The Bitter Sweetness of Life
Reflections on Stomping the Blues by Albert Murray
Dionysus or Apollo. Dance hall or concert hall. Profanity or sacrality. Saturday night function or Sunday morning worship. Reflecting on Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues causes these and other dichotomies to emerge, and especially if one is a composer: jazz and classical; improvisation and composition; folk and the fine arts.
It is the nature of the human mind to make distinctions, just as it is human nature to make music and art. But it is the nature of art—what it does and how it does it via music—that is the larger question of Murray’s book. In my opinion, jazz is a double entendre whose less “indecent” aspect unites it with classical music. Comparing the two genres with respect to the art of improvisation and its relationship to composition makes this apparent.
Classical music is a phenomenon of Western civilization. It deals in its own idiosyncratic ways with various musical parameters, including pitch, rhythm, dynamics and timbre. It also involves the phenomenon of musical notation. The classical music of most other cultures does not have this aid. Secondly, polyphony (numerous lines moving together) and the resultant harmony (the sounding of notes together with meaning) was a revolutionary and singular idea of the West.
Jazz is an American creation, an Afro-U.S. admixture with influences from Africa and Europe. The best jazz musicians found and developed new important aspects of the classical tradition. They played mostly Western instruments. Jazz’s original musical language was part of the West, as it used harmonic materials, rhythms, and timbres from that tradition, but developed them in new ways. For example, the use of rhythmic syncopation and approach to time, was new. Its interest in timbre, as displayed with various mutes in the brass, and the changing colors of various vibratos, was new. So too was its inversion of the understanding of the relationship between instruments and the voice: while in classical music all instrumentalists learned to play like the singing voice, in jazz this was turned on its head—voices sang like instruments, as evidenced in scat.
While in classical music all instrumentalists learned to play like the singing voice, in jazz this was turned on its head—voices sang like instruments, as evidenced in scat.
Both classical music and jazz rely on a particular but differing understanding of improvisation. Classical composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were fine improvisers. They improvised music in real time, and then may have written some of it down to create parts of their pieces. Composition itself may be considered an interaction with the improvised materials of the mind: the playful interaction of mind and material that then becomes fixed as an object that is finally out of time, a stable artifact.
Jazz relies on composed materials, designated as the song (tune or melody) or riff (what in classical music is called a motive), from which the improviser creates variations in real time. If the classical composer is concerned with the finished product, the jazz improviser is more interested in the process of creation. The former creates the object as a musical artifact, while the latter is often musically seeking the object. For the classical composer, the aural idea is transformed and finalized in the process of composition, but the jazz improviser is involved in finding the idea in the process of its birth. The former presents a finished object—meant to be pristine and as close to completion as possible—while the latter presents the work as the process of creation itself. One is about the crystalized state of perfection; the other is akin to the gestation and evolution of life.
Fundamental to life are the Blues—those feelings of melancholy that we all recognize. Thus, we find that jazz is a way of confronting, battling with, struggling with, such eternal feelings found in man. Murray says that the “fundamental function of the jazz musician …..is not only to drive the Blues away and hold them at bay,…but also to evoke an ambiance of Dionysian revelry in the process. The music comes out of both ballroom dances and life celebrations of birth, birthdays, and death.”
For the classical composer, the aural idea is transformed and finalized in the process of composition, but the jazz improviser is involved in finding the idea in the process of its birth.
As a response to this dance of life, jazz is also about elegance, or a refined style. “A jam session for all its casual atmosphere is not a wide open free for all or anything goes. It is the exclusive province of the dedicated professional to whom Blues music is ..a fine art requiring the very highest level of technical mastery of one’s instrument as well as unflagging spur of the moment inventiveness. In order to acquit himself with competence in a jam session a Blues musician must not only be a virtuoso performer but must also be able to create in a split second the most complex figures and runs. Elegance under pressure or bust.”
This music of sadness and joy finds a profound relationship with music of the Black church. For Murray, there is a very thin line between gospel music and secular jazz. After all, the best of all music certainly seeks a religious or secularized transcendence. It is meant to take us to a deeper meaning of life and mortality. While jazz comes out of the black experience in America, it is not isolated or hermetic. It has universal implications, and thus lies in the vast narrative of human experience. Such is the case, for example, with a performance of Louis Armstrong’s When the Saints Go Marching In, which displays that sweet bitterness, or bitter sweetness, of life and all its limitations.
Finally, while jazz is more like the spoken word, classical music is more like the written word. Jazz is more about stream of consciousness, and classical is more like the contemplation and refinement of consciousness. Jazz is often learned by ear (from recordings), and classical is studied by sight (from scores). Classical is about the idea made musical word, and jazz is about the feeling made sound.
Jazz and classical can both be contrasted with what the musical polymath Gunther Schuller calls commercial music, or popular music, which is written to make money and whose goal is to make people feel good, more so than to maintain the integrity of the musical object itself.
Where do these juxtapositions leave us? The popularity of jazz, which in contemporary times overshadows classical music to some extent, should not undercut its importance or be categorized as a folk tradition. Folk art can be profound, but limited. As Murray states, “Folk expression is nothing if not conventional in the most fundamental sense of the word.” Folk art is usually performed, or learned, or passed down by ear. By necessity, this means that there are certain limitations on complexity and depth of meaning, and even imagination. It is concerned with maintaining standards and is derivative, and therefore has little individual voice, as it is “of the people.”
By contrast, the hallmark of both jazz and classical music is invention. For Murray, “Invention comes from people of special talent and genius, not from those who are circumscribed by routine.” The larger fine art vocabulary allows for a wider, and more personal, range of expression. Murray would agree with Ernest Hemingway’s perspective: “all art is only done by the individual… the individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point… He takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.” The composer must have knowledge and craft, hours of practice and work, to produce something that matters. Little can be said if there is limited experience and vocabulary with which to speak. This is true of both classical and jazz artists, although their domains of expertise might differ.
To conclude, jazz and classical can both be contrasted with what the musical polymath Gunther Schuller calls commercial music, or popular music, which is written to make money and whose goal is to make people feel good, more so than to maintain the integrity of the musical object itself. Both classical composers and jazz musicians also often make use of materials of folk and popular life, but they raise them up through the use of more sophisticated and individual processes into objects of art. The elevating aspect here is finally the point. Both the classical and jazz traditions find their beginnings in the sacred. Dionysus and Apollo were gods it must be remembered, and were sometimes analogues of Jesus, even if not the Tetragrammaton. Saturday night quickly turns to Sunday morning; the dance hall ecstasies are an early call to the Holy Ghost. Music, in this regard, whether crystal and composed or Blue and birthed, marks the spiritual trajectory of the human soul in sound.