The Blues Going On and On (Part One): Horace Silver in the Netherlands
What solace is there for me in these strange reverberations, in these unholy echoes, what relief? If in moments of despair I am drawn to the blues because integral to the music (I have supposed) is a response to every cry, an answer to every pronounced existential appeal, at what point will I tire of its evermore mechanical replies -- of these inspired visions that are in fact only shadows of a sun that has long since set?
What to make of my recent, chance discovery -- of Horace Silver, performing on television in the Netherlands nearly half a century ago?
Anyone with a basic grasp of television history, which is to say, virtually anyone who has watched television, even indifferently, should be able to situate this clip in the late-1950s or early-1960s merely by looking at it. Something in its high contrast black and white
is synonymous with our perception of the era, and lends Silver's performance the aura of an authentic artifact. How much it must tell us about our past, we suppose, which is to say the phase of collective memory preserved visually in high contrast black and white. Yet the clip wasn't produced as a document of history or even as a document of Silver's performance, but as a performance of its own in which the music would relinquish its precedence to the audience, and to the audience's reception of the music -- as well as to images of individual musicians, and the manner in which they perform. This is not happenstance, given that the backs of Silver and his band have been turned deliberately away from the people who are listening to them, so that the band -- and the process of watching it -- will be captured in a single camera shot. Meanwhile the camera tends to focus on either one musician at a time -- instead of the group as a whole -- or on clusters of individual audience members, at the sake of depicting either the band or the audience as an integrated collective.
The audience, in fact, or the presumed audience, I should say -- a finite group of spectators who in 1959 were assembled in a studio-theater in the Netherlands and saw five musicians playing their instruments -- is ultimately succeeded by a different, more abstract kind of audience -- one not assembled at the time of filming -- who would experience the performance only later, in the relative isolation of its respective homes. Yet the Europeans for whom this clip was intended, who lived within broadcast range of the television station that commissioned it and saw the clip only once, presumably within a few weeks or months of its production, represent a far more integrated body than the world wide web users who (in my case) would not be born for another twenty years but who can watch the clip now as often as they like on their so-called personal computers.
What, though, does this tell us about Silver and his music? Most of what I've said is self-evident. Modern technology has permanently disrupted the relationship between those who devise and those who receive forms of expression once considered immediate. Merely lamenting this disruption will do nothing to reverse its course, nor would such a reversal necessarily be advantageous were it even possible. For the moment, it seems we instead have an opportunity to reconsider those forms -- such as jazz -- that rely on immediacy as their determining factor. The viewer who watches the clip of "Senor Blues" may be justified in regarding it as immediate, in some sense, as an arguably more vivid display of jazz improvisation than an audio recording -- but only within the context of this immediacy as an artifact of yet another technology. The clip didn't simply happen . . . and I wonder how much of its success I can honestly attribute to circumstance, the element so often prized as vital to jazz expression, providing its circumstances were highly controlled and externally manipulated by a group of producers, advertisers, and executives. (Surely there are few scenarios less conducive to the often-professed objective of improvisational freedom than the prescribed, indeed programmed, formatting of television.) So when I assume that Horace Silver's music offers each musician a chance to express himself fully while contributing to the advancement of the work as a whole, I should bear in mind that the camera is enforcing (and possibly even leading me to) my assumption by zooming in on the musicians' faces, one at a time, as they play both solo and as an ensemble. And then if I admire the sweat glistening on the musicians' faces as evidence of their dedication and of the intensity of their efforts, I may likewise consider whether their sweat is only the product of unusually bright lights necessitated by the filming. Or is a hot lamp still a hot lamp?
At the end of the clip, Silver retrieves a handkerchief from the lid of the piano and begins mopping his brow while he bows in recognition to the camera. The studio audience obliges him with applause and he smiles at the camera knowingly, as if the handkerchief, which emerges from the piano in a single almost organic movement, was an inspired, dramatic flourish added specifically for my benefit.
This is the first of what will likely be a three-post series. The second post will consider the relevance of T.S. Adorno's infamous excoriation of jazz within the context of Horace Silver's eternal life on YouTube. The third post will examine Cecil Taylor as a possible counterpoint to Adorno's critique. I haven't written the second or third posts yet, so they probably won't appear for a while.
What to make of my recent, chance discovery -- of Horace Silver, performing on television in the Netherlands nearly half a century ago?
Anyone with a basic grasp of television history, which is to say, virtually anyone who has watched television, even indifferently, should be able to situate this clip in the late-1950s or early-1960s merely by looking at it. Something in its high contrast black and white
is synonymous with our perception of the era, and lends Silver's performance the aura of an authentic artifact. How much it must tell us about our past, we suppose, which is to say the phase of collective memory preserved visually in high contrast black and white. Yet the clip wasn't produced as a document of history or even as a document of Silver's performance, but as a performance of its own in which the music would relinquish its precedence to the audience, and to the audience's reception of the music -- as well as to images of individual musicians, and the manner in which they perform. This is not happenstance, given that the backs of Silver and his band have been turned deliberately away from the people who are listening to them, so that the band -- and the process of watching it -- will be captured in a single camera shot. Meanwhile the camera tends to focus on either one musician at a time -- instead of the group as a whole -- or on clusters of individual audience members, at the sake of depicting either the band or the audience as an integrated collective.The audience, in fact, or the presumed audience, I should say -- a finite group of spectators who in 1959 were assembled in a studio-theater in the Netherlands and saw five musicians playing their instruments -- is ultimately succeeded by a different, more abstract kind of audience -- one not assembled at the time of filming -- who would experience the performance only later, in the relative isolation of its respective homes. Yet the Europeans for whom this clip was intended, who lived within broadcast range of the television station that commissioned it and saw the clip only once, presumably within a few weeks or months of its production, represent a far more integrated body than the world wide web users who (in my case) would not be born for another twenty years but who can watch the clip now as often as they like on their so-called personal computers.
What, though, does this tell us about Silver and his music? Most of what I've said is self-evident. Modern technology has permanently disrupted the relationship between those who devise and those who receive forms of expression once considered immediate. Merely lamenting this disruption will do nothing to reverse its course, nor would such a reversal necessarily be advantageous were it even possible. For the moment, it seems we instead have an opportunity to reconsider those forms -- such as jazz -- that rely on immediacy as their determining factor. The viewer who watches the clip of "Senor Blues" may be justified in regarding it as immediate, in some sense, as an arguably more vivid display of jazz improvisation than an audio recording -- but only within the context of this immediacy as an artifact of yet another technology. The clip didn't simply happen . . . and I wonder how much of its success I can honestly attribute to circumstance, the element so often prized as vital to jazz expression, providing its circumstances were highly controlled and externally manipulated by a group of producers, advertisers, and executives. (Surely there are few scenarios less conducive to the often-professed objective of improvisational freedom than the prescribed, indeed programmed, formatting of television.) So when I assume that Horace Silver's music offers each musician a chance to express himself fully while contributing to the advancement of the work as a whole, I should bear in mind that the camera is enforcing (and possibly even leading me to) my assumption by zooming in on the musicians' faces, one at a time, as they play both solo and as an ensemble. And then if I admire the sweat glistening on the musicians' faces as evidence of their dedication and of the intensity of their efforts, I may likewise consider whether their sweat is only the product of unusually bright lights necessitated by the filming. Or is a hot lamp still a hot lamp?
At the end of the clip, Silver retrieves a handkerchief from the lid of the piano and begins mopping his brow while he bows in recognition to the camera. The studio audience obliges him with applause and he smiles at the camera knowingly, as if the handkerchief, which emerges from the piano in a single almost organic movement, was an inspired, dramatic flourish added specifically for my benefit.This is the first of what will likely be a three-post series. The second post will consider the relevance of T.S. Adorno's infamous excoriation of jazz within the context of Horace Silver's eternal life on YouTube. The third post will examine Cecil Taylor as a possible counterpoint to Adorno's critique. I haven't written the second or third posts yet, so they probably won't appear for a while.
Labels: jazz musicians on youtube, the blues, you tube
posted by John E. Uhl at 12:34 PM
2 Comments:
O1ne of the reasons jazz can never truly become "America's classical music" is that it emerged more or less simultaneously with recording technology, thus producing "definitive recordings" to which all subsequent performances are compared. European classical music, by contrast, has no such analog -- it is simply the written music itself.
Maybe the analogy doesn't hold. But it seems like the problem Jazz faces is much like that of Homer, whose poems weren't written down until long after the Iliad and Odyssey were originally composed. Now all we have are two books -- we are permanently alienated from Homer's poems as they were originally conceived.
Or maybe jazz has precisely the opposite problem in that "definitive recordings" stand as perfectly crystalized examples of jazz purity.
I would argue it is the latter. The recordings become definitive with time, and therefore "pure." We wind up alienated from them, not because something has been substituted for the original -- as in the Iliad and the Odyssey -- but because nothing ever can.
Jazz developed as the result of an historically unique tandem between oral and technological processes of dissemination. Charlie Parker learned to play by listening to and memorizing solos off his records -- but he also saw Count Basie performing in person on a nightly basis when he was growing up, sat in on jam sessions, and gigged professionally with orchestras and other bands for years before he came into his own. Every important jazz musician learned through apprenticeship -- my guess is this was the primary means of gaining knowledge and establishing oneself, to the extent that I think we can call jazz of the 1900s-1960s a genuine oral subculture.
My sense is that this began to change after World War II ... for a couple reasons: 1) New economic opportunities and a sudden (relative) openness in American society culturally, during and in the wake of the war, led to a culmination in demographic shifts. Groups formerly isolated by race and/or economics mixed like never before, or since. The music spread into every corner. 2) The development of hi-fi recording technology greatly accelerated this process, and ultimately (I think) supplanted the oral forms of dissemination.
1945 is a cut off date. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single important jazz musician born after 1945. The only one even worth mentioning is David Murray, who I quite like (but, in all honesty, Murray's no Sonny Rollins... ). The musicians who grew up in the sixties and seventies would have cut their teeth in a period when records took precedence over gigs, especially given the emerging popularity of rock and roll and arena or stadium-size concerts that necessitated amplified instruments and lumbering, bass-heavy music. There just weren't that many night clubs featuring jazz anymore, which meant fewer and fewer opportunities for young musicians to learn by playing with and studying other musicians. They learned by listening to and copying records.
This was a fatal, and in my opinion, probably unrecoverable, break in oral lineage.
Meanwhile, the stage was set for jazz education, as it is understood, to begin working its way into public school systems. "Jazz Band" as a school period or a character-building extracurricular for the suburban middle class. Now you have the whole Jazz at Lincoln Center project dedicated to education, workshops, and memorial-type festivals featuring the compositions of established (dead) jazz icons -- in short, the preservation of jazz as a repertory form. Jazz has probably always had a repertory element, but Lincoln Center's emphasis on individual composers and compositions undermines those forms of oral delivery that were once the music's impetus. This draws implicitly on the idea of jazz as classical music, and ultimately diminishes jazz by confining it to the terms of European art music. I love Duke Ellington, but if you try to celebrate his music by putting it in the same category as Beethoven, Beethoven will win every time. (Hopefully my discussion of Adorno will shed a little more light on this last point.)
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