So, we'd all been hanging out at this friend's house on the pond. Fall, with all of the beauty loaded into that word. The long, slow arc of summer into autumn was progressing. Canoe paddles sliced through he water's surface as we made our way over to the other side of the pond to the old, abandoned farm house in the woods. Sad, in a way. It was empty but we filled it with life — the apple fight that broke out (dang, those uncultivated apples were hard as rocks) was intense and hilarious. Glad I wasn't the guy who took one in the face!
The sun was setting so it was back to the canoes, the water, the shore, the bonfire. The rest of our lives.
I'm not exactly sure was caused this old memory to pop out here. While listening to Way Out East, the new release by Wayne Horvitz's Gravitas Quartet, I'd begun to think of Claude Bolling's Suite for Flute & Jazz Piano Trio. Not that this music sounds like Bolling's. No. The initial parallel was that Bolling did a great job of illuminating the similarities between classical music and jazz. This led to the idea of unexpected lines of reasoning. A person might not think that those two genres had any areas of commonality.
Then... on to composed vs. improvised music. Both are "thought out," though differently. The majority of jazz uses the song's structure as framework for the improviser. Classical compositions do vary by performance, but don't contain much in the way of improvisation, at least not in the modern era. Reading these ideas, you might think that the two broad genres have nothing in common. Bolling's Suite proved otherwise. The idea that a section of classical music might be bent toward jazz was definitely an ear-opening experience.
Horvitz's Gravitas Quartet, while being mostly about improvisation, does seem to have more composed underpinnings. If you listen to the opening lines of the "LB," you'll hear a trumpet, cello, and bassoon (Ron Miles, Peggy Lee, Sara Schoenbeck) moving through some gradually descending melodies. This all seems (and may in fact be) written out, but then things change when Horvitz' piano enters the picture. The lines shear off in several directions with the performers responding to each other's melodic fragments and rhythms in many different ways. Things get pretty chaotic for a while until the piano improvises on the opening theme, which is then restated as the song closes.
Article comments
1 - Aaron Fleming
Big world indeed, large enough for any number of obscure jazz releases. Good stuff!