Texture Part 3: A piano solo from Hank Jones

My final and third installment in this trilogy on the issue of texture in art and life consists of a single performance on a single instrument - the piano - and by one of the greatest jazz artists on that instrument in the 20th century - Hank Jones.

This will be a consideration of varied and contrasting texture in improvisation and compostion based on popular original material - the theme of Ray Noble called The Very Thought Of You.

The immediate overall issue in Jones' creation is a sense of utter completion. Texturally this is a realm of symmetry, balance and fullness. The roots of the chords, the harmonies, steady rhythms and the lead melody are all represented with all the richness the piano can convey. The effect is at once orchestral and pianistic.

Jones' contribution to jazz piano is his blending of pre-Bebop swing era and Stride styles of Fats Waller or Art Tatum in the thirties with the modernity of Bebop. Jone's gift more  particularly is in his exquisite touch. His touch is unafraid to be precious, crystalline. At times he flirts with an almost willful delicacy that approaches the purposefully tentative. In this he is at utter odds with the more hard or percussive sound of, say, a Thelonious Monk. It is not a matter here of who or what style is better or worse, but merely a fact of profound difference. This is in the very nature of jazz performance which is about making individual expression. Different styles exist for the reason that there are different kinds of men and women and that life is filled with different occasions, both for sad heaviness, joyful lightness, and others too varied to be mentioned here.

Jones starts his reading of Noble's theme with an introduction setting up the 1 and V chords of the basic harmony: a kind of vamp with root and chord. This was a device that was beloved by Art Tatum, especially in his introduction to Jitterbug Waltz, a composition originally penned by Fats Waller. This alteration of tonic and dominant or cycles of the main chords in a piece as a way of setting up or introducing a composition is heard in millions of cases, from folk, to jazz, to rock, to show music, and vocal arrangements. But notice that in his simple outline of tonic and dominant how dissonant and chromatic his harmonic renderings are. (Also a nod to Tatum). Not so chromatic that the chord types are unrecognizable, yet just chromatic enough to take us into different places, than say, if we were to hear the Ray Noble orchestra playing it at a society function.

Throughout he alternates between wildly florid passages that are at once elegant and jagged and simple melodic phrases. All throughout the piece his touch is the touch that we have come, throughout mass culture and the entertainment industry, to associate with the so-called cocktail or lounge piano: that is, music to accompany dinner. This unfortunate reduction tells us nothing about the inherent value of the music itself, other than the fact that it is potentially "unobtrusive" enough to be played while other activities are being entertained. Bill Evans once remarked on the tragedy of how such solo piano music is treated by commercial culture. But make no mistake about Jones here or  jazz piano ballad playing at its best. In truth it is an art equal to anything from the European concert tradition and equal to anything meant to be actively heard without accompanying drinking and eating. And the "touch" we hear here is a touch that is the only one to make possible certain kinds of feelings in the listener, a sentiment, and affect, that would otherwise, without this touch, be unable to be invoked.

But those are issues of reception and treatment. Let us attend a little bit to the music. At one point, on the altered seventh on the second degree of the key he indulges in some mysterious whole tone play to create tension. Note too the chromatic alterations downward by half steps during the first chorus of the melody. This anticipates the tensions that will replay later. Every time Jones gets melodically simple, he will then get "further out". When he pushes the listener away, he will reel them in in turn.

Nobody put together a series of phrases quite like Hank Jones. He pushes melodic elegance as far as is possible to push in a swinging jazz context. There is a sweetness and dignity to Jones' art that seems to embody a whole tradition of lyrical piano playing for centuries. And it is all here in this little piece.

His uses of tremelo octave to mark the rising of Noble's melody underscores Noble's own melodic genius, how Noble creates movement through the addition of rising tones from the root. Jones respects the original material as much as he wrestles with and departs from it.

In this Jones piece we have an example of texture as the highest art. It is to music what John Cheever's paragraph was to prose. And, last but not least, to think that such texture is achieved on a piano, without the diversity of several instruments that can sustain notes for long periods.

This then finishes, for the time being, some examples of the uses of texture in art and life.

A Few Improvised Paragraphs Concerning Musical Matters

It has been brought to my attention that this blog needs to become more serious in intent, less coy in its avowed elitism. Other quarters plead for a more intimate, chatty touch. Everybody agrees that I need to include more stuff to look at that is stimulating, something on a par with the daily visual bombardment that greets you from, say, taxi enroute to airport.

I am offering for this, my latest post, some theses concerning the nature of some of our current problems in our life and in our art. I will approach this post (and others to follow) in an improvised fashion. Imagine I am taking choruses, or in this case taking paragraphs.

If you mention the phrase "The Three Tenors", it is popularly known that this refers to the celebrity and media event of the touring and recording of three most acclaimed tenors in the opera and classical world: Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras. This was as big an event as the classical world could ever hope to experience. Three masters of their art were everywhere televised, recorded, listened to and discussed.

Many years later another kind of "three tenors" musical event occurred. This was the recording and performance of three giants in west cast jazz tenor saxophone: Pete Christlieb, Ernie Watts, and Ricky Woodard. All three were alumni of the top big bands of several decades, like Kenton and Louis Bellson. All are supreme masters of the improvised solo, and all three are involved in important and noteworthy commercial and pop studio recordings, as Christlieb was in Steely Dan's work, for example.

http://jazztimes.com/articles/9809-the-tenor-trio-ernie-watts-pete-christlieb-rickey-woodard

The latter three tenor project was not very much heralded. Outside of a handful of jazz fans, and woodwind performers, maybe even fellow musicians, few people knew nor cared about this instrumental trio, especially when stacked against the fame of the opera singers.

Here is Christlieb playing "But Beautiful", to perfection.

All of our problems in culture can be gleamed from this single comparison and the data contained therein.

Any explanation that the classical tenor project is innately a widespread success because it is sung, or because the material is inherently likable by more people by virtue of its familiarity, or by the virtue of the superiority of certain Italian composers in the 19th century (or, in the case of "My Way", Canadian American pop composers) is an explanation that is question begging; it is a just-so story. Everybody loves a song with lyrics, my interlocutor would say; it is more natural, goes back to our earliest roots, song is our first creative act as humans etc.

It really doesn't matter how much brain data or social data you can muster to prove the reasons for this inequality of reception. It is a testament to a sheer lack of musical taste, dare I say imagination among the masses of people. (As much as it is a testament, perhaps to the special genius of Verdi and Paul Anka). That the tenor saxophonist is less appealing when he plays improvised lines upon standard popular songs whereas the operatic tenor is always, already a hit when he sings very proper, very predictable repetitions of arias that go back hundreds of years, is for me a matter of great sorrow.

Steve Martin in his play Picasso At The Lapin Agile has a character noticing that Elvis Presley is so much more famous than Albert Einstein. Then the character says a line to the effect of "it will always be that way", a line destined to generate great laughter in an audience. This may be a bon mot on Martin's part but it is not true. Or rather, it becomes the proverbial self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is not a question of the styles being different. It is a question of a deep human limitation that exists around the world. This is the same human limitation that causes millions of people to embrace movies like Titanic.

Comments like these get me called names like snob or elitist. People are forever defending people's right to not like Jazz. It is considered impolite to suggest that this dislike stems from a flaw in the listener.

Actually, given what we know about marketing, anything can be sold on a mass scale. There is no reason why some genius promoter could not have made three middle aged tenor saxophonists as famous as three opera singers. Instrumentals like Mason Williams' "Classical Gas" have been at times as famous as any vocal recording. Looked at in this way, I blame advertisers for not doing their job, or rather, they do their job rather selectively and aim their considerable powers of persuasion at the service of things like the movie The Social Network or trumpeter Chris Botti, rather than, say a grand tenor man like Pete Christlieb. Anything can be sold. Where is the advertiser who happens to be a jazz buff that feels Christlieb could be as famous as Pavarotti?

Perhaps it is the wrong era: in the past the three tenors could have been John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Joe Farrell. (Imagine that performance and recording)! Of course there was the late Michael Brecker. Nobody can hope to beat Brecker at tenor saxophone musicianship and he was almost famous, mainly, because of all the pop albums he was on.

Reception theory in academe has taken a wrong turn in being so accommodating of the receiver. Reception theory should interrogate the audience with all the skepticism and chilly distance that Marxist and Feminist critics once gave canonical works of art.

In any case, quality and taste are not matters that have ever been necessarily limited in appeal. Indeed, a large part of the history of art is a consistent and strong tradition of high quality work that reaches large numbers.

Historically this was always the case (until now) with literature. Books of the highest quality like Tolstoy's Anna Karenina were once widely available at local Kiosks. They were bought and read, I believe, approaching the sales, in their time, of a John Grisham or Jodi Picoult today. One might say that the classical music of Mozart was rather popular in the 18th century. Purely instrumental music has seen waves of popularity equal to that of vocal music.

I think one of the characteristics of a flourishing and "advanced" culture is the existence of widespread instrumental music.

What need explaining, because it is so historically unprecedented, is the appeal of rock music. What does it say that a music in that particular style is so pervasive and popular? What modes does rock ignore or choose to highlight? What gets lost by its domination? Indeed, when the very word "music" is uttered what is generally meant is invariably some kind of band with the usual singer and an electric guitar and so on. The phrase "music scene" means some of kind of alternative band.

But that is a topic I have already addressed once. Yet it bears some more research in the future.

I could not find any clip of the three tenor saxes on youtube. Yet I did find the following. I hope you "like" it.