Future jazz

In my recent post about “Giant Steps,” I briefly mentioned the idea of doing improvisational remixes of jazz recordings. This is a big enough idea to merit a post of it own. My slow-tempo remix of the tune includes a solo section that I played by slicing up the melody, putting each note on a sample pad, and then playing the slices back as an “instrument.” Listen at 1:49.

Rap and techno producers have been playing samples as instruments since the 1980s. The typical use case is to sample a breakbeat, slice it into individual drum hits, and then play the drum hits back as a new rhythm pattern. But you can just as easily slice up melodic samples too. This technique is so effortless with Ableton Live and similar programs that electronic music producers have come to take it for granted. But it’s a bonkers idea!

Imagine: I created an instrument which consists entirely of the individual notes in the melody of John Coltrane’s recording of “Giant Steps.” I can play those notes in any order and at any volume. I can do this as easily as I can play notes on the piano, and I can do it using the same interface, too. My GiantStepsatron doesn’t just play back the saxophone part. It also plays the underlying chords, bass notes, and drum hits. The chords in “Giant Steps” are pretty wild to begin with, and when you play them out of order, the complexities multiply.

The screencap below shows the GiantStepsatron, with Slice 20 highlighted. Ableton gives me no indication of the harmonic content of the slices, but by counting notes on the chart, I figured out that this slice is Coltrane playing a concert D-sharp over an F#7 chord in the piano and an F-sharp in the bass, taken from measure 12 of the tune.

The GiantStepsatron has some strange affordances as an instrument. The notes F#2 and G2 on the MIDI keyboard play slices 19 and 20, which both contain the note D-sharp. However, the D-sharp in slice 19 has a C#-7 chord under it, while the one in slice 20 has an F#7 under it. It’s weird to have the piano keys not correspond to the note that comes out when you play them. It’s even weirder to have adjacent piano keys that both play the same note but with different chords under them. It requires some rewiring of your brain to play an instrument this way! 

I find that there’s no point in trying to remember which key plays which note and chord. Instead, I just grope around by ear. It throws me into a state of zen mind/beginner’s mind. However, normally you wouldn’t want to listen to a beginner’s stumblings on an instrument. In Ableton, though, I can make my stumbling listening by editing, quantizing, and looping it.

My “solo” is pretty jagged melodically. Still, it sounds unified. It’s all from the same contiguous recording, the timbre is the same across all of the slices, and there are many repeated notes. I smoothed everything out further by adding compression, a filter sweep, and some echo. Also, to keep the solo from being an overwhelming amount of information, I played simple phrases, which I copied and pasted in groups of four, so you have plenty of time to absorb each one as you listen.

If I wanted to transcribe my solo, I could make a list of the slices I played and figure out what note and chord corresponds to each slice. This would be an excellent method for jazz composition, should I ever again find myself composing for a jazz ensemble. Sometimes I listen back to my jazz remixes and think, hmm, it might be fun to arrange this for big band. I work in a couple of music schools, maybe I’ll get a chance to do that someday. But then I think, even if I could, why bother? An instrumental performance wouldn’t have the futuristic vibe that the sampled versions do.

This brings me to the larger music-pedagogical point: remixing recordings has untapped potential for bringing the rich history of jazz into the ears of contemporary listeners. Jazz isn’t like high modernist classical composition. It isn’t supposed to be totally alienating or exclusive. The main pleasure of jazz during its period of peak cultural salience was that you were hearing surprising takes on familiar songs. That’s why Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus et al played so many corny showtunes–those songs were deeply familiar to their audience. If you went to hear Miles Davis in 1957, you weren’t just hearing a bunch of angular abstractions; you were hearing them used as commentary on ubiquitous jukebox or movie musical hits. Jazz today still uses the same angular abstractions, but they’re hard to understand, because they’re still based on the same midcentury pop standards that Miles and Coltrane played. As a result, the sense of signifying on familiar material is mostly gone from jazz, unless you’re an obsessive scholar of the music. You can see why a nonspecialist would have trouble getting interested in abstractions of abstractions of abstractions of tunes that were familiar to our grandparents.

While the source material of jazz is receding into the past, jazz recordings themselves have a life of their own that continues into the present. I have no idea what the lyrics are to “Bye Bye Blackbird” or “When Lights Are Low,” but I feel a strong visceral reaction to the sound of the 1950s Miles Davis records where he interprets those tunes. It’s a sound that’s familiar to anyone who has set foot in a Starbucks. While the specific songs on jazz records are unfamiliar to most of us, the sonic qualities of the records are deeply familiar, nostalgic even. You don’t need to know the history of the Blanton-Webster band to feel the 1940s vibe of the recordings; it comes through loud and clear, even in small fragments. Rap producers have been sampling jazz records since the 1980s, but they’ve barely scratched the surface (no pun intended). There’s an opportunity here to explore jazz not just as a bunch of music-theoretical concepts and tunes in the Real Book, but as a collection of sounds, timbres, and grooves.

The history of jazz is coextensive with the history of music as a recorded medium. A single artist can span multiple generations of technology–just follow Duke Ellington releases in chronological order, and you’ll hear the move from disc recording to tape, then to multitrack, and finally to hi-fi and stereo. There can be conspicuous differences in sound even between releases from the same label during the same time period. For instance, A Love Supreme is buried under murk, whereas Interstellar Space, recorded just three years later, has bell-like clarity. Sampling brings those sonic textures to the forefront of the listener’s awareness.

Sampling is also an opportunity to appreciate the full value of Duke Ellington’s music. College jazz programs teach his tunes and compositions, and they’re great, but Ellington is also a bottomless source of inspiration for sound designers and producers. Listen to his wild instrumental blends, his love of timbral extremes, and his horn players’ plunger-muted growls. I never need to hear “Satin Doll” again, but I’d love to hear more Cootie Williams and Tricky Sam Nanton looped over beats.

Note that I am not opposed to instrumentalists creating new jazz music. They should be doing that! But they should do it with some awareness of the state of music in the present. Jazz musicians should be signifying on electronic music production tropes, not just on tunes. They should be playing against and on top of recordings and samples. One of the freshest things I’ve ever heard is Yusef Lateef blowing a solo over a 1930s record. He put this on one of his albums!

Yes, I know, copyright and licensing are an issue with sample-based productions. So far, though, the jazz labels have been happy to open up the vaults to remixers. I’m optimistic that everyone would want to work together to encourage more jazz sampling.

This post is self-serving, because I do lots of jazz remixing, and I’m happy to do so for my own listening pleasure, but I feel like it’s just me and Madlib out here.

I want more people making this kind of music so I can listen to it. I want jazz musicians creating stuff that I want to listen to. I want to spend money on it! I don’t just want to hear people referring to Monk and Coltrane via quoting and interpolation; I want to hear conversations with their actual sounds.

Many years ago when I had my improv techno band, we had a couple of sax players show up for one of our (poorly attended) gigs. I played a track that included a loop of Coltrane’s fanfare intro to A Love Supreme.

Both sax players pulled out their horns and started playing along with the loop. Then they started harmonizing with it, and then rhythmically displacing their harmonies to make call-and-response patterns. It was magical. I would like music to be like that more often. I want jazz to have more of a DJ ethos.

There’s some precedent for DJs playing with jazz musicians. The most iconic example is Grand Mixer DST with Herbie Hancock in the 1980s.

Back in the 90s, I used to go to Project Logic shows.

The Herbie Hancock/DJ Logic model treats turntables as another instrument soloing in a jazz group, which is fine. But I want to invert the situation, and have the jazz group live inside the DJ music. I’m not exactly sure how that would look onstage, but I’m open to suggestions, and am eager to try things out myself.