The gods are laughing at us.
The broken heart of love,
The weary, weary heart of pain,—
Overtones,
Undertones,
To the rumble of street cars,
To the swish of rain.
Lenox Avenue,
Honey.
Midnight,
And the gods are laughing at us.
Jazz album cover art from the brilliant Jim Flora: jazz as aural cubism. See his site jimflora.com
We can accept this fact at the onset: Yes, modern jazz is a complicated music art form.
Nevertheless, like anything artistic that has any aesthetic value, even if it is complicated and we do not understand it, art can still touch us emotionally by what we see or hear. This is true for any of the arts. Yet, music or painting can only touch us if we are willing to temporarily suspend our judgments and keep an open mind.
Picasso’s Women of Algiers (Version O), 1955
Frankly, I do not understand Picasso’s work, even with my limited university art course back ground, but my lack of understanding does not hinder me from being moved, even in some indefinable way, by his work. For example, Picasso’s painting Women of Algiers (Version O), which recently sold for a record $179.4 million, is visually stunning, even shocking, its images and geographic shapes complicated. The painting challenges the way we normally see our balanced and symmetrical world. Rather than a “realistic” representation of objects in the world as seen through the picture window of a painting, Picasso has “deconstructed” the conventions of perspective so that these “objects” become, instead, visual metaphors that refer to or represent these objects. In Picasso’s words, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction” (The Art Story).
Eugène Delacroix’s The Women of Algier in Their Apartment, 1834
By comparison, it’s interesting to note the conventions Picasso is deconstructing in his painting are found in Eugène Delacroix’s The Women of Algier in Their Apartment, 1834. Apparently, Picasso had an imaginary conversation with Delacroix: “You had Rubens in mind, and painted a Delacroix. I paint [the Les femmes d’Alger series] with you in mind, and make something different again” (Art History News quoting A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, ed. by Marilyn McCully, London, 1997). The “something different” is easily apparent when the two paintings are compared side by side.
This is a creative process not unlike that of jazz composers, such as Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and others, who deconstruct a melody as a way of reinventing the original melody by stripping away everything but its “naked atomic elements” (C. Michael Bailey). The reinvented melody then becomes a kind of aural metaphor that references the original melody; what we hear is not the same original melody because we experience it differently.
This is what Teddy Wilson’s version of Gershwin tune “Embraceable You” sounds like (opening bars from the 1959 Columbia LP Mr. Wilson and Mr. Gershwin):
Wilson’s interpretation of the song’s melody is harmonically balanced, uncomplicated, and easily recognizable as melody.
Compare now to Ornette Coleman’s version of the same song (taken from his 1961 Atlantic album This Is Our Music, featuring Coleman on tenor, Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums):
Typically, it is the melody of the song that helps us connect emotionally to it. So, if we cannot identify melody, if we don’t hear it, our natural inclination is to reject this music. We might even claim that this isn’t music at all because there is no melody. Without melody, we may tell ourselves, there is nothing to please us, nothing to keep us listening. The challenge of the Coleman version is that we have to try to connect with his music emotionally in a way we haven’t experienced before.
Jazz music, like Picasso’s cubist paintings, is complex, and challenges us to question the ways we perceive the natural world and to approach the music in unconventional ways. If we have been exposed to classical music all of our lives, jazz may sound, at least on the surface, discordant, unstructured, chaotic, without purpose—no beginning, no middle, and no end. But jazz music, like painting and novels, doesn’t always conform to popular culture’s expectations, and that, of course, is the way it should be. After all, “the gods are laughing at us” anyway.
Call and Response 
The Rhythm of Life, Is a Jazz Rhythm
Posted in Art, Jazz, Music, Social Commentary, tagged cubism, Delacroix, Jim Flora, Langston Hughes, melody, Ornette Coleman, Picasso, Teddy Wilson on May 21, 2015| 1 Comment »
“Lenox Avenue: Midnight”—Langston Hughes
The rhythm of life
Is a jazz rhythm,
Honey.
The gods are laughing at us.
The broken heart of love,
The weary, weary heart of pain,—
Overtones,
Undertones,
To the rumble of street cars,
To the swish of rain.
Lenox Avenue,
Honey.
Midnight,
And the gods are laughing at us.
Jazz album cover art from the brilliant Jim Flora: jazz as aural cubism. See his site jimflora.com
We can accept this fact at the onset: Yes, modern jazz is a complicated music art form.
Nevertheless, like anything artistic that has any aesthetic value, even if it is complicated and we do not understand it, art can still touch us emotionally by what we see or hear. This is true for any of the arts. Yet, music or painting can only touch us if we are willing to temporarily suspend our judgments and keep an open mind.
Picasso’s Women of Algiers (Version O), 1955
Frankly, I do not understand Picasso’s work, even with my limited university art course back ground, but my lack of understanding does not hinder me from being moved, even in some indefinable way, by his work. For example, Picasso’s painting Women of Algiers (Version O), which recently sold for a record $179.4 million, is visually stunning, even shocking, its images and geographic shapes complicated. The painting challenges the way we normally see our balanced and symmetrical world. Rather than a “realistic” representation of objects in the world as seen through the picture window of a painting, Picasso has “deconstructed” the conventions of perspective so that these “objects” become, instead, visual metaphors that refer to or represent these objects. In Picasso’s words, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction” (The Art Story).
Eugène Delacroix’s The Women of Algier in Their Apartment, 1834
By comparison, it’s interesting to note the conventions Picasso is deconstructing in his painting are found in Eugène Delacroix’s The Women of Algier in Their Apartment, 1834. Apparently, Picasso had an imaginary conversation with Delacroix: “You had Rubens in mind, and painted a Delacroix. I paint [the Les femmes d’Alger series] with you in mind, and make something different again” (Art History News quoting A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, ed. by Marilyn McCully, London, 1997). The “something different” is easily apparent when the two paintings are compared side by side.
This is a creative process not unlike that of jazz composers, such as Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and others, who deconstruct a melody as a way of reinventing the original melody by stripping away everything but its “naked atomic elements” (C. Michael Bailey). The reinvented melody then becomes a kind of aural metaphor that references the original melody; what we hear is not the same original melody because we experience it differently.
This is what Teddy Wilson’s version of Gershwin tune “Embraceable You” sounds like (opening bars from the 1959 Columbia LP Mr. Wilson and Mr. Gershwin):
Wilson’s interpretation of the song’s melody is harmonically balanced, uncomplicated, and easily recognizable as melody.
Compare now to Ornette Coleman’s version of the same song (taken from his 1961 Atlantic album This Is Our Music, featuring Coleman on tenor, Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums):
Typically, it is the melody of the song that helps us connect emotionally to it. So, if we cannot identify melody, if we don’t hear it, our natural inclination is to reject this music. We might even claim that this isn’t music at all because there is no melody. Without melody, we may tell ourselves, there is nothing to please us, nothing to keep us listening. The challenge of the Coleman version is that we have to try to connect with his music emotionally in a way we haven’t experienced before.
Jazz music, like Picasso’s cubist paintings, is complex, and challenges us to question the ways we perceive the natural world and to approach the music in unconventional ways. If we have been exposed to classical music all of our lives, jazz may sound, at least on the surface, discordant, unstructured, chaotic, without purpose—no beginning, no middle, and no end. But jazz music, like painting and novels, doesn’t always conform to popular culture’s expectations, and that, of course, is the way it should be. After all, “the gods are laughing at us” anyway.
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