My roots are grounded in jazz. What I play comes out of that to one degree or another. At the same time there are a lot of other influences, some of which I'm sure I'm not even aware of. Someone who's heard my music said I should call it – fractal jazz. They adapted Isaac Asimov's famous quote on fractals to fit what I do:
| I believe that improvisation, probably the most important component of jazz, gives this genre of music a fractal-like structure. No matter how far we take improvisation; no matter how much irregularity occurs in the process, whatever remains, no matter how seemingly adulterated, is just as characteristic of the genre, as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of jazz. | ||
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How do you define what jazz is? It’s all about who you’re talking to – everyone has a different definition. Each jazz musician knows a very narrow part of it. They define what jazz is by the narrow form and structure that they know. So how do musicians define what they play in jazz? There’s only one way – they have to define it by relating it to someone else’s music – it creates a sound in your mind. They relate their definition to another jazz musician who plays in the same structure and form. Wynton Kelly, Tommy Flanagan, for example.
Jazz by my definition has an element of time and rhythm that is known as 'swing'. This is its most important quality and what sets it apart from other improvised music. Swing is very hard to define.
One other thing – when you’re studying an art form, there’s a language, history and a discipline – how it is organized. In jazz there’s a structure, there’s a form, there’s a pulse, there’s a common syntax, and there’s a common practice. From within all that you can expand all the elements. The traditional jazz musician negotiates around the structure without altering it. I wouldn’t say the jazz musician manipulates structure. I would say the jazz musician improvises within the structure – doesn’t see the structure as obstacles but as maypoles to free improvise around.
Leonardo da Vinci said strength is born of constraint and dies in freedom. It means if you have total freedom, you have no strength. If you have nothing but freedom, you have nothing to play against – it’s like doing weight training with no weights – there’s nothing that you’re playing against.
What Alan’s doing is composing without the vessel – it’s not an imposition on your composition – it’s its own vessel – the pulse is there –playing around with G minor and C minor and moving around at will – call and response going – at end the tempo goes slower – it’s not free music because it’s harmonic – it’s a mug’s game to give this music a label – it’s original that’s what I’d call it – moody – new age – that feeling of suspension – that feeling of not going necessarily somewhere you can predict.
Alan is playing a game that changes the rules as he goes. That actually has happened in jazz many times and it's valid. See Keith Jarrett's solo concerts (Koln), or saxist Ornette Coleman. Or look up free jazz.
Rules, structure etc don’t have to hamper a game or music. In spite of rules etc, each time a musician plays a piece, it will be different – no two musicians will play it the same way. Within the limits there is freedom. The structure, form, rules gives it strength. It’s the fighting against the constraints that gives the music strength. The game of music is meaningless without the rules.
It has to have a steady pulse – a sense of pulse. For a jazz musician, his world is that – and within that world he fills it with the improvisation. Pulse in a jazz sense is not just the beat but how you fill it – if you get enough pulses you get a bar of music and if you take enough measures you get a form and the form in jazz typically is 32 bars and that is the larger unit of the playpen that is your game. A pulse exists to be played against – a central place of discipline to work from. It doesn’t make any sense without the pulse being there. The game is meaningless without that vessel.
A game, hockey for example, would be meaningless if at random times the nets were turned around and gaping holes were left in the rink boards. So the game needs rules and boundaries. The rules do not limit the players; they need them to PLAY meaningfully. Notice, we "play" music and we "play" games. The rules are needed to give the game meaning. Yet with all these limitations, for example, in hockey, I'll wager there have never been two hockey games that were identical. Same with scrabble, chess, baseball, you name it. Baseball's whole history and the game itself would be rendered meaningless if tomorrow the rules changed to allow 4 strikes and 3 balls.
These games – and improvised jazz – are only interesting, to me anyway, BECAUSE of the rules, i.e. structures, imposed on the players. Rules, structure, form are there so musicians can play with each other. If each has their own rules etc, they can’t play together – there’s no consensus – it undermines the game. The trap is when jazz is explored to a high intellectual level – Charlie Parker being an example. Monk's music is as sophisticated as anything in jazz music.
Jazz demands that you understand how it works – the better you understand it, the better it sounds. The listener has to work at listening; the more he works at it the more he enjoys it.
Alan:
The traditional jazz musician negotiates around the structure without altering it. I’m not saying that I want to abandon all structure. But I tend not to like working within the structure of a jazz standard. Also, I don’t like playing all one pulse. It doesn’t give me the space I need. I vary the tempo, time signature – add beats, take away beats. I go by how I feel it. If you want to hold a bar or a chord – if you just want to sit on them, you can’t and still stick to the structure. The down side is that you can’t play with just anyone else. It’s harder to find people who are able to play within an improvisational structure that is also compositional.
Julian Clarke and Sam Dickinson picked up almost at the start what I was looking for.