Comments on: We link, we scatter: classical jazz/Warhol/Culture Shock

By: barry

barry — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:28:19 +0000

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.

By: Bob Hicks

Bob Hicks — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 05:41:05 +0000

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.)

By: pink martini

pink martini — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:21:42 +0000

[...] would be where the ???experiment??? part comes in. Can symphony musicians morph into jazz players?http://www.artscatter.com/general/we-link-we-scatter-classical-jazzwarholculture-shock/Pink MartiniPink martini plays a scintillating mix of world music ?? from Cuban rumbas to … One [...]

By: barry

barry — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:05:08 +0000

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.

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:34:54 +0000

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.