Working with James Joyce

This Saturday, (March 2nd - details below), I'll be premiering a new piece based on the writing of James Joyce. In doing it I'm very fortunate to have three of France's finest jazz musicians - Dominique Pifarely (violin), Stéphane Payen (alto), and Christophe Lavergne (drums), and the great Irish saxophonist Michael Buckley, playing with me. The mix of irish and French musicians isn't accidental, since the piece is called 'Counterparts - Joyce in Paris and Dublin', and is based around work he did when living in those two cities.

Music was very important to Joyce and his works are filled with descriptions of music, songs and singers. He himself was reputedly a fine singer, and he even competed in the Feis Ceol, (a venerable Irish amateur music competition, which is over a hundred years old and still going), entering the competition as a tenor. Joyce’s language is also very musical both in terms of rhythm and alliteration. The cities of Dublin and Paris are similarly very important to Joyce’s work – born and raised in Dublin but spending over twenty years of his adult life in Paris, both cities played crucial roles in his life and work.

The first impetus for writing the piece was my rereading of ‘Dubliners’, and being made aware again of Joyce’s musicality. The idea of Dublin and Paris came from my passing ‘Shakespeare and Company’  - the famous Parisian bookshop which had such an association with Joyce – on a recent trip to Paris. Since I’ve also had a close association with several French musicians in recent years, it was a short jump from the reading of Dubliners and thinking about Joyce’s life in the artistic hotbed that was Paris of the 1920s, to coming up with the idea of writing a piece for French and Irish musicians, based on writing undertaken by Joyce in both cities.

We also rehearsed the music in Paris and in Ireland  - before Christmas Michael and I went to Paris and rehearsed with Dominique, Stéphane and Christophe, and now we're at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, a beautiful artist's retreat here in Ireland, working on the piece and putting the finishing touches to the shape of it.

‘Counterparts’ is partly written and partly improvised, and uses audio taken from street sounds recorded in markets in Dublin and Paris - it's always fun and a different kind of challenge to work with audio. The piece also uses text from various works both as a generator for the music, and in spoken word format as an integral part of the piece. Sometimes I’ve used direct material from the music in Joyce’s work, including ‘Say Goodbye To Girlish Days’, Joyce’s only known musical composition. In other parts of the piece I’ve used ideas from the works he wrote in Paris or in Dublin as generators of musical ideas. 

In Counterparts I’ve tried to create a unique environment for improvising musicians to explore the work of Joyce through musical means, and through that to reveal to the listener the sheer musicality of Joyce’s prose.

For  anyone in Dublin this Saturday March 2nd is interested in seeing the finished result of this work, you can come to the National Concert Hall at 1.05pm where the piece will be premiered as part of the New Music Dublin festival. Full details here

And here is a video clip of some of the rehearsals from Paris last year.

The Boys In The Band

On the face of it the history of jazz seems to be a history of individualists and soloists. When people speak of the history of jazz they name names – Miles, Monk, Trane, Ellington, Armstrong etc On the other hand when people speak of the history of pop music or rock music they name bands –Rolling Stones, The Beatles, U2, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Nirvana etc But if you look a little deeper into rock music history, you can see that there are a lot of important individuals as well – Hendrix, Clapton, Bowie etc. And similarly, if you look at the history of jazz, you can not only see that it is a music that featured a lot of out-and-out bands, but also that a lot of the innovations of the great individualists would not have been possible if they hadn't created those innovations within the vehicle of a great band, specifically designed to support those same innovations.

Of course the concept of a band is one that is well recognised in jazz, but I'm not sure if it's given its due in terms of its importance in the development of the music. And, for musicians, I'm not sure that the possibilities for developing your music that having a real band affords you is fully appreciated.

At various points in its history, without the input of great bands, the history of the music would have been much different. Take two of the icons of jazz - Miles and Coltrane. Both Miles and Coltrane did influential work outside the ambit of their regular bands - Miles with Gil Evans for example, and Coltrane recording Giant Steps etc. But the vast majority of their most influential music was created from within vehicles that they consciously created in order to best express their overarching musical ideas - their bands.



The importance of bands can be seen if we compare another great trumpeter with Miles - Freddie Hubbard. Hubbard was undoubtedly one of the greatest trumpet players in the history of jazz - brilliantly virtuosic, swinging, a great improviser who played on many great and historical recordings. And at various times he fronted bands that also consisted of great players. But with Hubbard you never really get a sense of a concept that requires more than the virtuosity of the individual players to bring the music into being. You never get the feeling that Hubbard absolutely needed this drummer and that pianist and this saxophonist to achieve the vision of the overall music.

Hubbard's bands were vehicles for the playing of Freddie Hubbard. Yes his phenomenal playing required collaborators who were strong enough to stay the course with him, but his sidemen could easily be thought of as being interchangeable. Herbie, McCoy or Billy Childs - Elvin, Tony Williams, Al Foster - Hubbard played great with all of them, but you never get the sense that he absolutely needed any particular one of those pianists or drummers to realise his overall musical vision, he played great with all of them - but not differently. There is a monumental Hubbard trumpet legacy, but not a Hubbard band legacy. There is no concept of a Hubbard band approach to a piece of music in the way that there would be a Miles band approach.

And to compare Miles to Hubbard in this regard, while Miles was technically not the trumpeter that Hubbard was (although he was stronger technically than he's usually given credit for - such as his playing here which is killing!), he had a band concept that was second to none. The members of his bands, (at least up to the very latest years), were chosen not only for their great individual playing, but for their ability to realize the overall vision of the music that Miles had. As a result, it wasn't just the playing of Miles that was influential, in fact the music of Miles' bands, and the way they played that music was probably even more influential than his playing. It is impossible to imagine the current development of modern mainstream jazz without the input of the classic Miles bands of the 50s, 60s and 70s.


The same is true for Coltrane - his Classic Quartet was both a vehicle for his saxophone playing and a vehicle for the transmission of his overall musical concept. Again, like Miles, it is impossible to imagine the current development of mainstream contemporary jazz without the input of the Coltrane Quartet. Elvin and McCoy were themselves innovators and huge influences on players of their respective instruments, but the sound that the Coltrane Quartet made, and their approach to playing the music was at least as influential as the playing of the individuals within that quartet.

The same could be said for the Bill Evans Trio and the Ornette Coleman Quartet - both revealed a new way of playing in a group, of interacting, of creating music that was greater than the sum of its parts. Each group had a clear identity that was more than the identity of any one individual player. The same could be said for groups from both before this period (The Basie and Ellington bands) and after (Weather Report, Jarrett's American quartet, Dave Holland's quintet, Steve Coleman's Five Elements) and the band tradition continues into the present day with groups such as Jason Moran's Bandwagon, The Bad Plus, Tim Berne's Big Satan etc. All of these groups have a sound that is unique to the band, rather than being a showcase for any one member of the band.


There are different kinds of bands in jazz, (leaving aside the soloist with pick-up rhythm section genre, which is not really a band at all– it’s more like a marriage of convenience), but usually they fall into one of three categories

A collective

An out-and-out dictatorship

A benevolent dictatorship















The Collective

In the first example – the collective - there is no leader. Each member of the band has, (in theory anyway), an equal input into the material and the approach. A contemporary example of this would be the Bad Plus or James Farm. The advantage of this way of working is that, assuming everyone has a broadly similar aesthetic regarding the music, a group of people can shape the music collectively and through discussion and teamwork develop music that is unique to that collective.

The disadvantage can be that it becomes music by committee, with everything ending up in the middle because nobody wants to make a decision, or every decision becomes a tortuous thing with endless discussions over tempos, tune order, solo order and everyone having an opinion on everything. In my experience this is by far the most common format for young bands coming out of jazz schools – there is no leader per se, and the music often lacks a unifying identity or directional thrust. In order for a collective to work you need people who a) believe in each other completely, and b) are prepared to lead if necessary and be lead if necessary.


The Out-and-Out Dictator

The out-and-out dictatorship model is well known in jazz and harks back to the ‘bandleader as star’ idea. In this model the band is principally formed around the leader and it’s clear that the leader of the band is supposed to be the cynosure of all eyes. These bands are primarily a vehicle for the playing of the leader and even though others may have opportunities to solo and play extensively, their input is required primarily to support the leader and not to detract attention away from him or her. There are so many examples of this in the music, it’s hard to know where to start in giving examples. But I think a good example would be Oscar Peterson’s various trios. Even the greatest of them, the trio that featured Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen, is formed around Oscar’s playing and though Brown and Thigpen get lots of solo space the music clearly revolves around Oscar and inevitably everything leads back to him. I would think of Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio as being in the same mold – great as his sidemen are, and they make such a contribution to the group sound, ultimately the trio is all about Keith. I think he went from the benevolent dictatorship (see below) of his 1970s quartets, to the out-and-out dictatorship model of his current trio.

These bands can be great or terrible, everything depends on the leader, his or her leadership abilities and how good the sidemen are. Believe it or not, some leaders were known for deliberately hiring sidemen who were not very strong in order to make themselves look even better. That kind of thinking is all about the star system and not about the music. Having said that, much great music was played by bands in which the music was really all about one guy – Errol Garner for example, and the aforementioned Jarrett trio would be another.


The Benevolent Dictatorship

In this model the bandleader doesn’t just hire people to make him or her sound good, the sidemen are hired to do justice to the overall musical vision of the bandleader and are hired for their ability to be able to understand and enhance the bandleader’s vision. In this type of group the bandleader encourages the sidemen to be themselves and allows them the freedom within the music to do what they do.

The ultimate model of this type of bandleader is of course Miles. His ability to pick the right guys for his music over a period of more than 30 years was extraordinary. Although he was a guy who was very conscious of his image and his status in the jazz community, he was never happy to simply feature himself in his bands, he always wanted to play the MUSIC he thought should be presented to the listeners. And that meant getting the right saxophonist, the right pianist, bassist and drummer. He would choose the guys he wanted and then he would give them the freedom to develop the music – he would hire them for what they could do and then let them do it. He famously gave almost no verbal instructions, he would just allow the players to do what they felt was right in the moment.

It wasn’t a democracy – Miles chose the tune order on a gig, nearly always took the first solo and would think nothing of cutting off a player if he felt the music should finish or didn’t like what he was hearing. In all his bands it was very clear who was the leader, but at the same time the players in the band really got to express themselves because of Miles’ overarching concern about his music rather than merely his trumpet playing.

Coltrane’s Quartet was similar – Trane hired McCoy, Elvin and Jimmy Garrison and then gave them the freedom to do what they do. Again he was concerned about the music rather than just his own playing. He was clearly the leader, but the sidemen were hired because of what they could contribute to Coltrane’s musical vision, not because they simply made Trane sound good as a player, or were bit part players to his featuring act. Again, Coltrane was clearly the leader and they played only his compositions but he hired these guys for their ability to realize his musical concept, not just to make him sound good. A modern version of this type of band would be Wayne Shorter’s great quartet of recent years – they definitely play with a band concept, but Wayne is also clearly the leader. Here they are playing a phenomenal version of Wayne’s ‘Joy Rider’




Of the various models I’m probably fondest of the benevolent dictator mode, since it gives such a great scope to create ensemble music as a single entity, but at the same time it can accommodate the vision of one person. When I’m in bandleader mode myself, this is definitely the route I take – I get the guys who can best realize the ideas I have for the music, and then I let them get on with it, with minimum interference from myself. If you pick your guys well you can usually get results that are even beyond your expectations and the music can go places that you didn’t anticipate – true serendipity.

Having said that, I’ve also had fun in a few collective situations, including recently in a band called Métier, where we had the good fortune to be funded by our local town council as Ensemble in Residence and could devote time to rehearse and develop the music. This band was really fun to work with and we played many good concerts, and made one album that I’m very fond of. Here’s a track from that – a piece I wrote called ‘Cascade’



And while I wouldn’t recommend going the route of complete dictator to anyone contemplating putting a band together, it can be educational for a young musician to get into the band of one of these older dictator types - providing they’re really good musicians of course – and be told what to do by a more experienced musician for a while. You can learn a lot this way, so sometimes even these out-and-out dictator type bands can be good.

But whatever mode you choose, I do think it’s very important for people to think in terms of bands rather than of just being interested in being an individual soloist. By developing a band you’re not just developing yourself, you’re also developing something that goes beyond your individual playing and gets into the whole area of developing a musical concept. Think collective identity rather than individual showcasing, think music rather than instrument. See the big picture – develop a band!

Noel Kelehan

(Left to right - Jim Doherty, Martin Walsh, John Wadham, Louis Stewart, Noel Kelehan - late 1960s)

It's been a grim few months for jazz recently, with the departure of such giants as Bob Brookmeyer, Paul Motian, and Sam Rivers. Here in Ireland, we've just had a serious loss of our own with the passing of the pianist, arranger, conductor and composer Noel Kelehan.

Any non-Irish readers of this blog, and indeed possibly even some Irish readers, may not know who Noel Kelehan was. That's because, outside Ireland he was only well-known in the commercial music world, having the distinction of conducting more Eurovision Song Contest winners than anybody else in the history of the competition. He was also well-known as an arranger, and wrote orchestral arrangements for many commercial recordings, including U2's “Unforgettable Fire” album. In Ireland, he was very well-known, but again in the world of television and radio - as an arranger and MD of some of Ireland's best known TV shows. But though I knew Noel's work as an arranger and conductor, my relationship with him and admiration of him was related to his position as one of the finest jazz musicians this country has ever produced.

Noel was the staff arranger for RTE, the national radio and television company in Ireland, and having to produce arrangements to order for anyone, (mostly singers, both good and terrible), who might come within the orbit of RTE, kept him predictably busy. His busyness with his arranging day job, and his success and fame in the commercial music world, kept him from working as much as he should have, and would love to have done, in the jazz world. And it's been interesting reading all the tributes that have been paid to him recently here in Ireland, and how his jazz work usually just gets an honourable mention.

But jazz was his first love, and he was one of the first jazz musicians in Ireland to reach the kind of playing standard that would allow him to comfortably perform with people of the calibre of of Zoot Sims, Kenny Wheeler, and Art Farmer. To those of us on the Irish jazz scene, Noel was much more than solely a TV arranger, he was a great hard bop swinging pianist, an important bandleader, and someone from whom everyone of my generation learned a huge amount.

When I started playing on the Irish jazz scene over 30 years ago, there were very few players on the scene, and certainly very few really good players. But at least there were some players around the scene to look up to and learn from. And Noel was one of these. But when he and a few others began playing in Dublin at the end of the 1950s, they really had to invent the entire scene for themselves. Without pioneers such as Noel - who somehow in the conservative Ireland of the time, recognised the value of, and fell in love with jazz - the great strides that have been made in the music in this country over the past three decades would never have happened. I can't imagine what it must have been like to try and learn to play this difficult and virtually unknown music in the Ireland of those days, with no access to material, no access to a scene, no possibilities of hearing great players on regular basis, and probably no appreciation by the public of the music that they were practising like maniacs to be able to play.

















(The Jazz Heralds, 1960)

But somehow they managed to figure stuff out by listening and copying as best they could, by organising sessions, and by doing all the things that players in a small, and at that time, isolated city, far from the jazz mainstream, had to do in order to learn the music. Most were never able to align their abilities with their aspirations, but Noel was one the exceptions that prove the rule. He was classically trained as a pianist, but self-taught as a composer, arranger and jazz pianist. I remember him telling me about hearing a George Shearing recording in the 50s when he was a teenager, and being blown away by it and trying to transcribe Shearing's solo from an EP - a process that involved much leaping up and down from the piano, and much replacing the needle, something that was wearing for the recording which evenutally got completely worn out. Noel told me he destroyed three copies of the recording before he was able to get what he wanted!

In 1963 he went to New York for a year but, thankfully for us, he returned a year later bringing with him even more knowledge about how the music should be played and the standard that needed to be aspired to, and he also became immediately involved in the commercial music world, writing for TV and radio. Jazz and commercial music were much more closely entwined in those days – jazz training would prepare you for work in the commercial world in a way that would be impossible now, so far have the two worlds diverged. Noel played jazz at every opportunity, organising big bands for which he wrote adventurous charts, writing pieces that involved string quartets and chamber groups playing alongside jazz musicians, playing in the bands of others and accompanying visiting international artists.

























(left to right - Keith Donald, Noel, Mike Nolan, John Wadham, Johnny Griffin, Ronnie Matthews, Frank Hess)

He also lead several small groups, one of which, The Noel Kelehan Quintet, became hugely influential on me around the time I got really serious about jazz in the late 70s. Noel’s quintet played in a hotel every Sunday night for over two years, and going to see them was like a pilgrimage for me. The music was hard bop and post hard bop (music by Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Miles etc. As well as Noel’s originals), and the band were great, with the rhythm section in particular, (which featured another international standard musician, the drummer John Wadham) being outstanding. This was for me the first chance to hear jazz being played live, week after week, at a very high standard, and it made a huge impression on me.

I don’t have any recordings of those gigs (unfortunately.....), but here is a trio version of "Gone With The Wind' recorded by me around that time, on one of the first recording Walkmans (remember those!?) which shows how Noel sounded in those days. On this gig he was battling with a cottage piano (even smaller than a normal upright), and playing in a bar, complete with casual conversations going on in the background. The music is compressed by the Walkman’s built-in mic, and the version you’ll be hearing has been transferred three times – but despite all this, you can still hear what a great swinging pianist Noel was, with a tremendous vocabulary. There are shades of Red Garland, Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans in there, but I would recognise Noel’s playing anywhere.......... He is accompanied by two stalwarts of the Irish scene of those days, the bassist Jimmy McKay and the drummer Peter Ainscough.

Gone With The Wind

It was around this time that I first began playing with Noel, and it was an education. It was an education trying to keep up with him. He was a very busy player – lots of notes and lots of chord substitutions, which would appear out of nowhere. Speaking as a bassist, unless you really paid attention, he could leave you for dead in a split second. But with Noel it wasn’t just teaching by musical example, he was also one of the few players of that era who would actually sit down and show you stuff if you asked him. Some of the other players took a delight in playing tunes you didn’t know and making you look foolish, but Noel never did anything malicious. He was always positive and supportive to me despite being light years ahead of me in knowledge and experience.

This musical and personal generosity was something he was renowned for, both in jazz and in his dealings with everyone. Here’s an example of it, and an hilarious moment of Irish musical history. The event is a ‘talent’ competition from 1961, in which the talent was so bad that the engineer in the studio decided to capture it for posterity. Noel was leading the backing trio, and in this track has to deal with the most incredible rendition of a maudlin Irish ballad in which ‘Mrs. Daly’ wanders through numerous keys, with the band in hot pursuit. It’s hilarious, but notice both how brilliant Noel is in following her harmonic trail, and how generous he is to the singer, trying to accompany and help her out as best he can.

Doonaree

And the generosity he displayed here is a recurring theme whenever musicians discuss Noel. When I was starting out trying to do some writing, Noel gave me several invaluable arranging lessons for which he refused to take any payment, a typical gesture on his part. And I also remember when I got my first orchestral music commission, the first thing I did was call Noel, plaintively asking for help. I’d taken the commission without having any experience of writing for an orchestra, and the euphoria having worn off, was faced with the reality of my situation. Noel, as always, helped enormously and I can still remember him saying “Number 1, don’t panic, and number 2, get a copy of ‘Orchestration’, by Gordon Jacob” - both great pieces of advice, the second of which undoubtedly saved my bacon, and I’ve used and recommended the Jacob book ever since.

Noel was a great musician, a pioneer for jazz in Ireland, a musical and personal example to younger musicians and when he became ill a few years ago it was a real blow to the scene here to have one of its real heavyweights sidelined like this. About a year ago he came to a gig I was playing with my group Trilogue – I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye and felt the usual mixture of delight and nervousness that his presence at any of my gigs always brought on. We chatted afterwards and he was his usual generous and witty self, complimenting Izumi and Sarah and saying how much he enjoyed the music. As far as I know, it was the last gig he went to and I feel both sad about that, and privileged............

I remember seeing Noel play with Art Farmer and play an exquisite solo on ‘Blame It On My Youth’. At the end of the piece Art took the microphone and said ‘As it turned out, that tune featured Noel Kelehan on piano’, a generous and honest acknowledgement of a great musician by a great musician.

Here is Noel, as most of us here will remember him, burning through ‘This I Dig of You’ with Michael Buckley, Michael Coady on bass, and Peter Ainscough on drums. Michael’s solo is pretty savage too.... Yeah guys!

This I Dig Of You





'Hands', Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra - Premiere and Video Diary

Rick Peckham


Next week sees the culmination of a year’s work – the premiere of ’Hands’ my new concerto for electric guitar and orchestra which will be performed by the RTE National Symphony Orchestra with the great American guitarist Rick Peckham This will be the fifth piece I’ve written for symphony orchestra and the third concerto, (the other two were for violin and piano respectively), and hopefully I’m getting better at it!

I remember the first piece I wrote for the orchestra in 1994 and the incredibly gauche orchestration gaffes I made (what, string players need to have bowings written in!?) and how I sat up all night after the first rehearsal adding in hundreds of dynamic markings and slurs and bowings in an effort to a) not be as humiliated as I was the day before, and b) to get closer to what I was hearing in my head. I’ve never had any formal training in orchestral writing or composition and I’ve learned on the job, in the same way as I did in the jazz world. But discovering things by trial and error is often a deeper experience than having someone show you something – the act of discovery seems to deepen the experience, one is actively learning rather than passively receiving. Having said that I wouldn’t have minded receiving some basic orchestration lessons and being spared the agony of that first orchestral rehearsal!

In music, (by necessity rather than desire), I’ve always been an autodidact and have had to figure out different ways to get to where I wanted to go in terms of musical knowledge, technique etc. In the case of orchestral music, courtesy of my father who raised us all in an environment of great music, I am very familiar with the classical tradition and how an orchestra should sound, but I had no idea how to achieve those sounds. So I read some orchestration books, including the wonderful ’Orchestral Technique’, by Gordon Jacob, a crash course in orchestration in less than 100 pages recommended to me by Noel Kelehan, a great Irish jazz pianist and arranger, in response to my cry for help upon receiving my first orchestral commission and realising that if I was to keep the money I’d actually have to write some orchestral music...... I also checked out some orchestral scores, studying them closely while listening to the recordings, and making notes in a little book in which I would reference things that particularly caught my ear, and note the place they occurred in the score so that I could access this information later.

Over the years my orchestral writing has become more confident and competent and I don’t worry so much about orchestration any more, but relish the opportunity to work with that Rolls Royce of the musical world - the symphony orchestra. On setting out to write this new piece I decided to keep a series of video diaries of the process and make them available to anyone who might be interested.

Here is the first episode in which I describe my way of working and my plans (and hopes) for the piece



My first step of the actual writing of the piece took place in March last at the beautiful Tyrone Guthrie Centre, an artist’s retreat in Ireland where I was able to work for a week, undisturbed by everyday life. As you can see from this episode of the video diary, I met with both success and difficulties...........

One skill I've never aquired is conducting, and even if I had, I don’t think I would have got it to the level of being able to conduct a symphony orchestra. And of course the conductor is such a vital part of the interpretation of a symphonic piece and speaking as a composer, a conductor can make or break you when it comes to having your orchestral piece performed. With my pieces, rhythm and feel are vitally important, and getting 90 musicians to play together with a particular rhythmic feel, or even cohesiveness, are among the hardest things to achieve with an orchestra. To have any chance, you definitely need the right guy on the conductor’s podium.

So I was lucky to have the wonderful Scott Stroman to conduct the piece. Scott is adept in both jazz and classical idioms and is vastly experienced as both a conductor and composer. I know Scott very well too, so I was able to look forward to the performance of the piece without the necessity of that first meeting with an unknown conductor where you find out if the he (or she) ‘gets’ what you’re trying to do. In June I was working with Scott in London and took the opportunity to meet him and have a chat about the piece.

Later in the same month, I did an interview with the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin and talked in a more general way about composition. You can see the interview here

In August I was in Boston and met the soloist Rick Peckham at his home, and we talked pedals and general guitaristic stuff.

As the final interview in the series, I met some of the orchestral players who would be playing the piece. Oftentimes in classical composition, the orchestra is seen by the composers as some kind of impersonal machine whose job it is to reproduce what the composer hears, but of course an orchestra is comprised of individuals too and it makes sense to talk to them about what they like or don’t like when playing new music. We had a really great chat and I hope we can do it again soon.

The piece itself comes in at around 20 minutes, is in three movements, and has an improvised cadenza that will connect the first and second movements, as well as some spaces for improvisation for the guitar in the first movement. I know Rick's been experimenting with different sounds for the piece, so I'm really looking forward to hear what he comes up with.

We have two performances of it next week - an incredible luxury - a kind of workshop/preview on Tuesday (17th) at lunchtime at the National Concert Hall in Dublin and the official world premiere on the following Friday as part of the full symphony concert, alongside music by John Adams and Shostakovitch - no pressure then!

Here's the final segment of the video diary - I hope some of you who are in Dublin can make it to one of the performances

Listening Again (2) - Mahavishnu Orchestra - Birds of Fire

I have included several sound clips from the subject of this post - all are very short and are intended as a taster for the music on the album, and to illustrate various points. If you're interested in this music please go and buy the album, support the musicians and enjoy its full sonic beauty - don't settle for some crappy compressed version on Youtube!

I can remember where I was when I first heard ‘Birds of Fire’ – I was fourteen years old, and I was in a friend’s house, in the kitchen (where they had a record player for some now unfathomable reason). We were all prog-rock guys – King Crimson, Gentle Giant etc. and considered ourselves to be very sophisticated (no Black Sabbath for us!) in the superior way that only teenage boys can. I had been raised on classical and jazz music and had been exposed to pop music for the first time only the year before (seriously!). I had a brief flirtation with pop music, an even briefer one with Heavy Metal and then discovered King Crimson, which probably appealed subconsciously to my need for and experience of listening to structurally more complex music. And subconscious rather than conscious would have been an accurate description of my musical knowledge or expertise at that time.

So, back to my friend’s kitchen - he produced the album, (which had a very satisfyingly intriguing cover featuring soaring birds), put the record on the turntable, lowered the needle and…….. And basically my musical life changed from the moment I first heard the gong being struck and shimmering through some kind of phaser effect, followed by a dense and dark arpeggiated guitar figure, in what is one of the most dramatic opening moments of any album in my opinion. I sat there transfixed and almost shocked – I really had never heard anything like this. In retrospect I realize that I had in fact heard some of the elements of this music in other contexts – both classical and jazz – but at the time it just sounded like music coming from another planet.



And to cut a long story short, it set me off on a journey that returned me to jazz, and planted the seed of being a jazz musician inside me.

What’s interesting to me, almost forty years later, is that the music on ‘Birds of Fire’ not only has a function in my own personal history, but objectively, listening to it now, it more than stands up to the scrutiny of the decades. It’s still great music, on any level, and looking at it now, knowing what I know now and having the experiences I’ve had in the intervening years since I first heard it, I realize what a unique musical document it is – something that had never been done before, and has never really been done again – even by the protagonists involved in my opinion.



The Mahavishnu Orchestra was an interesting band for many reasons, one of which is the fact that it was probably the most multi-national major group in the history of jazz. There was only one American in it (Jerry Goodman), a Czech (Jan Hammer), a Panamanian (Billy Cobham), an Englishman (McLaughlin), and an Irish man – the bassist Rick Laird - someone we were very proud of around here because he came from my home town of Dun Laoghaire. Laird had left Dublin many years before Mahavishnu and gone to Australia and later London where he became the house bassist in Ronnie Scott’s club and accompanied an endless stream of American jazz legends including Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Ben Webster, Clark Terry etc etc. This was where McLaughlin, (who went to New York at the behest of Tony Williams who wanted him for the seminal ‘Lifetime’ band) had met Laird. London had an amazing scene in those days with future giants such as John Surman, John Taylor and Dave Holland all playing on the scene.

All of the Mahavishnu group had a jazz pedigree with the exception of Goodman who came from more of a rock background. Mclaughlin had played with Miles and Williams, Jan Hammer with Sarah Vaughan and Elvin Jones, Billy Cobham with Miles and Horace Silver, and Laird with just about everyone (He's almost certainly the only bassist to have played with both Wes Montgomery and John McLaughlin). Yet the music they produced was not a ‘jazz’ sound. This is the early 70s, post-Bitches Brew, post-Lifetime, all the instruments except the drums are electric, there are no swing feel pieces and odd metres abound. Both McLaughlin and Cobham played with Miles (together on Jack Johnson) and were among the Miles diaspora who created the genre that is now known as Fusion, but was known then as Jazz-Rock. And apart from Goodman, McLaughlin had connections with the rock scene, jamming with Jimi Hendrix, and playing in the same London rock/blues scene that produced Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page.

The group had been around for a while and ‘Birds of Fire’ was its second album. The first, ‘The Inner Mounting Flame’ caused a bit of a sensation on its release, its combination of instrumental virtuosity, complex time signatures, electric instruments and rock energy proved hugely popular and the band became an overnight sensation, selling a phenomenal amount of albums for an instrumental group. This album has always had its advocates as THE Mavishnu album, but for me it’s more like a prototype for what was to come rather than a definitive statement. I don’t think the compositions are as interesting or the sound as developed as on ‘Birds of Fire’ and I think at times it lapses into the solo-histrionics-over-static-rhythm-section-groove that was to so blight the Jazz-Rock movement as a whole, and which was to even become apparent on the Mahavishnu’s later live album between ‘Nothingness and Eternity’ - a blitzkrieg of duelling soloists and impossible tempos delivered with great virtuosity to an audibly ecstatic audience in Central Park. But between the bookends of these two albums the band delivered what was to be a seminal recording, both vastly influential on musicians of my generation and beyond, and also featuring music that has more than stood the test of time.




So what’s so special about this recording? It’s a combination of things - first of all there’s a cohesiveness about the entire album, it feels like something that was conceived as a whole rather than as a series of tracks that were put together to make an album. In the manner of ‘A Love Supreme’, ‘Kind of Blue’ and ‘Blues and The Abstract Truth’, a consistent atmosphere hovers over the whole album – the music feels all of a piece and not episodic in any way. It’s a much better recorded album than the previous one and this helps to create the feeling of an over-arching musical intelligence at work.

Then there is the sound of the music, much of which is due to the unusual instrumentation. Guitar, violin and keyboards combine together to give the music a lightness that is unexpected considering the gnarliness, chromaticism, and dense rhythmic tangle of much of the music. Jan Hammer featured the Moog extensively in the music, and these early monophonic synths didn’t have a a very wide sonic range, so Hammer favours the higher register which blends very well with the electric violin and guitar. The sonic spectrum of the front line instruments favours the upper register and they
create so homogenous a sound that sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s soloing where........



At the time I first listened to this music I was just blown away by it in its entirety, and it sounded to me like something that had come out of nowhere. But looking at it from many years later, and with thousands of musician’s flying hours under my belt, I can see the many influences that are in this music. The influence of Hendrix and the electric guitar culture of the 60s is easy to discern, what’s perhaps not so immediately apparent is the influence of Coltrane of the ‘Love Supreme’ period – but it’s there in McLaughlin’s playing – listen to the Coltrane-like way he soars chromatically over the shifting odd metre groove of the title track.




Another interesting thing to my ears now, having spent a lot of time over the past 20 years studying the rhythmic aspects of South Indian music, is just how much Carnatic music influenced McLaughlin’s writing in this period. Later of course he went on to form Shakti, (and presage the jazz meets world music movement by about twenty years), but he made a serious study of the Veena and this clearly be heard both in the sound of some of the melodies he composed and in the rhythmic structures of the odd metres he used which are clearly related to the tala structures of Carnatic music, while the structure of the melody, in a typical McLaughlin-ism, is clearly related to both Indian music and the blues



But I think McLaughlin not only used Indian music in his own writing, he very probably influenced other members of the group in this respect. On ‘One Word’ - which Cobham famously opens with a snare drum roll that has left generations of drummers in open mouthed disbelief – the drum groove that Cobham uses has no real precedent in jazz, yet is very common in Mridangam grooves of South India. Here is a percussion group from South India



And here is Cobham on ‘One Word’



Was Cobham checking out Indian percussion at the behest of McLaughlin? It certainly sounds like it!

But not all the pieces were either lightning fast, or odd metre workouts, the group could also get in the pocket with the best of them - ‘Miles Ahead’ is almost Headhunter-esque



But Headhunters would never have done anything as radical with this groove as Cobham and McLaughlin do later in the piece



Or how about this haunting Moog solo on ‘Sanctuary’, played over the shifting metre of the rhythm section, evoking an atmosphere worthy of the quieter passages of ‘The Rite of Spring’..............



There is just so much great music on this album – so many different ideas and approaches yet all contained within a very unique and immediately identifiable sound. The virtuosity of the players, even at a distance of forty years, is amazing (has there ever been a greater guitar right hand technique in jazz than McLaughlin’s? How can he play at that speed, with such rhythmic accuracy yet never slur anything!?), yet the virtuosity is put at the service of the music and is never subservient to it. Unfortunately the success of the Mahavishnu unleashed a slew of poor imitations all vying with each other to be the fastest, loudest highest.......

And unfortunately the Mahavishnu itself imploded not long afterwards, with the other members of the band wanting a share of the composing duties (McLaughlin had previously been the sole composer)– which wasn’t a great idea as evidenced by the release years later of ‘The Lost Trident Sessions’ which featured compositions by Hammer, Laird and Goodman, none of which rises to the heights of the earlier McLaughlin compositions. Internal disagreements ensured the the disintegration of the band, but by the time they split up they had already fallen from the heights of ‘Birds of Fire’ and had allowed their virtuosity to take precedent over the other elements of their music. But for a while their flame really did burn brightly, inventing a whole genre, influencing and inspiring countless musicians and creating one of the greatest albums of the modern jazz era.

Here they are in their prime playing in London in 1972 – chops and ideas to go, and notice the quote of the 'Jack Johnson' riff, which McLaughlin almost certainly wrote despite Miles being credited with it.............

Give the Drummer Some!

I originally wrote this post over a year ago, and also posted it on my website, but having recently listened to yet another multitude of drum solos over vamps, I thought it might be useful to re-publish it in the hope of putting some ideas out there that might be helpful for musicians who want to feature the drums as a solo instrument and are interested in putting a different wrinkle on it.....


For one reason or another, I’ve been listening to a lot of concerts and performances in recent weeks. And one thing I've heard SO many times in all kinds of contexts, is the drum solo over a vamp. Time was when the drummer’s soloing opportunities were limited to trades with the horns, or maybe a solo at the end of the night or on the obligatory burner at the end of the set or performance. This came to be seen as a cliché and other ways were sought to include the drums as a solo instrument without going to the obvious trades/solo option. Enter the solo over the vamp.

I'm not sure when this entered the vocabulary of jazz musicians -- I can think of Billy Cobham soloing over complex vamps with the Mahavishnu Orchestra back in the early 70s, but it was probably done before that, no doubt an enlightened reader can fill in the gaps for us. But only in the last 20 years or so that this become really ubiquitous, and is a stock in trade of most bands in contemporary jazz. And it’s only when you listen to as many performances back to back as I have in recent weeks that you realise that the solo-over-vamp thing has become as big a cliché in itself as the drum breaks/big solo was before it.

This is not to say that the drum solo over a vamp is not an effective device – it is and, like the drum break/big solo before it, it’s precisely because it is so effective that it’s become so ubiquitous and now somewhat tired. So is there a way to incorporate the drummer as a soloist in a piece without resorting to either of these rather overused devices? Here are a few suggestions:

1) Drum Breaks.

As usual it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel in order to come up with something fresh to do – just a bit of finessing of what’s already there can often yield interesting results. Take the ubiquitous drum break for example – drum breaks are still a cool idea, it’s just that they’re always done in the same way – i.e after all the other solos are finished. But here’s a suggestion: Let’s say you’re playing a changes/form kind of piece, (could be swing or not) why not have each soloist begin their solos with a chorus of exchanges with the drums? So each soloist will start with 8s (or whatever) with the drums for a chorus (or two depending on the form length), then continue with their own solo, the next soloist in turn will do exchanges with the drums and then continue on with their solo and so forth. In this way the drummer gets to both play and interact with the soloists yet the breaks are more incorporated into the structure of the piece than in the traditional way.

2) Drum Solo

Again this is just a variation on what’s already done. So if we imagine again it’s a traditional form piece, why not have the drummer play a solo chorus in between each soloist rather than a big solo at the end? Once again this will make the drum solo into a more holistic element of the overall piece and give the drummer a lot of material to work with since he/she will be soloing after more than one soloist. Each soloist in turn will be given a lift into their own solos by the preceding drum solo.

If the piece is less conventional, then other ways to incorporate this drum solo as interlude idea can be brought into place. So if the piece is multi-tempo’d for example, the drums could set up the new tempos with some solo improvised passages, or announce the different sections with a small solo section.

3) Solo Over Vamp!

The very cliché that started this train of thought can also be used in a fresh way – like so: Let’s imagine that you’re playing a piece at a brisk tempo – 200 or above – and you want to give the drummer a solo over a rhythmic vamp....... Well instead of playing the vamp over and over again while the drummer plays over the top of it, why not have a few members of the band (3 at most – any more than that and it can get messy), come in and out, and play any section of the vamp at any time? In this way it becomes a very playful thing with nobody knowing which part of the vamp will be played by any one of the players. It’s more challenging too for the players since everyone has to keep the vamp in mind at all times in order not to get lost!

4) Duets

Have the drummer solo with somebody instead of on his/her own, a series of duets (or at least one), probably (though not necessarily), without bass can be both stimulating for drummer and other soloist alike and also create a fresh texture for the ears of the audience.



5) Write longer sections for the drummer to solo over

Instead of writing a bare vamp for the drummer to play over, why not write something a bit more involved? This can be particularly nice in a slower tempo piece where drum solos are rarely heard. If you have a good creative drummer there’s no reason why they should only be given a chance to solo over ‘wham-bam-thank you ma’am’ kind of tunes. A slower piece with some nicely written passages for the drummer to interpret as a soloist rather than an accompanist can make a welcome change for everybody and freshen things up.

There are many more possibilities for using the drums, (or any instrument), as a solo instrument - like so much, it’s just a matter of having a think about the various possibilities available to us instead of always going for the default position. As we know, jazz has a fantastic tradition of drum soloists, and this continues to the present day - there are so many great drummers out there. So let’s try and take advantage of that by using our imagination on how best to incorporate solo drums into our music as an organic constituent rather than always as a flag-waving rabble rouser. Let’s give the drummer some

To finish - here's a piece by John Zorn's Masada where the drum solo is not only incorporated into the piece but almost IS the piece! This is quite an old-fashioned 'drum feature' in a way, but still great nevertheless - especially since it features one of the great contemporary drum soloists - Joey Baron

Music for Soprano Sax and String Quartet

It's a a pleasant surprise to accidentally stumble across a performance of your work that you didn't know had been done. In this case it was on Youtube and was a performance by a Polish group of the first movement of my 'Music for Soprano Sax and String Quartet', which I wrote for Dave Liebman in 1998. I think this piece is a good companion to the blog post I wrote about string writing in jazz, involving as it does a lot of the issues I discussed in that article.

The performers here are Andrzej Olejniczak & Apertus String Quartet. I knew Andrzej via email and I knew he'd performed the piece in Spain, but I didn't know about this performance or recording. They play the piece very well too and so it was a nice piece of Serendipity for a Sunday morning................

The String Problem

I’ve just been listening to Alan Ferber’s new recording ’Chamber Songs’, which features his nonet with the addition of a string group. I always keep an eye out for new jazz recordings that feature strings, because I have a particular interest in string writing, and am very curious as to how strings can be better integrated into a jazz context. I enjoyed Ferber’s recording, it has some very nice writing and playing on it and it’s really well recorded. He definitely knows what he’s doing, particularly with the nonet. Some of the writing had a tone poem quality to it that is quite attractively elegaic. But, for my own taste, I could have used a bit more counterpoint and polyphony from the strings and in the string writing in general.

This tends to be quite a bugbear for me – I love writing for strings and have done a lot of it both in my capacity as a jazz composer and also while writing for classical musicians. So far I’ve written two violin and piano sonatas, a violin concerto, a string quartet, a sonata for solo violin, a sonata for solo viola, a sonata for viola and piano, (for Tanya Kalmanovitch), a piece for string orchestra, music for string trio and clarinet, music for jazz guitar trio and string quartet (for John Abercrombie), and music for soprano saxophone and string quartet (for Dave Liebman) , as well as using strings in various orchestral pieces. As a bassist I am of course a string player myself, so I’m perhaps biased towards them and therefore fussier than the normal jazz musician when it comes to writing for strings..

Strings have proven to be problematic in jazz, in the sense that even in the 21st century a violin soloist, (or even rarer, a cello soloist, or viola soloist) in a jazz group is the exception rather than the rule. However in this post, I’m interested in discussing the integration of a string group as part of a composed piece, rather than discussing the paucity of string soloists in jazz, (perhaps that’s for another time).

String writing in jazz tends to be rather hit and miss – and perhaps more miss than hit. In general jazz writers tend to go for one of two options when writing for strings–they either use the strings as surrogate horns, or go for the dreaded “string pad” effect. “String Pad” is the term I’ve heard string players use to describe, in a less than complimentary way, the type of writing they often encounter from composers outside the classical world when dealing with strings. In this String Pad genre the composer goes for slow-moving chordal, lush backgrounds over which the jazz soloist does his or her thing. You can hear a lot of this string pad affect on “Bird With Strings”, where the lush backgrounds support Parker’s fantastic soloing. In this kind of writing the composer uses a string ensemble as a kind of block effect - slow moving chords that display the richness of the string sound. I can understand the temptation to use this kind of effect – after all the natural sound of a string group playing a chord is one of the richest sounds you can ever experience in music. And since we don’t normally deal with strings in jazz, when we get the opportunity to do so it’s very hard to resist the novelty of having this rich sound at your disposal. But it really is a kind of one-size-fits-all unimaginative way to use strings, and whenever I hear that kind of sound I always think to myself that the writer is being, at the very least, a bit lazy.

in reality string ensemble writing is all about counterpoint. From the baroque period onwards, (and even before this), counterpoint is the major feature of all string writing. They lend themselves so well to polyphony, and of course extend across the full range from deepest bass to highest treble. And strings not only cover the full range of the human voice, they also are able use as many expressive devices as the human voice. So with their ability to cover a very wide pitch range, and the huge range of techniques and devices that are available when writing for strings, it really is a cop-out to mainly use the strings as a kind of harmonic blotting paper filling up all the available space with their woody richness.



As I said, in string writing counterpoint is, to use the technical term, the shit. But in jazz we don’t tend to use counterpoint a whole lot – at least not in mainstream jazz writing. Have a listen to any post-bop recordings, then try and identify any use of counterpoint in the tunes. There’s usually not a lot there - any small bits of counterpoint tend to be used as small fillers to the main melody rather than any truly independent line. Like anything of course, there are exceptions to this – Mulligan’s piano-less quartet being a famous example, then George Russell’s masterpiece ’Jazz Workshop’ is another. But these are exceptions, counterpoint is rare in post-bop mainstream jazz.

And when we do use counterpoint, we tend to use a very “top–down” kind of writing, where the melody is played mostly in the higher pitched instruments and any counterpoint that’s going on is really just engaged with filling out the chords of the harmony underneath the melody - they’re often really just glorified guide-tone melodies. When I hear this kind of thing, I always get a sense that the composer conceived the music at the piano – you get that sense of the melody being played in the right hand while being supported by left hand chordal action. But examining compositions for string quartet by great composers reveals a whole other world of counterpoint. In this genre all four instruments are equal - the violins, the viola, or the cello can have the lead at any time, and themes, sub-themes, melody, and accompaniment are constantly flipped around through the ensemble. Rather than have the violin play the melody all the time supported by the lower instruments as in so much jazz string writing, in this world all the instruments are equal and are fully engaged in the cut and thrust of the musical dialogue.

There’s probably a reason why we jazz composers tend not to do this when writing for strings – this shit is hard! Counterpoint is hard. When you have four voices moving independently, their horizontal forward motion creates a vertical harmony. The writer needs to be aware at all times of the function of every note in all four instruments, how they relate to each other, and how they relate to the underlying harmony of the piece. Classical composers train for years to be able to do this, we get little or no instruction in this area–naturally enough, since we have other fish to fry, fish that take years in themselves to fry properly. But that’s no reason to succumb to the lazy string pad syndrome. I think if you have the luxury of working with a good string group you should try and write something worthy of the possibilities that this kind of ensemble can bring to your music.

My most recent piece that involved a string group is a recording that will be coming out in the not too distant future of a piece that I composed called “Renaissance Man”. This is a a large-scale piece for a jazz guitar trio and string quartet, with John Abercrombie as the guitar soloist. In this six movement work, I tried at all times to use the strings in the way that I believe they should be used, as contrapuntal protagonists in the musical dialogue, as well as occasionally using them for their beautiful colouristic tendencies. Here’s a sneak preview of one of the movements – the only one that is completely written, and features the string quartet alone - its called “And This Was Odd Because”, and features the group in very rhythmic groove oriented playing, as well as the aforementioned counterpoint.



If one has ever attempted to write string music, the best advice I can possibly give to anyone who wants to write for strings, but maybe hasn’t had much training in the genre, is to check out Bela Bartok’s six string quartets. Everything you need to know about string writing is contained somewhere in these quartets. The whole history of string writing to that point, is contained here - Everything you need is here with the possible exception of extended techniques, but really if you’re not an experienced string writer you is shouldn’t be worrying too much about extended techniques anyway. And Bartok puts plenty of different techniques into the string writing anyway – more than enough for all but the most experienced of string writers. Check out the amazing movement no. 2 from Quartet No. 4, where he uses the mutes to create a creepy rustling effect as the music hurtles around the four instruments.



Now THAT’S string writing! And of course great music. I still keep my ears and eyes open for great jazz string writing, but I’ve not had a huge amount of luck so far. Any suggestions as to good stuff to check out will be gratefully accepted and acted upon.

In the meantime here’s a little video clip from the making of the aforementioned ‘Renaissance Man’ recording – the CD should be out in early 2011.

Give the Drummer Some!

Too often in jazz and improvised music we just take the cheap and cheerful route regarding using the drummer as a soloist in our compositions and with our bands. But there's so much more that can be done other than the usual default drum solo options. I've made a few suggestions in an article on my website. You can see it Here


Coming soon - an extensive interview with Steve Coleman on the subject of rhythm. Watch this space...................

Why!?

I read this (admiring) description by Kyle Gann of a piece of contemporary music recently - a string quartet written in 1984 by Ben Johnston, which has never been played due to the almost insurmountable difficulties of performing it - here's a description of it:

If you know much about Ben's Third Quartet, you know it works its way measure by measure through a 53-note microtonal scale. The finale of the Seventh is built on a similar plan, but the structural tone row consists of 176 pitches - all different, 176 pitches within one octave, heard in the viola on each successive downbeat. Many other notes are heard in the other instruments whose harmonies link each note to the next, and Tim tells me that altogether there are more than 1200 discrete pitches in the movement - more than one per cent, five times as many as most people can perceive.

Mr. Gann goes on to describe how one Timothy Ernest Johnson of Roosevelt U. (the Tim referred to in the previous quote), had written his doctoral thesis on this quartet and delivered a paper on the subject to a Microtonal Conference. Here's a description of part of the paper:

Tim demonstrated how the players are supposed to proceed from the opening C to the subsequent D7bv-, a pitch ratio of 896/891. The violist is tasked to move upward from this C and come back down on a pitch 9.7 cents higher - just under one tenth of a half-step - than she started on. At the downbeat of the next measure, the violist lands on Dbb--, pitch ratio 2048/2025 - another ten cents higher. And so on for another 175 measures until the viola ends up traversing the octave and ends at C again. A good half of Tim's paper was spent talking us through the performance challenges of the first two measures.

So, a piece that can't be played, and even if it could be played most people couldn't perceive the pitches. Sounds like a great night out doesn't it? Yet despite the fact that it can't be played and most people can't hear it, guys do doctoral theses on it and deliver papers to others similarly interested. What is the point of this music? It certainly isn't written for the same reason most music is written - to be performed and listened to, by people who don't have a PhD..................

Contemporary composed music has long been accused of this kind of thing - composers writing music for each other and in order to fulfill some kind self-perpetuating composing/academic paper delivering world - for a long time. I'm very wary of this kind of accusation until I've heard the music, but in this case since it's not possible to hear the music I have to ask - WHY!? These guys really are writing for each other and nobody else

The Composer's Mind

It’s always interesting for a composer to listen to the work and study the work of another composer. It’s particularly interesting in the case of a jazz composer like myself who, like most jazz composers, is also a performer — so I get to not only listen to and study the work of other composers, I also get to play their music. At the moment I’m working on music by the great German trombonist Nils Wogram, who has written a new set of music for my group Métier. I’ve always been an admirer of Nil’s writing — to my mind he’s a real composer, someone whose every piece contains interesting wrinkles, new ways of looking at old things, and just out and out new things. The five pieces he’s written for us are no exception — they’re challenging and demand a fair bit of work on the part of the players, but it’s worth it — tough but fair!




Of course Nils is also a phenomenal virtuoso on his instrument, and I’ve brought him here to Ireland on several previous occasions to play my music, something which he has always done incredibly well and along with his great playing ability, he has always brought his own composer’s mind to bear on the interpretation of my pieces. This is the first time the boot is on the other foot, and I get to see what I can do to interpret his work. The music he’s written is full of surprises, and contains so much different stuff, yet all with the unmistakable stamp of his personality.



We’ll be performing the music with him next Thursday, 1 October, in Cabinteely House — a really beautiful setting for acoustic music. If you’re around, and are interested in hearing some really great original compositions, please come down and check it out.

Jim McNeely on Composition (Interview)

(Picture:Aestheticize Media)

Jim McNeely is one of the truly great contemporary American jazz composers. Following on from a comment he made to a post I’d written about integrating solos into extended form compositions, he allowed me to interview him about the act of composition in contemporary jazz. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, and it covers a huge area and many aspects of the art and craft of writing for improvising musicians.

It is a very large post, and I did consider dividing it into two parts, but in the end I left it as one post, because to divide it in two would have interrupted the flow of the conversation. I have added headings relating to the different aspects of composition we were discussing which should help with navigation. I think it makes for fascinating and essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary jazz writing.

RG: The first thing want to I ask you about is: regarding your beginnings as a composer, was there a time where you started as a composer? Was it an evolutionary thing, did you study composition, was it something you were very conscious you wanted to do, or was it something that you kind of found yourself drifting into?

JM: Well somehow I got it in my head one day, I was about 14 or so, that I could write a song — and I did. I had read somewhere that you could make a bass line based on different notes of the chromatic scale, and you could write them out and use that as the basis for a melody — I don’t know where I read this.............

RG: I don’t think it was in the local newspaper somehow!

JM: (Laughs) Yeah, right — in the “Weekly Shopper”! And I can’t even remember how it was, but I had this idea I could do it, and that led me to getting into arranging. I had the old Russ Garcia arranging book, in fact as a high school kid that’s where I learned most of my jazz theory — from that book. It taught basic voicings and keeping the root out of the voicings etc. — all the basic tools. So I started out arranging for the big band — I was lucky that the high school I was in had a very good big band, with a director who was very open to me bringing in music.

So I started arranging, and then I started writing original things for the band too. They were kind of tunes — they had tunes in them but they went to other places. At the time I was, (this was around ‘65 or ‘66), into Coltrane who’d just recorded “Ascension”, I was into Archie Shepp, and some pretty raucous music, and Ornette, as well as Count Basie — I guess I saw a marriage of the two! Then in college I became a composition major. First I auditioned and got in as a Music Ed. Major, but after a while I thought “this isn’t for me”, and I changed to a composition major. Again all I had written was jazz stuff, and it was really just trial and error — which is the basic process that for me has continued to today. I would write something and the stuff that sounded good I would say ‘well I’ll keep that’, and with the stuff that sounded bad I would say “well, I’ve got to find another way of doing what I thought I was doing”

And I learnt that listening with brutal honesty to what you’ve written is the key to the whole thing — not copping an attitude. I sometimes see this with students, where they say “well, that’s what I’m hearing man”, and I realise they’re not hearing anything! (Laughs) It’s like when Ronald Reagan said “I don’t recall”, there is no way to prove what is going on in someone’s head — it’s kind of a copout. Though maybe sometimes it’s not.

But for me it was just trial and error, and when I got into composition I studied more of classical theory and 12 tone techniques, and I also studied counterpoint and fugue, which I thought were really important. And I started writing chamber music that was ‘in the cracks’ between jazz and chamber music.

RG: And this was cool for you to do in college? It wasn’t an explicitly classical programme — or an explicitly jazz one?

JM: Yeah, that was at the University of Illinois in the early 70s. In fact at that time the U of I was a real hotbed of contemporary chamber music — they had a big festival every two years. And I played in a lot of those — I played clarinet and bass clarinet in those days and some piano, and I got to play some music that effectively erased the word “weird” from my vocabulary. In fact when I got to New York years later I’d often be sitting with a friend listening to some music, and he’d say “man this stuff is weird”, and I’d think, “man, I played that kind of stuff 8 years ago!”

So, a lot of what I did was chamber music oriented, in fact if I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t pursue a little more of the traditional classical orchestration studies, and writing orchestral pieces. When I think of it - you know, they say ‘youth is wasted on the young - and there I had access to all these great piano teachers, and a symphony orchestra, and I never took advantage of it. It was stupid, I was just trying to write big band charts!

But anyway, some of this stuff I was writing was somewhere in the middle between some of the more improvised chamber music that was going on, and jazz. And in a way I’ve tried to keep that alive in certain things I’ve written since then. So, what I did in college was I studied certain aspects of composition and I also learned some things about planning out a piece before you start thinking about notes.



Starting from Scratch

RG: OK, this leads on to another question, so I’ll take the opportunity to interrupt you there. I was going to ask you about starting from scratch. Sometimes one is commissioned to write a piece that involves some given piece of information — it might be a programmatic thing for example. But a lot of the time - and especially for someone like you who is very well known for writing for big bands - you're often just asked to write some music for a big band, and you’re faced with the situation where you have the band, and you have to write some music, but you have to start from Ground Zero so to speak. So what do you do in that situation — what are the kinds of things you think about before you think about the notes?

JM: I think about real basic things. I see it the way a painter might define the size of a canvas before they start to paint, or the way an architect knows he’s got a certain space to deal with. So — it sounds kind of stupid when you talk about it — but one of the first things I always think about is how long the piece is going to be. And if it’s for a specific group I think about their capabilities, or I think about their sound, because that’s the instrument I’m going to use to express the piece. There will also be other considerations — besides thinking of them (the players and the band), I also think of me. As in, “what do I want to write now? I’ve done this and this and this, and now it’s time to do something else”, for example. So I’ll perhaps use this opportunity to do something I haven’t done before, do something I haven’t tried, or maybe rework some idea I was working on in a previous piece. That’s what I call the Big Level stuff - the conceptual thing. Sometimes I'll think of just a one-word description of the piece such as “energy”, or “red”, or “spicy”, or “sedate” -- something like that. Sometimes I’ll think of how I want the listener to feel at the end of the piece, or the players to feel at the end of the piece. Whether I want them to feel exhausted or exhilarated

RG: Or maybe both (Laughs)

JM: Yeah, right! But often I find that once you let the cat out of the bag you can’t control the response - sometimes the response is different than you think it’s going to be, sometimes that happens. But I also often think of an overall energy, or of an overall harmonic sound. I think that the fact that harmony, that intervals can be reduced to low ratios — there’s a reason why things like fifths are soothing, while minor ninths are not — so I’ll think about the overall harmonic language or the overall density of the piece. How loud it’s going to get, how big it’s going to get - or do I really keep the reins on and really restrain it so it’s kind of like a Bonsai plant - you keep trimming it and keeping it very small. I have a tendency to have everything sprawling and huge, so sometimes I have to make a real conscious decision that a certain piece is going to be a small one.

RG: Right. And when you are thinking of these considerations, would you jot those down as you think about them? You’re not near a piano, you’re not near anything, so do you write it down — or can you remember all that stuff?

JM: I try to jot it down on paper because once you’ve written it down you’ve got something that you can look at and hold in your hand, and erase and change. I find at the initial stage I do a lot of this kind of stuff - I’ll be sitting here in my office and I’ll sit back in the chair and stare at the ceiling. And then my wife will come in to use the fax machine and she’ll say “I thought you were working!?” (Laughs) And it does look like I’m doing absolutely nothing but I am in fact mulling things over.

But I do like to write down little ideas, even if it’s just the conceptual ideas — just to get them on paper. It’s like a marriage license, it’s more of a commitment that way (laughs). I used to have a student who would come in week after week, and he hardly wrote anything, and he’d say “well I might do this, or I might do that, or I might do this”. And eventually I had to say to him, “look, I don’t want to see what you might do, or what you could do — I want to see what you’re doing”. It’s a more active process that way. And that’s why I write things down — because that’s what I’m doing, it’s not just in the realms of possibility anymore, I’m actually committing to it.

And sometimes I just draw a shape on a piece of paper, a very simple shape that shows how I want the piece to build. I also think about if it's a particular ensemble I’m writing for, or if I know the soloist — to me that’s very important — I think about who might solo on the piece.

Those are all things that are, maybe not relatively easy to decide, but you can think about them without getting into the nuts and bolts of the musical part. So then at some point I’ll start working with the musical part. Sometimes it’s just a small idea, I sit down at the piano and see what comes out of the hands and then start working with it and developing it. And sometimes not even that, sometimes it’s just a couple of intervals — a little cell for example — more often than not it’s some little fragment of melody, with something else underneath it. Or sometimes it’s just an idea for a vamp that comes up — and again I write these things down and start to work with them. For example if it’s a four-bar vamp, I’ll see if I can extended into a 64 bar unit, just using transpositions. Sometimes I’ll take the bass line and retrograde it — extend it a lot of different ways.

RG: So a very common compositional practice for you then is expansion of small amounts of material?

JM: Yeah, taking an idea that comes and - not to judge it – one of the worst things we can do is to find a musical idea and judge it as good or bad – it’s neither, it’s just there. And it’s there for you to work with, so I’ll try working with it and expand it and try to both manipulate the idea itself into different forms and then using developed strains – different variants of the idea as units in the strain. And sometimes I’ll say “OK, enough of that, let me find something that’s really different from that”, and I’ll just try and develop a contrasting idea.

So before I really get to writing the piece, I’m working on developing the small stuff, and I find that a lot of what I develop I end up throwing away. You don’t throw everything into the piece, but there’s a process involved of developing a lot of material, and then finding, in that material, what really speaks to you and what you really want to use. So I find the process of throwing stuff away is really important too. You create a lot just so you can end up with a little.

Intros, Interludes and Endings

RG: Let me ask about a couple of things that I notice are very strong in your music, or are things you very clearly think about – intros, interludes and endings - how you think about those. As a preparation for this interview I was listening to ‘Up From the Skies’, ‘Lickety Split’, and ‘Group Therapy’, and one of the things that struck me was how specific those three elements are in your music. They never sound generic, they always sound to me like you’re very conscious of them. Are they things you pay particular attention to?

JM: Yeah I do. One of the things I think about is the silence between the tracks of a CD – I think about “what’s the first sound we’re going to hear to break the silence, and what’s the last sound we’ll hear before the silence returns?”. John Cage said there’s no such thing as true silence – and he’s probably right – but at least as far as the blank stuff on the CD goes, the silence is the default stage. And one way to look at it is that my music is a disturbance of the silence, so what’s the first thing I’m going to use to break the silence and what’s the last thing I’m going to use before the silence comes back?

To me those are really important considerations, and I think about intros, interludes and endings as being the framework of the piece. Especially if there’s a song in the middle of it - those things are the elements that frame the song.

One recording I was involved in years ago, that really had an influence on me, was the second album that Bob Brookmeyer wrote for Mel Lewis’ band – it was called ‘Make Me Smile”. To me it’s a great example of Big Band writing in which there is a tune, but the tune is just one element of the whole piece. The piece was much bigger than the tune to the extent that you couldn’t call the piece an arrangement of the tune, even though there’s a tune there. He would takes elements of the tune and develop them into other solo forms, or interlude sections etc. And so, the tune becomes a source for the materials of the piece, and ultimately the piece is the piece – it’s not so much about the tune, the tune is there but the piece is larger than that. So, I think that had a big influence on me, in terms of how things like interludes and endings are drawn from the tune most of the time.

But you can never say never, and sometimes those elements are drawn completely out of the blue. One way that I think about that is, as a composer, sometimes two musical ideas work together because I say they do. Sometimes there’s a connection - as is the way with some of Monk's tunes where the first phrase of the bridge is the same as the last phrase of the A section - but there are also times when I’ll just write something completely contrasting and I’ll say they belong together just because I say so. It’s my little God complex! You’re creating this little universe and if you want it to be a Bb, you make it a Bb - no one can say anything about it. So, yes, intros, interludes, and endings are very important to me.



Orchestration

RG: What about orchestration? Well, there’s a question — what about orchestration?........ how much time do you have!? (laughs)

JM: Orchestration, it’s a great thing, I’m all for it! (Laughs), you can put me down in the “Yes” column!

RG: I guess my question is, if you’re dealing with a big band, unlike a classical composer, who, in writing several pieces of music for an orchestra, can say “I want three clarinets and two French Horns in the first piece, but only one clarinet and a harp in the second piece” - whereas when you’re writing for a big band, instrumentally you’re presented with what you’re presented with so to speak. Everyone in the band has to get to play. So when you’re writing a suite of music, or a collection of pieces for a particular band, do you think about the orchestration in terms of saying to yourself “I’ve used particularly dense orchestration in that piece, and now I’m going to thin it out in the next one”, or does it just depend on the piece itself?

JM: Kind of a combination of those. You’re right - the few times I’ve written for a symphony orchestra they’ll ask me ‘how many brass do you want, how many woodwind you want?’ etc. with a big band, we’ve got four trumpets, and that’s it, and we’ve got a particular kind of doubling in the woodwinds. And as an aside there, one of my concerns is always how good are the doublers? So for example in the Vanguard band there are two guys are really good flute players and there’s another guy that isn’t such a good flute player, so you can only use the doubling to a limited extent.

But I think of orchestration in terms of the overall palette that I have to work with. Yes I think of varying densities - the two extremes I think of are something very bold with saxophones and trumpets, versus something pastel which is more mutes and woodwinds, and the morphing of one version of the band into the other is sometimes part of the shape of the piece, the plotline of the piece. Sometimes when writing I’ll have a very specific idea about the orchestration, and hearing particular instruments playing something — other times I don’t, I just write it as a piano sketch — I feel that I have the experience to be able to find a way to orchestrate that for the forces that are available to me.

Sometimes when I have spare time, (which isn’t that often), for example when I’m in Europe working with a radio band I might have a weekend off, so I’ll just go into the studio and just write for four or five hours - just write something and have fun with it. I enjoy doing that because I’m not up against a deadline and I don’t have a specific group in mind, so I can just write in the abstract. And so usually I’ll find a way to use that stuff I write somewhere further down the line, but after adapting it for the orchestration or forces that I have to work with in that particular band.

Writing in the Abstract

RG: So, apropos of the question of writing in the abstract - as you’re so renowned as a writer for jazz orchestra, and I could be wrong in this, but I would imagine that you spend the vast bulk of your time writing for jazz orchestras of various kinds.........

JM: Yes

RG: Well is there a part of you that says to yourself “I wouldn’t mind trying something different for a while - I would like to write in the abstract, I would like to write simply because I want to write, not because I have to write”. Of course (laughs) there are loads of composers all over the world who would love to have this problem — having to write because they’ve been commissioned to write! But at the same time do you feel that you would like to take time out just to write, for your own purposes?

JM: Yes, every once in awhile I do get the chance to do just that, and I would like to do that more. I tend to get tied up with deadlines and writing gigs, and I have to say that’s a mixed blessing. It’s great to get paid for what you do, but at the same time you’re writing for existing ensembles, and in just about every group I write for their might be one or two players where I've said to myself, well if this was my band I’d have someone else in those chairs, you know. But in my situation you’re always having to write for the personnel that’s chosen for you by the leader or the producer or whomever. So though I’m usually writing music for a specific project or band, the few times I’ve written music without having to think about any of that kind of stuff, I’ve really enjoyed it. So it’s probably time, after all this time writing for specific groups, to explore that more.

Getting Stuck..........

RG: A kind of related question — I had a situation myself about two years ago where I was writing a huge amount of music in a relatively short space of time - I had a whole lot of stuff that I had to write. And I found that it reached a point where I was absolutely plagiarising myself — or I would think “oh that’s good”, but then I’d say “oh shit no, I just did that in the last piece!” Since you’re such a busy composer and write so much music, and a lot of the time you’re writing for similar kinds of ensembles, do you A) have a similar problem to mine where you simply come up against a wall with it, and B) if so, how do you resolve the situation?

JM: Well, full disclosure here, I do plagiarise myself from time to time. And sometimes I give it this rather noble spin as in “well there was this concept I was working on last year in a piece, and it was okay but I’d like to rework it and really get it right this time, so I’ll use this piece as an opportunity to do that”. There are other times where I'm just flat out and up against the wall and I’ll just say “well I’ll recycle that thing I did in that other piece”. So there are times when the intention is more noble than others! (laughs).

You know, I’ve realised that for me some of the more interesting music that I’ve written for bands with which I’ve have long-term relationships have come really early in the process when I don’t know them very well. And I you’ll sit here in my room and I think “well, I don’t know if these guys can handle this, but screw it I’m just going to write this music and see what comes out”. And then as I get to know them better and get to know their limitations and their strengths, I write more carefully for the particular players and in one way though I think the music is much more integrated with them, there’s a kind of rough edge in some of the early music I’ve written for some of these groups that I kind of lose the sense of later on.


For example that arrangement I did of “Sing Sing Sing”, for Dave Liebman and The Carnegie Hall band came about mainly because I was way behind the deadline. The copyist called me and said “I have to have the score tomorrow”, and the FedEx guy was standing in the room waiting to take it, so I quickly said, ”Okay, so Liebman plays and the band answers, and then copy these last 12 bars” and then I wrote a final chord and sent it off. I originally had a whole written scheme planned for that section, but I had to abandon it and yet it came out pretty successfully. The players in the Carnegie Band tended to be players older than me, guys like Frank Wess and Slide Hampton, and I didn’t even know whether this would go over with them. But it ended up being great — because I didn’t know any better!(laughs). And the same kind of thing happened with the Danish radio band, and the same with the Vanguard Orchestra. I feel that some of the earlier stuff I wrote for them, while the craft may not be as strong, there’s something different about the spirit because it kind of forced them into a zone that was surprising to them, or was a little out of their box — because I didn’t know what their box was.

I forget how I got off onto that tangent!

RG: We were talking about getting stuck.

JM: Right, in that situation sometimes I’ll just put on some music that is not jazz, or I’ll read about Bela Bartok or Stravinsky, about what those guys were doing, what they were thinking about, how they organised their material. Or I’ll just put on some African music of something, and then I’ll say ”well to hell with it, I’m just going to try this in the piece and we’ll see if it works out”.

If I feel like I’m stuck, first of all, in one way, being stuck is a good thing, because that motivates you to explore things that you maybe haven’t done before or that you haven’t been thinking about. It’s funny, when I’m not stuck in a piece then I have a tendency to get stuck later on, because I’m coasting. When you do get stuck, it’s like being stuck in a car, your first instinct is to say ‘what do I do to get out of this mud here’, so the same thing happens musically. So I’ll try maybe putting on some recordings I haven’t heard in a long time, trying to look at music especially not from the jazz perspective, but from some other kind of perspective.

Classical Writing

RG: So you mentioned Bartok and Stravinsky there, can I ask you - have you written for classical ensembles?

JM: Yes I have — I’ve written a string quartet and have written a saxophone quartet. And I wrote a piece two years ago for the Frankfurt Radio Symphony with their big band. Again it’s kind of a mash up, some of it sounds like jazz, some of it really doesn’t. It was a five movement piece, quite a big piece, but because the big band was there I’d say that music also had that aspect to it as well as the orchestral writing. But as I said earlier, years ago I was writing for a kind of hybrid chamber orchestra as well.

RG: So the string quartet and the saxophone quartet, were they recent works or written years ago?

JM: It was about 15 years ago, in fact this is kind of a demonstration of what you’re talking about. It was in my early days with the BMI workshop, and we had a string quartet come in to demonstrate some stuff, and I thought “you know, it’s time I wrote a string quartet”. So I did, and finally I had most of it written, and Manny (Albam) had written some string music as well, so we said let’s have a reading session and we hired a string quartet to come in just to play our stuff. Ultimately the piece was performed a couple of times, never recorded, but was performed. The saxophone quartet was commissioned by a commissioning body for the American Saxophone Quartet, who are all guys associated with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. They’ve performed it and it was also performed by the New York saxophone Quartet. But I haven’t done a lot of that kind of writing because it always seems like I’ve a got a full plate with all the big band music.

RG: So is that something that you would like to do more of, or would like to explore further?

JM: Oh yes definitely, it’s a matter of finding the time to write it and then finding people to play it. One of the hard parts about it is that when I write big band music it’s very easy for me to get it played because I’ve got so many relationships with so many bands. I think the thing that would be a little more daunting about writing chamber music for example would be getting people to play it. But I’d certainly be interested in doing that because ultimately jazz is limited — well anything is limited — and with my jazz writing as I said before, I’ll try and bring in other influences, but still essentially be writing for a jazz group.

Next year, for the Frankfurt radio band, I’m going to be writing a project for Rabih Abou Khalil

RG: Oh yeah, the Lebanese Oud player?


JM: Right, I’ve been talking with him, and to mix his music with a big band is going to be kind of a challenge. I was talking to the band’s producer about different projects and I said I would like at least one of them to be something really outside my comfort zone, and damn if he didn’t find something!

RG: Right (laughs) - how’s your knowledge of the Maqam system!?

JM: Right! (laughs) All those wonderful greasy intervals this guy plays on the Oud, to get the big band to do that (though maybe the trombonists could fudge it), is going to be a challenge, And I’m looking forward to that, because it’ll look like a big band but probably won’t sound like one. Actually in college I took a seminar in Persian classical music.

RG: that’s a whole different thing isn’t it, the Dastgah and all of that?

JM: Yes, the Dastgah

RG: That’s great stuff too – but really dark - I find it so severe it makes Arabic classical music sound like calypso! (laughs).

What do you listen for?

OK, a completely different question - when you’re listening to another composer’s music in the jazz idiom — could be big band or small group or whatever - let’s say outside the situation where the tune is just a vehicle for blowing, what is it that you’re listening for?

JM: Well you know, I guess on one level I just listen for the storyline. When I write myself, I have this whole parallel existence going on where I think of myself as a playwright, and I think about developing characters and explore whether there is tension between them etc. — stuff happens to the characters. And when I listen to music that’s not mine, I still like to listen to it that way.


Tom Macintosh, the composer arranger and trombonist - he was part of the early Thad and Mel band - some years ago I was judging a composition competition with him and he said to me, “when I listen to music the only question I should be asking is - what’s going to happen next? And If I’m not asking that the only other question I ask is - when is it going to stop?”. And I find that the music that I like to listen to has that quality of pulling me along and getting me to say “what’s going to happen next to this piece, or to this character?”. You know there’s a principle from creative writing that says that people have to want to care about what happens to the characters - whether Bob and Mary are going to stay in there for the whole play or for the whole novel. And obviously although in music it’s a more abstract thing, I still feel that way when I’m listening to music - I want to care about what’s happening to this melody here, I want to care about what this soloist is about to do to the structure that’s been set up. Or at the end I want to hear - if the character comes back - I want to hear him transformed by everything that happened in the ensuing 10 minutes or so.

That’s why so much of today’s pop music has so little interest for me, because it’s so predictable. Whereas — and this is where I get to sound like the cranky old guy - back in the 60s you would hear things on Top 40 radio that would tend to be a little more interesting - at least once in a while. When I was getting ready to record “Up From The Skies” I downloaded all these Hendrix tracks — I had lost all my old LPs — and I was amazed at the variety of this guy’s work. And this was a guy you’d hear on the radio — he wasn’t as popular as the Monkees, but still, he was very popular and yet you had the sense of real musical artist at work. So when I hear something at the beginning of the piece that surprises me and engages me and pulls me along and makes me wonder what’s going to happen next, well that’s the stuff I listen for.

The soloist conundrum

RG: So the point you made about wondering what was going to happen with the soloist and what they were going to do with the piece etc — this brings me back to that stuff we’ve talked about on my blog — that I was writing about and that you responded to — which is this issue, if there is an issue, with more extended form composition and the place of the soloist, with the typical contemporary proclivity for extended solos, within the context of those more extended or more complex compositional structures.

JM: When I read your initial post on your blog it resonated with me because I had just written a project for Richie (Beirach) and Dave (Liebman) – I was writing for two very strong soloists with very strong musical personalities, and shaping the piece for them. And when I’m writing for soloists whom I know well, I feel like I’m really tailoring the piece to them and it probably wouldn’t sound as good in somebody else’s hands. I’ve had a few experiences where I’ve written things for particular soloists and I’ve heard other bands play it with other people, and okay, it’s fine, and I like to think that the music holds up well - but just something about having a different person in the solo chair - his interpretation of the character being a little different to what I had in mind when I first wrote the piece. But sometimes that’s not the case, sometimes the new soloist is spot-on with their interpretation of the piece.

But I think this is a problem that goes back a long way — I mentioned in my response to you the Mozart clarinet Concerto which was written for Anton Stadler, and since then a lot of us have tried to play that piece but it’s just a fact of life that that some people really do it in the right way, and others don’t. Some people bring their own interpretation, and I have to say that there’s been a couple of times with my own pieces that I heard a soloist play something quite different to what the original soloist played, and I thought “you know, I like that, that works!”. If they’re bringing their own thing to the piece and it works, I like that. But of course if they’re bringing their own thing and it misses the point then that’s not so good..................

RG: Yes, it’s funny how that can happen - even in classical music. I remember several years ago writing a violin concerto and in rehearsal the soloist never played the cadenza which linked the first and second movements - at that point he would always say “and then I’ll play the cadenza”, and he’d carry on into the next section he had to rehearse with the orchestra. So the first time I heard the cadenza was in the concert and I have to admit, that what he did with that cadenza made it sound much better than what I had written! (laughs). He just slowed certain things down, added in extra dynamics etc -- really interpreted the piece. And to me this was a classic example of how sometimes you can place your music in the hands of a really great and creative player and they somehow make the music even better than what you wrote in a way.

JM: Yeah, I agree -- well in jazz there are people like Sonny Rollins who took tunes like “I’m An Old Cowhand” and played the hell out of them. But that’s a whole other story, an incredible improviser like him who can take something very simple and can use it as a source or a springboard for something great.

But to return to the other point in your blog, about this being the age of the extended solo - certain people can pull that off and certain people can’t - it depends on the players. I’ve been in situations where everyone wants to open a piece up and play longer solos, because a longer solo is supposed to mean that it’s going to be a better solo -- maybe because they feel better when they’re doing it, they’re not constrained etc. and sometimes I’ll make jokes about it and I’ll tell the soloist “just keep playing until you hear all those horns come in, then you know you’re done” - the big band syndrome!



But solos don’t necessarily have to be long. I’ve written a couple of things for Joe Lovano where he’s the only soloist, one of them was over 40 minutes long for the WDR band some years ago. He was amazing on it, he was always engaging and playing something interesting. But there are a lot of other people who come to mind for whom I just wouldn’t write that kind of thing, because they wouldn’t be able to pull it off.

RG: This is a slightly different thing too isn’t it? In that what you’re talking about there, what you wrote for Joe, is almost like a concerto.

JM: Right

RG: Whereas the problems I was thinking about when I was writing the blog, is a situation where if you’ve got X number of pieces and X number of soloists, you look at the line-up and you say to yourself “I have to give everyone a solo” - if I’m doing the math correctly that means I can have two soloists in this tune but I’m going to need three in that tune etc. and then I decide who goes in there, and who goes in there -- you have to do it, almost as a way of keeping the peace! (Laughs)

JM: (Laughs) Right! In the two albums I’ve written for the Vanguard Orchestra I wanted to make sure that the principal players all got at least a healthy shot, and that does end up as part of the planning for the music. But yes, the long solo thing is slightly different -- for example thinking about say Bartok’s ‘Concerto For Orchestra’, supposing you were to open it up and the clarinet player takes 64 bars of meaningless stuff - you’d never consider doing that. And there are certain things I’ve written that I like to think feel like there is an architecture to the whole form, and it’s just not right to open up the solo. There are other pieces where it’s fine, there are many examples in jazz were it’s fine to do that. But that doesn’t mean that it always has to be that way, and it doesn’t mean that a long solo is, by itself, better than a short solo.

RG: Yes, it seems to me to be something that could use being rethought a little bit, because as it stands now it is definitely in the default position of the longer solo. And I made this point in the response to the comment that you made on the blog, that we tend to think that the reason earlier players played short solos was because of the shorter available recording time that they had due to the limitations of the technology. But now that they’ve discovered some live air shots from that period -- even the bebop period -- you can hear that people just didn’t play 10 minutes solos in those days - Charlie Parker didn’t play 10 minutes solos. So I think it’s a different aesthetic it’s not just about the mechanical limitations of recording technology. And I think maybe something has been lost by always going to the default position of the longer solo.

JM: Yes, I agree.

The Most Important Question.......

RG: A final question Jim - What do you think is the most important question a composer can ask him or herself when they’re writing music?

JM: My first response is that the composer’s job is to ask -- “what if?”. That’s essentially how I’ve always perceived it. Sometimes “what if?” is a very specific musical question, sometimes it’s more of a social question. What if a band got together and played as if they hated each other?

RG: (Laughs) Sometimes that’s not “what if?” at all!

JM: Right - I’ve been in some of those bands! (laughs). Or sometimes it can be something simple like what if it’s a C7 chord and in the melody you hang on a B natural for a long time? One of the things I’ve used several times is - what if a band was playing and all fell down a flight of stairs together -- what would that sound like? Or what if John Riley the drummer had to play a bunch of different things during the course of his day? So to me that is the question that I’m always fundamentally asking myself -- what if this would happen/ what if that would happen? And when working with my students I've always emphasised that the question not to ask is “may I?”, or “is it in the tradition if.........?”, or “is it okay if I do this or that?” As I said before, one way to look at it is as a God complex, but also, if you see yourself as a playwright you’re just constructing a situation, and stuff happens in that situation and you’re in control of that stuff that happens. And in the end maybe the characters are dead, or transformed, or new characters have come along to replace them - what if all that happens? That’s pretty much how I operate.

Though I guess there may be other questions to ask - supposedly Stravinsky said that whenever he was asked to write a piece, he said -- “the two questions I ask are - how long, and how much?”

RG: (Laughs) Those are pretty good questions !

JM: Yes, those are good questions too!

RG: Jim, thanks very much for your time, it’s been really great to talk to you.

JM: A pleasure.