A few gigs, an album release – it’s a cul de sac, a grind, a cycle howsoever you prefer to term it. But there’s so much more to what a musician can achieve and how a listener can relate to their work beyond hebdomadal routines somehow.
The more you follow the underground of the jazz world where unknowns swiftly build a following and carve out a career for themselves the more you see patterns.
Take the central focus of the debut. That’s what a new artist, highly educated, fresh from music college – or even more interestingly, given these days it’s unusual, not at one at all – really, really wants.
And oh, every young jazzer wants and needs in no particular order: better kit, lots of gigs, rehearsal space, decent digs, a not too clapped out motor, an agent to book these gigs so they keep on coming and talk you up to the movers and shakers & extricate you from inevitable scrapes, a teaching gig, name recognition, decent fees, a band that stays together, ’nuff respect. Innit.
Time to compose is another item on the wish list.
Working musicians on the road use the boring downtime when hanging around to do this. Because it’s the only time they have. Or they book time away and hide somewhere remote to do it in a residential studio or rehearsal place just like a normal cottage, hut, lean to, Doris’ sofa, somewhere. Take a look at this video of a very successful example of the finding somewhere far from the madding crowd from Fergus McCreadie whose new album The Shieling captures the essence of his jazz Scottishness as effectively as anything he has done so far:
It’s the work, dear boy, it’s the work – don’t worry about the size of the audience, it’s better to write for twelve people sitting in a church basement on a rainy night in Mississippi if you love what you’re doing than to do something you hate for 50m people on network TV – source unknown
Geoff “far from” Dyer in But Beautiful (1991) dances around the subject of the organic nature of composition.
The book which has both fictional and factual episodes in it begins in a car when the Duke Ellington reedist Harry Carney is driving as he often did while Ellington dozes in the passenger seat.
Duke sometimes wakes up, and the pair joke and make notes on a song arrangement.
Dyer writes beautifully that Harry, “kept to a steady fifty but the landscape was so huge and unchanging that the car hardly seemed to move at all, a spacecraft inching its way to the moon.”
That snatched opportunity is what busy people need. Composition is a way out of the cul de sac pipeline that organises a jazz musician’s life. It’s also a compulsion that can’t be ordered up like a pizza. It just happens.
Composition – it’s The Long Game with or without italics – figuratively speaking or not
A Britjazz classic from 2019 full of witty iconoclast English pianist Liam Noble’s own gently subversive tunes. He’s in the company of Polar Bear heads Seb Rochford and Tom Herbert that are on one level an avant antidote to whimsy and on another an erasing of genre en route to a certain blameless euphony.
The composition may well have the last laugh – it will if it’s any good or simply becomes popular or is both – and may outlive the long forgotten but important at the time gig that put money on the table or the album that even when it sold OK and got good reviews still lost money to make and put its creator’s life on hold for a while to pay off the debts. Albums come at a cost in all sorts of ways, the worst of which is having the balls to release one and show just what you have – or don’t have – as an artist.
The thing that interests me most about jazz is composition. That’s the fact that unlike working classical musicians who as a rule do not compose (at least for public consumption and usually not in ensembles they lead) jazz musicians put their arses on the line.
They say I AM a composer. I am a piccolo reimaginer or whatever and do dinky tumbles too, etc, if bovvered. And all the rest. Cynics might say ah but playing tunes isn’t composition. It has to be fancy and highly arranged. That simply isn’t true. There isn’t a hierarchy – you know high brow, middle brow low brow notion of all this that makes any sense to me even though jazz snobbery is a thing just as classical music snobbery is one too. Rockers can sneer just as much as any jazz elitist.
If the tune invades you the listener you know it makes sense.
And the ultimate casualness (an artifice in itself) of composition? It’s even written into the title of Miles Davis’ ‘So What’ found on one of the greatest of all jazz albums 1959’s Kind of Blue.
