Jazz Thursday November 16, 2006
I go through musical phases where I play different kinds of music at different times, and when I play nothing. For the last year or two I’ve been playing jazz more than any other form, and I find it the most soothing and consoling music there is – even more than Bach or Handel. With rock music, I usually find I can only play it in limited quantities before it starts to feel enervating, whereas jazz is different in that respect. It is less demanding, so it is easier to listen to.
I’ve never really understood the ‘meaning’ of jazz because it is supposed to be make-it-up improvisation, but in practice is not like that: a CD contains well known set pieces which anyone else could also play, if they so wished. But they jam together spontaneously until they find a great melody? Well, so do other musicians, in the process of musical development. But they allow for moments of solo improvisation in live performance? Yes but within limits, and this is not totally unique. Rock chick PJ Harvey for example also varies her performance, according to how she feels on the night.
The few times I’ve seen live jazz, I’ve enjoyed the way a band spirals around without a direction or plan, and then suddenly coheres. There’s an interaction between the players, as they listen and respond to each other in the immediate moment. This is a distinctively jazz characteristic, although not so surprising when – again – musicians do this all the time when they are creating new work. Clarinet player goes off on his own for a few minutes, drums and trumpet become more quiet, listening to the progression and waiting not only for it to complete, but also for the moment when they re-enter. It’s not unique so we might have to use other definitions to classify jazz – classical and semi-classical instruments freed from classical restraints, perhaps – but jazz does present you with the visible creative process. Thus an audience will interrupt with applause after moments of improvisation or passion, because they are attuned to the unpredictable trajectory. The players interact, and then the audience interacts, because it is free form in spirit, if not in reality. A classical movement is very different, far more sculptured and precise: in fact the quality of the work depends on how faithful it is to the meaning of the score, as crafted by the composer. The conductor can interpret Mozart individually, and the same symphony can vary considerably according to who plays it. But this is not personal interpretation so much as the endeavor to discover and present the authentic musical idea, conceived by the genius. The inflexions of rhythm, emphasis and mood have to be intuited by the experienced musical interpreter who has been immersed in Mozart for many years, giving him a subtle understanding of Mozart’s intentions and style. But conductor A will arrive at different conclusions to conductor B, and who can say which is a more authentic representation of the Mozart template?
These questions present you with the dynamic balance between content and form. Marshall McLuhan famously suggested that ‘the medium is the message’ and although he wasn’t referring to music, it’s an applicable remark. Part of the fun of jazz is the feeling of playful freedom, so the medium is what makes it. Classical is…classical: reminding you of Greek architecture, expensive chilled wines, expensive Steinway pianos, and BBC received pronunciation. Rock is combined with roll, i.e. sexual and reveling in a kind of baseline human catharsis. The tunes are sculpted and defined, but in a live performance are varied and enlivened with raw emotions. And jazz? Jazz plays with the creativity, the dance between form and content, and has always been associated with cool i.e. laid back, don’t care, anti-establishment flow. It is non-committal, and on that basis the trajectory can follow any direction. Classical is pro-establishment based on discipline and tradition, rock is opposed to it with raw emotional beats, and jazz is opposed to it in the creative process.
About two years ago I was contracted to develop a community web site for artists, educators and managers searching for innovative practice and creative advance, and one of the books I referred to was John Kao’s Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity. He suggests that the creative process as depicted and exemplified in jazz is a good management model which, as with education, is often stuck in formal old-school methods. In the psychological field, Robert Fritz begins his study The Path of Least Resistance describing how he used the creative attitude and spontaneous methods of musicians to inspire his methodology of personal and institutional change. The first step is to recognize the importance of structure and the reactive orientation, whereby productive change is construed as a reaction against prevailing conditions. This is inherently limited, because it lacks creativity: what you have to do is change the underlying structure, not react against it. In the martial arts, Bruce Lee’s re-interpretation of traditional styles was like a sophisticated jazz improvisation, based on extensive familiarity with classical structure and the mind-set that accompanies it. He called the latter the ‘classical mess’, and he recognised the cult-like tendencies of martial art schools which advocate deference and submission rather than creative thinking, and the value of the ‘system’ rather than the person. Lee got his ideas from a variety of sources that included Taoism, Zen, Krishnamurti, and progressive educational theory. He analysed the different traditions in China, Japan, Europe and America and defined the component parts on which they are based, providing a general attribute template for all martial arts. His methods were fundamentally conceptual, combined with vigorous systematic training.
And finally in the art arena, surrealism challenged and undermined the traditions and assumptions of classical and conventional methods. It was unique, compared to other kinds of spontaneous artistry, because of its deference to unconscious process. Creative artists – including jazz musicians and Bruce Lee – sometimes refer to the unconscious in a vague way, as the ground of creative response. But the surrealists were interested in the more specific attributes of the hidden psyche, as conceived/interpreted by Freud. Thus, you see sexual and dream-like imagery in their work, according to free-form unconscious logic. You can dream that a lobster is a telephone, so why not paint it? Surrealism questions the nature of apparent form and our perception of it, as a basis for creativity. Contemporary Art Therapy works with the same psychological terrain – the unconscious – expressing hidden conflicts through a symbolic medium, reconfiguring those conflicts and facilitating a healing process. The difference is that surrealist methods are regarded as an aesthetic, whereas Art Therapy is a means to a private therapeutic end.
The differentiation between form and content underlies artistic endeavor, and meaning is derived from their dynamic interaction. In terms of brain function, structure and spontaneity correspond to the left and right hemispheres respectively. Creativity derives from a balanced interaction between the two acknowledging the utility of the existing building blocks, but insisting they can be assembled or discarded any way you like. In these examples of art, management, therapy, martial arts and music, the factor of play is a common theme. Creativity is playful, beginning in childhood with drawing and make-believe games when children reconfigure the world as part of their psychological development, making it coherent in their own terms. Jazz feels ‘light’ compared to rock music, and has a quintessentially creative ethos.
I half-watched the film Stealing Beauty on TV about two years ago, and there was a line where someone was described as smoking cigarettes and listening to jazz in the dark. Well the first part of that is rather foul – smelly and yuck, rather than cool – but the second two are rather nice. Jazz. In the dark.
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