We link, we scatter: classical jazz/Warhol/Culture Shock
An interesting experiment from the Minnesota Orchestra: hire a jazz trumpeter to direct a five-part jazz series, presumably using symphony musicians, which would be where the “experiment” part comes in. Can symphony musicians morph into jazz players? When I’ve heard the Oregon Symphony attempt to play jazz, I have liked the spirit of Norman Leyden conducting, but usually left thinking the effort was half-hearted, even on something like Rhapsody in Blue with Thomas Lauderdale, detached from Pink Martini, attacking the piano. Was it lack of rehearsal time, an interest deficit or did they simply lack the capacity to swing? In any case, we’ll be watching how Irvin Mayfield, the New Orleans trumpet player Minnesota hired, manages with his new orchestra.
Where the flashbulbs of the media are popping, there, moth to flame, we find the ghost of Andy Warhol. Or his traces. In the case of the Beijing Olympics that means the complete set of his “Athletes” series, ten acrylic paint and silkscreen depictions of Muhammad Ali, O.J. Simpson (!), Chris Evert and other heroes of the ’70s. They’ll be on sale at a Beijing Gallery. A single portrait of Ali went for $9.2 million in November at Christie’s. (Warhol produced eight sets.) Will this Olympics reach yet new levels of commercial and political exploitation? The presence of Andy encourages me to think so!
Finally, a tip of the hat to Culture Shock, a blog that we just “discovered”. There’s going to be a lot of Portland theater news on that site, if I’m any judge at all.
July 29th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Just for the record, the orchestra won’t be playing on most (maybe all) of the jazz concerts. The series is presented by the orchestra, and performed at Orchestra Hall, but it won’t be some sort of crossover thing where classical musicians are asked to play lamely along with music they have no expertise in. Serious jazz, played by serious jazz musicians.
July 29th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Ah. Thank you for the clarification. So the symphony acts as a presenter or producer, thinking perhaps that its audience might crossover (if not its musicians), which makes some sense.
July 31st, 2008 at 8:21 am
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July 31st, 2008 at 9:41 pm
I remember talking with a friend who plays in the Oregon Symphony a few years back, a fine musician whose musical tastes go well beyond the classics into new music, world music, even outlaw country and “Stairway to Heaven.” He’d played a summer festival with, if I remember right, fiddle champ Mark O’Connor, and loved the experience. He asked O’Connor, “How long would it take me to learn how to improvise?” And O’Connor said, “Oh, not long. Maybe a year.” He meant a year doing that and essentially nothing else — in effect, totally retraining as a musician. Which illustrates an important distinction between classical music and improvisational forms such as jazz: They come at the art of music from different directions. Within classical music is a surprising amount of room for freedom of expression — indeed, within a single bar choices can be and are made by individual interpreters, and various conductors’ interpretations of specific symphonies can vary in length by a matter of several minutes — but that isn’t the same thing as improvisation, which involves a breaking down of music to its basic structural elements and reconstructing them in the moment, like instant architecture. That sense of structured looseness is utterly different from the submission to the score which is the prime duty (and inspiration) of the classical musician. And Winton Marsalis’s forays into the classical world (do listen to his version of Haydn’s trumpet concerto if you get a chance) suggests that it’s easier for a jazz musician to succeed at classical interpretation than the other way around. (Of course there are the likes of Gershwin and Bernstein and Stravinsky, who once wrote a piece for Woody Herman. But they and other classical composers have written works that are flavored by the rhythms and textures of jazz, but remain composed pieces, in a written way that is different from the astonishing abstract compositions of, say, a Coltrane.)
August 1st, 2008 at 6:28 am
A symphony pops orchestra can have great charts (and I thought Norman Leyden’s were excellent, when I heard them), but it’s still going to need to bring in real improvisers to do the solo work. Still, I look at all those gifted musicians onstage and think that over time they could make themselves into almost anything if they wanted to. But maybe I’m wrong.