'Deconstructionist' Music

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?

it wasn't so entirely lighthearted & rooted in pop, no

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

Of course, but I think that does a disservice to the spirit of the piece. I think people are imagining a greater distance between R&H and Coltrane than actually existed in '61. Sound of Music was a popular, award winning work and became even bigger in '65 with the film release and that massively selling soundtrack album. Coltrane doing MFT would seem to be a conversation as aero calls it. Through that gesture Coltrane is bringing himself and R&H's music closer together, not highlighting any binary opposition between hip and square. The irony exists solely in the mind of the audience, not in the music itself. But rather than leading to contemporary audiences embracing R&H and SoM, I think the general rock crit reading pushes them further apart. Coltrane is elevated to canonical status within the rock world, partly because he is seen as having elevated a song that the rock audience perceives as being low and kitsch into something great.

lots of cps

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

^^^ exactly. rock audiences are projecting their own arbitrary perceptions of high/low, hip/square.

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

― we don't wanna miss a THING!!! (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, September 5, 2012 11:10 AM (3 minutes ago)

a lot of the "deconstructionist" rock music under discussion yesterday is both ironic and sarcastic (and perhaps even insulting), as well as self-negating, self-sabotaging, a deliberate critique of its own chosen form. so simply locating irony in coltrane's choice of material doesn't really connect it to this tendency.

well, when you're engaging a musical culture which has had little dialogue at all with your point of reference, it'd be hard to locate irony - how had indian music previously received jazz, it at all? and vice-versa?

but let's clear - your claim is that to hear irony in jazz renditions of non-jazz tunes is to misread what the players are doing, is that right? fine if so, I think you're imputing all kinds of alien stuff to the claim of irony, just making sure

so when jazz players riff on "my favorite things" today, are they still making a commentary or just referencing coltrane? i got the sense that it's just part of jazz vocabulary now, however it started. is there really any sense of archness involved when it seems like the selections are chosen out of how well it fits the jazz idiom? I'd grant that someone's probably being arch if they took some limp bizkit song or something but "my favorite things" really doesn't sound at all out of place.

but let's clear - your claim is that to hear irony in jazz renditions of non-jazz tunes is to misread what the players are doing, is that right? fine if so, I think you're imputing all kinds of alien stuff to the claim of irony, just making sure

No. I just think the importance of that irony is vastly overstated in the case of MFT. And "jazz renditions of non-jazz tunes" is the entire foundation of jazz!

And I think this line of thinking sets up a weird dynamic where a black artist can only take influence from a white artist in an ironic way.

No. I just think the importance of that irony is vastly overstated in the case of MFT.

yeah I mean - I agree with this, as I say, I think there's a mild irony, an awareness of contrast and of transformation, but if there are people claiming there's a sarcasm (as we might imagine in Zappa covering something from a B'way show) that's obviously wrong. But I don't know that there are such people!

well there are people itt calling MFT kitsch, which would make the cover more ironic than if you don't consider it kitsch.

coltrane had played 'surrey with the fringe on top' with the davis quartet, what, three years before?

also your original mention of MFT was in the context of contenderizer's "talking about music that seems to establish a kind of love/hate relationship with a specific genre. music that is in some sense of that genre, yet remains openly hostile to or critical of it"
xp

but i'd want to claim, or at least be willing to concede

i. 'surrey with the fringe on top' is (by the standards of r+h, or any external standard) really f'n bad
ii. 'my favorite things' actually isn't
iii. it's not hard to hear *things going on* in coltrane doing 'my favorite things' that aren't going on in 'surrey' (which is on ... cookin' with? relaxin' with?)

I guess you could argue that jazz criticizes musical theater by stripping away the corny and sentimental lyrics and entire theater aspect and using it as raw harmonic and melodic material. The problem for me is that I think MFT supports two contradictory ironic readings:

The current popular reading: Coltrane the hip jazz guy covers a piece of square white kitsch and makes it hip
or
IMO, a reading that may have been more accurate to the time: A piece of popular, acclaimed "high art" music is recontextualized as underground club music.

the popular reading is based on a contemporary understanding of the worth and relevance of musical theater which doesn't reflect it's actual status and cultural dominance in 1961.

its like skrillex covering u2

i. 'surrey with the fringe on top' is (by the standards of r+h, or any external standard) really f'n bad

I disagree. The rhythm is interesting as is the repeated note which then jumps up higher at the end of each line. pretty easy to see why it would work in a jazz context.

'surrey with the fringe on top' is (by the standards of r+h, or any external standard) really f'n bad

"Surrey" was the absolute favorite song of the African-American woman who used to host a jazz program locally. I probably heard every jazz version extant via her show, and I'm sure she didn't view it as square white kitsch. I'm inclined to side with wk's second reading.

the popular reading is based on a contemporary understanding of the worth and relevance of musical theater which doesn't reflect it's actual status and cultural dominance in 1961.

SUPER OTM

OTM w. a big red cape and yellow S on its chest

this isn't a case of coltrane covering show tunes, its him doing jazz changes over what was a much-beloved - and deservedly so, it's very beautiful - popular song at the time from a broadway show that actually had - for the era - very serious undertones

nowadays we're like "oh show tunes how kitschy" or whatever like he's going into peaches & herb territory. no.

the late great your contention that there's no discontinuity whatsoever between bop and Broadway is just...weird? no one is saying "oh show tunes how kitschy" though it's necessary to keep making that claim for the argument of total continuity between John Coltrane & Rogers & Hammerstein going I guess

i like "surry with the fringe on top". what's not to like?

also, it seems to me that the "meaning" of a given jazz piece is less dependent on the choice of head/tune than what's subsequently done with it. there may have been irony or even mockery in miles' choice of "surrey" or trane's choice of "my favorite things", but the musical result seems to unify more than divide, to embrace rather than draw lines.

your contention that there's no discontinuity whatsoever between bop and Broadway is just...weird?

there's no discontinuity, there's a continuum

both are equal parts tin pan alley, right?

jazz just has some new orleans thrown in the mix and broadway has, i dunno, something else

ha i stand corrected i guess

i just really don't like 'surrey with the fringe on top', i can't really provide a rationale for it

yeah again, the biggest link between bop and broadway is probably Gershwin!

no one is saying "oh show tunes how kitschy"

but you kind of are?

no, I'm not

jazz just has some new orleans thrown in the mix and broadway has, i dunno, something else

music hall iirc

yeah, that's what i was thinking

well "oh show tunes how square" at least.
xp

music hall iirc

and uh... jazz.

Gershwin and Cole Porter had fully integrated a jazz influence into musical theater and jazz musicians had absorbed their influence back into jazz before Coltrane was even born.

i wouldn't leap to describe bway showtunes as a fusion of tin pan alley and jazz though. tin pan alley + music hall makes more sense to me, though jazz definitely figures in.

he means JAZZ not BOP

yeah, i know, even so

would like to learn a bit more about 19th century bway stuff tbh

yes, the jazz of the 20s was integrated or at least available to the broadway shows of the 40s, and i think the swing end of things in the 30s was available to them too

i don't think it was called broadway at that point, it was called music hall, right?