Comment on December 28th, 2006.
One is posted at 360Grauss (page down slightly).
I like them, and I have this album on vinyl, and also saw them outdoors at Lincoln Center (were we both at that show?). We've talked about composition vs. improvisation before, and to a certain extent I share your feelings--but improvisation is the essence of jazz, and as far as I'm concerned, without it, there may be beautiful music, but it is not jazz.
Comment on December 28th, 2006.
I thought about including an acknowledgment of that commonly-held position in the post, but sort of decided to save it for another time. I understand that opinion. But. There are Mingus pieces that are through-composed*. Threadgill is on record as saying that much if not most of his modern music is through-composed (and he has also said that it isn't jazz -- but that doesn't stop everyone else from calling it jazz).
My position is that jazz, like science fiction, means what we point to when we say it. And that insisting that jazz is fundamentally about improvisation is taking a kind of Gernsbackian position (and I know you know what I mean).
*I am misusing this word.
Comment on December 28th, 2006.
Chris loves Raymond Scott - would he probably like this?
Comment on December 28th, 2006.
Chris would like this a lot.
Comment on December 28th, 2006.
Through-composed doesn't mean lacking improvisation (though it doesn't mean it has it, either). Your standard big-band chart is through-composed, but will have something like "10-bar trombone solo" written into it. This is certainly how Duke or Mingus did things. This is different from your standard small-combo bebop thing, which consists of an improvisation over the song's changes, of undetermined length, bookended by a written-out head (and even that may be partly improvised). I guess we could say that the structure is rigid, but not the pieces. Even there, there can be room: the famous Duke Ellington live set at Newport, which resulted in one of the best-selling jazz LPs of its time, had an extra-long solo by Paul Gonsalves because the Duke, veteran showman that he was, saw that Gonsalves was in the groove and gave the signal to let him keep wailing.
Even in small-combo jazz, there is often a good degree of structure: I'm thinking of those great Horace Silver Blue Note LPs, for example, where there are periodic charted horn riffs that break into the solos.
I love Raymond Scott, and the MS do remind me of him, but the relative lack of improvisation in his music, at least what I've heard of it, is probably why he was somewhat sidelined by the jazz world--though not by my father, who I was suprised to find owned a few Scott 78s right there among the Duke and Artie Shaw (my latest enthusiasm).
Comment on December 28th, 2006.
Yeah, and that's why I like the Horace Silver stuff more than a lot of improv-over-changes stuff. And I like a lot of that stuff, too; it just took me longer to get into it. I kept wanting more Mingus.
Comment on December 28th, 2006.
(I should add that the Microscopic Septet stuff has improvisation, too, and so does the Johnston and Forrester stuff. It just has more of a structural underpinning than most bebop-derived or post-free jazz.)
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