Jazz Creativity Monday January 22, 2007
I recently met and photographed Mr Johnny Roadhouse, who used to be an important figure on the UK jazz music scene. He was, amongst many other things, a musician with the BBC for 35 years. He seems not such an important jazz figure as pianist Stan Tracey, featured in a superb BBC documentary a few years ago, but was nonetheless a well known sax player a few decades ago. The time, you know, when jazz was jazz and not merely called jazz but resembling funk, swing, and general lounge music. Respect. Tracey himself spent many years as the house pianist at Ronnie Scott’s, the famous London venue, and in the documentary when asked what he’d thought of the developing new sound, so called jazz fusion, replied “not a lot”.
I realise for most people, this photo is merely of an elderly fella with a saxophone. Big deal. There are some talented jazz musicians around, but there’s an awful lot of lounge music dross. And people like Roundhouse and Tracey are old school geezers from a better jazz era.
Johnny said “as Louis Armstrong said, if you have to ask what jazz is, that’s not it”. I myself am interested in this issue; his remark was responding to the conversation I initiated, when I expressed some of the preceding ideas: the demise of authentic jazz, and the associated difficulty of saying what it is. Ten minutes later instrument repairer John, resident worker upstairs at Johnny’s shop in Manchester, referred to the “psychology of jazz”. So I’m not alone – it’s an interesting subject – and it’s inherently related to the subject of creativity.
Wynton Marsalis said
The real power and innovation of jazz is that a group of people come together and create art – improvised art – and can negotiate their agendas with each other. And that negotiation is the art (Crouch 2002 Jazz: A History of America’s Music).
Improvisation and moment-by-moment negotiation with musical colleagues is inherent to jazz. I asked Johnny if you had to blow hard with the saxophone and he explained no, you don’t. “Music”, he said, “is hard and soft”. Sometimes it’s loud, sometimes it’s quiet, but the sax doesn’t need a terrific breath. Sometimes, he said, jazz just depends on how you’re feeling. This differs from the idea that a composition has an intrinsic message, an inbuilt authority, that a musician seeks to discover in deference to who wrote it. I don’t think this should be regarded as a mystique; the fact is jazz musicians constantly repeat the ideas and insights of former accomplishment. However it’s qualitatively different from other musical forms, classical in particular, where the composer is idealised as the paramount genius.
In the same book, Jazz: A History of America’s Music, Duke Ellington is quoted as saying
Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct (439).
It’s not wholly Dionysiac, but Apollonian structure is not in the essence of jazz. In this respect, when you look into it, jazz is an interesting model for creativity. While form exists, structures, accomplishments and inherited models, we shouldn’t be confined by them.
In Jazz Files (1986) Steward and Harrison say
Classical musicians spend their lives learning how to play, note for note, somebody else’s music better than another musician. But jazz musicians spend their lives learning their instruments so that they can think, and thus execute what they think, better than their peers. So every time you hear a familiar tune, it sounds fresh, because every solo the guy plays is different. The jazz musician is always investigating his instrument. 12
The difference then is jazz musicians are most interested in discovering and refining the capabilities of their instrument, more than realising the received wisdom of a composer. It’s a subtle distinction, and no doubt one that would need investigating further involving counter arguments and contrary examples, but I suspect there’s some truth in it. The saxophone for example, it seems to me, is a far more iconic image than any classical instrument. It represents a means of self expression whereas a violin for example, to me has associations with Mozart, whatever, which is a different culture and psychology more concerned with tradition than creativity.
In jazz, form is less sacrosanct in relation to improvised creativity; James Poling in World Of Jazz (1962) says
Music, like oratory, is not only something said, but something said in a certain way; and since it appeals exclusively to the emotions, the manner of delivery is crucial…The way a jazz note is attacked in jazz differs sharply from the way it is attacked in classical performance. In the latter the attack is gradual in volume but constant in pitch, and the change in volume is upward – from soft to loud. In jazz both volume and pitch change; the note is attacked full, then diminished in volume, while the pitch drops too…In classical performance…each note it attacked individually and cleanly. What results from the jazz technique is the sounding of tones which are foreign to classical music…To describe the effect of this way of playing music – to describe what the listener hears – is scarcely possible. Certain things we can indeed pick out: the introduction of fractional tones…is strange and distinctly stimulating; the vibrato of the wind instruments imparts a feeling of suppressed passion; the barely perceptible diminuendo which follows each note is subtly suggestive of melancholy. But the total effect is something that must be left to the individual (14).