Extracts from
The Introduction, take time out to listen
Chapter 10, it ain’t who you are, it’s the way that you do it
Chapter 12, advanced arranging

From the Introduction take time out to listen
Jazz composition can be seen to encompass many different areas. But there is a vast difference between pieces such as ‘Blue Monk’, a twelve bar blues by Thelonious Monk, and Wynton Marsalis’ hour-long Blood on the Fields. In the way of such things, Monk’s blues has become a staple of the jazz musician’s repertoire, while Marsalis’ composition, which was given a Pulitzer prize (something denied to Duke Ellington, as we shall see), attracted very divergent critical reactions, and is now rarely performed.
Leaving such differences aside for the moment, can writers such as Sammy Nestico, Jim McNeeley, and the others named above, whose scores are in constant use around the world, be called jazz composers when they are, in the main, using formulaic arranging methods common over the past fifty or more years? Does classical composer Mark-Anthony Turnage become a jazz composer when he writes Blood on the Floor to feature jazz soloists John Scofield and Peter Erskine with the contemporary music group Ensemble Moderne? Does Gershwin become a jazz composer when his tune ‘Summertime’ becomes the basis for a great Sidney Bechet performance? Does Gil Evans become a jazz composer when his arrangement of ‘Summertime’ for Miles Davis recomposes it, adding a succession of constantly changing textures to support Miles’ solo?
In a word, yes. In so far as the world sees the term, they are all jazz composers in their own different ways. This will be discussed later, as will the fact that many who are called jazz composers are using styles and ideas firmly rooted in the past. In doing so, they ignore the real potential of the music. This potential, and its culmination in works of high art, can be seen in the work of the acknowledged big names of the genre: Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans. It can also be seen in the work of many other jazz writers around the world, far less known, who have followed their example.
Before taking this argument further – and possibly irritating even more people in the process – it is necessary to discuss what jazz composition means.
Take time out to listen to one of Bach’s solo cello suites. The way that the single line is developed is quite staggering, a feat similar to that achieved in Gregorian chant. Listen to one of Bartók’s string quartets, or those of Beethoven, Ravel, or Debussy, where the power and complexity achieved by just four voices are amazing. Listen to a Shostakovich symphony for the colours, the weight, the sheer power. Or try any of the sixteen symphonies by the little-known Swedish composer Allan Pettersson.
In comparison, it might seem that almost everything written in jazz is simple, naive and childlike. Many jazz compositions contain a great deal of straightforward repetition and simple transposition over some very basic chord changes. Perhaps Leonard Feather’s comment that ‘C-Jam Blues’ is ‘a trifle, even a child could have written it’, is true, not only about that very simple tune, but about jazz tunes, jazz compositions in general.
So why do jazz composers make the effort? Take time out to listen to a solo by Ben Webster or John Coltrane. Although they are, in theory, playing the same kind of instrument, their sounds are totally distinctive, as are their approaches to the tune in question. Additionally, the different colourings and shadings of almost every note, and the rhythmic and harmonic subtleties that are constantly on view, are incredibly complex. Allied with the development of musical ideas, they present a staggering vision of what, ostensibly, one person is capable of doing. Not, of course, that it is just one person. Take time out to listen to the interplay of the supporting rhythm section. The intricacy of their interlocking roles is a true miracle. And one that happens over and over again. The sound world inhabited by jazz musicians presents an entirely different landscape from that inhabited by the music of Bach or Bartók or Shostakovich, and it is this difference that creative jazz composers want to incorporate into their vision of the world. Take time out to listen.
No book such as this can pretend to be exhaustive, and this is not my aim. Nor is it my aim to discuss jazz composition in technical terms. In fact, I am not sure that it can be discussed in this way. When I see an extensive three-page analysis of Billy Strayhorn’s ‘U.M.M.G. (Upper Manhattan Medical Group)’ in Walter van de Leur’s Strayhorn biography Something to Live For, I can only marvel at the detail, but wonder why there is no mention of the performances that the tune inspired, apart from the routine comment that ‘the Ellington orchestra made a number of excellent recordings of the piece.’ In terms of jazz composition, what happened in the performances is a far more interesting and important matter than which chord resolves to which other chord. In writing about jazz, in appreciating jazz, even in playing jazz, what needs to be appreciated is that, more than any starting point, more than any chord voicing, more than any particular texture, it is the performance that is paramount.

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From Chapter 10 it ain’t who you are, it’s the way that you do it
Like John Surman, whose remarks head this chapter, I’m not an American. Nor, as would be obvious from pictures of us, are either of us African American, or black. The distinction at the end of the sentence is not included for semantic reasons, rather to point, briefly, towards another aspect of this discussion. Namely, do black non-American jazz musicians have an advantage when it comes to playing jazz over their white counterparts? A question that became relevant in England some years ago, and made me wonder at the time how the pecking order works, and how far down it you have to be before you’re beyond the pale, and would be better off taking up knitting.

[Used in jazzcontinuum as an introduction to ‘Have an Academic New Year’ inspired by reading that the Open University had given a grant of almost half a million pounds to a study of Black British jazz. And this at a time of global recession.]


Much more from Chapter 10 has been posted in the June 2009 issue of Bill Shoemaker’s Point of Departure web magazine.

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From Chapter 12 advanced arranging
Paul Grabowsky’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (Ringing the Bell Backwards,
Origin Records) and Christian Mühlbacher’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ (15-04-98, Extraplatte).
There are many examples one could give of notable advanced arranging, but here are two that sum up most of the strands of this chapter and of the book as a whole. The first, written by an Australian, uses, again, a seemingly totally inappropriate tune for jazz, and uses instruments and approaches far removed from grey music, integrating the vision of a composer with the soloing skills of his musicians. ‘Strange Meeting’, Paul Grabowsky’s version of the Vera Lynn Second World War song ‘We’ll Meet Again’, is a masterpiece of re-composition.
I use the word masterpiece advisedly. I was floored when I first heard it, as everybody else I have played it to has been – musicians, jazz fans, and those who profess not to like jazz. Vera Lynn’s wartime classic is very aptly retitled ‘Strange Meeting’, and from this unpromising basic material Grabowsky (who speaks of his take on the old tune as being ‘post-imperial’) creates a tour de force of different ideas. ‘It’s as though he has given the theme to, say, Gavin Bryars, Duke Ellington, Philip Glass, Gil Evans and David Byrne and then applied William Burroughs’ cut-up technique to the results.’
Among the disparate elements are the brilliant opening violin improvisation, a minimalist percussion pattern over which the melody is first introduced, a heavy jazz-rock section with the melody still peeking through at times, electronics, a distorted ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and, finally, a very sentimental piano ending, complete with the occasional deliberate wrong note. This may seem a very odd combination of ideas, but from them a stunning composition emerges, unlike anything I have ever heard from any writer anywhere. The fact that Grabowsky didn’t write the original tune is immaterial. His arrangement, allied with the Australian Art Orchestra’s performance, recomposes the tune, making it as much of a jazz composition as anything he, I, or anyone else could have written. Vera Lynn is, at the time of writing, still with us, and one can only wonder at what she would think of this particular makeover of the song she made famous.
As well as wondering what Vera Lynn would think of Paul Grabowsky’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’, one can also wonder what Judy Garland, if she were still alive, would have thought of Christian Mühlbacher’s ‘Over the Rainbow’. (I should perhaps point out that, despite Gene Santori’s* comment on many gay people liking Judy Garland, quoted in IT AIN’T WHO YOU ARE, I am among the many gay men who don’t!)
Mühlbacher, an Austrian percussionist and drummer, manages, uniquely as far as I know, to record one album a year, always on 5th April. His version of ‘Over the Rainbow’ on 5-04-98 is a masterpiece of postmodernism, from the very distorted harmonies of the opening through the seemingly never-ending repetitions of the already repetitive melody in the bridge. They finally resolve into a multilayered patterned background, inside which random versions of the tune’s motifs appear and disappear. It’s recognisably ‘Over the Rainbow’, in the same way that Picasso’s paintings of guitars are recognisably guitars, but something new has been created.
Although almost certainly unknown to most jazz fans, there is no doubt that the innovative writing of Paul Grabowsky and Christian Mühlbacher, and that of many others I could name, is world-class, and as far from grey music as it’s possible to be.

* As discussed earlier in the book the comment was actually made by Grover Sales, a slip of the memory corrected in Playing Catch Up.