Kinda Blue: An Open Question

[Niko]

Sorry, but to call Tristano Herbie's "prime" influence based on a certain similarity that perhaps only you happen to hear -- in the absence of literally one shred of hard evidence that Herbie seriously checked out Tristano -- is silly. I'm not saying there might not actually be some rhyme in the conception, but that's not at all the same as influence, let alone prime influence.

fwiw, googling reveals that Allen is not at all alone with this assessment, e.g. here and here; doesn't quite proof prime influence, but still...

[Larry Kart]

Like Lennie at a few points but mostly not IMO. Harmonically Herbie more or less "floats" (and thus also tends to float in his intentionally evanescent relationship to harmonic rhythm), while Lennie gets a lot of his virtually omnipresent rhythmic drive by pushing ahead/through/against a harmonic force field whose strength, in the process, he intensifies. For instance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQZxUwpVQPo&feature=related

[JSngry]

An influence, sure. But PRIME influence? C'mon... the only way that even begins to maybe possibly semi-work is if you isolate one small part of the Total Herbie Hancock Experience and ignore all the rest of it.

and fwiw, Richard Tabnik (2nd link) is a Confirmed Tristano Disciple, and they are True Believers indeed...

Edited June 17, 2010 by JSngry

[AllenLowe]

well, the disciples don't count - they chose to drink the Kool Aid.

and while I agree, per Larry and others above, that there is lots more going on than simply Tristano, if I were to do a pie chart (mmmm, pie...) it would show a greater degree of Tristano than any other, to my ears.

hence, prime.

[Mark Stryker]

Like I said, similarity is not the same as direct influence. Sure, Herbie's relentlessly linear, a cappella right hand lines here may rhyme with Tristano, but the sources of Herbie's playing by 1967 are so integrated and include, as much as anything, four years of nightly experimentation with these players in this repertoire, that to draw a straight line to Tristano as an unacknowledged prime influence, in the absence hard evidence, is fanciful speculation. If looking for a direct link, it makes more sense to tie this to earlier Bill Evans solos where there's a similar linear quality and where he leaves his left hand at his side for a while -- "Oleo" from "Everybody Digs Bill Evans" comes to mind. On another front, Herbie's approach here certainly arose in the context of playing in such a harmonically ambiguous universe, where marking harmony/form with his left hand makes little sense.

If you want to argue that Tristano helped create a sound that entered into the bloodstream of jazz and that at a certain point became so much a part of the DNA of the music that it filtered subconsciously into all kinds of places, including Herbie Hancock, well, that's a different issue -- though I'm not sure how far down this road I personally would take it. But that's more plausible than saying that Hancock's prime influence was Tristano, but he has never acknowledged it because he has selective amnesia, stemming largely from a personal/psychological hang-up over the fact that Tristano was a white SOB. Plus, even if there's a link of any sort, it only rears its head in this one area of Hancock's playing. It doesn't account for his approach to harmony, the blues, bebop, comping, funk or anything else.

Did Herbie ever hear Tristano live? Did he ever listen to the records?

Edited June 18, 2010 by Mark Stryker

[jazzbo]

This last year, when listening to the Milestones and Kind of Blue albums I've been fascinated with Paul Chambers' work on these recordings.

I wouldn't be surprised if the live appearances by the sextet and then quintet of this period hadn't slowly introduced and featured some of these steps towards modal jazz. . . and opened curiosity among other musicians. By which I guess I'm saying it's not just the album Kind of Blue.

Listened to "Two Bass Hit" this morning after reading this thread and seeing Larry's Milestones mention. Wow. What a performance.

[AllenLowe]

"he has never acknowledged it because he has selective amnesia, stemming largely from a personal/psychological hang-up over the fact that Tristano was a white SOB. "

Mark, you are not reading my posts - disagreeing is fine, but you are mischaracterizing what I said, which was much more complicated. There was a pervasive sense of Tristano, from many of the musicians I knew in those days, as a nasty, insulting guy - and the reaction to this, due to his meanness, vanity and self conceit, was frequently to completely deny connection rather than own up to a personal musical relationship.

As a matter of fact, the failure of Herbie to EVEN MENTION Tristano anywhere actually SUPPORTS my position, because the connection is so obvious that, if it was peripheral or minor, he would mention it in passing - so his failure to do so is almost bizarre - to the point that it comes closer to proving my point than yours.

And I believe the race thing enters in, especially as things were developing in the '60s, where critical tendency was to ignore Tristano et al because, interesting as his experiments were, they were allegedly lacking in "influence" - which is irrelevant, anyway, and also untrue (read some of the things Julius Hemphill has said in acknowledgement of such, as has Braxton; more to the point, in the course of racial events of the 1960s, when people like Sonny Rollins were being pressured for having white musicians, how likely was a guy like Lennie to receive credit?)

but this whole racial thing of the time is very complex - you can't sum it up in a sentence. You gotta actually know some of the musicians who were actually there, from not only Herbie's generation, but the one before, like Bill Triglia, et al.

Also, for a dose of reality, read Matt Shipp's account of Cecil Taylor going beserk because Matt's favorite pianist was a white guy - and this is 20-30 years later. So mulitply racial attitudes by about 10 and you have the '60s.

Edited June 17, 2010 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

...if I were to do a pie chart (mmmm, pie...) it would show a greater degree of Tristano than any other, to my ears.

I would question who was baking (mmmm, baked) that particular pie, then...

Seriously - when you look at what those guys were playing as that group evolved, a lot of things come into play, not the least of which is "20th Century Classical Music", including, specifically, Bartok. To not think that these guys weren't checking damn near everything out that was "advanced"out at one point or another would not be advisable.

I mean, you can hear - or not hear - what you want to hear or not hear. And really, what goes into the makeup of a musician as developed as Hancock makes a list longer than most of us would care to read, and probably includes some things that not even he knows about.

It's not a 3D thing, definitely not a 2D thing.

[JSngry]

If you want to compare apples to apples, compare Herbie in 1965 at the Plugged Nicked to Lennie at the Half Note in 1965, I think it was.

Or, ok, apples to pears - Herbie in 1968 to Sal Mosca with Lee in 1972(?) on Spirits.

[AllenLowe]

good points two posts up, so let me amend to say prime jazz influence.

and everybody liked Bill Evans, everybody dug Bill Evans, so he was easier to credit.

hey, good name for a record - ("Easier to Credit") -

Edited June 17, 2010 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

good points two posts up, so let me amend to say prime jazz influence.

When Tristano could have written "Watermelon Man" or "Dolphin Dance", or played "One Finger Snap", then there will be room for that argument.

[felser]

So hard to say. Not a no-brainer like D.D. Jackson comes from Don Pullen. I hear a lot of Bill Evans in early Hancock, but hear other stuff also, more dissonance. Can you bypass Tristano by mixing Evans with something like 50's/early 60's Cecil Taylor (very different than 'Unit Structures' and beyond Cecil Taylor to my ears)? I don't know. We have a favorite parlor game at home, guessing what breed our dog's father was. We know the mother was a Pomeranian, so we keep guessing what we could mix with a Pomeranian to get something that looks like our mutt. We still don't have a consensus answer five years later, keep going back and forth between a few different breeds, but the dog doesn't seem to worry about it even though we do. Might be the same thing here.

[AllenLowe]

[JSngry]

So hard to say. Not a no-brainer like D.D. Jackson comes from Don Pullen. I hear a lot of Bill Evans in early Hancock, but hear other stuff also, more dissonance.

Seriously - Herbie cops to both Robert Farnon and Nelson Riddle as influences. Riddle in particular was quite adept at pulling some left-field shit into otherwise seemingly "normal" arrangements of standards. It's not an influence you'd automatically assume, obviously, but once you know it's there (and admitted to), there it is. Not always, but the whole reharmonization thing...I cna hear some of Riddle's more advanced work now and say, "yeah, that's it".

Then again, Riddle copped to having a serious Ravel jones, so...

[Larry Kart]

A bit off-topic though perhaps not, here (later in that "Oxford Jazz Companion" chapter) I probably go well around the bend about Cecil Taylor:

Pre-Coleman jazz was marked by a steady increase in harmonic complexity . And that took place against the backdrop of this century’s western concert music, in which an increase in harmonic complexity not only had led to a drastic loosening of tonal function but also to Arnold Schoenberg’s invention/discovery of a way of organizing music that did not depend on tonal function at all. Thus Taylor’s early recordings -- “Jazz Advance “(Transition/Blue Note, 1955) and “Looking Ahead!” (Contemporary/OJC, 1958) led composer-critic Gunther Schuller to conclude that the extremely high level of disssonance in Taylor’s music meant that his work must be related to that of the “small minority of jazz composer- performers” whose music “often spills over into areas so removed from any center of tonal gravity that it can be thought of as ‘atonal.’”

But while dissonance for Taylor would come to play almost no tonally functional

role, that was not because he had a need to stretch or weaken tonal functions. Rather, what he was trying to do was collapse all elements onto the level of what might be called melodicized rhythm -- into a line of leaps, attacks and their resulting /accumulating shapes in which dissonance plays an accent/dynamics/attack role, not an harmonic one. That is, the more dissonant the chord or cluster that Taylor strikes, the greater the perceived force with which the blow has been struck, the more obliquely (in terms of perceived rhythm) it has been delivered. Also put to rhythmic use are the residual directional meanings of Taylor’s by now non-functional harmonic gestures, which become a further, extravagantly detailed means of speed control, a way of altering the rate at which the music proceeds by altering the angles at which we perceive it.

Taylor’s early partner, bassist Buell Neidlinger, has said that despite its apparently formidable level of complexity, he found from the first that Taylor’s music “was clear. I could see it as well as feel it....” Consider, for instance, the accelerating burst of notes with which Taylor emerges from the ensemble on “Mixed” (Impulse, 1961) . While the passage does not take place within the boundaries of the piece’s already loose metrical framework, except in the sense that Taylor’s outburst and that framework coexist, the melodic-rhythmic shape of this outburst is almost tangible -- largely because Taylor’s gestures at once generate and are heard against the musical equivalent of the picture plane of a non-illusionistic painting. (The “picture plane” for Taylor is the piano keyboard; and -- like Earl Hines, but unlike many post-Chopin composers for the piano -- he chooses to highlight rather than disguise the fact of fingers striking specific keys; every sound proclaims its actual location within space.) He reserves the right to make harmony do some work on the level of local drama, but if we listen well, it is his skein of melodicized beats that is the story. Thus, the materials of Taylor’s music are, to an alarming or thrilling degree, unencoded; as the poet Frank O’Hara wrote of the “things” in Jackson Pollock’s work: “They were left intact, and given back. Paint is paint, shells and wire are shells and wire, glass is glass, canvas is canvas.... [O]ne is present at the problem and at the solution simultaneously.”

The above is slightly edited; in the second paragraph in two spots I added the word "perceived," which I think clarifies what I had in mind.

[jazzbo]

"So What" on Miles "Milestones" album

?

Sorry -- I was thinking of the modal-ness of the title track on "Milestones,"

Definitely that composition evokes So What.

Also, the most Ellingtonian-Clark Terrian Miles composition and arrangement perhaps. . . .

[BillF]

"So What" on Miles "Milestones" album

?

Sorry -- I was thinking of the modal-ness of the title track on "Milestones,"

I guessed that was it.

[AllenLowe]

whenever I read something as perfectly expressed as Larry's description of Cecil Taylor, as above, I understand why the term "art" is so poorly understood, especially by those who dismiss the power and importance of criticism.

[felser]

whenever I read something as perfectly expressed as Larry's description of Cecil Taylor, as above, I understand why the term "art" is so poorly understood, especially by those who dismiss the power and importance of criticism.

:tup :tup

Agreed. Was so thankful to read that and get a grasp on what I have heard and grasped on a certain level for decades but couldn't begin to fully understand or describe until now. And yes, Buell Neidlinger always sounded so "right" on those early Cecil Taylor recordings, he obviously grasped what was going on (Denis Charles also, but for me, especially Neidlinger).

[Larry Kart]

Thanks guys -- writing that passage back when it happened was sort of an out-of-body experience, and I've never known how much to trust it.

[Shawn]

Debussy & Claude Thornhill's band. That's what I hear when listening to Kind Of Blue or Milestones or Paul Horn's Something Blue (the first sequel?). Now, my study of classical is limited, so I'm going more from my own sense of "mood" than anything else.

Thornhill's band had this way of getting into "zones", a track like Snowfall is very ornate and pretty...but there's some sort of underlying mystical quality about it. An implied drone if you will. Then you've got Gil Evans' charts which of course links directly to KOB.

And for whatever reason, when I hear the mellower sections of KOB, I always end up hearing fragments of "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun".

[Niko]

another thing found on google yesterday was from an instructions book by tenorist Jerry Coker where considers Sing Sing Sing as the most prominent predecessor of modal jazz/kind of blue

[JSngry]

Fresh Mode

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ivvJRqazk

[Teasing the Korean]

3) re: the attribution of Kind of Blues' effects on Mancini and other statically blue movie music: well, re: Mancini, I just do not hear this. As for movie music, I think this is also weakly supported. We need to go back to Alex North, I Want to Live, the Man with the Golden Arm, Kenyon Hopkins (Baby Doll) and a few others to see that this is very inaccurate.

Agree with you completely. Even looking beyond jazz, film composers such as Bernard Herrmann had already gone the minimalist, hypnotic static route previously.