"Miles Davis was never wrong about music." - Keith Jarrett

The Man with the Horn (1981) was Miles Davis' first album in six years, and it's a great one. The opening track, "Fat Time", has a title that I've always found thought-provoking. My interpretation is that it refers to all the possibilities that are available within a jazz groove, including rhythms that are only felt or implied rather than played. Ergo, the time is fat. Hear for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxDq65Wjua8&feature=fvsr

The latter part of Miles career contains many gems like this one, but they require a lot of background work to appreciate. Step one: listening to the recordings made in the early part of his career. Step two: realizing that an artist of his caliber is never going to be content to repeat himself. If we want to listen to Kind of Blue, there's nothing stopping us, but we shouldn't have expected him to record it more than once. Luckily for us, because so much interesting listening resulted (which will take us many years to appreciate and understand), he didn't.

Another interesting moment in the Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation DVD, that I've referred to a few times, comes during a conversation with the Standards Trio's incomparable rhythm section, Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock, when Peacock has a tremendous insight into the process required of an improvisor: "First, the music enters us. And if the music enters you, you don't have to worry so much about what to play; the music's telling you what to play." The reason that this is so helpful is that it happens very often that a musician begins to solo on a tune before the tune has been thoroughly learned. And until it has, nothing sounds right, even things that should be correct, technically speaking. But once the tune has been integrated, it's hard to go wrong. I think of it as the song-writer telling the player the following: "Now let me get this straight - you want to use my work as a vehicle for improvisation, but without really learning it." Strangely enough, the most important resource for playing ideas is the piece itself; if we're willing to take the time to let it in, it'll tell us all we need.

Variation is one of the most important concepts in music. And no style of music does more with it than jazz. While maintaining some type of constant, usually involving melodic material and the harmonic structure, the musicians are free to add layer upon layer of ideas. In fact, one of the measures of the quality of a jazz player is how much variety they are capable of adding to a piece, during both the accompaniment and the soloing in the case of the rhythm section (i.e. bass, drums, piano and/or guitar, generally). A listener will be able to hear much more deeply into the music if he or she can pay attention to what is going on, while still being able to keep the melody and form of the song in their minds. (The musicians certainly have to do so - most improvisors like to have even the lyrics running in their minds, along with the chords and the tune.) At that point, everything that is played takes on much more meaning, because it is then heard as what it actually is: variation. So here's a great track to listen to in this way, the Standards Trio (Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette) playing "Autumn Leaves": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io1o1Hwpo8Y. Try closing your eyes and listening to the number and depth of ideas in DeJohnette's drumming. Then try using it to do the choreography for an imaginary tap dancer. Also, notice the ending, as Peacock and DeJohnette instantly follow Jarrett to an unusual conclusion that quotes from "Speak Low".

One of the reasons that I enjoy writing this blog is because so many musical experiences have been opened up for me over the years by things I've read that I'd like to try to do some small thing to reciprocate. Reading something about a piece of music gives us a reference point with which we can either agree or disagree, but either way it gets the thinking going, so it's useful. And of course, musical concepts grow with both listening and thinking (I keep coming back to what Keith Jarrett said about his music being more influenced by non-musical ideas than musical ones). Criticism, whether it's done by professional critics or by a friend in a cafe, is what keeps music alive. If we stop talking about it, we'll stop thinking about it - and then listening to it would be next - a horrifying prospect. Let's not let that happen. Let's keep talking, writing and thinking about music, and not let anything stop us. Yeah!

OK, the following song ("Flowers on the Wall" by the Statler Brothers) is a good example, because it's one that took on a lot more resonance for me because of something I read in a non-fiction piece by Kurt Vonnegut in his collection of essays called Palm Sunday (1981). He called it both one of the most accurate portrayals of the results of divorce and an example of great American art. I agree and would add that it's also beautifully composed and sung: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBZNTW2BIaQ&feature=related)

Another interesting moment in the DVD called, Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation is when, after a soundcheck, both members of the Standards Trio rhythm section (Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette) sit down at separate pianos (apparently Jarrett likes to choose one at the last minute) and begin improvising together. The fact that every member of the trio is a multi-instrumentalist isn't a big surprise, but the way that Peacock described the importance of the piano in an interview segment was: He got to the essence of the instrument by saying that it's vital for a bassist, for any musician really, to play the piano because "it provides context", which is a very cool way of saying harmony ("setting" is another good one). It reminded me of the fact that notes only have meaning in relation to other notes, and that these relationships can become increasingly complex and interesting when we take the time to listen with this in mind. (It also explains why perfect pitch is of no importance in the making of music - it's entirely based on relative pitch, i.e. hearing the notes in context.) I once had a teacher who said that Gary Peacock was his favourite bassist because "every note he plays is a surprise and yet somehow just right". I suppose a lifetime of intense harmonic study had something to do with it. Here he is in another great trio, with Paul Bley and Paul Motian, playing "Don't You Know" from their 1999 album, Not Two Not One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RidEEFURoAs

I was very pleased to find the video linked below on YouTube. It's one of my all-time favourite performances: Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio, with Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock, doing a live version of "Green Dolphin Street". The players, both individually and collectively, are probably the best in the world, and have been for some time, in fact. The song, originally written for a 1947 movie of the same name, is now widely considered as one of the most productive vehicles that an improvisor can play. It contains a lot, in other words, and in the hands of great jazz musicians it begins to yield up musical ideas the way a prism refracts light. It's a perfect song, in my opinion, and this version is probably the best one I've heard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCSQbxzJyoU

Probably the most interesting moment in the excellent DVD entitled, Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation (2005), is the following exchange between the subject and the director, Mike Dibb:

"How important are other things than music in influencing the way you think?"

"More important than music."

"Like writing, philosophy."

"More important than music."

"Really?"

"Yes. You know, one of the biggest fallacies in art circles, and in music circles maybe when people talk about it, is that music comes from music. It's like saying babies come from babies. It's not true. That isn't what happens. Music is the result of a process the musician is going through, especially if he's creating it on the spot."

I found this simply astonishing, and I've been thinking about it at length since seeing the video the other day. As I mentioned above, it's thought-provoking to say the least. We find out shortly thereafter that one of Jarrett's biggest extra-musical inspirations is the philosophy of George Gurdjieff, and that he recorded an album of Gurdjieff's music called Sacred Hymns in 1980. Here is the only link that I could find for one of the tracks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYNyZ1iKbOA. And here's a link to one of Jarrett's clavichord improvisations from his 1986 recording, Book of Ways: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5RfzrztvaA&feature=related. More on Jarrett in posts to come.