Glenn Gould was also a fan of the iconoclastic free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor (along with Arnold Schoenberg, as I mentioned yesterday). In fact, Gould was enamored by his music to such a degree that I keep coming back to Taylor's recordings to try to identify what it was that Gould liked so much. I do enjoy them, don't get me wrong, but they don't stay on my CD player for as long as, say, a McCoy Tyner album might. But I'm also left with the feeling that the deficiency is mine, not Taylor's, and that I still have some catching up to do in regards to hearing him properly.

I was fortunate enough to see Taylor at the Montreal Jazz Festival a few years back, and remember that a large segment of the audience didn't share my sentiment: A good quarter of the crowd walked out during the first tune. I don't know if this kind of reaction bothers Taylor or not (my guess is that it doesn't), but I do know that it hasn't stopped his pursuit of his very specific form of musical expression. He's been playing this way for over sixty years now, and whatever one thinks of the music, that fact alone commands respect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5L8tjnB6w&feature=related

A question: Would bebop, the chromatic and scientific approach to playing jazz that involves the memorization of specific, complex vocabulary patterns, have occurred to its early progenitors without the atonal (i.e. twelve-tone) music of Arnold Schoenberg? Conceptually, there is a very large amount of overlap between the two styles. Both involve the dictated use of notes in a specific order - through the use of tone rows in twelve-tone composition, and in bebop through the use of lines or licks committed to memory in every conceivable key. In both cases what is left for the artist to freely choose is placement, primarily. The twelve-tone composer can use the next tone as part of a melody (in other words horizontally) or harmonically, or as part of a chord (i.e. vertically). Of course, the rhythms are up to the writer as well. In jazz, the notes are also very largely (if not entirely) predetermined, and the same kinds of choices (placement and rhythm) are left to the performer.

Schoenberg's music has taken a lot of critical poundings over the years, and it continues to do so. It's not to everyone's taste, I think it's fair to say, but Glenn Gould was a great admirer (and interpreter) of Schoenberg's, and so my guess is that we'll eventually catch up with it. But I am convinced that Charlie Parker et al were greatly influenced by it as a concept, and I'm not sure that their discoveries would have happened without Schoenberg's. Here's one of his early twelve-tone works, with the score included: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrjg3jzP2uI. And here's Bill Evans' "Twelve Tone Tune", a tip of the cap from a jazz musician of unsurpassed learning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB78xeZ8quk.

One of the most insightful observations that I've ever heard regarding the purpose and/or use of high tempos in music came from a composer with whom I had the good fortune of studying a few years back. He was talking about the fact that Glenn Gould, being the iconoclast that he was, was much discussed for his vast departures from the standard tempos of well-known pieces. But he felt that his recordings were very helpful in understanding the forms or structures holding them together, because "a high tempo is like altitude; it allows you to see more of the terrain." I've never thought of tempo the same way since. Here's a short excerpt from the 1981 version of the Goldberg Variations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpx6hJZ0-9o&feature=related

Howdy. Further to yesterday's discussion: The ability to maintain tempo, even as intensity rises or falls, is much more difficult than it sounds. It's a bit like the way that draftsmen can draw very straight lines freehand - much practice required. The greatest musicians in any style are always the ones with this quality. Glenn Gould, Jimi Hendrix, James Jamerson, John Coltrane, Ringo Starr. You can hear it in the music. The spaces between the notes are beautiful, thrilling, awe-inspiring. The difficulty in finding musicians capable of playing like this has unfortunately led to pop music essentially being played by machines. This might pass for a while - i.e. the time it takes for teenagers to buy a product en masse, make people famous, etc. but ultimately music made this way will not have the staying power of music played by humans.
So back to the Stones - to their credit, they know how good Charlie is, and at their best, they play with him. When they run into trouble, they don't. Sometimes, the band starts very strongly and then gets a bit out of control ("rushes", in Musician) as the track goes along. Sometimes they don't lock in with him at all.
On the Stones' website, there's a video of Charlie talking about jazz drumming, where he discusses, almost apologetically, the fact that what he knows he learned from copying, and he speaks with the humility found in all great musicians. But this is how all serious musicians learn. One of the paradoxes involved in music, and the other arts as well, is that the more copying someone has done, the more originality they end up contributing. (For a literary parallel, read T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent".) This also leads to the aforementioned humility.
Suggested listening: "Bitch", "A Day in the Life", "Little Wing", "My Favorite Things","Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell), The Goldberg Variations 1981 (cf. 1955).