jazzery

[calimac]

Don't let my enthusiasm for classical music fool you: I don't like all of it, and there are vast fields of other forms of music that mean nothing to me whatever. Such as jazz. I've heard a fair amount of it (cool modern jazz is the background music of choice for proprietors of used book stores), and an occasional individual piece will strike my fancy: "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck is kind of catchy, and if Windham Hillery is a form of jazz, I like a lot of that, though not enough to buy any. But though voidampersand and others have taught me a bit about jazz, as a form it strikes no musical response in me whatever. (One nimnul who briefly appeared in my life accused me of feigning a non-response through snobbery. Honey, these days jazz is a snob elitist's music second only to classical. If I wanted to be a snob, I'd direct my disdain at rap stars and pop bimbos.)

A touch of jazz can liven up a work by somebody like Copland, but my experience with full-scale jazz-classical fusion has been pretty deadly. Nevertheless, I have hopes that some day I might get it, and I always want to continue my classical education, so having a ticket to yesterday's SSV concert of three such works, I went.

I haven't been so bored at a classical concert since the last time (and by god that will remain the last time) I heard Tod und Verklärung.

David Amram's Triple Concerto showed a bit of life, but not any charm, in the final movement based on Middle Eastern folk music, but the rest sounded like the kind of jazz parody that Allan Sherman did with the Boston Pops - "Pete Tchaikovsky's Blues," that sort of thing.

Duke Ellington's Black, Brown & Beige in a cut-down version: three movements supposedly 20 minutes long, it seemed longer as the Duke kept coming to what sounded like final cadences and stopping but the movement didn't end - wrong again, Hubert - and what I learned from this work is 1) he has a not-particularly-striking seven-note motif that he loves to repeat but has no idea what to do with; and 2) if you put a mute in it, you can make a trombone emit really weird and ugly sounds. Even the third time around it was amusing, though.

After this, George Gershwin's An American in Paris, a work I've disliked for decades (I like Rhapsody in Blue, though), came as an old friend. Though I count the opening section as the most obnoxious earworm in classical music, the second half of the piece is pretty nice. There's a slow theme that sounds a lot like "Bess, you is my woman now"; it's good, but in a musical-theatre way, not a classical way.

Lots of virtuosity from the musicians, but virtuosity isn't musicianship. The orchestra sounded tinny. Enthusiasm from much of the audience, but if the SSV ever does this sort of thing again, I think I'll just skip it.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

There are two jazz pieces I like--"Take Five" and "Blue Rondo a la Turk." In both cases there is a perceivable melody, and for lack of proper term, a structure. Most jazz to me (and I grew up hearing it all the time) sounds like wailing without benefit of melody, or purposeless tinkling and twiddling, as as for harshly blown saxes, it has the same negative effect as screaming, distorted amplified guitar does--just hurts my ears, crosses firmly from music to noise.