A word from Duke Ellington

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Found in the liner notes of Herbie Hancock's "Gershwin's World" -

"It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line. - Duke Ellington

The Bad Plus present Science Fiction at the Berklee Peformance Center, Jamuary 24, 2015

Here's an oversimplification of the difference between "classical music" and "jazz".¹

In classical music the performers are tasked with recreating a musical experience that has been recorded in a notated document for this purpose, whereas in jazz the performers create in the moment using some sort of predetermined framework as a jumping-off point.

In classical music, the performer transforms the prerecorded information into live sounds to the best of his understanding of the composer's intentions, bringing to life the music in the composer's mind at the time he wrote it down.² In jazz, there are various traditions to writing things down, from full fledged everything-notated-all-the-way-through, to some sort of "you play what you feel like when I point at you" approaches to all points in between.

Let's take Duke Ellington for example. It's obvious when listening to his music, there's a lot of stuff written out. But, if you've ever heard a recording of a rehearsal or recording session out-takes, you'll learn that things could change on-the-fly if a better idea came along. And there's always the spontaneity of the moment. For instance, at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Ellington determined that between the mostly written-out pieces "Diminuendo in Blue" and "Crescendo in Blue" there would be a "blues interlude" where Paul Gonsalves would improvise over the standard blues form for an indeterminate length of time. As it turned out, Gonsalves' momentum and the audience's frenzied reaction sustained this interlude for 27 choruses (or about six minutes).³

No. 1 for January 3, 2014

American Hustle directed by David O. Russell

Some fine acting from across the ensemble, especially Jennifer Lawrence as the loose cannon homebody housewife who almost blows everything (she's the gun from the first act that goes of in the third) and Jeremy Renner as the crooked politician with a heart of gold, excepting for some cringes from Christian Bale's impersonation of Robert De Niro circa 1980. Any movie that has characters bonding over Jeep's Blues, falling in love even, gets a big gold star from me. (Also, another scene is scored with Monk playing Straight, No Chaser. The source music selections are so well chosen throughout, that when Danny Elfman's credit came up, I actually said “wait, there was original music in this movie, too?” I can't recall any.) 

I also will now only refer to the microwave as the “science oven” from this point on.

Top 6 from November 5, 2013

Rock & Roll – The Velvet Underground from Live MCMXCIII

Even after the amputation you can dance to a rock & roll station.

A lot of folks put down this album. It is the Velvets playing in the style of a 90's Lou Reed album, but frankly that's a better idea than trying to recreate the 1969 live album, and these were good years for Lou anyway. You can still dance to it, you know. It's also sort of is Sterling's valedictory.

Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue - Duke Ellington from Live at Newport 1956

Yeah, the solo, but, the tunes are pretty good too. Two sides of Duke's early style - contrapuntal, busy swinging, trying to cram in as many notes as a side of a 78 could hold, the frenzy of the audience providing the underlying energy that the super-fast revolutions of the turntable once did.