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.

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington: April 29, 1899 - May 24, 1974

Mr. Ellington's music will be programmed all day Monday, April 29, 2013 on WKCR.
The broadcast will be available via the internet at
http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/wkcr/

The Proof Is In The Jam Part 2 - Jazz Singers, An Obsession

Because of Jerrold Levinson's "Jazz Vocal Interpretation: A Philosophical Analysis" (cited in a previous blog-post), I've become obsessed with jazz singers, jazz singing, The Great American Song Book; with the Boswell Sisters, Leo Watson, Kay Starr, Jo Stafford, Doris Day; with the writings of Whitney Balliett, Alec Wilder, André Hodeir, Gunther Schuller, and especially Will Friedwald - his remarkable Jazz Singing: America's Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond. 
  My musical life before Levinson was quite simple. Except for Pops, Louis Armstrong, Lady Day, Billie Holiday, Mr. B, Billy Eckstine, and The Divine One, Sarah Vaughan, I needed no other singers   (except perhaps Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau). Jazz singers were an afterthought with me. Reading Alec Wilder's American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 and Will Friedwald's Jazz Singing has convinced me that Jazz (THIS music) and The American Popular Song are each unique events in the history of Western Music. Popular songs in many instances have the blues and/or jazz incorporated in their melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material. So-called 'American Exceptionalism' resides in little else except in its spirituals, blues, jazz and popular songs.

  "Angel Eyes" Is it possible for a singer to sing Matt Dennis's song straight? 

  What do you mean by straight?

  I mean by straight, non-jazzy, non-novelty - non-Frank-Sinatra, non-Spike-Jones.

  Isn't Sinatra a pops singer?

  Anyone who begins "Angel Eyes" in the middle, at the bridge, is a jazz singer.

  Quite an interesting interpretation then of "Angel Eyes".

  If that's what you want to call it. I reckon that Old Blue Eyes was doing a bit more than interpreting this tune. He was improvising too. He changed the structure of the tune. He began with the B section. Recall the structure of "Angel Eyes" is AABA. One doesn't begin a performance of "Angel Eyes" with "Drink up all you people...". One starts with "Try to think ...". Hardly a straight performance of the tune - too jazzy.

  But improvising is something done in the moment. It's not something arranged, not something on paper. We were treating interpretation, straight verses jazzy, remember?

  It can be something on paper that's composed to sound like something in the moment. Improvising is an act that transforms the good bits of a tune (sometimes the ugly bits are sorted out) - transforms melody, harmony, rhythm of a standard into something else. When I talk about interpretation it's in a thin sense of interpretation (interpretation*) not your thick sense. When I talk of improvisation it's in the fat sense

  If you say so.

I do say so. In addition to saying so - runnin' it down, instead of 'banging my drum'; I've been tip-toeing around Jerrold Levinson's Jazz Vocal Interpretation. . . .

I shall not criticize what Levinson has said in his very dense, thoughtful, carefully drawn paper - he has covered nearly every base. He has atomized the (a) notion of vocal interpretation in ways that give effect to the popular song as placed on the page (sheet music), as placed off the page (performance), and as heard (by an audience). He has invoked Paul Grice's meaning pragmatics in treating what a singer conveys in performance, in contrast with what the words of a song mean.  One could atomize Levinson's atomization, the result of which could be reckoned to be a philosophical analysis of a philosophical analysis. All of this is what philosophy is made of. But there are more things.... 

Instead I'll improvise on Levinson's changes - with the help of many side-women/men, I'll blow my own solo (tune?). 

To be continued.






    

Charles McPherson Honored in Detroit

Last Saturday (13 April) Detroit's native son, the alto saxophonist, Charles McPherson was honored at the Detroit Institute of Arts. His appearance included a conversation with Mark Stryker, music critic for the Detroit Free Press. Mr. McPherson spoke about his early years in Detroit as a young student musician and emerging jazz saxophonist. He spoke of the influence of the Detroit pianist and educator Barry Harris. See the link below for details about Mr. McPherson's exciting performance with his quartet that evening.

http://idigjazz.blogspot.com/2013/04/charles-mcpherson-played-some-bop.html

The Proof Is In The Jam - Part 1

Touchin' on stuff
In addition to the NCAA basketball tournament, I've been thinking about Jerrold Levinson's exciting paper, "Jazz Vocal Interpretation: A Philosophical Analysis" that appears in the current issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, pages 35 - 43. Before the basketball excitement, I expressed my hope in these pages that I'd have my own thoughts on matters Levinsonian published herein in a couple of days. Well it didn't happen. In the mean time I've written quite a bit, compiled notes, sources and listened and re-listened to quite a lot of jazz vocal and instrumental music. The listening has been exciting and rewarding. I've also done quite a lot of reading and re-reading in and of books, articles and interviews treating songs, song writing, singers, and vocal and instrumental jazz performance.
  I've always considered jazz vocalists to be instrumentalists without horns, Young Woman Without A Horn. I still hold this view. Also I don't believe that jazz vocalists or instrumentalists (for that matter) interpret songs, in spite of the fact that we sometimes speak of the 'jazz interpretations' contrasted with 'straight interpretations' of songs, tunes, scores, &c. We may speak of a singer's interpretation of a song or of Charles Rosen's interpretation of Schumann's Carnaval (Op. 9). What we are comparing are performances with performances - not performances with a score. Let's take new music. Can one actually and meaningfully say that the first performance of Pierre Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître was an interpretation of his score? If we are talking about performances of music we say "The DSO will be performing Mahler's 3rd Symphony at 8PM" - not "There will be an interpretation at 8PM". In terms of sheet music 'jazz interpretations' are the same as a performance at a certain time. And one should be aware that jazz musicians learn songs and tunes, they don't learn sheet music; they use lead-sheets and fake-books; they learn what they need to learn in order to make music and improvise with other musicians. They are not interpreting sheet music from Tin Pan Alley. The good singers own the songs - Sarah Vaughan owned If You Could See Me Now and Misty (the same song actually); Billy Eckstine owned I Want To Talk About You and I Apologize. In fact there are published suggestions for singers who on rare occasions are permitted to participate in jam sessions - e.g., don't sing Misty and don't sing anything owned by Lady Day, Billie Holiday. http://www.phillyjazz.org/
  Obviously, if one is attempting to impute meaning or a semantics to a page of music (a score), then talk of interpretation seems appropriate. But I don't think that one interpretes a page of music, one performs it. Remember: Composers of songs, melodies, symphonies most often don't have a 'straight interpretation' in mind until performances occur. Here's a page of music (a score); there is a composer of the page of music; there is (are) a performer(s) of the page of music (musicians); now we have music. When musicians perform music from  a score there are always choices to be made about how to perform the notes, accents, and other suggestions set down by the composer. The composer, having heard a performance of her composition may say, "That's not my music!" or "We'll do better next time, I thought that I had it all there on the page, but alas...." Our composer can say, "I don't care for your interpretation", but she won't mean it!
  I discovered Ethel Waters recorded vocal performances and was astounded - I had read of her, but never attended to her music. I've read most of Whitney Balliett's impressive book of portraits and interviews, American Singers, which was what I needed to go along with my re-reading in Gunther Schuller's Swing Era and André Hodeir's Toward Jazz. I think it was Balliett (or was it Andrew Porter?) who wrote somewhere that to criticize something one has to describe it. Whitney Balliett was a master when it came to describing music and musicians - his portrait of Coleman Hawkins in American Musicians is one of Balliett's masterpieces. His piece in American Singers, "The President of the Derrière-Garde (Alec Wilder)" is another of his masterpieces.
  Wilder writes in his book, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (Kindle Locations 5370-5372). Kindle Edition,

Am I Blue?, introduced by Ethel Waters in the motion picture "On With The Show" (1929), with music by Harry Akst, is dangerously interwoven with Ethel Waters' recording of it. And she made it sound like a masterpiece. It isn't that, but it is a good song, using a device somewhat similar to the one in April Showers. 

So until next time, keep listening; and re-reading Levinson.