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.

Texture in Life and Art Part 2: The Apple Store

In my last column I discussed the texture of John Cheever's art in prose. Now we shall proceed from art to life and deal with texture in architecture.

When we deal with matters in real life aesthetically, we shall deal with them in the same sense that we would when dealing with non-real representations in prose, poetry or images in art.

The first impression of the Apple store is that it might appear to lack texture since the entire point of it is to embody the disembodied, sometimes fanatical spiritualism of the Internet age. Since it lacks all depth and color, since it is all airy and light, and above all transparent, the Apple store has the texture of a society that wants to be finally done with texture.

 In the neoPlatonist view, recently reinvigorated by the late great James Hillman, spirit, body and soul, are the three parts of human life that each have specific and separable needs. Soul is always in the middle and is meant to prevent the extremes of bodily grossness at the bottom and spiritual purity at the top.

I know the Apple store is beloved but it is a textbook case of an environment that lacks soul. I don't mean this in the vernacular sense that the word "soul" is usually used. I don't mean that it cold or ugly, for example. Indeed I will concede that there is a certain beauty to the Apple store. Yet something is missing, and not as an oversight but willfully missing. I mean something technically specific.

Hillman noticed that there is a tendency in cultures at certain times to get overtly spiritual and lose a sense of soul. This usually happens when a society or a culture gets the idea of banishing certain human habits and traits, especially those that are comforting and dense or rich, all such refusal being in the interest of a kind of excess purification.

Is the Apple store an expression similar to the tendency Hillman noted? It sure feels like it. For example, I don't recommend that anybody with vertigo climb the design genius that is that glass staircase. You really do feel weightless, as if walking in midair. Initially, the most dogmatic of Modernists were worried about the sin of ornamentation. The Apple store has not only dispensed with comfort and coziness and the appearance and pretense of design but has also dispensed with any affection or conviviality for our physical selves. Like the computer itself, the store is a dream, a grand dream of a world without tensions, without genders, without limits: ageless and free from all burdens of a physical and human world.

This fact about the Apple store was made most apparent when I watched a celebrity interview with the great R&B supergroup Earth Wind and Fire that was held at Apple. Against such an environment the three musicians stood in great relief. Verdine White, the bass player, wore exotic, custom made embroidered denim trousers. Their whole career has been an expression of color - of soul in the vernacular and musical sense. The band's way of speaking and presence seemed to call out for another kind of architecture entirely: something that would be highly textured, with patterns and color. They looked as if they had the (mis)fortune to play a gig in an airline terminal.

The reason why the Apple store was designed the way it was was that it appeals to the anxieties and desires of the current moment. Ever since the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, there has been for the following forty-plus years a craving for transparency and a paranoid suspicion of privacy. Designs are expressions of beliefs and world views as all styles are. Any design that appears too solid or too colorful, that implies separation or privacy, or that seems too much like an object is a design that is implicitly guilty. We have learned to associate heavy with stodgy and hierarchy. The Apple store feels as it does because a part of us longs to leave Earth and body behind and evolve to something that is thought to be higher. There is no other way to account for the almost parodic fidelity with which it embraces a certain Modernism that one would have thought now to have been less strict in its hold upon us.

One of the dogmas of the current moment is that no behavior should seem unnatural or inauthentic. What could be less pernicious, many feel, than a design that hides nothing. In its way, however commercial the Apple company may be it is an expression of a certain spirituality as strict and austere as any traditional monastic religion. Of course, what people look at on the Internet are representations of all of the confused and diverse human mess of the previous century. The Apple store stand as a reminder that people would rather have none of that challenge in their actual, real life, however.

The first photo shows the starkest contrast between two very different buildings and the two very different worlds that created them. Note the soulful and heavy solidity of the stone in the building across the street, especially the elegance of the front doors with the arched tops. That building was an expression of certain human drives of its time. Then you can look at the Apple store and note its airy lightness and see some of the drives of our time.

Of course there are many ways to look at buildings and my comments are not meant to ignore issues of economy and budget, changing aesthetic taste, and so on. One would have to be very blind indeed to not see some of what I suggest here. For a building, like a piece of prose, or anything humans make, makes meaning and is not only for utility alone.