Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Driving home from Bowie last night, I was listening to jazz from the early 1920s on the radio. Most of it was melodically and harmonically interesting, but it sounded mechanical much of the time, as though the musicians were stapled to a metronome. The few, brief moments when it was rhythmically interesting weren't all that special, and just made me even more aware of how rigid most of it was.

I found myself wanting to cover the musicians' brains in soap, or oil, or something to make them not just "loosen up" but be a little "slippery". It wasn't just the drummers playing "four on the floor"; the whole band was in the same straight four lockstep, with the result that many of the tunes sounded plodding even when the tempo was brisk. If anybody swung it was only whoever had the solo at the time, and while some of what they did fit the definition it didn't feel swingy to me.

Part of my problem was that I didn't find the music expressive enough. Come to think of it, I didn't hear a lot of dynamics either (though I wonder whether that was a side effect of the recording technology ... if they couldn't close-mic because they had too few channels, and their mics fell off sharply with distance, folks might've had to play at nearly full volume the whole time to be picked up, leaving no room for dynamics. But I have no idea what microphones were like in 1923, so I don't know whether this hypothesis makes any sense. I do know the frequency response wasn't anywhere near flat, but I don't know whether that was the mic or the recording medium.)

It's not that I think music should be sloppy, though I know that some sequencers and drum machines introduce eensy-weensy random timing variations to attempt to sound more 'human'. What I felt the music was missing were the intentional, stylistic adjustments to phrasing. The pause to make you want the next note, too short to call a breath, more like a nod or half-a-wink. The "I'm not rushing but you can tell I'm eager" leading. The clever little rhythmic patterns that drive me nuts if I try to notate them, and the tiny phrasing elements nobody would attempt to notate unless you're scoring for MIDI. The music felt bare and lonely without those touches, didn't feel like jazz (well, my idea of what jazz is supposed to soud like), didn't feel whole.

It sounded like documentation, not a performance. Yeah, they were tight, dead-on, but so are Steely Dan, and Steely Dan's music is more alive. Again, perhaps these guys sounded a lot better live than in the studio ... given not only the popularity and cultural importance of jazz, but also the ways people described it then and what it meant to them, I can't imagine that mechanical sound having been what it was all about.

But as I was composing this message in my head (a lot of it got changed from what I was thinking then, after sleeping on it), some examples of what I wanted to hear in the music finally came on, in pieces recorded toward the other end of that decade (I think the announcer mentioned one of the tracks being from 1928). There were the expressiveness, the cleverness, and the looseness I'd been wanting. It started 'sounding like jazz' instead of sounding like a musicological lecture on the elements of jazz. The word 'swing' started to make sense again. (I know 'swing' seems to be a term more associated with the 1930s than the 1920s, but the announcer of the program was referring to it, and the technical appearance of swung notes showed up in the selections in phrases here and there, even if the music in question wasn't part of the swing movement that came later.)

In the later pieces, it wasn't as though everything was sliding around all over the place -- getting off the metronome was still mostly something only the soloist-of-the-moment did while the rest of the band kept it grounded -- but the soloists took more liberties than they had five to seven years earlier, the rhythm section did start swinging more (together), and there wasn't that four-square feel -- the beat was allowed to be suggested by the rhythm pattern as a whole, not locked down and counted out by the drum and the piano and the banjo one two three four.

And when they wanted to throw in some 'clever', some make-sure-the-audience-is-paying-attention, it was more interesting both as math and as spirit than what I'd heard earlier.

I suppose, based on this tiny sample, that jazz from the late 1920s is music I want to listen to, whereas jazz from the early 1920s is music that makes me want to re-do it -- that makes me think, "now there's a fun melody; it'd sound really cool if I played it this way instead ..."

I'm certainly not a jazz expert -- I know a lot more about classic rock -- but I hear enough jazz for "1928 is earlier than most of the jazz I listen to" to be a meaningful statement. (I think I mostly hear jazz from about 1935 to 1965 with some recent works and a little 1970s/1980s mixed in.) It's interesting to hear and analyze some of what the 1930s jazz I'm used to grew from. Though I'd love to have a better idea what it sounded like live -- as I said, I've got my suspicions about the recordings. For what it's worth, I've heard some jazz from the teens before, but didn't give it my full attention at the time, only noticing that I had trouble identifying the jazz-nature in it (it sounded less jazzy than ragtime to me -- I don't know whether the examples I heard were typical of the period or not). At some point I should listen seriously to really early jazz, to flesh out my musical education if nothing else. But I think the "comfort food" selections when I'm in a jazz mood are going to continue coming mostly from the big band era for a while.