In the PM Interim

So, um, this is ridiculously sweet - lean back and enjoy a 9:00 short homemade film:



And as long as we're posting, I'll write a little mabob on a couple things I've read / experienced lately:

Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion: 72

This was an Audio lecture series on CD I listened to the past week to and from the job. It walks through the various incarnations of jazz in order, explaining some of the history of the various forms' developments as well as playing samples of tunes and the various characteristics of each style. The lectures were given by Bill Messenger, a fantastic piano player who sounds like something of a Don Knotts clone. The lectures were fairly dumbed down but very enjoyable, and the lecturer was very clear on which particular points of each of the types of jazz he wanted to emphasize. He played numerous pieces and examples himself which were great, and when he wanted to emphasize band arrangement or otherwise go beyond what he could do solo on the keys, he played classic recordings from the various eras. He brought in a couple of other musicians for a couple of the lectures, and while their playing was superb, his interviews with them were pretty horrendous. Overall, it gave a great framework for determining the different aspects of jazz to listen for; I would definitely recommend it as a very good intro to the subject. Below are some notes (mainly for me) on the primary features of the different styles.

West African Music - Polyrhythmic and Syncopated music. B-buh b-buh buh (Hello my baby...)

Cakewalk - African meets Western music, basically a syncopation of European marches

Ragtime - A more complicated and "ragged" form of the cakewalk, ragtime maintained the syncopation and upped the energy; it offended Victorians as low-class and was the "rock" of the 1890s. Classic examples include The Maple Leaf Rag and The Entertainer, both by Joplin.

Dixieland Jazz - culled from the New Orleans funeral dirge/march, it's syncopated and polyrhythmic but also polyphonic (multiple running melody lines) AND utilizes improvisation. First used the tuba and banjo but later, with mics, used the bass and guitar (in addition to allowing soft-voiced crooners to take front and center). Features solo breaks.

Blues - 12 bar arrangements (I,I,I,I7,IV,IV, I,I,V7,IV,I) as opposed to the 32 bar w/ 8 bar bridge typical jazz arrangements. Blues is the visceral germ of jazz, or jazz with the abstract intellect removed. Features blue notes, embellishments of the typical pentatonic scale.

Swing - Based on the "swing" beat where quarter notes are not really quarter notes. Served as a blend of energy, improvisational spontaneity and composition/arrangement. Also featured antiphonal lines, or "call and repeat" sections. Stood out from "society bands," the adult contemporary / easy listening of the time.

Boogie-Woogie - A solo piano form featuring ostinato bass (3 piano notes rolled over and over in pattern) played in a blues progression. This is really the precursor to rock and roll piano songs (think Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Fats Domino).

Big Band Blues - Sort of an "advanced blues" which melds the jazzier cords and big band instrumentation with the blues progression / lyrical structure. It gets away a little bit from that which sounds gut-level about the amotional blues; it's more in the arty end of the spectrum.

Be-Bop - The punk of jazz - arose as a response to the over-slickness of commercial swing and is named after its harsh b-buh stops found throughout. Be-bop eschews the rest - the sound is constant and running and fast, and is generally difficult to play, requiring mastery of the level of Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie. Be-bop's hallmark is the flatted fifth, an odd insertion into the scale, that serves as the modern jazz blue note. Be-bop also largely drops the clarinet and does not feature piano ragtime, relying on the bass to keep time.

Modern Jazz (General) - generally an explosion of possibility. The traditional scales are expanded to include 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, 13ths, you name it. Dissonance is now legal, and "modern jazz" tends to be a shifty term, indeed.

Cool Jazz - A response to the frenetic tendencies of bebop, cool jazz is a "gentle rebellion," a style that uses the preceding innovations in a laid back way as well as some space to define them. The jazz of and behind the beatniks. It also features chord innovations (from the likes of Thelonious Monk) and time signature experimentation (Dave Brubeck, Take Five). Unsurprisingly, this style began with The Birth of the Cool by Miles Davis.

Modal Jazz - "neoprimitive" jazz that sticks to a single chord / key and dances within a particular mode. Messenger called this "Medieval Jazz" as it utilizes some of the same intervals found in, for example, the Gregorian chants. It is notably easier than some of the other forms, though perhaps not AS easy as...

Free Jazz - an apt description is that free jazz "divorces the notion of art and craft." No chord changes, no chordal instruments, and the only real structure is something of a constant tempo and occasionally an introduced theme.

Fusion Jazz - Jazz meets rock. Solo and riff-oriented jazz.

Okay, phew, another review:

Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Blunders: 40

Yawn. What I didn't know already was presented in the cutesy know-it-all fashion typical of Neyer. Plus he doesn't even adhere to some of the hallmarks of sabermetrics, such as not mentioning rbi's and average at every other breath. Blah. I was highly disappointed.

Yet another:

US Guys by Charlie LeDuff: 43

It really does come off as Hunter S. Thompson redux. I felt like I was reading a bunch of quirky characterizations with nothing in common but their quirkiness - I think he has really gone out of his way to find the fringe, and nothing to do at all with what makes a "U.S. Guy." Maybe this is a second level illustration of the fact that we really have nothing all that in common, but I felt his hippie-isms and come-on mans were nowhere near as good in print as they were on radio. He is a talented writer - vibrant descriptions throughout, and solid story-telling skills - but I highly question the existence of anything resembling a point. It almost reeked of a "Look at me the gonzo involved journalist" - am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that he thrust himself into all these absurd situations for the sake of lived-in journalism? My mind-set does not match his - I am an ardent denier of the concept that there is something vitally superior to actual, real experience as opposed to crafted and imagined experience. In other words, as I read this I found myself not caring whether it was real or not; the spice of him having "actually done it" did not add anything for me; I just thought it was a bad fiction story about an idiot out for too much attention. The quirky characters he ran into, the implausible stories, benefited not at all from their trueness, and they were generally boring enough to be entirely passable. Their trueness was a crutch, take it away and... anyways, the book was saved by a chapter on Burning Man in which Leduff exposed every hypocrisy and shallow, insipid stupidity the event has come to represent. Even that faltered towards the end; I suppose the deal is that the world of the real is not for me.