Confession of a Jazz Fiend,  Part One of One

I never thought of it as something to confess until now, but it’s keeping me up. I have been contemplating two sparse choruses of a Count Basie solo for days. Not only is it economical, it’s short. Yet there is so much space in it! I have been learning the architecture of all 24 bars as a whole, their shape against the grid of bars and beats, their excruciatingly delayed symmetry. Of course when I say “the solo” it is a frozen improvisation, the trace of one, and it is only the act of tracing it off the record onto paper that makes it look anything like architecture. Yet the engineering is there. The swing of the bridge depends on the math behind the suspension. There is tension in this transcription of Basie’s use of space; swing compressed into tension like a flattened spring. So bear with me, we have to move carefully for a while before we can

see the big picture and view the solo from above.

            Down in the keyboard, a fifth above middle C, Basie starts with the smallest idea he can play and still engage the groove.  He starts an eighth note before the beginning of the first bar with a string of four eighth note ending with a G. This G, the root of the V chord in this blues progression, establishes the tonality by sounding an octave up and down before stopping briefly on a the root of the chord, middle C, with the added stability of being a quarter note, and the second full beat of the measure. There are two more notes in this phrase, both eighth notes, followed by a quarter note rest. After the C we get the first note beyond root and fifth, the E, which is the third of the C triad, thus closing off any ambiguity about what key we’re in here.  Rhythmically,  there is both symmetry and asymmetry in this design, and that is why it swings. There is a symmetry to the quarter note being preceded and followed by a figure of two 8th notes, altogether it sounds like Da-da- Dum-Da-da. But this whole phrase is assymetrical because it begins with an eighth note before the first group of two note phrases, Da-da-dad-Dum-da-da. The quarter note rest at the end of this first bar is then the ghosted symmetrical echo of the quarter note C that sounded on the second beat. In the next bar, Basie finishes the phrase with four eighth notes on the first two beats, making a two bar phrase with an eighth note “pick-up,” a rest on the 4 of the first bar and a half bar rest at the end of the phrase. There is space rhythmically in the rests taking up a little less than 3/8ths of the phrase, and there is space harmonically in that we have only hinted at the triad with one note, the rest are all just root and fifth of the chords. Although G is the outside boundary of all the phrases, the one C and the one E are inside the first grouping, and the grouping in bar 2 begins and ends with the same octave G.

            After all that space, Basie gives a relative flurry of notes in the next two bar phrase. The phrase begins with a triplet figure blues cliché, just enough of it to propel itself into the long eighth note phrase of the next bar. The blues figure, an eighth note rest,  and then an eighth note G, followed by three triplets each composed of the half step blue note up to the third  and fifth of the chord, again, all ending in that same G in that same octave from the opening. Over this last whole four bar phrase the highest note is the one most often repeated, and the pattern that the G repetition makes rhythmically is one that repeats in the chord jab accents of the second chorus!

            This chorus lasts about a half a minute in real time. I have been up all night writing it out so I could look at it for a long time, at the rhythms outlined by the spaces between notes.

And now I’m writing out my experience of writing out, the Basie solo, tracing it, playing it, touching a swinging place in the universe, an echo of ivory and starched cotton in a Kansas City dive in the 1930s.

THE JAZZ TAROT

Your tonality card
 is the King of Trumpets.

As you might guess, this is an auspicious beginning,

A fanfare that may announce a royal entrance,

Or may signal danger, or both.

 (We will come back to the significance of the King of Trumpets by itself and as your tonality card)

Sure enough, the next two cards are more royalty.

Not only that but brothers of the same suit!

Cards in tension, the King of Saxophones (often pictured as a Hawk)

opposite the President of Saxophones.

The more prosaic interpretation is

A good natured but fierce competition,

one harmonic and one melodic, one wide and throaty and the other smoothly humming,

calling and responding with another call.

But the deep reading identifies a balance of two approaches.

You see here how the President is holding his saxophone sideways?

This is the powerful energy of underplaying, a quality also associated with

the Black Prince of Trumpets and the Count of Rhythms.

Here The President indicates an indirect approach balanced by the firm structural sounding of the Trumpet King,

Even the same suit can clash in rhythm and harmony.

If one of these Princes had been the Bird of Saxophones we would

sense a mild polarity, but with exciting consequences.

You must sometimes get in awkward and asymmetrical positions

in order to see outside the boundaries of your situation.

This arrangement of cards, so far, is rare and rather grand.

The King of Trumpets is your Tonality card,

and B flat is a dark but durable key.

Something big is going to happen.

In your counterpoint position you have the President and King of Saxophones

indicating a meeting of two great minds who think differently.

By the way, the two jacks or Princes of Saxophones

are not in as much tension as President and King.

They rarely appear together.

They go their separate ways, remaining brothers in the same suit.

They are known as the Giant Prince and the Sainted Prince of Saxophones.

Now we come to your Harmony card, 

The Dark Gentleman of Keys.

This represents inconsistent brilliance and future vision.

If you had drawn The High Priest of Keys, instead,

there would have been good feedback between him

and both the King and the Sainted Prince of Saxophones,

indicating a short but fantastically creative period.

The rest of that suit includes the Blind Priest of Keys, 

this of course indicates some form of virtuosity under duress,

and the Righteous Father of Keys, pictured with a wide smile.

You always like to see him and the Trumpet King pop up together.

Next is your Trump card.

You have drawn the Brown Prince of Trumpets.

This card in this position reminds you how little time you have.

If you had drawn the The Black Prince of Trumpets here

it would indicate a long journey through different time zones.

This is very unusual, to have two trumpets and four saxophones on the board.

All this power needs a Conductor, and that is your next card,

which turns out to be more royalty, the Duke of Bridges.

This is a very good omen. See how elegantly he is dressed,

pictured with a pen in his hand, composing at the keys.

Your Minor arcana over here, include

The Three of Horns represented persistence

 the Seven of Steps representing innovation

the Four of Hands representing discipline and cooperation

and the Five of Takes, indicating a period of rest which is

at odds with all the other cards.

Now for your Bass card and Time card.

You have drawn the Baron of Ming

and the Messenger of Art.

This pairing represents a strong but volatile relationship,

and in this position might mean a hypothetical meeting

that may or may not happen.

Looking at the entire array,

this is an auspicious time in which your every breath,

your every muscle, your reach, your strength,

you foresight and your ability to listen

will be put to a thrilling test of skill and discipline.

There are many good signs in this reading that you will succeed.

Jazz is my Religion
Jazz is the closest thing I have to a religion, and it is the thing I am closest to, other than people to whom I am devoted, many of whom are sisters and brothers in Jazz. I could not be very close to someone who vehemently disliked jazz but I am evangelical about welcoming anyone into the fold. I am not religious in the usual sense. I recognize the difference between religion and devotion, as I recognize the differences between beliefs and knowledge. Yet both positive and negative aspects of religion also appear in my devotion to jazz. While it makes me feel connected to something larger than myself, Jazz also asks for sacrifice. Like being a monk or a missionary, being a jazz musician is not very lucrative, and even those musicians who make a living at it spent many years not making a living at it. I suppose some jazz musicians become so frustrated that they “lose faith” get civil service jobs or like me, become professors and at least temporarily become bitter about the struggle. But jazz has always drawn me back, much to the dismay of certain people who thought my career as a writer or scholar was sacrificed to almighty Jazz.
            One of the positive things I think religion gives some people is a feeling of humble gratitude at having something to hold on to when everything else in life turns to shit. This is how I feel about Jazz, after many years of being more to less deeply involved in studying it and playing it. But I suppose the way in which jazz is most like a religion for me is in the certainty and sense of purpose it gives. I am certain that it is a good thing to learn another Ellington or Monk composition, as I imagine some Christians seem certain about praying or reading the Bible. When in doubt about what to do, I know that studying jazz and practicing to be able to play it are things worth doing. Neither prayer nor Jazz counts as truly necessary activities, in that they arguably don’t actually change anything in the physical universe. While one could claim that deity-oriented religions are obviously doing a lot better than Jazz at surviving, it seems obvious to me that all music can make a greater contribution to human survival and well-being than the accumulative effect of most religions, which survive partly through psychic intimidation, such as the threat of eternal damnation. This brings me to a major difference between religion and devotion to Jazz. While religious dogma is often harmful to both believers and persecuted non-believers, Jazz dogma is only harmful to jazz musicians. The music can’t hurt you, but struggling to play it can. If you don’t know the blues when you start, you know them soon enough.
     Now for some testifying. In 1976 I was 19 and going through my “beat” period, reading poetry and Kerouac novels, listening to jazz and trying to learn to play piano.  Sensing that I needed a journey of some kind on which to contemplate my future, I took a Greyhound bus across the country. Looking back on it now I realize the idea and the energy to do such a thing coincided with a manic episode I didn’t know I was having.  It was ostensibly a pilgrimage to Walden Pond but it included my first trip to New York City and Boston. One of my most vivid memories from that journey took place somewhere in the Harvard/Cambridge area on a Sunday afternoon.  I had come down hard from the mania and was falling into a depression I didn’t know I was having. I was almost broke and still social enough to feel lonely so I went to a place where a local jazz group was playing.  As soon as I heard them joyously launch into “In a Mellow Tone” I was lifted up, out of my loneliness, out of my anxiety and depression. They were not very technically skilled musicians, but they meant what they played, and they swung. The 50-something black man playing tenor saxophone winked at my 19 year old self as if he knew that I knew what he had been “talking about” in his solo.
Sitting there in historic Boston, contemplating how the music I most loved had the stain of slavery on it, I had an epiphany. It was not a conversion experience, I had already been converted and was still in that sophomoric phase of jazz snobbery. But that Sunday at the jam session, far from home, was the beginning of a kind of faith, a faith that Jazz was worth living for. It didn’t matter if I became famous or at the top of the field or even that I become successful financially at it, I just wanted to get good enough to sit in with those guys in that bar in Boston. I was in church in that Sunday, not because a great jazz musician was playing, but precisely because it was just an afternoon jam session of local players. 
 In all the jazz writing I have read, both criticism and history, there is little mention of the fact that the majority of jazz activity that goes on is not professional. Though we can only put rough numbers to this local jazz scene, we can be sure that in bulk it vastly outweighs the big-time arena in any terms: number of players, number of gigs played, and even number of audience members if we count school programs and the total number of local fans attending across the country. Ultimately, jazz is alive because of this local scene and not only in the U.S. but worldwide. This is my church, and it is a more diverse community than most congregations.
From the musicians I met early on in my own local jazz community I somehow got the idea that not only should a player strive for technique and knowledge, but to develop a voice, to play “like yourself,” which really means that improvising within this paradoxical “tradition of innovation” was a way of finding yourself. Playing like yourself means being musically honest, a transcendent Mecca that you face toward every time you play.  In this sense, it is like prayer. It becomes like meditation when you are free of intruding thoughts and are playing and listening to everyone else’s playing in present time. It doesn’t happen that often perhaps to most players, but once it does, it is a kind of ecstatic state that you want to return to, and you can’t find it by playing the same thing you played when you experienced it before. Most musicians will tell you that after a good improvisation they don’t really remember what they played. It is not what they played that leads back to that transcendent state; it is the act of trying to have ideas and be musical in present time with as little conscious deliberation as one has when carrying on an important conversation with a friend, or testifying in church.

I am not sure that my appreciation and devotion to jazz was anything more than a series of historical coincidences that led to me getting positive reinforcement, good neurotransmitters and friendship. In giving me what it did, though, Jazz was always there for me when nothing else made sense, and I think the discipline of trying to play it helped me tremendously in navigating the extreme emotional landscape I had to travel as an undiagnosed bi-polar person. As such, jazz saved my life. Broke and lonely at the end of a manic trip across the country with almost no sleep for a couple of weeks, I might have fallen into an abyss of Depression I could not crawl out of. Instead I had something larger than myself to live for, and while my faith in Jazz has wavered, I have never forgotten where my church is.

Today's sermon: A CREATION STORY

I will make Sundays my day to update the Jazz Blog. Next week I will be writing about Jazz and Religion.   To set that up, here is my first solo, improvised orally when I was about 19 and eventually written down and recorded with a swift walking 12 bar bass line underneath in the Landing Signals anthology. ( http://www.amazon.com/Landing-Signals-Anthology-Sacramento-Poets/dp/B000UB8KG0. )
It is a Creation story. I hope the poem still works, and beckons you back for future Sunday jam sessions.

Jazz at the Universe

Once you know what it is

you know that it has always been.

They might not have called it jazz, but the skies of music

by any other name would still be just as blue.

Funk is the grease in the grooves the stars slide in,

the pulse that pumps years and sets tempos of atoms,

Perpetual motion that moves because because it makes you move it.

Clearly the creation was the ultimate solo performance.

What scales did God run

to get the technique

for a riff like an aardvark or a moose?

His legato on waterfalls?

The crescendi and diminuendi at the beach?

Each snowflake,

a variation on a theme

which he lays down by the ton like the Bach of chemisty,

with a pianissimo you’ve never heard.

And so he wailed for five days,

defining heavy with the groove of gravity,

creating light with flashy runs

played at velocities impossible for the instrument,

spacing so far out that he outspaced the space

that he spaced out in the first place,

and still there was no applause.

The new club was a hot spot,

but it was still empty.

So God got down,

unlaced his robe,

shook a sandal off,

let a foot stomp and improvised a few funky choruses of

People.

Now luckily for us he liked the head enough

to write down the changes on a monster molecule.

D……N……..A!

Then the cosmic breakfast cook said,

“Here’s the toast babies, jam on it.”

(bass solo)

Awe, to experience life is to taste the toast.

But to live life is to toast to the toast,

spreading thick the jelly of inspiration

and feeding it to each other,

and that is all Art and all Love and all Jazz is.

Your life is a one-nighter with standing room only,

so blow up a breeze while you still got the gig.

Once you know what it is

you know that it has always been.

FOUR BAR INTRO
      What I want to leave to the world is something that pays back the honor of getting to play, hear, imagine and love jazz. This blog isn’t a novel or a serious academic study or a memoir or biography. Most of the writing in this blog will be improvisational, or as close as I can get to that habitual spontaneity that sometimes lets brilliance come through and sometimes doesn't. If I hit a “wrong” note when improvising on the piano, I can’t go back and fix it; instead, I justify it by being quick enough and creative enough to quickly slide into a chord tone, or if that doesn't work, keep the groove going on a chromatic or parallel run until I regain my balance and momentum. That’s what I will do here in this blog, too, so while I may be coloring outside the lines at times, I know where the lines are and will risk riding the unicycle across the tight-wire in real time. You don’t have to know a lot about jazz to read this blog, but hopefully you will want to know more because of it. There will be stories; some are oral tradition, some are my own jazz- inspired extensions of the mythology, some are true, some are partly true or inspired by something true. All are hopefully truthful. When I hear a jazz musician, more important to me than technical skill are sincere attempts at having good ideas. This blog will represent attempts at improvising on the presence of jazz in my life. These writings are my collected solos, verbal equivalents of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic pilgrimages like crossing the bridge of “Cherokee” with Charlie Parker, or digging for deep gold in the blues. In addition to stories there are poems and dialogues and journalism and criticism and jazz humor. If there is a place for such a variegated collection in the canon of jazz literature, it should probably be in the Apocrypha, a mixture of psalms, prophecies, lamentations, and shaggy god stories. I will not heed any restrictions of typography or genre, nor dilute the strain of thought to make it more or less accessible---- but as I wander toward and away from the melody, I will mean every breath, every click, every honk, every tap, every flight and every crash.

C.B. Davis, Ph.D.

C.B. Davis, PHD

http://drcbdavis.wordpress.com/2013/09/28/introduction-to-cultural-evolution/?preview=true&preview_id=6&preview_nonce=9898fdf308&post_format=standard

Practice Large page. XtRA.

Comic Strip Test.

Testing again.

What does this do?