Free Jazz Covers

one example: at least one of the trumpet parts on ornette's 'free jazz' (don't remember if it's cherry or hubbard, hubbard I would guess) is supposed to be kind of more traditional, isn't it? if that is seen as a defect it might be quite worthwhile to hear what 'free jazz' sounds like with a small thing like that tweaked. (even if you don't think it's necessarily a fault, having a version with a more out trumpet line would give you a point of comparison, help you suss out what exactly the ideas expressed in the record are like.)

Could be. As you point out, it's partly a question of semantics, too -- i.e. whether one's definition of "free [improvisation/music/jazz]" requires the absence of any substantial pre-existing composed/planned structures, and whether particular musicians have adopted that absence as a musical ideology, rather than as a means to an end (whether that end is "making good music" or "generating interesting material for future compositions" or etc.). One of the phrases that comes up more often in conversation with the free players I've talked/played/studied with is "spontaneous composition". This is in some sense a phrase descriptive of all improvisation, but it's also one that I think is consciously adopted by free players as a way of emphasizing a kind of legitimacy and possibly even a unity with avant-garde/etc. composers -- "we're doing what you're doing, but we do it in real time". (Of course, if that were said as the opening salvo in a pissing contest, one reply might be "And what, so you come up with a good idea and you just leave it there? You think you're so smart that you can get it right the first time, then?") Anyway, I've never subscribed to the notion that anything useful could be gained by deliberately avoiding composition (and pre-existing structures) for ideological reasons, so in a way "how it sits with the principles involved in free improvisation" isn't a question I'm well-equipped to answer: I'm willing to use any process -- composition, improvisation, algorithm, field recording, etc. -- to make the music I want to make, and accept any process if it makes the music I want to listen to.

It does strike me that what certain people would call "true" free improvisation -- no pre-existing structures, no reference to conventional harmony, melody or rhythm -- is an idiom in which it would be extremely difficult, WITH the aid of recording technology, to nurture any kind of complex, articulate idea over successive performances. (Without the aid of recording technology, it would be borderline impossible.) I mean, to do this, you'd need first of all to be able to clearly profile a particular idea in a context that specifically eschews reference to conventional musical forms. Second, you'd need to be able to fully absorb it, and identify the things about it that are extensible and upon which you can elaborate. And lastly, you'd need to internalize it in a manner that -- assuming you're not playing solo -- left you able to interact with your fellow musicians in an attentive and spontaneous way, and didn't turn you into the equivalent of the bebop player waiting to spring his latest lick when the right chord change comes along.

All this would be nightmarishly hard, so the alternative is to gravitate towards either simpler ideas/expressive forms, process-driven ideas, or textural considerations. But all of this involves either a loss of sophistication or of specificity, and artistic growth in either circumstance will demand that the confrontation happens anyway: the simpler ideas/the outcomes of the processes/the textures are elaborated and become complex, with implications that lead to still-greater nuance and complexity. When you're working in "traditional" forms, articulating the key idea in a piece of music is something for which we have recourse to a technical vocabulary of varying sophistication (i.e. well-furnished for describing the role played by melodic-motivic development; reasonably well-equipped to describe the role played by rhythmic drive and variation; not well-furnished with ways to describe the roles played by texture and timbre), which can operate synergistically with our intuition, non-articulate perceptions, and so forth, so that if you want to explore ideas like the ones contained in Tristan und Isolde or the opening track of Music For Airports, there are a lot of tools for zooming in on exactly what those ideas are, and using a combination of technique, inspiration and intuition to explore what they might imply.

But if free improvisation is practiced in a way specifically phobic of notation and composition, it forsakes or badly weakens most of those tools. If I listen to a Bill Dixon record, I might seize upon something that might be paraphrased as "the creation of a highly sparse, slow-time texture using trumpets and other instruments, played at low volume, in a non-harmonic context without any rhythmic regularity or repetition, and with moderate emphasis on non-pitched or non-traditional sounds." (It's actually being paraphrased twice -- once from the record to my induction of "what I hear in this", and once from that induction, which is largely a purely musical one, to text.) But that's both an unusually easy kind of record to paraphrase, and at the same time, a totally incomplete paraphrase -- I could just as easily be describing certain Lester Bowie records, or Don Cherry, etc. It also tells me very little about how to create that texture, in part because it doesn't really identify what the key germinative elements are. Of course, this is to some extent a problem faced by all music in which the emphasis is away from "named" notes and rhythms, but other kinds of music don't make an ideological point of being able to do it on the fly! Atonal music still has a very limited vocabulary for describing why it works when it works, but at least composers of atonal music can fine-tune it until they feel it does. (It can, at times, be much easier to figure out exactly what isn't working in a piece of tonal music; it may not be any easier to fix, mind you, but there are things about the character of a problem that are easier to horn in on.) It's hard enough to find the "right" note when you're writing atonally, let alone when you're improvising atonally.

Having said all that, one record that arguably tackles these questions head-on would be Touchin' On Trane, with Charles Gayle, William Parker, and Rashied Ali. These are musicians who have totally internalized the vocabulary in those albums, and who can articulate ideas and qualities present in Coltrane in ways that go beyond literal quotation or musical paraphrase. I've only heard the album a couple times, and I haven't formed an articulate opinion of it, but if you're looking into these questions it might be a good one to check out.

(This post is a mess but hopefully there's something worthwhile in here.)

it seems to me as if any free improv that has some kind of plan is open to this kind of covering, but I'm sure that just what the plan is matters a lot. like, are there any pre-discussed sections at all? do the musicians intend to play them similarly every time they play that same song or piece, if they even nail themselves down that much? what about players who play together a lot, and try to remove as many constraints as possible, but who develop a certain style of playing together, like people who have lots of conversations that start to have similar dynamics?

I also have a hunch that this sort of thing connects in interesting ways with the work that's been going on since the early days of free improv to develop ever more sophisticated ways of composing that incorporate improvisation. I have no idea how at the moment though. (think, like, holland and the m-base stuff, or some dave douglas, or something. these people seem to have compositions that allow for free improv without it JUST being 'insert freakout here', so maybe this covering thing might have a nice connection to that kind of composition?)

(paul berliner's book makes a lot of sense of this idea of spontaneous composition, but - haha mark s - I'm also recalling the case for coltrane-as-composer-by-way-of-improvisation that lewis porter makes in his coltrane book. I'm not clear on the details but I think you could make a similar case for most other pre-free jazz musicians, porter just does a great job for coltrane.)

josh would a "free jazz cover" necessarily have to reference any particular "composition", or could it simply touch on the idiom of a certain player or group of players to be considered a "cover" in a genre/method/mode which somewhat seems - on the surface before you get into all the detail like phil's post above - to repudiate the idea of covers or at least their ease.

i.e. could anyone who composes harmolodically be considered "covering" ornette? (for the sake of argument, we'll say they're attempting to play in the style of ornette anyway. so, some of masada then.) die like a dog doesn't perform covers of ayler tunes per se, but they're certainly engaged as a "tribute" to ayler (or the ayler-stylee...at least at the beginning.)

feel free to dismiss this out of hand, as i tend to lose the plot on subjects like this quite easily.

come to think of it, here's an example. I don't know if evan parker always does his twittery thing, but from what I (limitedly) understand he's got a pretty tight hold on it. if I wanted to count him as doing a free improv cover it seems like it would either have to follow the original composition closely (so it would have to HAVE some compositional stuff to latch on to) or he would have to drastically alter his idiom or assume another and inflect it with his own (perhaps he does this on the many recordings I haven't heard). but, uh. I guess even if he did say coltrane interstellar space compositions, I wouldn't count him playing the heads (because they do have heads etc) then twittering like he does then returning to the heads, because a bunch of the ideas come from the specific ways coltrane improvised in a certain non-parker idiom in the middle sections.

ps I know shit about evan parker.

I studied and played with C.G. (above) for about 3.5 years, and during that time, we spent a lot of time -- 50% or more -- using standards as our point of departure. When we did improvise freely, either he would begin and set the tone, or would make a suggestion as to the kind of thing we might play beforehand: maybe a mental image, or maybe an attitude or hypothetical situation (e.g. your rent's two months late, you don't have a dime, you have nowhere to go, you're getting up on stage, and if you try to bullshit, you'll starve). The idea of covering our improvisations seems far more improbable than the idea of covering the stuff I did with R. and R. -- even if I had a tape, which I don't, there was something structurally about them which makes the idea of trying to duplicate them seem silly: they were never meant to be heard again, somehow. But maybe that's also because they were indelibly stamped with C.G.'s musical personality, and who he is -- and who I became, when I played with him and listened to him -- is so crucial to what they were, at least for me, that they're inherently unduplicable.

By the way, now that I think about it, I think a cover definitely has to reference a composition for it to be a meaningful term. However, the question of what constitutes a composition becomes an issue: do I cover an algorithmic, partially aleatoric piece by duplicating/exploring its process (regenerating the algorithms), or by duplicating/exploring the sounds documented in a particular performance? If a free jazz record was born of the leader telling his colleagues to "play a rainbow", and the rest was undirected collective improvisation, am I covering his work every time I tell my friends to do the same, or would a cover be an intentional reference to the actual notes they played? I guess it's a question of how much of the idea resides where; I personally don't think "play a rainbow" really contains enough information for meaningful extrapolation.

josh, intersellar cover, i was hoping they'd take the hooks and overdrive them out of the circular or oval-shaped and on but more square or [x]exagram shaped box of his this way that way set of harmonic conventions 'trane was trying to find his own way out of -- to me 'trane's always sounded my favourite things type tune charts re-arranged as mazes, and 'space is like he's trying to fire _out_ of those knots and get to the next harmonic progression (this time a progression he did not already know, unlike all his music which he had pre-invented and knew, where next was what we hear when we listen, ie aiming for that half-non-sequed progression to that point new (so that it was still jazzily understandable))

AMM have been pursuing total improvisation w/o any kind of score or preprepared material for almost 30 years, and i saw derek bailey and prevost play together on tuesday (neither of them think they any longer have much to do with jazz, whether or not that has any relevance to this discussion). I suppose you could argue that every time they play, they are covering the same "song" (you could even argue that this piece is Cardew's "The Great Learning", the graphic score they kind of formed to perform). So the refinement and re-exploration is certainly proceeding internally: it's just the question of access to outsiders. I don't know how Eddie would answer this, if he would even recognise it as an interesting goal. He basically thinks of composition in any form as a kind of cultural oppression, I think. I think there's a big contradiction here: Eddie, doesn't a book "culturally oppress" its readers, then (unless it's like, improvised concrete poetry)?

In a way though I'd turn Phil's point upside down: the built-in ability to take ideas out and look at them is actually the built-in NEED to do so. Phil likes it and wants it: he favours work which allows it. I too think this need is a good thing, and I think such (bleh) deconstruction points are where (and why) the work crosses outside the locked world of its makers: in other words, it *isn't* just abt the composer/performers refining their idea, it's about how and why the work — imperfect as it almost must be, to be worth anything, heh — travels. The oddity of AMM-world is that it's actually so hermetic: this can be very soothing and also invigorating — the sense that you're in *exactly* the same place, apperception-wise, as everyone else in the audience AND the players on-stage. That no cultural baggage you've brought gives you any advantage as a listener (and watcher: I love watching Eddie play). Cage said that thing years ago, when a woman came in early to one of his Black Mountain happenings, and asked where's a good place to sit: that the whole point of his music is that everywhere is as good as anywhere else. I think this is an achievable goal, with a genuine social value (that's why AMM have lasted), but I also think that it sacrifices any kind of outreach or generalisability in order to achieve it. "Everywhere is as good as anywhere else: provided you're in the room as it happens." (Another contradiction: AMM recordings?? Cage hated records, except as material to compose with. Bailey is consistently sceptical about them, though since he is sceptical about THE ENTIRE WORLD AND ITS CONTENTS this may not mean so much.)

I think no also, but I'm completely agnostic about whether this means one is good and the other is bad. I don't think there's a viable synthesis between sport and cookery either, but it doesn't mean one is oppressive and the other liberatory: they perform different roles. As Phil knows, I'm inclined to be sceptical about the superiority-as-a-given of Establishment Ways of Knowing, but all that really means, pragmatically, is, if you always go at something one way, you may always be missing something you need.

I was round at my sister's last night and she has a little cat, Yoko. And as I watched it bouncing about ( it was trying to make sense of a radish), I kind of realised, and said to her, that I spend SO MUCH OF MY LIFE reading, one way or another, that I had sort of stopped believing in the existence or possibility of animals. I understand them as literary devices or cartoons or in art or in movies, but the actual things themselves, playing with the venetian blinds, are an astonishment and a bafflement to me. This doesn't necessarily mean "Divert the canals through the libraries!! Mark S has become a circus lion-tamer!!", but it does mean that I think deep knowledge of one kind of practice can lead to deep obtuseness about another, seemingly very closely related.

I'm also intrigued by the diff between private practice and public performance - do AMM ever rehearse together as a group (in some ways they are like the Rolling Stones of improv - an instantly recognisable group sound yet differing line-ups over 30 plus years, a collective music where the players have grown old together...)? When Bailey practices at home, does he ever play melodies/songs? How can you practice for improv?

Henry Kaiser's Crazy Backwards Alphabet grp do a gd cover of Albert Ayler's 'Ghosts', but then I suppose that has a v. strong melody, as well as all the cat-in-a-bag stuff...

And what wld happen, what wld it 'mean', if Keith Rowe threw the riff from 'Brown Sugar' into an AMM-set - wld it be 'wrong'?

(i meant hermetic more in the arcane cult sense than the vacuum-packed sense)

yes, good question, I wonder what ppl from a classical background would make of free improvisation. would they pay attention to different things that go on there from a person in who has listened to rock?

i don't think this is the case with most free improv, european or american

This is a relevant question from a legal standpoint because if it is a cover in the strict legal sense then you would owe royalties to the original artist. Just think if you could legally establish that you were the first bandleader who instructed his band to "Just play whatever the hell you feel like". You could collect royalties on the entire free-improv movement.

I am sure where to enter this discussion of yours. But I feel a certain pressure to comply!
Composition versus improvisation debate rattles on and on. Mark is correct to characterise my view that I find composition oppressive (although his emphasis is heavier that I would apply) . I find it oppressive as an ideological motif! It carries more authoritative weight than we should allow it to bear. Composition - reflective of a valued methodology - reflects views of the world that I find too overpowering. In brief I think that most musicians in the so-called advanced world are lost when they are confronted with making music spontaneously. Why is this? Obviously education and general cultural morés have led to a position where tradition - even that of Jimi Hendrix - is too powerful to be countered (or even countenanced!) with confidence.

In my view the only way to think about your music is to ask fundamental questions about what it is for. Or, what do you want it to be for. The way a musician might develop is perhaps personally easier if the answer is that they want to entertain or inform. It is easier simply because they have, if only intuitively, decided that the current hegemony is one in which they either feel comfortable, or are are prepared to work to become comfortable with. (By the way I am not suggesting that entertaining or informing are unworthy or uncreative occupations).

If on the other hand a musician views the work with sound making materials as exploratory in both a material and a cultural sense, then I suppose this suggests that the musician is looking for a different range of social and artistic parameters to set any idea of success and value against.

My own view, which is no secret (and which I hope will be become even more explicit in the forthcoming book to which Mark referred), is that we project very specific values within the way we make our music. Our relationship to the materials which make sound and our relationship with other musicians - being of the most immediate concern. I am sure you all would have noticed that you do not have to be a composer to be oppressive. I am suggesting then, that if artistically activity is bound up in a view of possible civil societies, then the work will (I think) come out differently than if you are bent upon making a best selling album. I think that these differences are obvious to anyone who chooses to listen thus. It is at this point in any critique of an artist’s work that I get particularly interested.

Forgive me if all this is just too oblique with regard to your general discussion or maybe a mite too obvious.

but surely not all composition is like this. Would you say that ppl who plays classical music are the 'oppressed'. Surely there are challenges for the players in bringing compositions to life?

I listen to both free improv and composition by the way.

don't know whether you'll reply to this (or whether it merits one heh) but thanks for the post. look forward to the book.

Imagine someone who designs and builds model airplanes; he very likely sketches them out before building them, perhaps selecting their colors from a book of samples ("presets" if you will, har har), building the wings separately and testing them, looking at previously made planes for guidance, etc. He prides himself on his craftsmanship, and the proof is in the product - it is what he wishes to be judged by.

Now imagine someone else who creates "structures" on the fly, a sorceror type who engages with whatever materials he has around in real-time, tossing them about, forging them together, etc. The proof here is in the process, and it is what he wishes to be judged by. This sorceror claims to create in a more natural way than the builder, whom he argues is trapped by tradition, training, etc. It would be very understandable, then, for the builder to feel oppressed by the sorceror, even by the very idea of structure sorcery, especially insofar as it's used as a vehicle to promote certain values and question others.

Also, couldn't we say that the builder's feelings of intimidation and oppression and the sorceror's feelings of naturalness and rightness are both to some extent unwarranted because, when you get down to it, they are engaging in quite different activities?

(anyone who hated my xenakis piece blame josh)

Oddly enough, back in the day AMM used to put on tape loops of things like "Barbara Ann" and "Lightning Strikes" and then attempt to drown them out as loudly as possible (this would've been '66 time). Cf. "Into The Groove(y)" by Ciccone Youth, obv...

Nonetheless, "rules" only exist if the consumer consents to acknowledge them while experiencing a performance.

nevertheless exposure to AMM the entity has been well counter-balanced (well left handily somewhat mysteriously inscrutable) by the Matchless Records back catalogue (and the odd handy JAPO/ECM one-off on other labels) -- the presentations of AMM as a unit consisting of different members/numbers (eg 'to hear and back' duo w/out Rowe, 'had been an ordinary day ..' duo Rowe/Prévost)

for me this has been lucky -- the Matchless re-issues all systematically commited to cd at a time when i could afford to collect many of them while still feeling that i was 'dipping in', in line with the bands recommendation that one should not listen too often

nevertheless i feel i am entering another world of listening approaching AMM -- it's easy to presume an hermetically independent different thing when feeling AMM out as an occasional listener -- easy to presume a 20-30-year old collective or group of friends or scene with its own secret language

but i think that's the path of least resistance -- i'm not there in London or Japan to participate from the audience, to feedback or at least feel the effect of intimate audience on the music

a mutual acquaintance from the UK until recently living in NZ assured me of the meta aims of AMM -- i'm not sure i'd have subsequently decided to listen to AMM if not for his assurances, and what i've read about Rowe's approach in The Wire more recently has been intriguing and re-assuring -- without the prescribed instructions i don't know that i would have found time to get into AMM, to listen with a non-rock level of patience, or even with a typically "fire music" oriented slant on "free jazz"

(except that the Matchless cd "generative themes" definitely "rocks" and provides a head-scratch-free listen, perhaps most share-able & listen-able with others of all the AMM i've heard, and maybe there's subsequently a danger of getting too familiar with that cd at least)

(will continue with this thread later -- time for a break)

I think this is one of the most interesting threads on ILM, particularly:

do I cover an algorithmic, partially aleatoric piece by duplicating/exploring its process (regenerating the algorithms), or by duplicating/exploring the sounds documented in a particular performance? If a free jazz record was born of the leader telling his colleagues to "play a rainbow", and the rest was undirected collective improvisation, am I covering his work every time I tell my friends to do the same, or would a cover be an intentional reference to the actual notes they played?

I think the definition of a cover version is that it has (at least partially) the same notes. If you play a song with the same instruments and/or same moods but not the same notes as some earlier tune, then you're inspired by it but not covering it.