An experiment in Jazz Listening (some revisions 2/14)

Today I'd like to try an experiment. For decades Broadway show tunes were the backbone of every jazz musicians repertoire; from dixieland to swing to bebop and the birth of the cool and onwards. What I'd like to do here is take a song and show how various musicians have interpreted it, from a very strict interpretation that sticks close to what the composer wrote all the way through to one where the song completely comes apart.

I've chosen "I didn't Know What Time It Was" by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart to be the test case here. It was Written in 1939 for the musical "Too Many Girls". It is the epitome of the Broadway show tune turned jazz standard.

We'll start off with Trudy Erwin dubbing for Lucille Ball in the 1940 movie version:



This is a very straight forward version. It's a show tune after all and this is a Hollywood product. (As a side note here, it was on the set of this movie that Lucy met her future husband, Desi Arnez, seen at the end of this clip.)

Ok, so now we know the song, we've heard Lorenz Hart's lyrics lets see what can be made from this. Well one thing that can be changed is how the song is sung. So the phrasing can be changed. In this next example things are still very straight forward, the only real changes, apart from a richer orchestration and the dropping of the introduction, is Doris Day's seductive phrasing.



So now we should have a good feel for the tune and some options on how it can be performed. Next Billie Holiday backed by Ben Webster(ts), Harry "Sweets" Edison(t), Jimmie Rowles(p), Barney Kessel(g), Red Mitchell(b), Larry Bunker(d) and Alvin Stoller(d).



The first important thing to notice is how the song now swings. Things are no longer so straight forward rhythmically.

The next video is Art Tatum playing the song as a piano solo. Through the first chorus he introduces and sticks quite close to the melody so that we can recognize what we are listening to. After that he uses it sparingly while he plays with the changes losing the melody completely until he brings it back in the end sounding as if it has been broken by the experience, never to be the same.



This is pretty much standard practice by Jazz musicians. What is interesting is that as time went on, from the 1920s to the 1950s, more and more the melody, the chords, the rhythm of the song would become more open for expression, for exploration. The more open things became the less important it became to stick close to the original song.

To better illustrate this the next video is Charlie Parker from his Parker with Strings album. Parker, one of the founders of Be Bop is backed here by a VERY straight sounding string section (making this album his most controversial recording among jazz fans). The string section, for all it's cloyingness, knows how to sit back and not get in his way during the solos, just following the chord changes to keep up with him.



Dave Brubeck with Ron Crotty on bass and Cal Tjader on percussion change things up by playing the song in what seems to be 7/8 instead of the original 4/4 of Richard Rogers:



If you go back to the previous examples and count, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and, you should easily find the beat. With the example above we will have to count to 7, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 etc.... which makes quite a large difference.

Currently pianist Brad Mehldau has a recording in 5/4 but there is no YouTube video for it.


Moving on McCoy Tyner in this next recording breaks the song down even further (back in 4/4) It's still recognizable at times in the beginning and end but is no longer clearly stated.


I'm going to end this with Albert Ayler's 1962 recording. No longer is the tune even recognizable. Ayler doesn't feel any need to remind his listeners from the start what he's playing, they are expected to keep up with him not the other way around. It's not until between 2:20 and 2:30 in that he even bothers to state the melody in any form at all. He plays with coming back to it around the 5:00 mark but this quickly disintegrates. It's hard to even tell if the chords are still there anymore.

25 or 8 years later: an aniversary reminiscence of 44 years of NASA disasters

For my mom it's the Kennedy assassination. She knows exactly what she was doing and where she was when it happened. She even more vividly remembers watching Lee Harvey Oswald being shot on live TV a few days later.

Before September 11, for me, the moment was January 28, 1986: I'm a freshman in college. I'm bored, I've been listening to the radio on which I've just heard the Talking Heads' "And She Was" before the announcer starts talking about the upcoming launch of the Space Shuttle. Being bored I decide I need to go off to the Campus Center and buy a paper to read. My choices would probably have been either The NY Times or The Village Voice. However between the time I flick the radio off, put on my coat and leave my suite everything changed. By the time I walked out into the hallway, a minute or so, everyone on my dorm floor was running around looking for who owned a TV.

We crowded into the one room with a tiny TV and watched as Dan Rather, the man who replaced Walter Cronkite, tried to fill that man's shoes. He was not successful. Playing around with a plastic model of the shuttle he was more of a hindrance to us getting the information we wanted than anything else. Still there it was, the shuttle with it's two smoke trails, one from a booster rocket careening off from main tank, blowing up with all it's crew on board. We were in shock.

Theoretically I knew that space travel was dangerous. I vaguely knew about Apollo 1 and Apollo 13 but had been two young when these events had happened to have them really register. Apollo 1 was the posthumously named Apollo mission that burned up on the launch pad 19 years and one day before the Challenger disaster, killing it's crew. I was a week shy of being 4 months old. Apollo 13 happened four years later in April of 1970. Being a three year old I watched Popeye cartoons and Captain Kangaroo instead. In 1986 I was an adult... well a late teenager who would about nine months later enter his twenties. It hit me like a lead weight to the solar plexus.

To come there would be investigations and Richard Feynman's star turn on the investigation committee where he would expose the rubber O rings and bureaucratic ineptitude as being the culprits behind the disaster. But the communal shock of that moment of national tragedy has stayed with me.

It was with me in February 2003, after a couple days of remembrances of the Challenger disaster. I was back in school, studying computer science this time and had taken a part time job as a supermarket cashier. I can still remember when a customer told me that the Space Shuttle Columbia had just been destroyed. I told him he'd mis-heard, that it was the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, that he couldn't be right. He insisted he was. After watching a few moments of CNN in the store's food court I took my lunch break in my car listening to the NPR coverage.

In the days that came it would seem to be eerily like a civil war reenactment gone wrong. One in which actual bullets have been loaded in with the gunpowder and the deaths are real. So was the realization that no one had learned any lessons from the last time. Which really should have come as no surprise since the same management problems had existed in the 67 launch pad fire. For a short time everyone's adrenaline was up and details were payed attention to. They landed a man on the moon. They did it a few more times and then inertia set in. The shuttle program itself was designed during this time of inertia that only got worse as time went on. For most of the decade following the Apollo 11 moon landing there would be less memorable missions in space. This is reflected in the concept of the shuttles themselves as 'space trucks'. The Apollo mission got it's public presence decreed by John F. Kennedy who made it a priority to land an American astronaut on the moon. A mission that was followed up by both Johnson and Nixon. The Shuttle program was announced to the nation by test launching the first one off of a converted Boeing 747 (there were two of these 747s used to transport the shuttles between alternate landing locations and Cape Canaveral in Florida.) At one point in time space travel seemed to be one of our greatest and strangest ambitions, an event experienced as a species. It had been turned into the mundane and commonplace in just a few years of it's greatest success. While everyone can tell you what the Apollo missions were about very few people remember or care why the space shuttles even flew.

Dan Rather reports for CBS New on January 28, 1986:



CNN coverage of Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003:

dubbing cassette tapes

Over the years, through the normal channels of inertia I have collected a lot of consumer electronic residue. Record players, tape decks, VCRs, TVs, mp3 players, cd players, computers of various types et cetera. It's interesting when examining the older of these machines which ones still have a function that they can perform well enough that I still use them decades later.

My Panasonic tape recorder, given to me as a Christmas present some 34 years or so ago, still works and has been called back to duty periodically over the time I've owned it. My SONY Walkman with the built in stereo microphone sits in pieces in my parent's basement. It it's motor hadn't given out and my brother hadn't taken it apart it would still be in use today as being incredibly useful. In some ways the time for these machines has past. I can cheaply buy a digital recorder that will do what they do. But since there are so many cassette tapes still in my possession there is still room for them.

No less than three small boomboxes live here with me. One, a mid 90s version with a cd player, lives in the bathroom where it serves as a radio since it's selector switch has long been too unstable to chance trying to play cs or tapes in it and having it die all together. Another one, the newest one, sits on the living room floor. It was a gift to my grandmother which became superfluous as she could never work it (bad eyesight coupled with bad circulation in the hands) and then moved to a nursing home and didn't need it anymore. The third, and oldest of the three sits unused and unloved by my living room window. It's a dual cassette model from the late 80s. Looking at it now I would think it would be utterly ludicrous to anyone of a more current generation. Why would you ever want to dub a tape onto another tape? What purpose would it serve? Tape to computer for digitization into an mp3, that would be useful. Onto another tape? Why bother? I was looking at it this afternoon thinking those very thoughts. Why do I even have this thing in my house anymore? When was the last time I copied a tape? Sometime in the 90s?

And that is where I think my point lies. Bells and whistles. A simple product of utilitarian design may continue to function perfectly well for years. But the more elaborate ones, the ones that are more specialized, they'll just become useless trash.

Joel and Ethan Coen and True Grit

Today I went out to see True Grit (at the Spectrum 8 theater on Delaware Ave. in Albany, the closest art cinema in 100 miles.)

You can see the (slightly misleading) trailer for the film here:


From the Johnny Cash song to the trailer's focus on Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn the trailer misdirects the viewer, but that's what trailers do. True Grit is not a wall to wall action movie and Bridges performance is not the central character of the story. But more on that in a moment.

True Grit, based on the 1968 novel by Charles Portis and the 1969 film directed by Henry Hathaway staring John Wayne. I first saw the movie when it aired on network tv in the late seventies and read the book shortly thereafter. The 1969 movie, a product of it's time is part of the Hollywood western movie tradition that dates back to the silent era (which was by coincidence the end of the era depicted in such films.) The Coen brother's film, while not sui generis exists somewhat outside of the tradition as well as outside of the confines of the Spaghetti Western (which exists to some extent as a hip comment on the Hollywood version.) Instead it works off of our more modern western mythology of supposed historical accuracy. All dialog is given as if it is from the voice overs reading letter from Ken Burns Civil War (which is the chief work informing our modern western mythology), this includes the music composed/arranged by Carter Burwell (the Academy has already condemned his use of actual hymns in the score with a resounding 'no nomination for you!') which often reminded me of Ashoken Farewell.

All three works, the novel and both movies, tell the story of fourteen year old Mattie Ross (actual 14 year old actress Hailee Steinfeld) of Arkansas who has traveled to see to the recovery of her father's remains and to seek justice for his murder. To do this she hires a drunken U.S. Marshal (Jeff Bridges) and insists on accompanying him as he goes into indian country, present day Oklahoma, in search of the killer (Josh Brolin). They are joined by a Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) who is also searching for the same man for another crime.

The casting of an actual fourteen year old in Hailee Steinfeld adds to part an authenticity that the 1969 version cannot claim. This greatly adds to the illusion of believability so necessary to pull off a film like this. Mattie is the central character of the film, as well as being it's point of view and narrator, it is her story being told. As much as both Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon give great performances in their roles (and to the credit of both these actors and their directors here they do not in any way play Jeff Bridges or Matt Damon but instead portray their characters) they never overshadow Mattie in the way John Wayne becomes the focus of the first film version.

Language plays an important role in the Coen Brothers' vision of the material. Part of the aforementioned 19th century epistolary dialog style they have adopted is the eschewing of contractions. In part this is because, following the novel, the story is told as it has been written down by Mattie decades later. The effect is to both anchor the movie in the supposed realism of it's time and to give it a mythical and more accurately a Biblical tone.

Most reviewers, such as Roger Ebert, have gone on about the film being more in the classic Hollywood mold, mistaking the simple lack of irony for any great change in the Coen brother's film making style. Though a great many of their films are ironic, True Grit shares with them an unflinching view of violence and what it means in America. Which is the true trademark of their body of work.

Further confusing matters is the very filmic cinematography by Roger Deakins, which is unlike something like the awful digital drek of last year's Robin Hood does not represent a modern intrusion on the body of the film.

One thing I should mention, John Goodman is not in this film, although actor Paul Rae seems to be doing an uncanny impression of him in his small part. I can't help but wonder if Goodman had not originally been intended for the part.

To finish this up here's the trailer for the John Wayne film. Just to be clear this is not a bad movie but it does suffer from the somewhat stilted look that calls to mind the TV westerns of the era such as Gunsmoke. Only less studio bound. For all his vitality in the role John Wayne was way past his prime and due to the removal of most of one of his lungs incapable of too much actual exertion.



Addendum: One thing I forgot to mention above is what many may find to be the most shocking aspect of the Coen Brother's film, and that is it's unflinching off hand treatment of the racism of the time period. Whether it is Mattie's dismissive treatment of the older black man sent with her to retrieve her father's body or Rooster Cogburn's physical abuse of Native American children the Coen brother's make no apologies for the characters nor do they minimize it's abhorrent nature by providing modern viewpoints for the characters involved. By reserving commentary on these actions they are skirting very close to edge where the film and therefore the audience become swept up in the character's period POV and therefore accepting of such racism with them. It's a close call. And I admit I am unsure whether it should be commended or condemned. Is it enough for the audience to be unsettled in and among themselves or does the film truly have to show it's hand in scenes like this?

British TV: Doc Martin and Martin Clunes

Lately I've discoverd Martin Clunes' British television series Doc Martin. The show is based on a character he played in Colin Ferguson's film Saving Grace... actually the name of the character and the general setting from the film. Clunes plays Dr. Martin Ellingham a surgeon who has developed hemophobia and retrained as a GP. He has moved to the sleepy Cornish village of Portwenn where he had spent the summers living with his aunt as a boy. A brilliant doctor but also grumpy with poor people skills (like Hugh Laurie's Dr. House) he is a fish out of water. The main thrust of the series his interaction with the townsfolk and especially the mutual attraction/hostility between him and school teacher Louisa Glasson, played by Caroline Catz.

A lighthearted comedy drama with quirky characters, much like Northern Exposure, Doc Martin succeeds because of Martin Clunes' portrayal of the title character. Unlike his usual, more affable roles, Martin Ellingham is not a likable character. He hates dogs, dislikes his patients, and generally hold pretty much everyone with few exceptions in contempt. It is Clunes' body language that sells the role, ramrod straight back with a near constant sneer together with the costuming of a perfectly fit suit and close cropped hair (this is in contrast most Clunes' portrayals, for example Gary in Men Behaving Badly, or William in William & Mary, have somewhat shaggy hair and even when dressed in good clothes have a more affable dispositions.)

Filmed for the British ITV network, one of the commercial alternatives to the BBC, Doc Martin has been a hit in it's home country and in the US on PBS. There are four seasons with a fifth and possibly final one on the way. One of the most likable things about British television is how seldom it ever overstays it's welcome. Seasons are short, usually six or eight episodes (last year's BBC series Sherlock had three!). This is a great relief from the American format which often leads to padding, filler for shows like this. A season in the US would have used up all the material from the four seasons and two hour special in one year.

I'll be posting more on British TV in the future.

All four seasons are available on Netflix for streaming and the first episode is on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHKgCGhI1xs

A new begining

After about three years of laying fallow I'm going to revive this blog. I seem to be more in a mood for talking about things again and I should be able to write a little more in depth here than the usual pithy Facebook posts I've been making. We'll see how it goes anyway.

Well that's all for tonight. Later this week I'll think up something more indepth to talk about.

Wheeee Fireworks

Whew! I'm throwing rocks tonight.

OK, My computer has gotten a bit old. Eight years old to be exact. And over that time it has developed some quirks that strike me as somewhat odd. Today I am going to talk about my dvd drive. Over the past few years it has developed a strange need. You see it won't play any dvd I put in it unless I first put in what appears to be it's favorite dvd and play a little bit of it. What, you may ask, would be the favorite movie of an 8 year old dvd drive? Why The Big Lebowski of course. I swear it does not play any other dvd unless I put The Big Lebowski in first. Then it will play whatever I want.