Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald to always be there, on their own or together. I don’t like watching Louis Armstrong—his grin makes me uncomfortable, but I can listen to him all day. People talk about his optimism, which isn’t wrong for songs such as “What a Wonderful World”, but there’s nothing so haunting like the pain in his performance of “Black and Blue”. 
Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on their own are fantastic. Together, they’re recognised as the greatest duets in jazz. Her velvety voice softens his edges. My favourite of theirs is “Summertime”. 
Well, let’s see how things turn out.

Listening to Coltrane

I discovered jazz several years ago, when doing a course called Multicultural American Literature at University of Oslo, which should have been called African American Literature and Jazz Music. My lecturer was American and had a degree in literature and a degree in jazz. He introduced us, or at least me, to jazz—I’m still thankful for that course.
Over the past few years, I’ve been listening to jazz, mostly vocals, especially Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, also Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, etc. I also listen to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, bit of Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck… (can’t really get into Charlie Parker at all). 
These days I’ve been thinking that I listen to jazz in a rather superficial way. I’m a literature and cinema person rather than a music person. I enjoy jazz, but can’t talk about it, the way I can talk about a book or a film, and can’t recognise the individual style of each musician. This needs to change.
For now I want to get to “know” John Coltrane properly. Listening to A Love Supreme at the moment. 



Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s album “Kind of Blue”, one of the most successful jazz records in history.


Obviously I spent yesterday listening to it, several times. Isn’t that just wonderful? Especially “So What” and “Blue in Green”.
Here’s a video of their live performance of “So What”:



I won’t say anything about Kind of Blue, because, as I said, I can’t talk about jazz. But I do love the combination of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Just divine.
Found this article: https://www.jazzwise.com/Features/miles-davis-and-john-coltrane-yin-and-yang