Scalene from Austin Vaughn on Vimeo.
Andrew Ralston wrote a big ol' piece of music just for me!
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The music world today seems to be growing smaller and smaller as separate strains of influence become interwoven and fused. Jazz legend Billy Hart frequently lectures his students about how the big innovation in “jazz” in the 40s and 50s came from the be-bop innovators checking out afro-latin music, and how the current thing is the influence of Indian rhythms in the current scene, which already includes the long list of all previous innovations in “this music”. While this is certainly true, for instance Vijay Iyer is taking these concepts to new heights with his trio, and exerting a large influence among many of my peers, I see several other trends emerging in the music now that indicate a very bright and varied future for music in general.
“Contemporary Classical”, “Pop Music”, and “Modern Jazz” have been evolving along the same lines for some time now. Cross pollination is frequent and often produces successful musical results.
One needs to look no further than the first track of Wilco’s 2002 release, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to observe the influence of John Cage’s early percussion music and prepared piano explorations. Tin cans and other metals form melodies that could not have been realized on any sort of equal-tempered instrument, while the strings of a piano are played with a portable fan and strummed with a guitar pick. Cage’s influence is also clear on Brad Mehldau’s studio project from the same year, Largo. On a cover of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android, a prepared piano recalls the various percussion instruments from the original recording.
Just recently, the often mentioned, often misunderstood concept of spectralism was fully explored, in a so-called “jazz” context, by NYC-based saxophonist/composer Steve Lehman on his most recent, recording, Travail, Transformation, and Flow. The record, released this year, features some very complex compositions for octet and will completely blow your mind if you’ve never experienced spectralism. Friends of mine who had never imagined spectralism in this context were also blown away. It comes as no surprise that the last track of T,T&F is a cover of GZA’s “Living In The World Today”. Hip-hop and Jazz are certainly not strangers, but it is satisfying to see “contemporary classical” and electronic musical influences meeting with the aforementioned two.
Bill Frisell, Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, and The Bad Plus, just to name a few, have been making new headway in the interpretation of the (modern) American songbook. By interpreting songs that are more relevant to the heights and depths of the human experience than the popular songs of the first half of the 20th century, these artists, among others, are at once honoring the old jazz tradition of covering popular American songs while relating much more directly to listeners under the age of say...60.
I could make cross-references and comparisons all day, but the point really, is that music today is informing itself more than ever. Programs like Bang on a Can and the Wordless Music series have already pushed this principle by programming diverse works and acts on the same program, but I think we can zoom in a little farther on this giant. Imagine a jazz guitarist who is well versed in the bluegrass tradition and is fluent on banjo, and lap steel, or a drummer whose percussive influences range from John Cage to John Hollenbeck, or a pianist who's studied everything from Haydn to Hancock and is also well versed on rhodes, B-3, AND knows how to program his own synthesizer patches. I often try to balance my listening diet to take in some sort of cross section of previously discussed traditions. Try digesting your favorite Blue Note session along with some Wu-Tang, and a Ligeti string quartet, all in the same week.
