Unavoidable Composers

[rictroll]

Chick Corea

Spain
Windows
500 Miles High
etc.

[Christian Miller]

Thanks to Mendelssohn, Bach is an early Romantic, post hoc.

(Alright Christian … hit me with it)

I don’t know if I disagree haha

Bach is a very weird composer for his era, not much appreciated at the time. Aesthetics then leaned more toward the elegant, graceful and stylish like Corelli’s music, while Bach was seen as vulgar and over complex. Bach was mostly appreciated as an improviser and a learned contrapuntalist afaik but his music wasn’t much liked in courtly circles.

Also - Germans. German nationalism very much a feature of the 19th century. They were constructing/inventing their own musical lineage (which we today call ‘mainstream music history’) while in fact Italians were culturally dominant in the c18 and the most successful composers of that era are widely forgotten today.

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[Christian Miller]

I first read that as 'mutilating'. Jerome Kern certainly felt that way about jazz versions of his tunes and his widow hated The Platters' version of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes so much that she took legal action in an attempt to limit any further distribution after its initial release.

Haha sounds about right


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[AllanAllen]

Chick Corea

Spain
Windows
500 Miles High
etc.

I can confirm this one. After avoiding Corea for years, I had to play Spain recently.

[pamosmusic]

I can confirm this one. After avoiding Corea for years, I had to play Spain recently.

I have never been asked to play Chick Corea at a session or gig or anything.

Ive been asked to play Spain loaaaads of times, but only ever with a classical guitar in hand.

[Christian Miller]

Just the introduction though - something something orange juice.

Come to think of it, why did jazz musicians keep putting that into things? It was cool when Miles did it but after a while I find it a bit cringe. Get yer own idea!


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[Christian Miller]

Yeah but your example is absurd while mine is true. Seeing as Gasb composers both wrote the bulk of the songs used in jazz which shaped it, and they had overlap with it, therefore they're part of jazz.

I'm pretty sure if you're borderline playing like Erroll Garner you might have lineage in jazz.

Calm down, old chap


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[pamosmusic]

Just the introduction though - something something orange juice.

Come to think of it, why did jazz musicians keep putting that into things? It was cool when Miles did it but after a while I find it a bit cringe. Get yer own idea!


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Hahah … something something orange juice.

Do we have a comprehensive list?

Jim Hall did it too, but he did kind of a plectrum arrangement of the whole thing, no?

[AllanAllen]

Just the introduction though - something something orange juice.

Come to think of it, why did jazz musicians keep putting that into things? It was cool when Miles did it but after a while I find it a bit cringe. Get yer own idea!


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The intro sounds a bit like How Insensitive to me.

[AllanAllen]

I have never been asked to play Chick Corea at a session or gig or anything.

Ive been asked to play Spain loaaaads of times, but only ever with a classical guitar in hand.

The big band I rehearsed with did it. I easily sat out 60% of the tune, I can't sightread those unison lead lines.... yet

[pamosmusic]

The intro sounds a bit like How Insensitive to me.

The intro is from one of the more famous passages of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concerto de Aranjuez (hence the something something orange juice joke).

It became a bit of a trope after a while.

[Bobby Timmons]

Calm down, old chap.

I was mad there.

[BWV]

Why is Jobim a jazz composer if GASB composers are not? Jobim was not a Jazz player anymore than Burt Bacharach was

also Pat Metheny should be on the list

[Christian Miller]

Why is Jobim a jazz composer if GASB composers are not?

Getz

Jobim was not a Jazz player anymore than Burt Bacharach was

also Pat Metheny should be on the list

James gets called. Anything else?


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[pamosmusic]

Getz

Yeah … as far as I’m aware Jobim actually collaborated with jazz musicians, Getz being the most prominent.

That puts him in a bit of a different category.

He was also a pioneer in a style of music that was distinct from traditional Brazilian music and incorporated some elements of jazz into it.

Maybe a better question is whether or not that makes him different than, say, George Gershwin specifically, rather than American songbook composers generally.

[pamosmusic]

Why is Jobim a jazz composer if GASB composers are not? Jobim was not a Jazz player anymore than Burt Bacharach was

also Pat Metheny should be on the list

Im not sure any Pat Metheny tunes get called on the regular. There are two or three in the real book I guess, but you could probably pretty easily go your whole life and never have to know a Pat Metheny tune.

Hes a great composer, but he is one that I have pretty successfully avoided thus far and it hasn’t really come up in conversation either. Maybe I’m an exception?

[RLetson]

To wax academical and taxonomical, maybe it's worth seeing "jazz" not as a unitary, Aristotelian entity definable by genus/species distinctions but as an historically-dynamic composite, or maybe as a set of operations deployed on a body of musical materials. And not all of those operations are equally significant, nor need all of them be deployed on any given material.

Abstract enough for ya?

When I map the items my jazz pals call with some regularity, I recognize in their practice 1) a strong attachment to "bop" as the stylistic center, 2) a corresponding tropism for compositions arising from that stylistic-historical tradition--thus lots of Parker, Monk, Rollins, Miles & co.--as well as standards that have been adopted by both bop and straight-ahead jazz players (Gershwin, Kern, Loesser, Rodgers, et al.). But since the band includes a very good vocalist with a bit of cabaret sensibility and a fairly lyrical pianist, they also produce what might be called jazz-adjacent takes on standards. The overall effect sounds pretty "jazzy." There's also a big dose of influence of performer-composer-arranger-stylists such as Bill Evans, and a lot of borrowing of well-known recorded performances--that ATTYA intro, for example.

I suppose what I'm hearing every Thursday night is what happens when "jazz" protocols are applied to a body of compositions, some of which were generated by those protocols by the people who were inventing them. What is a contrafact if not the application of X protocols to work originally devised under Y protocols?

Having climbed this far up the abstraction ladder, I should probably take care of the nosebleed I'm suffering now.

[pamosmusic]

To wax academical and taxonomical, maybe it's worth seeing "jazz" not as a unitary, Aristotelian entity definable by genus/species distinctions but as an historically-dynamic composite, or maybe as a set of operations deployed on a body of musical materials. And not all of those operations are equally significant, nor need all of them be deployed on any given material.

Abstract enough for ya?

When I map the items my jazz pals call with some regularity, I recognize in their practice 1) a strong attachment to "bop" as the stylistic center, 2) a corresponding tropism for compositions arising from that stylistic-historical tradition--thus lots of Parker, Monk, Rollins, Miles & co.--as well as standards that have been adopted by both bop and straight-ahead jazz players (Gershwin, Kern, Loesser, Rodgers, et al.). But since the band includes a very good vocalist with a bit of cabaret sensibility and a fairly lyrical pianist, they also produce what might be called jazz-adjacent takes on standards. The overall effect sounds pretty "jazzy." There's also a big dose of influence of performer-composer-arranger-stylists such as Bill Evans, and a lot of borrowing of well-known recorded performances--that ATTYA intro, for example.

I suppose what I'm hearing every Thursday night is what happens when "jazz" protocols are applied to a body of compositions, some of which were generated by those protocols by the people who were inventing them. What is a contrafact if not the application of X protocols to work originally devised under Y protocols?

Having climbed this far up the abstraction ladder, I should probably take care of the nosebleed I'm suffering now.

To un-abstract it a bit ...

... the term "Jazz Standard" is usually applied to a song composed by a musician performing the music.

That's the thing that all the "jazz standard" composers have in common. They're written by band-leaders or other musicians in the idiom, to be performed by their bands.

That is very different than what the tin pan alley composers were doing. Maybe they'd be interesting to compare to someone like Duke Ellington or (more recently) Maria Schneider. They both have really rich orchestral sensibilities and don't generally write lead-sheet-able pieces for small bands. But they're still writing for working bands to perform and improvise within certain parameters, etc.

Anyway ... it's that practical distinction that is generally the operative one.

Commence the downward spiral about "what even is jazz really"

[AllanAllen]

Im not sure any Pat Metheny tunes get called on the regular. There are two or three in the real book I guess, but you could probably pretty easily go your whole life and never have to know a Pat Metheny tune.

Hes a great composer, but he is one that I have pretty successfully avoided thus far and it hasn’t really come up in conversation either. Maybe I’m an exception?

Yeah, I'm also avoiding Metheny. I don't think he's popular outside the guitar fans. He was smart putting his tunes in the first RB.

[mr. beaumont]

Yeah, I'm also avoiding Metheny. I don't think he's popular outside the guitar fans. He was smart putting his tunes in the first RB.

Actually Pat might be the only guitar playing jazz composer I see get much of any props outside of the guitar playing world...but perhaps it's a chicken/egg thing with those tunes being available in the original RB...

[AllanAllen]

I just can't see a horn player calling Bright Sized Life at a jam. I'm pretty biased.... There's not a lot of post 1960s jazz that I like.

[Christian Miller]

Im not sure any Pat Metheny tunes get called on the regular. There are two or three in the real book I guess, but you could probably pretty easily go your whole life and never have to know a Pat Metheny tune.

Hes a great composer, but he is one that I have pretty successfully avoided thus far and it hasn’t really come up in conversation either. Maybe I’m an exception?

Don’t think so


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[Christian Miller]

How about Horace Silver?


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[Boss Man Zwiebelsohn]

How about Horace Silver?


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See post #9

[mr. beaumont]

How about Horace Silver?


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I suggested Horace a few pages back, I'd agree, I think he's on the list.