The General with Chamberlab at the Fox

Just got back from a fabulous show at the Fox theater downtown. A new music group called Chamberlab presented the Buster Keaton film from 1926, The General, with a live ensemble doing original music for it. It was outstanding. It was kind of an odd ensemble, but it all seemed to work. How has this ensemble and these people been in Tucson for at least five years and I haven’t heard of them or been to a show of theirs before?

Chris Black seemed to be the fellow in charge and the composer of a big chunk of the score, with additional music by Dante Rosano, Marco Rosano, and Tony Rosano. The ensemble was eleven people, including the composers. They all took turns on the piano and directing the ensemble when it was their compositions being played. All together, from left to right, there was a bass (Chris Black), trombone, cornet, baritone sax-clarinet-accordion-electric guitar (the three Rosano brothers), drum set and percussion, piano (played by the composers when they weren’t playing their own instruments), two violins, cello, two bassoons, and contrabassoon. Everyone to the right (house right) of the piano never switched instruments or places.

Three bassoons, including a contrabassoon who only played that instrument, never switching to anything else? Really? It looked really odd when I walked in, but it worked pretty well. The chameleon-like versatility of the bassoon really helped them blend into the ensemble very well. Even the low indistinct pitch rumble of the contrabassoon contributed to the overall sound. When the General (the steam locomotive that Buster Keaton engineers) first appears, the bassoons have a wonderful little chugging figure that was both effective and a little humorous all at the same time.

Interestingly, there were no electronics other than a few small amplifiers (for the bass and the electric guitar, I think) in the pit. Everything was miked and amplified but I don’t know if that was for balance purposes or just for sonic impact in the hall. I don’t think they really needed to be as aggressive as they were with the amplification, but the miking was done well and it wasn’t too obnoxious.

An ensemble this size (although not this make-up) would have been similar to the live orchestras that would have played for silent movies without significant amplification in regional places like the Fox. They didn’t really need to amplification, but I suppose they thought that people are so stupidly used to everything being so loud and in your face that they probably never even tried it without the amplification.

It would have been wonderful if the organ had been in place and they could have added that set of sounds to the mix. I’d love to do something like this with a theater organ but use more modern musical material with the old-fashioned instrument, kind of like I’d like to try playing a theater organ in a jazz context with a rhythm section and possibly even a small set of horns.

I didn’t see or hear any obvious missteps. The music was pleasant and mostly tonal, with only a few stretches of the language into more open territory. For the most part, there wasn’t much that would have been that far out in 1926, but it was all put together with a modern sensibility. Nothing was significantly out of place for the historical language with the possible exception of the electric guitar, but even that was used very tastefully.

The film was a lot of fun. It’s very hard to believe that it’s as old as it is. Of course, the period makeup and stylized form of acting belies how timeless the whole piece is, but it’s still a very enjoyable film. I’ve seen it before, but I can’t even recall what the accompaniment was then. It was probably piano.

All in all it was a very enjoyable trip to the Fox. I wonder if Chamberlab is Chris Black’s own playground exclusively, or would they welcome music from someone else? Could they be hired for other projects? I’ll have to find out. This was actually an inspiring evening. I think I’m going to go grab a pencil and the Mishkan T’filah siddur and start marking the pieces that will make up the whole service I have in mind.

I picked up their CD and a book-CD package from Chris on my way out the door. I look forward to listening to them and absorbing what they have to say.






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Location:S Sarnoff Dr, Tucson

Jews and Jazz, Session 1, Class 3

Here are the notes from the third class, the one from 17 February.

Part 1, Class 3: Jewish New Orleans, The Dance Craze
10 February 2015 - Temple Emanu-El, Tucson AZ


We talked a bit about Jewish New Orleans at the end of last week’s class. New Orleans was a wild place (even after the closing of Storyville in 1918), and perhaps due to the heat or the wildness the people who settled there tended to blend into one big melting pot of society and culture, like a big pot of jambalaya with many different identifiable ingredients that somehow all blended together into one very delicious stew.

Like everywhere else in the country, Jewish people were there. Although officially banned from the French Louisiana Territory due to the Code Noire of 1724, many Jews still made the delta of the Mississippi river their home. The first few waves of Jewish immigration in the early to middle nineteenth century were largely from the western regions of Europe, Germany, and the Alsace-Loraine region of France. These Reform settlers blended into the culture of Louisiana, in many cases losing much of their outward Jewish appearance, but keeping their Jewishness in their hearts and minds. In many cases they took on the Louisiana diet of (non-Kosher) seafood and eschewed many of the outward signs of their faith.

Many Alsatian settlers mixed in with the Cajuns because of their common language and ultimate country of origin. Many others became peddlers and later shopkeepers and the “Jew store” became a fixture of rural life, often being the only dry goods store in many communities.

Later on, the waves of eastern European Ashkenazi Jews of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century didn’t assimilate quite as easily, standing out in sharper contrast with their community. However, since the didn’t mix in as easily, they tended to keep to themselves in their own enclaves, settling around temples so as to be able to walk to Synagogue on Shabbat.

However, many of these Ashkenazi communities had their musicians, their klezmorim, who did ultimately melt into the culture. The influence of klezmer went way beyond New Orleans, though. In the northeastern US in and around New York City, klezmer became the lingua franca of the community and the people who lived there, blending easily with the new strains of jazz as it floated up the Mississippi and east across the Great Lakes to New York.

There was a whole neighborhood just off the way from Storyville where it was more mixed, black and Jewish and everybody. (This neighborhood was finally totally destroyed to build the Superdome and the new City Hall.) A lot of cultural mixing took place here. This is where a young Louis Armstrong danced and sang and clowned in the streets for pennies, and where he got his first cornet with money borrowed from one of his employers, the Karnofsky family, a Jewish family that owned a local bank.

(It seems that he was close with the Karnofskys and they even took him in as one of their own for a while. They loaned him the five/ten dollars (there’s some dispute, of course) to get the cornet from a pawn shop and/or got the cornet for him and let him work off the debt little by little (again, there are several different versions of the story from several different people who purport to know the “truth”). He was extremely grateful for the help. So much so, that he wore a star of David pendant (a gift from the producer, Joe Glaser) in gratitude and respect for the rest of his life. He also enjoyed listening to the Yiddish melodies that Mrs Karnofsky sang to her children and he even acquired a passable command of Yiddish.)

“In his memoir Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907, he describes his discovery that the Karnofskys were also subject to discrimination by "other white folks' nationalities who felt that they were better than the Jewish race... I was only seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for." Armstrong … wrote about what he learned from them: "how to live—real life and determination.””

( http://www.jewishjournal.com/sacredintentions/item/did_you_know_that_louis_armstrong_wore_a_star_of_david )

(The Karmofsky foundation, named for the family, today distributes instruments and helps get music lessons and classes to at-risk children. They’ve been especially helpful in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.)

On the surface, the similarities between klezmer and early jazz seem pretty easy to spot. It’s harder to see the differences, though, but they’re there. In our classification system, SHMRG:

Sound

Common instrumentation: Both groups used clarinet, trumpet, trombone, and bass, often tuba or later (when the dancing moved indoors), string bass. Klezmer also used the violin, an instrument which has not had as great a role in the world of early jazz. Born of economic necessity and the need to be portable, these were the instruments that were both available and easily moved from place to place. Piano was not common in either place until again, the dancing moved indoors and took on a more genteel affect. Drums were common in both, but klezmer placed more emphasis on “woody” sounding rhythms (more tick-tock sounding) and jazz used more drum and “skin” sounds. When the recognizable modern drum set evolves in the early days of the twentieth century, both camps adopt it and adapt it to their music almost immediately.

Harmony

Both ensembles worked in the western European tonal harmonic world, with the tonal dominant becoming the norm, growing out of the melody. This is essentially the prolongation of the dominant sound, never quite settling on the tonic even when reaching cadence points. Dominant sevenths become common and nearly ubiquitous.

Melody

The shape of melodies is vocally influenced, developing out of the folk sounds of each community. Pentatonic scales and augmented intervals become more and more common. In the case of klezmer, this is often developed from the so-called Hungarian minor and Freygish scales, which sound intensely Jewish to our ears, largely due to the augmented intervals. Similar intervals are common in blues-influenced scales, but the augmented intervals fall in different places and tend to resolve slightly differently.

The idea of melodic cadence, or a cadence point arrived at melodically (not purely harmonically) is common in both musics, but it diverges in later jazz. Klezmer remains a melodically based music, while jazz takes on more and more harmonic structure. Eventually by the time of the beboppers, the melody becomes almost irrelevant and improvisation grows out of the harmonic structure. Klezmer and early jazz soloing is more about ornamenting an existing melody. Klezmer evolves a very involved system of ornament, more akin to Baroque era ornament than later jazz.

Rhythm

Generally two-beat in both musics at this time. Later jazz develops the four beat (and the boogie-woogie eight to the bar that we talked about last week) but klezmer stays in two beat most of the time. Other folk dance rhythms come in to both, but different folk in each case. Hora comes into klezmer and never finds its way into jazz, except as novelty. Both musics make use of social dance rhythms like waltzes and (later) fox trots, but still staying mostly in two-beat.

Growth/Form

Early jazz takes its forms from all over the map, including marches, waltzes, and other similar forms. Later on, it coalesces around song form (an invention of largely Jewish songwriters!). Klezmer form is derived from the melody, which in turn is derived from largely vocal and/or textual sources.

Let’s listen. Here’s Dippermouth Blues from King Oliver. We heard this in the first class. What do you hear? Form? Blues. Rhythm? Two beat. Harmony? Mostly blues based. Melody? Again, largely blues. Sound? Prominent solos with full ensemble playing, everyone getting a chance to play with the melody.

Let’s listen. Here’s a piece of klezmer from Abe Schwartz’s Orcehstra, recorded around 1924, Die Shriller Bulgar. This might sound a little familiar, since this is the tune that was eventually adapted into “And The Angels Sing” and made into a hit by the recording with Benny Goodman’s band. (From the collection Early Klezmer: The First Recordings, 1908-1927.)

Here’s Dippermouth Blues, a piece we listened to in the first class. King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band from 1923. Similar orchestration, similar sounds, different effect entirely.

In both cases, the music is generally associated with events, the famous jazz funerals of New Orleans, the stereotyped klezmer wedding, and so forth. What develops in the early days of the 20th century, though, is a national fad for social dancing.

Social Dancing

In the wake of The Great War, what we now call World War One, there was a national craze for social dancing. Beyond the folk dancing of earlier days, this developed from several sources mostly simultaneously. From Europe, the fad for waltzes had swept through the US in the late 19th century. From the south and Ragtime, the cakewalk developed. From all over, the desire to escape the cares of the moment through dance became overwhelming.

James Reese Europe’s ensembles propagated a new sound of instrumental music designed for dancing. Built on the foundation of marches and ragtime, the foxtrot was developed. Premiered in 1914, it caught the eye of Vernon and Irene Castle, the (white) husband and wife dance team. They pioneered the flowing style that characterized the dance throughout the twentieth century. Like a lot of American fads, though, it was founded on African-American sources. Vernon Castle even credited black sources, noting that the dance “had been danced by negroes, to his personal knowledge, for fifteen years, [at] a certain exclusive colored club.”

The Castles were the dance team with James Reese Europe’s band. They first called it the “Bunny Hug” but soon changed it to “Foxtrot,” possibly named after the African American performer, Harry Fox. Subsequently it was standardized by Arthur Murray (who taught me dancing in a hurry) who incorporated some of the gestures of the tango.

Originally it was danced to ragtime music (such as the Castle House Rag that we played in the first class) but eventually the music was adapted with the evolving jazz and the foxtrot was danced to swing music. We’ll talk more about that as we get to the swing era.

(The Castles were performers on stage and in early silent (!) movies, and one of their Broadway shows, Watch Your Step, was the first show of Irving Berlin, a name we’ll hear a lot more about in a future class. Vernon died in 1918, but Irene kept performing for the rest of her life into the sixties.)

With the dance craze, the dancing moved indoors, the bands took on a more sophisticated sheen (tuxedos, evening clothes, and other uniforms), and the music evolved again. Going to a ballroom was an excuse to dress up and be elegant, if only for as long as the music lasted. Less portable instruments (like pianos) became regular parts of the bands.

The desire for the dance was so strong that the music adapted to it, and eventually one of the hallmarks of the evolution of bebop after WWII was the desire of the musicians to play for audiences that were actually listening to the music, not just seeking something to dance to.

The music deliberately moved away from the dance, and as a result the dancing public moved away from the music and the two worlds never really reconnected.

(In some ways, dance music is so strongly identified with jazz that the two blur in the popular imagination. The truly popular national music wasn’t King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, or Louis Armstrong, it was the kind of dance music played by the ironically named “King Of Jazz,” Paul Whiteman. He becomes important a little later on as we talk about George Gershwin and the evolution of “Concert Jazz.” Does that mean that the public’s understanding of jazz rarely reaches too far beyond the dance band? Is that why the bands of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, although both fine and capable jazz players themselves, really don’t qualify as jazz vehicles? That’s a deep thinking topic and probably beyond the scope of this class, but buy me a beer and I’ll be happy to talk about it…)

I’ll Build A Stairway to Paradise (Gershwin) - Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, 1922

The klezmer world also spawned dance bands in the newer, more elegant style. Here’s a piece of klezmer music from a larger band:

Ein Kik Af Dir (One Look at You) - Alexander Olshanetsky and his orchestra, 1929

The jazz and klezmer worlds also collided in more humorous ways, too. Here are some titles from the early US klezmer world. Sadly, most of these tunes appear to be lost, but I’m going to keep looking. (Update: Several of them are on YouTube and sheet music is in several archives around the country. Gee whiz, modern technology!)

“Yiddle on Your Fiddle Play Some Ragtime” (1909), “Yiddisher Irish Baby” (1915), “Rosie Rosenblatt, Stop Your Turkey Trot,” “Since Maggie Dooley Learned the Hooley Hooley” (1916), “Yiddishe Blues” (1919), “That’s Yiddisha Jazz” (1922)

Willie “The Lion” Smith

A true character in the development of jazz, almost on a par with Jelly Roll Morton (although The Lion would be upset at the comparison). Mr Smith is a pioneer of stride piano, a style of playing characterized by a “pumping” left hand, drawn from ragtime but developed into an almost orchestral sounding palette by Smith and others, through Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, James P Johnson, and others.

William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith (23 November 1893 - 18 April 1973).

He was the son of a “Spanish, Negro, and Mohawk Indian” woman and (reportedly, by Smith himself) a Jewish man (Frank Bertholoff). He grew up in the greater New York area, in Newark. He learned Hebrew and was reasonably fluent in Yiddish, which made him several friends and admirers in the Newark area. His early musical training is a familiar story, being attracted to the organ that his mother played in church at an early age and working as a boy to earn money to get a piano. He learned the expected tunes of the era like The Maple Leaf Rag of Scott Joplin and Cannonball Rag by Joe Northrup as well as less expected titles like “Don't Hit that Lady Dressed in Green,” about which he said “the lyrics to this song were a sex education, especially for a twelve year old boy.” His other favorites picked up from the saloons in and around NYC were “She's Got Good Booty” and “Baby, Let Your Drawers Hang Low.” (Plus ça change, eh?)

He married a lyricist and song writer, Blanche Merrill, in 1915. She wrote material in and around Broadway for people such as Fanny Brice. Smith went into the Army for The Great War, playing drum with the regimental band led by Tim Brymn. The story is that he earned his nickname ‘The Lion’ with his bravery and prowess with heavy artillery.

Like almost all of Mr Smith’s biography, it has to be taken with a grain of salt. In a notable recording, he accuses Jelly Roll Morton of embellishing the truth whenever he talked, but then he (Mr Smith) does the exact same thing. He’s a storyteller and a raconteur, plain and simple.

After the war he returned to NYC, playing in bands and as a soloist, developing the style known as stride (along with Fats Waller and James P Johnson). Stride is a style that bridges ragtime (play a few bars) and more modern jazz (play a few bars of something boppy). It uses the ragged rhythms of ragtime and starts to develop things into a more complete pianistic-orchestral sound. The left hand functions like a rhythm section and the right fills in like the horns, making the piano a band all in itself.

I think the best thing is to listen to Mr Smith himself, in this recording from November of 1957, in discussion with Leonard Feather.

(Play the first track and the beginning of the second track from The Lion Roars.)

The Lion Roars
Willie’s Blues
Passionette (1938 recording) - More typical of his style
Echoes of Spring (1957 recording, from The Lion Roars) - Most famous hit, the one most other pianists cover.

“Jazz comes from any where a human being has a soul and has a heart.” (Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith, as quoted in a video on the NPR website)

The son of a Jewish father, he considered himself Jewish all his life, even having a bar mitzvah at the age of thirteen.

Smith’s own words, quoted by Spike Wilner in Lion of the Piano by way of Nat Hentoff’s essay on jazz.com:

““A lot of people are unable to understand my wanting to be Jewish. One said to me, ‘Lion, you stepped up to the plate with one strike against you and now you take a second one right down the middle!’ They can't seem to realize I have a Jewish soul and belong to that faith.”

This Lion of Judah actually later became a cantor, or chazzan, himself at a Harlem synagogue of Black Jews!”

Nat Hentoff, an essay for jazz.com, http://www.jazz.com/jazz-blog/2009/10/8/hentoff-on-jazz-the-jewish-soul-of-willie-the-lion-smith

George Gershwin’s “Serious Music”
The merging of African-American and Jewish styles

When people start talking about the “Jewishness” of George Gershwin, a lot of people start drawing on the obvious examples, the bits of Porgy and Bess that seem to echo synagogue chant (“It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “Summertime” seem to be the most often cited). Although born into a Russian-Lithuanian Jewish family (originally born as Jacob Gershvine, although the extra E is probably a mistake by the doctor filling out the birth certificate) there seems to be little evidence for any kind of serious Jewish identity. Of the four Gershwin children, only Ira had a Bar Mitzvah, and George was never known to go to shul.

Still, growing up when and where he did (Brooklyn and New York City in the early days of the 20th century), Jewish sounds were unavoidable. He loved the Yiddish theater and wanted to write for it. Several of his early songs are reputed to be fairly transparent copies of Yiddish theater music. Later in his life he wanted to write an opera on the The Dybbuk, a popular play of the time, even doing some research on Jewish music and themes, but he abandoned the project when he was unable to obtain the rights to the play. (It’s been rumored that some of the sketches and material found their way into other pieces, but I’ve never seen any of the material from The Dybbuk and I’m unable to render a judgement on that.)

The influences he absorbed and then transformed into his own original voice are pretty remarkable. We’ll talk more about his influence when he talk about the great Jewish songwriters of the early 20th century, but suffice it to say that his influence is huge.

Let’s talk a little more about those two songs from Porgy and Bess:

It Ain’t Necessarily So

Right off the bat we have a bluesy figure that makes use of our old friend, the flat five. It slides down in a bluesy chromatic way, settling on the minor third of the scale. (Later on, the major-minor contrast asserts itself, like in the Klezmer and early jazz-blues styles.) The rhythm is triplets against duplets, giving it a real swing. This role was (allegedly) originally written for Cab Calloway and this number really seems to indicate that. Listen to the style of call and response that was a stock-in-trade for Mr Calloway in his hits like Minnie the Moocher and others.

This recording is from a German radio broadcast of 1952 with Cab Calloway actually doing the role. This was an American Ambassadors tour, sending great American performers all over Eastern Europe and ultimately behind the Iron Curtain to show the great diversity of American culture. Leontyne Price and William Warfield are the principals with Alexander Smallens conducting. They weren’t the first performers of the roles, but they were essentially the second wave of great performers in this piece.

(Trivia- Price and Warfield were married shortly before this performance in October of 1952, a marriage that was stormy and difficult for both of them. While they did love each other very much, the demands of two large scale careers in the performing arts essentially forced them apart. They separated in 1967 and divorced in 1972 or 1973.)

Summertime

It’s just a plain pretty tune. It has a fairly broad range (it’s clearly for a trained singer, regardless of how easy many singers make it sound) and it’s kind of tricky to do it right, with a lot of long phrases and difficult expression, having to sound like a lullaby in a fairly high register. The major-minor sound is all over the place throughout this one.

This is also from the 1952 German radio recording. Helen Colbert is the soloist.

Rhapsody in Blue

I‘m going to leave you tonight with this bit of fun: This is the second recording of Rhapsody in Blue with the original ensemble, Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, and soloist, Mr Gershwin himself at the piano. (The first recording was an acoustic recording made in 1924 shortly after the piece premiered. This one was made in 1927 with the vastly superior electrical process.)

That’s the original clarinet soloist, Ross Gorman, playing the opening phrase. There’s some dispute about the glissando, whether Gershwin intended it or if it was an improvisation by Gorman, but Gershwin clearly liked it either way and kept it in the score. Listen to the sound of that clarinet. Is that klezmer and jazz all rolled up together or what?

I’d originally intended to get into Hollywood and the great migration of songwriters and lyricists to the west, but I’ll save that for the later classes on the songwriters and the Great Jewish Conspiracy In Popular Culture.

Thank you.


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Location:N Country Club Rd, Tucson (Temple Emanu-El)

Jews and Jazz, Session 1, Class 2

Here are the notes for the second class, the one from the tenth of February.

Jews and Jazz

Part 1, Class 2: Blues and the Cantorial Style

Recap of SHMRG

If you take one thing away from this class, this is what I’d like it to be: A way of listening to music and being able to talk about it intelligently. Presumably if you’re taking this class you have the interest and desire to know more about jazz and to be able to listen to it and discuss it in a smart and logical manner. I’d like to think that most of you are beyond the “I don’t know music (or art or whatever) but I know what I like!” school of thought.

To this end I’d like to go over the concept of SHMRG again.

Invented by Jan LaRue, taught to me by Irving Godt, a student of LaRue’s. It’s a way of classifying thought about music and a way of intelligently thinking about it. This system works for all music of course, not just jazz. (I originally learned it as a part of a classical music history course, probably the one about early Medieval and Renaissance music up to early Baroque era music.)

Come gather ‘round the piano, children, and let’s dig in. I’m going to go slowly and try to illustrate what I’m talking about. Please let me know when you get confused or overwhelmed and I’ll try to talk you down.

To recap (from last week’s class):

(Description adapted from Texas Tech University’s Musicology Department web site, http://ttumusicology.wikispaces.com/SHMRG+details)

Sound
Texture, timbre, and dynamics

What’s making the sound? What instruments or voices? Thick texture or thin? Many voices? One voice? Everyone moving together (homophony) (play an example, Sun on the Treetops)? Everyone going every which way (polyphony) (play an example, a Bach invention)? Melody and accompaniment (play an example)? Some combination of them all? Is it loud or soft? Other contrasts in texture or sound? Is there a text? Does the text tell us anything about the music, or does the music have something to say about the text (play an example from my Hashkiveinu, the tick-tock figure in the vibes) (mention Fair Phyllis and the sexual baggage of three-four time, maybe Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites where the orchestra tells us that the brother and sister are more than just brother and sister…)?

Harmony
The “vertical” aspects of the music (show a score page, Hashkiveinu again?)

How many notes at a time? Standard tonal harmony (play something)? Atonal harmony (play something)? Diatonic construction (play)? Pentatonic, octotonic, hybrid scales (play)? Built on thirds, fourths, fifths, etc (play)? Chromatic harmony (play)? Cadences, tension and resolution, modulations, key schemes (in larger pieces), tonal centers? Major or minor?

Melody
The “horizontal” aspects of sequences of pitches in time (show score again)

Stepwise motion or leaps? Range of melody? Tessitura (range of melody in a given instrument or voice)? Shape? Diatonic, tonal, modal, pentatonic, atonal, implied harmony, etc?

Rhythm
The rhythmic aspects and division of time on the micro (beat by beat) and macro levels (over the whole piece)

Main subdivision of the beat? Prolation? Beat groupings: Consistent, repetitive, and predictable, or something unexpected or irregular? Odd or even meter? Steady tempo or rubato? Danceable rhythm or speech-like rhythm? Layered rhythm? Polyphonic (independent parts) or homophonic (unison rhythms)? Polymeter? Rhythmic contrast section to section?

Growth
The form or organization of the piece in time

Phrase length? Symmetrical, four square, or asymmetrical, unusual groupings of sections or beats or melodies? Repetition? Varied or contrasted? How is the structure conveyed to the listener, changes of harmony, modulations, texture changes, what?Familiar form (classical form) or something new? Is this being used to play with your expectations? How? Why?

Play one or two (short!) pieces from different periods to discuss the SHMRG aspects of them. Talk about one piece at a time. Listen for sound, discuss. Listen for harmony, discuss. And so forth. Leave blank space on the handout for note taking.

Examples: The Pineapple Rag, Scott Joplin (played live)
Sunny Side of the Street, Frank Sinatra arr Billy May

Early development, Blues

There are some identifiable characteristics of the blues. Some of these are melodic, some are harmonic, and some relate to the form.

Melodic

Talk about scale construction, diatonic scales, scale members and numerical designations. Mention solfege but don’t go into depth (Keep it simple! No parallels or relatives for now.)

Major-minor contrast, flat three and flat five, occasionally sharp four (rising four, a la Maria [West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein]), flat seven.

Melodies tend to be derived from the harmony and underlying structure.

Harmonic

Show how harmony is built on scale construction, I-IV-V-I (Simple!)

Major-minor conflict, often minor melody with major harmony. Constant sound of dominant sevens becomes standard, implying a certain level of unavoidable tension.

Form, musical and textual

Twelve bar form, three phrase lyrics:

I
Woke up this morning, feelin’ mighty bad.
IV
Woke up this morning, feelin’ mighty bad.
V
My baby done left me, I’m feelin’ oh so sad.

First phrase is a statement, second phrase is a repetition of the first phrase, the third phrase is a contrasting statement, sometimes ironic or humorous about the first two phrases. Rhyme scheme can be all over the map- it doesn’t even have to pretend to rhyme.

General matters

In blues construction, the twelve bar form is pretty much sacrosanct. The melody and text rise from the harmony and form. Even when the form is twisted (like a lot of sixties protest songs, even the occasional Dylan song that uses the blues) the three phrase structure stays intact.

Robert Johnson is an early example of country blues. This thread continued to develop down through the country-western historical threads. There’s not much country blues in the country music world these days, though. Occasionally you’ll find a three part lyric structure, but it’s not common and it’s never over the blues harmonic patterns.

Boogie-woogie piano is mostly blues based. Even when it’s not strictly a twelve bar form (Cripple Clarence Lofton) it’s still in the three part structure. These tended to be poor rural players in work camps along the railroad expansion and the logging operations in the Pacific Northwest. Boogie had its first real wave of popularity in the thirties, was briefly adopted by the big bands, but then disappeared again until more recent times.

Big band blues arose mostly in the Kansas City area, more or less contemporary with the rise of the big band. Lots of call and response, lots of pieces based on little riffs.

The blues tend to be a leather lunged style, with not much in the way of subtlety (especially the big band blues shouters, trying to compete against the horns and drums).

Example: The Jumpin’ Blues, Walter Brown with Jay McShann AHO

Listen for musical form, repetition of riffs, lyric formCantorial style

Melodic construction

Tends to be built from smaller phrases. Common sounds, built on distinctive scales.
Major-minor conflict, routine use of flat three, five, and seven. Often uses rising sharp four (Maria again). Repetition is common, call and response is common, often a cantor will line out a phrase or a section and then the chorus-congregation will sing it back.

Harmonic construction

No predictable harmony. Harmonies (if there are any) tend to be developed out of the melodic material.

Form

Again, rarely any predictable form beyond simple binary repetition. No standard forms or identifiable patterns song to song. What form there is tends to develop out of the melodic material and/or the form of the text. Texts tend to be sacred and liturgical, although later Yiddish secular songs used the same patterns and material.

Example: Hamav’dil, Yossele Rosenblatt and choir (1920?)


Klezmer

I wound up skipping this part in the actual class on 10 February for time reasons.

A lot of the early American Klezmer musicians were also early Jazz musicians, playing in the dance bands and jazz groups of their communities, but I don’t know if that’s evidence of an intermingling of cultures or simply clever musicians doing what they have to do to make a living.

The instrumental line ups of Klezmer groups and early jazz groups had a lot in common, being a portable style of music that would and would go all over the community. Like early jazz, the piano didn’t really come into Klezmer until it settled into dance halls and regular venues where a piano was available.

Many (if not most) Klezmer pieces are in similar (march, minuet, etc) forms to ragtime.

We’ll talk more about Klezmer and its relationship to early jazz in future classes.

Yiddish blues

Okay, here’s where it breaks down. My primary thesis in doing this class, the very thing I hoped to prove or disprove in my prep work for this class has eluded me. There are identifiable common threads in both types of music, cantorial style and blues style, and there are similar community uses and purposes for the music, but I can’t find the moment when they overlapped. I can see them, I can hear them, but I can’t find the common historical thread.

I can hear it, I can see it, but I can’t find record of where it happened. It’s maddening. Jewish Jazz is a bastard child, welcome in neither the Black community (“don’t need none of that junk here, it never happened, jazz and blues is the music of African Americans”) or the Jewish community (mostly racist crap that doesn’t really need to be repeated).

Where and when did they overlap? I don’t know. I don’t think they were like Darwin’s Galapagos insights, where they could have evolved separately but similarly in response to similar stimuli, but I don’t know. Did it happen in New Orleans? Did it maybe happen sometime earlier around the Mediterranean and around Northern Africa? Is it maybe some hard-wired, hard-coded element in the human psyche, akin to the sol-mi-la-sol-mi phrase in children?

A lot of the ways that cantors approach their improvisation is very similar to the way that jazz musicians learn to improvise, a catalog of typical licks and phrases that the artist then strings together to form a new piece of art. As the performer gains familiarity with the material, he/she can step further away from it and allow for personal imagination and creativity to take over.

In a class in this room last late summer with Rabbi Baruch he showed us a chart of characteristic “licks” for certain regional variants of chazzanic (is that a word?) improvisation. It looked an awful lot like the charts of characteristic licks that I made up from studying recorded solos of jazz players.

Jewish New Orleans is also a conundrum. As we’ll see below (and next week), there really wasn’t much in the way of a visible Jewish scene in New Orleans until some time after the period when jazz emerged. Of all the peoples that came through the port it seems like very few of them were Jewish, and Jewish people were banned from living in New Orleans until later. Most Yiddish speaking people seem to have gone through the Ellis Island/Northeastern US and settled in the greater NYC area.

(I’m finding more and more information, though, and we’ll talk about it as I read and discover more. There was a lot of Jewish and African American mixing in the region around where the Superdome and the [new] City Hall are located now. A Jewish pawn shop helped Louis Armstrong buy his first cornet.)

Of course, there were Jewish people there, but it seems like the first few waves of immigrants tended to assimilate into the culture at large. Like a lot of early American Reform Jews, they tended to ape the appearance of Christians while maintaining their Jewishness as best they could. As a result, they tended to melt into the larger society.

Those that didn’t assimilate kept to themselves and didn’t mix with society.

Many Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition came through, but few seemed to settle there, in large part due to the Code Noire of 1724 that formally expelled all Jews from the Louisiana French colony. Of course, the settlers in the region were more interested in surviving and developing their own trade rather than enforcing rules imposed by royal courts thousands of miles away in France.

Another wave of settlers came in early 19th century, arriving from western Europe, Germany and Alsace-Lorraine among others. The French speaking Alsatians found a niche in the fur trade with the Cajuns due to their common language.

Rural Louisiana has many stories of the itinerant Jewish peddler who came through town and eventually opened the “Jew store,” often the only dry goods store in a small town.

In fact, a lot of the new Jewish settlers took on more Louisiana flavor, eating the non-Kosher seafood of the region and forgoing kippot and other visible reminders of their heritage. (There’s the story of Hyman Salz who became an alligator fisherman, catching and selling treyf gator meat all over the town of Morgan City where his family owned the dry goods store.)

Intermarriage was common, although conversion to Christianity was not.

(Another person, Elaine Schlessinger, gave a regional variation of charoset that replaces the Manischewitz with Jack Daniels. Although it makes the dish technically non-Kosher, she feels it brings her closer to her southern roots.) (I just might have to try that this year.)

The ethos of “fitting in” succeeded so well that one urban legend tells of the Jewish merchant who was so accepted as a part of the larger community that he was asked to join the Klan. Supposedly he politely declined the invitation, but he knew that the boys buying white sheets were not suddenly taking an interest in helping out with the housework. Likewise, many of those good ol’ boys were unaware or uncaring that they were buying from a Jewish merchant. (Of course, like all good urban legends this happened to a distant relative or the friend of a friend of the person telling the story.)

The late 19th century wave from Eastern Europe Ashkenazi added a lot more Jewish people to the area, but these people really did keep to themselves and did not mix with the culture at large. They settled in small enclaves where they could walk to synagogue on Shabbat and they spoke Yiddish. This upset the earlier Reform members of the Jewish community because they considered them “too Jewish” for their taste, and worried about attracting anti-Semitism to their communities. In spite of the influx of the orthodox “German Uptown” Jews, the reform continued to dominate the community through the 20th century.

Touro Synagogue sponsors the Annual Jazz Fest Shabbat in April each year, but that’s a recent innovation. It’s one of the earliest synagogues in the region, but it has a pipe organ and many of the other trappings of 19th century American Protestantism. (It’s kind of gratifying to see that it’s a thriving congregation today, at least judging by its website.)

Ultimately, though, a lot of Jewish people were and are (understandably?) excluded from the Mardi Gras scene, although the first King of Mardi Gras was a Jewish man. Some krewes today actively forbid Jews from being members of them. (In retaliation a few years ago, a Jewish student group formed the Jieux Krewe that is still active in the scene.)

A black oriented Storyville with Jewish settlers? Maybe something else? I’m still reading. I’ll keep you posted as my thinking continues to evolve.


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Location:N Country Club Rd, Tucson (Temple Emanu-El)

Exhaustion

Why am I so tired today? I went to bed at a reasonable time and I fell asleep pretty quickly last night. Somehow this morning it's all I can do to stay awake. I'm not even sure I'm being all that successful at it, either.

I've been working on my lectures for the Tuesday night Jews and Jazz class and that's been interesting and illuminating. I'm finding and learning a lot of new things, including a deeper understanding of the cultural world that jazz was born into.

I've also been thinking a lot about how to flesh out the pieces from Shabbat Shirah into a full service. I think I have some ideas, but I haven't put down the outline and ideas on paper yet. That'll probably come this week after I get the class notes squared away.

I'll be putting up the class notes from last Tuesday some time this weekend. I just need to shape them into something and remove some of the snarky jokes.


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Class notes, Jews and Jazz, 3 February 2015

Here are my lectern notes for the first session of the class Jews and Jazz. I'm certainly open to discussion on all aspects of this. If I've left something out or ignored something important, let me know.

Enjoy!

Class 1, Session 1
Class teaching notes
What is Jazz?

Introduction

In this class, I want to talk about the development of Jazz and the influence Jewish music, Jewish musical inflection, Jewish culture and art, and Jewish society have had on the history of Jazz. Likewise, I’d also like to explore the areas where Jazz has had an influence on Jewish music and culture.

While it’s unmistakably true that Jazz can not be separated from African-American culture, I would argue that Jazz can’t be separated from American culture and all the components of the rich cultural stew that is America. African rhythm is essential to Jazz, but then so is Jewish and eastern European melodic inflection and western European harmony. There are also many other contributions from all over the world. However, all of these various strains are essential to make up Jazz as we know it know.

Jazz is a music indigenous to the United States. Jazz does not exist in its native form anywhere else in the world. All of the pieces came together and fused in just one place, the space in and around the port of New Orleans. The music then got carried up the Mississippi to St Louis and Kansas City and beyond to Chicago and New York and ultimately disseminated all over the country, with each location adding its own flavors to the mix. Eventually Jazz went all over the world, but its birthplace is here.

Tonight’s class isn’t going to get too deep into the Jewish aspect of things. That’ll really get going next week. Tonight I’d like to bring us all up to speed on the music, define a few terms, and talk a little bit about how to listen to music and then the broad history of jazz.

Terms and definitions
Who listens to jazz regularly?

Who in the room listens to jazz on a regular basis? Live? Recorded? Radio? Through CDs, computer files, phonograph records, what? What does jazz mean to you?

What is jazz? What is Jewish music?

What is Jazz? Scholars and “normal” people have argued over that for decades. For our purposes, Jazz is the improvised music (and its direct descendants, composed and/or improvised) that came into existence through the melding of cultural influences in and around New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What is Jewish music? Again, we could argue about this for hours, but for the purposes of this class I’m loosely defining it as the music made by and for the Jewish people both sacred and secular, including cantorial style sacred synagogue music, composed music in Jewish style both instrumental and vocal, and secular music for the Jewish community through the dance music of Klezmer, the show music of the Yiddish theater, and so forth.

“Jewish style” is another one of those terms that could be discussed for days, but I’m going to call it music with a specific intent that often (although not always) has identifiable melodic and harmonic characteristics. Improvisation may or may not be a part of the music.

There are a lot of overlapping materials and concepts, exceptions to these rules, and so forth, but we’ll discuss these as we go along.

Who is Jewish?

Also, a very difficult and thorny question. Not everybody we are going to talk about considered themselves Jewish in any meaningful way. Some were culturally Jewish, growing up in a secular Jewish household and taking part in community life but were not particularly religious; some were more religiously observant; and some others were deeply conflicted about their Jewish roots and identity.

Gdal Saleski, in his book, Famous Musicians of Jewish Origin (Bloch Publishing Company, NY, 1949), wrote:

“The author wishes to make clear at the beginning that the words Jew and Jewish are not used in their religious or national senses. The method of approach is purely an ethnic one. He has isolated these musicians into one volume for the simple reason that all of them have in their souls that fire to which the Jewish prophets gave utterance in the time of old Jerusalem's glory.” (from the Prelude, p.xiii)

(It’s an amusing book and I’m sure we’ll talk about it some later on in the class. It’s interesting, even though the book was published in 1949 there is not one jazz musician among its ranks. No Benny Goodman, no Artie Shaw, not one. George Gershwin is listed, but mostly for his concert music, and Irving Berlin gets a grudging two pages.)

What does jazz have to do with Jewish life?

Well, what does jazz have to do with anything? A lot of my playing and work here in TE is informed and inspired by my life and experience with jazz. Improvisation, flexibility, a willingness to learn something new and be stretched beyond what you know and are comfortable with. A lot of the creators and composers of Jewish music these days are from the worlds of jazz and rock and theater.

Sacred vs. secular

What do these terms even mean? On the surface, sacred music is created on sacred themes and/or intended for ritual religious use. Secular music is pretty much everything else outside the shul doors. Even so, the lines get blurred regularly. To me, ultimately, anything written and/or performed from the heart and mind and soul of the artist is sacred, because it honors the connection with the divine in whatever form that may take for the individual. Music and art to me are the strongest argument for the existence of the divine among humanity in the world.

When backed into a corner and asked what my religion is I often reply, I’m an artist, music is my spiritual practice, and jazz is my primary denomination.

How far are we going?

About 1955, although we will carry some things a little further. Why? That’s the death of Charlie Parker and the rise of Rock and Roll, when the jazz world and the pop world completely and irrevocably split. Jazz continues, of course, but the Jewish contributions and aspects become more and more assimilated into the culture so that they virtually disappear from conscious awareness, even though they’re still there if you have a careful look.

Recently, more and more people are studying jazz in a systematic and scholarly way and discussing and arguing over their conclusions. You can certainly think of this as a Jewish cultural influence if you like. Also, many Jewish institutions (JCCs, synagogues, cultural societies, and professional organizations) are sponsoring performances and supporting study, research, and the ongoing creation and performance of the music.

A quick note: We’re not going to shy away from potentially offensive words and terms that were in common use at the times we’re talking about. They are sometimes necessary to the story to get the full flavor of the culture. Please understand that I am not condoning or supporting modern usage of these words. They were wrong and offensive then, they are wrong and offensive now, but to censor them in historical contexts is to give them more power than they deserve.

How to listen to music, SHMRG

Jan LaRue was a musicologist (music historian) who taught in New York City in the post-war period. He was one of the main teachers of one of my beloved teachers, Dr Irving Godt. Dr Godt is one of the people who really instilled in me a love for and understanding of learning and how it must be a lifelong process. I still use daily the methodology and thought processes that he taught me when I was a student of his in the eighties. I recently found out that he passed in December of 2006. It is largely because of him that I continue to study and learn and teach like this.

He would be uncomfortable knowing that I was teaching in shul like this, but I think he would support the idea of the class. He was an avowed atheist, even after having grown up in one of the motherlands of United States Jewish culture and life, Brooklyn NY. He served in World War II and went to NYU on the GI bill after the war. From there he settled in the small college town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, where I met and worked with him. He lived a kind of monastic life among his books and his papers (although not lonely and certainly not celibate; one of his great pleasures were the erotic madrigals and obscene rounds [where singing the music in parts resulted in wildly inappropriate textual combinations] of the Renaissance). He has the unique distinction of being one of the few musicologists in the academic world that has published work on every period of music history from pre-medieval times up through the twentieth century.

His most influential work was the rediscovery of Marianna Martines, a contemporary of Haydn and Mozart who has been completely forgotten, for largely sexist reasons. She’s no Mozart (who is?), but she has every bit the talent and ability of most of the other (male) composers of her era.

(Side note: He went to Birdland on 52nd Street in NYC a couple of times in the early 1950s while he was trying to impress a young lady. He heard Charlie Parker live and several other innovators of bebop in person. However, he had no ear for jazz and this wild and unpredictable music left him entirely unimpressed. Even though he encouraged my scholarly study of jazz and other musics that he had little interest in, he didn’t really understand why I wanted to hear about his visits there. “I never had anything to do with it other than going to a club a couple of times.”)

Through him I learned LaRue’s system for classifying music, often referred to by its acronym, SHMRG. The letters stand for Sound, Harmony, Melody, Rhythm, and Growth (or form, but that would result in SHMRF which LaRue shied away from for some reason even though the little blue people were not created until well after he developed this system).

(Description adapted from Texas Tech University’s Musicology Department web site, http://ttumusicology.wikispaces.com/SHMRG+details)

Sound
Texture, timbre, and dynamics

What’s making the sound? What instruments or voices? Thick texture or thin? Single line, polyphony, homophony, etc? Dynamics? Contrasts in texture or sound? Dynamics? Is there a text? What does it mean? Does the music illuminate the text or vice versa?

Harmony
The “vertical” aspects of the music

How many parts? How many notes at a time? Standard tonal harmony? Atonal harmony? Diatonic construction? Pentatonic, octotonic, hybrid scales? Built on thirds, fourths, fifths, etc? Chromatic harmony? Cadences, tension and resolution, modulations, key schemes (in larger pieces), tonal centers? Major or minor?

Melody
The “horizontal” aspects of sequences of pitches in time

Stepwise motion or leaps? Range of melody? Tessitura (range of melody in a given instrument or voice)? Shape? Diatonic, tonal, modal, pentatonic, atonal, implied harmony, etc?

Rhythm
The rhythmic aspects and division of time on the micro (beat by beat) and macro levels (over the whole piece)

Main subdivision of the beat? Prolation? Beat groupings: Consistent, repetitive, and predictable, or something unexpected or irregular? Odd or even meter? Steady tempo or rubato? Danceable rhythm or speech-like rhythm? Layered rhythm? Polyphonic (independent parts) or homophonic (unison rhythms)? Polymeter? Rhythmic contrast section to section?

Growth
The form or organization of the piece in time

Phrase length? Symmetrical, four square, or asymmetrical, unusual groupings of sections or beats or melodies? Repetition? Varied or contrasted? How is the structure conveyed to the listener, changes of harmony, modulations, texture changes, what?Familiar form (classical form) or something new? Is this being used to play with your expectations? How? Why?

These considerations are a good way to help organize your thoughts and observations while you listen to music. It also helps to listen analytically and be able to remember and compare different pieces of music.

Play two or three pieces from different periods to discuss the SHMRG aspects of them. Leave blank space on the handout for note taking.

Listening: 1. Doin’ Things - Joe Venuti’s Four
2. Struttin’ With Some Barbecue, Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five
3. On The Sunny Side of the Street, Frank Sinatra with Billy May’s big brass group, from the album Come Swing With Me.
4. Walkin’ Stomp, The Modern Jazz Quartet from the album Plastic Dreams. Didn’t play this one due to time concerns.
Basic history of jazz

1890s: Ragtime
The division into decades is a little limiting and more than a little misleading, but it is what it is.
Sedalia, Missouri (outside of St Louis), and Scott Joplin. Mostly pianistic style adapted from the nineteenth century piano styles. Mostly in standard forms like marches and waltzes and minuets. Non-rag melodies were adapted to the rhythms (“ragged”) of the new music. Improvisation and adaptation of existing music started early. Cutting contests where one player tried to outplay another began in this time. Spread throughout the labor camps building railroads and throughout the entire south and west, eventually showing up in New York City through piano rolls. Some pieces were adapted into instrumental forms and began showing up in the repertoire of dance bands and polite society orchestras of the time. James Reese Europe’s military band was the rage of the Great War (now known as World War One).

Musical examples: 1. I played a little bit of the Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin. Many good recordings of this are available.
2. Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin, unknown arranger, from the album The Red Back Book by the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble. I skipped this one for time concerns, but it’s well worth a listen.
3. Castle House Rag by James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra, recorded in 1914. A rough recording, but interesting listening if you can hear past the sound deficiencies. Named for Vernon and Irene Castle, pioneers in the social dance movement. Obtained from archive.org

1900: New Orleans
Home of “voluntary and involuntary immigrants” (Berendt, p.7). Beyond NO, the entire Mississippi delta area developed this music more or less in synch. Rise of Storyville as a center of vice and prostitution (and apparently a swinging good time). Young Louis Armstrong growing up in this environment. Cornet/trumpet, clarinet, trombone, tuba, drums, banjo, sometimes piano, adapted from the military band of the 19th century. No known recordings exist, but the original Preservation Hall Jazz Band purports to be the real deal.

Musical example: Hindustan, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, from the album The Best of the Early Years, recorded in the mid-sixties when many of the original players were still in the group even though they were quite old. Obtained from iTunes.

1910: Dixieland or Traditional
Further development of what was started in the 1900s

Musical example: Livery Stable Blues, The Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded in 1917. This is considered to be the first recording of jazz music. Of course the band is all white, black musicians would have to wait until 1921 to be recorded.

1920: Chicago
Storyville closed by the authorities during WWI, people moved up the river to Chicago. King Oliver is the hero, Louis Armstrong is taken under his wing and develops as a cornet player with him. Jelly Roll Morton does his thing. Armstrong breaks out on his own. The improvised solo becomes a codified part of jazz. The saxophone takes over for the clarinet in ensembles.

Music examples:1. Dippermouth Blues, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band with Louis Armstrong on second cornet. Obtained from archive.org
2. West End Blues, Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. It’s hard to overestimate how important this recording with its out of tempo opening fanfare. It really set the stage for a lot of what was to come. From the Sony collection, The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, although this is available from many sources.
3. Black Bottom Stomp, Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers. Jelly Roll is a world unto himself. We probably won’t get much if any deeper into him, but again, he’s an influential figure in the music. Taken from an RCA-Bluebird CD compilation of Morton’s music. I also mentioned his Library of Congress recordings with Alan Lomax. They’re worth seeking out, too, and although they can be hard listening they’re a fascinating look into the mind of one of the music’s great original creators.

1930: Kansas City, Swing
Rise of four beat jazz, codification of swing rhythms. Bennie Moten to Count Basie in KC, Fletcher Henderson to Benny Goodman. The soloist versus the ensemble. Dance bands to the fore.

Music examples: 1. Moten Swing, Bennie Moten. Didn’t actually play this one for time concerns.
2. King Porter Stomp, Fletcher Henderson and his orchestra
3. King Porter Stomp, Benny Goodman and his orchestra
4. Begin the Beguine, Artie Shaw and his orchestra. Again, cut for time
5. Jumpin’ At The Woodside, Count Basie and his orchestra

1940: Bebop
Swing turned into a gigantic marketing machine, with the term and the artists being used in many different ways and contexts beyond the music. Musicians rebelled and formed a new music based (usually) around smaller groups with more musical room for soloists. Melodies became more complex and angular, harmonies developed into more complex sounds, and rhythms became more sharp and pointed. Tempos are often much faster. Separation from dance use.

Musical examples: 1. Night in Tunisia, Dizzy Gillespie. Didn’t play this one for time reasons.
2. Ornithology, Charlie Parker Septet. An early-middle period bebop recording from 1947, with a very young Miles Davis on trumpet
3. Ow, Dizzy Gillespie big band. Bebop style in a big band setting

1950: Cool, Hard Bop
More rebellion, this time in the opposite direction. More scored ensemble work, more modest tempos. But, by 1955 the pendulum swings again. Soloists featured again, tempos and melodies funkier and “hotter” than cool. Art Blakey, Horace Silver, The Jazz Messengers, and so forth.

Musical examples: 1. Little White Lies, George Shearing Quintet. An early recording of theirs before the sound was totally coopted by every Muzak arranger.
2. Venus DeMilo, Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool band, music by Gerry Mulligan. Seminal recording in the cool school of the late forties to early fifties.

1960: Free Jazz

1970: Jazz-Rock Fusion

1980 and beyond: Synthesis of all styles, rise of repertory playing and “retro” players


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Not bad.

Not too bad for a January. Six totally new arrangements or compositions and three other pieces edited and recopied. I'll take that. Now what do I do for February?




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Talk for Shabbat Shirah 2015

Here's the text of the talk I gave to introduce the Shabbat Shirah service at Temple Emanu-El last night. I did run my recorder but I haven't had chance to listen to any of it yet. If it's presentable I hope to post at least my pieces here eventually.

(begin talk)

Good evening. Shabbat Shalom!

Before I begin I’d like to say a special thank you to Marjorie; in addition to her beautiful singing she found and assembled the many disparate pieces of the service tonight. I’d also like to extend my gratitude to all the musicians for their hard work and cheerful attitudes in preparing the music.

Tonight’s service celebrates that moment when the people led by Moses stood on the far shore of the Red Sea and watched the waters swallow up Pharoh’s army. They sent up a great cry and a song of thanks to god, with dancing and singing led by Miriam and Moses.

(There’s a great bit of midrash that means a lot to me after a lifetime of being told that me and “my kind” are not part of “god’s kingdom”: The midrash says that when the people began their celebrating the angels started to sing out as well, but god said “No, stop, for those being destroyed are part of my creation, too.”)

This portion has been an excuse across the ages for services filled with beautiful music. In that spirit we have music tonight that spans over five hundred years.

Our oldest composed music tonight comes from the Italian Renaissance composer, Salomone Rossi. He was born around 1570 and attracted early attention as a talented violinist. He was hired by the court in Mantua where he was so highly thought of that he was excused from wearing the yellow badge that other Jews in Mantua were forced to wear. He was a contemporary of Monteverdi and his secular instrumental and vocal compositions were highly thought of in his lifetime. He also composed many settings for Jewish liturgical use. We’re singing his Bar’chu and Mi Chamocha tonight.

Aminadav Aloni was born in Tel Aviv in 1928 and came to New York City to study at Juilliard and New York University. He was a fine pianist and composer of secular music but around 1970 he began writing more identifiably Jewish music. He moved to the Los Angeles area and worked for the film and television industry in addition to writing symphonic and vocal music on Jewish themes until his death in 1999. Tonight we’re singing his Ahavat Olam.

Robbie Solomon is a cantor and composer in the Boston area and has been known with his group SAFAM for many years. He’s written formal service settings and more pop-flavored music and has recorded several albums. We’re using one of his more formal (but still very jazzy) settings of Yismechu.

Marcello Gindlin was born in the late nineteen-sixties and raised in Buenos Aires and is currently serving as cantor at the Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue. His training and experience include music therapy in addition to cantorial and compositional work. He’s the composer of the fun tango-style setting of V’shamru that the Marjorie and the choir have been singing recently. We’re not doing that one tonight, but we are using his setting of the Candle blessing.

I was surprised to find out that our final composer tonight is not the youngest person on the list. He was born in Phoenix a year or so before Cantor Gindlin in Argentina, and formally educated in the midwest at a state school in Pennsylvania and did graduate work at Indiana University. He moved around several cities working in theater and sacred music as well as jazz and classical before settling in Tucson in the late 1990s. I think it’s safe to say though, that his music has to be just about the freshest of any you’ll hear tonight, since some of the piano parts were completed just yesterday.

Yeah, okay, I’ll drop the conceit. It’s me.

I’ve written four new pieces for the service tonight, all part of a proposed larger setting of the Shabbat evening service. (If you know anybody who wants to commission the larger work, let me know.) Just like much of Judaism springs from the central statement of the Sh’ma, all of the other pieces are developed out of the themes and harmonies stated in that setting. L’cha Dodi, Tzadik Katamar, and Hashkiveinu are all musical variations on the Sh’ma.

We’re also singing a piece I wrote a couple of years ago to fill a hole in a holiday concert by a community chorus I was conducting at the time. It’s intended for Hanukkah and talks about lighting candles in the “cold of winter” while waiting for the warmth of summer to return. This wintry theme is interspersed with a setting of Oseh Shalom that I wrote for this choir in 2011. In the spirit of the midrash I mentioned earlier (and with the suggestion of the Siddur from Sha’ar Zahav, the Golden Gate temple in San Francisco) I added the words “val kol haolam” to the request for peace for the people of Israel, so that peace may be extended to the entire world.

Until everyone knows peace, no one can know peace.

Shabbat Shalom.

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Location:N Country Club Rd, Tucson

Random?

Trying again on the randomness of the dice throws. Today seems even less productive than the last session. I'm not discouraged but I do wonder about the value of the money I invested in the dice. It's a little too early to be too concerned about that, though. I haven't even played with any of the other dice yet.

Tonight is the last rehearsal of the temple choir before tomorrow night's Shabbat Shirah service. I'm ready and I think the choir will be, too, at least after tonight's rehearsal. I need to go load up my digital recorder to capture some of tonight's work. I'll try to get some of it up on here within the next week.

Today's dice page:






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Hashkiveinu rewrites done!

I had a good day today. Managed to get the intro and inserts for the Hashkiveinu done and I have a better handle on the piano accompaniment. I even think the final orchestration is pretty much finished in my head.

I took a few minutes this afternoon and played with the dice. I sorted them all into the different sizes and then took three rolls of the eight sided dice. Didn't see much of anything in the results today, but I didn't take the time to actually play any of them. I'll try again tomorrow. (I mapped the numbers out onto the diatonic scale.)

There was a concert of the Civic Orchestra tonight. It went very well, even if it wasn't very well attended. Was it the location? The orchestra? I'm not sure. I played piano and harp parts (on the piano, of course). I even made a bone headed rookie mistake and misread the key signature in one spot. Sheesh. I've been playing and writing music for how long now?

I'm off to go put the edits and inserts into the Finale file for the Hashkiveinu. I have a rehearsal with the soloist tomorrow and I need to have at least the vocals finished.

Today's photo is of the intro and insert for the Hashkiveinu. By the way, that's F148548 they're sitting on.




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Location:S Sarnoff Dr, Tucson

Lazy Monday?

Didn't do much today on anything musical. A bag of multi-sided dice came yesterday and I'm still thinking of how to use them. Diatonically with the eight sided ones, or chromatically with the twelve side ones? What about rhythm? Dynamics? Orchestration? I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. If anyone has suggestions please leave me a comment.

While I didn't get anything on paper today I did sit and think a bit about the Hashkiveinu setting while I was waiting for an appointment. I think I see how to fix it, but I'll have to put in a good work session before I'll see if it actually works. I need to do something so that I can give it to the cantorial soloist at our rehearsal on Wednesday and the choir on Thursday.

It was a little disheartening to realize that I've accidentally lifted so much mood and shape from Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915, but like I said to Victoria when she pointed it out last week, at least I'm stealing from a good source. I'd be thrilled to have written that piece. I'm just going to embrace it and go with it. Steal big or stay home, right?

Seriously, I don't think anyone is going to mistake my piece for Barber's, but it was a nice compliment from Victoria to be compared to such a fine composer and piece.

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Location:S Sarnoff Dr,Tucson,United States

Hashkiveinu rewrites

Today's work session: revising the setting of the Hashkiveinu prayer that I wrote last week. Silly me, I forgot a whole section of the text and now I have to fit it in. That's okay, I have more orchestration details ready now.

The section I left out was the one about mental fears and monsters. It falls into nice sections with sleepy time for the opening, then the prayer for protection from the monsters and scary things out there in the night, then a prayer to save us from the scary things inside our own heads and hearts. Then it all wraps up nicely with another lullaby section.

Nicely, except I left out the scary things in our selves section. Grrrr.


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A new start?

Wow. I started this thing eight years ago and have not been good about updating it. It's been over two and a half years since I made an entry.

I hope to remedy that.

I'd like to make a post every day, even if it's just a picture or a snippet of something I'm working on.

To recap, I'm a composer, pianist, and conductor living in Tucson, Arizona. My primary job is as piano player and choral conductor for Temple Emanu-El, the first Reform Jewish congregation here in Tucson. I also fill in with the religious school and wherever else they need a music teacher or pianist. This is only a part time job, though, so I fill my time writing and working at home. I'll tell you more about that as time goes on. I don't want to use up all my material in the first post.

Here's a photo of the Baldwin piano I play at Emanuel-El on Saturday mornings.


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