My hands are sore from much piano playing, typing, and dish cleaning.
My brain is tired and unable to concentrate on reading material.
I've been drinking.
And I really don't care enough about jazz.
But I will try to write something.
A lot of my previous experience with jazz has been somewhat negative. A pizza restaurant in my hometown would constantly play jazz, either live or recorded, so I developed a weird Pavlovian connection between jazz and pizza. Maybe that was the point.
Then in high school, whenever my school orchestra did these adjudication things, the jazz bands from each participating school would perform at the very end of the day, after hours and hours of high school orchestras and wind ensembles. So I then began to associate jazz with the end of a weary day.
The pieces I listened to for tonight's assignment sounded nothing like any jazz I had heard before. First I listened to (Soul Fusion) Freewoman and O, This Freedom's Slave Cries by Charles Mingus. I knew that Charles Mingus was a big influence on Radiohead, one of my favorite bands. I admit I did hear snatches of what could have influenced songs like The National Anthem (listen to the brass that arrives in at 2:39, then goes crazy).
Freewoman opened with some absolutely beautiful piano harmonies, and soon it developed into more of a jazz piece. There was a recognizable refrain of sorts. I heard a fairly standard jazz instrumentation, with flute added. It was very enjoyable stuff, with complex grooves and some passionate, crunching harmonies. I want to hear more!
Next I listened to John Zorn's Forbidden Fruit. Is this jazz? Because it really sounds like something that should have been in the New Romanticists section. I heard a collage: Beethoven string quartets and vocal samples pitted against contemporary techniques. Seriously, though, is this jazz? It's not even jazz instrumentation. That said, it was pretty damn cool.
Then I watched a video of John Zorn and friends performing Cobra. And here I realized the common thread between this music and standard jazz: improvisation. There was a lot of communication between the performers, and new improvisatory elements like symbolic signs that made it more of a game.
That's about all I've got tonight,
One more thing, though. Tonight I went to a metal show at someone's house. I knew someone in the band, and I was also scouting out guitarists and drummers for this avant-garde rock band piece I plan to write. It was incredibly enjoyable, and it was so visceral. There were a couple dozen people crammed into a little room with no stage, and the lead singer ran around screaming into people's faces. The music was loud, dissonant, and rhythmically complex, but everyone in the room loved being there. An hour later I found myself at a composition recital on campus. The music was great, but the staid atmosphere and the ritual of sitting silently, coughing during movement breaks, and clapping felt like a major buzzkill after having my ears pummeled guitars and drums and being surrounded by people moving their bodies and grinning.
The music sounded sort of like this great song by The Dillinger Escape Plan. It is so wonderfully alive and angry and in your face.
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