Charles Mingus, ‘Myself When I am Real’, from “Mingus Plays Piano”
Charles Mingus, ‘Adagio Ma Non Troppo’, from “Let My Children Hear Music”
I came to jazz late in life, by a rather circuitous route. I’d been immersed in rock & roll since I was knee high to a grasshopper, and grew up with rock. I was 15 when ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ hit the radio, and lived within that music for the rest of the decade (quite literally, actually — I once saw a Grateful Dead concert from inside a loudspeaker; what’s that you say, Granny?).
Thirty years later I went through a mid-life crisis. As always, I took care to DJ my life. I stopped listening to rock cold turkey, nourishing my bruised soul with the Bach solo keyboard oeuvre (see SoTW 5, Glenn Gould, Toccata in Cm) for two years non-stop, attempting to impose order on an otherwise chaotic world. Then I segued to the Preludes & Fugues of Dimitri Shostakovitch (see SoTW 84, Dmitri Shostakovich, Prelude & Fugue No 16 in B-flat Minor), an homage to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. And then, somehow, I tripped over Charles Mingus’s “Let My Children Hear Music,” an orchestral album he made in 1972.
To this day I associate Shostakovitch and Mingus in my mind. They’re both highly intellectual, willful, charismatic composers; often severe, harsh, brutally truthful; with not a little sweetness and romanticism in the mix. They’re both masters of melody who more often choose non-melodic, frequently atonal modes of expression. Often with both I find the accessible, the whistleable, bobbing and peeking through the dense forests of magnificent, grandiose, overwhelming angry constructs.
So I started to learn jazz. I put nose to grindstone, downloaded a dozen lists of Essential Jazz Albums, sold my designer rock LP collection to a Dutch dealer and used the money to buy The 50 Greatest Jazz CDs. And no looking back.
I’d known an odd smattering of jazz beforehand–”Kind of Blue“, Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” album, the inescapable Getz/Gilberto, even the original soundtrack of “Orpheu Negro”. But somehow I think of “Let My Children hear Music” as the first jazz album I encountered, fell in love with, and sort of understood on its own terms, going to it as A Jazz Album, meeting it there on its home ground and dealing with it as such.
It’s a strange place to start jazz. It’s an orchestral album, more or less, rich arrangements ranging from a medium-sized combo to big band to full orchestra. It’s almost symphonic in conception, large-scale pieces running around ten minutes. The music is grandiose, inspired, inspiring, large-canvas.
Charles Mingus (1922-1979) was a linebacker-sized bandleader, composer and bassist. He was brilliant and impossible and left a legacy of music employing an exceptionally wide range of styles, as accomplished as it is varied. Here’s the avant garde Charlie (with Eric Dolpy). Here’s the cuddly one (‘Self-Portrait in Three Colors from “Ah-Hum”). And here’s one of the first SoTWs I ever wrote, about his composition ‘Remember Rockefeller at Attica’, one of my very favorite Opening Cuts.
He had a lot of fun with the names of his compositions. “Let My Children Hear Music” includes ‘The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife are Some Jazz Ass Slippers’; “Mingus Plays Piano” includes ‘Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blues.’ Other notables include ‘All the Things You Could Be By Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife was your Mother’, ‘If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There’d be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats,’ and ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’. He often gave the same composition different titles.
On the one hand, he came into the studio with a very firm conception of what he wanted. On the other, he demanded the most creative skills from his musicians. Mingus was known to refuse to write out charts for his recording musicians, as was the practice of the time. He would teach them the fundamentals of the composition aurally, and then demand that they improvise the rest. He demanded involvement, total musical commitment. He once beat up one of his band members on stage, for not doing well enough during a performance.
The origins of the compositions on “Let My Children Hear Music” are obscure. I just re-read the history of the album as described in the definitive autobiography “Mingus” by Brian Priestley, and it’s simply incomprehensible. And here are Charlie’s original liner notes, extensive, brilliant, also incomprehensible.
So let’s just stick to the few bare facts that are pretty clear and reliable here. From the mid-50s to the mid-60s, Mingus recorded several albums a year, mostly in a 5- or 6- piece setting, but not rarely employing other voicings. The music had a vast range, from the obstreperous, strident and experimental to the sweet and memorable. He drew on blues and Ellington and poetry and Mexico and everywhere else under the sun. He confined himself to playing the bass, kept the same drummer (Danny Richmond), but switched other accompanying musicians frequently, due to no small extent to the fact that he was an obnoxious bully on the bandstand, virtually impossible to work with.
Following a personal and physical crisis from the mid-60s to the early 70s, Mingus hardly recorded or performed. His creative powers returned for a short while, but then he contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease and died in 1979 at the age of 57.
In 1963, he recorded a solo piano album. Mingus of course played a little piano, probably doing most of his composing there. But he wasn’t considered much of a player per se. The album, “Mingus Plays Piano”, is one of my favorites of any genre. It’s heartbreakingly personal, intimate, candid, including both covers of standards (‘I Can’t Get Started’, ‘Body and Soul’), Mingus originals (the classic ‘Orange was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blues’), and one remarkable improvisation, ‘Myself When I am Real.’ This is how Mingus describes it in the liner notes:
Now, on this record there is a tune which is an improvised solo and which I am very proud of. I am proud because to me it has the expression of what I feel, and it shows changes in tempo and changes in mode, yet the variations on the theme still fit into one composition. I would say the composition is on the whole as structured as a written piece of music. For the six or seven minutes it was played (originally on piano), the solo was within the category of one feeling, or rather, several feelings expressed as one.
Sue and Charlie Mingus
Please, listen to it. Improvised, he says. Incroyable. Such rare beauty. Such art. How could he not be proud of it?
Then this is where the story gets weird. Someone, maybe Hub Miller, transcribed it. Then maybe someone named Alan Raph orchestrated and conducted it. Then maybe Mingus sat in the corner and watched a whole orchestra perform it for “Let My Children Hear Music”, under the production and supervision of Teo Macero. I even read one account that said that the latter was actually recorded over the original, but I hear no piano in the mix.
The resulting track is called ‘Adagio Ma Non Troppo’. ‘Adagio’ means ‘slow’ in musical terminology. ‘Ma Non Troppo’ means ‘but not too strictly’. Listen to it. Is it not moving? Was it not worth venturing out of the cozy mindless comfort of rock music for this?
I recently saw a gig by the Charles Mingus Dynasty, a 7-piece group dedicated to performing his music, not slavishly reproducing it, but admirable going with the spirit of his voice. Charles’ widow Sue was in the audience. I introduced myself as a long-time fan. She thanked me. It was somehow unsatisfying. So let’s escalate it a level–thanks, Charles. What a great experience, listening to the bare sketch and then listening to the fully-fleshed version. Like holding the miracle of a new-born baby and then skipping to the next track, the kid all grown up holding a stunning work of art he’s just created. All the potential, all the realization. How wondrous can be the works of man.
In SoTW 060, I talked about one of the very finest pieces of music I know, the 1961 live performance of Bill Evans’ first trio, “Live at the Village Vanguard”, with Scottie LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums. I wrote there that ‘this is as beautiful as music gets, and no words can rival that’. This album is also widely acknowledged as being the invention of the modern piano trio. The recording was made on June 25, 1961. Ten days later, on July 5, LaFaro ran his car into a tree and was killed instantly.
He and Evans hadn’t been buddies. LaFaro harped at Evans frequently to give up his voracious heroin habit, to no avail. But LaFaro’s death had a debilitating effect on Evans. He lost interest in playing for half a year. Evans: “Musically everything seemed to stop. I didn’t even play at home.” His only recording sessions were unenthusiastic efforts, done only to earn a few bucks to support his habit. Bill’s brother remembers him wandering around NYC wearing some of LaFaro’s clothes. It was a bleak time.
On April 4, 1962, Evans made his first attempt to record a solo album. He recorded four cuts and aborted the session. The recordings were shelved until they were released in 1981without fanfare on a posthumous hodgepodge album of outtakes, “Conception”.
The four cuts–the Irish standard ‘Danny Boy’; a Dave Brubeck original ‘In Your Own Sweet Way’; and two standards, ‘Easy to Love’ and ‘Like Someone in Love’, have been considered Evans eulogy to Scott LaFaro. They’re uneven, unfinished, unpolished. But they are performances in which the man’s soul is speaking directly. Without mediation, without technical obstacles. Evans, his pain, and the music. Evans’ liner notes to his first official solo album, “Alone”, 1968:
Perhaps the hours of greatest pleasure in my life have come about as a result of the capacity of the piano to be in itself a complete expressive musical medium. In retrospect, I think that these countless hours of aloneness with music unified the directive energy of my life. At those times when I have achieved this sense of oneness while playing alone, the many technical or analytic aspects of the music happened of themselves with positive Tightness which always served to remind me that to understand music most profoundly one only has to be listening well. Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience. This has nothing to do with my desire to communicate or not, but rather I think just a problem of personal self-consciousness which had to be conquered through discipline and concentration. Yet, to know one is truly alone with one’s instrument and music has always been an attractive and conducive situation for me to find my best playing level. Therefore, what I desired to present in a solo piano recording was especially this unique feeling.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Brad Mehldau’s very fine new solo album, “Live in Marciac” and how differently he performs as a soloist versus his usual trio setting. I also expressed the opinion that I admire his solo works more, across the board. Could it be that I’m saying I like solo piano jazz?
Bill Evans towers over the last 50 years of jazz piano. He recorded from 1960 till his death in 1980. Three major jazz pianists emerged in the decades that followed, all immeasurably influenced by him – Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and especially Keith Jarrett. And the three of them still exert a great influence over the newer generation of jazz pianists, Brad Mehldau being by far the leader of the pack. The musical resemblance between Granddaddy Bill, Pa Keith and Li’l Brad is unmistakable.
I know it’s not fair to compare musicians, but I spend most of my waking hours doing so. And these three do encourage the comparison–all of them frequently play tunes ostensibly unsuited to quiet, introspective solo piano, usually medium tempo, light love song Standards. It’s a practice Bill Evans started, I believe. The bottom line is that I listen to Bill Evans four or five times as much as I listen to Brad, and to Jarrett hardly at all. I’d like to demonstrate why.
Here’s Bill Evans’ version of ‘Danny Boy’ from that aborted 1962 solo session. And here’s Keith Jarrett solo from 2002, clearly echoing Evans’ treatment. You listen and tell me which of the two men does a respectable, lovely job, and which is expressing a world view of pain, profound insight and gravitas. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why I prefer to listen to Bill Evans playing with one arm tied behind his back (or paralyzed by the needle) to Jarrett at the top of his game.
And here’s Brad Mehldau doing ‘My Favorite Things‘ solo. I find it very admirable. But why do I feel that, in comparison to Bill Evans, I’m watching a kid? Mehldau was 41 at the time of this recording, 10 years older than Evans was in these solo recordings.
I think Keith Jarrett’s a competent but rather superficial jazz pianist, not a drop more. And Brad Mehldau isn’t Bill Evans. That’s okay. No one is. Well, enough with the comparisons. We haven’t come to bury Keith Jarrett or to minimize Brad Mehldau, but to praise Bill Evans.
Here’s ‘Like Someone in Love’, written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, a sweet piece recorded by Dinah Shore in 1944. Here’s Ella’s lovely version. And here’s Bill Evans taking a bit of fluff, and investing it with the weight of the weary world.
And then Bill Evans plays it. And he takes you to dark, harrowing places. I listen to this, my kishkes squinch up. Life as a lemon. His deftness only emphasizing the wrenching beauty of the exquisite pain he’s playing. He speaks with the voice of a musician using his art to describe the world as he has viewed it. A man who has experienced all the pain in the world. A man who has a lot to say. An artist who can inform you. What I call life-changing music.
Over the rest of his career, Evans recorded solo infrequently. Two of them are well-known among Evans aficionados. On his very first album, in 1959, he recorded Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Some Other Time’. At one point, he began improvising on the introduction to the song, and the result was his legendary ‘Peace Piece’. In 1966, three days after his father died, Evans recorded a 4-part medley, ‘In Memory of his Father’. Here’s the first part. With his last trio (1979-80), Evans frequently recorded ‘Nardis’ with an extended solo piano introduction, but the style there is muscular and energetic, a whole different ballgame. Here’s a whole long SoTW on the evolution of Bill’s treatments of ‘Nardis’ over the decades. There are also two albums he released in 1968 (“Alone”) and 1975 (“Alone Again”). They’re fine, even moving on occasion; but typically of his middle years, not Evans at his best.
Much less-well known is the two-volume “The Solo Sessions”, recorded January, 1963, but not released until 1984. These are some of Evans best recordings, the fruition of what unevenly accomplished in our four 1962 recordings. If you are as taken by them as I am, dig up the 1963 sessions. They’re moving, profound, unforgettable. For me, works that make listening to music the best part of my life. As always, Bill says it best: Perhaps the hours of greatest pleasure in my life have come about as a result of the capacity of the piano to be in itself a complete expressive musical medium.
While you’re reading about Ms Schneider’s airborne music, you can listen to samples of it here, from her official Website.
Over the last four or five years, my musical tastes have become more eclectic, roaming far afield, exploring some rather arcane corners (Scandinavian Neo-Trad, Minimalism, Newgrass, a wide range of Brazilian styles, A Cappella Jazz), places where most boys weaned on Motown and The Four Seasons don’t go walking at night. But there have been four artists that I’ve encountered over the past five years who stand out in my mind as rising above the field, four artists who make worthwhile this constant, compulsive searching for interesting new music.
They are Kurt Elling (b. 1967) of Chicago, the best male jazz vocalist ever, period; Luciana Souza (b. 1966), a Brazilian singer, who turns to gold everything she touches; Esperanza Spalding (b. 1984), hailing from Portland, Oregon, a jazz-bassist/singer/composer prodigy; and Maria Schneider (b. 1960), a bandleader/composer of music residing somewhere between avant-garde jazz and modern classical, and the lady we’re button-popping proud to say a few words about in this week’s SoTW.
As I write these four names together for the first time, it occurs to me that they have much more in common than I’d previously noticed. Obviously, they all make (to my mind and ears) great, great, great music, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about them. But they all happen to be great innovators.
Not all great artists are innovators. There are plenty who are content to dig their own groove, conservative though it may be. Think of Bill Evans. Think of James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. No revolutions there. Heck, as far as I understand, JS Bach dealt almost exclusively with existing formats.
The least adventuresome of my four, generically speaking, is Mr Elling. He is ‘merely’ reinventing what a jazz singer can be, expanding the boundaries that have been observed since people like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald invented jazz singing in the 1930s.
The other three, the ladies? What a remarkable three they are. Each one of them has invented an entirely new mindset, her own new genre. These are explorers on the level of Amelia Earhart and Pocahontas, aural aviatrices, creative artists on a par with—well, sorry, I’m not going to compare them to anyone. I’m not sure I could. They are fine, fine, fine artists, each of the three.
I’ve been writing SoTW for close to two years now, and I’m very much aware that I’ve shied away from these, the greatest artists I know of now at the height of their powers. (although I did dedicate a post to Esperanza Spalding; Kurt and Luciana, I promise I shall do my best to give you the unbounded credit you deserve). I guess I’m daunted, afraid I won’t be able to do them justice. Well, tough, Jeff, that’s why you’re here. And if there are some people out there who are serious about music and who read your ramblings and listen to your links, you’re damn lucky, and you have an obligation to tell them about an artist like Maria Schneider.
Well, sportsfans, there is this lady who hails from rural Minnesota and lives in New York. She studied under and worked with the great Gil Evans, whom we’ve discussed in SoTWs via his collaborations with Miles Davis in “Birth of the Cool” and “Sketches of Spain“, as well as his behind-the-scenes impact on the modal jazz of “Kind of Blue“.
(Just to clarify things, if the name Maria Schneider is ringing some deja vu bell, it’s also the name of the French actress who played with Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris”. For my money, Ms Schneider the composer holds a much more subtle and enticing sex appeal.)
To talk about Gil Evans and Maria Schneider, we need to explain what they’re not. And to do that, we need to define the term ‘Big Band’. The standard format for a Big Band is 17-pieces: five saxophones (most often two altos, two tenors, and one baritone), four trumpets, three or four trombones (often including one bass trombone) and a four-piece rhythm section (composed of drums, acoustic bass or electric bass, piano and guitar). The first incarnation of The Big Band was Swing, a melodic, ebullient dance-styled music which captured the world’s ears and feet from the mid-1930s till after WWII. The most famous Swing Bands were white, led by bandleaders such as Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, with vocalists such as Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. A number of black Big Bands were less dance hall, more jazz oriented, and continued working into the 1950s and even 1960s, most notably Count Basie and Duke Ellington.
Gil Evans arranged for the Claude Thornhill big band during the 1940s, providing dreamy, slow, rich charts, as opposed to the swinging dance sound more prevalent among the white bands. Throughout the 1950s his best work was by, for and with Miles Davis. He was the musical spirit behind the Birth of the Cool grouping (his apartment was the meeting place for all the adherents). In fact, he’s often credited for being the spiritual father of Cool, an aesthetic that has dominated much of the arts for the last 60 years. He made three great collaborations with Miles (“Porgy and Bess“, “Sketches of Spain” and “Miles Ahead“, as well as one very much in the same vein under his own name, “Out of the Cool”. During the 1960s he made several very fine albums with smaller ensembles (10-piece), planned a collaboration with Jimi Hendrix till the latter ODed, and in the 1970s continued to explore the use of electric instruments within the context of his big band.
Maria Schneider is very much Gil Evans’ pupil. She worked on a number of projects with him as his assistant, and very much carries his mantle stylistically. The ‘sound’ of the two is very close–dreamy, floating, cloudy, rich, infinitely intricate.
But Ms Schneider has gone so much further. Evans was primarily a promulgator of an aesthetic. His major achievements were brought to fruition in collaboration with Miles, and indirectly on generations of artists from all fields. Maria Schneider has opened up entirely new vistas. There are a number of contemporary big bands working today. It’s a genre I’m quite fond of, large-palette, orchestrated jazz, and there are some fine artists working in this medium. But none has reached the breadth of context or the heights of musical achievements that Ms Schneider has. No one in the jazz or contemporary classical media has found such a relevant, thoroughly contemporary mode for expressing such a large, ambitious vision. This is the big-time, folks.
Maria Schneider recorded six full CDs from 1992-2007 (where’s a new one?), despite all the financial and logistic difficulties of maintaining a large ensemble. Her band, by the way, has remained remarkably stable. It is said that the members don’t just play her music–they would take a bullet for her.
Her last two albums have been released via ArtistShare, where musicians finance their projects outside the traditional recording industry via “fan-funding,” with supporters directly contributing to the project invited in to follow the creative process (how far depending on the level of contribution–give enough, you’re even invited to the recording session).
Maria Schneider is managing reasonably well financially in this way, artistically even better. In 2005, her “Concert in the Garden” became the first album to win a Grammy without being available in retail stores. She’s been nominated for and won many more since. The critics adore her, as do the lucky fans who’ve discovered her.
But we’re neglecting the music. It’s been called “evocative, majestic, magical, heart-stoppingly gorgeous.” It defies genre-categorization. In format, it’s standard Big Band, but the music exhibits a symphonic palette, broad and complex and rich and intriguing. Her compositions are often compared to those of Mahler and Copland. They’re ephemeral, transcendental and melodic, often simultaneously. Not impressionistic, but carefully thought out and planned and considered. Incorporating the vast, open, airy Minnesota landscape where she was raised. Thoroughly modern, thoroughly American, thoroughly personal. She’s even been called Nabokovian! A brainy romantic, passionate, an aural aviatrix.
Her music is a wonder to me. Take for example her sense of pulse. Often there’s a drum playing straightforward rhythmic riffs. But there’s never a beat. You’ll never tap your foot. Your soul will soar with the music, not bounce around the dance floor. I don’t know how she does it. The drums don’t provide a beat, they provide a pulse. They propel it without anchoring to the ground. The music moves, but it floats. Can you dance to the wind propelling a cloud?
Here is a segment of a beautiful composition in a remarkable ArtistShare collaboration, “Vertical Voices“, in which two vocalists, Julia Dollison and Kerry Marsh, perform most of the parts of Ms Schneider’s scores vocally, accompanied by the rhythm section from the original band.
And here’s a glorious clip of her conducting her orchestra in 2007:
Maria Schneider’s music may be deceptively light at first. It’s very easy on the ear. It’s beautiful and gentle on the ear. But I’ve been listening to it for several years now, a lot. And I’ve yet to plumb its depths. I listen to it over and over, always discovering new nuances and colorings and shadings. I never tire of it, and it never fails to make me feel as though I’ve been airborne.
Maria Schneider is a passionate bird-watcher. She often incorporates bird songs in her compositions. If you ask me, there are many birds who could learn a lot from her about how to fly.
There’s this kid from London, Jacob Collier. He’s 22.
Since achieving majority, he’s been releasing videos he’s produced and recorded all by himself. In his room in his parents’ home. Alone, as it were.
At least that’s his cover story. I don’t believe a word of it. I’ve been watching his videos, and I’m convinced he’s an alien. He displays musical and visual abilities way beyond the ken of Homo sapiens from Planet Earth. It wouldn’t surprise me if he turns out to be the front man for some nefarious intergalactic conspiracy to invade our minds.
Skeptical? Watch ‘Hideaway’, the first video for his debut album “In My Room”, due July 1.
See what I mean? The superhuman, multi-octave, mind-bogglingly rich vocals? His prowess on every instrument you’ve heard of and a few he seems to have invented (a miniature acoustic bass)? The outlandishly inventive visuals?
The humans I’ve encountered, even the musically gifted ones, can’t conceive of stuff like that, let alone execute it. By themselves. At the age of 22. Alone in their room in their parents’ house.
I remember, for example, hearing The Beatles’ ‘Rain’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ for the first time. I remember the quantum shock in my brain experienced witnessing the leap of imagination those recordings presented: This is something new.
This is a new world of aural and conceptual possibilities. Jacob Collier brings to mind that degree of innovation.
Jacobs
One of his favorite formats has been multitracked videos of jazz and pop standards, driven by (by his own account) Brian Wilson-inspired vocals, often a cappella but occasionally garnished with a knockout lead instrument or five. I wanna tell you, this is seriously impressive stuff.
But he’s also been venturing out into the big world, starting at the top – here he is guesting with the hottest, coolest band in the world today, Snarky Puppy:
‘QuarterMaster’, a live performance in which he solos on the melodica. Seriously.
‘Don’t You Know’, from Snarky Puppy’s new DVD/CD “Family Dinner – Volume Two” in which he plays piano and sings multi-tracked, live!!, using a device he invented with a team at MIT, the ‘harmoniser’ – a thingie that enables him to sing in chords that he’s playing on a keyboard. Huh? Did we mention that he’s 22?
But he’s also been starting to appear live, using another home-made invention in collaboration with the MIT guys, a one-man, multi-instrumental, multi-visual tool that allows him to simulate on stage the multi-track vocals/videos.
This is the kind of impression he’s been making on people:
“Talent oozing out of every pore”— Jamie Cullum
“Fucking unbelievable” — David Crosby
“The most talented kid on Earth today” — K.D. Lang
“Magnificent!” — Chick Corea
“Blown away” — Steve Vai
“I have never in my life seen a talent like this… Beyond category. One of my favourite young artists on the planet – absolutely mind-blowing” — Quincy Jones
“Wow!! Jacob, your stuff is amazing” — Herbie Hancock
“Staggering and unique… Jazz’s new messiah” — The Guardian
Conquering the world
I don’t know how far he’ll go, this alien whippersnapper.
Gary Usher, co-writer of the lyrics with Brian: “‘In My Room’ found us taking our craft a little more seriously. I played bass and Brian was on organ. The song was written in an hour… Brian’s melody all the way. The sensitivity… the concept meant a lot to him. When we finished, it was late, after our midnight curfew. In fact, Murry [the Wilson brothers’ father] came in a couple of times and wanted me to leave. Anyway, we got Audree [the Wilson brothers’ mother], who was putting her hair up before bed, and we played it for her. She said, ‘That’s the most beautiful song you’ve ever written.'”
Brian at 22
Brian: “I had a room, and I thought of it as my kingdom. And I wrote that song, very definitely, that you’re not afraid when you’re in your room. It’s absolutely true.”
Jacob echoes not only Brian’s harmonic and orchestrational genius. He also speaks of ‘his room’ as his natural environment.
One of the innumerable talents of Squire Jacob that I find profoundly unsettling is his self-assurance. He’s out there doing mind-bogglingly new and exciting stuff with folks like Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock and Jamie Cullum, and he behaves with aplomb and confidence as if as if he’s been selling tens of thousands of copies of this stuff for 10 years.
Let’s step for a moment into the form/content dichotomy.
Jacob at 22
In purely musical terms, at 22 Jacob is way beyond Brian. He’s not churning out the original surfing/hot rod hits that Brian was at that age; but he is going to town harmonically in a way Brian would only begin to attempt several years and several albums later in “Beach Boys Today!” But as an innovator of sound, technique, tools? Jacob is standing on Brian’s shoulders. The Wilson brothers had a midnight curfew, and the personal computer was 30 years away. I don’t know if Brian even had a reel-to-reel machine when he wrote ‘In My Room’. Jacob really does create a new world every three or four days (that’s how long it takes him to make a multitracked ‘cube’ vocal video).
I see Jacob potentially playing in a league with Brian Wilson, even John and Paul, some day. Why maybe? At the same time that they were creating new worlds of options, they were creating indelible, lasting music. Jacob’s not doing that yet. My sense is that he’s still rather overwhelmed by the tools and techniques he’s inventing as he goes along.
Brian Wilson’s genius goes beyond those harmonies and that orchestration. Both serve to celebrate the core, the song. As brilliant as is the whole of each of the worlds contained on the Beach Boys’ finest songs, it’s all finally in service of the song, even “Pet Sounds”, even ‘Good Vibrations’.
As a musician, Jacob Collier is still a kid, albeit a prodigiously gifted one. He’s just beginning to venture outside his room, almost literally. If he has the focus, the fiber, the soul, to concentrate on core values – melody, lyric, song structure – Jacob Collier could well be one of the major musical voices of his generation.
Here’s a fine video of Jacob explaining how and why you should consider reaching into your pocket and supporting him. Know what? I did. It makes me a patron of the arts, to kick in a little dough for a kid I have so much respect and hopes for. Think about joining me in supporting him.
If you liked this post, you may like enjoy these previous Songs of The Week:
I came to jazz late in life, by a rather circuitous route. I’d been immersed in rock & roll since I was knee high to a grasshopper, and grew up with rock. I was 15 when ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ hit the radio, and lived within that music for the rest of the decade (quite literally, actually — I once saw a Grateful Dead concert from inside a loudspeaker; what’s that you say, Granny?).
To this day I associate Shostakovitch and Mingus in my mind. They’re both highly intellectual, willful, charismatic composers; often severe, harsh, brutally truthful; with not a little sweetness and romanticism in the mix. They’re both masters of melody who more often choose non-melodic, frequently atonal modes of expression. Often with both I find the accessible, the whistleable, bobbing and peeking through the dense forests of magnificent, grandiose, overwhelming angry constructs.
It’s a strange place to start jazz. It’s an orchestral album, more or less, rich arrangements ranging from a medium-sized combo to big band to full orchestra. It’s almost symphonic in conception, large-scale pieces running around ten minutes. The music is grandiose, inspired, inspiring, large-canvas.
He had a lot of fun with the names of his compositions. “Let My Children Hear Music” includes ‘The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife are Some Jazz Ass Slippers’; “Mingus Plays Piano” includes ‘Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blues.’ Other notables include ‘All the Things You Could Be By Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife was your Mother’, ‘If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There’d be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats,’ and ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’. He often gave the same composition different titles.
The origins of the compositions on “Let My Children Hear Music” are obscure. I just re-read the history of the album as described in the definitive autobiography “Mingus” by Brian Priestley, and it’s simply incomprehensible. And here are Charlie’s original liner notes, extensive, brilliant, also incomprehensible.
