Dr. Jackie

Happy birthday Jackie McLean - 1931 - 2006.

The Proof Is In The Jam - Part 6: The Last Take

No doubt my reader(s) is (are) quite familiar with John Wisdom's "Logical Constructions", a series of five articles that appeared in Mind beginning in April 1931 and ending April 1933. Wisdom sought to elucidate - give an analysis of - the meaning of "Pennies are logical constructions". He wasn't satisfied with his efforts given to defining logical construction. In these pages I have recently attempted to provide an account of jazz vocal performance, while avoiding ideas about jazz vocal interpretation, in Jerrold Levinson's sense. I tried to confute ideas set forth in Levinson's paper about jazz vocal interpretation. I think my views are well founded given what I think that I have discerned about jazz vocal performance from having participated in Sarah Vaughan-Billy Eckstine and Johnny Hartman jazz vocal events as a member of their audiences, having listened to recorded performances and read the works of those who know about these very interesting matters.
  We are also aware of the (once) popular tune, "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off" - Levinson says, interpretation; I say, performance; Let's call the whole thing off!
  Back in the fabulous '60s I found Wisdom's Logical Construction quite interesting - in fact I was enthralled by his articles: Wisdom was jammin'. Those were the days!
  I could say, probably did say, that certainly musicians perform works of music. They sit at a piano (say) and attempt to decode marks on the music-score in front of them. After a musician decodes Alban Berg's Piano Sonata, marks-up her score with accents and helpful hints to aid in her performance and understanding, practices and rehearses playing her score; she's ready to perform her (marked-up score) - from memory or otherwise, it doesn't matter. Even if we grant that our pianist has interpreted her version of Berg's score in various ways, what are we comparing her performance of her score with? Do we compare her marked-up score with the latest Berg score, the score Berg scholars?
  I don't think we want to say the the set of Glenn Gould's performances of Berg's sonata is extensionally equivalent to the set of his interpretations of the sonata. Why not? Because interpretations (if such there are) could be private, could be unperformed, unrealized. In 1970, Glenn Gould wrote a piece that appeared in High Fidelity, June issue, entitled "A Desert Island Discography" [see The Glenn Gould Reader, pps. 437-40]. Gould writes of Bruno Maderna's "realization" of Schoenberg's Serenade, Op. 24, of Karajan's "version" of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, etc. Gould doesn't use "interpretation" anywhere in his piece.
  Interpretations of works, tunes, music occur - if at all - ,in the quite thin sense of the term, at the practice, pre-performance stages of a musical work or improvisation. Once a performer hits the stage, club, or recording studio there are no interpretations - just versions, realizations, improvisations &c.
  Interpretations reside with music critics and certainly with literary critics and with philosophers, or so I suppose. We'll treat style at another time.

The Proof Is In The Jam - Part 5: Jukebox Audience

I have often been perplexed by the seeming disregard by philosophers of music aesthetics to consider carefully the writings of musicians and music critics. Most of the chatter seems to be between philosophers only. When I read David Schiff's important books on Elliott Carter and Duke Ellington there are no mentions of philosophers therein - although the late Milton Babbitt and the late Charles Rosen are mentioned, both of whom were touched by maths and philosophy. A common move made by philosophers of music aesthetics is to mention Eduard Hanslick or Art Tatum and move swiftly back to the cosy, comfortable environment of academic discourse. Another thing that I've noticed, and which bothers me, is that the papers in music aesthetics tend to be less freely available on the internet than papers in metaphysics and logic.
  I've been concerned recently with jazz vocalists and Jerrold Levinson's concerns about jazz vocal interpretation verses pop vocal interpretation. Levinson may be right about a pop singer's interpreting a piece of popular sheet music. But I think he's wrong about what this comes to in terms of jazz vocalists. I think if one is going to avoid unnecessary confusion, it's best to stick with what one knows.
  I know for example that Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan were jazz vocalists. If I write about what it is to be a jazz vocalist, it helps if one has heard a jazz vocalist in person. It also helps if one has heard a jazz vocalist in a setting in which she/he feels comfortable. If one takes Billie Holiday as one's favorite example of a jazz singer, it is almost certain that one has not heard Miss Holiday in person. The best we can do is the television broadcast with Lester Young et al.
  So with these exemplars of jazz singing we are relying on recordings. If one assumes that was is a special connection between these singers and their audiences, one must rely on newspaper, magazine, and trade publication accounts such as Downbeat, The Jazz Review, or Metronome for news and insights about a singer's audience. Even today occasions to hear a jazz vocalist in person, up close are quite limited. The closest that I've been to a jazz singer's performing in a comfortable acoustic environment was in Detroit at the Book Cadillac Hotel 30 years ago, where Johnny Hartman performed with a trio. Mr. Hartman sang ballads that he had performed for many years. I was impressed with his singing artistry, quality of his voice, musical taste. That was the closest that I ever been to a great singer in performance. Communication? Did I feel that Mr. Hartman was transmitting or communicating anything? Sublime Artistry - That's what was communicated. Sarah Vaughan 'communicated' sublime artistry at great distances, in concert halls verses supper club settings (the setting where Johnny Hartman sang for (not to) me).
  Billie Holiday's 1935 recordings with Teddy Wilson's small groups - jam session settings - are thought to be the apex of her recorded jazz-vocal art. Martin Williams in his chapter, "Billie Holiday: Actress Without an Act" of his book The Jazz Tradition offers a vivid description of how Miss Holiday created music with Mr. Wilson's small band of soloists. Martin Williams writes, page 71,

[The] recordings were primarily intended for an urban Negro audience, and during those depression years they were sold largely to jukebox operators. Like Henry "Red" Allen and Fats Waller before them, Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday were asked to come to the studio with a group of the best musicians available (they would most often be drawn from the Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman bands). The were no preparations or rehearsals. The performers would be given "lead sheets" to the popular songs, many of which they had not seen or heard before, with indications of melody, simple harmony, and words. They did some "standard" songs too, but the new material seems to have been selected with little care or taste . . . . The jazzmen proceeded to transmute the material into their own idiom - they worked up fairly innocent arrangements and they improvised solo variations. Certainly not all of what they did was good - inspiration falters and some of the songs can't be helped much - but they apparently felt much at ease in handling material they had never laid eyes on before.

Miss Holiday, Mr. Wilson and the other musicians "transmute[d] the material", the songs qua "lead sheets"; they changed the material into something new - into new material. A jam session tradition allowed the musicians to rearrange the tunes into coherent new material in the jam session or swing session tradition. The audience was to have been an urban Negro audience. The transmission was to have been via jukeboxes in public places - restaurants, night clubs, pool halls &c. Whatever communication that would have happen between Miss Holiday et al. would have been in and of a tradition in swing-music. (My own jukebox experiences took place in pool halls and shoe-shine parlors - Gene Ammons, Miles Davis and The Drifters.)
  Given the setup as described above I doubt that Billie Holiday was trying to communicate anything to her audience. She and the other musicians were interested in creating music not in embellishing pop charts. Perhaps today we are at a stage in our jazz-vocal aesthetic lives where our singers' aims are not as high as Miss Holiday's. But at least we have Messrs. Hodeir, Schuller, Williams and Hamilton to redirect our thoughts about these matters.
  André Hodeir, Towards Jazz
  Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era
  Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition
  Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics & Music

The Proof Is In The Jam - Part 4: The Audience?

On occasion she [Billie Holiday] sang a song straight, without much variation; then she might be an interesting and even moving singer, but she was not a great one. Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition, p. 71

I've heard that Haydn, Brahms and some of some other Viennese cats jammed in clubs. I once asked the tenor-man David Murray if noisy, inattentive club audiences bothered him personally or affected his music-making, his performances. He replied, "Not at all." I heard in interview with a string quartet recently (on WKCR, where else?) that was promoting its forthcoming appearance at a Manhattan club featuring 'serious' composed music (mis-called "Classical music"). The quartet's members were asked the same question that I posed to David Murray. Their response was, "If the music's good, the crowd will be quiet." Crowd control is often a matter of a club's tradition - no smoking during a Blossom Dearie set. What about a singer's audience? Does she sing to or for her audience? In spite of her audience? Does a singer attempt to communicate something to her audience? Does a singer communicate certain of the details of the song she is singing, music that she's performing? In performing music, not just the tune, but in a performance-context, interacting musically in a group of musicians; does the singer communicate with the other musicians? Does it matter who is leading the band, whether it is the singer or an instrumentalist? - of course in the cases of Louis Armstrong and Billy Eckstine, it did not matter.
  Jerrold Levinson in his Jazz Vocal Interpretation advances a view that jazz-singers convey meaning to their audience; that the words of the songs they sing in performance have meaning; and the singer conveys the meaning of the words of the song to the audience. So in 'interpreting' a song a singer might be thought of as decoding a text (the song), in a similar fashion as a literary critic might do. A singer's phrasing, for example, imparts (conveys) meaning, as found in the song by the singer, to her audience. "Sometimes I'm Happy" might mean one thing what when sang up-tempo, as Betty Carter might do; and mean something else when sung very slowly, in a Schoenbergian sprechgesang way, as Jeanne Lee might have done. Members of Sarah Vaughn's audiences might have believed that she was communicating with them, that she was letting them in on a song's meaning, but I think such beliefs would have been in error. Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter certainly spoke with their audience, made them feel appreciated &c.; but they were about creating and re-creating music, often in spite of the words. Try singing "I Cried For You"; it's not easy. The meaning of this tune, if any, was in the beauty that resulted in Billie Holiday's 1936 recorded performance; beauty that resulted also in the context of the musicians performing in Teddy Wilson's band on equal terms with her - Miss Holiday, Mr. Wilson and the horns each get one solo chorus. When Miss Holiday became a band leader, she would take two choruses whilst the other soloist(s) at most got one - rather like 'sideman' Miles Davis on Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else disc.
  I don't believe that text (song qua sheet music), singer, audience meaning triangulation occurs in jazz-singing performance. A jazz-singers' audience may feel that it does; but they would be mistaken. 

 

The Proof Is In The Jam - Part 3: The Ways of "I'm Free"

June 8, 1953 - Detroit, Michigan, The Graystone Ballroom, The Battle of the Bands - Duke Ellington & his Orchestra vs. Stan Kenton & his Orchestra.

On the date shown above, I was a twelve year-old standing in front of Mr. Ellington's great orchestra. Only this year did I pin down the date. But I carried the image of Duke Ellington and me until now.

In 1957 I heard Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine ('B') sing duets with Count Basie's band. 'B' also soloed on valve trombone. Bud Powell was also on this Birdland All-Stars on Tour program. And over the course of the next few years I would have read André Hodeir's Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, subscribed to The Jazz Review and Downbeat, read the latter's accounts of Billie Holiday's and Art Pepper's arrests, and wore out my vinyl LP of Lady Day's Music For Torching.

Jam Session Aesthetic

Bob Crosby - "I'm Free" (Bob Haggart's original composition)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBYyQQ8YoqI
Lady's Way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07r-2zg0k24
'B''s Way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCVLUct6C_k
Linda's Way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdH5hrJKjlE

"I'm Free" or "What's New?"
Jerrold Levinson "Jazz Vocal Interpretation: A Philosophical Analysis", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2013, pps. 35-43.
Question: Could Billie Holiday have sung "What's New?" in a Levinsonian straight-way (Linda's Way) in addition to a Levinsonian jazz-way (Lady's/'B''s Way)?
Could " 'Round Midnight" be sung in Linda's Way?

Levinson's straight/jazz contrast in my view doesn't have any useful conceptual work to do when applied to The Great American Songbook, to (once) Popular Songs. According to Gunther Schuller, Phil Schaap and others, singers - both classical- and jazz-singers - were not often thought of by musicians and critics as being musicians; they were just boy- or girl-singers. Schuller in The Swing Era, page 527, writes, "The quip that singers have resonance where their brains ought to be is a stock joke among musicians all over the world." The "Great Soloists" section of The Swing Era includes only one 'singer', the musician Billie Holiday - the remaining twelve great soloists are male instrumentalists. Both musics of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, great musician-soloist-singers, were treated in Schuller's Early Jazz. Schuller's Great Soloists are Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Bunny Berigan, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Red Norvo, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Charlie Christian, Ben Webster, Jack Teagarden, Pee Wee Russell, and Henry "Red" Allen. Billie Holiday performed with, and recorded with, nearly of these musicians. They considered her to be one of them, a great jazz-soloist-musician.
  Her early recordings with Teddy Wilson and with Lester Young were in the Jam Session Tradition or what Phil Schaap calls the Swing Song Tradition - listen to Schaap's 2010 program devoted to Billie Holiday at Phil Schaap Jazz http://philschaapjazz.com/index.php?l=page_view&p=radio. In this tradition she was a soloist among soloists, in most cases a great soloist among great soloists. "I Cried For You" consists of a Johnny Hodges chorus, Billie Holiday Chorus, Teddy Wilson Chorus, Harry Carney chorus, ensemble takes the tune out - jam session feel. It is the jam session feel that predominates Billie Holiday's great early recordings and (in my view) her late, great Verve recordings, her Music For Torching, her "What's New" above. See Schuller's exposition of Billie's "I Cried For You" on pages 533-34. According to Schuller,

Of the several unique qualities Billie [Holiday] brought to jazz-singing - in some instances for the first time ... - none is more important than her ability to reshape (re-compose) [emphasis added] a given song to make it wholly her own. She did this on two levels - almost always simultaneously: on the larger structural level by freely reinventing both the melody and its rhythms, on the smaller level by embellishing these with her own vocal adornments. [pps. 532-33]

Like so many (most, I would say) popular songs, "What's New" has jazz, jazz-swing built into it. A singer may develop a way of 'interpreting' a song, develop a way of feeling a song in various ways - ways that Levinson treats in great detail in his paper (I counted twenty or so). But a jazz-singer's performance of a song - Billie Holiday's "I Cried For You" - need not be an interpretation of a song's embodiment in sheet music. I read somewhere that Teddy Wilson and his musicians who were recording with Billie Holiday were using lead sheets which contained the bare essentials of the music. The lead sheets resulted in improvisation and ensemble-playing by the soloists and rhythm section. Whatever 'interpretation' there was on Miss Holiday's part was certainly not part of the performance-mix that included all of the musicians in the recording session. There was no sheet music in the jam in other words, just creative musicians creating new music, new sounds, new ensemble textures.
  Miss Holiday was not an interpreter of songs; she was a re-creator, a re-composer, of songs, the results of which were among the highest forms of improvised vocal artistry. Her performances were not then interpretations of songs. She was a jazz soloist who was respected by respected jazz-instrumentalists.