'Deconstructionist' Music

The Godz are another example of this.

Nickelback are another example of this.

I believe there's this thing called sampling too

I think it's pretty common for rock dudes to read irony into My Favorite Things where there is none, and therefore to overestimate its significance within the overall context of jazz.

can you support this claim or is it a hunch?

yeah i'm not trying to pick any fights here since this thread is dead to me already but i've never heard anybody suggest anything like that re: coltrane

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5qhhhVWmU1qcs2ab.jpg

yes, those were the same words he used in that movie

or close enough

After slipping in some Devo, I've made a 60-minute mix of stuff that would fit in with this thread. I'll try and get it uploaded at some point soon.

I think it's pretty common for rock dudes to read irony into My Favorite Things where there is none, and therefore to overestimate its significance within the overall context of jazz.

can you support this claim or is it a hunch?

A jazz dude rather than a rock dude, but:

http://www.secretsocietymusic.org/darcy_james_argues_secret/2007/09/irony-man.html

All of the standards I listed above would clearly, clearly have been understood by audiences at the time as being ironic choices. But through a combination of the passage of time, the ascendence of the "Jazz Education" industry, the museumification of jazz, and and the overblown mythologizing of the "Great American Songbook," they have somehow been drained of their ironic bite and cultural significance.

But for audiences at the time, these songs were not "standards." They were covers -- reinterpretations of recent pop songs that had specific, current cultural associations. It's not just that the songs were familiar, it's that they meant something. When audiences in 1961 heard Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," they immediately thought of The Sound of Music, the Trapp family singers, "Doh, A Deer," "Edelweiss," Broadway kitch, Austria, WWII, all the rest. The show had been playing on B'way for less than a year before Coltrane recorded his cover version. (The movie version with Julie Andrews would not be released until 1965.)

Why is it that when Trane and Sonny use irony as part of their art, we understand that there is an underlying seriousness to what they are doing, but younger musicians can't touch irony with a ten-foot pole, lest they be dismissed a joke?

yeah, sounds reasonable to assume that most of Coltrane's audience would assume "My Favourite Things" was ironic given that they probably hadn't heard the original

may be letting the idea that "ironic" covers are the preserve of indie dweebs colour my perception tho

Wow, what a lot of thread. I think there's been some misconstruing here of the approach of bands like US Maple or whatever as being ironic or merely disassembling and reassembling sounds. And personally I don't buy the notion that deconstruction is purely a technique of reading; from what I remember of my undergrad days, and I may be remembering this wrong, Derrida himself said that deconstruction is a process that is always happening, whether we read it or not.

So for me it seems perfectly valid to read or analyse a given text (whether a literal text, or a concept like a musical genre, or even music itself) and take that as inspiration to perform an action (I want to say 'something tangible' but of course making music isn't that, apart from the playing) of deconstructing its binary oppositions (melody versus dissonance, etc) and rebuilding into something more true to what it is in itself, not what it is in contrast to something else (of course even in saying that you can argue I'm contradicting myself - and that's what's fun about philosophy).

Though I love Devo, I feel that what they did/are doing is getting into another territory, the nested dolls of bricolage, counter-bricolage, anti-counter-bricolage and so on. Still interesting, but different.

The Better Beatles & Culturcide?

There's definitely a camp/kitsch factor abounding on 'My Favourite Things'. I don't know what a modern-day equivalent might be, but you'd have to appreciate the more lighthearted aspects of "serious jazz dude" re-purposing a popular showtune and yet using it as a display of pure musical might.

I don't know how much it fits in with this thread's concept of "deconstruction" because it's still recognisably a cover of a song in another genre. Here we're talking about a style or aesthetic that's somehow been "taken apart".

I was thinking a bit more about this last night and remembering how in my younger days people would describe Autechre as "hip-hop", whereas all I heard was experimental electronica. It took a while for me to understand the connection, but now it makes a fair bit of sense. Autechre have always cited hip-hop and breaks as a central influence on their music. Break off all the abstruse branches and splinters and you will see that Ae's central core (or engine if we're gonna go back to the car analogy) is made of hip-hop. They share the same operating system, it's just that Ae have meddled with the subroutines.

Now I'm wondering about why I think Devo's version of 'Satisfaction' fits here but Coltrane's 'Favourite Things' doesn't...

Maybe it's because the Devo cover is almost entirely re-fabricated save for the lyrics. Even the topline vocal melody has been broken down into this stuttered yelp - a bizarro darkside version of Mick Jagger's sultry drawl. The rest of the music is bare-bones, but then so was much of the Stones' music stripped down and raw. The Devo cover is like looking at an exploded diagram of the original. I don't get this feeling with My Favourite Things.

There's definitely a camp/kitsch factor abounding on 'My Favourite Things'. I don't know what a modern-day equivalent might be, but you'd have to appreciate the more lighthearted aspects of "serious jazz dude" re-purposing a popular showtune and yet using it as a display of pure musical might.

this is nonsense

i wonder how ironic he and miles were being that same year when they played "some day my prince will come"

yeah, sounds reasonable to assume that most of Coltrane's audience would assume "My Favourite Things" was ironic given that they probably hadn't heard the original

if they hadn't heard the original, how would they have associated it with kitsch?

There's definitely a camp/kitsch factor abounding on 'My Favourite Things'. I don't know what a modern-day equivalent might be, but you'd have to appreciate the more lighthearted aspects of "serious jazz dude" re-purposing a popular showtune and yet using it as a display of pure musical might.

See I think it's just a great melody and Coltrane recognized that. He wasn't trying to elevate something he thought was kitsch into high art.

But my bigger point was that ironic or not, Coltrane's cover was hardly an innovation. A huge part of jazz's foundation was built on a cover of a corny song from a musical! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_changes

See I think it's just a great melody and Coltrane recognized that

people who covered rodgers & hammerstein songs from 1956-1961: sarah vaughn, frank sinatra, j j johnson, glen miller, ahmad jamal, ray conniff, stan kenton, kenny dorham, cannonball adderley, lena horne

so it's not like a way out of left-field thing to cover a rodgers & hammerstein song

and rodgers & hart were hugely popular w/ jazz dudes so it wouldn't have been a big leap sideways to rodgers & hammerstein

and ironic or not, it can't be read as a critique of jazz itself (at least i don't think it invites such a reading)

so it's not like a way out of left-field thing to cover a rodgers & hammerstein song

yeah, exactly

Now I'm wondering about why I think Devo's version of 'Satisfaction' fits here but Coltrane's 'Favourite Things' doesn't...

It's not that I don't think there was any humor or irony in jazz, but I don't think it was attached with the same level of cynicism that a contemporary rock audience reads into it. I think it was a more openminded borrowing. And because of that I think people read a bigger distance into My Favorite Things than there really was. But Devo or Residents doing Satisfaction definitely have less distance. They're still operating within their own genre I guess.

The big elephant in the room (re: residents, devo) is Zappa. But I think people overestimate the level of cynicism there too. I think it was Julian Cope who compared Zappa to Faust and claimed that while the Mothers were these really cynical guys who hated Louie Louie and covered it in a mocking way, the Krautrock bands genuinely loved that music. But it seems obvious to me that Zappa had a real affection for it too.

A jazz dude rather than a rock dude, but:

this completely undermines the claim that irony-finding is an outsider's wrongheaded view

the irony isn't a two-dimension dumb irony, i think the problem here is that people seem to be using irony as if it weren't a sophisticated artistic device. "My Favorite Things" is from square culture, safe white culture - jazz is avant-garde, especially bop. The irony in "My Favorite Things" isn't "ha ha, I'm playing 'My Favorite Things,' isn't that hilarious" - that's like amoeba-grade irony. The irony is in musical conversation between things that would be thought of, my non-musicians & probably by some musicians, as incompatible, and in how fluid that conversation in, how much there is for the jazz rendition to show us about the thing in which we did not previously here jazz. It's a free ride when you've already paid, you know.

my = by as almost fuckin always all my fuckin life

"My Favorite Things" is from square culture, safe white culture

I don't really agree with this but either way, isn't the same true of Gershwin?

What's the difference between the subtler form of irony you're talking about with MFT and say The Beatles doing a Buck Owens cover?

and anyway coltrane was FROM square culture, he'd been in the air force band like glenn miller!

lol a stint in the air force band does not make Coltrane a square - and besides, all players know that AFB/Navy band is player central, those guys are on point

should own up that most readings that people think of as crude "ha ha" irony don't strike me that way - "Act Naturally," for example. I think the Beatles do that because it's a great tune and a clever lyric; I don't think the Beatles are saying "Buck Owens is dumb" - they're musicians, they know Buck Owens is incredible

maybe not but i think it would be an easier case to project that onto coltrane's thinking ca. "my favorite things" than his attitudes of the 60s

by project i mean project the square attitude onto him

well, I mean - dude grew up in nowheresville, NC, right - but he's been making the scene for a while by the time he does "My Favorite Things." he's played with Miles & Monk, played Newport, done Giant Steps - he's for sure a heavy intellectual imo but his immersion in jazz as culture and his presence as a moving force in it is sure, I think. there's a divide between the culture in which his music is made and the culture of Rogers & Hammerstein, but a musician doesn't really acknowledge that divide as valuable: there's more to learn by contrasting crafts. irony is contrast, especially when, right, a guy from the avant-garde is putting "My Favorite Things" over modal changes.

surely the listener can locate irony in coltrane's "my favorite things" regardless of coltrane's intent

by that logic you could locate whatever you want in it

max if you start with that I'm gonna give you such a punch

should own up that most readings that people think of as crude "ha ha" irony don't strike me that way - "Act Naturally," for example. I think the Beatles do that because it's a great tune and a clever lyric; I don't think the Beatles are saying "Buck Owens is dumb" - they're musicians, they know Buck Owens is incredible

Exactly. And in the same way, TSOM is not kitsch, it's great! And Coltrane obviously felt the same way or he probably wouldn't have taken a song from it as a jumping off point for a 13 minute improvisation. So I don't know, maybe there's an irony inherent to a jazz musician borrowing influence from square white culture, but that doesn't mean Coltrane did that as a statement. I think he chose the song for purely musical reasons but I don't have any proof to back that up.

There's a similar dynamic at play within hip hop sampling. Where's the line between simply sampling a great break vs making some kind of hidden gesture or getting a kick out of the idea that the great break came from the Monkees? It's like the white rock audience and critical community has this weird self-hating thing going on where assume that a black artist couldn't genuinely enjoy "square white" music on its own terms without some layer of irony.

i dont think im saying anything that pomo or weird

xp

i don't know if it would be right to call coltrane a heavy avant-garde dude in 1961, when ornette coleman was doing "free jazz" the same year and what eric dolphy was doing and so on etc

miles and monk played all that songbook shit too and probably engaged w/ it even more than coltrane

i feel like this conversation is imposing this post-70s "jazz is the black rock fire music of beatnik rebellion" onto what was basically a given at the time, which is that dudes would play modal changes over a good tune regardless of whether monk had written it or rodgers had written it.

and the idea that "the sound of music" is some safe pedestrian shit is funny too

jazz dudes please school me on this but i thought taking riffs from pop songs and running with them was standard practice in jazz -- like it's just an established ritual that doesn't necessarily bring with it any trappings of irony or appreciation of the original. don't they still do that in jazz of today?

right, but it's not completely meaningless when they grab that tune from, as elsewhere on the same record, antiquity (Greensleeves) - there's play there, there's some irony. I think Trane's point is actually yours, that music is a vast conversation and that a new way of approaching it shows us new ways of hearing things, but another layer is the irony of a (what I'll hold still counts as avant-garde post-Ornette) jazzman playing a medieval melody

jazz dudes please school me on this but i thought taking riffs from pop songs and running with them was standard practice in jazz

afaik yes? and I think there's an affectionate irony in it. idk I think people have this conflation of irony with sarcasm or insult that's really limiting and dumb

The irony is in musical conversation between things that would be thought of, my non-musicians & probably by some musicians, as incompatible, and in how fluid that conversation in, how much there is for the jazz rendition to show us about the thing in which we did not previously here jazz. It's a free ride when you've already paid, you know.

― we don't wanna miss a THING!!! (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, September 5, 2012 10:33 AM (13 minutes ago)

i still don't hear the incompatibility. i instead hear some rather self-consciously "serious" musicians taking a break from that identity to play something light, popular and beautiful, something they genuinely seem to enjoy and respect. it's not as though there's no awareness of irony and incongruity, but the musical embrace of the piece seems completely earnest.

xp

well i'm sure he must've studied some classical / medieval music at some point - well actually i know he did - so is it equally ironic when he begins to deploy indian classical / medieval melodies or only ironic when it fits into a neat narrative of jazz dudes vs squares

i instead hear some rather self-consciously "serious" musicians taking a break from that identity to play something light, popular and beautiful, something they genuinely seem to enjoy and respect.

as if the other stuff they were playing was dark, heavy and alienating?