My sax players

The sax is really the core instrument of jazz, and when it supplants the clarinet as the reed instrument the music develops in a different way. 

Two giants stand at the head. First, Coleman Hawkins. A deep, throaty sound and endlessly confident arpeggios, locked into the beat. He not only inaugurates the sax, but also can hold his own in the bebop era.  

Secondly, Lester Young, who invents coolness itself. (only a slight exaggeration). His lines float over the beat in an uncanny way.  He also has a way of improvising that is telling a story, as he liked to say, rather than using arpeggios and scales.  Lester paves the way for Bird, the greatest jazz musician of all time.  Bird makes time feel almost infinitely elastic, in the way that Cortázar wrote about in his short novel about him.  

Two swing era alto saxes, Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter, are also favorites of mine. 

Rollins and Coltrane define the post bop sax.  Rollins develops motifs, whereas Coltrane offers sheets of sound, and develops a different kind of rhythmic approach beyond the swung eighth note feel.  

Coltrane and Ornette define avant-garde jazz.  Bird, Coltrane, Ornette, are major jazz composers like Monk or Ellington/Strayhorn.  

Yet there is also a wealth of players in hard bop and cool jazz. Lee Konitz is probably one of the best, but there are many others. Paul Desmond? Mulligan?  

Friday 13

 I was getting obsessed with Monk's tune "Friday the 13th." It has four chords repeated over and over (the Andalusian cadence!) and a melody that consists of motif, repeated 3 times.  After being obsessed for a few day, I turn on the jazz station this morning, and there is French pianist explaining the tune to an audience, and having them whistle the tune. 

Then he starts playing "Ruby, my Dear," a completely different Monk tune with a far more complex harmony and structure. 

His name is Laurent de Wilde. I discover now that he is the author of a book about Monk. He is a pretty bad ass player.  Unfortunately I missed the first part of this show, but now they are having a clip of a Dizzy big band playing in Copenhagen.  

Extreme simplicity and extreme complexity. They aren't even opposites, they are complementary. The same way a Jobim tune can have a super convoluted musical structure and sound like a relaxing pop song at the same time.  

"Desafinado" is one I've also been obsessed with in the past. The title means "Out of tune," and the melody has an odd shape, as though it were out of tune, though it is really not.  

Layered

 We can think of intellectual life as layered in chronological stages over one's life time.  Of course, it is perfectly possible that someone can die young, and yet make a significant contribution at an early age. In those cases, we don't know what the later stages of development might have brought. 

One layer sits over another layer. We still know what we learned as children in school. There is a layer, then, of more specialized (and general) knowledge gained in college. 

Graduate school is layered on that. Now knowledge is even more specialized, but general knowledge should increase there as well.  

Early years as a professor, young researcher.  Then the "mid-career" scholar. Then the recognized expert at the highest rank.  All throughout these stages there are plateaux, and even possibly declines.  You can actually get worse as scholar, or become simply repetitive.  I know at one point I was very repetitive. I probably still am repetitive.  

Intellectual depth comes from the layering of these stages. Growth doesn't have to stop unless there is an actual cognitive decline.  Otherwise, we can be innovative as long as we want to.  

The best of many worlds

 My friend would tell her friends when we were first going out  He is handsome, and so smart. 

Then, after a while, she would tell them. He is so kind! 

One Note Mayhew

 I'm kind of obsessed with songs that use 1 or 2 notes as the central motif. "One note samba" would be the obvious example. Of course, it uses more than one note, but the initial theme is monotone. It adds the Bb after a while, and then the B section uses a ton of notes. 

Second example, "Thelonious" by you-know-who.  The motif is Bb, repeated, going down a half step to A, then back again to Bb.  There is only one other note in the A section of the tune, a fourth up from Bb to Eb.  

What else?  C Jam blues has a melody that goes up a fifth from the tonic.  

So the movement that normally was in the melody is transferred to the harmony, in the Jobim example. The initial F sounds different depending on its relation to the underlying chords. There is also rhythmic dynamism. It don't mean a think if it ain't got that swing / dah dah dah dah / dah dah dah dah / dah dah dah dah /  dah dah.  The last part is all on one note.  

Staying on one note for a while is also an improvisatory technique.  It could be "honking," in which a tenor sax will pick a low note and just milk the hell out of it while the audience goes crazy.  Or, in Sonny Rollins, a way of creating tension and rhythmic variation.  Repetition creates tension, because the listener wants it to end, to resolve to something else. 

En effective technique is to play one note for a while, then a crazy ornamentation that goes all over the place.  

What other tunes use this device of repetition?  

Spot the fallacies...

" Decades ago, the sociologist Robert K. Merton worried that the rise of more rapidly changing forms of knowledge would exacerbate the costs of academic gerontocracy. It might have been more defensible in the past — the medieval university coming honestly by its premodern characteristics — but no longer. “Today everything is quickly acquired, even that experience in which formerly consisted the sole and genuine superiority of the old over the young,” Merton cited his forerunner in sociology, Robert Michels, as saying all the way back in 1911. Modernity meant that “age has lost much of its value and therefore has lost, in addition, the respect which it inspired and the influence which it exercised.”"

Anyway

 Anyway, there is a CHE article about gerontocracy in academia.  It states, outright, that younger professors are more innovative, and that we old folks just teach what we learned in Graduate School 40 years ago. This is so true... I only teach semiotics and structuralism.  The author has open contempt for values like wisdom and experience. Modernity means that we learn faster, and don't have to bother with accumulated traditions, like they did in medieval times.  

Look, I was smarter at 28 when I finished my dissertation, than I am now.  By smarter, I mean that I had a brilliant mind.  And yet, my work was (relatively) shallow at that point.  (But not as shallow as this guy's critique of us geezers in our tweed jackets with elbow patches!) What I might have lost in brilliance I have gained in depth. There is a balance there. You need both types of intelligence. 

Of course, when our generation of privileged white men finally retires, there won't be these privileged positions any more anyway. Academia will be destroyed anyway.