February 2007
- 8
What Is Jazz?
As part of an on-going photographic project I’ve been asking people ‘what is jazz?’. I’m producing a series of interview portraits located here, using this space as an improvised studio: It’s a complicated subject, but uncertainty and hesitancy in addressing it should not, I think, prevent or obscure it from being done. I’ve found it tends to be addressed in subjective terms, closely associated with personal enjoyment. ‘Jazz’ then becomes a favourable label, attributed to what…
- 13
Jazz Is
I did a course called the Tragic Play at university, and it was one of the most enjoyable and memorable parts of my first degree. Greek tragedy is a world in itself, and a great one. I’ve been remembering Euripides’ play The Bacchae, where the god Dionysus is the central figure, and considering how jazz is Dionysiac. He inspires madness, ecstasy and abandonment, usually in a group context. The god Apollo doesn’t feature in the…
- 19
Existential Landscape
1) Desert In Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide To Getting Lost, she says wistfully I once loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It wasn’t particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert’s invitation. There the geology that underlies lusher landscapes is exposed to the eye, and this gives it a skeletal elegance, just as its harsh conditions –…
- 25
Jazz And Improvisation
A little chill-out tune while you read: There is a crucial difference in terms of the way in which performers approach music. If you are playing in a symphony orchestra of if you are playing a piece of chamber music, you are trying, often against fairly heavy odds, to find out what somebody has meant when they said something. And I think that a jazz player, for example, is saying what is in him. He puts…