OK, I did say I would try and bring about an explanation of my own thinking and expound what I believe jazz is. My very early recollections of music included singing bouncy and tuneful hymns (Safe in the Arms of Jesus) at church in the company of my grand mother, a staunch Scottish Presbyterian. This graduated to a desire to sit at a piano and hear the sounds it could make. I got that piano at a young age. That desire has continued throughout the 74 years of my life quite relentlessly. In days gone by I listened to Jack Jacksons Top twenty from the pirate station Radio Luxemburg long before Rock and Roll. I was hooked and wanted to know how sounds were constructed - harmony. I listened to the big bands of the early 50s such as Ted Heath and came across Bill McGuffie, the nine finger Scottish pianist and Annie Ross, the Scottish jazz singer who sang in Ronnie Scotts London jazz club. What Bill played, I liked. It was my first encounter of what I would call jazz. He played tunes written by Duke Ellington one of the greatest jazz musicians that ever lived and sung by Ella Fitzgerald, the legendary jazz singer. I was consumed with a desire to copy. I learned that jazz rhythmical music had a swinging beat called syncopation and that this could be emulated on a piano using the right hand to maintain at least one melody and the left hand to control rhythm and harmony. I came across lots of people who could play by ear. How I wished I could do that. I went down a different route and learned about how collections of sounds (notes and scales on a piano) can be framed into what is known as chords. That was a major break through for me. Enter George Shearing to my life - gosh he was blind and could play bold and melodic harmonic chords. I began to understand that jazz musicians in the early years from the 1920s on had to have a tune or melody in their head and that jazz sounds could be played by many instruments especially brass (trumpet and trombone) and reed (saxophones) combined with rhythm sections including percussion and bass fiddle (the guitar came later) and add a vocalist for good measure, where they all talk to each other (sometimes referred to as call and response in jazz language). Musicians created new tunes (called improvisation or colloquially jamming) around the core tune with an understanding of harmony (sounds that fit together and are usually but not always tonally pleasing to the ear). To me that is jazz; tuneful sounds, rhythmically played or sung, with a swinging beat and added harmonies to make listening interesting and you could dance to the music. This of course is not the whole story of jazz, far from it, but it captured my imagination. Tunes and songs of today are sometimes described as not jazz. Buble can make most songs sound like my interpretation of jazz, just as Sinatra did. Maxine Sullivan, a noted American jazz singer, interpreted Scottish folk songs into a jazz genre, so did Julie London. Karen, last night, one of our Jazzfordians, rehearsed the Carly Simon song Nobody Does It Better and with good swing gave it a jazz twist. The Beatles number Cant Buy Me Love can easily be made to sound like a jazz swing song. Most Burt Bacharachs songs can be played as jazz. What I am saying is that jazz has a broad base which dates back to the late 20th Century (Joplin and Ragtime) and developed for the past 100 years but with the abiding tunes, the harmonic structures, the syncopated beat (sometimes slow as in Blues and sometimes fast as in Swing). Lovers of jazz must be able to listen and recognise what the musicians and vocalists are attempting to do especially todays singer/song writers). Jazz musicians and vocalists have a deep knowledge of music theory and how sounds are constructed within the classical collection of twelve sounds or pitches (black and white notes on a piano for example). It is very rare that magical inspiration causes a jazz musician to play his or her sounds totally off the cuff. It is highly structured (sometimes called riffs and licks - watch this space for explanations) around the basic framework of music theory and the given melody. If you have reached this point in my blog then congratulations....there will be more but for now just listen to jazz and try to familiarize and understand the overall jazz artists essay from beginning to end. Try Duke Ellington https://youtube/watch?v=qDQpZT3GhDg.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 08:23:46 +0000
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