I know Bogdanovic has experimented over the last forty to fifty years with fusions of classical guitar and jazz but I did not know until this week he'd composed a quintet for guitar and string quartet on a theme by Thelonious Monk. So here you go.
musicians are:
Benjamin Schmid,violin
Kirill Kobantschenko,violin
Benedict Mitterbauer,viola
Florian Eggner,cello
Edin Karamazov,guitar
movements are listed as follows:
Clearly we're listening to a set of variations where the core musical material is filtered through forms and character variations rather than the continuous variation form that tends to be the default in jazz. So think more "Goldberg Variations" or "Diabelli variations" than one long continuous jam.
It would take a formidable jazz band to go sixteen continuous minutes on just a single song. One of the things I've suggested here at my blog is that one of the challenges for jazz after more than a century is a cultural default to continuous variation form. Jazz composers have somewhat broken out of the confines of continuous variation but with mixed results. I think Wynton Marsalis' violin concerto written for Benedetti actually works. It's never going to be my favorite violin concerto but I liked it enough to listen to it a few times when it got released a few years ago. I'm not sure I'd go back to it like George Russell's Living Time but that's a different kind of musical thing and Russell revisited that work almost from the ground up later.
I think for we guitarists in the early 21st century variation form has its own separate set of challenges because while Ponce's "variations and fugue on La Folia" is cemented in the repertoire it takes a fantastic guitarist to make the work compelling for me (Marcin Dylla, for instance). For me there are too many firm cadences across each of the variations for it to win me over most of the time. Besides, given my historic sympathies for Bream repertoire I'm not sure any guitarist composers can top Benjamin Britten's reverse-variations/cumulative setting approach to variations in Nocturnal after John Dowland.
But I love the idea of a multi-movement chamber work including classical guitar based on a theme by Thelonious Monk. I would be inclined toward a sonata form using two different Monk themes as a first movement and then probably a cumulative form fugue derived from mutated elements of another Monk standard to get a sonata-prelude and fugue work because I love playing with sonata forms and fugues. Counterpoint inspires me. Your mileage may vary. I think when it comes to syntheses of classical music and jazz traditions we're collectively only just getting started. There have been a lot of failures that in some way or another fall between two stools, but the musical path seems worth pursuing.
I've made no secret I'm interested in developing practical and theoretical approaches that can span the often scholastically constructed gaps between forms, styles and vocabularies. If there are "enemies" (and I hate to have to put it this way) they are not among musicians trading ideas and experimenting, but ideologues who are style purists, genre purists, or formal purists who don't want their "real" music sullied by impurities from fusions. Many fusions have stunk, there's no denying it, but I think in the last half century Dusan Bogdanovic is one of he guitarist composers whose work offers very promising steps toward jazz/classical guitar synthesis. Some pieces I like more than others but he's always been an intriguing and inspiring composer to me.
POSTSCRIPT 4-15-2023
I've been thinking about this piece a bit and I think that while I like the idea of a set of character variations in multiple movements there's something I miss from Monk's song as performed in the jazz tradition. To use a term Ethan Hein has used, there are fun character moments but none of the movements is long enough for a listener to really savor the groove in each movement. In jazz we usually get the head theme, jamming variations and the reprise. Bogdanovic did a good job of exploring contrapuntal and harmonic possibilities dormant in Monk's tune but I personally feel as though four longer movements getting to sixteen minutes would give listeners more room to savor the grooves of different variations than seven smaller movements. I love the idea of a fugue based on a Monk theme but I wanted that fugue to have been longer. I also lean toward cumulative form. I mean, a fugue based on an inversion of the incipit of "Let's Cool One" that slowly built up to the arrival of the entirety of "Let's Cool One" as Monk played it would be more what I would want to do, speaking just for myself. The thing Charles Ives used to do was write complex fantasias where he'd have countermelodies to distorted forms of well-known American popular songs and he'd only reveal that all his musical material was building up toward the presentation of that pop song at the end. I think something like that would be fun to do with Monk.
Or, alternately, just building an entire fugue on the melody of Stevie Wonder's "Ordinary Pain" would be a dream come true. But I digress. I get to at my blog.
