Back in 1993 I have met composer David Raksin at the party in LA.
Next day he invited me & my wife to his house in Van Nuys.
We talked a lot:
David originally played oboe in orchestra in NYC when he was hired to transcribe down Charlie Chaplin whistling. Charlie was sitting in high chair smoking cigar and whistle. The result was song “Smile”. It’s success help David to move to LA. He arranged and composed for film.
After the war in 1945 David was asked for a quick job. Producer told him: we wanted to use Sophisticated Lady for our new film, but if you could bring something similar up to Monday morning , you will get the job.
It was Friday afternoon. As David told me, he was unsuccessfully trying to write something during Friday and Saturday nights and day as well. No success. When he nearly gave up on Sunday late afternoon, the first motiv appeared in his mind. Ami7/9 to D7 resolved to G.
Atfer that, David said , everything went smoothly. Next morning he got the job. Movie LAURA got many Oscars in 1946.
David accented that there is no other melody in the movie except his only one. 12 different arrangements, different tempos etc., explaining the use with certain scenes.
It was a nice lesson of film music for me, that I never forget.
Ethan, I preface this with the reminder it is all your fault : after finishing Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time earlier this year, I recently started listening to the audiobook versions performed by the great Simon Vance. Have you listened? They are fantastic.
Do you know of any autograph manuscript of Thelonious Monk's compositions, other than the following ones?
- A Merrier Christmas
- Boo Boo's Birthday
- Four in One
- Monk's Mood (two versions with "Be Merrier Sarah")
- Straight No Chaser ("Can't Call It That", that was a great alternate title)
- Trinkle Trinkle
It is interesting to see what he chose to write down, especially in the left hand. I almost feel guilty of being interested in this because he already left us all his recordings, but I would give a LOT to have more information about the "composition sessions" that happened with Mary Lou Williams (what kind of constraints did they put on themselves, what vibe/process/etc. was there), or anything else about his composition process. He gave us a big hint when he said "Get cats INTERESTED enough to come to rehearsals", but that's easier said than done, lol. I'm already aware of the information given by Robin Kelley in his autobiography and I can't wait to read the extensive interviews if they get released one day.
Side-question: do you make "Get cats INTERESTED" a priority when you compose music? It's a weird question but I ask it nonetheless because as a composer myself, I try to get the same "simple but great vibe" in my work, but it's never really successful ("easier said than done"), so I was wondering if other people take it a "serious goal" (like other more common composer's goals such as meeting deadlines, reaching a broad audience, orchestration, form constraints, feasibility, whatever else).
it sounds like you know more Thelonious manuscripts than me! Great topic, I hope an official folio of Monk manuscripts becomes available some day.
"Get cats INTERESTED" is interesting. I guess there is some balance of what interests ME as well as what might interest others. Still it's a very good point. I was asking Missy Mazzoli about orchestration, and she said, "If the music is good they will play it."
Kinda random but after listening a lot to Abbey Lincoln’s “Straight Ahead”, which I believe Ethan actually recommended to me, I listened to a bunch more: totally incredible taste in rhythm sections! Kelly/Chambers/Roach, Kelly/Sam Jones/Philly Joe, Hank Jones / Haden / Mark Johnson, Barron / Drummond / Jaz Sawyer, Rodney Kendrick / Haden / Victor Lewis, the list just goes on and on!
Your Higgins article was timely: a trip to Boston and watching The Departed got me to re-read At End of Day, his riff on Whitey Bulger and the FBI. It takes a little while to catch fire, but when it does, it manages to be suspenseful and deep all at once.
If you haven’t read it, though, you gotta read Bomber’s Law. That’s all I’ll say.
Vinnie Sperazza posted that at a music workshop as a younger person, Chris Potter mentioned that Paul Motian tried to get Keith Jarrett(!!!) to join a trio with the two of them. Have you heard anything else about this?
It was great seeing you in Albuquerque back in the spring and saying hi.
I've been brooding about the vexed but helpful idea of the jazz canon — specifically, the idea of a contemporary or at least relatively recent jazz canon. Recorded jazz has been happening for roughly a century, and the best and/or most famous jazz of the first 50 years, from Louis Armstrong to the Köln Concert, is more or less a settled matter. But looking for and finding a jazz canon within the almost 50 years from 1975 to 2024 seems far more elusive, contested, confusing, and frustrating.
I spend a lot of time in audiophile music threads online and the overwhelming focus there centers on the early and mid-1950s through the late 1960s and early 1970s, from bebop and hard bop through the first Miles Davis electric stuff. Part of that is a bias toward the great sound quality of all those Bluenote and major-label classics, but hearing those cats talk you'd sometimes think new jazz only existed until Bitches Brew and then fell off the face of the earth.
What I'm saying is that I love a huge swath of jazz recorded in the last five decades (Do the Math interviews and posts have been invaluable recommendation engines), but I couldn't begin to say what belongs in the short or longlist of the best of this period, or where to find such lists to share if any solid examples even exist. In our era it seems all about proliferation and profusion and heterogeneous pluralities of excellence, not consolidation and consensus and canon. And to some degree, that lack of consensus leaves jazz fans floundering.
Is there an inkling of truth in what I'm saying? Should we even be trying to come up with the 25 or 50 best jazz albums since 1975? Or have there been valiant efforts to do this and I've just missed them? However crude, canon-making gives us useful maps.
I think there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying. Part of the problem is how the music fragmented into so many different streams. Before 1970 it was all in sort of a certain area. More recently it’s been a comparative free-for-all. For myself, I really only comprehend it until 1991. After that, I had moved to New York and couldn’t follow it all in the same kind of way.
Small realization today: Since the first person that played me Puff, the Magic Dragon on the guitar went from C to E7 instead of E minor I never noticed (until double checking that it was in fact E minor as per your video sending me back to Peter, Paul and Mary’s original) how Puff is really Somewhere Over the Rainbow… sorta.
What kind of practicer were you when you were young and first learning to play jazz?
You've shared a lot of fantastic advice on various things students should work on, from Charlie Parker and Horace Silver blues transcriptions, reading old sheet music and more, but I'm curious how you'd recommend a student should tackle these things in some sort of routine? How much time would you spend on fundamentals (scales, arpeggios, technique) vs. transcriptions? What about comping vs. playing lines? Composing vs. learning tunes? Are/were you more of someone who chased what you were interested in, or were you more disciplined/organized and followed a routine that either you came up with or a teacher or mentor suggested? Thanks!
I have to say I was pretty lazy when I was young and to this day, I don’t have a very organized approach to anything. While I don’t teach anything I can’t do myself, I also wish I had had myself as a teacher — if that makes any sense lol. These days I am doing more technical exercises, but I don’t necessarily regard technical exercises as the answer. The answer is probably: do whatever that keeps you interested and chained to the keyboard.
"interested and chained to" - -My tai chi teacher just explained pursuing "mastery", and her 20 years of different kinds of students: the conscious or haphazard self-cultivation of the core ingredient interest, -whether running headlong toward the imagined grail, courting it thru familiarity and infatuation, ...cluttering the attic of myriad paths, coveting the precious, recovering from bandstand bruises, ...something that aligns the magnetic potentials of the details, using torque wrench or tea leaf to husband them to align with your own di-poles ..."interest", negative or positive, you want them "just right".
Dear Mr Iverson, you have used social media to great advantage for jazz education and conversations. I learnt a lot through your posts and reviews. I learn a lot about the ‘new brooklyn complexity’ music through IG and posts of fans like me, it often feels more genuine than mainstream media. From your perspective, is there a growing social media-based jazz community supporting the music?
Well, I think most people feel like they need to be on social media these days. However, I wonder if social media hasn’t already peaked in a certain way. Of course, there are many negative aspects to social media as well. Some of the best musicians have refused to engage.
Do jazz musicians ever think about their sub-conscious and how it impacts on creativity? I'm curious in terms of AI, cos don't think the machines have one, and I wonder will this be a serious limitation on their ability to create meaningful art.
I don’t have a very smart answer for this, but I do believe the subconscious is important. I suppose if I understood it better it wouldn’t be the subconscious! At any rate, I am not too worried about AI in terms of top table creativity. (There are plenty of other things to worry about, but not top table creativity.)
Jumping in to say that the answer here is yes — some jazz musicians do think about the play of the conscious and subconscious mind in jazz improvisation. Sonny Rollins and Charles McPherson, to name two, have been quoted on the topic. Kenny Werner’s teaching deals with these ideas too.
Thanks for all your great work on so many fronts., very inspirational. I was wondering if you know on which recording the amazing Lester Young solo ( from an earlier post) on After You’ve Gone can be found? I’ve transcribed lots of Lester and would love to buy the recording and learn it. I checked out iTunes but couldn't locate it there. Thanks again, Best Eric
I can't find it either. There are four performances of "After You've Gone" listed in Tom Lord and also in Büchmann-Møller's "You Got To Be Original Man," this one is not listed! (If we heard more of the other soloists or of the announcer that might be a clue...) It's definitely NOT the first "Spirituals to Swing" concert but it sounds like it's from that era (before Lester's army service). But it's very loose, very well recorded, hard to believe it's an aircheck/wire recording.
Back in 1993 I have met composer David Raksin at the party in LA.
Next day he invited me & my wife to his house in Van Nuys.
We talked a lot:
David originally played oboe in orchestra in NYC when he was hired to transcribe down Charlie Chaplin whistling. Charlie was sitting in high chair smoking cigar and whistle. The result was song “Smile”. It’s success help David to move to LA. He arranged and composed for film.
After the war in 1945 David was asked for a quick job. Producer told him: we wanted to use Sophisticated Lady for our new film, but if you could bring something similar up to Monday morning , you will get the job.
It was Friday afternoon. As David told me, he was unsuccessfully trying to write something during Friday and Saturday nights and day as well. No success. When he nearly gave up on Sunday late afternoon, the first motiv appeared in his mind. Ami7/9 to D7 resolved to G.
Atfer that, David said , everything went smoothly. Next morning he got the job. Movie LAURA got many Oscars in 1946.
David accented that there is no other melody in the movie except his only one. 12 different arrangements, different tempos etc., explaining the use with certain scenes.
It was a nice lesson of film music for me, that I never forget.
INCREDIBLE comment, Emil!! Thank you so much! Great stories
Ethan, I forgot one funny detail. On the wall in living room, next to smaller grand piano, there was a framed picture.
With the title written on top:
SERIAL COMPOSITION.
Behind the glass on the regular music paper were glued about 10-15 pieces of Kellog corn flakes.
sensational!
Ethan, I preface this with the reminder it is all your fault : after finishing Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time earlier this year, I recently started listening to the audiobook versions performed by the great Simon Vance. Have you listened? They are fantastic.
This is the kind of comment I like to read! I rarely listen to audiobooks, but might give this a shot!
Do you know of any autograph manuscript of Thelonious Monk's compositions, other than the following ones?
- A Merrier Christmas
- Boo Boo's Birthday
- Four in One
- Monk's Mood (two versions with "Be Merrier Sarah")
- Straight No Chaser ("Can't Call It That", that was a great alternate title)
- Trinkle Trinkle
It is interesting to see what he chose to write down, especially in the left hand. I almost feel guilty of being interested in this because he already left us all his recordings, but I would give a LOT to have more information about the "composition sessions" that happened with Mary Lou Williams (what kind of constraints did they put on themselves, what vibe/process/etc. was there), or anything else about his composition process. He gave us a big hint when he said "Get cats INTERESTED enough to come to rehearsals", but that's easier said than done, lol. I'm already aware of the information given by Robin Kelley in his autobiography and I can't wait to read the extensive interviews if they get released one day.
Side-question: do you make "Get cats INTERESTED" a priority when you compose music? It's a weird question but I ask it nonetheless because as a composer myself, I try to get the same "simple but great vibe" in my work, but it's never really successful ("easier said than done"), so I was wondering if other people take it a "serious goal" (like other more common composer's goals such as meeting deadlines, reaching a broad audience, orchestration, form constraints, feasibility, whatever else).
Thank you for your work!
it sounds like you know more Thelonious manuscripts than me! Great topic, I hope an official folio of Monk manuscripts becomes available some day.
"Get cats INTERESTED" is interesting. I guess there is some balance of what interests ME as well as what might interest others. Still it's a very good point. I was asking Missy Mazzoli about orchestration, and she said, "If the music is good they will play it."
Kinda random but after listening a lot to Abbey Lincoln’s “Straight Ahead”, which I believe Ethan actually recommended to me, I listened to a bunch more: totally incredible taste in rhythm sections! Kelly/Chambers/Roach, Kelly/Sam Jones/Philly Joe, Hank Jones / Haden / Mark Johnson, Barron / Drummond / Jaz Sawyer, Rodney Kendrick / Haden / Victor Lewis, the list just goes on and on!
Abbey Lincoln! Deep waters. Thanks Paul!
Your Higgins article was timely: a trip to Boston and watching The Departed got me to re-read At End of Day, his riff on Whitey Bulger and the FBI. It takes a little while to catch fire, but when it does, it manages to be suspenseful and deep all at once.
If you haven’t read it, though, you gotta read Bomber’s Law. That’s all I’ll say.
Duly noted!!
Vinnie Sperazza posted that at a music workshop as a younger person, Chris Potter mentioned that Paul Motian tried to get Keith Jarrett(!!!) to join a trio with the two of them. Have you heard anything else about this?
no, new to me!
It was great seeing you in Albuquerque back in the spring and saying hi.
I've been brooding about the vexed but helpful idea of the jazz canon — specifically, the idea of a contemporary or at least relatively recent jazz canon. Recorded jazz has been happening for roughly a century, and the best and/or most famous jazz of the first 50 years, from Louis Armstrong to the Köln Concert, is more or less a settled matter. But looking for and finding a jazz canon within the almost 50 years from 1975 to 2024 seems far more elusive, contested, confusing, and frustrating.
I spend a lot of time in audiophile music threads online and the overwhelming focus there centers on the early and mid-1950s through the late 1960s and early 1970s, from bebop and hard bop through the first Miles Davis electric stuff. Part of that is a bias toward the great sound quality of all those Bluenote and major-label classics, but hearing those cats talk you'd sometimes think new jazz only existed until Bitches Brew and then fell off the face of the earth.
What I'm saying is that I love a huge swath of jazz recorded in the last five decades (Do the Math interviews and posts have been invaluable recommendation engines), but I couldn't begin to say what belongs in the short or longlist of the best of this period, or where to find such lists to share if any solid examples even exist. In our era it seems all about proliferation and profusion and heterogeneous pluralities of excellence, not consolidation and consensus and canon. And to some degree, that lack of consensus leaves jazz fans floundering.
Is there an inkling of truth in what I'm saying? Should we even be trying to come up with the 25 or 50 best jazz albums since 1975? Or have there been valiant efforts to do this and I've just missed them? However crude, canon-making gives us useful maps.
I think there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying. Part of the problem is how the music fragmented into so many different streams. Before 1970 it was all in sort of a certain area. More recently it’s been a comparative free-for-all. For myself, I really only comprehend it until 1991. After that, I had moved to New York and couldn’t follow it all in the same kind of way.
Re your “Puff piece”
Small realization today: Since the first person that played me Puff, the Magic Dragon on the guitar went from C to E7 instead of E minor I never noticed (until double checking that it was in fact E minor as per your video sending me back to Peter, Paul and Mary’s original) how Puff is really Somewhere Over the Rainbow… sorta.
I can dig it
What kind of practicer were you when you were young and first learning to play jazz?
You've shared a lot of fantastic advice on various things students should work on, from Charlie Parker and Horace Silver blues transcriptions, reading old sheet music and more, but I'm curious how you'd recommend a student should tackle these things in some sort of routine? How much time would you spend on fundamentals (scales, arpeggios, technique) vs. transcriptions? What about comping vs. playing lines? Composing vs. learning tunes? Are/were you more of someone who chased what you were interested in, or were you more disciplined/organized and followed a routine that either you came up with or a teacher or mentor suggested? Thanks!
I have to say I was pretty lazy when I was young and to this day, I don’t have a very organized approach to anything. While I don’t teach anything I can’t do myself, I also wish I had had myself as a teacher — if that makes any sense lol. These days I am doing more technical exercises, but I don’t necessarily regard technical exercises as the answer. The answer is probably: do whatever that keeps you interested and chained to the keyboard.
"interested and chained to" - -My tai chi teacher just explained pursuing "mastery", and her 20 years of different kinds of students: the conscious or haphazard self-cultivation of the core ingredient interest, -whether running headlong toward the imagined grail, courting it thru familiarity and infatuation, ...cluttering the attic of myriad paths, coveting the precious, recovering from bandstand bruises, ...something that aligns the magnetic potentials of the details, using torque wrench or tea leaf to husband them to align with your own di-poles ..."interest", negative or positive, you want them "just right".
Nice comment
Dear Mr Iverson, you have used social media to great advantage for jazz education and conversations. I learnt a lot through your posts and reviews. I learn a lot about the ‘new brooklyn complexity’ music through IG and posts of fans like me, it often feels more genuine than mainstream media. From your perspective, is there a growing social media-based jazz community supporting the music?
Well, I think most people feel like they need to be on social media these days. However, I wonder if social media hasn’t already peaked in a certain way. Of course, there are many negative aspects to social media as well. Some of the best musicians have refused to engage.
Do jazz musicians ever think about their sub-conscious and how it impacts on creativity? I'm curious in terms of AI, cos don't think the machines have one, and I wonder will this be a serious limitation on their ability to create meaningful art.
I don’t have a very smart answer for this, but I do believe the subconscious is important. I suppose if I understood it better it wouldn’t be the subconscious! At any rate, I am not too worried about AI in terms of top table creativity. (There are plenty of other things to worry about, but not top table creativity.)
Jumping in to say that the answer here is yes — some jazz musicians do think about the play of the conscious and subconscious mind in jazz improvisation. Sonny Rollins and Charles McPherson, to name two, have been quoted on the topic. Kenny Werner’s teaching deals with these ideas too.
Do you have pieces you never tire of playing, and if so, what are they?
I seem to always play “All the Things You Are” on almost every jazz gig. My sincere thanks to Jerome Kern!
Hello Ethan!
Thanks for all your great work on so many fronts., very inspirational. I was wondering if you know on which recording the amazing Lester Young solo ( from an earlier post) on After You’ve Gone can be found? I’ve transcribed lots of Lester and would love to buy the recording and learn it. I checked out iTunes but couldn't locate it there. Thanks again, Best Eric
I don’t know where it is. It is a bootleg. I might research this further.
I can't find it either. There are four performances of "After You've Gone" listed in Tom Lord and also in Büchmann-Møller's "You Got To Be Original Man," this one is not listed! (If we heard more of the other soloists or of the announcer that might be a clue...) It's definitely NOT the first "Spirituals to Swing" concert but it sounds like it's from that era (before Lester's army service). But it's very loose, very well recorded, hard to believe it's an aircheck/wire recording.
Thanks so much for the reply. Lester sounds SO GREAT on that recording. It blew me away. Take care/ Eric
PS: Any plans on coming to Gothenburg Sweden in the near future?