Allan Holdsworth (guitar), Chad Whackerman (drums)Bill's posts make very good reading because as a highly skilled trumpeter he knows what he's talking about, and you can sort of feel along with him when you read his accounts. These are ephemeral objects indeed, these jams. It's quite precious to have records of them. Anyone can download an mp3 of some “live” performance, with an ease that smooths over the strangeness and difficulty of playing together, let alone of simply coexisting.
Trying to figure out why jamming is different from classical playing will take me some time. There are obvious reasons. You're not reading music, you're “reading” your inner state and your instrument and the people in the room, and a tune that you may be working on, perhaps a standard that you're reworking. This leads me to the inescapable conclusion, which I hinted at below, that the configuration space of jazz includes “classical” music as a much smaller, rather oddly stabilized and crystallized island within it.
When you improvise you are reading—Derrida liked to make this point, not to belittle improvisation, but to work at the assumptions we have that jamming comes ex nihilo, that it's an act of some lone genius who condescends to use physical objects simply to display his prowess.
No—it's much more like you're attending to something that comes before you. And as Bill points out, a good solo is when the instrument takes you over. That's why that quotation attributed to Miles Davis is so good: “Sometimes you have to play a long time to sound like yourself.” He mean that good music listens to itself. He also means that this listening takes place on multiple levels. For instance, your whole career could be seen as a long jam that includes taxi trips to the gig, sleeping and fingering the clasps on your instrument case nervously. You are listening to yourself throughout that long jam, tuning yourself to yourself. There is more than an uncanny gap here.
In a post on ouds yesterday I started to become interested in how one object—oud, lute—can be attended to, attuned to, in different ways that bring out strange hidden properties of that object. In this sense playing an oud is like doing phenomenology. You are attending to the inner structure of the object, allowing yourself to be taken over by it.
Look at this piece of Benzon's account:
I didn’t like the idea of following a good chorus with a mediocre one. I couldn't remain in the trumpet’s difficult upper register, nor could I drop back to the middle register and then build back up—the two most obvious options for constructing another chorus. In a split-split second I decided “oh, what the hell” and did a Sonny Rollins, dropping to the middle register, growling and flutter tonguing to make the nastiest, bluesiest sound I could. Another power had entered my playing. Captain cat went on the prowl and the music went into overdrive. Solid.
As the band stood around after the gig, several people came up to me and chatted, touching me on the forearm on their way out. But it wasn’t me they wanted to touch. It was the power that emerged during that second chorus.
Those people were trying to touch the inside of a trumpet. Not the spatial inside, but the ontological inside. Somehow Bill's playing had released something of this withdrawn essence, some hint of what Xavier Zubiri calls (happily) its notes or what I would call its timbre.
The fact that trumpets can be manhandled in this way—or are they trumpet-handling humans?—to release their molten core, tells us something about objects in general. Because this never works absolutely—no solo ever exhausts the trumpet—there is that feeling that there is always more of the object than we think.
I read a book about guitarists recently. It talked about some modern rock guitarists and assumed that all the moves had been made by Hendrix, McLaughlin, Steve Howe of Yes and various others. The simple fact that the book forgot to mention Allan Holdsworth (my favorite jazz guitarist by the way and a truly contemplative player who listens) was a symptom of a wider fact: even if the book had listed every guitarist, past present and future (suppose that it could), it would not exhaust the reality of the guitar.
And as strange as it sounds, this is how causation works. One object plays another one, in just that same way. This empty orange juice bottle is playing the table in this airport, waggling back and forth as the table sways due to a wonky leg.
4 comments:
Thanks, Tim.
Note that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were all masterful improvisers. And that improvising was part of the deal in classical music going into the 19th century. Why'd it die out? I mean, why did it happen that top notch virtuosi would stop improvising their own cadenzas and, instead, use cadenzas that someone else had written?
Note, however, that liturgical organ music has, I believe, maintained an improv tradition that survives to this day.
And then there's the feel of the instrument. You can't treat it as a passive Other, to which you do something. You have to treat it as an active player, you have to respond to it, merge with it. (I vaguely recall that somewhere in The Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty talks about feeling a hammer as an extension of yourself. Relevant here. Bela Julesz, I believe, did some classic work on the psychology of touch back in the 1950s.)
You might think, for example, that banging on a bell is, well, just banging on a bell. Wrong. There are subtleties. The bell has its own elasticity, as does your striker. When you hit the bell, the bell will bounce your striker back at you. Do you damp the bounce-back or let it happen? Depends on the sound you want. Etc. This post talks about bell subtleties:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/08/musicians-journal-on-learning-to-play.html
Oh, great! I see Herbie Hancock in front of his synthesizer gesturing like a vodou shaman. Jamming is a kind of tentative conjuring spell. Many factors combine to create a marvellously glimmering musical object with different kinds of momentum and allure — and the jamming is a mutual causation centered on it. If tunes are objects then classical music is about reproduction; you have exact blueprints and replaceable parts and all that. Jazz is more about letting a new object emerge out of the concrete situation, ethereal and cloudy enough to allow freedom for the improvisers, but also having its own authority and power.
I also thought about an old article by Tom Jenkinson, the musician who calls himself Squarepusher.
"The machine facilitates creativity, yes, but a specific kind of creativity that has undermined the idea of a composer who is master of and indifferent to his tools - the machine has begun to participate."
I've got the beginnings of some remarks on jamming/classical over at NS.
Mikael: Jamming is all over conjuring, or is it that conjuring is all over jamming?
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