Author: jcourtright

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Fell in Love with a Stupid, Ridiculous, Painstakingly Difficult and Time-Consuming Medium

Unless you’ve been inhabiting the space under a rock for the last half-century or so, you’re probably familiar with a certain wildly successful Dutch company known as Lego. Lego has captured the imaginations of millions of children (and adults) worldwide with their system of stackable colored bricks, offering endless possibilities for creation and even more endless opportunities for toe-stubbing. If you actually are unfamiliar with Legos, their website might give you some idea as to what I’m talking about. In any case, you can understand the ubiquity of this toy, its iconic status in popular culture. This status makes it all the more impressive that an artist could take this toy and use it in ways not previously conceived of, could re-appropriate it for artistic purposes in a totally novel way.

At first view, one might be tempted to believe that the “Fell in Love with a Girl” video is the product of some kind of pixelation filter applied to an otherwise-normal music video. However, in a style similar to claymation (a la Wallace and Gromit created by Nick Park – watch this video if you’re unfamiliar, it is well worth your time) the video was in fact created frame-by-frame with real Lego sets, shown in rapid montage to give the illusion of movement. Why this artistically bold-yet-inherently childish style for the video? The lyrics to the song suggest a kind of paradoxical struggle between love and lust, with the narrator trying (and failing) to distinguish between the two. Perhaps this duality is meant to be expressed by the silly-yet-complex Lego animation. Perhaps the depiction of people with small plastic bricks is meant to convey the humanizing force of love versus the more animal force of lust. Indeed, the people depicted in the video (often Jack and Meg White) are often stark white – is this a sign of ghastliness or purity? (It should be noted that they are rather pale in real life as well, though…) Or perhaps, and in all  honesty this is where I would put my money, this song was chosen for the Lego video because it is incredibly short.

The collective hive-mind of YouTube users tends to agree with this assessment. TheAndrewj96 writes: “THIS SONG IS TOO DAMN SHORT. You can’t put this much kickass in a song and just make it less than two minutes in length. I mean, this should be at least three minutes long.” Andrew J raises an interesting point about artistic compromise here – is it okay for an artist to limit their output due to a labor-intensive medium? Andrew isn’t forthcoming about whether or not he has ever constructed an elaborate stop-motion Lego video synchronized to music, but in case he has, he makes a valid point. The song is relatively short, for better or worse.

Other viewers seem less perturbed by the song’s length, instead focusing on its status as something of an anthem within its genre. Nugie simply writes “Timeless punk jam.” This seems to say it all, in three simple words nailing down the White Stripes’ origins in punk as well as their rise to iconic status over the last 20 years, thanks in large part to bold and recognizable songs like this one. For some interesting accounts on how the band (Jack White in particular) developed this sound, check out this series of brief interviews with some of the band’s early associates and friends.

However popular the band has become, though, there is evidently some question about their place in history, as evidenced by comments like this one, from Memedkemal Aksoy roughly one year ago: “The white stripes was a legend in the 2000’s” While on the surface this appears to be a compliment to the band, it can be read as a thinly-veiled jab at the importance of the White Stripes’ music. Were they really only at this legendary status for one decade? Has the musical culture that once welcomed them since forgotten about innovations like “Fell in Love with a Girl”? In fact, often the White Stripes are excluded from discussions of their own genre, as in this article detailing the shape of punk music over the last half-century.

Indeed, the White Stripes have only made their way into the limelight of popular music a handful of times in their existence. But does this prove the assertions of nonbelievers like Memedkemal Aksoy? Or do legends come from beyond the realm of popularity, ascending by their art alone?

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How Could Holst Write About Planets He’d Never Even Been To?

This is not a blog post about Gustav Holst. It is not about Holst’s “Planets” suite and will not mention anything remotely related to Holst’s music from this point forward. If you are disappointed because you thought this was going to be about Gustav Holst, feel free to walk away now, no judgment.

Still reading? Great! This blog is not about Gustav Holst because Gustav Holst never even went to Saturn. You know who did go to Saturn? Sun Ra went to Saturn. Do you know who Sun Ra is? Most people don’t, so don’t feel bad (or if you do, congratulations on belonging to this educated minority).

Herman Blount (later known as Le Sony’r Ra or, more commonly, Sun Ra, named for the Egyptian solar god) was born – or awoke or arrived, depending on who you ask – on May 22, 1914 in Birmingham Alabama. This was, according to him, the least important of all his births, though it still seems to be the one that we Earthlings gravitate toward. This essay from Sun Ra’s official site gives some insight as to how he conceived of his arrival. To give a radically condensed history of Sun Ra’s early life, he was a skilled pianist who gravitated toward jazz (strong traces of Duke Ellington, and later on Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk can be found in his playing and his composition) and briefly attended college until an unexpected trip to Saturn changed his perspective. As he describes the experience:

“My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up…I wasn’t in human form…I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn…they teleported me and I was down on a stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop attending college because there was going to be great trouble in schools…the world was going into complete chaos…I would speak (through music) and the world would listen. That’s what they told me”.

And thus Sun Ra embarked on a decades-long musical career with his Arkestra (named for ‘Ra’ the Egyptian sun god and ‘kist’ coming from a Sansrit word meaning ‘sun gleam’, though Sun Ra also remarked that the name was simply “the way black people say ‘orchestra'”). This and loads of other biographical info on Sun Ra can be found in John F. Szwed’s Space is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra. You can also check out Szwed’s personal site for more writings on African American studies and jazz biographies.

Sun Ra’s work falls into a movement known as Afro-Futurism – an artistic and cultural movement that uses ‘futuristic’ (think science-fiction) and cosmic influences to represent black culture and grapple with the experiences of the African Diaspora, or African-descendant communities throughout the world. This 43-second video can give you a snapshot idea of what this movement stands for, but for an in-depth study would benefit from the writings of Octavia Butler or the art of Angelbert Metoyer (pictured below).

Themes of the great cosmic unknown, furiously advancing technologies, confusion and peace permeate Afro-Futurist art, and Sun Ra is no exception to these themes. His music often deals with space and the cosmos, with performances by his Arkestra often referred to as ‘space jazz’. Long, open-ended groove sections, various combinations of keyboards and synthesizers and confusing dissonances all contribute to this label and combine to create one of the most distinctive sounds in jazz music. Sun Ra also often included other arts or media in his performances, including dance, poetry and electronic visuals. Perhaps most famous of these other media is the Outer-Space Visual Communicator invented by Bill Sebastian in a collaboration with Sun Ra in the late 1970’s. In a nutshell, this device is a giant keyboard controlled by one’s hands and feet that manipulates a light display, to be played in real time (as opposed to being pre-programmed) and projected onto a large screen. This collaboration, including the hopelessly complicated and futuristic OVC device, seems to strike the heart of what Afro-Futurism is for Sun Ra – a seamless musical and visual presentation that cannot possibly be considered from this world, that seems to take the audience on a journey toward some sort of unattainable enlightenment, defying you all along the way to categorize it. This piece is called “Calling Planet Earth” and features the OVC and the Arkestra. It lasts 15 minutes, but its effect is not lost if you jump around in the video – in fact, in light of the piece depicting a surreal, other-worldly experience mostly disconnected from this reality, I’m sure Sun Ra would even welcome this. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPuK7hfWCfA

 

 

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Just Play Along!

Every living jazz musician has had to contend at some point or another with the idea of using a play-along track. For those who aren’t familiar, this is an audio track consisting of rhythm section instruments (most commonly drum set, string bass and either piano or guitar) playing behind an imaginary soloist. Jazz musicians use them to practice when they have no live rhythm section of their own to play with. The musicians who record the track (except in cases where the track is computer-generated) simply play the chord progression of a familiar tune together for anywhere from two to ten minutes, and the consumer at home can use it to pretend they’re playing with real people while they practice this tune. Here is what one of these tracks sounds like:

Perhaps to the untrained ear this just sounds like normal jazz music, but to a jazz musician it sounds like something is missing – what’s missing is you, the soloist who needs to practice Giant Steps. So how did this strange, anonymous musical collaboration come to be? How did this sort of virtual reality become the norm for aspiring students of jazz music?

50 years ago (roughly half the amount of time jazz as we know it has existed) a young saxophonist named Jamey Aebersold stumbled into one of the most prominent tools in jazz education (an educational field virtually nonexistent at this time). Seemingly without realizing it, he launched the Jamey Aebersold Play-Along Series after students at a summer camp requested that he make them a recording of piano accompaniment for a few standard jazz tunes. You can read about how this series took off unexpectedly and became one of the most recognizable volumes in jazz music here.  For more from Aebersold himself on jazz education, which itself as a technology has only been around for half a century, you can check out his article “Music is for Life“.

Fast forward to today: Learn Jazz Standards is a free online resource with literally hundreds of videos including backing tracks and podcasts about common jazz education topics like tune-learning and improvisation techniques. This page gives you a good idea of the sheer volume of content they have available.  Apps like iReal and Drumgenius offer a seemingly endless array of customizable backing tracks for anyone with a mobile device.  This is a remarkable difference from Aebersold’s earliest tracks, which were recorded in his basement studio and sold in an LP format with an attached book of lead sheets. (For reference, this is a lead sheet, or simple statement of the main theme of a tune with the basic underlying harmony, to be expanded upon by improvising jazz musicians. This is the sheet music the players from the above video would be looking at. Giant Steps) 

Of course, there is disagreement among jazz players and educators over the merit of playing with pre-recorded tracks. Some say this detracts from the spontaneous and improvisational spirit of the music, training the student to treat rhythm section players like a static background drone instead of living, constantly improvising musicians. Kelly Rossum, professor of trumpet and jazz studies and Christopher Newport University insists that his students play with real jazz recordings with interacting musicians instead of backing tracks, even if it means the student plays over John Coltrane’s saxophone solo. On the other hand, many insist that playing with tracks is the only way to develop one’s aural skills as an improviser, as practicing alone or with a metronome doesn’t give one a sense of the form and harmony of a jazz standard, and playing over another soloist is not indicative of real playing situations. Others see the tracks as a sort of unique challenge: Bill Dobbins, professor of jazz composition and arranging at Eastman says of the tracks’ repetitive nature: “Some people complain that when they’ve played with a track a few times, they know exactly what’s coming. Well, you should use that to your advantage. Get creative with it!”

Play-along tracks have undoubtedly made great strides since they first came about in the 1960’s. As a technology they have clearly made a seamless transition into the digital age through the internet and mobile technology, and as a tool of jazz education they have at the very least become ubiquitous enough to warrant specific opinions from jazz pedagogues. In any case, backing tracks are out their for students of all ages to use, for better or for worse…