Thanks to everyone who came out on the European gigs with Thomas Morgan and Kush Abadey. It was a great tour. I also made a new friend in Bolzano.
In Oslo I was interviewed by Filip Roshauw for jazznytt; the Norwegian page is here. (The title, “Odd Iverson,” is a pun on a legendary soccer player, Odd Iversen.)
Filip was unusually prepared and engaged. Since I really liked this interview, I asked Filip if I could run it on TT in English. Filip said yes; I also edited the answers for grammar and clarity, although the flow remains intact.
Filip Roshauw: I thought I'd ask you about the title of the new album, Technically Acceptable. You’ve mentioned that it’s a quote from a book, but I wondered if it has more meaning than that?
Ethan Iverson: It's not a serious title. I want to make people smile!
But if you want me to be comparatively serious for a moment, between the trio and the sonata, this is the set of tools that I’m going to be using from now on: Playing open and loose trio music on one hand, and writing formal music on the other. I am confident in my abilities in these fields. I’m technically acceptable.
Does the idea of letting those two aspects live within the same album feel new to you this time around?
– Yeah, I think so. Of course, nothing's truly new. There's always a precedent. But as far as I know, no jazz pianist has put a sonata on a record on a jazz label like Blue Note.
When I read the title, I was also reminded of something you mentioned somewhere. You wrote an article about Billie Holiday, and you considered the title “Billie Holiday: Technician.” And it seems that a lot of stuff that you've written is about assessing jazz from, I guess, a technical standpoint in some way. That it is music that can be explained in those terms. And the piece that you've chosen for this title is a deceptively simple, Count Basie-ish tune...
– Well, that's right. A lot of the time, something simple on the surface is full of complexity underneath.
Many people think they've got Billie Holiday's number, but, actually, they don't have her number. The same goes for all great jazz. The composed melodies of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue can be scratched out on a paper napkin, but there are so many other elements that make the album very sophisticated. Often there hasn't been enough of the proper terminology to describe those sophisticated elements, and as a writer and critic, I am trying to move that discussion forward.
The song “Technically Acceptable” is a medium tempo rhythm changes tune in the Count Basie idiom. You're correct, that does not seem very hard. But I was talking to the great bass player Ben Street, and I mentioned I was taking that piece on the road to play with local rhythm sections. And Ben said to me, "There's nothing harder than medium tempo rhythm changes.”
Let's talk about the idea for the Piano Sonata. Obviously you've composed stuff before, but what was the idea behind this specific piece?
– Longer formal composition started happening about a decade ago. I have worked a lot with the choreographer Mark Morris and his wonderful Dance Group, and Mark asked me to arrange a set of Beatles themes for Pepperland, the evening-length celebration of the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We could only get rights to a certain number of songs, only six pieces, and we needed an hour show. So to fill up the time, I wrote some original compositions that were related to The Beatles or the idea of the swinging ‘60s. Paul McCartney liked classical music, when they worked on “Penny Lane,” he told George Martin to put in the piccolo trumpet from Bach's Brandenburg Concerto. In fact, there's obviously a lot of European classical music references in the Beatles. So…well…even though I never did this before, I realized I should write a sonata allegro for Mark Morris’s dance. The composition went very quickly, and I really liked the result. After that, I thought, “What am I, a sonata composer now?
Apparently I was! During the pandemic I wrote six sonatas for diverse instruments plus piano. In fact, there were seven because one didn't go well and I withdrew it. So the Piano Sonata was actually the eighth full-length sonata, which meant I’d already done a certain amount of groundwork in terms of refining the aesthetic and learning how to shape a longer narrative.
What I like about the Piano Sonata is that it sounds like me, meaning it doesn't sound that different than when I'm playing jazz. The frame is new, but the actual chords and melodies are kind of the same. When I've shown the Sonata to other people I trust, they all say, yeah, this is what you do.
So it's not a big stretch. I don't have to suddenly think, what do I do now that I'm writing formal music? It's like I am just doing what I always do, and it just happens to be notated — which may make it more valid than it might be otherwise.
It’s hard not to think about the article you recently wrote in The New York Times about Rhapsody in Blue, “The Worst Masterpiece,” which in a sense is about how Gershwin’s piece became the road not taken in American classical music.
– Exactly! With my sonata, I am trying to say this is the road we could take. It's the 21st century, and we should all know all these idioms.
There’s been a lot of debate about decolonizing classical music or music education in the last years, and it seems like your point has been that jazz deserves a different place in all of this, that it needs to be defined and analyzed on its own merits.
– My mentor Billy Hart says jazz is America's classical music. Billy gets that phrase from John Coltrane, who said that every culture has its classical music. And I know what they mean, and I respect that opinion.
Still, at this point, for better or for worse, when we talk about classical music in casual conversation, we're talking about the European tradition. I love the European tradition. I'm a piano player, after all – all piano players love the European tradition. I don’t like the word “decolonizing” because that sounds like you want to shame people who love Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin — meaning, you want to shame me! Get out of here! Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin are truly great!
But when you get to the establishment and the academy in America, someone like John Coltrane is definitely not considered to be as serious as someone like Gershwin or Aaron Copland. But honestly, Coltrane was bigger and better than either. I like Gershwin, I like Copland – I'm not against those guys. But in terms of some sort of absolute peak of an aesthetic, Coltrane was much, much greater. Coltrane is actually like Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin.
My dream is that classical musicians, especially in America, could learn to be a little more humble and take John Coltrane more seriously. That goes for all of us: let’s take Duke Ellington seriously. Let's take Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, and Billie Holiday seriously. Let's use their techniques for our American music, regardless of what genre we call it.
The specific issue of swing and blues is still not too well understood in classical circles. And that was part of my argument about Rhapsody in Blue, for I feel like it has obscured the issue of how hard black rhythm really is. Since it's a flashy, virtuoso number with a few big beautiful tunes, no one has to swing or even really play in steady tempo. It's got this sort of quick-change musical theater “bluesiness” to it. While it's good for what it is, at this point — a hundred years later! — I’m ready for the people on those classical concert stages to be able to dig in and really swing and really play some blues. It's about time.
But do you see any movement there?
– There is some movement, but there could be a lot more. Look at all those people who were so upset about my piece! It just shows how I'm right. While foaming at the mouth, my critics don't see the obvious piece that's missing with rhythm, blues and frankly, black music.
It’s surprising that people became that upset. I mean, the title is well chosen, it’s a bit provocative, but I didn’t read the article as a diss on Rhapsody in Blue. Rather, it felt representative of how many people have perceived that piece, from Leonard Bernstein and onwards.
–-I had thought of that phrase, “the worst masterpiece,” when practicing Rhapsody in Blue in order to perform it in concert. One day I said to myself, somewhat in despair, “God, this is the worst masterpiece.” Aha! That’s a good title, I've got to use it…
Unfortunately, many read the title and did not consider the essay. If I had the chance to publish again, would I change the title? I don't know.
On to another piece of the album - I’m not sure if I’ve heard a theremin sound quite as close to the human voice as Rob Schwimmer does on the version of “Round Midnight.” Speaking of Gershwin, it reminded me of recordings of Ann Brown performing “Summertime” in Porgy and Bess.
– I wasn't thinking of that way just because I know Rob and his theremin so well — he’s actually featured in that score for Mark Morris’s Pepperland — but a lot of people have said it sounds like an operatic soprano, and that's beautiful too.
The idea of an avant-garde “Round Midnight” actually does have a source. George Russell recorded it with Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, and I’ve always loved that version. It's a very abstract, full-on deconstruction. Years ago, I recorded “Round Midnight” with a trio. The version was more in the tradition…and now I've got a “Round Midnight” that is more in the George Russell/Eric Dolphy lineage.
Another song is “Victory is Assured (Alla Breve).” “Victory is Assured” was the sign-off phrase that Stanley Crouch used. It was also the title of a posthumous collection of Crouch essays. What was the idea behind a tribute to him?
– The piece was just called “Alla Breve” at first, which is not that good of a title, although I remain amused at the idea of marking the meter of a jump blues as in cut time. And then, after the piece was recorded, I suddenly thought of Stanley Crouch, and how he would probably approve of this piece, since it is a sincere nod to Count Basie and Kansas City. I looked online, and as far as I could tell, no one had actually done a jazz piece with the title “Victory is Assured” yet. If Wynton Marsalis or Marcus Roberts or any of Stanley’s musician friends had used it already, I don't think I would dared. I keep “Alla Breve” in the title to make it all a little less blatant.
Stanley thought any jazz music should relate to the fundamentals of the original black aesthetic: swing and blues. And I have to say I mostly agree, even though a lot of the music I make — and will always make — brings in many other sources. In The Bad Plus we used indie rock and concert minimalism and all sorts of references very far from swing and the blues.
There’s also maturity, I guess? Probably, the older you get, the more you want to honor traditional values. Thomas Morgan used the word “integrity.” I was sort of talking about this and he looked at me and said, yeah, this is all fine if you do it with integrity.
Perhaps unlike Stanley, and certainly unlike Wynton, I do believe that the avant-garde needs to be part of skillful modern musical discourse. Coltrane showed us that.
I heard a conversation with you on the Manifesto podcast where you discussed Marsalis's famous piece “What jazz is and isn’t.” During that conversation, you said that part of your writing has been as an apologist for Marsalis and Crouch. Did that inspire your writing in the first place, or did it become clearer after a while?
– I read all of Stanley and Albert Murray, and I grew up liking Wynton’s music, especially the period with Jeff Watts on drums. I suppose Stanley is quite a literal influence on my prose style, for whatever that’s worth.
Not to make too much of this, but The Bad Plus was news in 2003. We we on the covers of all the magazines as “The bad boys of jazz,” Midwestern white guys referencing indie rock, Kurt Cobain, and Apex Twin. I enjoyed the tension of bringing in Stanley and Wynton to my fans and readers. Some members of my peer group always hated Stanley and Wynton, but I thought that was a mistake. They both have something to teach us. Albert Murray also. There’s more nuance in Crouch, Murray, and Marsalis than their critics think.
It’s also important to remember how they were also reacting against the dominance of certain Caucasian tropes in jazz that weren't that hip. One problematic area was jazz education, which by the mid-1980s had ended up in this Gary Burton/Berklee space that was very profitable but also very uncool. And then there was the discourse around conceptual avant-garde music, for example someone like John Zorn, who really rose to this incredible prominence in that era, a cultural icon whose many influential and acclaimed recordings were initially classified as “jazz.” John Zorn has excellent qualities, but he doesn't have much to do with what Stanley and Wynton believe should be the center of the music. So. If forced to take sides — you know, if there was actually a war on — I don't want to be in the Gary Burton/Berklee education camp, and I don't want to be John Zorn camp. I actually want to be camp with Wynton and Stanley, where at least we could talk about Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Billy Higgins before going back out on the battlefield.
I was lucky, I picked up Considering Genius, a collection of articles by Crouch before I really knew anything about the so-called jazz wars. And a lot of those pieces are just wonderful, lucid pieces about the music. It seems like there’s a lot to learn there, now that the context has shifted.
– Yeah, Considering Genius is a fabulous book. It’s so nice that you have this positive history with Stanley’s writing. I agree that most of those essays are simply good.
After I got some of the high energy and bitter reactions that I did from the Rhapsody piece, I thought, this might be sort of what Wynton and Stanley felt when they said some pretty obvious stuff 30 years ago.
People react like scalded cats. They just don't want to hear, “Pay attention to black music as a technical resource you need to study.” The original sin of America is slavery, and the after effects from that terrible history are not accurately assessed or commonly agreed upon to this day. A lot of people say, “Out of sight, out of mind.”
I'm not putting myself in there with Wynton and Stanley in terms of any kind of risk or public profile or anything like that. But I did just have that thought: Well, people don't always want to hear the truth about the blues. Stanley and Wynton know about that, too.
Do you think it’s changing? I mean, some of this should resonate right now. His perspectives on jazz being the music for working class or working-class or middle-class African-Americans goes a long way in explaining his frustrations with the critical hype surrounding avant garde jazz, for instance. You might not agree with his assessment of the music, but it seems valid.
– That’s a pretty basic point totally ignored by many jazz critics then and now.
Both Wynton and Stanley actually occupy a middle position, so, as fashion changes, they can be hated by any political faction. I know conservatives and liberals who agree on nothing else but that Stanley Crouch was a problem. Is something changing? I don’t know. I admit that a few people have confessed that after reading me on Stanley and Wynton, they’ve gone back and rethought some things.
But something else must have changed as well – you mentioned John Zorn earlier, and the discussion surrounding him and other musicians seemed extremely partisan. That “tradition” and “modernity” was a clear choice. But a lot of jazz musicians, yourself included, inhabit both of those worlds. Living with the jazz tradition while also growing up with hip-hop or rock, and being shaped by that, seems a given these days. If you listen to someone like Jason Moran, I think both the rich tradition and the historical interest in his music lives nicely alongside an obvious hip-hop influence, for instance.
– Jason is one of my favorites. Of my piano peers, I probably look up to him the most. His balance of future, tradition, and the present is perfect.
You and him share a fascination for stride piano and “other modernisms,” if that makes any sense. Do you think that those things are more visible now than when you broke through around the millennium?
– I really have to credit Marcus Roberts. He was the first person a lot of us heard that was doing some stride in a modern context. There’s a moment of Marcus Roberts on Live at Blues Alley with Wynton and Tain that I’ve been imitating and working with for decades and decades — in fact, that moment is in my Piano Sonata, as well as on every gig with Thomas and Kush on this European tour.
But stride never went away. One of my influences is Jaki Byard, and Jaki was also Jason's literal teacher. Jaki played the whole language, “Ancient to the Future” as they say. So did Stanley Cowell. Those two are very close to Jason Moran and they are important to me as well. They really matter. Don Pullen was also important, and Keith Jarrett in his way was also always connected to stride and boogie-woogie. There are moments where you can hear Jarrett’s commitment to ragtime. Even someone like Kenny Barron — a perfect straight-ahead pianist, one of the greatest — will play some slow stride when playing solo. So it was always there…
…but you are absolutely right, I don’t mean evade your point, for when I was growing up, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and McCoy Tyner were the total central idiom for jazz piano players, and mostly that idiom was not much like stride. So when Marcus did play some stride, it was a clear alternative. It was like: “Oh wait, that's a good idea. Go back, go back further. There's a lot of stuff to be done if you go back.”
More than in the immediately preceding generations, many younger musicians have visibly treated stride as a resource. Also, as you say, hip-hop has been a dominant popular music for a long time, and so many significant jazz musicians are interacting with that idiom in a positive way.
And I guess there's always still time for shifts in perspectives. I mean, we're living in the 2020s, so in a couple of years it'll be a hundred years since the Hot Five recordings by Louis Armstrong. That might be a good time for rediscovering those things and the… sheer modernity of it.
– Well, of course, this is exactly what Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch would have said, that jazz was always modernist.
I think that's one of the sort of hypocrisies that Crouch was really good at pinpointing. When writers called “Schoenberg influences” modern while swing became something old.
– Obviously, this is a great point. What’s really more idiosyncratic and unpredictable, “Pierrot Lunaire” from Arnold Schoenberg or “Weather Bird” from Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines?
But do you think that jazz needs the romance of the avant-garde, the idea of breaking through to something new? Is that an essential part of the driving force behind the music or the fascination for the music?
– Probably any high culture object needs innovation. Perhaps innovation is not required on the local level, there’s a lot of beautiful art that can do without it, but if you're going to a forward thinking gallery or the new music series at the concert hall, the work on display probably needs to be innovative. That’s part of the agreement between creator, curator, and consumer.
Do jazz critics like to find the next new thing? Of course. That's probably true in any genre of art or performance. It's more dominant in visual art now that I'm thinking about it.
The critics role might be more significant there as well.
– No doubt. I don't know if any jazz critics have really made or destroyed careers for jazz musicians in the same way critics have in visual art.
Where is the new stuff that excites you in jazz right now?
– There are some incredible piano players, and I’m lucky to be friends with a couple of them. David Virelles is a little younger than me. He's got this Cuban element. Incredible. Really deep. Aaron Diehl is a master of stride, he can play all sorts of classical music at a professional level, but he's also got an esoteric side. I don't know if you've heard Aaron play with Tyshawn Sorey, but it's pretty extraordinary. Sullivan Fortner is the casual virtuoso. He can play anything on the instrument, but he’s also tasteful and swings hard.
Between those three people, I’ve got plenty to worry about!
You mentioned that, the European classical tradition is sort of inescapable as a jazz pianist. Do you feel that there’s a difference there between piano players and other instrument groups?
– They say Coleman Hawkins invented the tenor saxophone, and there seems to be some truth to that. There is some European alto saxophone music, but if you play the tenor saxophone, you rarely have much to do with that side of things. European music is there, but it's a footnote.
The saxophone is interesting in that regard – invented in the 1800s, without the long history that brass instruments have.
– Great point. The brass family is so recalcitrant and unforgiving. It's very hard to make a basic sound or to play a scale. You can’t avoid the European tradition if you play trumpet or trombone, for quite literally a European-styled teacher has to show you how to begin, and that initial process takes months.
But I do think if you give a talented kid a tenor saxophone and show them how to put the reed on the mouthpiece, that kid might be able to just go into his family’s basement and figure it out in some sort of homemade jazz way.
The drum set is a 20th-century American instrument. The drums go far back, Beethoven wrote a few drum parts, but it's not fair to compare symphony drums to the drum set, for the drum set is so much more evolved.
The bass is sort of in a middle spot. They don't play pizzicato that much in European music, so the very act of making a tone in jazz doesn't have much to do with the European tradition. Ron Carter playing one note is stronger and louder than eight classical double bassists playing pizzicato all together. Symphonic bassists need the bow for their sound. The bow is in jazz, but it's more of a special effect.
That said, I would say almost all the jazz musicians I'm associated with love classical music — including the tenor sax players!
I read on x/twitter today that you wrote “I like the tenor saxophone”, haha!
– Yeah! Now that we're talking about it, I think I like it partly because there's less of an obvious European relationship. It really is this African-American instrument. Of the conventional jazz instruments, it might be the most “blues” instrument. And each of those people I mentioned online as making essentially my favorite music [Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, Dewey Redman, Mark Turner] were their own scientists in a private laboratory starring the tenor saxophone. The instrument was invented by a European, but whatever these geniuses did to make it whatever they do is truly American and personal.
How did your jazz interest start?
– My parents weren't musicians or music fans. Music came in through the TV set. Early things I liked weren’t really jazz, but they were jazz-adjacent. The James Bond movies, what was that music by John Barry? The Pink Panther cartoon, what was that music by Henry Mancini? Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas music. Stuff on Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. When I was ten years old or so, I started on a journey to find my first jazz records.
Are you able to pinpoint what you liked? Was it the chords, the texture of the music, the rhythms?
– I don’t know exactly, but I can say this: Jazz is equally dependent on harmony and rhythm. Probably a lot of folk and pop music is rhythm first, and probably all European classical music is harmony first. But jazz is right in the middle. At a subliminal level, that reliance on both sides must have been part of my attraction in the beginning — and it's still part of my attraction now.
You think that's the reason for the sort of continual identity crisis of music as well? That it's kind of in the middle of this bigger conversations about rhythm, harmony, improvisation, art music, folk music, pop music, and so on.
– It's a great question! I wouldn't want to tell any great musician who said they were jazz that they weren't jazz.
To go back to Wynton and Stanley: they argued for a precise definition of jazz, and that offended some people. But I get what they mean, because if you don't have a definition, how do you learn the rules? The rules become less accessible if anything is allowed.
Some jazz education is pretty delinquent in terms of instilling basic jazz values. Graduates of the most insular schools end up playing one gig a year at a small jazz festival in Europe, hitting buttons on a MacBook while their partner plays some saxophone squeaks and squawks against that freeform digital soundscape. Okay, I want to hear that music if the artists are geniuses. But there’s not so much genius to go around, and plenty of students use their time at jazz school to argue about why they shouldn’t practice the basics.
But at the same time, there's a lot of music I love that Wynton and Stanley don't like…and I suspect part of the reason they don't like some of that music simply because it doesn't fit their strict definition of jazz. So I need something broader. That’s for sure. Stanley told me how much he enjoyed certain jazz players that I personally found as predictable as a karaoke singer.
But how do you reconcile those things – the need for a clear or usable definition, but also this big mosaic of possibilities?
– I'm not afraid of the word “postmodern.” To me, postmodern means simply: it’s all available. Of course, any fresh sound was always a mixture of different things. What we’re talking about in the postmodern era is about how deep you want to get into each original source. For myself, I know quite a lot about straight-ahead jazz, I know quite a lot about European piano, I know something about pop melody. When I push things together, I have a certain confidence about the languages that I'm appropriating.
I don’t know if I’m talented, but I don’t give up easily. When I first started putting the puzzle pieces together in my twenties I didn't know nearly enough about any of those things… but I figured I’d just have to keep on trying to study the various idioms until I was… if not good, then at least technically acceptable.
I think I’m going to leave you at that!
– That was absolutely the right note to end on!
This is a great interview. Thanks for sharing!
I also thought the Stanley Crouch/Wynton Marsalis episode of the Manifesto! podcast was a great episode on a consistently great podcast. It did cause me to reconsider Crouch and Marsalis. While I always appreciated their work, my mental shorthand was to think of them as talented, erudite but small minded. (I sort of thought of Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" in the same way.) The Manifesto episode helped me understand the world from Crouch's and Marsalis' perspective.