“Now’s the Time” listeners know that they get a poem every show at no extra charge.
This month, I’ll be featuring the poetry of the enigmatic Kenneth Patchen. Moreover, I won’t be reading any of the poems myself. (Welcome news to many listeners, I’m sure!) Instead, I’ll play recordings of Patchen himself, sometimes accompanied by musicians. The vast KUSP library includes a 1957 record of Patchen with a jazz sextet led by pianist Allyn Ferguson, as well as a record of Patchen reading a number of his Fables.
I’ll also sample the fantastic record by the Claudia Quintet + 1 entitled What Is The Beautiful? (Cuneiform, 2011), which is built around musical settings of Patchen poetry. Here’s what Claudia Quintet leader and drummer John Hollenbeck has to say about Patchen’s poetry: “He has a wide palette, which I like. There are a lot of really dark, political poems, but then he has whole collections of almost childlike drawings with very short, funny poems. And usually in every collection there are lyrical love poems, always dedicated to his wife, which are more flowery, almost old-fashioned. I really started to love the humor, the darkness, and the sincere love he had for his wife.” The Claudia record features Kurt Elling declaiming and Theo Bleckman singing some of the poems. Elling’s reading of the poem that gives the record its title is an apotheosis of jazz-plus-poetry (hear it on the archived 6 June broadcast while you can).
Here’s a link to Patchen’s bio at the indispensable Poetry Foundation web site. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kenneth-patchen
During May, “Now’s the Time” – late-night music for people who love jazz, and not only jazz – featured ten hours of Miles Davis programming. It was great. Really, really great. But I find myself with an acute desire to venture to the outer reaches of the “not-only-jazz” part of the program’s mission statement. This desire is reflected in the choice of two albums to be spotlighted all this month of June. First, Steven Wilson, late of Porcupine Tree, creates a kind of neo-prog-rock on The Raven That Refused To Sing. My friend John Kelman of All About Jazz turned me on to this record. The songs are just lovely, and the band is really good (keyboardist Adam Holzman is an alum of the 1980s Miles Davis outfit). Then, there’s the self-titled second album by The Caravan, a hip-hop trio from Halifax, Nova Scotia. They manage to create the rap version of a Maritime Canadian kitchen party, informal and low-key, but oozing with talent.
And you know, after ten hours of Miles material, I am struck by how many great Miles records I didn’t get to… So, as usual, I’ll highlight something from the Davis catalog too: this time it’ll be Nefertiti (Columbia, 1967). It’s a high point for the incredible mid-1960s quintet (including Wayne Shorter on saxophones, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams). I feel like this quintet was at the center of the story I was trying to tell about Miles during May; every record I played was either leading up to this quintet, or working out the musical desiderata the quintet developed in its brief life.
Franck Bergerot, whose 1996 book on listening to Miles Davis has been the inspiration for our month-long tribute to the late trumpeter, noted that Miles seemed again and again over the decades to create pure gold out of a few grains of sand. He was a sorcerer, an alchemist. In the last installment of “El Mundo Miles,” we will look into a few of the magic spells in his sorcery kit. Revealing how the magic tricks are done, we will find, does not diminish the mystery of the spell.
Here, pell-mell, are a few of the leads we’ll uncover.
Miles had a profound empathy with certain of his sideman, a kind of ESP that is heard in magical interactivity. Two such privileged interlocutors were drummer Philly Joe Jones (mid-50s; pictured top center) and pianist Wynton Kelly (early 60s, top right).
Miles increasingly rearranged the roles of the instruments. In “Water on the Pond” (1967) the guitar and bass, usually relegated to rhythm, state the melody while Miles’s trumpet plays a more rhythmic role. This track also marks the first appearance of an electric keyboard, with an odd harpsichord sound: adding new instruments, especially electric ones, to the tonal palette is another of the sorcerer’s tricks.
The trumpeter frequently left errors and studio chatter (like John Coltrane asking “where’s the beer opener?” during a 1956 session) on the issued versions of his recordings, lending a rough-and-ready vérité feel to the proceedings. Paradoxically, he and producer Teo Macero simultaneously cut and pasted the recorded sessions into elaborate post-performance collages: albums like Bitches Brew (1969) and A Tribute to Jack Johnson are high points in this collage style of production.
In an earlier episode (“The Rules of the Game”), we looked at the development of modal jazz, and Miles’s attempt to create more musical space by slowing – or stopping altogether – the harmonic progression of the compositions. He would cast aside the twelve-bar blues and the thirty-two-bar popular song in favor of aggressively extended performances. His 1970s music in particular began to sound like 60-minute windows on performances without beginning or end, snippets of truly colossal musical expression (e.g. “He Loved Him Madly” from 1974). In this development, Miles was influenced by James Brown‘s unmodulated funk, Sly Stone‘s riffs and rhythms, and Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s cosmic contemporary composition (pictured in the lower row of photos above).
As always, I’ll try to fit in as much of all this sorcery as I can. And of course, there will be a Miles Davis poem! Next week, we return to the full eclecticism of the Now’s the Time Omni-verse.
Listeners to “Now’s the Time,” in addition to all the late-night music for people who love jazz – and not only jazz – that they can tolerate, also get a poem for no extra charge. As we are celebrating the music of Miles Davis all this month of May, we are seizing the opportunity to read some Miles Davis-influenced poems.
For those keeping track at home, here is a run-down of the featured poems:
23 May: “Four, and More: For Miles Davis,” by Quincy Troupe. Troupe (pictured, with Miles) is the coauthor of Miles’s polemical, brash and wonderful autobiography, as well as the author of a slim memoir called Miles and Me.
The poems not hotlinked above can all be found in the indispensable Jazz Poetry Anthology, edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa (Indiana, 1991).
The fourth installment of our month-long look at the music of Miles Davis (born 26 May 1926) explores some of the critical musical partnerships of his long career. More to the point, we peer into the vampiric (in the words of Franck Bergerot, whose book on Miles is the chief inspiration for this month’s programming) relationships forged by the “Prince of Darkness” to bring his own musical ideas to fruition.
Miles’s collaborations bore remarkable fruits; nevertheless, he would always be dogged by criticisms that he stole others’ ideas, took credit for their compositions, and other nefarious prince-of-darkness stuff. We’ll explore a little of the evidence and find that it’s mostly true. And it’s mostly irrelevant. Miles relied critically on his “grey eminences”; he appropriated ideas with cavalier sovereignty. And, he got more out of most of those collaborators than they were able to achieve in any other setting.
Among the key eminences grises whose contributions will be explored on this evening’s program:
1. Arranger Gil Evans (upper left), with whom Miles recorded three classic albums (Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958) and Sketches of Spain (1960)), but whose influence and collaboration ranged from the 1949/50 “Birth of the Cool” sessions straight through to the mid-1980s guitar solos he arranged into charts for Miles’s electric bands;
2. Pianist Bill Evans (upper middle), whose tenure was brief, but whose conception of pianism indelibly marked the genius of Kind of Blue (1959);
3. Saxophonist Wayne Shorter (upper right), whose compositions sustained the great mid-60s “Second Quintet”;
4. Bassist Marcus Miller (lower left), whose energy (and absorption of the lessons of Prince) fueled Miles’s finest 1980s work.
All that, plus – if there’s time – music from trumpeters Wynton Marsalis (pictured with Miles lower middle) and Ambrose Akinmusire (lower right).
We’ve taken a long listen to Miles Davis‘s distinctive sound, and we’ve traced his approach to improvisation. In the third installment of our series on “El Mundo Miles,” we look at Miles’s approach to ensembles. His groups were legion and wildly celebrated; we’ll attempt to sketch a storyline that makes sense of their evolution. In doing so, I will once again draw heavily upon Franck Bergerot‘s excellent book about listening to Miles.
Much of Miles’s musical career can be understood as his reaction to be-bop, the revolutionary musical language crafted by his first boss, Charlie Parker. One aspect of be-bop – heard in Miles’s early “Sippin’ at Bells” (1947), the first twelve bars of which feature no fewer than eighteen chords – is harmonic overload. Many chords, requiring lightning reflexes and virtuosity on the part of the improviser. Miles would over the subsequent three decades simplify the harmonic structure of the music, while foregrounding other more profound aspects of performance. Even in “Deception” (1950), Miles’s version of the George Shearing composition “Conception,” the trumpeter and leader introduces a stubborn bass pedal, as though he’s trying to stop the harmonic progression. This has the effect of creating tension, but also space for the soloist, freed from the straitjacket of be-bop baroque.
Modes. Miles’s first and greatest innovation in this approach to harmonic simplification was the development of “modal” music, inspired by bandleader and theorist George Russell. Instead of a sequence of chords, the improviser could draw from a mode, or scale, of notes, taking as many bars as needed to develop his or her ideas. Kind of Blue (1959) would prove the masterpiece of the modal model.
Controlled Freedom. Miles’s so-called “Second Quintet” of the mid-1960s pushed the modal idea radically forward: they called what they did “controlled freedom.” Harmony – and indeed the chord-playing left hand of pianist Herbie Hancock – was sidelined in favor of a propulsive rhythm, attention to melody and an astonishing freedom in the possibilities opened to the soloist. The drumming of the young Tony Williams was a critical part of the success of the trumpeter’s 60s sound, creating variety by alternating older swing rhythms with a more direct, rock-friendly beat. While Miles himself was arrogantly dismissive of the Free Jazz and New Thing innovations that coincided with his controlled freedom experiment, but it is clear in hindsight that these various practices were of a piece.
Watch this fascinating short documentary featuring members of the 1960s quintet (hat tip to Mike Lambert, host of “In the Groove”):
By the eve of Miles’s late-70s retirement, he had pushed these innovations as far as he could. He had eschewed the piano for a swirling guitar sound (inspired, he said, by James Brown), and had abandoned both the twelve-bar blues and the thirty-two bar popular song for long, slabs of tectonic post-jazz.
Hear as much of all of this as fits, tonight on “Now’s the Time”!
In the beginning, there was the Note, and the Note was with Louis, and it was Good. After that, things got considerably more complicated.
Louis Armstrong’s unparalleled sense of jazz improvisation was centered on the note – exquisitely expressed, perfectly played, chosen with intelligence and soul. Miles’s solo on “Sid’s Ahead” (1958) is the apotheosis of this approach to choosing the notes. But Miles didn’t stop there: he would, according to Franck Bergerot, whose book on Miles has inspired this month of programming on “Now’s the Time,” develop his own version of John Coltrane‘s “sheets of sound.” His solo on “Black Satin” (1972) stretches the very conception of what is meant by a solo in the first place.
You remember the Miles tune “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down” from Bitches Brew? Well, tonight’s show is entitled “Miles Chooses The Notes.” The second installment of our month-long celebration of the music Miles Davis in May highlights Miles the improviser. We’ll see where he sits in the continuum of great jazz soloists starting with Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young.
In many ways, Miles the improvisor can be seen as a reaction against his early boss, Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. Whereas Bird favored short, audacious bursts off the top of the chord, Miles preferred contemplative solos in the middle range of the chord, developed at great length. Bird created and celebrated bop’s baroquely intricate harmonic language; Miles sought almost immediately to restore a less frenetic style. Bird exploded the blues; Miles, over his lifetime, went deeper and deeper into a blues consciousness.
We’ll also explore Miles’ career-long response to a paradoxical bit of advice given him Thelonious Monk: “When you improvise, play the melody.” Paradoxical because in jazz improvisation, you should be playing anything but the melody (check out Bird and Hawkins on this score). Miles developed a corollary: when you are not improvising, don’t play the melody. Accordingly, we’ll hear a 1964 live recording of “Stella by Starlight” in which Miles statement of the theme is unrecognizable, and in which his long and complex solo refers repeatedly to the celebrated melody. And much more.
Join me for two hours of Miles and fellow travelers on “Now’s the Time.”
Our exploration of Miles Davis’s music in May starts at the beginning, with his sound. Miles came out of a school of trumpet players in St. Louis, and shared many of their characteristics: a sweetness, a vibrato-less tone, an affinity for the instrument’s middle register, a penchant for the blues. We’ll hear some of these St. Louis players – Charles Creath, Clark Terry – as well other trumpeters who influenced the crystallization of Miles’s sound – Erskine Hawkins, Bobby Hackett, Harold “Shorty” Baker, Freddie Webster. We’ll listen to other trumpeters that inspired Miles, or from whom he distanced himself – notably Dizzy Gillespie and Chet Baker. We’ll hear exemplary performances from Miles that highlight his distinctive and personal sound: perhaps “Walkin’” (1954), for example, or “Tutu” (1986).
We’ll also follow the evolution of Miles’s trumpet sound, including his striking use of the Harmon mute, and his experimentation with electronic effects and distortion. Join me for two hours of fantastic late-night music for people who love jazz and not only jazz!
No one has ever accused me of playing too little Miles Davis on the program. Come to think of it, no one has ever given me any indication that they’ve ever listened to the program at all. But were they to comment, they would likely note the generous space given over to Miles Davis on the playlists of “Now’s the Time.”
May marks the late trumpeter’s birthday (born 26 May 1926 in Alton, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis), and that’s my pretext for playing even more Miles all month. We’ll hear plenty of his records and those of his fellow travelers, plus the music that inspired him and the music he inspired in turn. We’ll have the luxury of contemplating Miles as a trumpeter, an improviser, a bandleader and a musical revolutionary.
This will not be a biography or a chronology. Each week we’ll consider El Mundo Miles from a different vantage point. In so doing, I will draw inspiration from my favorite book about Miles: Franck Bergerot‘s Miles Davis. Introduction à l’écoute du jazz moderne (Seuil, 1996). If there are any Miles fans reading this blog who (a) speak French and (b) haven’t read this book, you should do so at once. It’s perfectly suited to a shady spot, a bottle of chilled wine (or strong espresso) and an iPod fully loaded with Davis music. Bergerot devotes five chapters to five perspectives on Miles’s music: his sound, his choice of notes, his structural innovations, his band leading and his collaborations. There are five programs in May, and we’ll hit each of those topics. Join me in this extraordinary exploration!
On this week’s program, I played a track from drummer Buddy Miles‘s 1971 A Message to the People. It’s a very nice funk-rock-jazz record. I picked it up at SOM Records in Washington DC on Record Store Day, last week. In the 99-cent bin, no less. (SOM is located in the extraordinarily transformed 14th Street corridor, near the corner of T Street. Also found cool discs by Primitivo Santos, Wes Montgomery and Los Van Van.)
Among its many other virtues is the disc’s wild gatefold sleeve. It’s by artist Mati Klarwein, identified here as Abdul Mati. Klarwein also provided the cover art for Miles Davis‘s Bitches Brew and Live Evil. The Message sleeve seems to me somehow less mythic and symbolic than the Davis sleeves, and also seems to depict Buddy in a not altogether flattering light (on the inside sleeve). You be the judge.
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