Music Appreciation Thread

seeirwin

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This is a space to share your love of a particular style (hip hop, thrash metal, industrial, bluegrass, or whatever!), artist, or album. What do you like about the music? What can you share with people here to help us discover new things in the music?
 
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Bebop

Bebop is a style of performing music, and any song can be played in a bebop style. One aspect of the particular aesthetic of bebop is to play long passages of notes in a rapid, steady succession. The quickness and evenness of the notes gives bebop a characteristic aggressive frenetic feel. It can feel like listening to a manic, run-on sentence. How does this help? “Bebop” is a name that was given after the fact to the way a group of musicians made the intentional decision to perform popular songs of the day. The fact that bebop was the style played over a pre-existing songs, rather than a school of composition makes it much easier for the listener to find a way in because the song supplying the raw materials for the soloist’s performance may be familiar to the listener. And, even if the song is new to the listener, the popular songs often had predictable and repetitive forms.

Repetition might be your way in, and was ultimately a causative factor in many bebop players’ transition out of bebop and into new styles

Consider the children’s song Old MacDonald Had a Farm. That song has two main melodies. Melody A is “Old MacDonald Had a Farm e i e i o.” The part that goes “and on that farm he had a cow” also uses Melody A. Melody B is the “with a moo moo here…” part. The overall form of the song is melody A, melody A again, melody B, and melody A for a third time. After that, the whole song repeats. This is such a common song form that it is usually referred to as AABA. Depending on your level of musical training, you may or may not have a difficult time hearing when the form ends and starts again (the bebop equivalent of every time a new animal is introduced into the Old MacDonald song). If a bebop song has more than one soloist (e.g. a saxophone and a trumpet), a fun and interesting way in is to try and remember that both the saxophone player and the trumpet player are making up their solos over the exact same form. To continue the ridiculous Old MacDonald analogy, you might imagine it as similar to each soloist getting to freely choose the animal on the farm when it’s their turn to solo. Once the soloist chooses the animal, there are rules of the form of Old MacDonald that dictate how the soloist will incorporate the noise that animal makes to complete their verse. In order for it to make sense, everyone has to agree that “quack” is a noise that is appropriate for the animal named, and the singer has to fit it into the rhythmic space afforded by the “with a __________ here and a _________ there, here a ___________, there a ________, everywhere a __________.” Like Old MacDonald, a song played in the bebop style can go on forever. You can sing one verse or ten, you can trade off with friends, and–if you are forced to sing it every night for hours on end–you might eventually end up making little musical jokes or weird references once you’ve exhausted all of the straightforward options.

One of the joys of jazz is listening to how the musicians interact…

This is definitely NOT bebop, but it’s a wonderful and charming example of the interactions between soloists. Here, Louis Prima sings the song “Pennies from Heaven,” and saxophonist Sam Butera tries to immediately repeat every one of Louis Prima’s phrases. As the call-and-response develops, Louis Prima begins to toy with Sam Butera and try to sing a phrase the saxophonist can’t quite get.
A similar dynamic unfolds in the opening of the Charlie Parker classic “Ornithology.” At the end of the first statement of the melody, the piano imitates the rapid succession of notes just played by the saxophones, guitar, and trumpet (this happens at 18 seconds), before developing it into a new phrase. When the same musical moment comes around again at 34 seconds, the same riff is repeated by several different instruments (trumpet, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, guitar) before Charlie Parker launches into his solo. Even though the goal isn’t to copy each other as in the opening of Ornithology, bebop soloists are still playing the same thing on a deeper level underneath the notes of their melodies; the song provides a repetitive structure with rules, and each soloist enters that space to create music (it’s good to remember that there is nothing binding the soloist to follow the rules!). As you hear Charlie Parker solo on the alto saxophone, Miles Davis solo on the trumpet, and Lucky Thompson solo on the tenor saxophone, what similarities do you notice? What differences do you notice? Does one seem to play faster? Do any of the soloists seem to repeat ideas? Does one soloists playing feel more “jumpy?”
Much of the classic repertoire of bebop is highly repetitive so listening to the way each soloist within a song (or across different versions of a song) handles the “same material” is always an interesting exercise. As a final example of this type of listening, here is “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane. This song is famously opaque to many listeners. What differences do you hear between the saxophone solo and the piano solo? Can you hear when it sounds like the piano player runs into difficulty playing in this style and the rhythm gets choppy? Do you hear when the piano player turns to playing chords and leaving lots of space? Can you hear the comparative certainty and intensity when John Coltrane jumps back in for another short solo? The pianist Tommy Flanagan was a very talented improviser. What does that tell you about the difficulty of the song?
 
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Bebop (continued)

Ready to dive into the mechanics of the song itself? No musical background required!

If you read the previous piece on in-groups and out-groups, you’ll recall that the roots of bebop are intentionally exclusionary. While us listeners may not be able to play an uninterrupted string of improvised notes, it wouldn’t have been a high enough barrier to entry to define the bebop aesthetic as long strings of notes played at fast speeds. In addition to the run-on-sentence feel alluded to earlier, bebop musicians created alternate and/or additional structures that they would impose onto pre-existing songs. The additional constraints had the dual benefits of fostering creativity for those in the know, and creating confusing, unspoken rules for those on the outside. Here’s Duke Ellington playing “C Jam Blues.” Here is Roland Kirk playing the Charlier Parker tune “Blues for Alice.” On a fundamental level, these songs are structurally identical. If you listen to the piano parts on both songs, however, you may be able to hear that the piano on Blues for Alice sounds “busier.” Blues for Alice takes the relatively simple structure of a Blues (that’s the name of the form, like AABA is a form) and complicates it by dramatically increasing the number of chords in the song from 3 to 15. Fortunately, there is a logic to the types of complexity that are typically added to a song to give it a bebop feel. The following videos break down how a blues gets transformed into Blues for Alice. They do not assume any musical background on the part of the viewer so don’t be intimidated by the presence of the piano! That said, if you know the answer to the question suggested in the title, feel free to skip ahead.
What is a five-one?
What is a two-five-one?
What is a “chord substitution?”
What are “Bird changes?”

Something added

If you still don’t feel like you fully understand these concepts, or you don’t know how to hear them in the music, that’s okay! Let’s take a step back from fives and ones and blues and birds. Like any innovation, bebop needed to remove and/or add some aspects of the music from which it developed. A few of the key additions were substitutions (changing some chords in already popular songs into entirely different chords) and adding extra chords between the existing chords (e.g. Bird changes). There are rules for how to handle both of these, and these rules were simple enough for the in-group players to use freely and in inventive ways, while also being innovative enough to make it hard for members in the out-group to hear what is happening. As suggested in the two-five-one video, a player can arrive at any conceivable chord by way of a [series of] two-five-one and depart from that chord to any other using another [series of] two-five-one. In this way, the difference between older styles of jazz improvisation and bebop playing is a bit like the difference between people who book flights with a small number of legs vs. the people who book flights in the most convoluted way possible in order to rack up the most rewards miles.

If C Jam Blues is a New York to Los Angeles non-stop flight, Blues for Alice is a Boston to New York flight with stops in San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, and Houston.

Much of the complexity and activity you hear behind the soloist in bebop is the equivalent of racking up these extra miles between two locations that are really quite close to one another. You don’t need to worry about every little detail happening in bebop. Consider Confirmation one more time. The song is a close relative to Blues for Alice, using many of the same devices. If you listen to it one more time, can you hear parts that get repeated? The song is in the AABA form and it uses the Blues for Alice trick to get from the first big idea chord to the second big idea chord. Can you feel the “slinky going down the stairs” with the cascade of two-five-ones? Maybe not, and that’s okay! What do you think of the piano solo vs. the saxophone solo? You don’t need to hear everything all at once to find a way into the music…

Something taken away

After thinking about the extra pieces bebop introduced to playing jazz, it might be interesting think about something taken away: the melody. In the previous post, you heard that Donna Lee is the “same song” as (Back Home in) Indiana. The same is true of Ornithology (see above in this post) and “How High the Moon.” Why get rid of the familiar melody and replace it with a new, unfamiliar melody (one that is likely much more difficult to sing or hum)? Is this more material for constructing out-groups? Maybe. It certainly didn’t make the material more accessible. A big factor in stripping away the existing melody in favor of something new was almost certainly the influence of the actual recording medium (in this case 78 RPM shellac records) on the music.
 
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Cool jazz/West Coast jazz


The bandleader does not play a solo. For most of the five-and-a-half minutes of the song, he alternates between two simple chords. Likewise, the bassist eschews the typical insistent thump-thump-thump-thump rhythm for a series very simple three note patterns. The music is unhurried. The saxophonist’s playing is fluid and varied without feeling busy. His understated playing and the soft-spoken round sound invite sustained attention. The drummer begins the song with a swing feel in full support of the band, before launching into a solo that lasts for over 2 minutes and is characterized just as much by silence as it is by accented drum hits. The song is an original tune written by one of the band members, and it is not in the typical 4/4 time signature.

Everybody is not playing bebop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmDDOFXSgAs

In many ways, the story of bebop is the story of a musical arms race that ends with the mutually-assured destruction of the style. An iconoclastic performance aesthetic appended to otherwise conventional music, bebop could not grow in perpetuity. Musicians trying to upstage one another with even faster playing and more complicated chord substitutions necessarily resulted in music that was opaque for many listeners, and lacking in enough degrees of creative freedom or players.

Cool jazz extends a warm welcome to anyone who may feel like they are on the outside looking in at bebop.

Cool jazz is style of doing, not out-doing. The idea of musicians competing to out-cool each other, out-relax one another, or out-invite the listener in to the music is as silly as it sounds. It is a genre in which artists are too busy using the musical space in painterly ways to worry so much about gate-keeping. As such, it is also a style not bound by too many rules. Fast tempos () can be cool. Block chords can provide a characteristic feel of cool jazz CONCORDE () on the piano, but Gerry Mulligan’s and Chet Baker’s piano-less quartet is every bit as cool (). Speaking of Chet Baker, his performing is cool jazz whether he plays the trumpet or sings ().

Because it is not too rigid, whether music is cool jazz or not is fairly subjective. Much of Miles Davis’s playing on music that others might identify as belonging to Hard Bop (), or Modal Jazz (https://youtu.be/F3W_alUuFkA?t=17) sounds awfully cool, and even a seasoned jazz veteran might be hard pressed to explain why it can’t be both cool and modal. That particular distinction seems neither important nor helpful. Dividing 1950s jazz by region, however, does suggest more concrete divisions, and a West Coast vs. East Coast vs. other places will yield some interesting food for thought.

One sound, three ways

Developed by Milt Buckner more-less-simultaneously with bebop (here’s Robbins Nest from 1947: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUPNsC7ata8, “block chords” or “locked hands” is a style of piano playing that favors clusters of notes in close proximity that travel up and down the keyboard together. Here’s a quick video on the mechanics of the basic use of block chords: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0K2uvD2S7I

Although you don’t hear much of this style in bebop, the sound and feel of block chords lend themselves well to cool jazz. Here are a few examples of cool-sounding block chords in the wild:





Although the songs above share certain “cool” atmospheric qualities, critics tended to dismiss one of these performers (Ahmad Jamal) as merely light cocktail entertainment, while assigning Red Garland (If I Were a Bell) to “hard bop.” Why?

Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, Cocktail Music

The label you earned seems to be primarily determined by your ethnicity and geographic location. White artists tend to be associated with cool jazz, as do musicians operating on the West Coast of the united states. In fact, Cool Jazz and West Coast Jazz are sometimes used interchangeably. Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Art Pepper, Stan Getz, and Dave Brubeck are all associated with cool jazz and were primarily active in California. What about Bill Evans? His playing uses block chords and is fully of “cool” elements; is he cool jazz? Since Evans was mainly active in New York, he does not tend to be lumped into the Cool Jazz genre. In the 1950s, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco were areas in which there were active live jazz scenes and record labels who recorded and distributed the music of the jazz players in that area. New York had Blue Note, Riverside, Prestige, and Columbia records, while Verve, Fantasy, Contemporary, and Pacific Jazz records were all located in California. Based in Chicago, Ahmad Jamal never saw wide notoriety (in spite of Miles Davis’s efforts to bring him into the greater public spotlight) and wasn’t associated with one of the regional record labels. Had he been based in either California or New York, he probably would have been perceived as part of a movement and not a cocktail pianist.

One final thought on cool jazz: these boundaries and distinctions seemed to matter more to critics and record company executives than they did to the musicians themselves. Ahmad Jamal’s piano playing in the 1950s sounds heavily-inspired by Buckner and Shearing (two white artists), and Miles Davis famously used Red Garland in his “first great quintet” because Garland knew how to sound like Ahmad Jamal. Along with Art Blakey and Max Roach, Miles’s first quintet was important in defining the Hard Bop sound. Hard Bop is a genre typically associated with black musicians from New York, but the sound Miles wanted out of Garland can be traced back to a white man from England (Shearing).

Ultimately, drawing firm distinctions between styles is unimportant. Take, for example, Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16OoypHXcps

Here, Art Pepper (cool jazz) is backed by 3/5 of Miles’s First Great Quintet (Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers, and Red Garland). It’s a lovely, East-meets-West album. So is it cool jazz or hard bop? Whatever you want to call it, it is great music.
 
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